Cool Colonia! How the spirit of the 1980s continues to define the city today

Literary critic Gisa Funk and literary scholar Gregor Schwering are the authors of a book about the subcultures that existed in Cologne in the 1980s. In our interview, they talk about the “spirit of Cologne”, Joy Division, SPEX, punk and why the heyday of subculture isn’t actually over in Cologne.

From 1980 to 1995, Cologne was an undisputed international hot spot. Artists came from as far away as New York to seek inspiration from the spirit that pervaded the city. Why here of all places?

GREGOR SCHWERING: The Rhineland region has a long tradition of art collection and wealthy collectors always create a conducive climate for up-and-coming artists. The art boom in the 1980s played a major part too. Famed gallery owner Max Hetzler came to Cologne and Martin Kippenberger followed in 1982. An “art bridge” developed between New York and Cologne. In the mid-80s, there was huge demand in the US for the works of the Junge Wilde artists Kippenberger, Oehlen, Büttner and Dahn. Any collector worthy of the name had to come to Cologne. The trend didn’t appear out of nowhere though – it was a continuation of a tradition that began in the 1960s and 70s with Buthe, Klauke, Richter and Polke. But the 80s saw a significant boost in demand.

A Bohemian city needs a certain tolerance towards dreamers. That tolerance existed back then and it still does today. With a history stretching back 2,000 years, the locals tend to think fate’s on their side.

Gisa Funck

GISA FUNCK: I think it’s a combination of several factors that still hold true today: the Art Cologne fair, Museum Ludwig and the proximity to Düsseldorf’s art academy. Another aspect back then was that the other big cities simply weren’t as interesting. People thought Hamburg was arrogant and Munich was cosy but miles away from anything else, down in the south. Cologne’s really convenient for gallery owners to get too. Paris is four hours away on the ICE train and London is one hour by plane.

SCHWERING: I was in Brussels recently. It’s two hours by car. Cologne definitely benefited from the fact that lots of things were happening at the same time. An incredibly innovative underground techno scene was emerging in Cologne at that point. The “sound of Cologne”, developed by Cologne artists such as Michael Meyer, Jürgen Paape, Reinhard and Wolfgang Voigt and Jörg Burger, became a global techno trend in the early 1990s. At the same time, SPEX rose to become West Germany’s main pop magazine under editor-in-chief Diedrich Deiderichsen.

SPEX started off as a fun project in a garage in the Belgian Quarter. The copywriters’ style revolutionised how feature writers cover pop and contemporary culture. In the early days, it was all about punk. Mr Schwering, you were in the audience at a legendary Joy Division concert in the basement of the Protestant Christuskirche church in 1980…

SCHWERING: That was what you call a punk concert. Though, nowadays, Joy Division are considered more post-punk. Back then, they were still one of a number of punk bands that played in Cologne. The gig was in the crypt. It was hot, cramped and there was no stage. They performed “No Love Lost” and songs like “Isolation” and a punk rendition of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. After, it was clear to me we’d seen a band that was different to all the others. They had to stop the performance because the singer, Ian Curtis, had an epileptic fit.

Different groups frequented the same bars back then: punks, skins, rockers, artists. They all hung out in places like Sixpack or Blue Shell.

SCHWERING: Yes, it really was like that. You could meet all of them at Sixpack. I used to go there a lot and I had a few run-ins too. Brawls were a regular occurrence. But you could still talk to everyone. Even the skinheads or at least the ones who hadn’t become radically right-wing yet.

Kippenberger, Diederichsen, Ralf Niemczyk, Peter Bömmels, Marcel Beyer: when you read those names, it seems half of the cultural elite of the time was at a bar in Cologne.

SCHWERING: All of them were just starting out. Kippenberger was about to make it big and he had this charming way of just chatting non-stop. Diederichsen was often to be found at the bar at Sixpack and you just nodded at each other. You might exchange a few words if the opportunity arose. I knew who he was, obviously, but it wasn’t important. I used to enjoy talking to Marcel Beyer, whom I knew from the Kölner Autorenwerkstatt writers’ group. Back then, he was touring Cologne with his Dadaist project, “Postmodern Talking”. Today, he’s one of Germany’s best-known authors.

Did the subcultures exist alongside each other or were there overlaps?

SCHWERING: There was quite a lot of intermixing, actually. Between 1980 and 1987, the old Stollwerck chocolate factory in the southern part of the city was a focal point for Cologne subculture. On the top floor, there’d be CAN drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, rehearsing with his band, Dunkelziffer, and Hellmut Zerlett rehearsing with Unknown Cases. Downstairs, there was a punk/new wave basement. Jörg Burger and Wolfgang Voigt met there at the beginning of the 1908s because their rehearsal rooms were next to each other. They went on to co-found the Kompakt label. In fact, not only did the subcultures intermix – that mixing led to something new, Cologne’s special techno sound. Kompakt is a product of that Stollwerck scene too.

Cologne is a techno mecca for fans around the world.

Gregor Schwering

You’ve explored the scene from a critical angle…

FUNCK: Something people tend not to mention is the sexism that existed back then. SPEX used to print readers’ letters without commenting on them – even if they were extremely abusive towards female editors, of which there were only a few at SPEX. We have to be quite clear on the fact that the scene back then exhibited a level of misogyny that wouldn’t be tolerated nowadays.

The title of your book translates roughly as “We were cheerful no-hopers”. When you meet the people who put Cologne on the map as a hot spot of the international art scene, that seems a little modest. How did the title come about?

FUNCK: It was a quote, given to us by Peter Bömmels, who was part of the Mühlheimer Freiheit group of artists and co-founded SPEX. It was originally from Peter Iden, a left-wing art critic for the F.A.Z. newspaper, who was writing about the group’s intense paintings. Mülheimer Freiheit weren’t about artistic virtuosity, they were about punk’s anarchic energy, a do-it-yourself mentality and amateurism. So the no-hoper label was really an accolade. And Bömmels and the rest of them saw it that way too.

SCHWERING: It was 1980 and it was a watershed moment. Punk was on the rise. In fact, everyone we interviewed for the book, was influenced by it – not just the Mühlheimer Freiheit group but also the people whose Kompakt label had a defining impact on techno later and, of course, the writers from SPEX. When they started out, they weren’t journalists in the conventional sense; they were just people who took the initiative and got things going.

What’s left of that era?

FUNCK: I think there are two factors that were key back then and still are today. First, everything’s doable by foot so you bump into people all the time. Bohemianism requires a certain cosiness and that still exists today. And second, in Cologne we’re tolerant of people who don’t succeed, who are crazier than the rest of us and who like to dream.