There’s a song on this week’s Sunny Side Up playlist that sounds like it belongs on a beach somewhere. It’s all easy joy and holiday anticipation. It’s actually a wry little joke about the limits of East German freedom; in the opening verse, Manfred Krug considers heading all the way to Kamchatka, on the Soviet Union’s Pacific coast, before his hard currency runs out halfway there and he has to settle for a campsite by the Baltic instead.
GDR citizens could travel fairly freely across the socialist bloc; Bulgaria, Hungary, the Black Sea, even Soviet Crimea were common destinations. The real wall, however, was a financial and political one further west, and the song plays that limitation for laughs rather than protest.
Manfred Krug’s „Wenn der Urlaub kommt“ was released in 1976 on Amiga, the state-run record label of East Germany. Pure, uncomplicated happiness on the surface: a jazz-schlager confection built around the simple pleasure of the holidays finally arriving. But underneath, it’s got real teeth — a knowing wink about Devisen, campsite permits, and the small, everyday negotiations of GDR life.
From Steel Smelter to Socialist Star
Manfred Krug himself was a genuinely strange and brilliant case. Born in Duisburg, in what would become West Germany, he moved east with his father at just 13, after his parents divorced and his father, who was an engineer, couldn’t find work in the Ruhr. Manfred trained as a steel smelter before talent pulled him into acting, and by the 1960s he’d become one of East German cinema’s biggest stars, DEFA studio’s go-to leading man, frequently cast as the noble socialist hero. Alongside that, he built a genuinely respected second career as a jazz singer, often working with composer Günther Fischer. It wasn’t an actor’s vanity side-project, but rather proper, serious jazz vocal work behind the Iron Curtain.
The Year Everything Changed
In November 1976, the same year „Wenn der Urlaub kommt“ came out, the East German government stripped dissident songwriter Wolf Biermann of his citizenship while he was on a rare, sanctioned concert tour in the West. It triggered a wave of protest inside the GDR the authorities hadn’t remotely anticipated. A dozen major writers signed an open letter asking the government to reconsider. In the days that followed, more names attached themselves. Among them was our friend Manfred Krug, one of the most beloved faces in East German entertainment, risking a career built over two decades for a colleague he barely knew personally.
The state’s response was swift: Krug was banned from acting and singing. Within months he’d applied to leave the country, and in 1977 he crossed into West Berlin for good — one of well over a hundred artists and writers who left the GDR in the wake of the Biermann affair, a cultural exodus historians now point to as one of the moments the East German state permanently lost the trust of its own intelligentsia.
A Second Act Nobody Expected
What makes Krug’s story genuinely remarkable is what happened next: He didn’t fade away in the West. He became, if anything, even more famous. He played a gruff long-haul trucker in „Auf Achse“, and then, unforgettably, the Hauptkommissar Paul Stoever alongside Charles Brauer in „Tatort“, a partnership that was so beloved it ran for seventeen years and forty episodes, with the two actors occasionally breaking into song mid-investigation. He crossed from the East’s biggest star to one of the West’s, in a country that had just spent decades convincing both halves that the other was the enemy.
Whose Holiday Is It Anyway?
Which brings us back to this song, and why it lands so well this particular weekend. It’s the first Sunday of the Austrian school summer holidays. Families across the country are packing cars, checking ferry times, arguing about who forgot the sun cream. Maybe that is what you are doing while listening to Sunny Side Up this week?
Whatever „Urlaub“ means for you this year, it’s worth remembering the very different calculus behind this one: hard currency, campsite permits, and a joke about Kamchatka that would have landed instantly with anyone actually living the constraint. A year later, Krug would trade all of that for a freedom of a different order entirely — and never look back.
There’s something almost defiant, in hindsight, about the sheer unguarded happiness in this recording. It was made by a man who, within months, would put everything on the line for a friend’s right to speak freely, and lose his own freedom to sing in the process. Krug got his summer eventually. It just took leaving everything behind to get there.
A Little Soul songs are curated by Wolfgang Bachschwöll and come from his incredible vinyl collection.