The ballad of the bloody Bomme

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Christa Reinig's ballad vom Bloody Bomme is popular at school and relates to a real criminal case. But what exactly is its content?

A hatchet plays a major role in the ballad of Bloody Bomme.
A hatchet plays a major role in the ballad of Bloody Bomme.

Christa Reinig's ballad - that is the content

  • Christa Reinig's ballad vom bloody Bomme is about a criminal who is sentenced to death by guillotine in a sensational trial. This is followed by a time when he is doing well in prison, but the time for his execution is getting closer.
  • While Bomme, sentenced to death, still entertains guards and fellow prisoners with his witty manner, he has to help build the guillotine in the prison yard. Eventually he ends up under it and is executed.
  • But even at this point the ballad does not lose its entertaining character. Reinig demands that one should throw a penny in one's hat when one feels entertained.
  • What is striking about the text is the very free and experimental use of upper and lower case. If you read the text to match - that is, out loud in the capitalized places - you sound like an excited reporter.
  • The morality-like structure and the "news" character leave the story appear to have real backgrounds. But what is behind its content? Did the bloody Bomme really exist in the end?
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From the bloody Bomme - the Gladow gang

  • In the late 1940s, the so-called Gladow gang made Berlin unsafe by carrying out raids in both the west and the east that also killed people.
  • The leader of the gang, Werner Gladow, who was only eighteen years old, and some of his accomplices were finally caught and had to stand trial.
  • They made an entertaining show out of that, just like the story of the bloody pompon.
  • Leader Gladow was eventually sentenced to death by the ax. But he is not the true protagonist of the story, rather Reinig has here combined several members of the gang into one character. The nickname of the member Redzinski was actually Bomme, but the characteristics of the protagonist fit better with other members.

Conclusion: The content of Reinig's text is quite clear, the background is absolutely real and quite tragic, because this criminal case really did exist.

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