Counterculture: Go to the cities!

FRG 1975: “Jaws” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” are shown in the cinema, Didi Hallervorden’s “Nonstop Nonsense” starts on television, and the charts are topped by Abba (“SOS”), Penny McLean (“Lady Bump”) ) and Udo Jürgens (“Greek Wine”). And the counterculture? Later, Tilman Rossmy from the band The Government will sing in the song “1975”: “You don’t like policemen/you don’t like men in suits/and you hate this whole pig system.” With a similar attitude, Pentecost 1975 in Mainz found the first ” Open Ohr, a culture and music festival that celebrated its 50th birthday this year – organized without a director and on a voluntary basis by an independent project group, which is quite unique.

To this day, it is a non-profit event secured by the progressive parts of local politics and supported by the city of Mainz, with the head of the social affairs department responsible. Even though the CDU has made various efforts to weaken or abolish this always left-wing festival (which failed in 1994), it can no longer avoid recognizing it as a regional brand product that could no longer be invented today.

In the anniversary volume “Who doesn’t dance now”, published by the Open-Ohr Association, the sociologist Detlef Siegfried is quoted: “Don’t let yourself be put off by tomorrow’s revolutionary society, but live now,” that was the motto of many in the mid-70s They were activists when, in continuation of 1968, they liberalized the Federal Republic of Germany from the left and made it more bearable. At the festival, “music should not just be heard, not just consumed, but everything should be questioned from different perspectives,” is how co-founder and radio journalist Tom Schroeder, who died at the end of 2023, summarizes the intention at the time in the book.

“Go to the cities” was the slogan in order to discuss with those “who care about it,” says the singer and youth worker Uli Holzhausen, also a co-founder. The festivals at Waldeck Castle had already taken place before; Critical songwriting had been invented there, but people had stayed very much to themselves: artists, hippies, intellectuals who were more or less similar. When the graphic artist Reinhard Hippen designed the first poster, he came up with the title “Open Ear” instead of “Open Air”, and that wasn’t meant to mean: ear in one ear out the other, but the opposite.

The festivals do not have mottos, but rather topics that are dealt with in a variety of ways. A small selection: “With and without work” (1977), “No one can! What to do?” (1982), “The Stranger, The Stranger, The Stranger” (1983), “The right-wing middle” (2001), “Homeland – what the heck?!” (2016) or “Disposable Human Being” (2017 ). When the Eastern Bloc collapsed, the topic was “One World – Burning” to discuss the “plight and beauty of the failing spaceship Earth.”

The political spectrum of the people who discussed such things ranged from Heiner Geißler to Thomas Ebermann, musically it went from Hannes Wader to Die Toten Hosen and Nina Hagen. There were and are also theaters, cabarets and workshops for 9,000 to 11,000 visitors every year on the grounds of the Mainz Citadel above the city area, where neighbors’ complaints about too much noise are limited.

The very first festival was called “Hits & Antihits”, hit songs were supposed to meet songwriting, Marianne Rosenberg and Peter Horton met Dieter Süverkrüp and Christof Stählin – that didn’t work at all. Reinhard Hippen later called the plan to attract pop fans to such a festival “a pretty stupid idea.”

Much more successful over the years have been the substantive discussions of the general terms “work”, “xenophobia” and “fear”, which Monika Mühlhausen presents as “three quintessentially German themes” in the very clear anniversary publication, which is designed almost like a textbook. She was also a member of the project group in which her first namesake Monika Winhuisen was actually the only woman from 1976 to 1984. Nevertheless, in the 2010s the festival underwent a development from “equality to diversity,” notes journalist Sabine Giehle, so that today the question would be: “How diverse is the project group?”

When asked whether the stage team had developed a special ritual, stage manager Volker Seidler replied: »Not a specific ritual – but always a big bag of sweets. The festival itself is the ritual.«

Open-ear club: Anyone who doesn’t dance now. 50 years of the Open Ohr Festival, Ventil-Verlag, 176 pages, hardcover, €20.