Sunday evening, late 70s. Pajamas and O'boy in front of the TV. Soon they will come, the puppets who show that a more fun world is possible: "It's time to play the music/It's time to light the lights/", they sing as they dance in from the left. "It's time to meet the muppets/on The Muppet show tonight!"
Many Swedes over a certain age have that melody stored in their auditory memory. The jazzy, showy cabaret music still makes one smile inside.
But where does it come from?
On Anne Sofie von Otter's new record "Berlin! Berlin! Berlin! Kabarett und exil" there is the answer. The Muppets' signature tune was originally called "Music, Music, Music!" and is a number from the film "Hallo Janine!", a German spoof comedy about a beautiful and suggestive tap dancer, full of leg-spinning and carefree escapism.
The film premiered in July 1939, just two months before the Nazis invaded Poland and started World War II. The big star Marika Rökk, one of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' favorite stars in the Third Reich's entertainment industry, played the lead role. The "light cavalry" in music and film would convey optimism and life affirmation and prevent the home front from sinking into gloom and melancholy. Escaping reality became for many Germans a way of living and surviving. Towards the end of the war, the noises from the front and the bomb-damaged cities were drowned in hits like "Es geht alles vorüber" ("Everything will pass").
With her increasingly deep mezzo-soprano, von Otter appears with a miraculous mixture of smokiness and decadence
Anne Sofie von Otter's album, recorded with fantastic musicians from the Komische Oper in Berlin, is a cultural achievement. It mainly concentrates on music from the years before the war and shows the multifaceted functions of culture in a society located on the edge of the volcano. The entire aesthetic friction of the Weimar period is represented: romantic ballads, political satire and burlesque bone-rattling. Nazis also liked "Prussian schwing".
At times you feel transported to the dirty yellow interiors from the TV series "Babylon Berlin". With her increasingly deep mezzo-soprano, von Otter appears with a miraculous mixture of smokiness and decadence. Much of the music she sings has come to exert a huge influence on recent film, musical theater and television entertainment. It was no coincidence that it was from this time that the genius puppeteer Jim Henson borrowed the music for "The Muppets".
I listen to von Otter's record in the closing acts of this very strange Swedish election campaign and am struck once again that as obvious as culture's presence is in ordinary people's everyday lives, its absence in Swedish politics is just as obvious. Most people live and breathe every day with music, TV shows, games, stories. But in the political conversation, culture and its expression are completely absent, almost taboo. As if culture were not a part of either man or society.
Perhaps as a counterweight to this, this week P1 Kultur has started a series of fine mini-interviews with the Swedish party leaders about their views on culture, both in private life and in politics. These are sympathetic – and revealing – conversations. Nooshi Dadgostar loves Pedro Almodóvar and Shakira, Simona Mohamsson confesses her love for Hjalmar Söderberg's "Doctor Glass". And after some of his dutiful outbursts against a "polarizing" cultural elite, Jimmie Åkesson says one of the truest things I can remember that a Swedish politician has said about culture: "Without culture, the world and life become quite boring," states the SD leader. "We may not go around thinking that we practice culture or consume culture all the time, but we do, all the time, and if we didn't, life would be pretty gray and dreary."
If a Sweden Democrat gets the post of Minister of Culture, greater upheavals await in Swedish cultural life than more concerts with Miss Snusk
Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is precisely Jimmie Åkesson who articulates this truth, with his usual tone of slightly aggrieved obviousness. In recent years, it has often been said that his party is the only party that has deeply understood the potential of cultural politics when a society needs to be recast. In the past four years, municipalities and regions have thus been made into a kind of testing ground for the cultural policy that the Sweden Democrats would like to use also at the national level.
The idea document "Tidö 2.0", where representatives of the think tanks Timbro and Oikos earlier this year made common cause about their visions for the next term of office, is a clear indication of what may happen. In addition to a series of radically authoritarian measures, this includes the proposal to phase out all state support for Swedish public education. If a Sweden Democrat gets the post of Minister of Culture, greater upheavals await in Swedish cultural life than more concerts with Miss Snusk.
Nor was the 'Mupparnas' show politically innocent, if anyone thought so
But Anne Sofie von Otter's record also bears witness to another truth: that the expression of culture is not causally dependent on social development. Feather-light chansons can contain both gallows humor and despair. Tragic ballads can convey comfort and hope precisely because of their beauty.
The haunting line "Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt" (roughly "I heard a song in the wind") conveys a subtle hope against the threatening background of the 30s, as a quiet assurance that a better world is possible, even if we don't get to experience it right now.
Nor was the "Muppers" show politically innocent, if anyone thought so. Behind the nonsense, slapstick and humor there was always a message of radical tolerance and criticism of the double standards of power. The gentle and soft-spoken Jim Henson had his roots in the anti-commercial counterculture of the 60s and was also involved in the "Muppets" predecessor "Sesame", which started as a kind of public education project to increase equality for black children in poor American metropolitan areas.
A few years ago, the supposed wokeism of the 'Muppets' caused offense on Fox News
Therefore, it is reasonable to also take "The Muppets" with the political seriousness they deserve - not least when you know where the music comes from. Tolerance, absurd humor and mockery of authority can be such controversial positions today. A few years ago, the supposed wokeism of the "Muppets" caused offense on Fox News, and in connection with the No Kings protests last year, the orange-haired laboratory assistant Beaker was highlighted as better suited than the sitting American president. In a 2014 "Muppets" movie, Kermit the frog was sent to a brutal prison camp in Putin's Russia as a result of a plot - but managed to escape from there, unlike most others.
And perhaps it is Kermit, he who realizes that the show must go on, who is the true incarnation of the everyman of our time - the poor citizen trying to make life and society work despite more and more people behaving like complete lunatics.
