Bruno Koschmider

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Bruno Koschmider was a Hamburg entrepreneur who spent three hours of a night in 1960 reporting a fire that did almost no damage. Behind that complaint stood three young men from Liverpool. He was born in 1926 in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdańsk, and died in Hamburg in 2000. Over those decades he controlled a handful of businesses in the city. Today he is remembered chiefly as the man who first put the Beatles on a German stage. How did a cinema owner end up employing them? What did he give them, and what went wrong between them?

  10

• 2. Cinema and Clubs

  ›

  Koschmider's businesses in Hamburg included the Bambi Kino, a cinema, along with two music venues called the Indra and the Kaiserkeller. In May 1960, a promoter named Allan Williams booked the Beatles into the Indra. The band's home during that first stay was far humbler than its stage. They slept in small, dirty rooms tucked behind the movie screen at the Bambi Kino. When the Indra closed, Koschmider moved the group to the Kaiserkeller, a larger room that he also owned. The arrangement lasted only a few months. In October 1960 the Beatles left the Kaiserkeller for a rival, the Top Ten Club, which was run by a man named Peter Eckhorn.

  12310

• 3. The Burned Condom

  ›

  Paul McCartney and Pete Best walked back into the Bambi Kino to collect their belongings and found the building in total darkness. Their solution was improvised. They fixed a condom to a nail on the wall of their room and set it alight. The small flame gave them enough light to pack. The source says there was no real damage. Koschmider nonetheless reported the two musicians to the authorities for attempted arson. McCartney and Best spent three hours in a local jail and were then deported. George Harrison was deported too, for a separate reason, because he was working under the legal age limit. The group's first German chapter ended with the three of them sent out of the country.

  45689

• 4. Koschmider on Screen

  ›

  Koschmider has since been portrayed in several films about the early career of the Beatles. Richard Marner played him in the 1979 film Birth of the Beatles. Paul Humpoletz took the role in the 1994 film Backbeat. The 2000 television film In His Life: The John Lennon Story cast Alex Cox as Koschmider. That last film appeared in the same year he died in Hamburg.

  45689