He has ten number one successes, and many people still know his name today: pop star Freddy Quinn is celebrating his 90th birthday.
The poor guy must have been through a lot in his younger years. In the “burning hot desert sand, far, so far from the homeland”. Or when someone else took the beautiful Juanita out of his hands and all he had left was the guitar and the sea, while the mother at home pleaded: “Boy, come back home soon!”
And always this cursed homesickness, because “1000 miles from home, the world looks very different because there is no one who loves you”. It was a bitter fate, “day in, day out, no luck, no home. Everything is so far, so far.” Those were the days when Freddy Quinn (90) sang about his lot as a lonely sailor far from home and the whole nation moaned comfortably. In this way he fought for his unique selling point as an expert on wanderlust and homesickness, a “specialist in longing”, as the “Zeit” wrote.
His name remains present
It was all more than half a century ago. Although Freddy Quinn – with over 60 million records sold alongside Udo Jürgens (1934-2014) and Peter Alexander (1926-2011) the most successful pop star in Germany and Austria – has not had a major hit for well over 60 years, his name is also with still present to younger generations. He’s just Freddy, because there is only one. The idol of the fathers, or better said: the grandfathers. He will be 90 years old on September 27th.
Reports about him could well begin with “Once upon a time …”, especially his biography, up to around the age of 25, the novel-like vita of an adventurer. First of all: Freddy, the seaman with the unmistakable Hamburg idiom, doesn’t come from the Waterkant at all, but from Austria. In Vienna he was baptized Franz Eugen Helmuth Manfred Nidl.
His father takes him to the United States, where the boy starts school in Morgantown, West Virginia. So English becomes the second mother tongue. When his mother received custody in Vienna, the child came back to Austria. In the meantime, his wife Mama, who is now the publisher of the two magazines “Tierpost” and “Die Glocke”, has married the poor Rudolf Anatol von Petz, who writes animal poems for her papers. He adopts her son, whose surname is now Nidl-Petz.
He was at the circus
During the last years of the war, the boy was sent to Hungary by Kinderland, where he fled the advancing Red Army in 1945 and was stranded in Pilsen at the age of 13. There he runs into US soldiers whom he tells he is American. So he ends up back in the USA with a military transport. There he learns that his biological father, Johann Quinn, had died in a traffic accident as early as 1943.
The Americans send him back to Europe, he ends up in a reforming home in Antwerp, where he completes elementary school and learns Flemish and French. In 1946/47 he found his way back to Vienna, but did not get along with his adoptive father and stepfather. At the age of 16 he ran away and went to the circus and trained as an acrobat, while the animal poet Rudolf von Petz had the police look for him.
Contact with the Foreign Legion
The young man now hitchhikes to Rome. Later he tells the writer Heiner Link: “In Rome I got a visa for Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco … I then made my way to Palermo, took a ship to Tunis, from there I hitchhiked to Algeria. I landed in the small town of Sidi bel Abbès, the training center of the French Foreign Legion, and played the guitar in a bar where legionnaires also frequented … An instructor spoke to me there and I said, half out of joke, half out of seriousness, that I wanted to The instructor suggested to me: ‘You take part in the basic training, after three weeks we’ll see each other again, then you decide whether you want to go in or out again. Then I’ll actually be out again. That is unique in history the Foreign Legion, and then … “
… he comes to Germany, first lands in Fürth and performs country songs in front of US soldiers, later on the American military broadcaster AFN in Nuremberg. Finally he makes his way to Hamburg, is discovered in the Washington bar on St. Pauli as “Frederico Quinn” and in 1956 records the single “Heimweh” for the Polydor label, which was named “Schnulze des Jahres” on Bavarian radio. is broken in front of an open microphone.
His career is picking up speed
It is the starting signal for a great career. “Homesick” becomes a number one hit, the best-selling title of the year. Someone is singing from afar. Dark, male baritone, sometimes one has the impression that he is about to sob. That was the case for many people back then who were also stolen from their homes by the war ten years ago?
But the song also fits his résumé perfectly. Or is it the other way around? The journalist Elmar Kraushaar, author of the book “Freddy Quinn. An improbable life” in Berlin’s “Tagesspiegel”, harbors this suspicion: “The singer’s ‘homesickness’ has to be explained by his biography, text and interpretation have to become one with Freddy Quinn one more, even more success. After all, with the buried ‘homesickness’ feeling of the masses in the middle of the post-war German economic miracle, did not one stumble upon a gold vein? “
In fact, composer and producer Lotar Olias, who wrote most of the Freddy songs, later bluntly admits, “It took me a month to get Freddy’s story into a tangible form for the press.” And the “Tagesspiegel” states: “The adventurous vita of the newly created idol is clearly inspired by the musical ‘Heimweh nach St. Pauli’, which Olias had written long before he met Freddy Quinn.”
His big hits
Between 1956 and 1966 he had ten number one hits such as “Homeless”, “The Legionnaire”, “The Guitar and the Sea”, “Under Strange Stars”, “La Paloma”, “Boy, come back soon”. And because everyone loves Freddy so much, the songs become movies like “Freddy under strange stars”, “Freddy, the guitar and the sea,” Far is the way “etc.
Then, in the mid-1960s, the Beatles and Rolling Stones came, and the romance of the sailors was over. But Freddy is still the most famous Hamburg sailor. He now sings the song “We” in which he insults the youth movement as “bums”. He later says that his producers urged him that the song was “idiotic”.
But the audience now gets to know the circus star Freddy. He does gymnastics live on the tightrope without any special protection and is awarded the “Circus Oscar”. But it is inexorably quieter around him, which he also really appreciates, because he actually disgusts the hype around his person.
Trouble with the judiciary
Then things get lurid about him again, in 2004 he is on trial for tax evasion because he was registered with his main residence in Switzerland, but mainly lived in Hamburg. Freddy pays back 900,000 euros, plus a fine of 150,000 euros, and is sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on probation. The proceedings also reveal that he had been happily married for decades to his longtime manager Lilly Blessmann, who died in 2008 at the age of 89.
He’s been living with a lady named Rosi for years now. “We can have breakfast for two hours in the morning without any problems. We never get bored. Rosi loves painting and is very good at painting. I repair clocks,” he told the “Neue Post” in July.
So he is still not really lonely, and he has never gone to sea, as he himself admits. So he would hardly have grieved that Stefan Remmler (74), a star of the Neue Deutsche Welle, recorded an album of Freddy songs. Or that Karl Dall (1941-2020) has rewritten the huge hit “Under foreign stars”. Freddy says: “A white ship goes to Hong Kong”. The Dall version is: “Ship a white horse to Hong Kong …”