Klaus Renft; 'Bad boy of East German rock'n'roll'
Hyfler/Rosner
13 October 2006
Ken Hunt
Klaus Jentzsch (Klaus Renft), rock musician: born Jena,
Germany 30 June 1942; married (two sons, two daughters);
died Löhma, Germany 9 October 2006.
The East German rock scene spawned many beat and rock acts
whose very livelihoods depended on concert income, rather
than making records. The Klaus Renft Combo and Renft count
among the finest that the GDR (German Democratic Republic)
ever produced. Klaus Renft's chequered history and repeated
brushes with GDR officialdom made him a perfect witness for
Stasiland (2003), Anna Funder's examination of life under
the Stasi (secret police) regime.
Funder called Renft "the bad boy of East German rock'n'roll"
and the Klaus Renft Combo "the wildest and most popular rock
band in the GDR". The Puhdys rank as the GDR's most
successful band commercially and City, Pankow and Silly had
their moments and high jinks, but when it came to flouting
rules Renft was in a league of his own. He courted disaster
and official censorship rather assiduously. Accordingly, the
state took revenge, as it did against any elements deemed
malcontent, decadent, long-haired. Yet, as the Berliner
Zeitung summarised so succinctly, "If there ever was a rock
legend made in the GDR, then it was Renft."
Born Klaus Jentzsch in Jena, Thuringia, he borrowed his
mother's maiden name for his stage name. "Renft" also means
"bread crust" in the dialect of Saxony. Somehow he managed
to earn his crust playing beat and rock music. He made his
first appearance aged 16 in the Leipzig-based Klaus Renft
Combo in 1958.
By 1962 they had fallen foul of the authorities - so easy in
so many ways in the GDR's era of multiple prohibition. So in
1964 he founded the Butlers, a name as redolently English in
Leipzig as the Beefeaters was for the pre-Byrds in Los
Angeles. The Stasi duly opened a file code-named "Wanderer".
In 1965 the Butlers were banned from performing. GDR jargon
created several variations on Auftrittsverbot (stage ban)
and it is unclear which one the Butlers were subject to, but
the authorities did not lift the ban until 1967. The new
Klaus Renft Combo worked on creating original material,
sometimes, as with "Cäsers Blues", setting lyrics to jams.
Throughout Rendt's career he remained partial to covering,
amongst others, the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, Deep
Purple, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. He once said he thought
he would be reprimanded for playing the Stones' "Tell Me";
instead a rebuke was given for the length of his hair.
The group learned this decadent Western filth phonetically,
taping Rias (Radio in the American Sector) broadcasts, since
Russian was the second language on the GDR school
curriculum. Of "Satisfaction", Renft told Funder, "We didn't
know what it meant." Coded Renft staples like "Wer die Rose
ehrt" ("He Who Honours the Rose") and "Der Apfeltraum" ("The
Apple Dream") were heavily scrutinised by fans and state
watchdogs alike. Their "Autostop" ("Hitchhiking") not only
bottled the Zeitgeist but provided the theme song for a
generation thumbing to Erfurt, Prague or Krakow.
The lyricist Gerulf Pannach's arrival in 1969 took the group
in a more political, socially critical direction. (Later, in
1986, Pannach appeared as a dissident GDR folksinger in Ken
Loach's Fatherland.) The politicking ushered in divisions
and divisiveness. In his autobiography Zwischen Liebe und
Zorn ("Between Love and Anger", 1997), Renft said,
At the end we Renfts were six musicians with seven opinions,
never a homogenous troupe, very often arguing, constantly
searching . . . Only on stage were we a group. Sometimes I
believe if we hadn't been banned back then, we'd have soon
broken ourselves up.
The state record company Amiga was not just the only game in
town, but the only game in the nation. Lyrics always came
under the burning magnifying glass of argus-eyed
apparatchiks. Götz Hintze's Rocklexikon der DDR ("Rock
Lexicon of the GDR", 2000) describes the next débâcle. On 22
September 1975, the group were called before the authorities
to be told that they didn't exist any longer. Renft had had
enough foreign currency to buy a cassette recorder and he
taped the interview. He later let on that the incriminating
tape was in West Berlin. Overnight, gigs stopped and Renft
vanished from the Amiga catalogue. Although some group
members stayed, a splinter group, Karussell, became the
state-sanctioned shadows of their former selves.
Renft reached West Berlin in 1975, finding employment with
the radio station Rias. He later toured, revisited old
material and recorded new material. But the title of his
1999 album, Als ob nichts gewesen wär ("As If Nothing Had
Happened"), could be taken as a cry of frustration.
Renft's place in the annals of cult European rock music is
assured. As the photographer Harald Hausmann wrote in Bye
Bye Lübben City: Bluesfreaks, Tramps und Hippies in der DDR
(2004), one of the definitive texts about the GDR rock
scene,
Music was the bridge. If Renft played [Deep Purple's] "Child
in Time", I felt myself freer for the rest of the week. Then
I travelled in my thoughts around the globe, became part of
the universe.