BERLIN— Neglect SpongeBob SquarePants, Sesame Road and the sourdough starter trend: a clinically depressed German loaf of bread called Bernd das Brot is commemorating his 25th wedding anniversary as the unwilling celebrity of a youngsters’s tv program that inadvertently came to be just as preferred with grownups.
A cult standard in Germany, Bernd das Brot (Bernd the Bread) is a creature renowned for his deep, bleak voice, his continuous pessimism and his trademark expression, “Haze!” (Assume “crap!” in English.)
Played and articulated by puppeteer Jörg Teichgraeber, Bernd is a tv speaker that desires absolutely nothing to do with television and can not wait to go home to look at the wallpaper.
This year, his good friends– a lamb and a blossom shrub– are advising him to come to be a bread influencer.
Bernd’s beginnings
Born as an illustration on the back of a paper napkin in a restaurant, maker Tommy Krappweis attracted Bernd’s notorious grimace after co-creator Norman Cöster’s face when they were asked ahead up with mascots for KiKA, a German youngsters’s public tv network.
Comic musician Georg Graf von Westphalen developed Bernd as a pullman loaf– white bread commonly cut for sandwiches– with brief arms and a long-term grimace. Bernd networks German stereotypes with his irritated personality, fondness for grumbling and completely dry funny bone and paradox.
Bernd’s very first episode broadcast on KiKA in 2000 along with his more-optimistic friends, Chili the Lamb and Briegel the Shrub.
A hesitant popularity
Because KiKA is a youngsters’s network, there was commonly silence from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. On Jan. 1, 2003, the network placed Bernd’s brief episodes right into the evening loophole for the very first time.
The action brought a grown-up target market– frequently those resting in your home and smoking cigarettes pot, or returning after a lengthy evening of partying– right into Bernd’s globe, sealing his appeal as a German cult traditional.
In 2004, Bernd won the Adolf Grimme Reward– the German tv matching of an Emmy– due to the fact that the court stated he stands for “the right to be in a poor state of mind.”
” Bernd reveals you that you are much less susceptible with wit and self-irony. And possibly one of the most crucial factor is: It’s completely alright if you do not really feel well in some cases. That’s entirely great,” Krappweis, Bernd’s maker, stated in a KiKA Q&A concerning Bernd’s wedding anniversary.
Bernd’s busted heart
Bernd is dispirited for a wide range of factors, including his unsuccessful effort to be the mascot for a pastry shop’s ad campaign (that’s exactly how he wound up as a television speaker, as a last option).
Yet it remains in Episode 85 that we lastly learn more about Bernd’s busted heart.
” A long, very long time ago I loved a stunning, slim baguette. She was so extremely enchanting and amusing,” Bernd informs Chili and Briegel. “Yet sadly it failed.
” She just had eyes for this ordinary multigrain bread with its 10 sorts of grain. It was so dismaying.”
The kidnapping
Despite Bernd’s best shots– among his catch phrases is “I wish to leave this program”– the episodes have actually never ever withered. He sings, he dancings, he’s been to area. He’s the celebrity of goods, a computer game and headings like “Provide United States Our Daily Bernd.”
He was also abducted! In 2009, his 2-meter-tall (6.56 feet) sculpture was swiped from his typical location outside the city center in Erfurt, where KiKA is based.
An insurance claim of duty appeared on YouTube, by sympathizers of a team of demonstrators that were opposing a business that had actually generated cremation stoves for the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. The demonstrators, nevertheless, rejected participation in Bernd’s kidnapping and the video clip was eliminated from the net.
Bernd was imprisoned for virtually 2 weeks prior to being found unhurt in a deserted barracks.
The wedding anniversary year
KiKA is recognizing Bernd’s 25th wedding anniversary– regardless of his grievances– with brand-new episodes, an upgrade to his hit track and online tasks for youngsters and grownups alike. The events start currently, as Bernd’s birthday celebration is Feb. 29.
The most up to date collection will certainly premiere in September as Bernd, Chili and Briegel introduce the social networks network “Better with Bernd” in their initiatives to make him right into a bread influencer.
The triad will certainly offer developments to make institution, and life, less complicated for customers however normally their mixtures backfire. Bernd rather ends up being a defluencer– and an uncontrolled trailblazer.
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AP reporter Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin added to this record.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All civil liberties booked. This product might not be released, program, reworded or rearranged without consent.
