The Eisenach jazz club is a unique case, says musicologist Simon Bretschneider, who works in the Lippmann+Rau music archive. This is due to the huge voluntary commitment right from the start. The club was founded in the 1950s – at a time when everything was actually banned. According to Bretschneider, the city’s jazz fans kept going, so that the 65th anniversary can now be celebrated: “It is the oldest still operating jazz club in eastern Germany!”
The politically responsible people were suspicious of this departure.
Reinhard Lorenz, Jazz Club Eisenach
Jazz on the GDR index
Founder Manfred Blume, long-time chairman Reinhard Lorenz remembers in an interview with MDR KULTUR, had to convince the FDJ officials at the VEB Automobilwerk Eisenach with a lot of rhetoric: “It wasn’t easy to manage because in the fifties there was this music “I think there are still a lot of misconceptions.”
Jazz was considered the “music of the class enemy,” reports Lorenz. “The politically responsible people were suspicious of the new departure that the young people were showing at the time.” Jazz was the music of the oppressed blacks, Blume argued at the time, in order to get the founding through. And he pointed out: The National Socialists rejected jazz and swing
Music as a “worldview”Eisenach Jazz Club as a free space
Lorenz has been a member for more than 50 years. He owes his worldview to the Eisenach jazz club, the concerts and lecture evenings, he says today. With music, young people back then indulged their longing to break out of the walled-in GDR:
And that has had consequences for all of our personal development.
Reinhard Lorenz, Jazz Club Eisenach
For one person it was jazz, for another it was rock’n’roll or the book by Jack Kerouac. Lorenz quotes Manfred Krug’s famous saying: “How can I have a worldview if I can’t look at the world?” The world gave him a worldview, says Lorenz.
The Erfurt musicologist Martin Breternitz wrote his doctorate on the Thuringian jazz clubs during the GDR era. About what they have in common despite all the regional differences, he says: “I think it’s the search for their own niche combined with great enthusiasm for music.” The whole thing always took place in a community, Breternitz continues: “In some places there might have been three, four, five people who were enthusiastic about jazz. In other places there might have been 50, like here in Eisenach.”
New home in the Alte Mälzerei
The jazz friends had been looking for a place of their own in Eisenach for a long time, reports club member Lorenz:
We were looking for a jazz cellar where we could dress like existentialists, smoke pipes and prepare for the revolution with jazz music in the background.
Reinhard Lorenz Jazz Club Eisenach
In the mid-1980s they found something exactly like that: the vaulted cellar of the Alte Mälzerei.