LOLA Issue Four

ISSUE 04 SUMMER 2017
LOLAMAG.DE
FREE
+
Yony Leyser explains
the beauty of examining
life through film
Microdosing and how
some Berliners selfoptimise
with LSD
Mohammad Abu Hajar
on making music in exile
Notes of Berlin
Sara Neidorf
Pinball in Berlin
Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
20 Years of Melt Festival
Käthe Kollwitz
The Battle of Mosul
Julia Bosski
MODERAT
AN INSIDE VIEW OF
THEIR RAD KINGDOM

10+ Commissioned Works by ABRA / Abu Hajar & Jemek Jemowit / Andreas Dorau / Balbina / Circuit des Yeux / Darkstar & Cieron Magat / Evvol
Fishbach & Lou de Bètoly / Grandbrothers / Hendrik Otremba »Typewriter-Klangwelten« / How To Dress Well & Jens Balzer / Henryk Gericke »Too Much Future«
Romano / Steven Warwick / »Sticker Removals – The Visual Anthropology of the Hype Sticker«
70+ Concerts, DJ-Sets, Talks and Movies by Acid Arab / Alex Cameron Alexis Taylor / All diese Gewalt / Andrra / Anna Meredith / ANNA VR / Arab Strap / AUF
Barbara Morgenstern / Bunch of Kunst / Boiband Christine Franz & Simone Butler / Cristian Vogel / Daniel Meteo / David Laurie & Simon Price / Decadent Fun Club
Emel Mathlouthi / Erobique / Friends of Gas / Gaika / Gudrun Gut / Happy Meals / Hello Psychaleppo / Idles / Iklan feat. Law Holt / Islam Chipsy & EEK Jacaszek
Jakuzi / Jeff Özdemir, F.S Blumm & Friends / Jessica Pratt / Lady Leshurr / La Femme / Lenki Balboa / Let’s Eat Grandma / LeVent / Liars / Little Simz / Lucidvox
Manuela / Masha Qrella / Michelle Blades / Miss Natasha Enquist / Monika Werkstatt / Noveller / Oligarkh Oranssi Pazuzu / Paul Williams, Rob Young & Rob Curry
Piano Wire / Prairie / Riff Cohen / Ritornell / Rouge Gorge / Shirley Collins / Sophia Kennedy / Smerz / Strobocop / Soft Grid / Tasseomancy / Throwing Shade
Tobias Bamborschke / T.Raumschmiere / Young Fathers and many more …
23 – 25 August 2017
Kulturbrauerei Berlin
pop-kultur.berlin

Summer 2017
Editorial
A YEAR IN THE LIFE.
Here we are, one year on. It’s been a
rollercoaster ride of emotion and
thrills. I’m going to turn this editorial
letter into a long list of gushing thank
yous, because the truth is that without the
amazing hard work, dedication, creativity,
talent and love of all the people you can see
on the masthead, LOLA simply wouldn’t
exist, and everything that’s happened in
last year wouldn’t have happened.
Take Marc Yates, our esteemed Editor,
for example. If only you could see the
amount of graft, toil and expertise Marc
puts into making sure each issue of this
magazine is the best it can possibly be. His
attention to detail always amazes me, as
does his capacity to tolerate my crazy ideas.
The title of Associate Editor doesn’t do
Alison Rhoades justice. Alison has provided
her expertise and support to every area
of LOLA, and her contributions are phenomenal.
Every piece you read is improved
by her touch, and so many of the editorial
concepts are the result of her work.
Linda Toocaram deserves a special
mention for always being an absolute rock
of a Sub Editor, for working to our insane
deadlines and for schooling us in the art
of perfect grammar. A huge shout out for
Stephanie Taralson, who goes above and
beyond her role as contributor to help with
editing and proofing. Maggie Devlin has
also become a big part of LOLA since we
met two issues ago, and her editorial contributions
are completely invaluable.
For the writers, I have to single out Alex
Rennie, who has contributed something
incredible to every single issue, and who
always throws himself full-force into each
article he writes. There have been so many
great features written this last year, so huge
respect and thanks go to Stuart Braun,
Emma Robertson, Hamza Beg, Ryan Rosell,
Dan Cole, Anna Gyulai Gaal, Jack Mahoney,
Gesine Kühne, Alexander Darkish, Jessica
Reyes Sondgeroth, Nadja Sayej, Jana Sotzko,
Hanno Stecher and Jane Fayle.
As for the visual impact of the magazine,
I have to give the biggest thanks to Robert
Rieger and Viktor Richardsson. They have
both helped to shape the visual identity of
LOLA in amazing ways, and are a joy to work
with. Of course, endless thanks to all the
photographers who have contributed to the
magazine: Marili Persson, Justine Olivia Tellier,
Julie Montauk, Zack Helwa, Fotini Chora,
Soheil Moradianboroujeni, Roman Petruniak,
Shane Omar, Tyler Udall and David Vendryes.
Outside of the magazine, an enormous
thank you has to go to Allan Fitzpatrick for
designing and continuing to develop the
LOLA website; it’s a thing of beauty. Also to
our Editorial Assistant Erika Clugston for
the endless help, especially with managing
our social media presence and increasing
the office smile count immeasurably! For
all of the help in running our events, Emma
Taggart has to get a special shout out.
Finally, thanks to everyone who has
supported us to date – BIMM Berlin, BRLO
Beer, Crazy Bastard Sauce, Garvey Studios,
Goethe Institute, Melt! Booking, Mobile
Kino, Our/Berlin Vodka, Puschen Concerts,
Studio 183 and Universal Music.
And of course, thanks to everyone who
has been featured in the pages of LOLA.
You are the reason we do what we do. Our
immigrants’ love of Berlin shines on. Jonny
Publisher &
Editor In Chief
Jonny Tiernan
Executive Editor
Marc Yates
Associate Editor
Alison Rhoades
Photographers
Soheil Moradianboroujeni
Shane Omar
Viktor Richardsson
Robert Rieger
Justine Olivia Tellier
Illustrator
Patricia Tarczynski
Writers
Hamza Beg
Stuart Braun
Erika Clugston
Maggie Devlin
Gesine Kühne
Alex Rennie
Ryan Rosell
PR & Events
Emma Taggart
Special Thanks
Alex Brattig
Sven Iversen
Ben Jones
Ann Kristin
Sarie Nijboer
LOLA Magazine
Blogfabrik
Oranienstraße 185
10999 Berlin
For business enquiries
jonny@lolamag.de
For editorial enquiries
marc@lolamag.de
Sub Editor
Linda Toocaram
For PR & event enquiries
emma@lolamag.de
Published by Magic Bullet Media
Cover photo by Robert Rieger
Printed in Berlin by Oktoberdruck AG – oktoberdruck.de
Summer 2017
1

2 Issue Four

Photo by Robert Rieger
Contents
04. berlin through the lens
Notes of Berlin
“What are people searching for?
What are they complaining about?
What have they lost? It’s an insight
into everyday life in Berlin, but it’s
not something that’s written in
your typical tourist guide.”
08. local hero
Sara Neidorf
“I think it’s really important to have
people in your community who inspire
you, and who you can look to
as somebody who knows their shit.”
12. Yony Leyser
“When you make a documentary it’s
like writing a memoir. You’re shaping
a reality through a very big lens.”
16. Pinball in Berlin
“As the day wears on, cries of
“Scheiße!” can be heard across
the room.”
20. cover story
Moderat
“We don’t yet know when we will
continue with Moderat, and we
also can’t say if. So this Berlin concert
will be like the end of an era!”
26. Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
“The community really keeps me
going: just when I feel like I’m
ready to leave or move on, this
incredible community is like ‘Wait,
no, we’re here.’”
30. Microdosing
“There’s definitely something
major happening right now. I think
these drugs will play a key role in
the future, in psychiatry and other
fields of medicine.”
34. Mohammad Abu Hajar
“I won’t accept going back to Syria
as a humiliated person. I would
only go back as a free person.”
38. 20 Years of Melt Festival
“There was a couple climbing on
the crane at the Gemini Stage, on
the very top of it, like 30 metres
high, fucking.”
40. Käthe Kollwitz
“In 1943 she evacuated Berlin,
shortly before her apartment
was destroyed in a bombing that
claimed much of her life’s work.”
42. dispatches
The Battle of Mosul
“Too much is going wrong in this
war, and too many photos are
showing that to the world.”
44. the last word
Julia Bosski
“Call a friend, go for some champagne
and I’m back in the game.”
Summer 2017
3

Berlin Through The Lens
Notes of Berlin
BERLIN THROUGH THE LENS
EXPLORING OUR PEN
AND PAPER CITY WITH
NOTES OF BERLIN
words by Marc Yates
Whether fluttering in the breeze or streaked with running ink in the
rain, Berlin’s handwritten posters, ads, announcements and notes are
part of the fabric of the city – a sticky taped, pasted up, stapled staple
of our urban landscape. They are everywhere. But why is it that such a
lo-fi means of communication continues to thrive in the digital age, and
what does it tell us about the people we share our city with?
Joab Nist is in the seventh year of running Notes
of Berlin, a website that seeks to answer these
questions while archiving and paying homage to
the expressions of frustration, anger, love, humour
and desire left by Berliners on every available surface.
What started as a blog has since become two books, a
popular annual calendar, and Joab’s full-time job. We
meet with Joab to talk about the motivation behind
the project and the fascination with public proclamations
that keeps it going.
What was the inspiration behind Notes of Berlin?
I was always taking photos, especially in places I’d
never been before. Not wanting to take pictures of the
typical tourist sites – I was curious about discovering
the residential and industrial areas. That’s something
I did when I came to Berlin as well. In the beginning
I was very curious, as it was new. But the curiosity
didn’t go away, so I often walked around and took
pictures of anything that, for me, was typical of Berlin.
The written notes all around the city were something
I hadn’t seen anywhere else in that quantity. They
became some sort of treasure for me. When you are
new to Berlin, you want to discover how the people are
here: what do they think about, what’s on their minds?
It could’ve been that a note was very creative, very angry,
very political, romantic, maybe lonely – everything
that came to mind when I was thinking about Berlin.
What are people searching for? What are they complaining
about? What have they lost? It gives an insight into
everyday life in Berlin, but it’s not something that’s
written in your typical tourist guide. It’s completely
unfiltered. It’s the truth, and to some extent you can
identify with a situation that may have happened.
So I tried to find as many notes as I could, but it’s not
so much a matter of time as a matter of being at the
right place at the right time. That’s when the idea came
to document as many as possible, to really capture the
character of the city, to style a project that everyone
could contribute to by sending in the notes they see.
What is it about the notes that people find so
compelling? It’s definitely not only one thing. The
main thing I think is that a lot of the topics that you
4 Issue Four

Notes of Berlin
Berlin Through the Lens
Top left: “Lost dog: on February
28th around 15:30pm, our
dog boarded the M13 tram at
Schönhauser Allee without me.
Who saw this happen and can
help us find him? He responds
to the name ‘Baader’, has a
chip and a heart condition, and
hobbles on the right hind leg.”
Top middle: “CAREFUL. OLD
MAN SPITS FROM BALCONY.”
Bottom left: “PISS HERE ONE
MORE TIME AND I’LL SHIT IN
YOUR MOUTH!”
Bottom right: “Elevator doesn’t
work, you’ll have to walk, eh!!!”
Previous page, right: “In my
darkest drunken hour of the
night on Friday, you carried
me home up to the third floor
– that was definitely no fun.
For that, lovely French girl,
THANK YOU!”
find in the notes are things that every one of us
faces each day. Your neighbour is having loud
sex; your mail is not getting delivered; someone
throws garbage in front of your house; your bike
gets stolen; you have a political opinion you want
to express; you saw someone in the U-Bahn that
you want to see again; you’re searching for a flat.
If you live in a city, you experience all of these
things to some extent, so it’s very easy to identify
with the people who write these notes because it’s
someone just like you and me.
Another reason people like to follow the notes is
because they are from Berlin. It’s more interesting
than it would be if they were from Frankfurt or Hamburg,
for example. Also, if you were to go to Hamburg,
Munich, Cologne or wherever, you wouldn’t
find these kinds of notes. They’re not there.
Why do you think this form of communication
is so widely used in Berlin? It’s just normal
for the people living in Berlin that you make
use of this form of communication. It just fits
somehow. I think it’s not surprising that people in
Berlin like to express what they think. They started
on the Berlin Wall, you have graffiti, street art,
urban gardening, all movements where people are
taking part in creating the cityscape.
I did a test four or five years ago in Munich. I
stuck some creative notes around the subway stations
and I saw people taking them down, without
reason, just because they thought they didn’t fit.
But besides the cityscape, you need the people. You
need a certain clash of cultures, of nationalities, to
create the situations that result in the notes.
Do you find common themes among the notes
that you think are particularly ‘Berlin’ in
nature? There are some notes that you can easily
assign to some districts: things that children lose,
or some really fucked up things that happen in
Wedding, more international things that happen
in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. But when it comes
to the themes, there are main topics that you can
identify in the notes: neighbours, sex, stealing,
Summer 2017
5

Berlin Through the Lens
Notes of Berlin
dirt, noise, love, the search for flats, bicycle theft,
packages that don’t get delivered…
These things are so relatable. Do you think you
could use the notes to create a profile of the
typical Berliner? [Laughs] I was actually planning
to do a little story based on real notes and how a
day or a week in Berlin unfolds. So, you wake up
because your neighbour is being noisy, you find
that your bike has been stolen, you lose your wallet
on the way to the U-Bahn, where you see someone
who you want to see again, you spend your day
searching for a new apartment… it’s the everyday
life of people living here.
What you’re capturing is such a deeply personal
view of the city, and what it really means to
live here. You just can’t make it up. And even if
this form of communication is beginning to disappear,
people have sent in 18,000 or 19,000 notes
over the last few years. It’s an archive that will
never really go away.
Do you write notes yourself? Yeah. I found my first
apartment through writing a note. I wrote a note and
stuck it around certain streets where I wanted to live,
and two days later some artist called me and told me
I could live in his apartment for the next year.
Also, some years ago I met a girl in a club. We
walked to the tram station together but I didn’t ask
for her number; maybe I was too shy [laughs]. So
I wrote a note because I wanted to see her again. I
knew where she lived because she told me where
her tram station was, so I stuck 20 or 30 notes
around the station and she called the next day.
You had an exhibition recently, a room in temporary
art space THE HAUS - Berlin Art Bang.
Tell us about that. Something I always wanted
to do was to have a room completely covered with
notes that I printed out. I covered the ceiling, the
walls and the floor with the best of the last six
years. I have done certain exhibitions but not such
creative ones as this, and it’s a very nice feeling.
I spent sometimes one or two hours in the room
watching people – I don’t usually get to see my
audience so it was a great motivation. It makes you
happy to see that you are making people happy. I
would like to continue more with the exhibition
stuff, the material is there.
Apart from potentially more exhibitions,
what’s next for you? I’m planning to do another
photo book, but it will be made with quality
paper and design in mind. Of course it’s way more
expensive to produce that kind of book, so it won’t
be an amazing commercial project, it will address a
different audience.
Once you know about Notes of Berlin, it’s impossible
not to notice them everywhere. Contribute your
finds to the project at notesofberlin.com
Top left: “Calling the cops
because of loud music???? How
pitiful!!! Move to Charlottenburg if
you want quiet!!!!”
Top right: “Doorbell is defective!
Either call, yell, or go home!”
Bottom left: “Optimist seeks
2-room flat for themselves
and their daughter, up to 400€
all included.”
Bottom middle: “To the two
‘fucking-acrobats’ in the building.
It would be fantastic if you would
close the window during your
nightly yodelling practice and not
tyrannise the entire neighbourhood.
It makes us sick that we’re
constantly being ripped out of
our sleep by your howling and all
the residents have to close their
windows, just because your ‘openair
tournament’ fills the whole
courtyard. Screwing is not an
Olympic discipline and your nightly
presentations won’t be greeted
with thunderous applause.”
6 Issue Four

Berlinstagram
Berlin Through the Lens
Summer 2017
7

Local Hero
Sara Neidorf
LOCAL HERO
SARA NEIDORF
EMPOWERING
WOMEN IN MUSIC
As a musician, drum teacher and film festival organiser,
Philadelphia-born Sara Neidorf has been
on a mission to improve Berlin’s cultural landscape
for women and genderqueer individuals since she
landed here in 2012.
We meet in her drum studio, a black box tucked
away behind a carpenter’s workshop on Sonnenallee.
We’re a little early, and as she coaches her
student through Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’, we
notice how quiet, poised, and watchful Sara is –
the kind of teacher who cares about more than
mere instruction. She’s a mentor.
8
Issue Four

Sara Neidorf
Local Hero
«
MY ENTIRE
STUDENT BASE
IS FEMALE OR
GENDERQUEER.
THAT’S WHY I DO
THE WORK I DO.
»
words by
Maggie Devlin
photos by
Viktor Richardsson
Iron Man
The song took it’s name from
vocalist Ozzy Osbourne’s comments
upon first hearing the
main riff, as he said it sounded
“like a big iron bloke walking
about.” It later earned a place
on Rolling Stone’s list of the
500 Greatest Songs of All Time,
and VH1 named it the greatest
heavy metal song ever.
The lesson finishes with Sara’s student telling us
we should check out her band’s first show. Her
confidence warms the heart and is precisely
why Sara is so important in a scene where women
often struggle to get ahead.
Was teaching drums part of the plan when you
moved here? I’ve been teaching since I was 17. My
school didn’t really have a music department; there
was no drum set on campus. So I convinced the
dean’s office to purchase one in exchange for me
giving free drum lessons. Then I came here, and it’s
really all I’ve done, steadily. Teaching drums is the
job I know best and that I’ve done for the longest.
What do you think your students get from
learning drums? With my younger students, I can
definitely tell that they love being loud. It seems
to be really liberating for them. They get their
earphones and they’re like, [mouths screaming,
mimes drumming]. That’s usually always the first
five or ten minutes, just letting them get that out of
their system without too much structure. After that,
I encourage them to start simple things, and we
keep going with that for as long as it’s fun. I think
they have a lot of fun having the freedom to make
unstructured noise and just be kind of aggressive.
And what do you get from teaching? I personally
love the drums so much, so spending all day surrounded
by them is a pleasure for me. I like knowing
I can pass on that passion to someone else, because
it’s such a satisfying way to express yourself; it’s
non-verbal. We struggle with verbal communication
all the time, so I think music is such a great escape
from miscommunications and missteps. We’re all
on the same page: we all just want to express something,
to communicate with each other, and I think
doing that on a musical level is really refreshing.
So I hope I can pass that on; that ability to express
yourself outside the verbal realm.
What would you like to see change for women
in Berlin’s music scene? Is the future on your
mind? Of course, of course it’s on my mind. My
entire student base is female or genderqueer. That’s
why I do the work I do. I want there to be more
female musicians, I always want it to be better. I
found a couple of really important role models when
I was learning the drums as a teenager. Having them
around was essential to feeling motivated, encouraged
and welcome to learn as a drummer. I think it’s
really important to have people in your community
who inspire you, and who you can look to as somebody
who knows their shit. At least for me it was.
You seem really invested in Berlin’s musical
landscape. How did you come to be here? I was
here as an exchange student for a semester and I
really fell in love, not just with Berlin, but with so
many different things about the city. I found some
people I connected with in the music scene, but my
main thing was the underground cinema culture.
I encountered the Queer Film Club, which I now
help to run. And there were all these awesome film
festivals, I was really impressed with them; how they
had such a rebellious and odd spirit. I was inspired
by that, and now I’m running one!
Yes! So, tell us about Final Girls Film Festival.
It’s a festival dedicated to horror films made by
women. We’re in our first year, but already on
Summer 2017
9

Local Hero
our second festival, because when we
opened up our call for submissions for the
first we received over 400. For the second
festival, we have XX, which is a horror anthology
with four female directors; Karyn
Kusama, Roxanne Benjamin, Jovanka
Vuckovic and St. Vincent, which is pretty
rad. We also have an art exhibition and a
couple of talks. I’m going to give one with
my mom about ‘horror hags’ – these huge
Hollywood stars who fell from grace and in
their older years couldn’t get any serious
roles. They were just booked in B-horror
movies, basically, and turned into a spectacle
for being middle-aged – a horrific,
ageing woman.
You’re also in a band, Choral Hearse.
Yes, my doom metal band. Half of our
songs I wrote as a teenager. I came up
with a full album of material that I had
written the guitar, drums and some bass
parts for, and searched high and low for
awesome female musicians in Berlin. I
didn’t even have the intention to start
a band with it, but then this friend had
told the singer, Liaam, that I had some
music and she was like, “Oh cool! I’ll be
in a metal band.” We started as an acoustic
duo: acoustic folk metal – that was
fun! Eventually we expanded and now
we’re a full band.
Sara Neidorf
«
I THINK MUSIC IS
SUCH A GREAT
ESCAPE FROM
MISCOMMUNICATIONS
AND MISSTEPS.
»
You’re a well-known face on the music
scene, and visible as a champion of
female musicianship… Wait until you see
me play guitar with Choral Hearse. [Laughs]
How much do your projects intersect
with the queer and feminist scenes?
The film festival more directly, you could
say. The music, I mean, in terms of the
content, not in any obvious way. But all
four of us in Choral Hearse are queer.
I don’t want to be a ‘female drummer’,
just a drummer, but I’m okay with being
a female drummer, I don’t get angry
with being designated as such. It is, in
many ways, also a shortcut for finding
each other – if a band is playing I want
to know if they have a female drummer,
‘cause I’ll go and see them.
It would be, of course, wonderful if
every show that you went to had a female
drummer in it. If it was three bands and
definitely one had a female drummer,
yeah, that would be ideal, but how many
shows have you been to where all you see
on stage is white men? Most of the shows
I’ve ever been to.
What’s been your high point in music
to date? My favourite thing is always practising
the music. For me that’s the high
point. Shows are great, but I get the true
high when I’m just focusing on the music
in the practice room.
What can we do to support female
musicians in Berlin? Support your
friends who are trying to earn their
living with music. Keep them in mind
for music jobs or creative jobs in
general. Share their events on social
media. Also, it’s really important to let
them know you appreciate what they
do. We all really thrive on validation.
Buy their music. Buy their CDs. Go to
their shows. Make them feel seen and
acknowledged and appreciated for
what they’re doing.
Follow the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival
at facebook.com/finalgirlsberlin and listen
to Choral Hearse at soundcloud.com/
choralhearse
Horror Hags
Notable horror hags include Joan Crawford and
Bette Davis, whose performances in 1962’s What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane? are lauded as the
beginning of the sub-genre of horror known as
psycho-biddy, or hagsploitation.
10 Issue Four

Our Summer Negroni
by
Summer 2017
11

Queer and Now
Yony Leyser
TRANSGRESSION,
DESIRE, REVOLUTION:
DIRECTOR YONY LEYSER
ON BREAKING RULES
Director Yony Leyser is as curious
as he is warm. A born interviewer,
he poses as many questions as he’s
asked, and delights in little idiosyncrasies
on the Neukölln streets that
he walks down each day: the grimy
sex shop, the fishmonger, the tiny
hut at the entrance to a car park
on Karl-Marx-Straße. “I’ve always
wanted to rent this as my office,”
he laughs. “Wouldn’t that be great?”
12 Issue Four

Yony Leyser
Queer and Now
Perhaps it’s this fondness for the incongruous
that contributes to the power of his work. In
his films, transgression and desire act as catalysts
for countercultural revolutions, be it through
a vibrant portrait of Beat Generation icon William
Burroughs in his 2010 documentary William S.
Burroughs: A Man Within or explorations of identity
and queer underground in 2015’s Desire Will Set You
Free. Both films exhibit a profound interest in people
upsetting the system, driven by passion, paradox, art
and community. “When you make a documentary
it’s like writing a memoir,” says Yony. “You’re shaping
a reality through a very big lens. People think
documentary is like a photograph of something,
when in actuality it’s more like a painting.”
Yony was born in DeKalb, Illinois and went on
to study at California Institute of the Arts and The
New School in New York. “Before I was making
movies I was an anarchist; I was an activist,” he
explains. “But being an activist was too didactic. I
had too much humour and I figured art was a more
effective and fun way to do it.” The art of filmmaking
in particular allowed him to roll all his passions
into one: “I was always interested in writing and
journalism and documenting, photography,
theatre, and I figured film kind of encapsulates
everything. It’s such a powerful medium.”
A Man Within happened almost by accident, as
great works of art often do. After making an art piece
at CalArts criticising the dean of students and illegally
using her signature, Yony was given the option of
either facing prosecution or taking a leave of absence.
So, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas planning to make
a documentary on counter-culture. Coincidentally,
Lawrence was William Burroughs’ home for the final
years of his life. Gradually, Yony made friends with
Burroughs’ friends, and eventually the film evolved
into a portrait of Burroughs himself.
Burroughs was a fascinating subject: a gun-toting,
cat-loving, queer junky who shot his wife
in the head and made an unprecedented mark
on literature. Making a film about such a largerthan-life
icon was no small feat. However, Yony
managed to successfully marry the enigmatic
persona with the conflicted man behind it. Only
21 at the time, his audacity, talent and persistence
got him interviews with Burroughs’ lovers, friends
and contemporaries from the fields of art, literature
and music. “His friends wanted to talk about
him,” says Yony. “It was this ripe subject.”
Making the film allowed Yony to honour the man
whose writing had had such a profound influence
on both him and the queer community at large. “I
liked that he was the first to break the rules,” he
says. “I always felt like someone who didn’t fit into
society and I just was kind of imagining someone
who was this outcast, who was queer and didn’t fit
in, and was rebellious and created his own realities,
and did it at a time when no one had ever done it
before. Genet too, all these kinds of people paved
the way for the subcultures that I took part in.”
The result is stunning. A Man Within weaves
together footage and anecdotes of a long and
astonishing life riddled with joy, lust, addiction,
pain, tragedy and poetry. Grainy footage of Burroughs’
face stares you down as his growly voice
recites his own erotic and abject verses in the
perfect cadence of a poet. The film splices together
never-before-seen footage from Burroughs’ life
with interviews with punks, poets and counter-cultural
greats including John Waters, Patti Smith,
words by
Alison Rhoades
photos by
Robert Rieger
DeKalb, Illinois
The city was named after decorated
German war hero Johann
de Kalb, who died during the
American Revolutionary War.
Other notable people from
DeKalb include model and
actor Cindy Crawford, author
Richard Powers, and the inventors
of barbed wire.
Summer 2017
13

Queer and Now
Yony Leyser
« I’M SICK OF SEEING OR
HEARING STORIES OF
WHITE, HETEROSEXUAL
COUPLES DOING BORING,
MIDDLE-CLASS SHIT. »
Iggy Pop, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Icons of
the Beat and punk movements − the artists, the
outcasts, those who upset social norms – talk about
their friend and hero with tender conviction, scraping
together memories as if trying to sort out who
indeed the ‘man within’ really was, once and for
all. The point is probably that we’ll never know. But
that’s the beauty of examining a life through film:
you realise just how complex humans actually are,
how riddled with contradictions.
Yony’s next film, Desire Will Set You Free, is part feature
film, part documentary, and full-on love letter
to Berlin. At once a great departure from his previous
film and a natural next step, it portrays the city in all
its poor, sexy glory. The film follows American writer
Ezra and Russian escort Sasha on a fast-paced ride
through Berlin’s hedonistic queer underground.
It is a study in dualities: Ezra (played by Yony
himself) is an American of Palestinian and Israeli
heritage, Sasha is a man discovering that he’s a
woman, and their friend Cathrine is a bisexual
radical obsessed with Nazi paraphernalia. It
invokes the contradictions of Burroughs, and plays
with Berlin’s divided past by depicting characters
at war with themselves, who are two things, or
everything all at once.
Yony was eager to change gears and do something
new, despite the success of his previous
film. “The system tells you to do the same
thing,” he says. But after years of working on a
relatively straightforward documentary, Yony
wanted to depict his life in Berlin in a more non-traditional
way: “I really wanted to experiment and
use my training as a documentary filmmaker to tell
a true story and use non-actors, but do it in a fictional
approach and not a documentary approach.
And it was so fun! Shooting Desire was so much fun.
I feel like in a way, it documents just as well as it
would if it was a straightforward documentary.”
There is a clear storyline, but Desire is also characterised
by its non-linearity, with long and beautiful,
poetic sequences of the characters simply relishing
in the pleasures of having bodies, exploring, and
improvising. Yony says that the film was indeed
“hugely improvised.” He continues: “When it wasn’t
100% improvised, the text was based on real events;
like if it was about these two sex workers at this bar or
whatever, then we would go to the bar the night before
and hang out with those sex workers and then use that
text the next day in the shooting.” The cast is also composed
of “either real characters or a mix of real characters.
There are only three actors in the film,” says Yony.
“The rest are playing themselves.” In fact, the film was
inspired by Yony’s encounter with a Russian man who
came to Berlin to party before the Mesoamerican-predicted
end of the world on December 21st 2012, and
came out as a woman during her visit.
Desire is like wandering into a dream where
narratives don’t always make sense, choices are
non-binary, and the landscape is governed, not by
rationality or even morals, but by lust and invention.
Yony cites Instagram as a visual inspiration for
the film. It reads as such, swiping through colourful
vignettes composed with seductive humour: Nina
Hagen offering life advice from a trailer, trans-men
and -women sharing their coming-out stories over
mid-morning champagne in a sunlit squat. Late
afternoons are spent naked with friends bathed in
sun and glitter, exchanging philosophical musings
and taking drugs. Night unveils the anachronous
pleasures of Berlin’s dark underbelly, from Peaches
performing in a plush breast-suit to leather daddies
flexing their muscles for a cheering audience.
“I actually thought it would be even more
fractured,” Yony says. “And if I could do it again I
would make it even more fractured. Just because I
feel like this city is a dream and it’s about a dream
and even in our daily lives we have ideas of what
we want to do, like ‘I’m going to this interview and
then I’m going grocery shopping or to a play’, and
then little things happen in between, like you see
someone on the street doing something weird or
crazy. I think that’s also part of the Berlin atmosphere,
at least for me: you’re going to a meeting
and you walk through Görlitzer Park and you see
people having sex in the bushes or whatever, and
it’s like these moments of distraction.” He smiles:
“That’s how life is; life doesn’t play out like it does
in a Hollywood movie, you know?”
Radical Gay Punk Zine
J.D.s ran for eight provocative
issues from 1985 to 1991, and
is considered the catalyst that
pushed the Queercore scene
into existence. Founder Bruce
LaBruce claims that the name
initially stood for ‘juvenile delinquents’,
but “also encompassed
such youth cult icons as James
Dean and J. D. Salinger.”
Yony first came to Berlin in 2007 on a Fulbright
scholarship. “I fell in love with it,” he says. “I was
living in New York at the time and I was so stressed
out and the quality of life here was so amazing. I
14 Issue Four

Yony Leyser
Queer and Now
remember my first weekend out, waking up
in a queer squat and having breakfast with
12 drag queens in the morning after some
performance and I was just like, ‘I gotta
figure out a way to live in this city.’ The
subcultural landscape, especially the queer
subcultural landscape, was really impressive
to me. The use of public space, the idea
of street culture and people of all backgrounds
intersecting with each other on the
street was very inspiring as an artist.”
Does Desire have anything to say about
Berlin? Yony pauses to think for a moment:
“To me it did – to my version of Berlin.
People can be very critical of that because
there are a lot of versions of Berlin depending
on who you are, and of course class
and race and gender and cultural background
and neighbourhood or whatever,
they all play such big roles. Even in my
building, for example, how differently all
the neighbours live and what the city, the
neighbourhood, or the building means to
us is vastly different. So it’s hard to say that
a film could represent the city, but what
I thought was interesting was that Berlin
had something very special that other
cities didn’t have: this kind of psychedelic,
Club Kid nightlife, and then this kind of
multicultural mixing pot of expats and
people who came to the city not for work
but for a cultural escape, or to live out their
fantasies. I wanted to depict the world as
parallel to the 1920s in Berlin − Christopher
Isherwood’s ‘20s or early ‘30s.”
In both A Man Within and Desire, the importance
of community in queer culture is a
noteable throughline. “Well, for a lot of queer
people, a lot of ostracised people, the idea of
a queer community is like creating your own
family because a lot of people’s families don’t
accept them and aren’t there for them,” explains
Yony. “So they can’t relate to them and
they can’t relate to a lot of society, so they say
‘let’s create our own tribal family’. It’s a very
central theme in my new film, too.”
Yony’s upcoming film, Queercore: How to
Punk a Revolution, premieres at the Sheffield
Documentary Festival this summer.
“It’s a documentary about the movement
that Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones started
in the late ‘80s, a gay punk movement, and
it started as a farce,” says Yony. “They got
a bunch of straight punks drunk and took
pictures of them and wrote these stories of
all these bands in Toronto being gay in this
radical gay punk zine, and people believed
it. It was before the internet so people
couldn’t really fact check, so the zine
spread and all these bands started. It led to
bands like Gossip, Peaches, The Knife; all
these guys kind of got their start from this
Queercore thread from the ‘90s.”
The German director Rainer Werner
Fassbinder once said: “Every decent director
has only one subject, and finally only
makes the same film over and over again.”
Yony bristles a bit when asked what this
subject might be for him, or indeed what
drives him as an artist. He turns the question
back around: “What do you see?” For
a director driven by a quest to discover the
hidden desires, passions and pleasures
that spark creative communities and even
radical progress, this is a fitting retort. But
upon reflection, he offers this: “I like to tell
stories from marginalised communities.
I’m sick of seeing or hearing stories of
white, heterosexual couples doing boring,
middle-class shit, and that’s what 90%
of films are. I think it’s quite boring and I
think there are very interesting marginalised
cultures that are doing interesting
things that can also play out in film, and
should have a place there, too.” Challenging
norms and subverting the language of
cinema to be more inclusive and more daring
is a noble goal, and Yony is definitely
up to the challenge. After all, as Burroughs
himself once wrote: “Artists, to my mind,
are the real architects of change, not
the political legislators who implement
change after the fact.”
You can find William S. Burroughs: A Man
Within and Desire Will Set You Free on
streaming platforms now. Queercore: How to
Punk a Revolution will hit cinemas in Berlin
later this year.
Summer 2017
15

Game On
Pinball
A NICHE PASTIME MAKES A
TRIUMPHANT RETURN AT THE
GERMAN PINBALL OPEN
The back corners of arcades, basements, and bars across the globe are home
to hundreds of thousands of pinball machines. Some lay forlorn as their intricate
web of parts give out, one by one. Others flourish in the care of tender
hands and function as though they have just come off the assembly line.
With the same appreciation as a vinyl collector or analogue photographer,
pinball players adore these kinetic wonders of human innovation. Pinball is
not a game of chance from a bygone era; it’s a combination of art and skill, at
once repetitive and full of infinite variations.
16 Issue Four

Pinball
Game On
After decades of use, every machine plays
differently. Repairs have been made,
pieces modified to fit into place; some
parts simply cannot be fixed. Each table is a
Sisyphean puzzle, with players endlessly competing
against their own highest score. And
like life itself, no matter how good your game
is, the ball always drains in the end.
Despite achieving popularity as an American
phenomenon, the general consensus is that pinball
was invented in western Europe during the end
of the 18th century as a spring-loaded variant of
the French game, Bagatelle. They called it Billard
Japonais – Japanese Billiards. As it had nothing
to do with Japan, the game’s title was a misnomer.
In an ironic twist, however, the same game also
evolved into the Pachinko machine, Japan’s most
widespread and beloved form of gambling.
1940: New York City. Pinball machines were
a largely mob-controlled business, and the
press-hungry, bullish Mayor Fiorello La Guardia
was sick of them. In an effort to combat what he
saw as “mechanical pick-pockets,” La Guardia
conducted prohibition-style raids on arcades and
bars across the city. The ‘gambling machines’, as
he saw them, were rounded up and smashed with
sledgehammers, then dumped into the rivers. Major
cities across the US followed suit, and in many
places pinball became a criminal activity. Yet,
despite its struggle, pinball lived on. Major companies
continued to produce tables and distribute
them to regions where the game had not been
banned. In places like New York, pinball machines
were imported on the sly, sitting in the back rooms
of seedy porn shops and gambling dens.
That was true until May 1976, when a young
pinball fanatic named Roger Sharpe was brought to
a Manhattan courtroom to play in front of the New
York City Council. He was a good player, even rumoured
to be the best. A writer for GQ and The New
York Times, Sharpe gave an eloquent and logical
explanation to the City Council about how pinball
had evolved into a game of skill. To prove this he
began to play ‘Eldorado’, one of two tables brought
to court that day. The Council, keen to see a
demonstration of such skill, requested that Sharpe
play on the table that had been brought along as a
backup. He was much less familiar with the second
table, ‘Bank Shot’, having trained for his day in
court on ‘Eldorado’. However, he stepped up to the
second table and announced that the ball would
pass through the middle lane of the playing field.
Sharpe pulled back the metal plunger, launched
the ball into play and sent it through the desired
lane. He had called his shot, and the Council formally
recognised pinball as a game of skill. Today,
Sharpe looks like a typical dad. His formerly wild
mustache has been trimmed, he’s neatly dressed,
and wears glasses. At pinball conventions, however,
he’s a living legend – known as the man whose
bold demonstration of skill saved pinball.
Following the City Council’s ruling, the
machines became legal, and across the country
pinball experienced a renaissance. At this
point, pinball’s history starts to get pretty nerdy.
Machines changed from electro-mechanical to
solid-state, dot-matrixes were introduced, etc. To
sum up: it was the 1980s. America’s arcades were
packed. Capitalism and haircuts were out of control,
and kids had coins to burn. Video games were
already starting to encroach on the pinball market,
which only fuelled the fire for pinball designers,
who were trying to keep the game (and their jobs)
alive. During the mid-1990s – like poets on their
deathbeds racing to finish their magnum opuses
– major pinball companies such as Williams and
Bally produced the most technologically advanced
and entertaining pinball machines ever made, but
neither ‘Addams Family’ nor ‘Twilight Zone’ could
stop the bubble from bursting. All of the companies,
with one exception, eventually shut down or
used their factories to produce a much more profitable
coin-operated contraption: the slot machine.
But pinball didn’t just lay down and die.
Instead, it was martyred, and from the ashes of a
once-thriving industry rose a new form of competitive
play. Obsessive fans and barflies began
putting their skills to the test as an official global
ranking system, the International Flipper Pinball
Association, emerged. Today, whether for amusement
or for glory, players flock to pinball competitions
all over the world. This brings us to Potsdam
in 2017 for the 20th German Pinball Open.
Pinball by nature requires a stretch of the
imagination. In ‘White Water’, the ball represents
rafters heading through turbulent rapids
as it descends a bumpy ramp. In ‘Banzai Run’,
the player is a dirt biker ascending a treach-
words by
Ryan Rosell
photos by
Soheil Moradianboroujeni
Pachinko
Gambling for cash is illegal in Japan
so Pachinko players win steel balls,
which can be exchanged for prizes or
tokens. Pachinko balls are engraved
with elaborate identifiable patterns
specific to the premises they belong
to, and this has led some fans to
start collecting the different designs.
Summer 2017
17

Game On
«
CRIES OF “OOH”
RIPPLE THROUGH THE
GROUP AFTER EACH
CLOSE CALL, AND
PEOPLE BREAK INTO
APPLAUSE BREAKS OUT
AFTER PARTICULARLY
NICE SHOTS.
»
erous mountain trail. Many of the games
are wonderfully kitsch; they revel in their
artificiality. So it makes perfect sense that
this year’s German Pinball Open would take
place in the Babelsberg Film Park, just down
the road from the tryhard Quentin-Tarantino-Straße,
in a building next to a giant
mountain fabricated for a film set.
Inside Metropolis Halle, lined up backto-back
in neat rows, stand more than 160
pinball tables. Their dates of manufacture
span half a century, with the newest tables
not even available to purchase yet. Some of
the best machines in the hall come from that
golden period, before neon-clad kids started
begging their parents for Super Nintendos
instead of arcade money. Many of those tables
were produced in runs of less than 2000.
Playing a game on one of these machines is
like finding a piece of treasure.
For the the crowd on opening day, however,
it’s business as usual. Vendors selling replacement
machine parts set up shop and begin jovially
cutting deals with returning customers. Rivals
vying for the same position on the podium
taunt one another. Fanatics inspect the tables,
arguing over the advantages and disadvantages
of replacing bulbs with LEDs. There are punks
Pinball
with mohawks and pinball patches sewn into
their jackets, nostalgic grandfathers who stick
to the slow-paced machines of the ‘70s, and
old friends who play sitting on bar stools they
brought from home. Some of the serious players
are already here, with fingerless gloves and
headphones blasting EDM; they have the same
tense, sobre manner as professional poker players,
seemingly taking no enjoyment from the
game. This day is mostly for freeplay, and many
of the serious players stay at home, saving their
strength for the serious competition.
To say the crowd is diverse would be
misleading, but it is certainly a diverse group
of middle-aged white men. In their heyday,
pinball machines traditionally catered to a
male audience, and the back glass of many
machines sports the likeness of a voluptuous,
scantily-clad woman. This is a sad,
sexist truth about the game, but it has begun
to change in recent years. As the day rolls
on, a small but noticeable percentage of pinball-playing
women turn up, turning more
heads than even the highest scores.
Without any major competition on the
first day, it seems the pinballers are in for
nine or ten straight hours of uninterrupted
pinball. That’s until the German Pinball
Association guest of honour strolls into the
hall: Gary Stern. In 1999, the already-merged
Data East/Sega Pinball was about to go under,
as so many American pinball manufacturers
already had. In a courageous move as president
of the company, Stern bought the assets,
rallied an A-Team of unemployed pinball
designers and founded Stern Pinball, Inc. The
tables they produced may not always have
been the greatest, but with keen marketing
techniques and a steely resolve, Stern weathered
the roughest years in pinball history
as the owner of the last surviving company,
which manufactures new tables to this day.
EXTRA CREDIT:
OUR PICK OF BERLIN’S
HIGH-SCORING
PINBALL SPOTS
Logo Cafe
Blücherstraße 61
This Kneipe is open 24 hours a day,
so you can scratch that pinball itch
whenever it comes. They’ve got the
new ‘Ghostbusters’ table and cheap
drinks, but no matter how rowdy things
might get, a player’s concentration is
respected above all else.
Ron Telesky Canadian Pizza
Dieffenbachstraße 62
This place gets it. Tasty pizza, good
music, and ‘Medieval Madness’. Go
have a slice and a ball on one of the
best tables ever made.
East Side Bowling
Koppenstraße 8
This place is bar-sports heaven. In
addition to bowling they have ping
pong, poker tables, pool, arcade
games, and five pinball tables. It’s
the only place inside the Ring where
you can find more than two or three
tables in one spot.
Flipperhalle Berlin
Kleinmachnower Weg 1
This place is a game changer. It’s only
open from 13:00 to 20:00 on Fridays
and it’s in Zehlendorf, but the trip is so
worth it. It’s €5 entry, and once you’re
in you can play for free on all of their
fifty tables. Plus, beers are €1. That’s a
crazy deal. This is the cheapest way to
fall in love with the game.
18 Issue Four

Pinball
Bird’s-eye View
On the second day of the tournament, competitive play
begins. A separate section of the hall is opened and competitors
are assigned to tables in groups of four. While a massive
amount of skill is required to become a pinball champion,
there is also an element of luck. Some people are assigned to
a table they know intimately, others step up to a table cold.
As the day wears on, cries of “Scheiße!” can be heard across
the room. Dreams are crushed, and competitors are slowly
whittled down in number until only four remain.
The showdown between the final four takes place on the
third day. A surprise selection of three tables is presented,
and the winner is chosen based on the culmination of their
scores on all three machines. This year’s selection includes
the Stern hit ‘Ghostbusters’, a table that has widely instilled
faith in the pinball community by proving that new machines
can be as good as the classics. The next is ‘Medieval Madness’
from the 1990s, regarded as one of the greatest tables ever
made. The last to enter the championship is ‘Domino’s Pizza’.
This table, like most fast food, is pretty disappointing.
The first of the finalists is Stefan Harold. He’s the oldest
of the group but incredibly fast. He has the footwork of a
featherweight boxer and his shoes dart back and forth under
the table as he plays. Up next is young Roland Schwartz,
hailing from Austria. He keeps a Swedish Pinball Championship
hand towel tucked in his back pocket, which he uses
to methodically wipe down the table and his hands before
every ball. Next comes Martin Hotze, who won the German
Open in 2015 and is a favourite with the crowd. Last is Armin
Kress. He’s young and in decent shape, and when his ball
inevitably drains, Armin is the only player not to become
visibly upset. He just smiles modestly, steps back from the
table, and waits for his next turn. A crowd of around 30 gathers
around the finalists as they progress from table to table.
Cries of “ooh” ripple through the group after each close call,
and applause breaks out after particularly nice shots. None
of the players do too well on the ‘Domino’s Pizza’ table.
In the end, age and experience beat youthful enthusiasm,
as the final game is between Harold and Hotze. The
match comes down to the very last ball, but Hotze needs
only a few flips to restate his position as German champion.
Trophies are disseminated, awkward handshakes are
exchanged and the crowd dissipates. The machines are
carefully packed away by their owners and prepared for
long journeys home. The crowd leaves the hall, many of
them having played pinball for three consecutive days. The
sun is bright, but it’s not flashing ‘EXTRA BALL’, so no one
pays it much attention.
Reading about pinball is not nearly as fun as playing it.
Gather your spare change and check out our picks of the top
spots in Berlin for a beer ‘n’ ball.
KEVIN MORBY
02.07.17, Quasimodo
OF MONTREAL
20.07.17, Festsaal Kreuzberg
BEACH FOSSILS
06.09.17, Musik & Frieden
CHASTITY BELT
17.09.17, Berghain Kantine
CHAD VANGAALEN
22.10.17, Berghain Kantine
MOUNT EERIE
05.11.17, Silent Green
PEAKING LIGHTS
12.07.17, Berghain Kantine
ULRIKA SPACEK / THE MEN
03.08.17, Berghain Kantine
NADIA REID / MOLLY BURCH
13.09.17, Berghain Kantine
WAXAHATCHEE
28.09.17, Musik & Frieden
PRIESTS
26.10.17, Urban Spree
MAC DEMARCO
08.11.17, Astra
Summer 2017
TICKETS & INFO: PUSCHEN.NET
Spring 2017
19

Cover Story
MODERAT
20
Issue Four

Moderat
Cover Story
words by
Gesine Kühne
photos by
Robert Rieger
This summer, Berlin loses one of its most iconic
acts to an undetermined hiatus. As Moderat
begins what could be their final festival tour,
we join them and talk transitions: past to present,
and urban sprawls to garden walls.
Moderat: the chimeric brainchild of techno
giants Modeselektor and Apparat. Although
their name means ‘moderate’ in German,
their sound is anything but: sombre and sophisticated, exciting
and often painfully lush. Moderat is a play on words,
on genre, on sound and vision, and on what it means to be
a live band. By definition a supergroup, the Berlin-based
producers wear their status as ambassadors of the city
with a casual air. They smile and cajole off stage, and let
their music do the serious talking. Like many of Berlin’s
closely-cherished heroes, they are of the city but not from
it, hailing from small-town Germany and finding their
futures in the grimy basement parties of the late ‘90s.
Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary’s Modeselektor is
all punch, sex, grit and grime. A cross-section of ‘90s boom
bap, stuttering vocal samples and bass drops that can feel
like G-force training, as euphoric synths wrench the listener
in all directions. It’s a union of blissful paradox – where
Modeselektor thumps, Apparat whispers. Sascha Ring’s
soulful dream-pop delights the ear with vocals that walk the
line between the acrobatic and the strained, on a tapestry
of nimble beats. Apparat skirts the radio mainstream but
always manages to keep things off-centre, cementing his
place as one of music’s countercultural superstars.
Moderat lives an amphibious existence between both
sounds: all the sensitivity and intricacy of Apparat, delivered
with the take-no-prisoners moxie of Modeselektor. It’s
a cocktail that wins hearts across the globe, and last year
sold out Berlin’s massive Velodrom in a matter of minutes.
Make no mistake: this band is loved in this town, a fact
that makes this a painful year for fans. On September 2nd,
Moderat will take to the stage at Wuhlheide where they’ll
say an indefinite Auf wiedersehen. Until then, they’ll court
the summer festivals, filling parks and melting heads with
their visually stunning live set.
We join them on the road to Reims in the heart of provincial
France, where they will headline La Magnifique Society.
It’s a brief foray: a weekend getaway with a 14-hour drive
each way. It’s a lot of distance to cover for a one-hour set,
but it’s the kick-off for festival season, and with a further 28
shows to go, Moderat have more experience and grit than
to quiver at overnight bus journeys, sleeping to the ambient
hum of an engine a metre or so beneath their pillows.
What is life on the road for Moderat? Backpacks with fresh
underwear, packets of cigarettes and pressed baguettes from
a sandwich toaster say ‘student digs’ rather than ‘club circuit
celebrities’. Laughing, Szary insists that the toaster is one
of the bus’s most valuable possessions: “A sandwich gets
about 300% better when you grill it in a sandwich maker!”
Compared to the band’s early days, he has a point – a sandwich
toaster is a step up. “In the very beginning, we drove
ourselves and shared a hotel room,” says Sascha.
The Moderat project began in 2002 – the trio writing
their own software so they could jam together, since
what they needed wasn’t available off-the-shelf. They
produced their first EP the following year. Auf Kosten der
Gesundheit (At the Cost of Health) emerged to a flood of
positive reviews, but the title and subsequent six-year
hiatus hinted at a trying time behind studio doors. Nevertheless,
in 2009, Moderat released their first full-length
record: a self-titled opus of post-minimal, club-ready
hits. Trampolining off the success of the first EP, Modeselektor’s
Hello Mom and Happy Birthday!, as well as Apparat’s
collaborative LP, Orchestra of Bubbles with Ellen
Allien, Moderat was an unquestionable success.
Despite their decade-long success, Gernot, Szary and
Sascha have managed to remain grounded, avoiding the
tropes of inflated egos with characteristic nonchalance. They
still leave their hotel rooms to explore the surroundings of
their latest gig, be it a city or somewhere more remote.
“I mean, I grew up in a village, kind of, so I always have
a need for green,” Sascha says. “Previously, I satisfied that
desire by motorcycling into the woods, for example. Now I’ve
found something that fits my age better. I drive to my piece of
land, to my garden.” All three members have bought land just
outside Berlin where they’ve each built houses – Sascha’s,
next to a pond; Gernot’s, near the open countryside.
“I realised that my job is done all over the world, but
99.9% of everything happens in huge cities, so I don’t
need to live in one any more,” Gernot says. “Back in the
day, we destructively exploited our bodies,” he adds,
explaining some of the reasons why the trio have turned
away from urban living. “We only worked at night, then
when we were done around five or six in the morning,
we’d have another kebab and a beer and go to bed. We’d
get up around two or three in the afternoon. We wasted
so much time this way, but now we’re trying to optimise
our lives. The environment we’re in and what’s in front of
our door plays an important role; for example, no drunk
tourists having the summer of their lives in Berlin.”
Gernot continues, “That’s why the photos for LOLA were
shot where we feel comfortable; where no one lives, where
we don’t have to talk, and where no one recognises us. It
happens a lot in the city: we go for a coffee, and all of a
sudden we get a coffee for free because someone else offers
to pay. That’s not bad, of course, but on the other hand you
feel watched the whole time. Where we live now, north of
Berlin, there is a little organic supermarket and they don’t
care at all who shops there. They leave you alone,” he says,
then laughs. “Unless you touch the vegetables.”
As much as Gernot, Szary and Sascha love their newfound
sanctuaries with their families, they equally love
being on tour. “It is Tourlaub,” or ‘tour holiday’, Gernot
says, smiling. “That’s the term our wives came up with.
They don’t see touring as work.” But Sascha interjects,
clarifying: “We wouldn’t call it Tourlaub, I mean, we are
talking about sometimes playing every day for three
weeks in a row. That really wears you out.” However,
even on the road they manage to find a routine: “We have
learned to live with a certain rhythm,” says Sascha. “During
the day we wind down, and we still get very euphoric
about our job on stage. It still gives us a huge kick.”
Summer 2017
21

Cover Story
Moderat
“We are touring professionals,” adds Gernot. “We
toured as Modeselektor and Apparat before and during
Moderat, and we know all forms of touring: as a band,
as DJs with USB sticks, on buses, trains, planes, jets
and boats. We haven’t had a helicopter yet,” he laughs.
“When we get home the mode switches instantly
because our kids take over, and they aren’t interested
in what happened at Fabric, for example. Switching
modes quickly is actually quite nice.”
Szary agrees: “When I get home the first thing I do is
I make myself some coffee. Then I go outside, drink it,
and smoke a cigarette. Then I say, ‘Kids, come over, sit
down on my lap, because Papi would like to explain to
you what he has experienced.’ And after that, it is back
to normal: clearing out the dishwasher…”
In addition to giving them plenty to tell their children
about when they return home, Tourlaub allows
them to escape the routines of work, the record label,
studio and family time, to travel with friends. And
like friends, they listen carefully when any of the crew
members have personal matters to talk about. “We are
dependent on the crew,” Gernot explains. “They have
to give 110% so we can deliver 120%. Trust and being
nice to each other is essential.”
“There’s no one in our crew who is just a worker,”
Sascha adds. “They are all people we have known for
ages. Most of them are part of the crew for exactly
that reason. We grew together. We rarely have changes
within the crew, and that’s important.”
From the production manager to the technicians,
the crew work with the kind of intimacy that comes
from years of knowing each other. And Moderat
is the fulcrum, the three characters creating the
kind of balance needed to get through such punishing
tour schedules. Sascha is the contemplative
maverick who maintains the overview of production
plans and costs. Szary pursues new interests and
broadens his knowledge over coffee and cigarettes.
His interest in foreign climes has made him the socalled
travel minister, checking routes and researching
hotels for the band. Then there’s Gernot, the
cheeky, bright-eyed joker, who listens carefully and
is able to parse out solutions to whichever obstacles
present themselves. His demeanour and outgoing
nature make him the perfect candidate for handling
press and communication.
Maintaining a jovial spirit isn’t always easy. Back
on the bus, the clock reads half-past-midnight, and
Sascha looks uneasy. “I’m really worried that I won’t
get enough sleep,” he announces, sitting at the small
table on the lower deck of the double-decker bus, a
white nightliner with tinted windows. Christoph, the
lighting technician, points silently towards a bottle
of whiskey, but Sascha leaves the bottle untouched
and goes to bed in the tiny bunk that’s only just long
enough for his tall frame. He closes the curtain behind
him with a bright ‘shink!’, the heavy piece of fabric
creating something close to privacy. Sascha doesn’t
like touring on buses. “I don’t sleep very well on
them,” he mutters, from within his ersatz sanctuary.
The next morning, we cross the Belgian border. Szary
and Sascha are still sleeping, but Gernot is already on
the task at hand, discussing the gig, now mere
“WE STILL GET VERY
EUPHORIC ABOUT OUR
JOB ON STAGE. IT STILL
GIVES US A HUGE KICK.”
22 Issue Four

Moderat
Cover Story
Summer 2017
23

Cover Story
Moderat
hours away. He’s reviewing the changes
to the set, because as soon as the crew
arrives at their destination, the trio will
vanish into separate hotel rooms for
hours of preparatory isolation.
Hardened tour-bodies notwithstanding,
the trip to Reims is taxing. After all those
hours of travel, when nine-to-five office
workers would call it a day, they get to work
giving interviews, having final consultations
with the production manager, and
warming up their voices.
At around midnight, Sascha is practising
his high notes. They don’t come easy tonight;
he’s coming down with a cold. Szary
stares at the middle distance, focused.
Quiet. “I’m not nervous,” he assures us.
“Just very concentrated. I’m going over
everything in my head.”
It’s almost time for the headline act to go
up. Out front, hungry fans wait for Moderat
to start their set. As soon as the first notes
of their intro can be heard, the whole crew
gathers around the band. Everyone highfives
each other, a long-practiced ritual. As
they stand in their circle, Moderat and the
crew are close-knit, tight as a fist. On their
faces, appreciation and unquestioning
readiness. Just seconds later, Gernot, Szary
and Sascha vanish into the white fog that
spills out from the wings. The crowd roars.
Do they think about transitioning back
to their respective projects? Switching between
outfits can have its downsides. “After
Dave Gahan
Depeche Mode have enjoyed
great success in Germany over
the years. In 1988 they became
one of the very few western
bands to ever play in the GDR
with an unannounced performance
in Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle,
East Berlin.
the first album we went back
to our own projects,” Sascha
explains. “And for me it
was really hard to get back
to the work with Apparat,
to be alone in the studio,
because I really got used to
the dynamic between three
people. So because of that experience we
didn’t want to make the switch back again
to Apparat and Modeselektor after II. It
just took too much energy. The music
world runs in phases. An album is a certain
phase, and this one is coming to an end.
That means it will be the last chance to see
us for a while.” In fact, Modeselektor are
already in the studio again, eager to get
back to their techno roots.
“Moderat was planned as a recovery project
from our individual ones,” Sascha tells
us the following day, everyone recovered
from their high-energy set at the festival.
Gernot picks up Sascha’s thought: “And now
we have to recover from Moderat! We’re all
clear about a hiatus for the time being. It
doesn’t have a set timeframe; we don’t yet
know when we will continue with Moderat,
and we also can’t say ‘if’. So this Berlin concert
will be like the end of an era!”
It’s time, they say, for Moderat to take
a pause. The trio didn’t take a break
following the release of II in 2013, touring
instead for two years and going straight
into the studio again to record III, which
they released in the spring
of 2016. They’re still touring,
clocking up 150 live shows
and more than one trip
around the world.
That’s not to say the trio
aren’t relishing the joys of
the Moderat era. Gernot,
Szary and Sascha love to play, and every
single time they approach the stage seeking
to “shred the audience,” as Gernot says.
“Like at our most recent gig at Coachella,
there were so many people and we were
still able to create something like a studio
atmosphere, where we didn’t feel watched,
where we all push each other to play even
better. It’s our little bubble. That’s why
Sascha sometimes forgets to interact with
the audience, to get his Dave Gahan on,”
he laughs. “We have something like an
electronic grandeur. I realised at Coachella
that I don’t give a fuck how many people
there are. It works – still.”
There are plenty more shows ahead of
the three musicians before they step onto
the stage in Berlin for their final night of
the tour. The September 2nd gig will be a
huge event in Berlin’s live music calendar.
Not only in terms of size – although the
Wuhlheide holds 17,000 people. The Berlin
crowd’s energy is different. The audience
is full of friends and long-term fans, so
it’s inevitably a unique experience for the
band. “We were asked to play Lollapalooza,
but we decided against it. To play
Wuhlheide was always our dream,” says
Gernot. “We want it to be a grand finale.
We booked a support: Mark Ernestus’
Ndagga Rhythm Force. Mark Ernestus is
a legend. He’s the owner of the Hard Wax
record shop. He’s a musical genius.”
The home-crowd can also bring some
nerves. “I find it uncomfortable sometimes,”
says Sascha. “I get the feeling
we’re being properly watched, because the
audience knows us so well. The feedback
in Berlin was always quite personal,” he
adds. “But now I’m more relaxed, and it is
nice to play in Berlin. Maybe that’s a sign
of growing up, that I’m not afraid to play in
my hometown any more.”
“Berlin is unbelievably special!” adds
Szary. “If it’s in front of 9,000 people, like
last year at Velodrom – that was rad – or if
it is in a small club in front of just 200, Berlin
is always so intense. Berlin ist einfach
unsere Heimat!” Heimat – the place where
you feel you belong.
Get your tickets for the Berlin show
by following the link at moderat.fm/live
and follow the tour on Instagram with
#teambadkingdom
24 Issue Four

Moderat
Cover Story
“THE MUSIC WORLD RUNS
IN PHASES. AN ALBUM IS A
CERTAIN PHASE, AND THIS
ONE IS COMING TO AN END.”
Wuhlheide
The open-air stage in Bezirk Treptow-Köpenick was
built for the occasion of the third World Festival of
Youth and Students in the summer of 1951. It is the
second-largest open-air stage in Berlin.
Summer 2017
25

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
BLACK IN BERLIN
JESSICA LAUREN
ELIZABETH TAYLOR’S
CRUCIAL SALON
Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor has her feet firmly planted in multiple
spheres. The artist-in-residence at District Gallery, Berlin, she
works within the realms of both conventional and non-conventional
theatre, but outside of that, she participates in a particular form
of artistic activism. Having studied theatre in the United States,
Jessica’s move to Berlin coincided with her growing interest in advocacy
for people of colour. Issues of race, identity, and belonging
are the materials of her work as a community organiser and artist.
Under Jessica’s guidance, dialogue blossoms.
26
Issue Four

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
Vital Debate
words by
Hamza Beg
photos by
Justine Olivia Tellier
hair styling by
Tata Nuo
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates’ second book Between
the World and Me and his
article in The Atlantic, ‘My
President Was Black’, were
both informed by his many interviews
with Barack Obama
and their differing philosophies
on race in the US.
As we chat, Jessica speaks enthusiastically.
Her tone is matter-of-fact and informed, a
combination that makes it strikingly clear
why she is a successful moderator for discussions.
Black in Berlin is a salon that Jessica began in 2012
in order to challenge the mainstream German–
English press on their mishandling of racial issues.
That challenge has grown into a movement that
empowers people of colour in the city and speaks
to Jessica’s own personal journey.
Jessica is part of a larger group of people
inciting discussions on race in Berlin, although
she admits: “I didn’t arrive and get involved, I
accidentally got involved.” The catalyst was an
article in a prominent Berlin-based magazine that
used racially offensive terms in reference to the
Afro-Deutsche community, such as ‘jungle fever’
and ‘from the bush’. Appalled, Jessica went directly
to the source: “I went to a panel discussion with the
editors of the magazine, but the panel was terrible;
they talked over the Afro-Deutsche community. I
was just really incensed that this was a liberal-left
magazine’s take on race in Berlin. Afterwards, a
group of us stayed and just chatted into the night.
That’s when I started Black in Berlin.”
Through this moment of collective frustration,
Jessica discovered a critical need in the community
here in Berlin. “In the UK and US we talk
about race all the time, with our families, with our
friends, our neighbours, but here people aren’t
used to talking about race at all,” she says. Since
the salon began, Jessica and the attendees of Black
in Berlin have been discovering the benefits of having
an open dialogue with each other about issues
of race. As with the victims of discrimination of
any kind, the space created for discourse has to be
one in which the participants feel completely safe.
In this case, this means that the guest speakers
are always people of colour, and the ensuing
discussions are ones that an audience composed
primarily of people of colour feels encouraged to
contribute to. But the demographics of the salons
are slowly changing: “The salons at the beginning
were 60% black and brown and, say, 40% white,”
Jessica tells us. “But now we’re getting down to
about 5% white.” That the number of non-white
participants is increasing speaks to the welcoming
environment, where demographics of the panel
and community reflect those of the participants.
Jessica speaks with meticulous clarity of how
she constitutes ‘whiteness’. “When I use the term
‘whiteness’, I am referring to a concept of interlocking
political and cultural systems,” she begins. “I like
what the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say about
whiteness: that it is a social construct, a fabrication.
He says: ‘Whiteness and blackness are not a fact of
providence but of social policy,’ though it is important
to note that even if whiteness is an invention,
it has very real repercussions. Something I always
tell people at my salon is: if you’re bristled or made
uncomfortable by the terms ‘whiteness’ or ‘white
people’ then you have some unpacking to do.” The
level of precision with which Jessica explains complex
concepts is perhaps a product of her role in responding
to the needs of her community. Her ability
to distil identity politics into understandable terms
is particularly refreshing in a time when many find
the subject both difficult and confusing. Jessica concedes
that when she came to Berlin, she didn’t have
any knowledge of critical race theory, and it is clear
that the salon has been a learning experience for her
as much as for the participants. “It’s really amazing,”
she continues. “I can say that unabashedly because
it’s all about the community and the people who
come and speak. It’s at least 40% regulars.”
The issues that the salons are trying to tackle
are not limited to the experience of racism. They
are a place of celebration, of sharing thoughts
on how to spread a positive message throughout
society at large. While Jessica feels that “Berlin is
decades behind,” in regards to how race is imagined
by other Western, multi-ethnic societies, she also
states that she’s “not yet exhausted or tired of
explaining things to white audiences.” The salons
themselves, however, are not set up for this kind
of explanation, but as safe spaces of expression –
where people can discuss why most German companies
still require headshots on CVs, for example.
The community surrounding the salon is making
great strides. “Just last week I had to choose between
Isaiah Lopez’s talk on what it means to be black, male
and queer at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, and
Natasha Kelly’s celebration of the life of May Ayim
at the Hebbel on the same night. The community is
just so rich now.” While the salons can be a place to
simply let your voice be heard, they are also a space
to begin learning or relearning how to articulate your
experiences. Jessica’s contribution to the slow and
steady march toward racial equality feels revolutionary,
but she draws a line between the work of an activist
and how she sees her role: “I’m not an activist,
and I say that because activists, from what I see, are
putting blood, sweat and tears into the movement.
I’m an artist, so I’m working for the movement, but
I’m also working in the arts context.”
Summer 2017
27

Vital Debate
Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
«
IN THE UK AND US WE
TALK ABOUT RACE ALL THE
TIME, BUT HERE PEOPLE
AREN’T USED TO TALKING
ABOUT RACE AT ALL.
»
Black in Berlin tackles topics that require subtlety,
patience and a variety of viewpoints. The events usually
last for two hours, although Jessica admits that this is
often not long enough. A recent salon looked at the idea
of a ‘new diaspora’ with intersectional perspectives on
privilege, class, race and mobility. This style of nuanced
and open public discussion is not only radical but also
accessible, and often therapeutic for its audience. Here,
the participants find themselves in a rare and welcoming
space where they can begin to reckon with the trauma
inflicted by the politics of race.
Diversifying the group of literature- and arts-focused
20–40 year olds is a difficult task. Jessica tries
to convince her Turkish and Afro-Deutsche neighbours
to attend, but language can be a limitation. To tackle this
problem, she encourages people to speak in their own
language and finds translators to help out. Black in Berlin
is always hosted in a different space. “I try not to have it in
academic and art institutions too often, because I want it
to have more of a kitchen-table feel,” Jessica explains. This
seems to be the very heart of the project: the creation of a
safe space in which those who have few places to turn to can
be heard. “We work in majority-white spaces, we socialise
in majority-white spaces and a lot of us are in relationships
with a white person. A lot of people have told me that the
salons are a bit like church and a lot of the time, these
spaces can feel like coming home,” she continues. There’s
a simple beauty in creating a homespace here – despite
Berlin’s notorious transience – for people who feel that their
very social existence is also transient.
“Whiteness is so pervasive, it’s in all of us,” Jessica says
when discussing the theatre scene in Berlin and finding her
place in it. “Berlin has a long, rich history of alternative,
progressive, radical theatre. The theatre I was seeing here in
institutions, like the state theatre, was the most radical theatre
I had ever seen in my life, and it still is,” she says. And yet
the actors on stage were all white. Back in the United States
where Jessica grew up, the stage was more diverse. She now
cherrypicks the shows she will attend. “I also go in with the
knowledge that I will be one of the only black bodies in the
space. I just made a decision to stop going to majority-white
spaces. I realise that I felt deeply uncomfortable, but more
importantly exhausted by these spaces. Going to openings
and being the only black person in the room, I always felt
like a peacock. People were always looking at me, commenting,
or touching me, my hair or my outfit.”
Jessica’s experience of her own blackness, particularly
as a child, has clearly informed her work in Berlin. “As I
was growing up I was never black enough. I was always
told that I talked like a white girl by the other black girls
in my community. I went to predominantly-white schools
and all of my extra curricular activities were also majority-white.
All of my social community programmes were
majority-black, and those were the spaces I didn’t feel
welcome in,” she tells us. This early narrative is replete
with experiences that impact not only Jessica’s work in
the salon but also her ability to understand others. “That
was particularly tough growing up because I also grew
28 Issue Four

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
up in a pro-black household,” she says. “My mum came
in every year to teach Black History Month to my whole
school, she started the first black book club in our town,
but then I also had this part of myself that didn’t identify
with being black because I was being rejected.” Even later
at art school, both students and professors nullified her
blackness because it did not quite fit the pervasive stereotype.
She was frequently cast as ‘the fool’, a subversive
character that comments on the play from the margins.
They are often intelligent and witty characters – but it
wasn’t until a black professor put on a ‘black play’ that
Jessica was cast as a leading lady. With the complex interplay
of institutional and inter-personal racism, Jessica’s
move to Europe made perfect sense. “In Berlin, I was free
from all gazes, and in terms of identity I felt that it was a
place where I could start over and be who I wanted to be,
because in the States there was a certain way to be black.
“The American South is a very special place, it’s a
place of warmth and family and bigotry and rampant,
rampant unchecked racism, and backwoods and country
roads and lawlessness,” Jessica says. Growing up around
a certain amount of lawlessness in Florida seems good
training for living in Berlin. Jessica points out that both
places are built on swamps: “Berlin comes from the Slavic
word for ‘swamp’. It’s a place where it is hard to find solid
ground, and I think that speaks also to the people here.”
It seems, however, that Berlin has stabilised Jessica
in her beliefs and passions. She was on her way to the
Jacques Lecoq School of Art and Mime in Paris when she
first stopped over in Berlin, and never left. She schooled
herself instead with alternative theatre in squats and
abandoned warehouses. “I felt that it was my classroom,”
she says. She plainly loves theatre, but her solid ground
atop this marsh of a city is the community of people of
colour: “The community really keeps me going: just when
I feel like I’m ready to leave or move on, this incredible
community is like ‘Wait, no, we’re here.’”
Jessica’s next venture sits at the intersection of race and
gender. It feels like a deeper, more specific iteration of the
Black in Berlin series. She explains: “I’m starting a garden,
incubation interview series called Muttererde, which
actually means ‘topsoil’. I’m going to be interviewing
other femmes of colour about their great-grandmothers
while gardening, because I don’t know anything about
my great-grandmother at all.” She clarifies that the only
thing she does know about her great-grandmother is that
she passed down her green fingers, inspiring the project’s
gardening theme. “I started the garden a month ago,” she
continues. “I go there every afternoon. I’ve always had
plants in my house but a garden is something different,
a really meditative place. We’ll start the interviews and
filming in July and then have a screening in late August
or early September.” Finding ever-innovative ways to offer
marginalised people a space for expression, Jessica’s work
invokes not only significance but also longevity. It is a
transformational and representative style of social politics
that offers a frame for marginalised experiences. She is in
Berlin, not only to take all that the city offers, but also to
give back what it so badly needs.
Keep up with Jessica and her upcoming projects on her
website, thejessicastudy.com
Summer 2017
Summer 2017
29

High Times
Microdosing
ACID
TEST
AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE
MICRODOSING TREND
30 Issue Four

Microdosing
High Times
Lysergic acid diethylamide – more commonly known as ‘LSD’ or ‘acid’ – is a drug
that has long been affiliated with marathon benders, hippy culture and tie-dye
visuals. Yet these associations are being completely overhauled by microdosing,
the practice of taking tiny amounts of acid to boost creativity, productivity, and
even deal with mental health issues such as depression. We talked with some of
Berlin’s microdosers to find out how this traditionally recreational psychedelic
substance is being put to use in an entirely new context.
LSD’s tumultuous history began in
1938, when it was first synthesised
by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman at
Basel’s Sandoz Laboratories while he
was trying to develop new circulatory and
respiratory stimulants. In 1943, utterly by
chance after accidentally ingesting the drug,
he discovered its strong psychoactive qualities.
Three days later, Hoffman intentionally
took 250 micrograms (µg) of LSD, famously
first feeling the buzz as he cycled home.
The following half century saw LSD
transform from a promising medication
into a controlled substance. Numerous
CIA-led experiments, the Vietnam War,
a massive counter-cultural revolution in
the 1960s and the subsequent 1971 United
Nations Convention on Psychotropic
Drugs resulted in LSD being denigrated as
a harmful recreational drug, consumed en
masse by vociferous hippies all looking to
‘turn on, tune in and drop out.’ Its apparent
threat to the moral fabric of society
was judged too grave, and most research
into LSD ground to a halt.
Today, LSD is strictly regulated around
the world. In Germany, the drug is classified
as an Anlage I substance. According to
the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs
and Drug Addiction, substances that fall
into this category are defined as “narcotic
drugs not eligible for trade or prescription.”
Under Germany’s drug policy, or
Betäubungsmittelgesetz, distribution and
possession of acid is a criminal offence,
although prosecutions seldom occur for
small quantities intended for personal use.
However, this socio-judicial overhang is
slowly ebbing away. A reinvigorated scientific
interest in psychedelics has emerged,
and a host of studies have cropped up that
seek to explore the potential benefits of
LSD in treating psychological conditions
such as anxiety and PTSD. Perhaps the
biggest driver of this renaissance is microdosing,
a trend popularised by hyper-smart
techies holed up in Silicon Valley looking
for an edge in a competitive corporate
landscape. But it’s not all software engineers
and complex algorithms. Microdosing
is thriving in Berlin, and there’s more to
it than meets the eye.
Our first port of call was Susan (not
her real name), a radio journalist who
put together a story on microdosing for
Deutschlandfunk in April. Over a glass of
wine, Susan explains how she was switched
on to the idea after hearing it talked about
amongst her yoga circles. “I ran into a few
people who started dropping the term ‘microdosing’
at my yoga practice; it was the
first time I’d heard of it,” she says.
After a few more conversations, she
realised microdosing was much more widespread
than she initially thought: “A couple
of months later another friend mentioned
they were trying it, and I thought, ‘you
too?’” The idea had presented itself. In the
process of producing her story she reached
out to a handful of microdosers, as well
as Dr Henrik Jungaberle – a Berlin-based
psychologist involved in drug prevention
programmes and research.
Dr Jungaberle asserts that microdosing
is a proxy for enhancement. “With microdosing,
people are trying to self-optimise,
they want to work better,” he says. “Peo-
words by
Alex Rennie
illUstrations by
Patricia Tarczynski
Summer 2017
31

High Times
Microdosing
“THERE’S DEFINITELY SOMETHING
MAJOR HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. I THINK
THESE DRUGS WILL PLAY A KEY ROLE
IN THE FUTURE, IN PSYCHIATRY AND
OTHER FIELDS OF MEDICINE.”
ple today experience real boredom, everyday
life may be monotone. It’s a tool to make
things more enjoyable.” In his opinion, there
are parallels with Ritalin usage, especially as
a means of driving up productivity.
As part of her groundwork, and in true
gonzo style, Susan decided to experience
microdosing for herself. “I wanted to try
it because people were saying it opens up
different pathways in your mind,” she says.
“I wanted to see whether it’s bullshit or not,
to know what it does and doesn’t do.” But in
embarking on this endeavour, she discovered
one of microdosing’s biggest difficulties:
how to measure an accurate dose.
Typically, one tab of acid contains
100µg of LSD. The best way to siphon off
a microdose – between 5–15µg according
to Dr Jungaberle – is to soak a tab in
100ml of distilled water overnight. Storing
it in the fridge preserves its potency
for approximately one month. Using a
syringe or pipette and taking it neat or
in tea is the most precise way to hit the
sweet spot, though more haphazard
microdosers simply snip off a tiny corner
of the tab and hope for the best.
Susan recounts sampling her first
microdose one Saturday. Shortly afterwards
as she went to meet a friend in a
café, it quickly dawned on her she’d had
more than enough. “When I got there I
was super hyperactive, my friend asked
me why I was being so giggly. I told him
about microdosing. He got me to look
him in the eye, and he said, ‘Oh my God,
you’re high!’” She estimates she took
about 30µg, double the ideal amount.
The following time she tried it, it didn’t
have much of an effect. Dr Jungaberle
notes that this is quite common: “Obviously
the dose depends on the individual,
its effects can vary. There are people
who’re very sensitive to LSD and people
who won’t feel anything on such a small
amount.” It’s hard to gauge how to hit the
jackpot in this psychedelic lottery.
In retrospect, Susan is sceptical of how microdosing
has been extolled as a means to
increase productivity and creative output:
“I think it’s a bit hypocritical using it to
achieve something; it feeds into our digital,
non-stop, don’t-sleep, we’re-all-replaceable
world.” Though this critique has traction,
it doesn’t quite gel with the reality of other
Berliners who’re readily portioning out
their own micro-odysseys.
A week later, Max (also not his real
name) sits in the spring sun beside Wedding’s
lesser-known Schifffahrtskanal, a
secluded stretch of water bordering the
western edge of the district. It is midday
and it seems a beautiful enough location
without psychoactive drugs – but Max
is here to bare all about his psychedelic
encounters. Originally from the US, he’s
been living in Berlin on-and-off since the
early 2000s. He divides his time between
photography, filmmaking, and teaching
English. He’s been consistently microdosing
10µg of diluted LSD every fourth day
for the last three months.
Before leaving his flat, Max carefully
measured out a tiny droplet of acid and
swallowed it. It’s striking how lucid he is.
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide
LSD is synthesised from the lysergic
acid found in ergot fungi, an
organism that grows on rye. There
is widespread belief that kykeon, a
drink imbibed during Ancient Greek
cult initiations, contained hallucinogens
derived from ergot.
Albert Hofmann
The LSD-pioneer was rumoured to
have microdosed for decades, well
into his old age. He died in 2008 at
the age of 102.
Bicycle Day
April 19th 1943 is the day that
Hofmann tested the effects of LSD
on himself. After ingesting 250μg
and experiencing an extraordinary
change in perception, he cycled
home. The anniversary of this
event is now celebrated among
LSD enthusiasts around the world
as ‘Bicycle Day’.
Shroom for Improvement
Microdosing isn’t limited to LSD.
People also consume tiny amounts
of psilocybin, psilocin or baeocystin
mushrooms in order to feel similar
enhancements to creativity and
productivity.
Berlin’s LSD Kiez
Prenzlauer Berg’s Helmholtzkiez
is known locally as the LSD-Viertel.
However, that’s not because
residents are partial to tripping; it
gets its name from the three main
roads that intersect the neighbourhood:
Lychener- Schliemann-
and Dunckerstraße.
32 Issue Four

Microdosing
High Times
Not only that, his answers are thorough and
crammed with information. But how does
he feel? “I’ve got that butterfly feeling in my
stomach, and the acid taste in my mouth
is slightly apparent,” he says. “The colours
are brighter and I can hear the birds, they’re
fucking loud as shit right now!”
Echoing Susan’s reservations, Max explains
how his first foray into microdosing
wasn’t a calculated one: “I started off with
the slap-dash approach. It’s OK if that’s
your entry point. But if you want to be more
serious about it, when it can be an addition
to your week and help your productivity, it’s
better to figure out how to do it properly.”
Having tailored the right amount to his
needs, Max expands on how microdosing
aids his daily routine: “There are days
when you wake up and you feel tired and
sluggish, you’re forgetful. It’s about not
being that; it makes you a better version
of yourself. You’re getting closer to peak
performance: you’re happy and in a good
mood, you’re sharp, ready and focused.
For me, it’s less about creativity and more
about efficiency. My ability to empathise
with the world around me and the people
that I talk to is greater, too.”
So far, Max’s motives resonate with Susan
and Dr Jungaberle’s assessments. This
link wavers when Max digs deeper into the
reasons behind his experimental assays. It
was in the midst of a severe bout of depression
that he decided to revisit acid. “I started
doing LSD again as therapy for myself,
to get into a better state of mind. The first
time I did LSD again I had a very clear view
of whatever pit I had fallen into.”
Beyond the efficiency, Max’s stance on
microdosing is one that’s strikingly holistic.
“As a tool it is incredibly useful, I’ve
cleaned out that emotional closet in my life
a handful of times, not just microdosing
but also macrodosing,” he says. “If you go
into it wanting to resolve problems, it’s
extremely helpful. If you’ve ever tried to
be creative whilst you’re stressed out with
normal life shit, it’s so hard to do.”
After an hour in the sun discussing how
microdosing “connects these different
parts of the brain that wouldn’t normally
be connected,” Max finishes on a poignant
note concerning its paradigm-shifting
potential. “Society has definitely portrayed
LSD as something scary, and that shapes
our views on these kind of things. It’s time
to get past it. I think this can be a norm,
as well as a wonderful helping hand in the
growth of our human consciousness.”
It’s tricky to argue that Max’s personal
experience is solely centred on
self-optimisation in the Silicon Valley
sense. In fact, his microdosing mentality
seems more to do with therapeutic
factors than anything else. His belief
that acid could one day slot into the
normative framework is both upbeat
and infectious. It’s also an ideal shared
by Kjartan Nilsen, a Norwegian filmmaker
with a background in medicine.
Having landed in Berlin three years ago,
Kjartan established The German Psychedelic
Society last June. “We want to be a platform
for psychedelic users, a space where
people can connect, exchange knowledge
with each other and participate in seminars
and social events,” he says. Their last event
in April at Prenzlauer Berg’s Musik Brauerei
attracted around 250 guests.
Like Max, Kjartan also extolls the
virtues of microdosing, though he only
dabbles in it every now and then: “It’s
been very beneficial for me. I become
more focused and my creative output is
higher, and it also has a strong spiritual
side to it; I become more aware. From
morning to evening, I’m experiencing this
‘flow’ state. Even though this sounds kind
of floaty, it removes the ego, the mask that
you’re carrying in your daily life, and you
see others as an extension of yourself.”
Kjartan is clued up when it comes to
current research. He spends some time
fleshing out recent scientific investigations
into LSD, including Imperial College
London’s now notorious fMRI scans of
brains on acid. Though he admits “we
need more science” concerning microdosing,
he references American psychologist
James Fadiman’s qualitative work as an
encouraging benchmark. “His studies
are quite promising: 99% of users report
positive effects, and a slight percentage
are reporting an emotional release during
microdosing sessions,” he says.
But we have to ask: what about the risks?
Is Kjartan not concerned that repeated LSD
use could inflict harm? “Certainly, there is
risk,” he agrees. “But I would argue that the
risk is minimal because we already know
that psychedelics are the least harmful
group of substances on the market today.”
Harkening back to Dr Jungaberle’s responses,
Kjartan’s confidence is well-founded.
“LSD is one of the least damaging substances
that exists, certainly less harmful than
alcohol,” says the German scientist.
So could it be that we’re on the cusp of
something truly revolutionary? Kjartan
thinks so: “There’s definitely something
major happening right now. I think these
drugs will play a key role in the future, in
psychiatry and other fields of medicine.”
Perhaps it’s too premature to assess what
the future holds. Nevertheless, this reinvigorated
surge in psychedelic science does
seem to be a convincing marker of things to
come. And as microdosing becomes more
visible in the public domain, it may well
begin to dissolve the perceived danger that
LSD poses to society’s mental wellbeing.
Kjartan is quietly optimistic: “A lot of information
that people have on psychedelics is
based on myths spread throughout the media.
But the evidence is telling us that these
are some of the least harmful substances
that exist, and that they even have great
personal benefits, spirituality and creatively.
Times are changing.”
Keep up with the latest from The German
Psychedelic Society at facebook.com/
psychedelicsde
Summer 2017
33

Music in Exile
Mohammad Abu Hajar
WE FED UP
words by
Stuart Braun
photos by
Shane Omar
On a cold day in early February, a large crowd gathers at the Brandenburg
Gate to protest Executive Order 13769, Donald Trump’s ban on
persons entering the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries.
Amid the ‘Ban Fascism Not Muslims’ and ‘Love Trumps Hate’
placards, Syrian rapper and activist Mohammad Abu Hajar steps onto
the stage at the front of the rally to address the crowd. The young man,
also known as MC Abu Hajar, grew up under authoritarianism. He has
spent time in the prisons of the Assad regime. He understands how one
man seeks to maintain power by brutally oppressing others. This understanding
is shared by his Syrian bandmates in Berlin and it fuels the
powerful music they’ve been unleashing on the city’s stages since 2015.
34 Issue Four

Mohammad Abu Hajar
Music in Exile
Above: Mohammad
(second from right)
with Mazzaj Rap.
Survived Hitler’s War
Although it was still standing,
by the end of the war the
gate was badly damaged.
Bullets and nearby explosions
left holes in the columns,
and only one horse’s head
from the original Quadriga
survived. The head can now
be found in the collection of
the Märkisches Museum.
“
For me, what matters is that we don’t only
fight Trump, but we fight the infrastructure
that created Trump and will create
other Trumps in the future,” Mohammad tells the
protesters who are cheering him on during the grey
mid-winter day. “I’m not here only for Muslims,
I’m here in solidarity with my white fellows not
represented by Trump. I’m not here only because
I’m Syrian or an Arab. I’m here for humanity.”
Mohammad goes on to speak of a dictatorship
that has been in power for half a century and has
ultimately destroyed his country. “I don’t wish it for
the rest of the world,” he continues. “I think it’s so
important to start dismantling the whole mentality
that brought about Trump. It’s not only people standing
in solidarity with Muslims. We are standing in
solidarity with each other.” The cheers grow louder.
He reiterates that despotism is never far away.
Backed by the vast sandstone columns of the Brandenburg
Gate that somehow survived Hitler’s war,
Mohammad says that Berlin understands this well.
A flag of the Syrian revolution flutters above
the crowd as Mohammad introduces a rap song
he wrote on his first day as a political prisoner.
He says that his interrogators would ask him if he
wanted freedom. If he responded ‘yes’, they would
torture him. “That’s the freedom you deserve,”
they would say. That night he wrote a rhyme in
response to his beatings. “Do you want freedom?”
it begins. “Yes, we want freedom and we want Syria
to be a country for all, and we want this world to
be a place for all.” Mohammad soon has the whole
crowd chanting, “yes, yes, yes,” in Arabic.
Partly inspired by emerging Arab rappers in
countries such as Egypt and Lebanon, but also by
elements of traditional Middle Eastern and Sufi music,
MC Abu Hajar was one of Syria’s first political
rappers. A then-Marxist and atheist, he was barely
20 when he was first jailed in 2007 for making music
that was critical of the regime – in particular, a song
that criticised honour killings of women by men,
who are rarely prosecuted for these crimes. That
was the year he also formed the band Mazzaj Rap
with local Tartous musicians, Alaa Odeh and Hazem
Zghaibe. Mohammad’s birth city of Tartous, on the
Mediterranean coast, is fiercely pro-Assad.
Having already gone into exile in Jordan to study
following his initial incarceration, in 2011 Mohammad
was inspired to return to Syria during the Arab
Spring to take part in the first spontaneous peaceful
protests. After decades of emergency rule, of
extreme intimidation and fear among a heavily-policed
populace, this was a bold grassroots demand
for civil and democratic rights that was inspired by
revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Mohammad and
his collaborators never worked for a political party,
nor did they later fight for the Syrian Free Army
when an exercise in civil disobedience became militarised.
He was there as a citizen, simply campaigning
for freedom of expression among all Syrians,
whether Arabs, Muslims, non-Muslims or Kurds.
As the revolution spread across Syria by late
2011, Mohammad believed that the regime would
relinquish power, just as the Mubarak dictatorship
had done in Egypt. But a few months later, he was
back in detention, a victim of a vicious crackdown
by a desperate government that didn’t shy away
from killing its own people.
Mohammad first told us his story in a café in
Wedding that had recently been opened by members
of the growing Syrian community here in Berlin. As
we sat and drank tea, he pointed across to a man at
the next table with long hair. It was Ahmad Niou,
the Mazzaj Rap percussionist with whom he shared
a jail cell in early 2012. After being arrested, the two
were beaten and then accused, without evidence, of
unauthorised political activism. They suffered daily
torture, from whippings to beatings with electric
prods. Mohammad was witness to the killing of one
prisoner, and heard of the deaths of many other
inmates. He doubted whether he would get out alive.
Mohammad was released two months later, but he
was pursued again by secret service agents and one
day was forced to flee over his back fence in his pyjamas.
Soon after, he left Syria for the last time, arriving
in Lebanon before travelling to Europe. He lived
in Rome for a couple of years, where he finished his
master’s degree in political economics. Mohammad
then came to Berlin, in part because a strong community
of Syrian political exiles was already established
here. Ahmad Niou, also from Tartous, came to join
Mohammad in Berlin. Mazzaj Rap were reunited, this
time joined by Matteo Di Santis, a friend from Rome
who provided electronic beats and samples.
In 2016, the core band evolved into another project,
Mazzaj Raboratory, which includes Alaa Zaitounah
(oud) and Zaher Alkaei (violin), who also made
circuitous routes to Europe from the Syrian cities of
Swaida and Homs. Beyond the hard-edged American
rap idiom, Mazzaj Raboratory are forging
Summer 2017
35

Music in Exile
Mohammad Abu Hajar
“IT’S NOT ONLY PEOPLE
STANDING IN SOLIDARITY
WITH MUSLIMS. WE ARE
STANDING IN SOLIDARITY
WITH EACH OTHER.”
what Mohammad describes as an “oriental
rap” sound that “tries to break the contradictions
between eastern and western
music.” “It’s a road that we can all walk
together,” he says. This new direction is the
subject of the album the band is currently
recording, entitled Third Way.
Mazzaj Raboratory play their first
show in front of a packed audience at
Kreuzberg’s Köpi squat. The heavy beats,
overlaid with hand percussion (darbuka)
and driving oud and violin solos, somehow
evoke the flames of the Arab Spring that
these Syrian exiles still nurture, and which
fuel MC Abu Hajar’s pointed political
rhymes. Meanwhile, images of people enduring
detention and torture flash across
the back wall, along with song lyrics in
English. The band is playing ‘We Fed Up’, a
track “dedicated to all the political detainees
and their mothers,” the lyrics of which
Mohammad also recited at the anti-Trump
rally. The many Syrians in the audience
thrust their fists in the air in response to
the chorus: “You want freedom. Yes, and
we want all the detainees!” It is impossible
not to be swept up in such a cathartic public
outpouring of emotion that has been so
long repressed. The band comes back to
perform two encores.
On May Day 2017, Mazzaj Raboratory perform
on a bill entitled The Revolution Will
Not Be Televised at Yaam, on an outdoor
stage directly on the Spree. Mohammad
introduces ‘People Well’, a song about a
time when young Syrians dreamed that
the Arab Spring would spread from Tunisia
and Egypt to Syria. “Two weeks later it
came,” he says. The beat kicks in. “From
Tunisia, from Egypt, tomorrow a victory
will arrive, and people who have been
martyred will dislocate the gates of the
palace,” he raps, in Arabic.
The words and the music have an added
tension as police vans line up across the
bridge spanning the Spree and beyond.
The audience, including a man draped in a
Syrian revolution flag, dance and
chant, urging political action as
Kreuzberg threatens to explode at
the May Day witching hour.
These Syrian exiles not only
depict what life was like under
Assad, but their attempt to regain
their dignity as they are persistently
stereotyped as part of a migrant
horde that broke down the
gates into Europe. “Who will give
housing to a refugee?” Mohammad
asked us last year after a spate of
terrorist attacks in France and
Belgium that fuelled the xenophobic
rhetoric of Trump, Le Pen,
and Germany’s Alternative für
Deutschland party. “On every application
I write: ‘I’m Mohammad,
I’m not a terrorist.’” Although
many refugees like himself do not
follow Islam, they suffer the consequences
of extremism. “I even
feel humiliated by the pity of some
people who are pro-refugees,” Mohammad
adds. “Pity will always
show me that I’m not equal.”
On the upcoming single ‘Uncertain
State’, also the title of a concert the band
performed at the Akademie der Künste
last October, Mohammad expresses the
anxiety that derives from his rootlessness
in Europe. “I am trying to stand on my
feet but the soil below is so fragile,” he
sings. “I’m trying to say I belong … but
the tribe’s mentality rejects me.”
This uncertainty is amplified by the fact
that these exiles do not have the choice
to go home. In ‘Homeland’, a video and
music collaboration with the Turkish artist
Halil Altindere that was exhibited at last
year’s Berlin Biennale, Mohammad leaps
over a border wall and leaves Syria behind,
forever: “The home is lost, the home
died, the home is behind me now. And
everything finished, it’s over.”
Speaking to Mohammad on Pariser
Platz as the anti-Trump protesters form
a cordon and begin marching down
Unter den Linden, we discuss the album
he and the band have been recording.
Inevitably, we talk about Syria. A lot has
changed in the weeks prior. With the
help of a Russian air bombing campaign,
Assad has taken back Aleppo, Syria’s
largest city, from the rebels. Mohammad
says it has been a difficult time. The dictator
having consolidated his power and
the revolution now unlikely to succeed,
this young man is contemplating the
very real possibility that he will never be
able to return home.
As we walk, Mohammad explains that
it might only be possible to go back if he
renounces his opposition and commits
fealty to the regime. As a relatively wellknown
activist, this might be seen as a
coup for Assad, and might save Mohammad
from ending up in prison. “But I will
never do this,” he says. “I won’t accept going
back to Syria as a humiliated person,”
he tells us. “I would only go back as a free
person.” The revolution continues.
Mazzaj Raboratory released the single, ‘Uncertain
State’, in May and the forthcoming
album, Third Way, is due out in the summer.
Follow them at facebook.com/mazzajrap
36 Issue Four

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Summer 2017
37

Moments and Memories
20 Years of Melt Festival
GERMANY’S TOP FESTIVAL
CELEBRATES TWO DECADES
OF GOOD TIMES
From its modest beginnings
as a 1,000-capacity festival by
Lake Bernstein in 1997 to the
20,000-capacity behemoth now
taking place every year in the
‘iron town’ of Ferropolis, Melt
Festival has grown into one of
Europe’s leading festivals. This
year it celebrates its 20th birthday,
and throughout these 20
years, countless live acts and DJs
have graced its many stages.
As a festival-goer, you usually only get
to see the front-end experience: the
music, the setting, the atmosphere.
What you may not have considered is the huge
amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to
make something of this scale come together. It’s
a mammoth task with many moving parts, and at
every step of the way there is a dedicated team of
people working tirelessly to keep things running.
Here we speak with some of those unsung heroes
who work on making the festival such a roaring success
year after year, getting an insight into the crazy
things they’ve seen, the moments when things go
awry, and some of their own personal highlights.
TOMMY
Director of Communication
and Marketing
Do you have an all-time favourite performance?
Björk in 2008, closing the festival. One of the best
performances I have ever witnessed in my life.
How about a favourite year? Again, 2008: the
first year we went for three days because Björk
could only play on the Sunday. There was a positive
vibe, tension and excitement overshadowing the
whole weekend as everyone was waiting for Björk
and her crew to show up. The atmosphere
was emotionally charged at all
times during the weekend, and it felt
like an atmospheric discharge when
finally Björk appeared on stage. That
show felt like collectively having multiple
orgasms after an amazing weekend.
Was there a moment when you
said, “We’ll look back on this one
day and laugh”? Melt 2005, when
Maximo Park opened the main stage
and the festival. We heard a heavy
thunderstorm coming, and within
seconds there was rain pouring down,
lightning, thunder, the band running
off stage, tents flying around. It felt
like the apocalypse for ten minutes.
Luckily, no one got injured and not
too much damage was done.
words by
Jonny Tiernan
38 Issue Four

20 Years of Melt Festival
Moments and Memories
STEFAN
Artistic Director
What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen
at Melt? Maybe in 2006 or so, there was a
couple climbing on the crane at the Gemini
Stage, on the very top of it, like 30 metres
high, fucking. There were some cheap
mobile videos of it, but they’ve since disappeared
in the clouds of YouTube.
Have you ever had any disasters? More
than one! Over the years we’ve had almost
all the problems you can have organising
a festival, from heavy queues to massive
technical problems. The worst was when
I had to evacuate the festival because of
heavy weather on the Sunday morning
around 4am. I had to tell deadmau5 (without
his mask) that he had to stop DJing
after just ten minutes, and used a mic to
tell everyone to please move into the heavy
rain and take a nice walk back to the campsite,
and that for safety reasons we also had
to stop the bus services. Not nice at all.
What about near misses? When me and
some production colleagues were very
frightened watching more and more people
entering Deichkind’s show on the Main
Stage at 3am in 2005. The security couldn’t
stop people climbing up onstage to dance
during the last song with the band. In the
end, there were more people on the stage
than in front of it, and we were really worried
that the stage might collapse. We came
close to switching off the energy for the PA,
but it turned out to be a legendary moment
and fortunately no one was injured.
Could you give us a favourite-ever
performance? That’s very hard to say
when so many of your favorite artists have
performed. Booka Shade on the Big Wheel
Stage in 2007, and Tiga on the Gemini
Stage in 2009 both had crazy vibes. When
Tiga finished his set and the festival site
closed, people wouldn’t stop making their
own beats with cups, sticks on trash cans,
whatever they could find.
JULIE
Head of Artist Liaison
What’s been your wildest Melt experience?
Actually, I just heard it on the radio.
They’d found an artist on the campsite the
day after his performance – long after his
band had left – still partying, with a seriously
agitated girlfriend on the phone.
Was there a time where it almost all
went wrong? Yes, there actually was a
time when it all went wrong, but what I
learned from it is that you are never alone,
your team always helps you and you are
allowed to make mistakes. And it’s good if
you do, because you learn from it. I’m very
grateful that my boss was his calm self and
accepted the fact that I just fucked up and
simply moved on with the show.
Has there ever been a time where there
was nothing you could do but laugh?
Yes, all the time, you have so many absurd
things happening. I think when you’re
working in the festival business you have
to decide one day whether you’ll become
angry all the time or if you start not taking
things too seriously. I decided on the second
option, and I’m quite happy with it.
Best performance? Tiga 2009, closing the
Gemini Stage. After he finished, people
refused to leave the festival site and started
clapping and banging the rhythm of his last
track. Everyone kept on dancing – it was
one of the best moments ever.
Do you have a favourite year at Melt?
2015, because I felt so confident in my job
and my team, and everything just came
together so perfectly. We all had such a
great time working and enjoyed ourselves
so much. How many people can say that
about their job?
See the lineup for Melt Festival 2017 and
get your tickets at meltfestival.de
Summer 2017
39

The Mother of Berlin
Käthe Kollwitz
COMMEMORATING
THE LIFE OF ARTIST
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
Regal and somewhat worn, a bronze statue
of German expressionist artist and activist
Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) gazes out over the
playground at Kollwitzplatz in her former
neighbourhood. The children of Prenzlauer
Berg clamber onto her lap and sit on her knee,
the skirt gleaming with patches of gold where
the bronze has been polished by generations
of hands. Like Berlin’s other monuments
and Denkmalen, the statue is a treasured fixture
of the Kiez, and the 150th anniversary of
Kollwitz’s birth offers us the perfect opportunity
to give an introduction to this amazing
woman for the uninitiated.
Having borne witness to two world wars,
Käthe Kollwitz critiqued the tragic impact of
conflict on society with vivid and emotional
art. Her life’s work had an immeasurable influence
on the art world and on the city of Berlin, which will
celebrate her 150th anniversary with several events
this year. Kollwitz remains a powerful symbol
of feminism, activism and resistance – her work
mourning a tragic past and seeking a better future.
Growing up in an unusually liberal, middle-class
family, Käthe Schmidt was encouraged to pursue
a career in art. She studied painting in Berlin
and Munich before finding her calling in graphic
art, devoting herself to etchings, lithographs,
woodcuts and drawing. In 1891, she married Karl
Kollwitz, a doctor for working-class Berliners, and
in his patients she found new subject matter. With
incredible tenderness, Kollwitz depicted the daily
struggles of poor and working-class families. She
focused on the oppression of women and children
in particular, and found printmaking a useful medium
for creating and distributing her provocative
artworks. She became popular amongst the German
working class, and made her art readily available
to the masses as prints, posters and postcards.
A critical turning point in Kollwitz’s life was the
death of her youngest son, Peter, who was killed
in combat during World War I. From that moment
on, Kollwitz embraced pacifism and dedicated her
art to inciting social change, increasingly turning
to darker themes such as sacrifice, death and
mourning. She spent the years from 1924 to 1932
working on a memorial to her son: The Grieving
Parents (Die trauernden Eltern).
The granite sculpture depicts
Kollwitz and her husband bowing
over their son’s grave, wrought
with the pain of losing a child. In
addition to memorialising her son,
Kollwitz’s sculpture pays tribute
to all the children who were lost
during the war.
In the following years, her work
reflected the legacy of the trauma
inflicted by war, particularly upon
women. With dark, hollow eyes,
heads bent in sorrow, and large
hands clutching dead bodies in
agony, Kollwitz’s images convey
the cruelty of war in all its wretch-
words by
Erika Clugston
Above: Self-portrait 1888-89.
Below: Gustav Seitz’s statue of
Käthe Kollwitz in Kollwitzplatz. It
is based on one of her self-portraits
and was erected in 1961.
Soheil Moradianboroujeni
40 Issue Four

«
HER PROTO-
FEMINIST WORK
PORTRAYS INDIVIDUALS
WITH COMPASSION
AND STRENGTH,
SPEAKING OUT AGAINST
INJUSTICE AND CALLING
FOR REFORM.
»
Käthe Kollwitz
The Mother of Berlin
Kienzle u. Oberhammer
edness. Figures emerge from a black abyss,
shaped by the artist’s expressive lines. The
pain of loss is wrought in colourless fury.
Mothers’ cries are heard from the shallow
depths of ink on paper. Kollwitz also devoted
her art to social justice causes: from
advocating for abortion and contraception
rights to class equality, Kollwitz created
complex images that called attention to
women’s issues. Her bold prints, posters
and sculptures were a passionate outcry
against violent injustice.
Kollwitz continued to produce dark, socially
critical work, but her international
acclaim arose from her talent as an experimental
artist as much as from her subject
matter. She was elected the first female
professor of the Prussian Academy of Arts
in 1919, proving that she had established
herself as a formidable success in a world
dominated by men. However, in 1933 the
newly-elected Nazi party forced Kollwitz to
resign from the Academy, prohibiting her
Above: ‘Sturm’ (‘Storm’) 1893-97.
from exhibiting, and classifying her art as
‘degenerate’. They would later appropriate
her art for propaganda, recontextualising
her anti-war imagery for their manipulative
purposes, including a claim that her Hunger
series showed victims of communism.
Kollwitz nonetheless was steadfast in her
pacifist beliefs and continued to work. Her
last great series of lithographs, titled Death
(Tod) (1934–37), was even darker, starker,
and more emotional than before.
The following years were filled with loss
as World War II raged. Kollwitz’s husband
died in 1940 and her grandson was killed
in battle two years later. In 1943 she evacuated
Berlin, shortly before her apartment
was destroyed in a bombing that claimed
much of her life’s work. Kollwitz died in
the spring of 1945, just two weeks before
the war in Europe ended.
To the end, Käthe Kollwitz was an audacious
artist and advocate for the oppressed.
In museums and monuments across Berlin,
her artwork makes her an ever-watchful
presence in the city. Her proto-feminist
work portrays individuals with compassion
and strength, speaking out against injustice
and calling for reform. And although
Kollwitz’s dark figures, shrouded in death,
haunt our present moment with their fierce
critique and painful memories, they also
burst forth with life. Her artwork speaks
with a mother’s love, bearing the pain of
tragedy while tenderly lifting us up – like
children she cradles in her lap – urging us
to strive for a better future.
Find out about all the special events honouring
Käthe Kollwitz in 2017 on the Käthe
Kollwitz museum website: kaethe-kollwitz.de
Above: Käthe Kollwitz museum. Right: Hand study 1891.
Summer 2017
41

Dispatches
The Battle of Mosul
DISPATCHES:
A FRONTLINE REPORT FROM MOSUL
“
Photojournalist Sebastian Backhaus depicts the ravages of war as
only a photographer can. His work focuses on the Middle East,
where he continues to report on residential districts shattered by
terrorist bombs, volunteer armies preparing for battle, and the
horrors of the front lines. Here, he shares his recent experiences in
Mosul, where the largest deployment of Iraqi troops since the 2003
invasion continues its campaign to reclaim the city from ISIS forces.
Mosul, Iraq has been under fire since
October 2016 as Iraqi forces battle ISIS,
who overran the city in 2014. When
the fighting will end is a question of weeks or
months, and the winner will be the Iraqi army.
But it’s tricky to talk about winners in this
war. The losses experienced by the Iraqi forces
are countless; the word ‘winner’ has lost all
meaning. The international media focuses on
civilians, who will finally get back their freedom
after three years under ISIS occupation, but they
are the furthest from winning. The state of Iraq
will get back its city; the ISIS jihadists will reach
their goal when they are killed and get access to
the paradise of their perverse ideology; but the
people of Mosul are losing not only their homes,
but also their relatives in the crossfire when
they are caught between the front lines, during
imprecise mortar shelling or air strikes, or when
ISIS use them as human shields.
When the offensive started last year, photographers
were warmly welcomed to join the euphoric
beginning, to show the world that Iraq was
starting to take its fate into its own hands with the
Mosul offensive. But today, thousands of civilians
are dead or trapped in the last embattled western
part of the city. The Golden Division, the Iraqi
special forces unit for the first front line, practically
doesn’t exist any more because of their high
losses, and the mission for photographers in this
war can only partly be accomplished. Access to the
front lines is only possible with deep relationships
words and photos by
Sebastian Backhaus
Left: These sisters are living with their family
downstairs after a shelling destroyed the
upper floor of their house. The heavens are
darkened with smoke from the oil fields, still
burning after ISIS set them alight as they left
the city, to make it more difficult for coalition
fighter jets to take aim on ISIS positions.
Below: Mud covers a refugee collection
point in Hamam Al Alil, where citizens
mainly from the city of Badoush gather.
Top: A boy who stayed at home
in western Mosul with his family,
even under ISIS occupation. His
belly shows strong indications of
malnutrition.
Above: A boy is treated in a field
hospital in Hay Samah, Mosul after a
rocket hit his family’s house injuring
him and killing his grandmother.
42 Issue Four

The Battle of Mosul
Dispatches
Below: A family arrives at the first post behind the front line in the desert,
after fleeing from their village between Qayyarah and Mosul, where heavy
fighting between the Iraqi army and ISIS took place. Here they get checked
by fighters of a unit of the Iraqi army. They told me that they managed to flee
when ISIS pushed them with other families from their village towards the Iraqi
army to use them as a human shield when the army opened fire.
Top: A soldier of the Iraqi army on
a house roof at the front line of a
fire fight with ISIS, in the embattled
district of Bark, south-eastern Mosul.
Above: A rare picture of happiness in this war:
a family, who managed to escape from ISIS
territories in Mosul, reaches a liberated area in
the eastern district of Hay Samah.
Below: The feet of an exhausted citizen from Badbush, near Mosul,
on arriving in Tal Ghassoun after his escape. As he fled, he lost his
shoes and walked for two days in the cold, muddy desert.
with high-ranking military leaders, or while working on
assignment for big names. Too much is going wrong in this
war, and too many photos are showing that to the world.
Capturing the war against ISIS in Iraq is a special challenge
for photographers. Besides the problems of access there is the
danger of being shot, specifically by extremely well-trained
and well-equipped snipers, becoming the victim of a mortar
shell, stepping into a booby trap, or being kidnapped. However,
these are only the dangers that are visible on the surface.
Each photographer, and each writer, has to find their way
through this experience without losing their mind.
Personally, it’s hard for me to find a professional distance
from some of the experiences I have had in and around Mosul
during the last months. When I was shooting at a field
hospital directly behind the front lines, I became witness
to the lives of whole families changing within seconds.
Humvees were approaching the field hospital from the
embattled areas, sometimes at a rhythm of mere minutes.
Doors were opened, and heavily injured civilians or dead
bodies were brought to the medical staff. And around them
the parents, partners or children of those dead or wounded
were screaming, falling to the ground or were so shocked
that they just functioned and helped where they could.
But there is one picture from this mission which will
never leave me. I worked at an escape point where civilians
managed to flee the fighting. A couple with their baby in
their arms approached, exhausted after nearly three years
under ISIS terror, and told me their life-changing story.
Some weeks previously, their baby had a high fever and
they went to the hospital in Mosul, in the ISIS controlled
area where they were living. The doctor asked for the name
of their child and they told him, without considering that it
could mean the death penalty for their daughter, given her
Shia name. The doctor recognised that they were not a Sunni
family, and gave the baby an injection. Afterwards, their
child became seriously mentally and physically disabled. I
went to the field hospital with them, and after an examination
the doctors diagnosed the cause of their child’s
disability as a sudden intoxication, with gasoline.”
See more of Sebastian’s incredible and affecting photography
at photo-backhaus.de
Summer 2017
43

Champagne Supernova
Julia Bosski
didn’t have bubbles! I know this business,
so I knew they must have given me some
stuff from an old bottle. I mean, it was a
pretty fancy bar; I couldn’t take it.
When was the last time you found a new
favourite restaurant? Lately Pauly Saal,
because I often go to another bar in Mitte
(Cordobar which is my most beloved place
at the moment). The other night there was
a sommelier there from Pauly Saal. We
started talking and he invited me for lunch
the day after. Great place.
THE LAST
WORD:
JULIA BOSSKI
Chef, business woman and jazz singer
Julia Bosski is the powerhouse behind
Polish Thursday Dinners. As one
of Berlin’s friendliest regular dining events, it
aims to bring the tastes and influences of the
Polish diaspora to the city, but always with
a twist. Here we get a unique insight into
Julia’s psyche with a quick-fire interview.
When was the last time one of your
heroes disappointed you? I don’t get
disappointed easily, let’s drink a shot and
forget it. It will all be fine.
What was the last compliment you received?
That I look like a Japanese warrior.
When was the last time you cried? I’m
that ice queen with a heart of stone. I cried
a few months ago, but only because I was
so hungover that I thought I was gonna die
from being sick. [Laughs]
When was the last time you doubted
yourself? Hm, that happens to me pretty often,
mostly when I’m about to get my period
or when a business deal I was hoping would
succeed didn’t work out. But I always say to
myself that ‘this is life’. Call a friend, go for
some champagne and I’m back in the game.
Viktor Richardsson
When was the last time you were scared?
“Was that the last bottle of champagne?!”
When was the last time you broke the
law? Honey, you’re talking to the queen of
Polish mafia here. [Laughs]
Who was the last person to truly surprise
you? I get surprised by tiny sweet
gestures, like when someone opens a door
for me, or gives me a hand when I get out of
a car, or when my business partner brought
me homemade, Italian honey from his
vacation, or when my flatmate brought me
delicious cakes from her coffee shop. These
are small, beautiful surprises.
What was the last good film you
watched? Woody Allen’s retrospective. I
watched all his movies, and totally loved
the last one, Café Society, but I also recently
saw Godard’s Bande à part. When I watch
his movies I want to be in love and hang
out with my babe, behaving like these
French bohemians. I love Godard.
What was the last good album you
bought? Chet Baker’s best stuff on ten CDs.
What was the last great meal you ate?
I just came back from dinner at Umami,
a Vietnamese place in Prenzlauer Berg. I
had beef with mango stripes on rice, then I
had a matcha cake at a Korean café on the
corner of my street.
When was the last time you sent something
back at a restaurant? I sent back a
glass of champagne, on Valentine’s Day – it
When was the last time you drank too
much? [Laughs] I say to myself every day
‘I have to stop drinking so much.’ The last
time… Friday? I started with whisky cocktails,
next went through champagne, mixed
with wine, then more wine, and at the end
a few more cocktails…
What was the last new recipe you tried
out? Porridge with oat milk, Himalaya salt
and blended banana with some smoked apple
cream, toasted sesame, and homemade
cherry marmalade. And for my last dinner
I made buckwheat sourdough soup – my
own version of traditional polish Żurek.
When was the last time you were on
TV? In January – so lame – but I’m coming
back on air soon! Maybe with something
really geil, like my own TV show.
Let’s see, wish me luck.
Find out when the next Polish Thursday
Dinners event is at facebook.com/
obiadyczwartkoweberlin
LAST ORDERS
Elix Cup
Make a simple syrup of equal parts
sugar and warm water, and set aside
to cool. In a highball glass, muddle a
few fresh mint leaves and a couple of
cucumber slices, then fill with ice. Add
half a shot of fresh lime juice, half a
shot of the simple syrup, and a shot of
vodka, then top up with prosecco.
THIS ISSUE WAS
POWERED BY…
Saltwater, complaining about the
weather, waking up early on Saturday,
breathing, apartment moves, various
kinds of pain, stressing, not stressing,
sunshine, Korean fried chicken.
44 Issue Four

BERLIN’S RICH MUSIC SCENE
AND THE CREATIVE
ENVIRONMENT AT BIMM
BERLIN
CALLED ME TO MOVE FROM
SWEDEN
TO STUDY SONGWRITING.
THE TUTORS ON MY COURSE,
THE SKILLS I’VE DEVELOPED
AND THE FRIENDS THAT I’VE
MET AT BIMM HAVE SHAPED
MY LIFE AND HELPED ME TO
DEVELOP AS AN ARTIST.
THIS PLACE
HAS STOLEN
MY HEART!
‘‘
KAROLINA BEIJER BRONDEN
LUND, SWEDEN
EUROPE’S
MOST CONNECTED
MUSIC COLLEGE
BIMM.CO.UK/BERLIN
Summer 2017
45

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