Hebby BIRS Day!
a laudation by Karin Jäckel,
Chairwoman of the Ortenau-Alsace authors network on the “creative powerhouse” Gerd Birsner

Over Writing to Gerd Birsner from Kehl am Rhein is something like squaring the circle. Where do you start? with the music,
that oozes out of his every pore? With the lyrics that he pours out of his poetic sleeve? With the stage presence that earns him the title of “Rampensau”? Or with the know-how of the former broadcaster and media technician, who enjoys recording music, films and audio books in his perfectly equipped recording studio “Schnoog Räckorts”?
Or with the entrepreneur who manages to reconcile all of this with a sympathetic “Alla hopp”?

One thing is pretty certain: the muse who kissed the jack-of-all-trades Gerd Birsner probably did it with great pleasure.

Of course, such successes don't come by chance, no matter how hot the kisses from the muses. In Gerd Birsner's case, too, life put hard work before price. But it was always hard work that he enjoyed. He has been writing songs “with the accent on the Baden accent”, as he himself liked to define his dialect poetry, since the mid-1970s.

In 1980 he became the first winner of the “Baden-Württemberg Kleinkunstpreis” and at the same time started his broadcasting career at SDR in the children's and youth program. A few years later he switched to television and hosted, among other things, the SDR meeting point -
"In fact," says Birsner, "until the introduction of the flat screen - I no longer fit in because of the space I had now taken for the inner values..."

Also in 1980, the promisingly talented artist received a scholarship to study pop music at the renowned University of Applied Sciences for Music on the Outer Alster in Hamburg.

With his music formation “Birsner & Co” he won the WDR “Folk im Sender” competition, the Duisburg “International Democratic Song” competition, and successfully performed with Peter Horton in his ARD program “Cafe intakt” and on the Wa(h) lpurgisnacht at the then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's pulpit festival, appeared on ZDF and even on GDR television. There he represented the Federal Republic of Germany with his songs at the “People and Sea” festival in Rostock.

In 1984, Gerd Birsner founded his record label “SCHNOOG - the label that (be)strikes” - and a little later he received the “German Record Critics Quarterly List” award for his first self-produced long-playing record “Dreikäsehochs & Luftküsse”. The series of these successes could be continued with numerous increments and lines of text, but no list is even remotely as impressive as an evening with him on stage...

Karin Jäckel

... and here you can find more information: Gerd Birsner on Wikipedia