It is an autumnal Monday in West Berlin in 1969. Lord Knud is presenting the program “Schlager der Woche” on RIAS, and in Kreuzberg, right next to Kottbusser Tor, a 17-year-old teenager is sitting in front of the large furniture radio in the apartment , where he grew up with his sister. He has been fascinated by pop music of all kinds since he was a child. In the living room of this two-room apartment, listening to Lord Knud’s hit parade, which is still divided into German and English numbers, is preceded by a more or less violent struggle with the completely uninterested father, while the mother has noticed for a long time that the child is constantly singing melodies he’s picked up . That Monday Lord Knud presented for the first time ever two Title of an act in its broadcast. Here Comes the Sun and Oh! Darling.”. The Beatles have just released Abbey Road and young Klaus Beyer is electrified. Of course he already knows the Beatles. The fact that Lord Knud now plays two of their songs before saying goodbye with the famous “Oki Doki” impresses him a lot. When Klaus heard “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” a few days later, it was clear to him: he’s now a Beatles fan. And from his point of view, that primarily requires writing down these songs in order to be able to sing them. For this, the album must be purchased from Radio Bernd, the electronics and record store on Adalbertstraße. After that, the songs have to be carefully transcribed with pencil on paper. Klaus Beyer still owns the first edition of “Abbey Road” and these notes can probably be considered the nucleus of one of the most extraordinary art projects ever; the Klaus Beyer One Man Factory is born.
Klaus Beyer was born in West Berlin in 1952, his sister Monika seven years later. The parents belong to the proletariat that is now also thriving in the West. You work in one of the factories on the outskirts of the city, occupy four or more apartments with two or at most three rooms, move around in the gray monotony of the frontline city, then live off the visit of a US President, who even affirms in German that he is one of to be with them and is primarily concerned with maintaining a modest livelihood. The war, the scars of which are omnipresent in Berlin, is still deep in the bones of this generation. It is their children who, with rock ‘n’ roll behind them, rebel against the leaden down-to-earth attitude of the post-war period. The dabs of color of the pop songs sparkling from the radios are eagerly sucked up by them like fresh ink from the flow sheet.
Klaus Beyer doesn’t just leave it at the notes. After his mother wonders why he only sings in English, he decides to translate the songs into German after work – he is a trained candle wax maker. In order to be able to accompany his German singing with music, long before the word “karaoke” was first heard in this country, he developed his very own cut-off technique using a standard tape recorder. Bar by bar, he records the instrumental passages of the selected pieces one after the other and uses the resulting tapestry of sound as a playback basis for his singing. All this takes hours of detailed work, is implemented precisely, bar by bar. His mother and sister are his only audience. In 1978, after moving into his own small apartment two houses away from his parents’ home and receiving a Super 8 camera from his father as a gift, he began to produce small, self-drawn cartoons to which he added his own music. He also paints, draws and translates himself into the Beatles universe again and again, but also composes and produces his own pieces and stories.
When Klaus Beyer presented the first four clips at the behest of his neighbor Gabi Poschmann’s mother, she encouraged him to show his films publicly. A little later he presented them to the (still very small) public for the first time in the “Frontkino” on Waldemarstraße. In May 1985, this also led to his first public live appearance in “Trash”, the punk rock bar in the old department store on Oranienplatz. In “The Sun is Coming” he is booed by a reliably drugged-up, ignorant audience, which prompts Gabi Poschmann to say: “If you continue like this, there will be no sun for you!” After that there is peace and the foundation stone of Klaus’ remarkable stage career Beyer laid.
For Klaus Beyer it is evidently self-evident that his admiration for the Beatles is expressed in his own artistic activity, which in turn inspires him to create his own works. He is not only a consuming fan, but finds his own artistic expression in the confrontation with worship. This kind of appropriation is indeed deeply moving. The precision of these works – combined with the poetic immediacy of a seemingly childish fantasy – opens up a deep, direct insight into the heart of the artist. You can’t really expect more from art. The term “loving” in the execution of the cinematic work in particular seems rather short-sighted. In view of the available means, what is at stake here is an almost superhuman capacity for abstraction. If, for example, figures cut out and colored on paper are cut in so many variations that, filmed in stop & motion, they then rotate fluently around their own axis, this is just as surprising and funny in its virtuosity as the creations of “Wallace and Gromit” inventor Nick Parks. Except that Klaus Beyer does all this on the floor of his living room in a small apartment in Kreuzberg, which he regularly clears for this purpose, and draws, paints, cuts and sings for hours without worrying whether his films and his music are ever made by anyone other than seen or heard by his mother and sister. He just has to do this. He needs to express himself. He becomes an artist through being a fan. Is there a purer and more sincere motivation?
Over the years, Klaus Beyer continued to work in the wax goods factory, but a new manager forced him to work for three years in Aurich, East Frisia, where the factory was based. When the boss heard that Beyer’s mother was complaining about him in a film, he was fired in the mid-1990s. In fact, Klaus Beyer has meanwhile achieved a considerable degree of recognition. The film in question is called “The Other Universe of Klaus Beyer”, was made by Georg Maas and Franke Behnke and was broadcast on television in 1994.
It is this Frank Behnke who has taken over the management of Klaus for several years, who organizes his numerous performances throughout the country and looks after the steadily growing fan club. Klaus Beyer is a real, highly authentic attraction in the lo-fi scene that flourished in the 1990s. Often in a “Sgt. Pepper” uniform, he performs his pieces – only with the tape recorder at his side – in pretty much all hip clubs and locations in the German-speaking world. He is admired and promoted by people like Françoise Cactus or Christoph Schlingensief.
Schlingensief also incorporates Klaus Beyer into his panopticon and regularly makes him the protagonist of his productions and films. The highlight of this phase is certainly the legendary evening at the Berlin Volksbühne, where Klaus Beyer gave an acclaimed concert in June 1999 as a supporting act for Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston. The year before, his own composition “Die Glatze” ran on MTV with the video shot for it. Finally, Klaus Beyer’s performance in 2008 in Schlingensief’s “A Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me”, a kind of oratorio, in which Schlingensief deals with his cancer and Klaus Beyer gives information about the stroke he recently suffered and the consequences, was moving.
From today’s point of view, which is restricted by moral norms and narrow-mindedness and seconded by digital noise, these performative experiments, in their epic and elaborate nature, seem like they come from a bygone era in which great freedom, overcoming borders, and a new classification of values were possible . The cards were reshuffled in an analogous manner and every resulting game was surprising and bewildering. Klaus Beyer traveled around the world with the Schlingensief troupe. Celebrated guest performances in Brazil, Namibia, France, Austria and Iceland. Quite a large radius for someone who actually never intended to leave Kreuzberg.
Klaus Beyer will be celebrating his 70th birthday on July 8th. In his honor there will be a concert with him, Anton & Gina d’Oria, Doc Schoko, Frieder Butzmann, the Original Kreuzberg Nose Flute Orchestra and many others on July 13th in Berlin’s Festsaal Kreuzberg, probably the only appropriate location for this occasion. I can also contribute two songs. Jörg Buttgereit moderated.
We are celebrating Klaus Beyer’s total work of art, with which a humanity comes to light that in turn celebrates beauty, fantasy and playfulness entirely out of itself, completely autonomously and originally. Beyer’s access to his artistic possibilities is as undisguised and immediate as this very great feeling that possibly really pushes the world and holds all the forces in the universe together: love itself.
One can say so much about the Beatles and be immensely grateful to them anyway; but one of its most beautiful side effects is having produced an artist like Klaus Beyer.
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