This cantata was composed in Berlin in November/December 1928 and dedicated to the Frankfurt Radio, which commissioned it. The first performance ‐ Hans Grahl (tenor), Johannes Willy (baritone), and Jean Stern (bass), with members of the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, conducted by Ludwig Rottenburg ‐ took place in Frankfurt on 22 May 1929, after several postponements resulting from objections (whether political or religious) raised by one of the programme committees responsible for censorship of all broadcast material. Although the objections were overcome without sacrificing a line, the work was broadcast only once, and was not related by any other German station.
The text of the cantata is a selection of poems from the Hauspostille [a book of poetry by Bertolt Brecht] and elsewhere. The selection seems to have been partly determined by the tenth anniversaries of two related events: the end of the First World War and the murder of the Spartakist leader and militant pacifist, Rosa Luxemburg, by officers of a paramilitary right-wing organization. However, the Grabschrift (Epitaph) for Rosa Luxemburg was, musically speaking, an afterthought, and almost certainly was never offered to the radio: Weill first set the non-political "Marterl" and then adapted the vocal line to the slightly different prosody of the Grabschrift, which exists as an alternative. The choice is crucial to the traumatic elegy of the "Ballade vom der Ertrunkene Mädchen" (Ballad of the Drowned Girl), since Weill expressly intended that the following Grabschrift/Marterl should be understood as commemorating the "Mädchen"; Rosa Luxemburg's partly decomposed body had been recovered (after a considerable lapse of time) from Berlin's Landwehr canal where it had been flung by her murderers.
Weill had been deeply interested in the development of radio from its inception, and since 1924 had been publishing regular critiques of Berlin radio programmes in the weekly journal Der deutsche Rundfunk. His first radio commission ‐ and the first such commission offered to a notable composer in Germany and perhaps anywhere else ‐ was a major score for Grabbe's Herzog von Gothland, produced by Funk-Stunde Berlin in September 1926. The composer said of the Requiem: "The radio presents serious musicians of our own day for the first time with the problem of composing works which can be assimilated by as large a number of listeners as possible. The content and form of these compositions for radio therefore have to arouse the interest of a large number of people of all sorts. The title, 'Berlin Requiem', is not meant to be ironic; we wanted to make a statement about death in the way city-dwellers feel about it. The work is a series of dirges, memorials, and epitaphs and (therefore) a kind of secular requiem." The conception of the work may have been influenced by that of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, while the instrumentation and the stark textures certainly owe something to Weill's practical experience of the musical possibilities and limitations of radio technology at that early stage. It is also relevant to note that his friend Max Butting, the composer and teacher, was in charge of a class in radio composition at the Musikhochschule in Berlin during this period.