On the morning of September 26, 1930, the following sign decorated the door of the saloon Emrich’s Braust\u00fcbl<\/em> inn in the Palatine town of Kusel: “Fritzchen has arrived today. Saloon closed!”. Just who was it who had “arrived”? Perhaps more importantly, who were the parents of \u201eFritzchen\u201c, the new-born baby?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second child of the bandmaster Paul Wunderlich and his wife Anna, Friedrich Karl Otto Wunderlich, whom everyone called “Fritz”, was born on that September day. Once Fritzchen had outgrown his diapers, little Fritz was a real rascal: he regularly played billiards in his parents’ inn. To be able to play, he stole pennies from his parents’ cash register. When the cash register was locked, he plugged up all the holes in the billiard table: if he wasn’t allowed to play, then certainly neither the guests of the inn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the age of five, Fritz was hit by a heavy blow \u2013 he lost his father. From then on, it was up to his mother Anna to support the family, which also included Fritz’s ten-year older sister Marianne. If one follows the remarks of Fritz’s sister, the death of his father can be traced back to numerous harassments he experienced in the course of the National Socialist seizure of power. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although those years without a father and the subsequent years of the Second World War brought many privations \u2013 his mother had to get by on a widow’s pension of 89 Reichsmark a month \u2013 Wunderlich drew his artistic energy precisely from those circumstances. His goal was to no longer be on the “fringes of society”: He wanted to be right in the middle of it, to take on his role in the truest sense of the word. What was better suited to achieving this goal than making music \u2013 the thing he enjoyed most? <\/p>\n\n\nPaul and Anna Wunderlich<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The environment into which Fritz Wunderlich was born was relatively modest \u2013 in terms of financial prosperity. All the richer was the Wunderlich family’s cultural tradition: first Wunderlich’s parents traveled throughout Europe as musicians. The couple met in Cyprus in 1918. Both Paul and Anna were trained musicians and settled in Kusel in 1929, where they learned from a newspaper ad that the saloon Emrich’s Braust\u00fcbl<\/em> (formerly Preu\u00dfischer Hof<\/em> ) was up for lease. <\/p>\n\n\n\nGreat loss<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n