me – 1960s

1961 – 1971

I went through the demands in schools like meals I had to eat – not forced to – but without comments.
When I was 19 after the so called “Reifeprüfung”, meaning “Statement of Maturity” I showed the biology teacher my book of flowers I had collected and pressed. I thought she would be interested, but instead told me off “Why did you not show this earlier ? I would have given you a better mark.”
I separated schoolwork from pleasure.
“Work” had to be done. I was “gewissenhaft” (conscientious).

1961 Oct

I took my mother seriously, how could I not?

When I was 16 I met carpenters in Sweden. They severely warned me about illusions of carpentry and my suggestions about Canada.

When I was 17 I went on a course – made whistles out of metal pipes with three holes, played them with my left hand and a drum with my right. I liked a girl and started an exchange by letter. I drew myself with coloured pens and sent it to her. She didn’t mention it in her response. That turned me off. 3 years later I met her studying to become a primary school teacher. Could that be my future?

When I was 8 I made a model out of plywood with a fret saw for my boyfriend. There was no response. I was hurt. Looking back, I realise how much I depend

on a response, not praise, though

Why did I WANT to be

noticed,

mentioned,

responded to?

When did I like NOT to be referred to?

NOT to be praised?

and most of all

NOT to be criticised?

When do we, YOU, feel OPEN minded and

TO BE APPRECIATED?

Not to be exposed, any stories to tell?

I took part in “Musische Wochen” = musical, dance- and theatre related events. I also offered my help with the organisation and the running of group activities. Should I become an events organiser?

NO, because I knew I was not good with money.

I spent a month in the office of an architect known to us and felt it was tedious to work on tasteless housing projects that I couldn’t identify with.

Then I set my mind on the possibility of becoming an art

teacher. That would allow me enough

freedom with an income and spare time, SO I THOUGHT.

I took part in an art course in the Academy of Art in Stuttgart,

recommended by my parents. The competition between the

students and the selection of best results by the professor

left me feeling undermined.

I went through application forms for the Art Academy in Kassel and was impressed by examples of work done in their entrance exams.

I approached the art school in another state in Germany, very near to us, the Institute of Education in Art and Crafts in Mainz. I knew that the number of students accepted would depend on the availabilities for future employment possibilities in art education.

Therefore

I cautiously joined a year long foundation course of the design school in Wiesbaden, before applying to Mainz.

I managed to show my portfolio to a professor to assess my suitability. He hardly looked at it, then said I could have saved my time attending that design course, but if I wanted I could join the

more than 200 people who had already applied. And… :

FROM THE 200 ONLY 20 WERE CHOSEN AFTER A

WEEK OF WORK ASSESSMENTS.

TO MY GREAT ASTONISHMENT

I WAS ACCEPTED!

But deep down I didn’t wanted to be ONLY? a teacher? Did I wanted to be ONLY? artist in the first place?

I assumed RIGHTLE ? that as an artist I would NOT make a living and I had to

Hide, if not suppress that thought.

What it really meant – and I was hardly aware of that – was, that I didn’t fully identify with this course.

Did that really matter?

And, how did I find my way around this?

When do we hide deep wishes away,

and what is precious to us?

When

are we over sensitive,

even selfish, squeamish.

WHEN are we hidden and difficult?

WHAT IF WE LAY OPEN OUR DEEPEST WISHES?

FIRST YEAR DRAWING TASK: FURRY ANIMALS

April 1962

The first year was an all-round introduction into techniques that could be useful in the classrooms of a secondary school:

Drawing, Printing, Casting, Carving, Painting, Bookbinding, Scriptwriting and later Photography. It was a jolly atmosphere to start with but great sadness occurred when the director died who was instrumental to the creation of this uniquely creative place. An example was an orchestra with instruments made out of scrap by students who then played at his funeral.

A student from our course asked me to travel with him to Rome in his tiny Goggomobil. Practically without any money and completely unprepared I agreed. We formally applied to a drawing course in the Accademia Dell’ Arte. We spent four months in Rome and in Sicily. Essentially I tested my drawing skills in the markets and streets. It became obvious to me that I was interested in movements.

When we came back the Institute had changed.

A new Director was in place and his changes demanded attention.

He introduced 2 new subjects: Early child psychology and lectures

on up to date living artists. I disliked him and his courses and felt that

all this was fairly unnecessary to attend. In the final oral exam I did

badly not realising that I had spoilt my entire efforts over the many

years not following these, his, demands. Every other subject

I finished with a first or at least a second.

I was hiding my great disappointment and my lectures and professors

were astonished about the results but I wouldn’t complain.

For that I was too powerless anyway.

Although I might say it was a lesson to stick to rules when it counts,

I felt why when I learned an awful more joining lectures and

courses that were NOT absolutely necessary but really interesting to

me. After all I had met and was influenced by several great people

and teachers that I still admire:

Hardly believable that this building kit I did in 1964 was used by my granddaughter and her dad in 2012.

And my grandson played with these building blocks in 2018.

The teacher MR STARKE in my special subject, WOODWORK, was my favourite. His patience, help and advice did me good and I flourished.

My model dolls house, a toy as a panel building (Plattenbau) inspired by THE BAUHAUS and all the other objects were produced in HIS Woodwork Class. My friend, Bruno Plum, working next to me, referred throughout his teaching to the benefit of this class.

Architectural utopia to live in a Hi-riser adjustable to wind and sun.

A multi-purpose wooden storage box that I associate with the art of Marcel Duchamp for me was an inspiration to sculptures inviting interactions.

Touch – sculptures to be folded, unfolded and changed by people passing by.

Moving wooden blocks to suggest alternative housing.

Moving wooden blocks to suggest alternative housing.

This box was designed for two reasons, one, to keep games and the other, to hold sewing stuff, but it never worked that way.

It remains to be an artwork and for me a gesture of myself to be open, flexible and adaptable.These characteristics I felt should be exercised.

All practical and technical work took place in the Institute for Art, Crafts and Education in the town near to the river Rhein. Most of my purely theoretical and academic studies took place in the University a mile further up from town.

All these studies were completely unexpected to me.

I had not realised that I need a “Beifach”, meaning an additional subject, to teach art in a German state secondary school.

Art history professor ARENS

For that reason I chose religion because of the many links to art history and my family context.

I combined art and religion in a thesis about sculptures in the tympanon fields above the main entrance to churches in the area of Rheinland Pfalz and for that I bicycled to many places around. My result can be found in the Uni Mainz.

Art history professor KROENIG, my uncle

I joined students of my uncle on a 3 week intensive but exciting excursion through French cathedrals.

The reader might not understand this heap of studies outside and on top of all my art work. I myself am astonished that I couldn’t shake this off.

My reaction to that was that during 1965 to 1967 I practically withdrew into one room, my studio, in an unfinished student’s compound, and painted whilst listening to string quartets, french chansons and Jazz. I felt that was ME.

Theology professor BRAUN

The theology professor MR BRAUN, a stocky little force and his research to find the first possible documents in the NT, the New Testament, about what Jesus really had said and stood up for, stunned me. He named his study RADICALISM. His lecture room was always packed. Even I could follow him in my tiny New Testament in Greek, as I had studied the language in school. He also understood my position as an art student and made allowances in the oral exam concerning parables, his special subject.

Philosophy professor von RINTELEN

I can’t forget another professor MR RINTELEN who came to our Institute to teach Philosophy. I happened to have a godfather Dr. Martin Thust who was a mathematician but became well known and nearly a professor in Breslau (Wroclaw) because of his book about Kierkegaard, the reason I did well on existentialism. My professor recognised my name because he knew my uncle’s book. He didn’t know that the Nazis had inhibited him to become a theology professor. I read his book after the exam.

I loved the short stories by ALBERT CAMUS.

I had to make clear that this disk, turning on the wall, was not influenced by Duchamp. It was an emotional and philosophical reflection on an inner and outer life and movement.

It could be turned by hand and was mounted on to a lazy Susan.

I would have loved it to be motorised at the time, but now it could be done.

After my Italy trip I met my girlfriend in the course above me. She was younger but finished her course a year earlier. Her subject ,Textile Design, was an acceptable subject then to teach in a secondary school. We became close friends and married in Jan 1968, but not in a church!

Before applying for the job as a civil servant to teach in a state secondary school. You had to spend up to a year and a half to prove your teaching practice and teaching theory. My wife did this training at a school near Koblenz.

I took time off to paint.

With the little money she earned we lived on top of a washhouse. I painted us as a couple in the midst of the traffic. It was a sweet and sour time. I felt the excitement and the threads of historical and political changes that I was keen to face up to. Paintings of protective armoury and threatening insects resulted from that.

Then it became my turn to join a teacher training course and I applied and got accepted to study in Braunschweig. The reason was that I wanted to know more about puppet making and street theatre. I had heard about the only person in Germany who was a professor for this kind of course work. Half way through this course I found out that BREMEN was looking for art teachers.

This was the town my mother loved and told me about. Being from Hamburg as a child she with her family met other members in Bremen for weekends and holidays. She was full of it. One of her contacts, a couple, helped us to make our start easier. We moved into a top flat of a house that made me feel like living in Montmartre. I loved it and really moved in with excitement.

My wife’s dress making skills came to light. Bits and pieces, including furniture, were left in the streets for everybody to take once a week before the removal. In no time she renewed seats and I set up shelves to our liking.

The 1968 uprising and the activities following after that in Berlin and Frankfurt made a deep impression on me. Thinking about my role as artist and teacher I lived mentally through gender discussions, communes, exchange of partners, open sex education, happenings and literature by Freud, Reich and Marx.

Although the two books you could NOT read nor get to look at in Libraries at the time in Germany were Hitler : Mein Kampf and

Marx : Das Kapital !!!

In the midst of all that we wanted to have a child

I achieved a FIRST for a change, because I liked and impressed my course leader.

My written work was about JOSEPH BEUYS who during the 2nd world war survived a crash with his airplane in Siberia. Shamans saved him. They smeared his body with fat, wrapped him in felt and put him on a sledge pulled by dogs to the nearest village. This is his impressive healing story he based his art on.

What influenced me even more is the fact that he as a professor acted against the rules of the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and accepted ALL students who wanted to study with him. He lost his job because of it.!

But he created the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in London 1970. That excited me.

His controversial call was EVERYBODY IS AN ARTIST.

I modelled my teaching on this statement..

Gymnasium Huckelriede in Bremen with me during a lesson.

I was accepted to teach with a staff nearly all my age in a new school at the edge of Bremen. Within a week I had to teach six different classes with at least 25 children of different ages in each room.

Overriding all known curricula I did essentially the same with all ages. I handed out newspapers for them to look through and to discuss the content and the images. Then I invited all to make life size puppets, filling up old clothes and forming heads out of paper. A panel of pupils judged with me the results democratically.

This was displayed and staged in 10 groups as an exhibition in the corridor of this new school together with the pictures and headings that had inspired the students.

We produced a booklet about the project and handed it to parents. There was a mixed response and lots of questions remained to be answered.

In the following year I bought 6 super 8 cameras, the newest and cheapest film media affordable, and handed this out in one classroom and after that in others, and so on..

The cassettes in the cameras had to be posted. Then they came back. After a week the films could be projected. In groups films were planned and shot in and around the school. I insisted that each take had to be directly followed by the next without any gaps. There was no editing possible within the classroom.

Therefore each scene had to be really very carefully planned beforehand.

By the end of the year, film shows filled two parents nights and got the support from the young headteacher. He helped me to develop my teaching further in this direction. I was invited to join a seminar about new approaches in media studies.

I think I was over excited with the idea of becoming a sort of NEW MAN, a term used for the newly politicallyand gender aware. What really was new in 1971 for US was our baby. We called her CORA. I felt she was “auserkoren”, a core in our midst. In Greek mythology she was the goddess of spring.

At the same time another writer on education influenced me. It was

HARTMUTvon HENTIG with titles like:

Was ist eine humane Schule = What is a human School Die Schule überleben = Surviving the School
Education as political training

Arbeit am Frieden = Work on Peace

Die Sache und die Demokratie = The Case of Democracy.

In 1971 this was a further impulse to think about re – schooling.

I was keen on new experiences. But the projects I did in school were threatened by curricula demands I didn’t share. My colleagues were only looking for their house building and pensions, as we were financially secure civil servants, but otherwise they fell victim to constant moaning about everything.

Two of my colleagues were dismissed because of their communist tendencies and lost their jobs. It was the making of chancellor Willy Brand’s rules, the man who was once my hero. I changed my mind.

The thought of classroom teaching for another 40 years was not for ME! I had to act and to be politically active. Reforming the school was in the air but already in decline and not taken up by the government on the whole.

Friends left the school and applied to become lecturers or professors or got grants to write their theses leading up to PhDs. Others even fought to get recognition of their art work as PhDs. I wanted to find an independent way to widen my experiences OUT of school. I applied to become a teacher In a German School in foreign countries and in 1971 was accepted to go with my family to Peru in 1972 for four years.

Another plan was to apply for a year off to advance my knowledge about film making and my English language.

In 1971 I casually said to my wife, in passing, after school, “I would like to go to London for a year to study film.” She answered spontaneously in two short sentences:

“Jetzt reicht’s” = “that’s enough” and “dann bleibe ich aber nicht allein” = “I won’t remain on my own then”. It was a brisk and clear response.

I knew what she meant. We had a one-year-old child. But her harsh reaction shocked me.

Had she really suffered from my searching and looking for where to be with myself? Was I too restless for her?

Did she not understand my drive to get out of full-time teaching?

She suffered from a very bad experience travelling on her own through America and then to London before we married. I knew this had left her fearful. I had hoped she would be able to overcome this and planned and looked forward to travelling with her and our child in future.

But we developed in different directions.

Did she really think I would leave her alone?

I tested the London Film School with a colleague and friend during that summer 1971 to see If I liked the place and if there was a way to stay with my family. I felt to study there would give me a better chance for a future position in Bremen.

When I came back, before any talk, my wife bonded with my companion and colleague. He had sassed me out and won her over.

There was a sudden disconnect.

I was unprepared to take the role of the father and didn’t want to destroy the life of my daughter and her mother. They would have to stay together. I had to go.

I suffered increasingly from an inverted chest bone problem and needed an operation. For four months I didn’t go to school and then withdrew dismantling everything we had bought together and left Bremen although I was proud of the town and all that I was able to develop there. People had definitely been very welcoming and good to me and to my development but …

In Bremen, you could avoid paying the State Church tax if you officially distanced yourself from that institution.

As a civil servant and fully trained teacher a woman with a newly born child could take advantage of a half-time job for 6 years without losing her life time state commitments. Bremen was one of the few progressive States, as a town, with a proud tradition of mayors who were practical and socially orientated. We made use of that. I was proud of it, but…

if a marriage wasn’t consummated for a year a divorce could be applicable. My wife wanted a divorce. I wanted to sort this out. In many ways we both wanted to start with a clean sheet again.

TRUST and PATIENCE are the keywords here. That didn’t develop between us. I felt deeply wounded, but never requested a therapy.

I dealt with contradictions and needed understanding and support. But whom from?

My “carrier” in Bremen was destroyed. I lived from the feeling of possibilities and options that I then couldn’t take up.

This Website is NOT the place to invite others to discuss my divorce in a “workshop”.

But these are still part of me MY open questions :

Is REAL love only meant to be for a limited time?

When it is gone, what is left over?

Can love still carry on when it has lost its drive?

Or is it like Germans say hanging on like bear shit?

Is thinking about LOVE essentially fictional and not “real”?

I did accept the offer to spend a year in London to study film without any salary but my job being safe on my return. I was lucky, I had inherited money from my ‘Kierkegaard’ uncle. It was enough to get me through the year.

But what about Cora? OUR child! Her life became an act between two fathers and her mother who didn’t communicate with me apart from the necessary practical arrangements.

This was and remains to be an emotional double act for HER. and me.

Despite it all, it is a miracle to me that she married here in England and has been with her husband and her child with us in our Barn in Shropshire, from 2000 onwards until now.

Next – 70s – 80s