FAMILY AFFAIRS - SHALOM-MUSIK.KOELN

In the organizer's words:

A musical-biographical journey with Sharon Brauner & The Goy Boys

TO THE PROGRAM

A musical journey through the moving family history of Sharon Brauner. In her biographical program "FAMILY AFFAIRS", which she conceived especially for the SHALOM-MUSIK.KÖLN festival, the Berlin native from the well-known artist and cinema family takes us on a journey into the world of Jewish culture and traditions, peppered with personal anecdotes and inspiring encounters.

Sharon Brauner provides insights into her moving family history and tells which artists have influenced her and presents music that has shaped her life, from the Yiddish songs of her childhood, to jazz standards she sang in the clubs of New York, to her own German compositions in Berlin - each melody tells a story that touches and connects us all.

Sharon Brauner writes about her evening:

"The wall that separated West Berlin from the rest of the world was already a given when I was born into a Berlin family with Jewish roots. My parents, two hedonists who survived the Holocaust, gave me a suitcase, the contents of which were packed with the duty to remember and instructions on how to be happy.

The instructions were simple: we didn't survive so that you would be unhappy!

The duty to remember, on the other hand, is more diverse. It is a reflection on the roots. The tradition. The task of carrying on the identity of our ancestors. But what do you do if you are born into a religious community like Judaism but are not a believer?

I started looking for answers early on and found them in my own family history.

The family on my mother's side was first mentioned in writing in Worms in the early 15th century. The family was assimilated and rooted in the German-speaking world and, despite several pogroms, held on to both their "Germanness" and their Jewish faith.

When my grandmother fled Berlin in 1939 with her husband and newborn child, my mother, she took her love of German culture with her. Schiller, Heine, Lessing, Goethe and Beethoven were her intellectual companions, which also led her unerringly back to her hometown of Berlin after the war. She had returned out of love for German culture and language, but how German did the woman who proudly sang in front of Hindenburg as a child still feel after the war?

These questions preoccupied me from an early age. Through my father, who was born in Lodz in 1923 and survived the war in the Soviet Union before moving to Berlin at the end of the 1940s, I got to know and love Yiddish culture. After graduating from high school, I studied acting and singing in Berlin and New York, and since then I have worked as a singer and actress on television and in the cinema and have appeared on a wide variety of stages.

I sing and talk about this in my new program "FAMILY AFFAIRS". I learned Yiddish songs as a child, sang jazz standards in clubs while studying in New York and wrote my own German songs in Berlin. Whether Yiddish, German, English, tango, jazz or chanson, the songs tell stories from life that we all understand, that remind us of what unites us."

Sharon Brauner

CONTRIBUTORS

Sharon Brauner, voice
Daniel Zenke, piano
Harry Ermer, bass
Paul Brenning, beatbox
Vit Polák, trumpet

Price information:

25€/ reduced 15€