When Hans Süper stepped onto the stage, it was enough for him to call out his partner's name and the hall was in the mood: "carpenter!".

Stretched out with at least three Ä, followed by: "Do Ei!", Süper started to explain why his neighbor was "Dat Ei".

He, in turn, stood there like stupid August or stiff as a guitarist on the parade ground and kept asking, apparently stupidly, why and how he gave reason for Süper's assessment.

He, in turn, danced around the others like Rumpelstiltskin, on rubber twisted legs, a sequence of steps that would have done Michael Jackson credit, let a crazy torrent of speech run wild, let his eyebrows shake his bowler hat and laughed dappled - until the next song of the both,

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for feuilleton online and "media".

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With this style of performance, Süper and Zimmermann set standards as a Colonia duet in the Cologne carnival from 1974 to 1990 and shaped an era.

Hans Zimmermann died in 1994. With Werner Keppler as a partner, Süper continued in the style he had coined until 2002, but the "Süper Duett" did not live up to the original.

In 2004, Hans Süper retired as a professional carnival performer, lived in his home district of Cologne-Sülz and on Gran Canaria, and returned for a few big solo appearances.

Even if the jokes at the beginning of each staccato were at the expense of "Zimmermän" and all sorts of others, Süper always pulled himself through the cocoa in the end and most lastingly.

It couldn't be any different, he said in a film that WDR once shot about him.

Giving others fun when you're not making fun of yourself the hardest seemed inconceivable to him.

The signal to the audience - we are just as imperfect and potentially ridiculous characters as those we sing about - was what made the Colonia duet so successful.

In this and in the joy of playing, which was expressed in the sharp contrast between "Zimmermän" and Süper, the "little one", the two were unmatched.

An orange box strung with strings

The first "Flitsch", i.e. mandolin, on which Hans Süper, born on March 15, 1936 in Cologne, played, was not one at all, but an orange box with strings that his father - Johann "Hans" Süper senior, also a musician, gave him and carnivalist - brought from captivity.

This can be read in Süpers' biography, "My Life with Flitsch", written by the journalist Helmut Frangenberg.

Hans Süper died in Cologne on Saturday at the age of 86.

"His sense of humor was unique and his role on stage never equaled," said the Cologne Carnival Festival Committee.

"I am dismayed by the death of Hans Süper," said Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker.

"This real Cologne original has inspired us all for many decades with its wit, its cheeky charm and also with its 'Flitsch'."

With his "Flitsch" Süper could fire off the hottest numbers of Kokolore or the smug songs that are just as typical for the Cologne soul and the Cologne carnival.

Our recommendation is Hans Süper's interpretation of the classic "I ben ene kölsche Jung" by Fritz Weber (1909-1984):

"I'm a Cologne boy, what do you want to do?


I have a Kölsche Jung und dun Jään Laache


I still don't sleep like that, well I have a good


Ming favorite word, it's called Kölle Alaaf!"