#munich again

I miss this place.

Also read this monstrous post I wrote 10 months ago

I take a little bit of time off of my paid holidays (that’s such a new and welcome concept) to look back on the last few years of my Munich adventure. In a way, I think my journey reflects a reality that is bigger than myself – for example, the number of Clubs in Munich got cut in half in the last five years. In the same time frame, my excitement at discovering great artists working together in a vibrant scene (once penned the city of hard choices by yours truly) turned into delusion and apathy. And I had been warned about it from Day 1 by the artists of the Munich subculture.

This learning process, which makes me now say back “Yes, you’ve been right all along,” helped me really understand why the different constellations of the Munich Scene work the way they do and somehow I became one of its members, instead of one of its curators.

This is why in the following few pages, I write about the personal (Part 1 : From fanaticism to apathy), I jump to the community (Part 2: The Munich Underground Sound in the last decade), to politics (Part 3: Autopsy of a City™).

November has always been an important month for Munich Again. November 22nd 2014 is when i published a picture of me on my blog for the first time, and got viral. On November 25th, I changed my Tumblr name from “thequeenston” to “munichagain”, and it marks the moment I “professionalized“ my blog. It was not a typical fan blog anymore. It was content-oriented. For my readership. Less than a month later I was interviewed on German radio. This period was the peak of the obsession, fueled by playful nerds overseas, that found the whole ordeal quite funny and refreshing.

A year later, in November 2015, I came to Munich for three months, with an empty credit card and a lot of wounds to heal. I started that trip with the idea that I would write the whole time, make a live-in-the-city blog about the nightlife, use my “fame” to promote unknown bands, and so on. Little did I know, I would get too close and personal. The creative residency lasted for a good month, and after, it was writer’s block. I got caught in the trap of the subculture, which is : Keep it to yourself, because anyway the only people it interests are those that were there. And if you missed the thing, you’re at fault. It’s a VIP thing, you know.

November 2016 : I moved to Munich. With even more wounds to heal as the year before, some of them raw and deep. I came over this time around with a loaded credit card. I still hadn’t managed to get back on my feet after the last two trips (yeah I did a quickie to Germany in July too). I came ill-prepared, and relied on the kindness and desire to help of people close to me. I still do actually. But I understand much more about the structures of my new country now, and how to survive in them.

In November 2017, after nearly a year of weekly bookings in Rote Sonne, everything is once again uncertain : the concert series are not viable anymore. To have weekly underground booking in a techno club sounded like a idealistic avenue, and it was. To bring ideals to completion, one needs a lot of money. Talking about money, I was still not allowed to work. And even if my German was getting better, I still could not form full sentences. Oh, and I stopped smoking. A year of pushing away pain, and keeping anxiety under control, because it’s still full-blown survival mode.

We are now five years later, in November 2018. I just found a full-time job in Germany. My German is ok, my financial situation is less of a catastrophe and more of a work-in-progress. For the first time since what feels like two hundred years, I feel lighter. There’s solutions ahead. And beauty. And I finally decided to end a three years long Schreibblockade by committing myself to put down this whole story on paper. Because an enormous part of it is still untold.