To the 50. Birthday of Josef Eberle

[08.09.1951] It must have been 1926 at the beginning, when I found a letter in my mailbox to the "Sonntagszeitung" from Leipzig, with a nice, small, condensed font that I immediately liked. A young bookshop assistant named Josef Eberle offered a manuscript. I saw at once that he could do something that few writers can afford: the so-called little form. From then on, Tyll, which was Eberle's alias, was an employee of my "Sonntagszeitung". It soon turned out that he also knew how to express himself in verse. On the 2. May 1926 appeared as Tyll's first poem one "Ode to stupidity"which I still know by heart today, and whose first stanza, frankly, sometimes occurs to me:

"Let me wind wreaths around your pedestal
from immortelles and periwinkles.
Never will the omnipotence of your throne fade,
and to wrest the scepter from your hand
is hot but futile effort. "

In the late summer 1926 we saw each other for the first time when Tyll visited me on my editorial office on the third floor of Lange Strasse 18 in Stuttgart. He was inducted into our now existing 4 Ringelnatz club, which was at his member Willy Widmann in the "Alsatian tavern" used to meet, with or without Ringelnatz; and one day Eberle-Tyll also came with another coworker of the "Sonntagszeitung", my old friend Dr. Owlglass from Simplicissimus, together, to whom he was somehow congenial. I am still as pleased today that I have been able to establish the connection between the two, as well as the consciousness of having discovered the writer and poet Eberle twenty-five years ago so to speak. I do not know if I can assert that I have greatly supported him. Great fees could not pay the "Sonntagszeitung". Basically, that was probably more then er the giver, although at times he was somewhat lazy in poetry.

From a stay in Paris in the year 1927, which he had actually taken as a reporter of the "Sunday paper", he has z. B. except letters for money no line written. But then again, each number brought something of Tyll's, and the increasing circulation proved that his time-critical and satirical products made the readers as much pleasure as I did myself. There are magnificent things among them, which incidentally are partly up to date again today. A ribbon "Mild and wholesome" has appeared 1928 and probably great rarity, because in the Third Reich you should not have such a thing. In the second, it was not without danger to lead a pen so boldly opposed to the ruling powers, see "Ode to stupidity!" and yet we were only once in court - it was the woodhead thing - and getting away with 50 Mark.

Today, after both sides have survived Hitler, we are now back together and try, in a few words, to help prevent him from coming back.

Spoken in Süddeutscher Rundfunk on 8. 9. 1951

http://erich-schairer.de/wp-content/uploads/mp3/ESzuJE50.mp3