A treasure that nobody wants
A good 3,000 books by the dialect poet HP Müller rest in a basement in Frankfurt
They are a treasure for lovers of Frankfurt dialect. But they cause some concerns for his keeper: Hans Kumpfmüller took care of the estate of his father-in-law, the Frankfurt dialect poet, publisher and carnival performer Heinz Philipp Müller, usually just called HP Müller. This also includes thousands of books that Müller once published. For example “Römerberg – Frankfurt history, stories, pictures”. Or “Frankfurt like a fairy tale – happy fairy tales and stories”. Or his classic “Frankfurt people happy people”.
They have all lain in a cellar in the Northrend for centuries. However, according to Kumpfmüller’s will, they shouldn’t stay there much longer. For months he has been trying to find a place for the volumes. But this is not so easy. Institutions such as the Institute for City History and the Historical Museum already own works by the native of Heddernheim, who made a name for himself early on as the author of handmade speeches and who is still remembered today on H.-P.-Müller-Platz in Heddernheim .
Boxes full of books on the side of the road
So it was only logical that Heddernheimer Fastnachter fetched some boxes with books. Actor Michael Quast and author Sabine Hock, author of a biography of popular actress Liesel Christ, have also been rummaging through the estate. He also gave away boxes of books to some bookstores, says Kumpfmüller. And sometimes, when the weather was nice, he would put a few boxes full of printed matter on the side of the road in the hope that passers-by would take one or the other volume with them.
At some point he even had the idea of trying his luck at cider farms – after all, Müller’s “Frankforter Ebbelwei-Bichelche” can also be found on the cellar shelves. But they waved it off: not interested. Despite all the efforts, there are still more than 3,000 Frankfurt original books in the Nordend cellar – with humorous texts and rhymes about this and that: from the “Kerchgang” to the artists’ Christmas market, from the Frankfurt slimming diet to the Feldberg hike.
In the absence of alternatives, he is now getting used to the idea of leaving them to a professional clearer, says the estate administrator: “The market for the books simply isn’t there anymore. And at some point it’s over, you have to end something like that.”
Humor as the elixir of life
A step that would still be difficult for him. Then it is about the life’s work of his father-in-law, who was a special person. “Humour was the elixir of life for him”, Exactly Kumpfmüller. Probably also because HP Müller, born in 1921, was drafted into the Wehrmacht as a young man, had to fight in the Soviet Union and experienced terrible things there. Laughter and happiness must have been his way of dealing with it, the estate administrator suspects.
Throughout his life, Müller, who ran an electronics store as his main job, continued with the topic of humor in all its facets – and Frankfurt’s local history. Kumpfmüller recalls that there were at least 60 boxes in his study. Their content: newspaper clippings on all sorts of Frankfurt topics such as the zoo, palm garden, but also politics, which Müller meticulously archives. He also made a name for himself as the inventor of the “Frehliche Frankfurt Telefon”: a popular telephone announcement service that the city of Frankfurt offered in the 1980s and 1990s, with news, anecdotes and recipes in Frankfurt dialect, where, in addition to HP Müller, Liesel Christ and stock exchange guru Frank Lehmann babbled. Not to forget his “Frankforter Kalenner für Uzer und Schenner”, which he published annually and in which wonderful vocabularies such as “Großduher”, “Schmachtlabbe” and “Quadratsimbel” can be found.
He published a total of 20 books, the last of which appeared in the late 1980s. 1998 Star HP Mueller. His funeral in Frankfurt’s main cemetery was a special experience, says Hans Kumpfmüller. Not only because so many people flocked there that the mourning hall could not hold everyone. But above all because it was one of the few burials where people laughed – when a poem by Müller was recited, in which he imagines how he would fly over his beloved Frankfurt after his death as a dove, giving some of his contemporaries a heap puts on the head.
Which should have been entirely in his mind. Because as he once said? “Lived happily and died happily / is em Deiwel spoiled the bill.”
A cultural value
Michael Damm, landlord of the Frankfurt cult jazz bar Mampf im Sandweg, is also committed to saving HP Müller’s books. Then the volumes are a “cultural value,” he says – testimony to the diversity of the Frankfurt dialect, which is more and more being forgotten. In order to keep them alive and to preserve the books, he has in mind the formation of a working group that could also hold appropriate dialect events. Anyone interested in such a project or in HP Müller’s books can send an e-mail to Michael Damm: [email protected]. Brigitte Degelmann