My Life: the 70s

1971 we emigrated to Germany, don't ask me why, it's still one of the mysteries in my life, but it was definitely my mother's decision. My dad flew over 6 months before the rest of the family (Mama, my sister Andrea and myself). We went to New York City (I remember seeing the WTC under construction), stayed with friends and then we took the ship over the Atlantic. Here it is, the TS Bremen:

So, in July 1971 we arrived in Regensburg in Bavaria, and I've been living here ever since.

There's so much to tell. I was still a child when we emigrated, but by the end of the 70s I was nearly an adult. One thing I can say about this whole decade is that I was horribly homesick for the States all those years. That only changed when I finally became an adult.

This was not immediately the case: at first it was thrilling to enter a whole new (well, at least different) world and to get to know my German grandparents better, who I loved very much. I did already speak German, but the first say 2 years I needed to get it perfect and, which was more difficult, to deal with the Bavarian dialect, which is quite different. Today, Bavarian is more or less the tongue I speak most of the time.

Unfortunately, I don't have too many older pics scanned (and our scanner isn't working at the moment), but I'll try to include pics where possible.

The rest of my childhood consisted of school and living with my German grandparents. The German school system is divided into several kinds of schools with different education levels. My mother wanted to me to attend the 'High' German school (called 'gymnasium'). You can only go there, if you pass a test in elementary school in the 4th grade, so it was decided that I restart with 3rd grade, although I already was so far in the States. Here's a picture of my elementary school, St. Konrad school:

Well, I managed the test, and from the 5th grade on I went to the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium which was downtown and quite a ways from where my grandparents lived, so I needed to take the bus. 5th grade starts with your first foreign language which was English, in my case, so that was real easy for me. In the 7th grade I got Latin which was OK, I think I would never have managed French (which was the other option) with my newly learnt Bavarian accent.

The Gymnasium goes till the 13th grade and the last years are equivalent to what you call undergraduate college. So I went to school till 1982.

As long as my German grandmother (called Oma, grandfather is Opa) lived - she died in 1974 of cancer, age 62 - I was fully in the choke-hold of a strict Catholic upbringing. Oma was extremely pious, going to mass (and communion) every morning at 8am and attending all other services which we had to join, too. So more often than not we'd be called in from playing with the neighbours' kids and forced to go to church for the Rosemary and similar stuff. For a kid like me it was like hell, and as soon as I was of age with 18 I declared to quit Catholic lessons at school, too.

My Oma was beyond that incredibly superstitious and believed in nearly anything 'otherworldy': stigmata occasions, ghosts, flying saucers, alien abductions, natural catastrophes as God's punishment, etc. The horrible Managua earthquake in 1972 was due to the people's sins there to her, and she was tireless in describing those sins to us. She also knew everything about the stigmatized Therese of Konnersreuth (near Regensburg) and had a book full of gory pics of her bloodletting.

You can imagine that it was complicated to get an impression of the real world amongst such a raising, but then I must say that my Opa was quite the opposite to his wife. He was a devout Catholic, but with ratio: he'd never believe in anything unreasonable and was much more tolerant to worldy things. He once told me he found an 'oh-so-holy' prayer book among Oma's things, he took it to Church the next Sunday and deliberately 'forgot' it there telling me "so that some other old holy witch can find it".

What you might not know, the 70s in Germany were a pretty dark age, and I was very early confronted with the reality in contrast to the supernatural world my Oma lived in. To this day I really don't know how she coped with what really happened in the outside world. Only 3 years after we arrived in Germany my Oma died of cancer at the age of 62.

So I grew up in a new strange world, terribly homesick for the States, the death of both my grandmothers (my American grandmother died of Alzheimer in a very slow and horrifying downward spiral of losing her mind) and the terror that occurred in Germany.

The first event that knocked me onto my feet was the massacre at the Munich Olympics, this happend just 80 miles from here where I live. All Germany was enthusiastically celebrating the Olympic games (just like the football championship), and all of a sudden it was destroyed by the hostage taking of the Israeli players and then the catastrophe in the attempt to free them. I was 10 years old, but from that day on I started reading the newspaper on a daily basis.

In my childhood innocence I would never have imagined that so much malice was ever possible. And neither my grandparents nor my parents were able to explain it to me.

Munich was just the beginning of my long quest for enlightment. Reading the news and digging a bit into history it didn't take long to find out that I'm living in a country that just a few decades before committed some of the most hideous crimes in the history of mankind, and the German state at that time was not too keen on being remembered about the Third Reich and its repercussions into present day Germany.

The 70s was also the time of hippies and political radicalism, especially here in Germany, because of its recent history. Starting in the 60s mostly students became very radical founding what they called an 'extra-parliamentary oppostion' (the German abbreviation APO) culminating in demonstrations, rallies and later on in violent acts. You've all heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the German RAF who very much dominated the political atmosphere in Germany of the 70s and early 80s.

Of course it was terrorism, but it didn't start out that way. There were justified causes for protest (especially former Nazis in high positions in the state), but the government ('establishment') and many of the older citizens did not accept the protest and stroke back violently in the process provoking the radicalization, too. In the 70s there was a cutting down on civil rights, legitimized police brutality with new laws to enable their activities and a witchhunt against anyone who said something 'critical' (or had long hair, for that matter). You were very quickly labeled as a "sympathisant" of the terrorists, one of the most-used words in the German 70s. This political conflict culminated in the kidnapping and murder of Hans-Martin Schleyer and the subsequent (supposed) suicides of the RAF leaders in jail.

As we were recently discussing teenage rebellion elsewhere I'd say about myself that my only rebellion with my elders was a political (and religious) one, otherwise I was a 'good boy'.

In those years I became a Marxist, read all the relevant philosophers and theoreticians and participated in diverse political organizations, events and projects, nothing really special, though, but I was to be labeled as 'sympathisant', too.

I'm just mentioning this, because - among other things still to be told - it very well defined what kind of plans I'd have for the future in my life, and I still see a straight line from there to me now.

Woodstock was my real introduction to rock music. In the early 70s we had an Armenian friend, a fugitive from Lebanon who joined the American army to speed up his naturalization as an American and was immediately accepted and stationed to Regensburg. His name was Krisdapor, we had a lot of fun together and he gave me 2 cassette copies of the Woodstock album.

Till then I didn't know much more about rock music other than the Beatles and the 50s/60s/70s major hits and evergreens and was already sick of the local German top 40 music which is probably the worst of all mankind. But the music on "Woodstock" immediately made me homesick for the States, at that time Regensburg was way behind the times, and there were no hippies until later in the 70s. Yep, they kind of appeared here when punk started and punk arrived even faster, say about 5 years too late. "Woodstock" got me addicted to 'old' rock music and kind of spoilt me for Punk and New Wave, too, which I hated at first hearing.

Needless to say that I built onto this introduction. I was immediately a Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young fan, and I started buying and reading books and magazines on rock music systematically collecting the essential albums of that era. In fact I became quite a serious collector, founding my own mail order and organizing local record collector's conventions. In the 90s I even was co-owner of a store selling cds.

If I don't count my childhood Beatles addiction Frank Zappa was the first artist I really did become a fan of, and very literally so.

This was something that was way beyond my small teenage world, a music that I had no grasp of. The music was deliberately cacophonous, the lyrics and jokes obscene and appeared completely desultorily. It took me a few weeks, before I found some kind of understanding. I became a fan and also an admirer of Penderecki and other modern composers in the bargain.

Of course, as a fan, I loved nearly all of Zappa's work, managed to get my friends to become fans as well. And in our days organizing record collectors' conventions and gatherings we did get a reputation for being those weirdo Zappa aficiandos. To this day some people still ask me about him. In reality my enthusiasm simmered down by the mid-80s, since Zappa started repeating himself too much, and I had already found much more unusual music out there. Still, it is very sad that he died so early.

My affection for 60s American rock music very much ruined me for the punk era, I really hated the 3-chord stuff. But very early I did find out about the more unusual and innovative bands, such as Pere Ubu, the Residents and the re-founded Red Crayola. That got me started on finding ever more music outside of the mainstream and to this day I'm still at it.