70 Years of Eurovision

From persecution into the spotlight: The life stories of Walter Andreas Schwarz and Freddy Quinn

Less than 20 minutes after the program began, Walter Andreas Schwarz stepped onto the modest stage in the otherwise glamorous Kursaal in Lugano. His hands in his pockets, he appeared relaxed as the orchestra began to play – only to fall silent after a few bars. Next, a piano took over the accompaniment with a series of slow melancholy chords, soon joined by haunting violins. Against this musical backdrop, Walter Andreas Schwarz delivered a cynical “speech-song” performance in the style of Bertolt Brecht. The lyrics tell the story of a ship that never arrives and the people who nonetheless longingly await its arrival.

But the song “Im Wartesaal zum Glück” was not a ballad of longing or love. It was a veiled indictment of post-war German society, which remained in a state of shock, hiding behind dreams of the future to avoid confronting the Nazi past. The artist knew exactly what he was singing about: He was a Holocaust survivor and had been interned in forced labor camps.

A stark contrast: Freddy Quinn’s upbeat performance

A little less than half an hour later, a very different performance followed, no less provocative than Schwarz’s. The young Freddy Quinn – the same man who would later become known for his melancholy seafaring ballads – performed an energetic rock ’n’ roll number. “So geht das jede Nacht” described casual encounters between a man and a woman – scandalous by the standards of the day. Although he would later cultivate a very different image, the song reflected Freddy’s past as a runaway and a “US Army mascot” in a displaced persons camp.

Neither Freddy nor Walter ever spoke publicly about their years in the camps. Instead, documents preserved by the Arolsen Archives serve as witnesses. A reconstruction.

Walter Andreas Schwarz: an actor with Jewish roots

Walter Andreas Schwarz was born in Aschersleben on June 2, 1913. His father was Jewish, and he enjoyed an unremarkable childhood. A few early stage appearances encouraged him to move to Vienna in 1932 to study acting after finishing school. His first professional engagements soon followed, but as a young man with a Jewish father, the political situation made it increasingly difficult for him to find work, and he went back to live with his parents in the Harz region of Germany.

In 1937, the family was forced to change their surname on the orders of the authorities. From then on, Walter’s surname was “Kapuzek,” which was his grandmother’s maiden name. Her marriage to Walter’s grandfather Schwarz had been declared invalid on the grounds that the marriage ceremony had been performed according to Jewish rites. Two years later, in the spring of 1939, Walter was officially expelled from the Reich Theater Chamber (Reichstheaterkammer), the Nazi-controlled licensing body without whose approval no performer could work legally in Germany. The grounds given were that he was a so-called “half-Jew,” a person with one Jewish parent. He also lost his German citizenship. Other family members also endured Nazi persecution: his father Karl was deported in 1938 and died two years later in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp – from “exhaustion,” according to the camp commandant.

In the wake of the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the Nazi regime systematized the deportation and murder of Jews. The situation also became worse for people with only one Jewish parent. Walter had to perform forced labor. The Gestapo sent him to Clettenberg (now Klettenberg) in the Harz region, where he worked for a company called Rudloff. In March 1943, by then officially stateless, he applied for an extension of his residence permit.

Deported for forced labor

In November 1944, he was deported to the Holzen-Eschershausen sub-camp of Buchenwald concentration camp in the uplands of Lower Saxony. The Nazis wanted to continue their armaments industry in a facility hidden underground in the Hils range of hills. Forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners had to dig tunnels into the rock. Walter was registered in the Lenne forced labor camp in December 1944, but was sent back to Clettenberg a few weeks later. A contemporary witness suggested this may well have been thanks to a former school friend who happened to be serving as a camp commander at the Holzen sub-camp complex.

After the war, Walter returned to Aschersleben, where he was initially still listed as stateless. However, he soon returned to performing, working as a German radio announcer in London and Paris. Back in Germany, he appeared in television series and worked as a cabaret artist, lyricist, and composer. In 1956, he took part in the first “Grand Prix d’Eurovision de la Chanson” in Switzerland with his own composition “Wartesaal zum großen Glück.” After this brief foray into the music world, he worked primarily as a radio playwright, voice artist, and author. He died in Heidelberg in 1992 at the age of 78.

Freddy Quinn: A free spirit and a DP

Freddy Quinn was born on September 27, 1931, as Franz Eugen Helmuth Manfred Nidl, probably in Vienna. “Probably” because he would keep his true origins and life story shrouded in secrecy for the rest of his life. According to the biography by Elmar Kraushaar, “Freddy Quinn – Ein unwahrscheinliches Leben” (2011), , he was an illegitimate child and was brought up by his grandmother in Niederfladnitz, a small village in Lower Austria very close to what is now the Czech border. His mother worked as a journalist, sometimes for publications with close ties to the Nazi Party in Germany.

Quinn’s biographer Elmar Kraushaar also wrote that Freddy’s mother married Baron Rudolf Anatol Freiherr von Petz on July 27, 1939. Petz adopted the boy, who was called Franz Nidl-Petz from then on. In 1941, according to Viennese court records, his mother was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for defamation. During this period, the boy was sent to a children’s home in Vienna, partly because he had a difficult relationship with his stepfather. When his mother was released from prison, Franz, later known as Freddy, returned to the family home. Freddy Quinn’s biography was rarely clear-cut: one version has him joining a traveling circus at the end of the war, while another suggests he was evacuated to rural Hungary.

Escape into a new identity

In 1945, he encountered US troops in Italy and was captivated by their lifestyle and their music. The 14-year-old pretended to be younger than he was, passing himself off as a Czech who had been forcibly displaced. The troops took him under their wing, and from then on, the boy called himself “Freddy Quinn” and dreamed of an American father and a life overseas. When the US troops left Italy for Germany in 1947, they took their lucky mascot Freddy with them. There, the Allies registered him as a displaced person (DP) and began searching for his relatives. It did not take long for the Child Search Branch to find his mother.

His mother in Vienna was informed of his whereabouts in Germany in the same year. By then, Freddy had long since moved to the Netherlands. He wrote his mother a letter, but his DP file was closed anyway: as an Austrian citizen, he was no longer the responsibility of the Allied tracing organizations.

A legend takes shapen

It is uncertain whether Freddy, then 16 years old, ever returned to his mother in Vienna or whether he continued travelling through Europe all the way to Algeria, working as a circus performer and street musician. In the early 1950s, Freddy, posing as an American, performed as a country singer at the Washington Bar in Hamburg and was discovered there by the Polydor record label. Polydor put him forward to ARD, the West German public broadcaster, for the first “Grand Prix d’Eurovision de la Chanson.”

1956: First place goes to Switzerland

Neither Freddy Quinn nor Walter Andreas Schwarz won the first edition of what would later become the Eurovision Song Contest. In 1956, the first place went to Swiss singer Lys Assia with her song “Refrain.” But Freddy’s breakthrough came later the same year with the song “Heimweh,” and from that point on, record companies and producers elaborately embellished the identity he had invented for himself. Freddy Quinn remains one of Germany’s most successful German-language “Schlager” singers to this day. Now 94 years old, he lives on a farm near Hamburg.