Inge, Sing! the Shattered Dream of Inge Brandenburg a Film by Marc Boettcher Germany 2011, 118 Minutes, DF Release Date In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SING! INGE, SING! THE SHATTERED DREAM OF INGE BRANDENBURG A film by Marc Boettcher Germany 2011, 118 minutes, DF Release date in cinemas: Autumn 2011 Press contact: JAN KÜNEMUND for Edition Salzgeber Mehringdamm 33 · 10961 Berlin Telefon +49 30 / 285 290 70 · Telefax +49 30 / 285 290 99 [email protected] · www.salzgeber.de SUMMARY In Germany, jazz had a voice: Inge Brandenburg. Inge Brandenburg had a difficult upbringing and soon had to learn to stand on her own two feet, but by the late 1950s she was being acclaimed as Europe’s finest female jazz singer. Time magazine compared her with Billie Holi- day, while musicians in general admired her. But the Ger- man record industry ignored her or tried unsuccessfully to reduce her to singing hit songs. This is the story of a woman in the 1950s and 1960s, when there was no place in Germany for self-assured women with international aspirations, a dramatic per- formance style and an emancipated attitude to love. Only through SING! INGE, SING is it possible to dis- cover a great German artiste. PRESS NOTICE It was at a flea market in Munich that the collector Tho- mas Rautenberg discovered an old photograph album containing photographs of an attractive woman who was completely unknown to him. He started to leaf through it and found a number of signed cards. The woman in question turned out to be Germany’s former Number One Jazz Singer, Inge Brandenburg (1929–1999). Rautenberg acquired a part of her estate and tried to find out more about her. Together with the film maker Marc Boettcher (Alexandra: The Legend of a Singer; Strangers in the Night: The Bert Kaempfert Story), he delved into a life full of privations, longings and excess. Marc Boettcher spent four years researching the project, producing a mul- tifaceted portrait from countless audio clips and images that dispenses with the need for an additional commentary but allows Inge Brandenburg to tell her own story in her own words. In this way we are able not only to rediscover an unjustly neglected star but also to revisit an important period in Germany’s cultural history. Ica Vilander, MB-Film Press contact: JAN KÜNEMUND for Edition Salzgeber Mehringdamm 33 · 10961 Berlin Telefon +49 30 / 285 290 70 · Telefax +49 30 / 285 290 99 [email protected] · www.salzgeber.de 2 offence at the home, they’d say you were the chil- CONTENTS dren of criminals, or ‘Nothing will ever come of you!’ Or: ‘It’s no wonder with parents like yours!’ Inge Brandenburg was born in Leipzig on 18 February I often withdrew into a corner and read or crept off to the playground, where there were swallows’ 1929 and was brought up in poverty. Arguments, acts of nests. I wanted to stroke the young swallows. arbitrary violence and alcohol were a regular feature of her When they flew off from their nests, I was really everyday life. She never knew parental love. miserable. I just wanted to show them some ten- derness. Then there was the affair with the apples. For weeks they thrashed me until I admitted to “When Daddy came home drunk, he would hit having stolen them even though I hadn’t. I never Mummy. But they also fought when Daddy was got over that. Even today I feel unsure of myself sober. It was terrible. And I never knew who I whenever I have the impression that people don’t should be more frightened for or who I should side believe me. The only love that I received during my with.” youth was the cooling hand of a nun who stroked me when I fell ill with diphtheria.” Inge’s father was a Communist and a conscientious objec- tor, which meant that in the eyes of the Nazis he was a Immediately after the war, in a dangerous cloak-and-dag- parasite and a social misfit. Inge watched him being beaten ger operation, Inge managed to escape to the American sec- up by the Gestapo, and then dragged away and interned. tor. She was picked up by the police in Hof, half naked, her According to a dubious entry in the death register of the floral confirmation dress missing. Drunken GIs had torn it Mauthausen concentration camp, he committed suicide in from her back and raped her. She had no papers, and so she 1941 by throwing himself against the electrified barbed- was locked up for six months for vagrancy. After that, her wire fence surrounding the camp. journey took her to Augsburg. “My mother was working very hard at this time, “I then worked in a bakery for twenty-five marks and I had to take charge of my two little sisters. a month. And I was also allowed to use the family My mother was working for a coal dealer at this piano. The baker and his wife were musical, and time. She drove the coal wagon and carried the they even put me in touch with a piano teacher. heavy sacks of coal down into people’s cellars, Out of my twenty-five marks, I had to pay him where she also piled up the coal. I felt terribly twenty for his lessons. But I became a different ashamed in the presence of my classmates as my person. Finally I had a goal in front of me.” mother was doing such dirty work. Sometimes when I was returning home from school, she Her great love had always been music. Her favourite sta- would meet me with her horse-drawn cart and nod tion was the American Forces Network, AFN, and the per- at me with her blackened face. If other children formers she most enjoyed listening to were Peggy Lee, Judy from the school were around, I would turn away quickly as I was afraid they would tease me about Garland and Frank Sinatra. One day she saw an adver- her. At home I sometimes used to cry because she tisement in the Augsburg daily paper announcing that a had to work so hard.” local dance orchestra was looking for a good-looking sin- Inge’s mother was likewise arrested for making “anti-gov- ger with a low voice, and so she applied. From February ernment remarks” and died in unexplained circumstances 1950 onwards she appeared in German night clubs for 170 while being transported to the concentration camp at marks a month. Whether it was swing, cool jazz, blues, Ravensbrück. The five brothers and sisters were separated hillbilly or popular hits of the period, Inge Brandenburg and taken to what were called “homes for maladjusted sang her way through the 1950s but without coming to the children”, where compulsory sterilization was routinely attention of a wider public. carried out. The children were seen as “degenerate”, and The turning point in her career came when she was doctors were of the opinion that criminality was heredi- invited to appear in Sweden. An agent who had heard tary, with the result that it had to be “eradicated”. about her signed her up for a four-week engagement, and she proved so successful that others followed, so that what “In 1941 I was sent to a secure unit in Bernburg. had originally been intended to be four weeks became eight At first I tried to escape, but after a few attempts months. During this time she worked with some of the I gave up. Each time you committed some minor great names in Swedish jazz. In the 1950s Scandinavia and Press contact: JAN KÜNEMUND for Edition Salzgeber Mehringdamm 33 · 10961 Berlin Telefon +49 30 / 285 290 70 · Telefax +49 30 / 285 290 99 [email protected] · www.salzgeber.de 3 France were seen as the main centres of jazz in Europe. It was with her self-confidence boosted but with mixed feel- ings that she returned to Frankfurt in the spring of 1958. “The idea of returning home after my success in Sweden and living in anonymity was one that I found terrible and it drove me almost to the verge of despair. And so it came about that I found myself sitting in Carlo Bohländer’s legendary Domicile du Jazz in Frankfurt and had had rather too much to drink. That gave me the courage to say to a pianist: ‘Come on, just play for me and I’ll prove I can sing.’ Some people began to giggle but as soon as I’d sung a few bars, they all fell silent. Privatarchiv MB-Film Two days later they told me I’d be appearing at the jazz festival. Now there was no going back.” This appearance turned Inge Brandenburg into an over- night star and led to her being named Germany’s leading jazz singer. Audiences, too, were impressed by her ability to turn ballads such as “Lover Man” into intensely moving numbers. The critics had nothing but praise for her singing, and Germany’s leading jazz writer Joachim-Ernst Berendt wrote that “She sings with incredible feeling. Her singing has an intensity in which a whole world seems to vibrate. Above all, she doesn’t sing like June Christy but like Inge Brandenburg. German jazz finally has a voice!” Privatarchiv MB-Film Inge Brandenburg with Chet Baker (above) and June Christy “It was in 1958 that I was ‘discovered’. People fêted me. And I thought: I hope those old women hit singles as well. The high point of the year was a series of at the homes are still alive! I thought that my big the best jazz recordings of her career: “All Of Me”, “Lover moment had finally come, but I was to be proved wrong.” Man”, “Don’t Take Your Love”, “There’ll Never Be Ano- ther You” and “Pennies From Heaven”.