A table, a chair, a microphone. Behind the red curtain. The man on stage says, “We didn’t know what cabaret was, but we were sure we hated it.” And then he talks about an extraordinary general meeting. In heaven. About God the Father, who reads the Passau diocese gazette. Of the Holy Spirit who was addicted to spirits. From Maria, who is in different circumstances for the second time. “And no one claims it was.” The man is 36 years old, his name is Sigi Zimmerschied and he is fighting his long, hate-fueled battle with the catholic-clerical-reactionary spirit on the theater stage in Haar, which not only shaped his hometown of Passau at the time: eloquently and with malicious humor.
You can watch Zimmerschied’s performance from July 1989 in its entirety on YouTube, under the motto “Peters Fundkiste”. Anyone who enters this will also come across Gerhard Polt and Ottfried Fischer performing in Haar in the early 1990s. To the music cabaret duo “Mehlprimeln”, to Dieter Hildebrandt and his wife Renate Küster or the singer-songwriter Hannes Wader, who became known for his socialist hymns and workers’ songs as well as for his quieter, poetic chansons.
“The recordings come from a time when social psychiatry was developing. Efforts were being made to end the ghetto of the closed institution and to care for the patients in a community-based manner,” explains Peter Vaitl, former senior physician at the clinic in Haar. The VHS cassettes were discovered in the archive some time ago and saved from destruction. What’s more: 14 events from around 1990 have now been digitized and are now available on YouTube.
Back then, in the late 1980s, Peter Vaitl was one of the key figures who promoted the idea of dismantling the ghetto character of the institution and realizing art and culture projects for people with psychiatric experience; admission was free for patients. The whole thing was rooted in the work of the “Regenbogen” association founded in 1986 and was linked to the “Culture at the East Pole” initiative coined by Vaitl and Jürgen Michal – for which they later, in 2000, received a Tassilo main prize from the SZ.
“We handed over the approximately 20 VHS cassettes to the German Cabaret Archive in Mainz for safekeeping.”
The recordings of the performances should not only arouse nice nostalgic feelings, but are also of cabaret historical relevance. “We handed over the approximately 20 VHS cassettes to the German Cabaret Archive in Mainz for safekeeping,” explains Vaitl.
One who was already rocking the stage with blues sounds in Haar (although, to Vaitl’s regret, he did not agree to a publication of his performance at the time), will be performing in the Small Theater this Thursday, September 8th. In the “Seelen-Art” series, the “Isarindianer” Willy Michl aka “Sound of Thunder” is giving a concert, starting at 7 p.m. “Seelen-Art” is also rooted in the “Culture at the East Pole” initiative and supports art projects for mentally ill people, which are financed, among other things, with the proceeds from concerts or cabaret events. More information is available at https://kleinestheaterhaar.de.