song writer
“Here today, there tomorrow”: Hannes Wader turns 80
Musician and singer-songwriter Hannes Wader turns 80. Photo: picture alliance / Swen Pförtner/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
After many decades on stage, Hannes Wader is celebrating his 80th birthday. Calmer, but still with a critical eye. Even punk rockers have covered his most famous song.
Songwriter is a bulky term. As if the art is not as important as the making. And yet this word is the counterpart of the French chansonnier.
One of the most important representatives of this guild, who, like Franz Josef Degenhardt, Wolf Biermann or Konstantin Wecker, always strived to combine artistic standards and political statements, is Hannes Wader. He is considered to be the most popular singer-songwriter in the Federal Republic of the 1960s and 1970s.
His famous song “Here Today, There Tomorrow” expressed the restlessness of a generation that no longer felt connected to the static image of society of the Adenauer era and was looking for new horizons. This Thursday (June 23) the man from East Westphalia celebrates his 80th birthday and is still a well-known name in the German cultural scene.
Fluctuations in mood
Wader is currently looking to the future with more concern than before, as he emphasizes in an interview on the occasion of his new CD “Noch hier – Was ich nochdio sang”: “To say it with Karl Valentin: “The future was also better in the past”. According to the – as I already indicated – currently particularly pronounced fluctuations in my state of mind, which also influence my thinking, I fear the worst. »
And Wader continues: «I could now back up my “fears of the end of the world” with arguments – nothing easier than that – but I’d rather leave it alone. Too negative my “mega low”. I hope to get out of there as soon as possible. I want my old historical optimism back.”
Always looking for something better
Like so many of his contemporaries, Hannes Wader experienced his artistic beginnings at the folklore festival at Waldeck Castle in the Hunsrück. He appeared here for the first time in 1966, in order to then sharpen his political perspective in politically turbulent West Berlin. But above all, he became a member of a lively folk and singer-songwriter scene, which also included Reinhard Mey, Klaus Hoffmann, Katja Ebstein and Ulrich Roski. In 1969 the first record appeared, “Hannes Wader sings”, which was to be followed by many more.
He published the iconic “Today here, tomorrow there” in 1972. The line of text “Today here, tomorrow there, I’m hardly there, I have to go” sums up the feeling of so many people of his generation to be constantly on the lookout for something that is better and more beautiful than the present. Its catchy rhyme and melody made the piece a popular song that could be played and sung by many and thus found wide distribution.
In North Frisia, the artist then found the fixed point of his life for a long time. There he bought an old windmill that would become his home for 25 years. Wader’s art also changed there. Still politically involved, he added a new facet to his repertoire. He increasingly composed and sang songs in Low German – folk music in the classical sense.
Wader regularly released records and CDs and was honored with numerous awards. In 2013 he received the “Echo” for his life’s work. At the ceremony, Reinhard Mey gave the laudatory speech and sang “Here today, there tomorrow” – together with Campino, whose band Die Toten Hosen covered the song. Just like the punk rockers Die Schröders before them.
Farewell tour 2017
Shortly after his 75th birthday, Wader decided that public life as a singer was enough. He completed his farewell tour in 2017. A year later he released the Berlin Tempodrom final concert under the title of the tour: “Macht’s gut”. The following year his autobiography was published with the telling title «In spite of everything. My life”.
Wader misses the audience, even when developing the songs. “I’m not just missing the applause. Because as a corrective for newly created songs, the direct audience reactions at live performances are basically irreplaceable and I miss them accordingly. But I won’t be going on stage anymore, at least not in the foreseeable future. So in the future I have to hope that the charm of freshness and immediacy, which is sometimes said about drafts and rough versions, will compensate for the lack of “maturity” in my new songs from now on. »