A well-known radio voice in the region has gone silent. Nero Brandenburg, the legend of the Rias reporter and moderator, died last Friday at the age of 80, as friends and companions now report. Brandenburg had many fans, especially in the eastern part of the city. In GDR times, people liked to listen to his programs there, although receiving Rias was forbidden in the SED state.
After training as a postal clerk, Horst Peter Paul Brandenburg. That’s the birth name of the Berliner, who started out as a program manager in West Berlin youth clubs in the 1960s. Nero loved music, especially jazz. “Dalli, Dalli” legend Hans Rosenthal brought him to the radio, to the Rias. Along with Gregor Rottschalk and Lord Knud, “they were among the DJs who were supposed to spice up the station,” said Nero Brandenburg once in an interview with the “Berliner Kurier”.
The moderator also had a good connection to artists from the GDR. Brandenburg brought East stars like Frank Schöbel and Helga Hahnemann to the West for public events of the Rias Schlagerparade, when the Wall was still standing. He was on friendly terms with Henne until the entertainer’s death. Whoever met him saw him mostly wearing a baseball cap with the Rias logo on his head, even after the end of the station in 1993. Brandenburg then worked for RBB (“The German Schlager Parade”).
