Wenceslas 70 – still: Wenzel is a power plant

This man is very well organized for an artist. Last November, Hans-Eckardt Wenzel handed over his preliminary to the Marbach literary archive. So nothing important can be lost if some fire catches. But the whole thing also has practical use: others can sort and there is space for something new.

Actually, he does not want to be addressed with the somewhat bulky first name. His name is just Wenzel. After all, after one of his Bohemian ancestors who only bore this name, an entire place was named in Prague, he said. Today’s Wenzel is certainly something of a king in its industry, like its possible ancestor. You can read it from the number of orders and prices.

It is not entirely surprising that he also thinks of the last curtain after 50 years of artist. After all, he jumped off the shovel at the beginning of 30 times. And still has an incredible workload continuously to this day and 100 days of tour a year. In addition, the life that is as unhealthy as it says in his “Kamper drinking song”, a farewell hymn of his annual open airs for the summer solstice at the port near Kamp near the Hubbrückenruine Karnin near Anklam.

There he stands on stage at five in the afternoon to the morning. Only with his long -time musician friend Tobias Morgenstern. Then for a while alone and finally with his grand band. This year he brought it to 108 titles presented, only with one single he had a hanger in the text. The few breaks: Prussianly disciplined each half an hour, almost too little time to talk to those you meet there.

The former Green politician Antje Vollmer, who died in early 2023, had taken care of her friend Wenzel: he literally burned on stage, she says in the documentary film that Lew Hohmann shot about the poet, composer, author. It routinely changes on stage between the guitar, accordion and piano. He studied that as little as finding melodies.

Then there is the cabaret artist, actor, director Wenzel. As early as 1976, he was part of the Berlin song theater Karl’s grandson, since the beginning of his cultural studies. The group set up 13 full -length programs in nine years. For Wenzel it was always clear: he did not want to be a permanent job in science or at a theater, but freelance. With this wish, he was able to prevail over the authorities, although something like this was not intended in the GDR with the diploma financed by the state – and although his rather subversive work was eyed.

In the theater group he slipped into the role of the clown. So he was able to scourge arrogance, bigotry and rituals of the GDR superiors by playing through them as his own stupidity. In the last GDR years he did this very successfully together with Steffen Mensching as a duo “Meh and Woe” in the successful “Da there” programs. The last of them became a film in 1990. Before that, there was a short -term arrest in Hoyerswerda and a ban on performance in the city.

Wenzel still uses the means of clowning in his appearances, which also live on his moderations and witnesses. His self -irony also gives hard social criticism a certain ease. For example, when he rushes over “eight years in the lockdown”, the gender, which gives the gender, and sees Sascha Lobo’s swear word “rag pacifist” as an honorary title.

Many of his pieces are anger and spotted songs about denuncants, opportunists, about decadence, the brutality of the “system” towards weak, all of which with tongue-bridal word acrobatics. Wenzel can keep up with people like Alligatoah. Although he would certainly prefer a comparison with Georg Kreisler.

In between the great melancholist and minstrel Wenzel again and again. Some of his delicate pieces sound like Bach choirs or hymns, the verses like old folk styles or Heine or Paul Gerhardt. If you hear them without knowing the origin, you can hardly say whether they come from 2025, 1789 or 1524.

The arrangements that often come from his guitarists Thommy Krawallo and Hannes Scheffler ensure that his appearances can go through as rock concerts. The collective actually uses everywhere: speed polka, folk music of various world regions, country, blues, jazz. In productions such as “King of Honolulu”, the clownesque comes to his right, which he describes as his Schlageralbum. Some songs can actually be swayed, for example to the title giver about the king, who is actually a ferryman in the Sahara, dealer in the Bundestag and, above all, dancers of Hawaii.

Wenzel can certainly imagine as happy people. One with many long -time friends. One who always did what he really wanted – and could. Did not have to bend for it. And he knows how many he touched with his songs. Also after I bought his first solo plate in 1986. In the shop in Stavenhagen there were not all albums to buy like in the West, and so you took what appeared interesting. Google who that is, how he looks on the cover photo without this white theater make -up on the face and what else he does. I didn’t know him from the radio either. The title “Die with me a piece” still causes this pull in the heart area: “Fine loved, now the leafy brown / again in the tips / when we sit under the chestnut tree / in the evening. / The year continues with heavy freight, / the shoe binds. / I’m so sad tonight, / and you, you laugh. “

Again and again Wenzel also sets poems of others like on the “Stars Glühn” record with texts by Johannes R. Becher. On another he sings ballads by the Austrian poet Theodor Kramer. The veneration for Kramer may have brought him together with Erich Hackl. The Viennese writer made him aware of the Linz poet Henriette Haill (1904–1996), worker and communist. And so there is also a wonderful CD on which Wenzel Haill sings.

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Wenzel would not be Wenceslas without his political interventions, interviews and contributions to cultural policy, upgrading, war. In 1989 he was the main author of the resolution of rock musicians, who demanded basic reforms for the GDR society and democratic socialism.

Today it annoys him when he is further apostrophized as an East German artist. But of course it is still much better known in the east than in the West. People over 45 mostly come to the concerts who appreciate or worship him for a long time. On the other hand, there are always larger groups of very young, text -safe people. In addition, he undoubtedly shaped him to deal with the attempt at a social alternative to capitalism on German soil. In a conversation with journalist Burga Kalinowski for her anthology »Was that the turn that we wanted? At the same time, he made it clear to discussions with contemporaries “(2015) that he knew in 1989 after a work in Nicaragua” that there were other forms of life and what was so desperate about in the GDR “.

In recent years he has been one of the initiators of the petition “Culture in the Basic Law”. In 2023 he was one of the first signers of the “Manifesto for Peace” initiated by Alice Schwarzer and Sahra Wagenknecht. Like Antje Vollmer. Together with her, Wenzel wrote a comprehensive biography of the great filmmaker Konrad Wolff. Years earlier, the two had already published their correspondence on “the lost Federal Republic in the films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder”. Vollmer said about Wenzel: “Sometimes I think: One who is on stage will also die on stage. To be honest, I also believe that this is his most secret wish. ”For the time being, he and his audience wish that he leaves the stage alive and healthy for the umpteenth encounter. On this July 31, his 70th birthday, he will be on the boards – in the sold -out Berlin Admiralspalast.