Deutsch
EnglishOskar Siebert:
"Ich spielte um mein Leben" [“I Played for My Life”]
Von der illegalen Musikkapelle in Mauthausen zum Berliner Tanzorchester [From the Illegal Band in Mauthausen to the Berlin Dance Orchestra]
Published with additional afterword and CD by Constanze Jaiser and Jacob David Pampuch
With assistance from Dirk Geldmacher
"I have never made anything but music. Even in the camp, I made music – that saved my life", Oskar Siebert declared to an agent in the 1950s as he searched for work as a guitarist in the USA.
He grew up in the Wedding district of Berlin. His father was descended from a Roma family and had his own workshop making violins. The Nazis would later bring in instruments for repair that they had looted. His mother was a Russian Jew. Oskar wanted to become a professional violinist but he and his brother were arrested by the National Socialists in 1941, as so-called gypsies. Oskar Siebert outlines the adventurous stages of his imprisonment, which took him from the Mauthausen concentration camp to France. But he also recreates the immediate post-war period in vivid imagery and with a fine sense of the absurd in these brutal realities.
Audio sample (Hörbeispiel) Mp3
- Oskar Siebert, “I Played for my Life”
- The Siebert family, Berlin 1937 (right to left: Oskar, his mother Alexandra, his brother Egon and his father Erwin)
- Staff at the Racial Hygiene Institute in Berlin designate Oskar Siebert a "Gypsy half-breed +"
- Bob Siebert Sextett at the opening of the radio station RIAS, Berlin 1946.
