Werner Wunderlich

Werner Wunderlich's grave

Heinz Werner Wunderlich (born September 15, 1926 in Minden ; † April 2, 2013 in Baden-Baden ) was a German jazz journalist and radio presenter.

Live and act

Werner Wunderlich had his first encounter with jazz in 1942 through records smuggled into the Nazi Reich. After military service and imprisonment, he began studying civil engineering at the TH Darmstadt in 1949 . There he was involved in founding a jazz club in 1950 (hot-circle-darmstadt), of which he was chairman from 1954 to 1957. Wunderlich wrote his first press publications about jazz in 1954. He was the club manager of the German Jazz Federation for many years and was a member of the council of elders until the end.

In 1959 he was the initiator and for 44 years the organizer of the open-air concert series " Jazz im Palmengarten " in Frankfurt am Main . Since 1963 he worked as a radio presenter for the Hessischer Rundfunk . In 1970 he became press chief of the record company CBS Germany . In 1978 Wunderlich went to Baden-Baden as an editor for Südwestfunk . In 1987 he succeeded Joachim-Ernst Berendt as head of the jazz editorial team and thus also of the New Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden until he retired in 1991.

Wunderlich produced numerous concerts and workshops for radio and jazz in the Palmengarten , which he also moderated. In 1958/9 he was the author of the "Opa Hirchleitner Story", a satirical biography of the fictional "Nestor of German Jazz", which Albert Mangelsdorff put into musical form (also 1958, Bear Family Records).

His Polish contacts, which he had made while he was a prisoner of war from 1945 to 1949, he continued in his jazz work. As early as 1957, Wunderlich was the initiator and organizer of the first concert tour of West German jazz musicians in Poland with a performance at the jazz festival in Sopot near Gdansk . The encounter was recognized by Polish intellectuals as the first cultural contact between the Federal Republic of Germany and the then People's Republic of Poland after the Second World War. Wunderlich has also contributed to tours of many Polish jazz musicians in Germany through invitations. According to the Warsaw magazine “ Jazz Forum ”, Wunderlich is to be regarded as an “ambassador of Polish jazz” (“ambasador polskiego jazzu”) in West Germany. Vladyslav Sendecki dedicated his composition "Little Waltz Wunderlich."

In 1997, Minister Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt awarded Wunderlich the Hessian State Government the Hessian Jazz Prize for his services . In 2004 he was awarded the plaque of honor of the city of Frankfurt am Main . In 2007 he received the Goethe plaque from the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art and the Order of Honor from the Polish Ministry of Culture.

He is buried in the main cemetery in Frankfurt .

Web links

• Prize of the German Record Critics / Jury Biographies H.-Werner Wunderlich ( Memento from July 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Jazz newspaper 2002 on Wunderlich
• Obituary on the SWR2 homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The corresponding part of his estate will be made accessible by the Darmstadt Jazz Institute together with the Darmstadt Poland Institute . See message (Jazzcity)
2. ↑ See Vladyslav Sendecki & Atom String Quartet Le Jardin Oublié / My Polish Heart . New sound 2018