VA - Burg Waldeck Festival 1967 - Chanson Folklore International

This double album documents the fourth Burg Waldeck Festival, 1967. The festival theme was "Das engagierte Lied" ("The engaged song"), three thousand people came to attend the concerts and lectures given by forty-two different groups, solo performers, and speakers.

Refelcting the gradual politicization of the festival, the artists were all asked to answer four questions about the politically engaged song and their own artistic commitment. The organizers stated in the festival programm: "The fourth festivl should openly discuss not only the difficult questions of our society, but also the difficult question about the form of artistic engagement."

As´well as the usual figures of Degenhardt, Schobert and Black, Hedemann, Wader, Mossmann, Mey and Hüsch there were also several first time appearances including the author Erich Fried and the gypsy jazz group Schnuckenack Reinhardt. The GDR was "officially" represented in the form of the Brecht singer Hermann Hähnel and by Inge Lammel and Erna Berger from the Institut für Arbeiterlieder of the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin. They presented a workshop on Wolfgang Steinitz´s research on the German democratic folk song. In the discussions, however, they were asked uncomfortable questions about Wolf Biermann and the suppressed Liedermacher scene in the GDR, questions which they dodged or were not able to answer.

A unprecedent event was the concert of Alex Kulisiewicz from Poland, who performed in the clothes of a concentration camp prisoner. With broken voice and alarming authenticity he sang songs he had gathered as an inmate at Sachsenhausen. After the war he had written down from memory seven hundred pages of songs and texts in four languages.

Burg Waldeck Festival 1967 - CD 1
Burg Waldeck Festival 1967 - CD 2
(192 kbps, front cover included)