Jo van Nelsen - Weihnachten mit den Hesselbachs
Christmas Reading
To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Hesselbachs, Jo has been presenting a new reading since November 2023 under the title "Weihnachten mit den Hesselbachs".
"The Christmas Gift" by Wolf Schmidt, first broadcast on December 24, 1949, by Hessischer Rundfunk, is the focus of this dialect reading. And it is highly topical: a refugee family has been accommodated with the Hesselbachs and is stirring up the Christmas festivities quite a bit. These and other Christmas radio stories by Wolf Schmidt are complemented by further authors of the Hessian dialect, who were well known to Schmidt: Karl Ettlinger and Ferdinand Happ.
"Kall, mei Drobbe!" Do you still remember Mamma Hesselbach's legendary exclamation? Do you recall the radio and television stories about the Hesselbach company "somewhere in Hesse"?
The well-known Jo van Nelsen, born near Frankfurt and a familiar face on all German cabaret stages, has unearthed two wonderful books that are now only available second-hand: "Babba" and "Mamma," written in 1967 by Wolf Schmidt, the creator and unforgettable actor of Babba Hesselbach, who adapted his favorite episodes into independent narratives. Van Nelsen now reads from these: relishing the quirky entanglements and hidden jabs at politics, which wonderfully resonate even today.
And the audience discovers, thanks to van Nelsen's widely praised storytelling art, the radio and television veteran Wolf Schmidt for the first time as an ironically distanced novelist, who knows how to reveal the universal in the personal catastrophes of a Hessian petty-bourgeois family and condense the absurdities of everyday life into cabaret-like dramas. Not least, Schmidt's cleverness, as well as his deeply felt commitment to democracy and humanity, place him on equal footing with the second great Hessian dialect poet, Friedrich Stoltze.
The Hesselbachs were Germany's first television family, whose series swept the streets with audience ratings of up to 94 percent. Because that's what "blockbusters" were called back then – street sweepers. But that was at a time when people still got upset about a "dirty little edge" and a "Roaring Stag" adorned the living room. Van Nelsen received similar acclaim at the launch of the Hesselbach reading series in 2006 at the Stalburg Theater in Frankfurt/Main, where he read to sold-out audiences on the first Sunday of every month for over three years.
Let yourself be transported into the Hesselbach universe full of tranquility and serenity – and if you close your eyes, you will meet them all again: Babba and Mamma Hesselbach, the sons Willi and Peter, daughter Heidi, the Swabian accountant Münzenberger, the chief secretary Miss Sauerberg, the cleaner Mrs. Siebenhals, the apprentice Rudi, and all the other unforgettable characters from the hit series "Die Hesselbachs."
However, if you keep your eyes open, there is only one person sitting there: Jo van Nelsen. But listening to him and watching him play all and everyone in succession and in a jumble is an experience you should not miss!
Doors open: 7 PM
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
