2023-06-10 19:39:12
An exhibition with a simple title can be visited in the Rostock art gallery until the end of August: Udo Lindenberg. Everything should be said with this. The show promises insights into the “Udoversium”: record covers, clothes, stage productions, photos, texts and, last but not least, drawings, paintings and his famous liqueurs – watercolors made from alcohol.
I’ve been a fan for almost 50 years, grew up behind the wall with “Andrea Doria”, “Bodo Ballermann”, “Votan Wahnwitz”, “Riki Masorati”, “Schneewittchen”, “Jonny Controlletti”, “Rudi Ratlos”, “Gerhard Gösebrecht “, “Mr. Nobody”, the girl from East Berlin, my hometown. I really wanted to learn “cello”, and of course “To London”, on Udo’s “Reeperbahn”, “High to the North”, “Deep to the South”, preferably with a “thumbs in the wind”.
I wanted to “sit by the docks all day”, have real “sympathy for the devil”, longed to be “still crazy after all these years”. I was looking forward to the “stokers”, wasn’t afraid of the “rockers”. I was there when Udo was on the road as a “detective”, about “Baltimore”, “New York”, the “Desperado”, the “Salty Dog”, “The Small Town”, “Norman Jean”, the “American Dream” sang, promised “Born To Be Wild” and lamented: “Just enough to survive”.
I was a GDR teenager and I longed to live in a country where these dreams could be told without fear: “Damn, we have to get out of the dirt”. And of course, like Udo, I believed that “My first love” wouldn’t burst after all, believed in “Baby, when I’m down”. And when I actually got married, centuries later, Udo sang for us: “With you even a child”.
I was lucky. When Udo conquered the German stages in 1973 and presented one great LP after the other, I was always there. Because I had an older sister, my dearest Ghenia, who was stricken with Udo “street fever” from the start. And parents who, for some reason, not only had nothing against the yodeling singer, but somehow even liked him. When my mother wasn’t doing so well in the early 80s, I had nothing better to do than play “She’s 40” to her. She was 38 years old and looked at me a little helplessly.
When Udo performed in the Palace of the Republic in October 1983, my euphoria was over.
My sister and I were even luckier. Because we lived in East Berlin and on Saturdays we heard the Rias meeting point, where “Marc Bohlen from Cottbus” heard the “T. Rex from Sömmerda” greeted and Lindenberg songs were played, which my sister eagerly recorded. Everyone did it, at least everyone I knew. The latest catalogs by Zweitausendeins were circulating on the illegal record swapping and buying markets. I couldn’t afford any of it, but I had friends and acquaintances who would lend me their records to dub. All of Udo’s records were in my “archives” right up until the disc “Udopia” (1981) and the fantastic live double album “Intensive Stations” (1982).
My hero had bowed to the censorship of the SED state
Then my interest flagged, not in Udo, but in his new things, which no longer seemed so crisp and spicy, so original and unique to me, with a few exceptions: “I’m with the Bund”, “Panic Panther”, “He wanted to Germany”, “Bunte Republik Deutschland” and, of course, “Sonderzug nach Pankow”. I almost bought a famous record, but let it be.
It happened like this: In 1980 the Intershop had the fantastic double album “Livehaftig” for about 40 DM. I didn’t have that much, worked in Friedrichshagen am Müggelsee with neighbors to renovate the house, dirty work. But it was worth it. They gave me Westknete, I drove to the Intershop Invalidenstrasse (the one with the best records) and asked for “Livehaftig”. But the record was not a “Gema” but an “AWA” pressing, an edition only for the GDR Intershops. The title “Sympathie für den Teufel”, Udo’s adaptation of the Stones classic, was missing.
I was stunned. My hero had bowed to the censorship of the SED state. That was still misread in the last Udo biography. Today I’m annoyed that I didn’t buy this GDR edition, it’s missing from my collection.
When Udo performed in the Palace of the Republic in October 1983, my euphoria was over. That was no longer my Udo, the indomitable. When he met Honecker in Wuppertal in 1987 on the sidelines of his working visit to the Federal Republic, things got even more embarrassing. No, you don’t crawl before dictators, not even because of your own fans, who would love to experience their idol live.
The wall was not high enough to keep out the influence of Western subcultures. That was a nuisance for the communists – they couldn’t go against rock ‘n’ roll, they couldn’t go against punk. When Vaclav Havel met his fans Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in Prague in 1990, they bowed to the underground hero. He replied: “It’s not you, we behind the Iron Curtain, who have you to thank. Because no one can overestimate the dictatorship-destroying influence of your freedom-longing music.” I don’t know if the Stones understood that.
Udo shaped my everyday life, but also my thinking as a teenager, more than anyone else.
Before the SED board invited Udo to play in the Palace of the Republic – which they only did because the recently deceased unique Harry Belafonte had linked his coming to East Berlin to “little Udo” being allowed to perform – they had allowed the state record label Amiga to release a disc from “Jodeltalent”. That was in 1982. And I was there, riding my bike with a friend from Friedrichshagen to Köpenick on Grünstrasse, to queue up at Karl Jendrysik’s private record store shortly after 1 p.m. I was never there alone. Shortly before 3 p.m., when the owner ended his lunch break, there were often 50, 100, sometimes hundreds, queuing to the end of Grünstrasse to see whether there was a licensed record that week, i.e. one with western artists. Most of the time there was nothing and we left without having achieved anything. But in 1982 there was the record of the master.
The disappointment couldn’t have been greater. It started with “What are wars for?”, a song that always goes, but there wasn’t a song that hurt, none from the punk box, not even “I’m into disco”. And then the covers! A good Udo with a disco glitter shirt! It was embarrassing: “Unfortunately only a vacuum”?
I bought the disc anyway, drove home, sorted it into my collection, put another Udo disc on the turntable and never looked at the Amiga part again.
When Udo came to East Berlin in October 1983, I was convinced that I would see him in Friedrichshagen with some SED functionaries. She in her ugly plastic suits, he in his udoic gear: hat, leather clothes, panic buckle, Jupiter shoes. Or was it a Uda Morgana?
I wasn’t one of those guys who dressed up like Udo. I didn’t have access to funky clothes and preferred to spend my money on LPs. Of course I also had Udo pictures hanging around. Some of my best friends had more Western than Eastern money, more Western than Eastern relatives. Sometimes they gave me Udo memorabilia; the only color photo of Udo that came out in the GDR, in 1978 in the August issue of “neues leben”, hung in my youth room.
My awakening tune: “Cat”
Yes, Udo shaped my everyday life, but also my thinking as a teenager, more than anyone else. I would like to say that Wolf Biermann or Vaclav Havel ended my political slumber and put me on the path of longing for freedom. But it was Udo who woke me up from a deep sleep.
And that’s how it happened: In 1979 Udo released his second rock revue disc (“Der Detektiv”). The Rias put on a “Long Night of Udo Lindenberg”, in the studio more than 20 panicked sat around with alcohol and lots of smoke. I recorded the whole night on tape, listened to it again and again, was soon able to join in every sequence, was infected, just didn’t know what to do with the virus. A little later, in 1980, “Panic Times” came out. One of those classic records that many people still don’t know exist, but know every track – even my mother, I assume. And on this very preserve there was my piece, my awakening melody: “Cat”. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this song in my life. Almost 16,000 days have passed since it was released, so I must have made it a few thousand times. At that time I heard it every day.
But sometimes there are situations
you have to be tougher
when your old man fiddles his sayings to you
and always says you’re still too small
Say hello to him and stuff
he should better throw up on the toilet
Girl, isn’t that animal
all humans are like cats
Many are silly stuffed animals
on the Leisetreterpaws
But we are different and we don’t fit
to the toy department and not to the zoo
We are the friends of the jungle
and our song goes like this:
We are the tigers and one thing is clear
Cages are for breaking out
This is my life and I do what I want
This is my head and I think what I want
I’m a tiger, you can’t tame me
anyone who tries
gets the paw full in the face!
Dear Udo, you’ve done a lot of nonsense in your life. I don’t even believe you that you would do “same again” everything. Your drinking is none of my business. But I found the glorification in many a song to be shit before my best friend Uwe, who is also a big fan of yours, broke up with alcohol. And many a song about adventure and attraction to young, very young, too young people irritated me as soon as I started listening to your songs. But the political resilience, the courage to rebel, to say no, to say I, to go my own way, your songs, your cats have paved me like nothing and no one else. I don’t thank you for that, you can’t do anything about it. But I love you for that – still and always.
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, born in East Berlin in 1967, is a historian. His book was published in 2019 “The takeover. How East Germany became part of the Federal Republic”, his biography “Walter Ulbricht. The German Communist”.
#rockers #GDR #woke #deep #sleep