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"Eine Kurze Geschichte des Autonomen Kultur Zentrums" or "A Little Story of the Autonomen Culture Center" This is the first installment in my little series. I don't know how generally pertinent it may be, but it's about a place and time which I consider formative in my thinking. It may seem odd that a US soldier in a military intelligence battalion becomes a regular at an Autonomen bar in Wuerzburg, Germany, but that's how it happened. I arrived in Germany in January of '87, and spent a long time being aimless in my off-duty hours. Although I spoke German rather well I had not yet found the people I wanted to spend time with, and I avoided other soldiers whenever possible when I saw them in town. Many a time I got away with pretending not to speak English. After several months of this I made friends with a fellow who had been transferred over from the states. We met at some kind of drinking function on the barracks, and then decided to go downtown and look for something to do. This remained a favorite game of ours even after we discovered the AKW. Actually I had occasionally seen flyers for events at the AKW, and even walked by the place before, once or twice. But I was kind of averse to long-haired bearded people at the time, and that's all I saw when I peeped in the windows. I had always figured it for some kind of hippy jazz club and kept right on going. But the night I met Tim, we were both so hard up for amusement that he said to me, "Let's check out that hippy jazz-club place" and in we went. We got beers and pulled up at one of the bars against a wall. I found a little pile of offset print newsletters and started paging through one. The thing was called KULT, and it had a calendar of events some of which were bands playing, one of which was 'Frauenabend' (women's night), others I couldn't tell or can't remember. I brought back a number of Kults that I picked up over the years, but I wish I had that first one. In addition to the calendar there were political articles that I didn't really understand, but that I would learn to with practice. From our stools at the bar we noticed a short-haired blond woman with her nose in a book, but didn't really pay attention to her at the time. She later introduced us to many friends in Wuerzburg. Part of her name is now part of my password. It was a Friday night, one of the two nights a week that they had a dance floor going; and they actually played some good, unpopular music. I had never been in a bar such as this; my ideas about it being a hippy jazz club got quickly swept under the rug. At the time I did not even know what "autonomen" was; like the pun of the bar's name, I sort of figured it out as I went along. They called it AKW for Autonomen Kulturzentrum Wuerzburgs. Little did I know that AKW is also their abbreviation for Nuclear Power Plant; Atom KraftWerk. For a while I had been utterly baffled as to why there was an "anti-AKW movement." So Tim and I had found a home. We hated the Army; they hated the Army. It took no time at all to become accepted there, really, once we got over ourselves. The fact that we always spoke German helped a lot. The AKW was not just a bar, although I call it that because if you walked in off the street that's what you would see. There were two large rooms, one of which was the bar proper, the other of which was usually sealed off by a large sliding door (it had once been a mechanics' garage). This space had the stage, and could be opened up for dance night and bands, or it could be sealed off again for meetings or plays to take place there while the bar part did its normal routine. In addition to this space, they also had part of the building adjoining their rear. It blew my mind when I first went back there; I had always imagined that Kult was written under candlelight, by someone pecking on an old cobweb-encrusted Remington manual typewriter. But the offices maintained by the collective were better equipped than my battalion's headquarters. Computers. Copy machines. Racks and racks of office supplies. There were a few small rooms back there too, usually just a table and chairs. The Wuerzburg Greens (these were Fundi greens, not Realos) met there from week to week, as did the Marxistische Gruppe, and other groups which I can't remember. They had a sizable kitchen as well, as I recall, and on some Sundays they charged admission to a big smorgasbord for brunch. The space officially opened in early 1982, after a particularly unsucessful street festival at an abandoned slaughterhouse near the river. It was decided that an independent venue or space was needed to provide constancy to the politicized elements in Wuerzburg, which up to that time had essentially just seen each other around at demos and in bars. The election of Ronald Reagan is what had engendered all this political sentiment in the first place, or so the story goes. A foundation was formed, and space for rent was hunted up. The AKW in this sense had more in common with the thinking being done in the Midwest at present about collective space than with the squatting culture in Berlin or Hamburg. Those places were romanticized of course, but Wuerzburg is small enough and the social "safety net" extensive enough that working within the existing property structure was more plausible than going outside it. The AKW was even funded in part by some kind of civic grant. I recall an incident where one of the local politicos pointedly asked why an "autonomous" culture center should be given outside money. There were other differences as well; Wuerzburg is a university town, more or less, and the AKW was a little milder in its rhetoric than the more famous places. Also, according to Army intelligence, Wuerzburg is used by violent elements of the German left as a rest-and-relaxation site, so there's not much overt trouble there. How much the AKW people actually had in common with the Autonomen people as a whole, I have not been able to make out. It didn't really interest me at the time. But it seemed that the space had a lot in common with some others I visited, like EX in Berlin, Rote Fabrik in Zurich, and Cafe Normal in Muenchen. I don't know much about the intervening seven years. They pretty much just did their thing, I guess. Tim and I were what they called "Stammgaeste," meaning regulars, but we were not part of the collective as such and did not go to their business meetings, although with hindsight I would have liked to. We spent virtually every Friday and Saturday evening there. During the week I sometimes went to see bands, films, and the occasional speaker. Once I saw Morton Sobel, indicted in the 1950s as one of Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs' co-conspirators, speak on the topic of political prisons in the US. In 1989, there was a celebration of the AKW's Seven-Year anniversary. This seems to have been part of a publicity campaign to find new quarters for the space, since early in the year it had been learned that the original site was scheduled for demolition and gentrification. So another hunt was started. In addition to not having my first-ever copy of Kult, I am also missing the May '89 installment which described part of the history of the AKW, and the search for new quarters. But I will try to recollect it as best I can. Early in the process, they asked the city of Wuerzburg to help them find a suitable property. The city suggested an old harbor building by the water front (Alter Hafen), but the AKW soon found that the Alter Hafen was a historically protected example of a certain rare architecture, and that they would not be able to knock out walls and make other needed modifications. It was a huge building, and it would have been great, but the AKW either rejected it or the city withdrew it, I can't remember which. 1989 was a strange year in Wuerzburg politics, because there was an unusual three-way race for the mayor's office. The SPD and CSU had candidates, of course, but there was also a CSU splinter that decided to run. In the midst of this, finding space for the Autonomen Kultur Zentrum inexplicably became a public campaign issue. Maybe the idea was to cow the collective by incurring some kind of political debt. Or maybe the SPD reached out to them as a reaction to the rightist CSU splinter. At any rate, an old brewery on the other side of the river was finally located. When the residents of that neighborhood found out, they all signed a petition that the AKW not be located there because of the noise associated with bands and so forth. The AKW didn't like it much themselves because the natural lighting was so bad. Memory fails here again. They took either that place or another one nearby. Then the walls closed in. After they had signed the lease and made some other payments, the city informed them they would have to wait for some certain period while permits for beer or whatever were being approved. Beer and music nights were essentially their livelihood, and maybe they got forced out of the music business by the residential location. I don't know what all got thrown at them, it was explained to me in German and I think I didn't exactly understand even at the time, but the result was that the AKW sank under the weight of the various formalities. They literally went broke running the legal gauntlet. The crash came in late 1989 or early 1990, several months after I was back in the US. What's doing in Wuerzburg now? I wish I knew. *sigh* Writing all this down has brought a lot back to me. *sniff* One AKWer had moved back to Nuernberg and was involved in some kind of Mothers' Co-op, last I heard. Another is probably still with his "hardcore blues" band, the Daltons. The last contact I had with Wuerzburg was a letter I got in late 1992 from the woman I mentioned early in the story. She was really into art when I knew her in the past, but now tells that she's considering studying computer science. I wrote back and included my email address but as yet no reply.