“I go to my marble train and don't know what to do first.
First I vomit, then brush my teeth, then the other things, then a sip of corn from the hip flask, and then I'm still scared. "
These are the first sentences in the book "Abgehauen" by Manfred Krug, published in 1996. Krug describes how in November 1976 he invited the nomenklatura of the GDR state power and some cultural people to his house in Berlin-Pankow to discuss how it should be go on.
Something monstrous had happened.
He secretly recorded the conversation - a deadly sin in the East.
If someone is recording, it's the Stasi.
Hence the fear.
But not just because of that.
A few days earlier, the GDR had not allowed the songwriter Wolf Biermann to re-enter the country after a concert in Cologne, the uncomfortable poet was simply expatriated.
To ensure that this "does not become naturalized," as Krug called it, he signed a petition and even peddled this list to extend it.
That cost him his existence in the GDR.
As an actor and singer, he was one of the few superstars in real socialism, and for the persona non grata he fought with the state, defending Biermann's "poetry that will outlast him."
"It can go straight into the history book if it's not already there."
Today, five years after his death, Krug is himself a character for the history book.
Six months after the coffee party with the old men from the Politburo, he and his wife Ottilie and their three children Josefine, Fanny and Daniel turned their backs on the GDR and, after grueling months of negotiations with the authorities, moved to West Berlin.
Erich Honecker is said to have said in 1972: "We need a lot of jugs." But the jug that the State Council Chairman actually wanted to increase broke on his state.
A career came to an end that was unrivaled in the GDR: as an actor - Krug appeared in almost every third Defa film - but above all as a singer.
He never really learned to sing
This career began in 1957, when the 20-year-old bard was heard for the first time in the Berlin “Young Artists Club” and accompanied himself on the banjo.
The audience in the East loved the singer Krug more than the actor, because at concerts they met the undisguised, uncensored, indomitable artist.
Someone who often used the pauses between the songs for tips against the state, as you could not hear anywhere else in the East.
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Krug was a self-taught musical artist.
Nobody taught him to sing, nobody to make music on the guitar or the piano.
"My father probably got that on the way from his grandmother," recalls Daniel Krug.
“She had a partner who played the violin, he listened to him for hours.
Even when Grandma broke up, my father kept going over to him to eavesdrop. "
When Krug had completed his apprenticeship as a steelworker, he was drawn to vibrant Berlin.
At the age of 19 Bertolt Brecht engaged him in the Berliner Ensemble, but after appearing at the theater he much preferred to hang out in the then famous club "Möwe" at 19 Luisenstrasse.
There he made friends with the bohemians of the East.
Meinhard Lüning, who later became a professor and radiologist at the Charité, also went in and out of the Möwe and often brought his amateur band, the Berlin Jazz Optimists, with him.
Krug improvised jazz standards and traditionals with them;
the trumpeter Lüning was fascinated by Krug's sonorous voice, the timing, the talent for entertainment.
In 1958 both officially appeared together for the first time, a guest performance at the Berlin Prater.
Krug pounded through the clubs in East Berlin and sang wherever the opportunity arose. Son Daniel tells how a childhood friend of his father's first meeting remembered "a guy who, when he was young, dominated the whole" press café "at Friedrichstrasse station". It was always amateur performances, always spontaneous improvisations.
In 1963, Klaus Lenz was the first professional musician to notice Krug. His modern jazz big band toured the GDR once a year, Krug, now a sought-after and permanently employed Defa actor, took four weeks off, went with him and filled the halls to the last seat. In 1965 he recorded the first Amiga LP with Lenz. "Here we actually find Manfred Krug in a jazzy top form and relaxed, inspired by his own mentality and virtuosity exactly the same big band as we have hardly known from him before," wrote Karlheinz Drechsel, author of the album's liner notes.
Lenz is still excited today when he thinks of the time almost 60 years ago.
"Krug had perfect pitch, his intonation was perfect, although he didn't know a single note," he says.
“Once we were in the studio, we recorded the songs and they were done.
A thoroughbred musician. "
Alone with the cloakroom there was something wrong.
Lenz had to lend him the white jacket that Krug wears on the album because he “didn't look like a stage performer”.
Krug brought loudspeakers to the concerts so that the back rows could also hear something.
Material was in short supply in the GDR, "but Krug always had connections."
In the meantime, Krug was so established as a singer that even the "Komische Oper" Unter den Linden wanted him. The Austrian Walter Felsenstein, founder of the theater, staged Gershwin's »Porgy and Bess« in 1970, and Krug was supposed to act as »Sporting Life«. "He was so scared of it," says Krug's daughter Fanny. “Felsenstein had hired stars from the USA, Cullen Maiden, John Moulson, Ronald Dutro, trained singers. My father thought he could never keep up. "
After some persuasion, he agreed, but before each performance was "terribly nervous, had stage fright," says Daniel Krug, who visited his father twice at the performance as a six-year-old. Krug apparently had this stage fright until the end of his career. “Before every gig he was unbearable. But once he was on stage, he drove as if on rails, «says Fanny Krug, who later gave concerts with her father herself.
During this time Manfred Krug met the saxophonist Günther Fischer.
The young student at the music college earned a few marks in Klaus Lenz's Big Band.
The two hit it off right away, had the same taste in music, wanted to stir up the dreary everyday GDR hits and show that they can definitely take on international artists like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles.
Enlarge image
Günther Fischer with singer Krug at an appearance on GDR television in 1975
Photo:
Klaus Winkler / ullstein picture
"If they can't come here, I'll give the audience Ray Charles," Krug once said.
Hubris was not a welcome trait in the workers 'and peasants' state, but without this excessive self-confidence, without Krug's brute presence, the legendary four records that Manfred Krug recorded with the Günther Fischer Band between 1971 and 1976 would probably never have been made.
At first they only thought of a single.
Fischer wrote a melody and played it to Krug.
"That was only a moment" was the title of the piece.
He liked it so much that he said, "Write ten more songs, we'll make an LP."
Enlarge image
Wolfgang "Zicke" Schneider, Krug drummer in the Günther Fischer quintet
Photo: Cleografie by Schlechwerbung
Under the pseudonym Clemens Kerber, who stood on his doorbell until he died, Krug composed all of the lyrics to Fischer's compositions. They were originally intended to be in English to emphasize the competitive edge. But the state does not participate, the songs should be in German. "Which in retrospect was a great stroke of luck," says Wolfgang "Zicke" Schneider, who played the drums in the band from the start. "This is how Krug's gifted talent for lyrics came to the fore, which contrasted pleasantly with the banal Schlager monotony."
The record hit like a bomb.
“So many were made until the molding compound for vinyl and the record sleeves were all,” Schneider recalls.
"He was a natural." The sound was funky, with brass sections and a Fender Rhodes piano.
And the lyrics, mostly about love, were of tender beauty:
You are like new today so I don't know you, why?
You have such a lovely smile on your face today, why?
And your hair is wavy again
You put roses on the table
What kind of day is it today, what is the world celebrating today?
And I'll run and get champagne and caviar in the evening.
And if that's not available, we'll go to the bar today.
When it's day off, I'll buy beer and make tartare, of course
It was the wedding day that Krug had forgotten, and he shamefully processed the faux pas in a song text.
In another (»You«) he tried to comfort a complete stranger in the S-Bahn about her lovesickness and to bring himself into play as a new lover:
You, sorry, I've counted your tears.
Why are you crying.
Are you alone since today
? Oh, don't grieve anymore
The world, it's not as dreary and empty
As your gaze
you will surely find
your way
back
You, your inner life needs new vigor.
Look at me
. We paint the eyeliner after
you smile and that is good.
And in the search for new courage,
only one thing is missing
A good heart, namely mine
On the record sleeves, an imaginary Isa Karfunkelstein conducted ironic interviews with Krug, actually Krug with himself, in order to cheat the stupidity of the GDR censorship:
Karfunkelstein: "What should the steps on one of the titles mean?"
Krug: "They should mean that steps can be heard there."
Karfunkelstein: "When should No. 2 appear?"
Krug: "When No. 1 is sold out. «
Nobody in the West was interested in his singing
A record number five with Fischer never came out, although parts were already recorded. In 1977 Krug went to the West; nothing of the works he had left in the east was allowed to be published. There was no further collaboration with Fischer even after reunification. Krug claims to have read in his Stasi files that Fischer had spied on him over the years. In 1993 he settled accounts with his former friend in the SPIEGEL, wrote an open letter to "Günthi" that he had been saved from the mistake of "little Mozart asshole, to work with you again". As gentle as Krug could be in his texts, he was raw when someone came to him stupid.
In 1979 he recorded another soul-style record in the West by the Fischer / Krug duo, with excellent musicians such as Toots Thielemans, Wolfgang Schlüter and Ack van Rooyen, while Peter Herbolzheimer arranged »Da bist Du ja«. Alone: It was a total flop. “Nobody knew me then, and people all rightly listened to and looked at Milva. And not on that somewhat chubby bald man from the Zone, ”Krug said.
“He was offended, extremely popular in the East, nobody in the West was interested in his singing. That bothered him, «says daughter Fanny today. "But he didn't want to ingratiate himself either and has finished his career as a singer." Krug assumed that he would have to support his family as a truck driver from now on - and not in the film. The West had at least recognized his driver's license.
Krug made his comeback as a singer almost 20 years after his last record.
It was at a reading in the Paunsdorf Center in Leipzig, where a small jazz band played in front of 1000 people between the reading passages to entertain during breaks, and Wolfgang "Zicke" Schneider also played the drums again.
In the audience, however, the people didn't want to hear Krug read, they wanted to sing it.
They shouted "Sing, sing, sing," they wanted their old man back.
Krug spontaneously improvised an "All of me" with the band, and the knot was broken.
A late rediscovery
In 2000 he even dared to release his songs, which he sang as Kriminalhauptkommissar Stoever with his »Tatort« colleague Brockmöller (Charles Brauer), on a record. In the end he only gave concerts and hardly read any more, with the jazz singer Uschi Brüning he recorded the album »Chosen«. But until his death, Krug persistently refused to sing a song that he had once recorded with Günther Fischer.
Others take care of that now.
The youth have discovered the "fat bald man from the zone" for themselves.
The indie band Das Paradies around Albrecht Schrader and Florian Sievers recently recorded the song "When it's green outside".
Stefanie Tisch recorded “Kalt und Weiß”, the pop duo Lina Maly & Moritz Krämer sang “Ade”, an originally slow Brazilian number that Krug had once recorded with Caterina Valente.
In the coming year, an entire sampler with Krug songs will be released on the »Krokant« label.
What is it that fascinates the youngsters today about the Krug classics?
Florian Sievers is one of the producers of the sampler and was born in the GDR himself in 1983.
His parents hardly told him anything about their time in the GDR.
"What you can't get out of them is what Krug's art tells," says Sievers.
It contrasts in an impressive way "the impression and the idea that one has made of life in the GDR up to then".
And that cliché consisted of gray houses and hideous music.
"It was a complete surprise to hear that funky and sexy music was also recorded there," says Sievers.
"Poetic, free, wild and impetuous."