At Café Exil – with Robert Stadlober

“Café Zukunft” with Robert Stadlober takes you on a journey to the coffeehouses of Europe, where people once dreamed of freedom, love, and a better world. A poetic and musical evening about hope, memory, and the future that never came to be. At night, a hundred years ago, as the borders crept closer to the small tables, as the armchairs trembled on the brink of the abyss, as the curtains were drawn even tighter to shield against the crumbling world outside—that was when the most beautiful utopias blossomed on the edge of freedom in the coffeehouses of Europe. Friends were made and enemies created; cooperatives and alliances founded, celebrated, and then destroyed. Loves ignited and faded away. Great novels and short stories were celebrated and torn to shreds. Political ideas were conceived, manifested, and discarded again. The planet was out of joint, so why not lift it completely off its hinges and reassemble it anew at the tables of the cafés—that was the idea. We all know: things turned out differently. Robert Stadlober takes us into a world that could have made ours a better one, had we only allowed it. With stories, literary vignettes, and newly set poems by such diverse minds as: Masha Kaleko, Erich Mühsam, Irmgard Keun, Joseph Roth, Peter Weiss, Else Lasker-Schüler, Stefan Zweig, Rose Ausländer, Karl Kraus, and all the others, he paints a panorama of desperate hope, a dream of another world and a future that never was because it was driven away, destroyed, and killed. Listen, dream along, remember with us, and raise a glass to what might have been! Please stay with us for a moment at Café Zukunft. And who knows, maybe we’ll make it, and the world will turn out beautiful after all. With Robert Stadlober and Daniel Moheit.