It was 1990. My brother had gotten the VHS tape from someone and it said “Bath Salts.” The magnetic tape was rewinding and rewinding so many times, the sound blurred here and there, there was noise and snow on the screen. But the live recording of the Badesalz performance from the community center in Sprendlingen worked.
“The Census” was our favorite sketch. We watched it so many times that we started speaking the same way: “Bus driver, take off your jacket!” we shouted. Just like Gerd Knebel, the bald man from Badesalz, did on stage. He threw himself into his role so much, it was great and infectious. “Bus driver, take off your jacket!” we shouted to each other in the schoolyard as a greeting and farewell.
The bald man could play the Hessian bourgeois, the hooligan, the right-wing pig, the left-wing Green softie, the siffpunk, he could simply do everything: old, young, good, bad, left-wing, right-wing, horny. Nobody could talk big nonsense as quickly as him. I will never forget his character “Hessi James”.
We would like to show you external content here. You decide whether you also want to see this element:
Growing up in the Saarland province in the 1990s meant: bourgeois with party rooms full of hits, mopeds, tuned-up cars, football, Dutch techno, camouflage pants and jeans suits. For us, Saarbrücken was New York, Trier was LA. For the most part, people were only addressed by their last name (“de Schneider”, “de Kruchten”, “de Thyssen”). If it was too difficult to pronounce, there were nicknames (Dille, Lölle, Pelle). Surrounding villages are called Fitten, Britten, Mechern or Ballern. That’s why: Seeing and hearing bath salts on TV was liberating because you could finally understand the people around you better and process their behavior. And that even though everything was in Hessian.
The biggest asshole
Gag was very good at playing sadists, government types, salesmen, asshole landlords, bouncers, football coaches and philistines who would rant about anything that wasn’t the norm. But he played it like this: Nobody knows anymore who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. When Knebel plays the asshole at the dry cleaners, lovingly wrapping up a freshly washed blanket with a swastika on it for one of his customers, then in the end you don’t know who is the bigger asshole, the Nazi or the one who ignores it. To show what Nazis and bourgeois are like, Badesalz let them speak, let them be, without much explanation.
I would now like to be at the party where Gerd Knebel plays one of his characters. He moves lightly from conversation to conversation, always dropping a few casual remarks and pats on the shoulders. “Yes, yes, if it rains nicely, there won’t be a drop.” As a teenager in the 90s there wasn’t much money to spend, but luckily there wasn’t much to buy either. There were bath salts in the record store, they had “Oh yeah”, that was one of my first CDs.
Thank you Gerd Knebel. “You say ‘Huh’, you say ‘Hot’, the old one is long gone, you do this, you do that, you can’t get any further up the ladder. You’re not, you’re watching, when it doesn’t rain there’s no rain. And as I interpret life, people are like people.” (From the song “Jesu S”, sung by Hessi James)