Fredl Fesl

Alfred Raimund Fesl (7 July 1947 – 25 June 2024), better known as Fredl Fesl, was a Lower Bavarian musician and singer who was said to be the one who invented Bavarian musical Kabarett.

Early life

Fesl grew up in the town of his birth, Grafenau in the Bavarian Forest and then moved with his parents to Greding in Middle Franconia. There, Fesl's parents ran an inn, Zum Bayerischen. In his childhood, Fesl was, according to the story, once expelled from a school for replying to a box on the ear from a teacher by boxing the teacher's ear back. Further academic endeavours, though, were somewhat more successful. After finishing at the Volksschule, he passed the intake examination for the Oberrealschule in Ingolstadt (now called the Christoph-Scheiner-Gymnasium), where he lived at boarding school. In 1959, the family moved to Munich, where Fesl learnt from his father how to play the trumpet — this after his earlier failed attempts in Greding to teach his son to play the clarinet and the accordion. Fesl was, in both 1966 and 1967 the Upper Bavarian Junior Champion Weightlifter for the club ESV München Ost, to which he had belonged since 1962. Fesl did an apprenticeship as an artist blacksmith. He learnt to play guitar while he was in the Bundeswehr, where he also became the joker in the background in his outfit, the Gebirgsjägertruppe ("Mountain Infantry"), which somewhat irked his superiors.