New Frankfurt School: Anna Poth: My favorite shameface

When I came to Frankfurt am Main to the “Titanic” in June 1986 as the first of four Bielefeld editors of the fanzine “Dreck” to begin my three-month traineeship, the atmosphere there was pretty poisonous. The then 27-year-old editor-in-chief Jörg Metes – the youngest boss to date – was not only completely overwhelmed by his task, but was also hopelessly at odds with the rest of the editorial team, especially with the three Hamburgers Richard Kähler, Hans Werner Saalfeld and Hans Kantereit. Conversely, they also made no secret of their dislike for Metes. Even the illustrator Stefan Mittag, who Metes flew in from West Berlin for some money – among other things, got him an apartment and paid for the move – quickly turned away from his sponsor and returned to Berlin a few months later because he in the editorial office could no longer stand it.

I was looking forward to working on the Titanic; Wasn’t I finally where I had always wanted to be? But the real atmosphere in the attic of Frankfurt’s Brönnerstrasse depressed me. In my diary I wrote down the resigned sentence that Richard Kähler said to me one afternoon: “There are no people here, only colleagues.” I also found it surprising how middle-class the so-called old people of the New Frankfurt School behaved. I came from an undogmatically left-wing milieu in Bielefeld and had expected that my idols would lead at least as unconventional a bohemian life as they drew and wrote. But I met people in their “prime” who lived in large Wilhelminian-style apartments, owned them themselves, were well acquainted with the Frankfurt dignitaries and some of them even met me.

At that time I lived temporarily in a barely furnished attic apartment at Neuhaußstrasse 12 that Robert Gernhardt had converted for himself. He would later use it as a studio, but in the summer of 1986 it was still empty, partly because Robert lived elsewhere in Frankfurt. There was a bed in which I slept and a magnificent fitted kitchen, but that was it. Chlodwig Poth lived with Anna in the house opposite. I hardly knew anything private about the two of them, not even whether they were even married, because Clovis had children, but not with her.

But I wouldn’t find out the exact details until a few weeks later. One morning in the early summer of 1986, Anna Poth left her house on Neuhaußstrasse at the same time as me. I greeted her briefly and then wanted to quickly go to the Holzhausenstrasse subway station to take the train to my depressing workplace. Despite the wonderful weather, I was in such a bad mood that I didn’t want any company on the way. But Anna didn’t let up. »Oh, you always get on at Holzhausenstrasse. Just like me. Sure: the Miquel/Adickesallee station is perhaps a few meters closer. But I hate going in any direction other than the one I need to go, even if it’s faster.” She had me with that remark. I have exactly the same quirk, which on closer inspection is quite irrational.

My mood immediately brightened and we both chatted quite happily with each other on the few hundred meters to the Holzhausenstrasse subway station. Anna didn’t care at all that I was a nobody from Bielefeld at that point, and I was happy that someone here finally treated me as – yes, let’s just write it down, even if it sounds a bit trite – as a human being and not as colleagues.

It didn’t take long after this first encounter until I visited the Poths over there more often and learned almost everything about the funny couple. How they both met in the “Pardon” editorial office, where she worked as a secretary, and soon met, even though they were married, in a secret love nest on Bergerstrasse. That they both later divorced their respective spouses and that now, of course, they had been married for a long time.

Even later, when they were thrown out of their rented apartment and found a last place to stay in an old school in Sossenheim, I was always happy to be their guest. At all of their parties it was relaxed and informal, which was contributed not only by Clovis’s good weed, but also by Anna’s Hessian shameface. She was happy to wipe her husband’s lips when he muttered a steep thesis into his long beard. I loved the mock fights between the two, because I also knew that despite or perhaps because of it, Anna and Clovis loved each other hotly and deeply until the end. For me they were the dream couple of the New Frankfurt School, and Anna probably contributed a little more to that than Clovis.

I even got along so well with Anna and Chlodwig that I went on a short vacation to Amsterdam with them and Achim Greser in June 1989, shortly after I started as a real editor at “Titanic.” Unfortunately, we lost touch when I went to East Asia in 2003. Clovis died a short time later, in July 2004. Anna died this week at the incredible age of 100. I had always planned to visit her at least once more, and when she celebrated her 100th birthday last November, I thought to myself: You still have time. Anna is so robust, she will outlive us all.

I am very sad that this was a mistake.