In 1970 I left Stellenbosch University after a failed attempt to get an Art degree. I blamed Apartheid for this, as a lot of people still do for their failures. I married Lynn Squires to satisfy the conservative society that frowned on a young couple living together. I wanted to study photography, but there was not a single school of this nature on the African continent.
After much research, I was accepted at the second oldest Photographic school in the world, The Bavarian State Institute of Photography, in Munich, Germany. (The oldest one is in Vienna). There were over 300 applications for the first year course. I was accepted under ‘Foreigners Clause’, where the school authorities felt that a 3 % intake of foreigners would enhance the competitiveness amongst German students. Coming from a life of leisure in South Africa and starting a new one in Germany came as a huge shock. I immediately learnt when to work and when to play. You see —- bloody Apartheid, once again.
One should remember that Germany in the early 70’s was alive with radical leftwing student politics, against most forms of authoritarianism. The darker face of this radicalism exploded in the formation of the Bader-Meinhoff and Red September terrorist movements. Meanwhile, back in the Munich photographic School, the few foreign students worked harder than the Germans. I soon became best friends with Razamik Arezooian from Persia. We also started to play harder than all the rest. Beneath Razamik’s dark, handsome façade lay the features of a revolutionary. He was born Armenian and hated everyone who had stolen his country from him: the Turks, the Iranians and the Russians. In the many famous Munich bars in Schwabing, we posed as freedom fighters: him for the liberation of the people of Armenia and me, the liberator of the oppressed peoples of South Africa. We were both so suave and swashbuckling cool. In these bars we were always surrounded by a large group of students. We spoke about our respective countries with passion and dramatic expressions in broken German. They lapped it up with hungry ears whilst we swallowed at length of the beer that always appeared in front of us. Viva-liberation-Bla-bla-bla-viva-viva-glug-glug-glug-viva-viva-bla-bla-bla.
During the day, Razamik and myself sometimes travelled into the Bavarian countryside to photograph landscapes. One night we had a particularly successful liberation fight in a student bar not far from our school. We had the audience gripped, frothing at the mouth and hanging from our lips, which of course made them extremely dry. In a weird way, we loved the fact that the young Germans were buying us foreigners so much beer. The next morning, with my head as thick as my parched lips, there was a ring at the door. It was the Armenian liberation fighter, also with a thick head and swollen lips. I presumed that he had enjoyed more than just beer, looking at the grin in his eyes. “ Let’s go and take some landscape photographs”, he said. I stumbled outside and looked up at the sky, which appeared as grey and thick as our heads. I agreed, as one doesn’t argue with an Armenian revolutionary, with his camera slung over his shoulder like a Kalashnikov.
This was the start to one of the most significant incidents in my life. It still to this day brings a grin to my eyes. First we travelled south on the U-Bahn, the Munich underground. Then above ground on the S-Bahn to the end station called Neu-Perlach. It was morning rush hour and every Fritz, Hans and Gisela were coming in to work. All of them were dressed in morbid colours. This was the advancement of the grey working masses into the city to earn their daily “Brot.” Each one on the train was locked into their darkened cubicle of existence. The mood was one of sombre reluctance, mixed with a pessimistic veneer of acceptance. Doomsday seemed close at hand. Except for the grin in our eyes, humour had fled the packed carriages to Transylvania, or even further. “Shit” I said. ”Rкакаться”, Razamik answered. (This meant shit in Russian).
Once above ground, the landscape and villages slipped by under a veil of dark grey so intensely dismal that I feared some calamity approaching. Finally we reached our end destination of Neu-Perlach. This city of grey high-rise flats had sprung up amongst the rolling hills of Bavaria. Suddenly in the late fifties, it had risen from the earth, a demented landscape of human existence – little grey boxes stacked on each other in front of leaden grey skies that held no birds, not even crows. We just stood there and stared, forlorn, two lonely foreigners surrounded by a deathly greyness. Never before, had we looked at such ugliness. A conveyer belt of people trudged past us like grey, ugly robots. The eyes of the photographer should reflect his surroundings. We had both lost the grin in our eyes. For a while we staggered around bewildered by our surroundings, blinded not by light but by a terrible greyness. This was the eye of the storm —- the urban holocaust.
We dragged ourselves to what seemed like a central plain or square. Huge masonry structures struggled upwards in tortured grey. Then, almost together we saw it. On the greyest of grey buildings, amongst a jungle of grey cement, someone had painted in giant red paint —– ‘Warum isst die Welt so schön?’ (Why is the world so beautiful?). Slowly, the grin returned to our eyes, then a smile developed around our dry lips, then we giggled, and then burst into a full throttled laugh. It became so loud that the grey people cringed in fright and our laughter echoed up from the buildings and away to places where the fields were still wide and green.
