EA popular legend from Munich nightlife (the authenticity of which is confirmed by at least twenty people who are said to have been there) tells how the following dialogue took place on a summer night in the early 1980s at the door of “P1”: There were a few people outside shaggy, very confident men. Jan Klophaus, the bouncer, stood in the door and said: “Not today.” The men protested: “But we’re the Scorpions.” The bouncer grinned: “Exactly!”
Whether it’s true or not, the story is coherent because anyone who is old enough and lived in Munich at the time can possibly remember that at the same time, for example, a lively language student or an intellectually posing political student from the same bouncer waved in with smiles, although it was clear to everyone that the two of them would not be able to afford more than two drinks and after that they would either have to drink tap water or pretend they were among the people who were being bought champagne that evening by a rich person. They were just young, and they fit into the mix, which the clever bouncer might have called a social sculpture even then.
Buccaneers of the Nights
However, the four-part Amazon series “Schickeria” only knows about such subtleties insofar as it repeatedly shows very funny, over-the-top, completely unrestrained scenes from the nightlife of the late seventies and early eighties. And you can see quite clearly, if you want, that all the parties and dance nights would have ended pretty dull if the rich people there had just kept to themselves. The buccaneers of the nights were urgently needed, who, instead of money, brought their youth, their beauty and a strong physical condition to party. The commentary of the series, however, attributes the end of the chic crowd, which he already sees coming at the beginning of the third episode, to “commercialization”, to rising rents and the increasing isolation of those who could afford to party.
The series also mentions the Oktoberfest assassination, the dramaturgical use of which as a warning sign seems irreverent – especially since nothing follows from this horror in the course of the plot. It is more conclusive to assume that AIDS may not have completely ended the general libertinism, but that it has cooled it off quite a bit. But Helmut Dietl missed the kiss of death for the socialites with “Kir Royal”, the television series that, as a parody, was so elegant, evil and intelligent that the real socialites could no longer bear themselves afterwards: you could take the dialogues for the right thing Don’t let Dietl and Patrick Süskind also write about life.
In the ruins of Berlin
The explanation that soon after reunification, the best parties were no longer celebrated in Munich, but in the ruins of East Berlin, because there were such spectacular backdrops: that was apparently too banal for the creators of the series. Or it didn’t fit the concept, which boils down to a few Munich residents and ex-Munich residents who are old enough to remember the sixties and seventies; that Iris Berben and Thomas Gottschalk, Fritz Egner and later, when the eighties are approaching, Princess Gloria mainly talk about the fact that they were all young once and had a lot of fun with it; that her own youth and Munich’s heyday coincide for her.
Anyone who is just a little younger will probably talk about other great times, about Rainald Goetz or Hito Steyerl in the “Tanzlokal Megalomania”, about Prince, who was allowed to sit on the stairs to the gallery in “P1”; or the bartender from Harry’s New York Bar, who talked about opening his own bar one day until, in 1982, he had no other choice and opened what is still the most famous bar in the world today ( and which does not appear in the series).
On the other hand, the probability of bumping into Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in Munich bars, discotheques and taverns, Donna Summer or Freddie Mercury or, in Uschi Obermaier’s Bogenhausen apartment, both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, has never been greater than in the 1970s . And the series also knows who was responsible for it: It was the South Tyrolean Giorgio Moroder, who set up an extremely popular recording studio in the basement of the Arabellahaus, and it was the sound engineer Reinhold Mack, who provided the unique sound there.
The hedonistic revolt
“Schickeria” was probably, you only have to listen to the song of the same name by the Spider Murphy Gang, more of a term for those for whom the whole party mood was too frivolous, too superficial, too unhealthy. The fact that the series starts the phenomenon with the Schwabing riots in June 1962 is not a bad idea: at that time, as those who had fought along later said, it was about more south, more youth, freer love, not about the re-establishment of one soviet republic. However, when Iris Berben, very charmingly, reports on the hard and heroic struggle against the bourgeois and uptight, that is certainly the truth. But maybe not all of it. Back then, more than now, the memory of the bohemians of the turn of the century before the last turn of the century was stored deep in the collective memory of the city – of artists whose studio festivals and carnival celebrations were much wilder. And who already felt back then that in a city that still practices its Catholicism as a celebration (here: of strong beer) even during Lent, every new hedonistic movement is very welcome.
“Schickeria – When Munich was still sexy” runs on Amazon Prime.
