Dandy-Pädagogik – Julian Dax: Small Town Teacher

The idea of ​​the resurrection is a religious idea. It is widespread and popular because it takes away the fear of their own disappearance. According to the lexicon, this means the “awakening of the deceased after or out of death”. Now the smarter among us know, so far nobody has succeeded. The dual concept of life/death is simple and not very mysterious: who breathes, lives, and whoever does that one day dies. Hopp or top. We have to cede at some point so that the following also get a chance.

But in one point we can outsmart death: we, which are still breathing (before it caught us soon), can remind you of the deceased. In this way, we show them respect for who they were and what they did during their lifetime. And bring them back to life by keeping them from being forgotten. Be it only for the short moment you need to read a newspaper page.

I would like to remind you of one of my former teachers, whom I liked very much and who died four years ago, in April 2021. According to the funeral notice, which appeared in the local newspaper of the area in which I once went to school, he turned 72. His name was Julian Dax. A not exactly everyday name – for a person who stands out of that of everyday life.

In the first half of the 1980s, when he was my German and English teacher for two or three years, both the student body and his colleagues presumably perceived him as what one murdered a “dazzling personality”. Already his external appearance fell out of the frame, one looks at the time and place of your work at the time. The place was the most dreary Baden-Württemberg province; The time was the dark years of the FRG, in which the aging of Nazis still sat in the institutions; Even the Prime Minister, who had ruled the bleak region in southern Germany from 1966 to 1978, was a former Nazi Marin judgment.

In a memorable presentation, Mr. Dax, again, entered the classroom in a memorable presentation: tight red lederhosen, white leather tie, exotically patterned shirt and boots with paragraphs that seemed to come directly from the glam rock universe. However, the elevator did not seem to be tied, everything was perfectly coordinated and tasty and combined with carelessly. The shirt was ironed, the jacket was sitting correctly. Mr. Dax tolerated sloppiness and inattentiveness neither with himself nor with his students.

There has been an exquisite as an idiosyncratic wardrobe over the years in which one looked at your meaning for fashion and style. I still know that a snake leather sako, a snow -white leather jacket and pants with leopard patterns also counted. Pieces of clothing that looked like he had just bought them in the Carnaby Street in London. And who had never been seen in Swabia at the time, except maybe on television on people who appeared in Manfred Sexauer’s pop show »Musik-Laden«.

Dax had voluminous dark brown hair, which was slightly wavy and that he wore strictly backwards like a kind of indestructible helmet. In the 70s, his hair was said to have been almost shoulder long, but after the new wave and post-punk era, they became shorter. On his pocket calendar, which was on the teacher desk, there was a sticker on which the cover photo of the band The Police’s debut album was shown: “Outlandos d’Amour”.

One could have thought: this is the man who invented pop. And in fact he was a kind of “man fell from heaven” for us, in the middle of this desolate region, which consisted of potato fields and was populated by fascist pantheres. He was the forgotten German stepbrother of David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, whom it had ended up with a Swabian high school as a study council. A glamorous, almost unreal figure, whose dandy -like appearance did not really want to fit the elegant reluctance and gentle rigor, which he used to show in class or in conversation with his students.

Dax was also a film enthusiast, which, as can be seen in the blog of another film lover, was also “preferred to attend the midday performances at the time”. Once he was even seen on television, as a candidate of the then popular quiz show “Do you know cinema?”, But he lost and was not allowed to come back in the following broadcast.

Of course, the school newspaper at some point printed an interview with him, the pop star of the teacher room, whose flamboyant’s appearance made him the preferred object of the curiosity of the students. I still remember some of his answers today: He asked that he stated that he houses about 3,000 long -playing plates in his apartment. He seemed to buy her every week in a dozen. He appreciates, he said, moreover the newer science fiction literature: Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov.

A short time later he regularly wrote record tips for the school newspaper and recommended new albums from Devo, the B-52S, the Cars or Roxy Music. Every few months you could see on the pin boards in the schoolaula with ziped purposes attached DIN-A4 leaves, on which he had listed alphabetically-from Blue Öyster Cult Zappa-his LPS no longer required, all in a new condition that he offered for eight or nine marks each for sale.

He did not deny his passion for the cinema, for advanced pop music, contemporary pop culture as a whole, but carried them into his lessons: for example, he had our favorite plates brought with us, which was then played on a turntable in front of the class; Everyone should – in English – give five or six sentences to the music they have chosen. He made us known to us with films such as “Quadrophenia” and the so-called rock opera “Tommy” by The WHO or let us translate lyrics. I mean: which teacher already played a concept album of the kinks in English 40 years ago in English lessons, which is about power, hierarchy and authoritarian education, and together with them interpreted their song “Headmaster”, whose last verses are: “Headmaster Don’t BE I BEG YOU,/ I know that i’VE let you down./ Headmaster SPARE ME I BEG YOU,/ Don’t make me take my trousers down. «

There are some traces of Mr. Dax on the Internet. A few photos that show him in the presence of friends in the 1970s: in front of a head shop (“Forbidden Fruit”) in the London Portobello Road, with Bluejeans and Rolling-Stones-T-shirt in front of a record business, in the audience at a status quo concert. In a photo from 1976, he, marked as a “translator”, is a participant in an interview with the band Genesis. A chat message from 2019 shows that, in order to be present at the interview “in Zurich” at the interview with a friend of a friend, he had “jeopardized his” civil servant status as a teacher “because he did not go into school.

At that time Julian Dax taught his students much more than the teaching material. In his own way, he was a guide, the one who was receptive to the cultural wasteland and the conformism of the backwood existence and showed them that a cosmos exists beyond “Create, Create, Häusle Bau” and Sunday visits: the music, the cinema, literature, art. As a thank you for this, I wanted to revive him in this small text.