Joe Bausch - "Verrücktes Blut. Oder: Wie ich wurde, der ich bin"

Joe Bausch brings his new stage show "Verrücktes Blut" - or: How I became who I am.

A brutally honest and deeply moving personal story from the beloved TV star and bestselling author. A farm in the rugged Westerwald, early 1950s. The horrors and hardships of the war are still lodged in people's bones, and the region has always had a harsh character of its own. There is no time for warmth, no room for tenderness.

Josef Hermann - who will later call himself Joe - is a bright, restless child. He learns to read from newspapers left in the outhouse before he even starts school, and from an early age is expected to pull his weight on the family farm. He is only allowed to attend grammar school because he works himself to exhaustion. Beatings are routine, and the foster son thirteen years his senior, taken in by his parents, has sinister intentions.

His father raises him to inherit the farm with all the severity he himself endured and considers necessary. But Joe wants nothing of it - he wants out of the Westerwald, away from a world of suffocation and dishonesty. In his latest book, Joe Bausch speaks for the first time about a period of deep humiliation, violence, and abuse. He reflects on the traumas of his childhood and youth, and how they shaped the man he became.