Burg Waldeck Festival

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Burg Waldeck Festival 1968
Hannes Wader (2005)

The Burg-Waldeck-Festivals (1964–1969) in the Hunsrück were the first open-air concerts in Germany and formed a decisive chapter in German folk history. They were influenced by French chanson and the American folk and protest song scene. They set the committed and critical song as a counterpoint to the popular hit at the time . They were also the starting point for a number of important musicians and songwriters such as Franz Josef Degenhardt , Reinhard Mey , Dieter Süverkrüp , Hannes Wader and Walter Mossmann . When in 1969 rock music and revolutionary-political debates predominated rather than folklore, the end of the festival series had come.

History of origin

Two different groups have ownership and home rights on the site of the Waldeck castle ruins : the conservative youth association Nerother Wandervogel and the more progressive Arbeitsgemeinschaft Burg Waldeck (ABW). In 1963 there was a “student working group” within this working group, founded by some students and group leaders from the Bündische Jugend , among others from the youth group , and which dealt with current cultural issues. “The thought of Waldeck as a workshop” or, as the charismatic singers Hein and Oss Kröher called it, a “Bauhaus of folklore”, was virulent at the time. From the idea of ​​establishing a kind of musical construction hut here, where singers and musicians, but also authors and scientists, would come together, the plan developed into a festival to which song lovers from Europe were invited. The ABW gave its approval, the working group should take over the financing itself. The group that initiated the festivals and was able to inspire many helpers included the later art educator and cultural historian Diethart Kerbs , who shaped the events ideologically, Jürgen Kahle, who headed the organization, Rolf Gekeler, who was responsible for the program and from 1966 that Magazine song published, as well as the singer Peter Rohland , who knew and invited many artists.

Difficulties and resistances

terrain

View from the Burg-Waldeck site to the Baybach Valley (1968)

The area near Waldeck Castle was unsuitable for a festival in 1963/64. It was very lonely in the Hunsrück above the Baybach valley and had no paved access road. It had no electricity connection for a festival and only primitive sanitary facilities. There was no stage and there was no financial means for a large marquee. In addition, the space was also in the approach path of the US airfield Hahn , and there were few parking spaces and accommodation options. Most of the difficulties were later overcome by the great willingness to help of many enthusiastic volunteers from all over Germany. When there were almost 6,000 visitors on the site in 1968, the insufficient infrastructure was completely overwhelmed.

Involved

Not all of the ABW were enthusiastic about the idea of ​​the student working group, because its plan did not correspond to their old Waldeck image and they were afraid of the financial risks. The main opponent of the events was the conservative castle neighbor Nerother Wandervogel, headed by Karl Oelbermann . “King Oelb”, as Der Spiegel dubbed him in a report on the disputes, and his youth association, which was ideologically opposed to the ABW, disliked the presence of leftists, people with long hair and the “fashion figure of blue jeans” . There were numerous incidents up to 1969 in which supply lines and radio cables were cut, car tires were stabbed, a wooden stage burned down and the stage structure designed by the sculptor Eberhard Fiebig was destroyed and its base was blown up. Despite a search by the criminal police and investigations by explosives experts from the Federal Criminal Police Office, no perpetrators could be found. When, during the last two festivals in the Hunsrück villages, the walls were smeared with left-wing symbols and " bums , hippies and revolutionaries" caused considerable damage to the hallway through garbage and wildly parked cars, the festival visitors were no longer welcome by the local population.

The festivals

Dieter Süverkrüp

First festival: "Chanson Folklore International - Young Europeans sing" (May 15-21, 1964)

Around 400 people came to the Waldeck for the first festival. In the opening speech it was said: “We found that a certain type of music, for which we have a very special preference, is by no means sufficiently noticed and cultivated in Germany. We mean the chanson, the song, the bench song , the unkitted folk music. We asked ourselves why we don't have Georges Brassens or Yves Montand , Pete Seeger or Joan Baez in our latitudes . ”The singers found a very open-minded audience, there were numerous lectures, talks and studio concerts. Reinhard Mey sang songs by Fritz Graßhoff and French chansons, Franz Josef Degenhardt had his first public appearance, Michaela Weiss performed Israeli songs and the duo Hai & Topsy , who had traveled from Sweden, sang international folklore. There were American folk songs , for example by Carol Culbertson, songs against the atomic bomb performed by Fasia Jansen and satirical songs by Dieter Süverkrüp . The Yiddish songs that Peter Rohland sang, hardly known at the time, attracted particular attention . Since several German radio stations (SWF, SDR and WDR) were on site and produced music programs, the festival quickly became known nationwide.

Hein & Oss (2006)

Second festival: "Chanson Folklore International" (May 26th - June 1st 1965)

The second festival already had around 2000 visitors. In the four-hour opening concert, in which each artist performed two songs, mostly newly created songs were sung. Colin Wilkie & Shirley Hart were there for the first time , as was John Pearse from England. The audience discovered Walter Mossmann's chansons, which are characterized by haunting imagery , heard Yiddish songs by the Dutchwoman Lin Jaldati and folk songs by the Canadian singer Perry Friedman . In addition to the many who were there at the 64th Festival, new artists came along, for example Eva Vargas , Schobert and Black , Walter Hedemann and Susanne Tremper . The festival was rainy at times; Many therefore drove into a yurt in which there was constant discussion and singing; the Palatinate singers Hein and Oss Kröher had set up this Mongolian fire tent as a communication point for artists and the public. This time the ZDF was there with TV recordings. It was a very harmonious festival in which the focus was on songs from other countries, chansons, petty songs, ballads, protest songs and even minne songs by Walther von der Vogelweide .

Hanns Dieter Hüsch

Third festival: "Chanson Folklore International" (May 26 - June 5, 1966)

The third festival took place over Pentecost, when the focus slowly began to shift towards the political song . At the time , Klaus Budzinski wrote that “committed people” and “folklorists” sing side by side, and if you are lucky you will discover poetry in intellectual protest and appropriation through a specific temperament in folklore ”. A working meeting was held before the festival concerts on Whitsun, followed by a “folk song week” with workshops on, among other things, guitar techniques and old German lute songs. This year, the songwriter Hannes Wader, whose singing career began here, and the cabaret artist Hanns Dieter Hüsch performed for the first time . In the preliminary reporting, the Rheinische Merkur with the title " Gammler auf Burg Waldeck - Nihilistische Pfingstfeier" attracted many curious people who could not do much with the often top-class contributions, and which led the announcer of the first concert to the greetings that were received with joy : "Dear bums, dear nihilists, dear atheists". The program included an improvised hootenanny concert with the Anglo-American musicians, including the banjo player Hedy West from Georgia, who also came to Waldeck for the next two years. In addition to many artists from the previous concerts, numerous new artists sang in 1966, for example Ulrich Freise & Fredrik Vahle , the Belgian Julos Beaucarne or the Italian songwriter Fausto Amodei. There were various press reports about this festival, from the trend magazine twen to the rotogravure supplement “Pictures and Times” of the FAZ .

Schnuckenack Reinhard Quintet (1972)

Fourth festival: "The committed song" (May 24-28, 1967)

Easter marches and the Vietnam War had aroused political awareness among artists and young people, which led to the fact that the participants were asked to deal with the festival theme "The committed song" with their texts and songs and in the lectures and working groups that there was more and more contradictory discussions than in previous years. Walter Mossmann performed the “Ballad of Conscientious Objector M.” and the poet Erich Fried came and read his political poems and songs. On Pentecost Sunday, Aleksander Kulisiewicz from Poland performed at an event , who was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp , where he organized recitals and wrote many camp songs. The French actress and singer Magali Noël was on the Waldeck for the first time , as was the Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintet , which enriched the festival's musical diversity with jazz from German Sinti . As in previous years, Franz Josef Degenhardt, Hanns Dieter Hüsch, Walter Hedemann, Schobert and Black and many other artists were involved in the festival. Ivan Rebroff sang with the “Balalaika Ensemble Troika”. Organizers and visitors suffered from acts of sabotage, including cut cables, the destruction of the Red Cross emergency power generator and the temporary interruption of the water supply.

Fifth festival "Lied '68" (June 12-17, 1968)

Odetta (recorded at the Burg Waldeck Festival 1968)
In 1968 chaotic scenes played out on the stage

As festival director, Rolf Gekeler visited the Newport Folk Festival in the USA in 1967 and invited some protest singers, including Phil Ochs and Guy Carawan , to the 1968 Waldeck Festival, which was to focus on the American protest song. The African-American singer Odetta was also there. The increasingly revolutionary mood among the students due to the death of Benno Ohnesorg and Martin Luther King also spread to the Waldeck, when representatives of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) came from some university towns and used disruptive maneuvers to hinder the performances of singers in their Didn't see any political relevance when writing texts. Your "Basisgruppe Waldeck Festival" criticized the lack of political relevance to the festival and the increasing commercialization and tried to repurpose the main concerts. Its members occupied the stage, waved Viet Cong flags, read leaflets and demanded: "Put the guitars in the corner and discuss!" While Franz Josef Degenhardt showed solidarity with the actors, the performances of Reinhard Mey and Hanns Dieter Hüsch were disrupted; the latter was supposed to defend himself before a tribunal for the content of his texts. The American guests and the stupid group Insterburg & Co. remained unmolested.

In protest against these demands, numerous artists refused to perform, there were chaotic scenes, the audience sat helpless for an hour before the singers, led by Colin Wilkie, returned to the stage. The Kröhers and their colleagues publicly insisted on a festival of the song; Discussions about this should only take place after the concerts. Overall, many of the songs were politically related, for example Walter Mossmann sang the song "Drei Kugel auf Rudi Dutschke", which Wolf Biermann , who was not allowed to come to the festival from the GDR, had sung over the phone, and Dieter Süverkrüp performed with the left-wing political cabaret Floh de Cologne . The folk festival had got into a crisis, there were debts because of the high flight costs for the American artists, the ABW criticized the anarchist excesses of the event, and the multitudes of "bums" left a very negative impression on the population.

Sixth Festival: "Waldeck 69 - Counterculture" (September 10-15, 1969)

Rolf Schwendter (2007)

The last Waldeck Festival took place in September 1969. Declared as a so-called "working meeting", it was no longer organized by the ABW student working group, but by a project group. In this organizing group - in previous years the responsibility had rested with the ABW, which this time only provided the site - among others, members of the Mainz Republican Club and some song editors, including Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Henryk M. Broder, worked ; the magazine song appeared now with the subtitle "magazine for progressive subculture ". With the aspect of making Beat usable for political action, appropriate bands had been invited, and so Tangerine Dream and Xhol Caravan were among them . There were hardly any acoustic guitars to be heard; some of the earlier participants, Reinhard Mey and Hannes Wader for example, only gave a brief appearance; others didn't even show up. There were numerous working groups, but “most of the workshops suffered from the fact that there were too few or no participants with practical experience on the topic under discussion. Workshop I 'Workers Culture' fell victim to this completely. "

When the happening art group “First Vienna Working Group”, founded by the writer Joe Berger , appeared on the famine in Biafra , there was a scandal; she had a sumptuous meal brought onto the stage and every now and then only uttered one phrase (the sentence “Even Uncle Ho no longer goes to the toilet” was chosen by Der Spiegel as the title for his reporting), which some “orthodox revolutionary Dogmatiker ”provoked so much that they stormed the stage and the artists had to flee. The cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit wrote in Die Zeit : "Even the provocative attack on consumer attitudes is merely consumed by the majority of the audience, misunderstood by the rest, and only recognized by very few as an attack on the forms of theater frozen in ritual." The Austrian writer and deviance researcher Rolf Schwendter attracted attention “with his anti-songs about the children's drum, to which he lectured in chant about latent fascism and his own theory of subculture.” Günter Wallraff read about his undercover experiences as a worker. The Swiss songwriter and cabaret artist Franz Hohler , who first appeared at Waldeck Castle in 1969, was one of the artists with a particularly high-quality artistic performance. Compared to the previous festivals, the audience structure had changed completely, the dogmatists had the upper hand; a festival in the sense of “Chanson Folklore International” was no longer feasible.

Echoes

Hai and Topsy 2004 at Waldeck Castle
Colin Wilkie and Shirley Hart 2004 at Waldeck Castle
Black (Lothar Lechleiter) 2014 at Waldeck Castle
Cynthia Nickschas and Band 2016 at Waldeck Castle

It wasn't until four years later that there was another big song festival. At Easter 1973 Carsten Linde organized the Ludwigshafener Songtage, which ran smoothly and at which many of the well-known Waldeck songwriters appeared as participants; new artists were added, for example the American folk singer Tom Paxton and the Irish folk brothers Eddie and Finbar Furey . "The [festival] on the Waldeck was the birth, this is the child," said Oss Kröher in the Rheinpfalz region . Whitsun 2004, on the fortieth anniversary of the first “Chanson Folklore International” festival, an anniversary song festival was held, to which many of the artists from previous festivals came to the Hunsrück. In the meantime, Whitsun events organized by the ABW on a smaller scale than in the 1960s take place at the Waldeck, at which new talents are discovered and well-known artists perform, for example at the 2007 song festival Barbara Thalheim , Joana , Frank Baier , Jens-Paul Wollenberg and Klaus der Geiger and in 2008 Johanna Zeul and Tilman Lucke. Whitsun 2014, the event "Fifty Years of the Song Festival on the Waldeck" took place with the participation of numerous participants at the first festival. Among others, Hein and Oss Kröher, Lothar Lechleiter (Black), Joana , Christof Stählin as well as Colin and Shirley performed.

The importance of the Burg Waldeck Festival

"The festivals at Waldeck Castle were probably the most important dates in the history of the German folk movement," says the Folk Lexicon , evaluating the Waldeck festivals. They were the first open-air festivals in Germany and, influenced among other things by French chanson and the American folk and protest scene, made new German-language song forms known as a counterpoint to the popular hit at the time. With the Waldeck Festival, the rediscovery and processing of German folk songs of a democratic character from the past centuries, which the folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz had collected, and which was later continued by groups such as Zupfgeigenhansel , Elster Silberflug and Liederjan . A renaissance of Yiddish folk music began. For several years the political song received a lot of attention; the artists were given many opportunities to perform; Radio and television stations as well as record publishers were interested in publications and numerous small folk magazines were created and are continued to this day (for example Folkmagazin and Folker! ). The festivals paved the way for new forms of German-language song, for example a new type of children's song was created , which was initiated by Fredrik Vahle as well as by Süverkrüp with his "excavator operator Willibald". And finally, the Waldeck was the starting point for many artists' careers. "Nobody thought at the time that musicologists would later speak of the beginning of a new music-historical epoch and historians of a cultural revolutionary event," writes press researcher and Professor Holger Böning , the effects are unmistakable and unparalleled in German music history; For a "brief moment the German-language song had become a cultural phenomenon with a considerable broad impact."

Exhibitions

See also

literature

Sound carrier

  • 1968: Burg Waldeck Festival 1967 - Chanson Folklore International . LP - Xenophon
  • 2004: Burg Waldeck Festival 1967 - Chanson Folklore International: A Documentation . 2 CDs. (Editor) Arbeitsgemeinschaft Burg Waldeck, Helmut König (extended new release of the LP from 1968) - studio wedemark. STW 040504
  • 2008: The Burg Waldeck Festival 1964–1969 . 10 CDs. - Bear Family Records.

Movies

  • When the hippies came to the Hunsrück - The Burg Waldeck Festival 1964–1969. Documentary, Germany, 2014, 29 min., Written and directed: Rolf Hüffer, production: SWR , series: Known in the country, first broadcast: May 16, 2014 on SWR, summary by ARD .
  • The short night of long hair. Open air festivals at Burg Waldeck 1964 - 69th documentary film, Germany, 2004, 152: 20 min., Script and direction: Werner O. Feißt , Hans Albert Lettow, Elmar Hügler, Horst Schäfer, Jürgen Lodemann , Rolf Hüffer, production: SWR , first broadcast: June 11, 2004 on SWR, table of contents by ARD .
  • The festival took place outdoors. The history of the festivals at Waldeck Castle. Documentary in two parts, Federal Republic of Germany, 1984, min., Script and director: Christel Priemer, production: Saarländischer Rundfunk , first broadcasts: April 4 and 11, 1984 on SR, film data from spinnert.de.
  • Chanson - Folklore 1966. Report on a festival. Documentary, Federal Republic of Germany, 1966, 26 min., Script and director: Werner O. Feißt , production: SWF .
  • The Waldeck. Documentary, Federal Republic of Germany, 2013, 120 min., Script and director: Gabi Heleen Bollinger, production: GHBollinger in cooperation with ABW.

Web links

Commons : Burg Waldeck Festivals  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holger Böning at the “Whitsun Talk 2008” at Waldeck Castle
  2. ↑ a b King Oelb . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1969 ( online ).
  3. ↑ a b Eckart Holler: Fifth Festival. Song 68. In: The Burg Waldeck Festivals 1964–1969. Chansons Folklore International , Hambergen 2008.
  4. ↑ Sources on "Resistance": Jürgen Kahle: From the difficulties of making a festival . In: The Burg Waldeck Festival 1964–1969 . Kahle was responsible for the logistics of the festivals from 1964–67.
  5. ↑ Diethart Kerbs on May 16, 1964. In: Report on the first international chanson and folklore festival at Whitsun at Waldeck Castle in the Hunsrück . Archive of the Burg Waldeck Working Group
  6. ↑ Diethart Kerbs: Looking back after 40 years. Waldeck Castle and the consequences . In: Michael Kleff: The Burg Waldeck Festival 1964–1969. Chansons Folklore International . Hambergen 2008.
  7. ^ The time of June 10, 1966
  8. ↑ Where the wandering bird once sang . In: twen , 1966, No. 8;. Bernhard Frank: Yes, where are the songs, the old songs? Folksinger at Waldeck Castle . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 11, 1966.
  9. ^ A b Klaus Theweleit : Anti-culture in Hunsrück loneliness. In: The time of September 19, 1969.
  10. ↑ “UNCLE HO NO LONGER WALKS IN THE TOILET” In: Der Spiegel 39/1969 of September 22, 1969. The North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh had died shortly before.
  11. ↑ The Rhine Palatinate. Ludwigshafener Rundschau from April 14, 1973
  12. ↑ According to Köpfchen, No. 3/2004, there were Hannes Wader, Colin & Shirley, Hai & Topsy, Hein & Oss, the Pontocs and Black, Carol Culbertson, Christof Stählin, Walter Mossmann, Rolf Schwendter, John Pearse and speakers Diethard Kerbs there.
  13. ↑ Kaarel Shriver. In: Folk Lexicon . Reinbek 1981. p. 267
  14. ↑ Often short-lived periodicals such as sing in. Kabarett song chanson or Spektrum. Magazine for Chanson - Folklore - Protest
  15. ↑ Holger Böning in: Other, better and nasty songs. In: Friday , June 4, 2004, No. 24.
  16. ↑ They are a selection from 147 CDs on which Helmut König and Stephan Rögner burned all of the recordings of the festival with the help of the German Broadcasting Archive.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 30, 2008 .