Triptych, Oil on Canvas
2x 150cm x 120cm
1× 120cm x 60cm

In that very same student residence, on the top floor, lived my guitar teacher, Harald Blumenthal. He occupied one of the large apartments in an eight-person shared flat at the far end of the building. His room was exactly what one would imagine a guitar teacher’s room to look like: a bed, a desk, guitars hanging on the walls, and amplifiers scattered across the floor.

Harald was involved with a petite woman who looked almost like a child. I no longer remember her first name—only that her surname was Freudenberg. He had long blond hair and a beard. He looked exactly the way a guitarist was supposed to look in those days: bell-bottom trousers and lanky framed body. I liked him, and he was a good guitar teacher.

At some point, my friend O. also started taking lessons with him, and I immediately noticed that she somehow received more attention than I did. She was one of those delicate little girls, which automatically made me feel big and clumsy. Looking back at photographs now, I realize I was neither particularly big nor clumsy—just not especially delicate. She had long dark hair, large eyes, dimples, and a button nose. So from the beginning, I was already a little jealous of her. Then I noticed that Harald looked at her differently than he looked at me.

We were about nine years old, and for some reason a weekend camping trip was planned with the three of us—Harald, O., and me. I no longer remember how it came about or who had actually initiated it. The three of us drove to a nearby campsite, and I was incredibly excited.

My mood changed almost immediately when I realized that I had never really been intended as part of the plan. From the very start of the trip, I felt like the third wheel on the wagon. Once the tent was set up, it became obvious that I was not supposed to be included. Several times I was sent out of the tent so the two of them could be alone, and then it started raining and I was expected to entertain myself outside.

In my childish innocence, I had no idea what was actually happening. All I knew was that I became intensely jealous. Eventually I burst into the tent and discovered him kissing her.

At the time, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world—except that I was furious that I was not the girl being kissed.

How could that be? We were nine years old. How was it possible that it did not strike me as strange or terrible? How had he managed to make us girls compete with one another instead of joining forces against him? He had prepared it brilliantly by constantly playing us against each other.

We stayed the entire night. I could hear them whispering softly and touching each other in the darkness. I think the only reason I later told adults about it was because I was consumed by jealousy. The only consequence was that we never went back there, which meant my guitar lessons ended. Naturally, the police were never informed. That was not something people did “in our circles.” In general, nobody really talked about it.

Of course, I eventually understood that none of it had been right. Later I heard that the childlike woman that he had been with had supposedly left him.

O. and I also traveled together in my mother’s Volkswagen Beetle to visit Gisela and Bernd in Berlin. There was always plenty of good food and drink at their place, and we visited flea markets. We also dressed up in costumes. Photographs still exist from those visits. One in particular survived, with that peculiar yellow-green tint typical of the 1970s. In it, I am dressed like a biker, wearing a leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth, while protectively draping my arm around O.’s shoulders. It almost looks like a pimp posing with his girl. Later, that was somehow how I felt, because I had been the one enthusiastically telling her about my wonderful guitar teacher.

O. and I were also invited by Dagmar, our former flatmate, to spend a weekend in the commune where she had moved after leaving our shared apartment. Back then, many people were searching for alternative ways of living. I think my mom had flirted with some of those ideas as well, but Dagmar had fully committed herself to them.

Why we were there alone and why I have so little memory of my mother’s presence in that situation remains a mystery to me, because some very strange things happened there. At least O. and I thought so. The adults, however, acted as though everything was perfectly normal.

The commune occupied a former warehouse. There was a huge communal room from which doors led into self-built private spaces. Upon entering, you climbed a half-flight of stairs and found yourself immediately in this vast common area. At the back left was the kitchen. In front of the kitchen, also on the left, a large loft platform had been built, covered with an enormous mattress area. I think O. and I slept in one corner of it.

From the loft we had a clear view of everything happening below. It should perhaps be mentioned that we were not the only ones sleeping up there.

Every evening after dinner, a large assembly took place downstairs. At first that may sound harmless, but it was anything but. The discussions were not about politics or household chores. They revolved around sexuality, free love, and everything that supposedly had already turned us into bourgeois pigs even as children.

To re-educate people and restore their freedom, individuals would be singled out, surrounded by the group, buried beneath piles of mattresses, and subjected to a symbolic rebirth. There was shouting, hitting, and often panicked crying like that of a terrified child. Apparently this was supposed to accelerate liberation.

There were no stable relationships. If two people became particularly fond of one another, they were accused of still being trapped by convention. I remember one woman very clearly who absolutely did not want to spend the night with a certain man. She was beautiful, while he was a lanky, pockmarked redhead who, in ordinary life, would probably never have had a chance with her.

Because of his persistence, the group pressured her into spending the night with him. After a while she yielded to that pressure and disappeared with him into one of the rooms.

Throughout the day and night, couples would gather on the loft and have sex there. O. and I found it all deeply unsettling. We hid ourselves, giggling nervously out of embarrassment, often frightened but also strangely fascinated by these human rabbits.

The real scandal erupted when we once again sneaked into the kitchen, completely unsupervised—or perhaps I should say entirely ignored—and ate nearly an entire crate of blood oranges. We had not thought anything of it. Everyone else seemed to do whatever they wanted.

Later, during the evening assembly, we were publicly accused by everyone of being selfish and antisocial for taking so much without thinking of the collective.

What a crazy world, I thought at the time. Public sex was acceptable, but eating blood oranges turned us into antisocial parasites.

Years later I discovered what kind of commune it actually had been. It was an offshoot of the AAO, the Action-Analytical Organization. It had been founded by an Austrian alpha male who imagined that his own inability to form attachments represented a viable model for everyone else. An artist and egomaniac, he quickly realized that presenting himself as a guru ensured that women flocked to him and that he would never have to work again.

He decreed that all members should shave their heads—perhaps because he himself was bald—and wear blue overalls. He taught that the family was the root of all evil and separated men from women and mothers from their children.

Eventually he was put on trial because he considered it his right, like some feudal lord of former times, to be the first to introduce even very young girls into “free love.”

Looking back, O. and I can probably count ourselves lucky that the only price we paid was the shame of eating those blood oranges and not with our bloodstained underpants.

Eventually I stopped seeing O. altogether. Our friendship simply dissolved. I think the adults decided that. It would have been uncomfortable for me anyway, because after what had happened with Harald, the guitar teacher, I felt like a traitor.