As of: February 25, 2024, 6:58 a.m
By: Sandra Sedlmaier
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Signing session after the impressive reading: Author Josef Brustmann signs for Anna Bellmann from Münsing in his book “Everyone is who”.
© Dagmar Rutt
The cabaret artist, musician and author Josef Brustmann gave the people of Bergen a hometown evening in the best sense of the word with a reading from his memories “Everyone is someone”.
Mountain
– we all have memories.
But when we tell stories, we rarely manage to place them in the larger context, in economic development or even in world history, in the big picture.
Josef Brustmann (70) does this casually in his memoirs “Everyone is someone”.
At his reading on Tuesday at the invitation of the Berger Cultural Association in the Strandhotel in Berg, everything was there: big story, big feelings, a lot of laughter and almost tears.
The locations of these memories are very close: Waldram, the Isar and Lake Starnberg.
The award-winning cabaret artist, musician and singer also played the zither, including setting an Oskar Maria Graf poem to music.
So the reading became a hometown evening in the best sense.
Little Josef Brustmann didn't even know some aspects of his homeland, as he realized when he looked back.
For a long time he was not aware that his home town of Waldram, where he moved in 1957 at the age of three with his parents and six siblings, was the largest European reception camp for Jews who had survived the Holocaust at the end of the 1940s.
“What is astonishing and disturbing in retrospect is that we children grew up without any prior knowledge of the place.
Only shortly before our arrival there had been a complete shtetl life in Waldram/Föhrenwald,” Brustmann read.
“But no one talked about it anymore.”
The mother with three small children and an elderly mother-in-law ended up in Bavaria after being expelled from Moravia; the father joined them after eight years in the war and in captivity.
“Great happiness” began for Josef Brustmann’s parents in Waldram in 1957.
The father worked as a medic in the Munich slaughterhouse and often brought home a lot of meat, intestines and offal, which the large family could use.
And also a pig's head that looked out of the mother's pot.
Laughter in the audience.
The description of how blood sausages were made at home and how blood sausages and liver sausages were available for days - boiled, fried, warmed up and always popular with the Brustmann children - was also wonderful.
The mother, on the other hand, was there primarily for her children.
“My mother didn’t know any hobbies,” said Brustmann.
The word wouldn't have passed her lips; work was her life.
Brustmann shared an intimate moment shortly before his father's death with the 120 listeners, and his voice briefly faltered.
On his deathbed, his father finally looked at him: “His eyes rested on me, rested on me.”
“Everyone is who” is also a homage to the grandfathers, especially to the musical grandfather on the mother’s side, Josef Huber.
Although he drank himself to death at the age of 65, he was extremely musical and passed his talent on to his children and grandchildren.
The grandfather sang all day long, and once while slaughtering the pigs he is said to have sung “O head full of blood and wounds,” said Josef Brustmann.
“In other families there were arguments, in ours there was singing.”
When other families already had color televisions, the Brustmanns still sang.
“We had to make our own entertainment.” Without Dieter Thomas Heck, Karl Moik and Heinz Schenk, “I can describe my childhood as a very happy one.”
The games were accordingly.
He spent a lot of time in the nearby Isar meadows, said Brustmann, and fell into the Bavarian dialect.
“A day with me: Shui, hoam, Isar.
On vacation: Isar.
On the big vacation: six weeks on the Isar.” Everyone was home at 7 o’clock in the evening because that’s when “Betthupferl” was on the radio.
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The author, who lives in Icking, talked about the tours as star singers, where they first got apples and nuts, then chocolate and at some point the first “Milky Way”, a chocolate bar that they divided into four parts.
It wasn't until later that money was given, and the boys knew which coin had ended up in the can just by the sound.
The many older people in the audience nodded, these were memories they shared.
And they laughed when Brustmann told how he was allowed to take part in an Achternbusch film at the Bierbichler in Ambach as a bather and as a corpse.
In fact, he almost drowned once in Berg on an altar boy's trip.
“That’s when I realized that swimming in the Isar wasn’t the same as swimming in the lake.”
The book “Everyone is who” was published by Allitera Verlag and costs 20 euros.