Jürgen Strack - Achtung! The Only Sauerkraut in Town - Post-Edinburgh Fringe Interview

In a series of interviews, we'll reflect on this year's Edinburgh Fringe with artists and creatives who performed at the festival, learning how it went and hearing more about their work.

In this interview, we speak with Jürgen Strack about the run of Achtung! The Only Sauerkraut in Town.

With the run in Edinburgh now complete, how do you reflect on the time at the Fringe?

I stayed until the official end of the Fringe, even though my show had finished, partly because I wanted to experience Edinburgh without the pressure of having to perform. I could see other shows, spend time in different venues, and talk to people without having to think about my next performance.

Looking back, I feel a mixture of pride, relief, gratitude, and, frankly, a bit of disbelief. This was my fourth consecutive Fringe, but it was my first full solo run in a paid venue. I was 58, virtually unknown outside my existing comedy circles, and I had decided to take the risk.

I did 22 performances of my own show, including 13 consecutive days, plus seven guest spots. I sold 370 tickets. There were good houses and difficult houses, good days and difficult days. I was exhausted at times and ill at one point, but I didn't pull a show. I showed up 100% of the time.

I had wanted to use the Fringe to build an audience for Jürgen and for the Achtung! series, but also to understand more about how the Fringe ecosystem actually works. I think I came away with a much better understanding of that.

When it was finally over, I drove north into the Highlands, eventually seeing Suilven in Assynt in the distance. After everything that had happened, that felt like a fitting image: I'd climbed a mountain.

What is the biggest lesson you learned during the run in Edinburgh?
Prepare as well as you can, expect things to go wrong, and then trust the person you've prepared.
The Fringe tests you physically, mentally, psychologically, and emotionally. It shows you how you behave when you're tired, when something doesn't go according to plan, when an audience doesn't respond as you'd hoped, and when you have to get up the next day and do it all again, and again, and again.

One Wednesday, the room was unexpectedly full. It had been a great show and there was a real buzz afterwards. I remember telling the technicians, ‘Today's show reminded me why I love performing.’
That's probably the lesson in a nutshell. Fringe comes, it goes, and you are left with what you learned about yourself. I feel like I climbed a mountain.

How did the reality of your run compare to what you envisioned during rehearsals?
I knew the show. I didn't know the environment.

You can rehearse a show as much as you like, but you can't rehearse the Fringe. One day I had a seven-person audience and had to work very hard to keep the thing alive - my character bit, Mr Towel, came to the rescue. Another day I had a man from Chicago who was incredibly engaged, and a German couple in the audience with the bloke doubling over.

Then there was everything outside the room: flyering on the Royal Mile, dealing with different audiences, varying energy levels, the room and slot, and everything that comes with doing a Fringe.
I was constantly making small adjustments. Towards the end of the run, I also brought more MC energy into the show, which unlocked another side of me.

So the show I finished with wasn't exactly the show I started with. The bones were there, but the Fringe became part of the process.

What was the biggest surprise, positive or negative, once you were in front of Fringe audiences?
Probably the biggest surprise was simply being there and discovering that people would actually come into the room and go on the journey with me.

I remember sitting in the 49-seat black box before the run and looking at all those empty seats. It was just a rehearsal room then. Then people started coming in, and suddenly the thing that existed in my head could become real between me and a room full of strangers.

One audience member, Claire, is a trans woman originally from Leicester who now lives on a remote Scottish island. She had a hilarious snorty laugh. So, at one point I got the whole audience to do a collective belly laugh. They all joined in and Claire snorted. I nearly died laughing. We did it again and she snorted again. It became a whole moment in the room.

Those are the moments you can't rehearse. You can't manufacture them. They just happen.

Was there a specific moment on or off stage that defined your Edinburgh experience?
Oddly, one of the moments that stays with me happened on the final day, when I went to sit in the audience for another performer's show.

There were only three people in the audience. Afterwards, I ended up talking with the performer for about two hours.

It was a very Fringe moment. We talked about the struggle, the talent, the highs and lows, the exhaustion, the audiences, and why we keep coming back and doing it.

That conversation captured something essential about the Fringe for me. It isn't just about your own show. You're surrounded by thousands of people all trying to make something happen. Sometimes the most meaningful moments happen when you're not performing at all.

How did you manage the physical and mental stamina of performing daily?
I tried to take it one day at a time.

I had the same breakfast most mornings, two fried eggs, mashed avocado with cayenne pepper on a slice of sourdough, got my espresso, and then got on with it. I treated flyering as part of the job and did it with quite an industrial level of effort.

The spa was also important. It sounds slightly ridiculous, but physically getting away from the Fringe for a while and letting my body recover made a huge difference.

I also had comedian friends around me, once a week we socialised and ate together, and on difficult days that helped. You realise that everyone has good shows and bad shows. Nobody is walking around having a perfect Fringe.

I think I also had to keep something in reserve every day. You can't spend everything you have on one performance when you know you've got another one tomorrow. 

How did you handle reviews and word-of-mouth chatter while performing?
The audience in the room mattered more to me than the reviews, although I have to admit the reviews mattered to me.

I'd had the Buxton Fringe Best Stand-up Show 2026 nomination and some good feedback before Edinburgh, so I was hoping that reviews and word of mouth would help people find the show.

One reviewer came to see me and afterwards gave me some private feedback. He said he thought I was ‘on the cusp of a great little show’, that there was strong material and crowd work, but that the pacing and overall spine could be stronger. I valued that because it was specific and useful. Another reviewer who announced he would come never appeared when the door opened! It felt like a kick in the balls because I'd built myself up for it mentally and summoned people in, gave out some free tickets etc to get bums on seats, only for him to not walk through the door.

I think I probably gave reviews too much mental space while I was there. In the end, the real people sitting in the room were the audience. If they laughed, engaged, and enjoyed themselves, that was the thing that mattered most.

How did your clowning background help you deal with unpredictable crowds?
I don't think Philippe Gaulier's clown training created the fearlessness I have on stage. I already had some of that before I went there. I had Mr Towel as an idea before Gaulier, and I had a fairly instinctive response to hecklers before I did the training. A stand-up teacher many years ago even told me, ‘When Jürgen is on stage, hecklers beware.’

What the clown training may have done was sharpen some of those instincts: being present, responding to what is actually happening, reading the room, playing with the audience rather than trying to force a predetermined result, and, perhaps most importantly, continuing.

There was silence during some of my Fringe shows. I simply continued. Mike Gunn once described that as ‘continuing’. It sounds obvious, but it is a genuine choice and a technique.

Another time a woman shouted something from the back of the room about something a man in the second row had said. I could have become defensive, but instead I said, ‘If that's true, what she just said, you're one up on me.’ The room went with it.

And then there was Claire and the belly-laugh moment. I noticed what was happening and played with it. You need a certain fearlessness, but you also need the eye to recognise that something is happening and make something of it.

I also had two friends from Gaulier sitting towards the back of one show. Afterwards Fraser said ‘the energy’ seemed outstanding, while Keaton said I have a big heart. Neither of them said I was funny. It occurred to me.

What was your most unscripted or absurd audience interaction?
Probably the woman who became my date for ten seconds.

It happened within a joke/story and was completely improvised. I asked her, with her consent, to play along, knelt down and serenaded her, and then noticed something I could play with and came out with  ‘good teeth’. She laughed and the moment grew from there.

A close second was Claire's and the audience's mini belly snorty laugh orchestra. I got the audience to collectively belly-laugh, and Claire snorted. Once that happened, there was no way I was going to ignore it.

Those moments are part of why I enjoy audience interaction so much. You don't know quite where it is going to go.

There have been comparisons between your style and comedians such as Henning Wehn and Marcel Lucont. How does ‘Sauerkraut comedy’ carve out its own niche?
I think this is probably an apples-and-pears comparison.

Henning Wehn is a master of what he does and has been doing it for decades. He has pretty much cornered that particular market, and there are very few established British comedians who could touch him at it. I'm a fan of his. We were also born only about 25 kilometres apart.

A reviewer at Buxton once said I have a much better singing voice than Henning Wehn. I didn't know that, but I'll take it!

I'm also a fan of Marcel Lucont. I watch him and learn from him. He seems like a lovely guy and a very talented performer, and I'd love to perform on Marcel Lucont's Cabaret Fantastique if that's still running.

For me, ‘Sauerkraut comedy’ is really about developing what I call Jürgen-ness. Being German is part of it, but I don't want being German to be the whole joke. That would become very boring very quickly. My German background is more like an entry point and a connective tissue.

Leicester is also a huge part of it. I've lived there since 1989. It's home. I spent my formative years in Germany and came here aged 21. And increasingly I find myself looking at Leicester and British life through a German perspective. I'm even planning some short videos around that.

I'm also not a one-dimensional stand-up. There is physicality, characters, props, music, wordplay, and audience interaction. I enjoy finding different ways of making people laugh.
Everyone in comedy is on their own journey. No two are the same.

Did you have a post-show ritual to decompress?
I had a few different ways of resetting.

Sometimes I'd have to deal with publicity or pre-sales for the following day and then leave the venue. Usually I'd get a supermarket meal deal and find somewhere quiet, away from the beaten track, to eat it.
The spa became another kind of reset. If I had a long gap between performances, I'd sometimes get the bus home, eat, shower, and come back.

On Saturdays, around 6pm, I'd sometimes go to a friend's shared flat. It was an intimate space where I could chill, eat, and just be away from the Fringe for a while.

Sometimes I'd also go somewhere else and chat with comedians I knew. They understood what you'd just been through.

I think the important thing was the reset. Whether a show had gone badly and you needed to dust 

yourself off, or it had gone brilliantly and you were coming down from the adrenaline, your system needs time to come down from performing.

Sometimes you just need to come down from being ‘on’.

What advice would you give someone considering the Edinburgh Fringe in 2027?
First, ask yourself why you want to do it and what you are hoping to get out of it. That probably depends on where you are in your comedy journey.

If you're a relatively new comic, go and do some open spots. In my first few years I did the Free Fringe, which massively reduced the financial risk. I may go back to that myself.

I had also heard people say that you should do five years before taking a solo show to Edinburgh. I did mine in my fourth year, and I'm very glad I did. The bloke who originally gave me that advice was pleased that I'd ignored him!

Years ago I asked Logan Murray what I could do to improve as a comedian. I was prepared to do pretty much anything. He told me that the best thing I could do was work at the ‘coal-face of comedy’. That stuck with me. I thought about that repeatedly during this year's Fringe, and I've said it to other people too. What better place to do it than at the world's biggest arts festival?

This year I had three main goals:

• Bring my debut solo show to Edinburgh and complete a full run, including 13 shows in a row, in a paid venue - tick.
• Bring Jürgen and the Sauerkraut idea to Edinburgh and begin establishing myself as one of the UK's German comedians - tick.
• Come through it with my mental health (largely) intact while covering the basic costs of being there (rent, accommodation, bus pass, and spa) - tick.

I've now got the appetite to do it all again.

Where can people follow your future work?
Instagram: @jurgen.strack.9
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jürgen-strack-7aa31a18