Biography “The Wild Life”: The man who was Uschi Obermaier

It was a thankless job. He would soon regret accepting it. A ghostwriter lives by being fed information. But the woman who was supposed to tell him her life story remained taciturn. “There were immeasurably large blank spots on the terrain of her memory,” is how Claudius Seidl describes the basic problem when writing the autobiography “The Wild Life,” published in 1994. What to do? »So the white spots had to be labeled by the author, and when the book was finished, it sounded less like Uschi Obermaier than like my attempt to write a pop text in the style of the 90s. (…) No wonder that she often didn’t recognize herself in this text.«

It does not matter anyway. Because the book that irritated Uschi Obermaier so much that in 2007 she felt compelled to tell her life again to another ghostwriter (this time under the title: “High Times: My Wild Life”) is the Nick Drake of literature – a masterpiece that would finally be discovered 30 years after its publication.

The only difference is that its author, Claudius Seidl, was already no stranger when “The Wild Life” was published. Together with his colleague Michael Althen at the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and at “Tempo” he had proven that it wasn’t just the cinema that could make you smarter and happier. Sometimes it was enough to read what the reviewer felt about what they had seen. When Seidl wrote about films, his own head became a projection surface and his thoughts switched to widescreen format. His texts were not classic criticisms, but rather digressions. The screen action merely served as a hook to tell the story behind the story. Afterwards you understood the world and sometimes your own life a little better. And because such fundamental things can be explained not only using the example of films, but also using records, books, television programs and art, the “Spiegel” put him in charge of the “Popular Culture” department in 1990. This spring he published the second collection of his feature texts with Edition Tiamat under the title “Incitement to Civil War”.

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Uschi Obermaier seemed to be the ideal conversation partner for Claudius Seidl. Nobody embodied popular culture better (even in the literal sense) than this woman, who captured the imagination of millions as a Kommune 1 member, partner of Rainer Langhans, photo model (for Helmut Newton, among others) and lover of Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had fired. It stood for what had been violently suppressed in Germany’s economic miracle: freedom and self-determination.

Of course, you can also express it in less pathetic terms: Uschi Obermaier lived the life she wanted to live. Most of the girls during the Adenauer and Erhard years were denied this. The career options were housewife or whore. Her own mother never tired of warning young Ursula about the dangers of a dissolute life that would end in the gutter. Maybe because she recognized in her daughter’s lust for life the man who had abandoned her: Uschi’s father.

It is not a new realization that the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and early 1960s was an uptight country in every respect. But reading what this actually meant must have seemed like a story from the Paleolithic to people in 1994. Yes, there was this legendary Schwabing, where as early as 1962 young people had taken the Beastie Boys motto “Fight for your right to party” to heart and fought day-long street battles with the police. But just a few kilometers further – in the Sendling district, where Obermaier spent her childhood and youth – cosmopolitan Munich shrank to lower middle class size.

Uschi Obermaier lived the life she wanted to live.

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These were the years before the sexual revolution and the drugs that came with it. Seidl’s achievement is that he not only describes the omnipresent stuffiness, the oppressive confinement, but also reflects and interprets it. In this way, Uschi Obermaier goes through a metamorphosis. The It Girl (as we would say today) becomes an intellectual. Seidl’s Obermaier knows herself and the world in which she moved better than the real Obermaier.

And when she was finally able to leave this far too small world behind her, there was no stopping her. One wonders how she survived all the pill, champagne and drug excesses that came with living among communards, rock stars and neighborhood bigwigs. And one is not surprised why the descriptions of these years are incomplete. Between the lines, Seidl (representing Obermaier) apologizes for the fact that the memories of the wild life often seem fragmentary: “And every now and then there came a night when there was so much alcohol and speed in the head that afterwards nobody knew whether it was one “It was a good night or a bad night.”

The great freedom is followed by the even greater hangover. When her partner Dieter Bockhorn, the “Prince of St. Pauli,” drove his motorcycle into a truck on New Year’s Eve 1983, it wasn’t just a single life that was buried, but an entire attitude to life. The 80s no longer needed Uschi Obermaier. The afterword is written in the third person – as if an acquaintance had to reassure the readers that Uschi had turned things around after all. A book about the search or addiction to intoxication ends on a rather sobering note.

When “The Wild Life” was published in 1994, sales figures fell short of expectations. Which was understandable. Why read a book about past parties when it was much more exciting to celebrate yourself! They were not aware that the young people of the 90s were reaping the fruits that bon vivants like Uschi Obermaier had sown in the 60s. She probably wouldn’t have been interested either.

Now another 30 years have passed. The “pop text in the style of the 90s” has itself become a contemporary document. Reading it makes you feel strangely sad. Because the coolness and nonchalance with which Claudius Seidl lets Uschi Obermaier talk about sex and drugs and rock’n’roll would no longer be possible today. In the age of neo-bourgeois, the 90s seem further away than the 60s. For this reason alone it is worth picking up the book – as a reminder and reminder of what has been lost.

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