Pop Sunday

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Pop Sunday tape recordings, around 1980

Pop Sunday (English for Pop (am) Sonntag) was a literature and music show on Bavarian Radio from 1968 to 1984.

History and meaning

Gert Heidenreich

Pop Sunday was created in 1968 as an element in building the Bayern 3 wave . Youth radio editor Walther von La Roche commissioned the writer Gert Heidenreich to create a one-hour program with political poetry on current events and, for the time, progressive rock music. These poems mostly had a left , aphoristic character and came from Heidenreich himself or from submissions via the listener's mail. The long-time BR presenter Georg Kostya invented the title of the show ; From his record collection came the rhythmically stumbling opening music of the show, Painting for Freakout by John Simon . Heidenreich selected the music within the programs. It was mostly titles that were too extreme for the BR's first popular rock music show, Club 16 . In these programs, long pieces like In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida were played , probably for the first time in the ARD network - 17 minutes.

Heidenreich designed and moderated the show every Sunday, first at 9 a.m., then 10 a.m., then 11 a.m., always live. In order to have the texts edited, he phoned La Roche - usually the evening before - and read them to him. The topics of the show were radical for Bayerischer Rundfunk, but remained an insider tip because of Bayern 3's test status. La Roche knew the risk involved, but felt that the program corresponded to the zeitgeist of political upheaval and the student movement .

In the spring of 1970 there was a falling out between the editor and his presenter: For the first time, Heidenreich had pre-produced a program (due to illness) instead of broadcasting it live. It included music such as Arthur Brown's satanic song Fire and Heidenreich's own split-up narrative procedure . In the text, a student fantasizes how he uses school instruments against his sadistic teacher. In Heidenreich's absence, Walther von La Roche canceled the program on the grounds that it openly called for teacher murder, and replaced it with an hour of pop music. The incident led to the rift between the two initiators of Pop Sunday. La Roche asked Heidenreich to send the next Sunday, but he refused and brought his colleague Carl-Ludwig Reichert into play. Immediately afterwards Reichert received a telegram from the BR asking if he wanted to read from his book Children's Games for Pop Sunday . The station broadcast this program on said Sunday.

In 1971 Bayern 3 became a full program with a lighter focus . Pop Sunday came in the hour before Sunday midnight on Bayern 2 , where the show stayed until the end. It was not moderated, but only consisted of the authors' texts - which were later more and more elaborately produced - together with music that was mostly chosen by the authors themselves. The core team that was formed on the occasion of Heidenreich's exit from the show and that steered the fortunes for years consisted of Gerald Brauner, Michael Czernich and Michael Fruth in addition to Reichert.

Basic democracy in the editorial meetings

Walter Schricker headed the editorial meetings for the first 10 years in the broadcasting houses in Munich and Nuremberg . Young, unknown authors were invited to these conferences (not broadcast on the radio), which usually lasted several hours, via word of mouth or via the programs Club 16 and later Zündfunk . They could read their texts on site and vote on the texts of other authors. Everyone in the room, including members of the editorial board, had one vote. This form of grassroots democracy arose from the student movement of the late 1960s and attracted, among other things, the alternative literary magazines and their authors, which were repelled by the establishment of the major publishers. Wolf Wondratschek , Elfriede Jelinek and Herbert Achternbusch were among the first authors, who were already better known at the time .

Contact point for young authors

In the mid-1970s, Pop Sunday was a fixture in the ARD broadcasting landscape; no other broadcaster could come up with such a demanding weekly program of young, new literature. The program was conceived politically; aesthetic texts had no place. The underground rock music underlined this. For some authors, such as Helmut Krausser , who had his first broadcast here at the age of 16, Pop Sunday was a springboard into a career of his own. Others, such as Thomas Brasch , Jörg Fauser , Fitzgerald Kusz or Thomas Meinecke , had their first radio experience. Pop Sunday has become more and more elaborate over the years. Some of the programs had radio drama character around 1980 . The authors often directed themselves, but there was also a solid base of freelance journalists who came to the sessions with or without their own texts and brought their directing experience to the table.

End of broadcast

After Walter Schricker, often represented by Konrad Franke, Christoph Lindenmeyer became head of youth radio and led the meeting alternately with Dagmar Reim . Lindenmeyer ended the series at the beginning of 1984 - among other things because the grassroots democratic form had run out of steam after 16 years, fewer and fewer new authors showed interest in the program and were able to prepare their texts acoustically demanding. The follow-up program, entitled Zündfunk Nachtausgabe , no longer aimed to offer new authors a forum, but was recruited from the now established freelance journalists from the core Pop Sunday team, such as Herbert Kapfer , Claus Biegert , Thomas Palzer .

Pop Sunday authors (selection)

literature

  • Christoph Lindenmeyer: Pop Sunday - When it gets dark in Bavaria . For the 10th anniversary of the show. Kartenhaus Verlag, Zeitlarn near Regensburg 1980, ISBN 3-88533-000-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Procedure was published by Piper in 1986 in the anthology Die Gnade der late Geburt. ISBN 3-492-03069-6 .
  2. ↑ There are other information about cooperation with this team in the articles about Carl-Ludwig Reichert and the avant-garde rock band Sparifankal .