| Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Franz Josef Degenhardt |
| Cover: | Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern.jpg |
| Genre: | Protest song |
| Label: | Polydor |
| Producer: | Jimmy Bowien |
| Prev Title: | Rumpelstilzchen |
| Prev Year: | 1963 |
| Next Title: | Väterchen Franz |
| Next Year: | 1966 |
Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern (Do not play with the grubby kids) is a 1965 album by liedermacher (singer-songwriter) Franz Josef Degenhardt, named after the track of the same name. It was his second album, after Rumpelstilzchen. The songs also appeared as a 1969 book. The title of the album and the song became a catchphrase, and the title song is regarded as Degenhardt's most successful work.
The album is a collection of songs criticising the bourgeois society in Germany after World War II with sarcasm and surrealism. It anticipated the 1968 student movement in West Germany. The singer "with the piercing voice and the powerfully plucked guitar" criticised nuclear war, class-based society and the war in Vietnam. The title song became one of Degenhardt's best-known, in the style of a moritat. It tells the story of an upper-class boy who likes to play with workers' children, but is forced into an upper-class career to fulfil his parents' expectations.
The first line of "Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern" became a frequently quoted phrase. The song was included in the popular song collection Die Mundorgel in 1982.[1]
In 2010, the album was ranked No. 42 among the 50 best German albums by a jury of the German edition of the Rolling Stone magazine, reasoning:
Reviewer Daniel Koch described the album as a moral portrait of the Federal Republic in the mid-60s, when the economy was successful (Wirtschaftswunder) but problems such as nuclear war, class differences and Vietnam were looming. Three years before the 1968 student movement in West Germany, Degenhardt tackled the upper class and its "only partially hidden Nazism", using wit and surreal poetry, with "the right images". The reviewer called the album both a historical document and a work that is still valid today. Degenhardt influenced generations of liedermacher, from Hannes Wader to Gisbert zu Knyphausen. The title song is regarded as Degenhardt's most successful work, an expression of opposition to the "bourgeois complacency and bigotry" ("bürgerliche Selbstgefälligkeit und Borniertheit") of the 1960s.