This Is... Weird.

We've recently seen the  "Ball im Savoy", which is something like a lightweight opera version (Operette) that was written in the 1930s. The version that we enjoyed (vastly!) was gently modernised and shortened, according to the information given by the theatre, and it was fantastic. (The Cologne ensemble did a guest staging at the Luisenburg Wunsiedel, which is a very lovely open-air stage.)

The reason for the cuts, by the way, was given too - some of the text and songs were rather "-istic" in some way. Racist, mysogynist, etcetera, so not really what one would want to have on a stage today, at least not in the theatre equivalent of a feelgood movie.

Afterwards, we looked up some more of it on Youtube... and stumbled across one of the songs that did not make the cut into the version that we saw. The English translation of the title is "when we Turcs kiss".

We listened to this, and we were really confused by the singer's accent. It sounds like the aim is to sound "foreign", but to our ears, it was all the wrong foreign, because he states that he's from Turkey. That's not a Turkish accent!

And that is when we realised... today's German people are all very, very familiar with Turkish accents, because of the influx of Turkish people in the 1950s and 1960s. But this was written and performed in 1932, when things were still quite different. Which explains why the accent is "generic foreign" and not "generic mock-Turkish" as it would be when a modern German imitated the typical accent...

Funny, and slightly weird, isn't it? And also an amazing example about how little things in art change, and how our perceptions and receptions change.