Lesung & Gespräch mit Gisa Funck und Gregor Schwering

In the organizer's words:

READING & TALK WITH THE AUTHORS GISA FUNCK & GREGOR SCHWERING ABOUT THE BOOK "WIR WAREN HOCHGEMUTE NICHTSKÖNNER" - DIE RAUSCHHAFTEN JAHRE DER KÖLNER SUBKULTUR 1980-1995

The book:
Today, creative artists flock to Berlin in droves, but in the 80s and 90s, the undisputed center of the German art and culture scene was somewhere else entirely: Cologne.

The starting signal for Cologne's rise came on January 15, 1980, when the unknown British band Joy Division played at the Basement. Peter Bömmels, a member of the artist group "Mühlheimer Freiheit", was so impressed by this new sound that he founded the magazine SPEX shortly afterwards with seven of his comrades-in-arms.

Here, a whole new kind of music journalism made its voice heard, whose cultural studies analyses and steep theses were conceived at night at the same bar counters where the later founders of the techno label Kompakt stood at the same time, while New York artists and the heads of the legendary Autorenwerkstatt got drunk next door. The whole city shimmered with creative energy, and while the fate of the government was being decided just a few kilometers away, the cultural metropolis of Cologne shone far beyond the borders of the Rhineland for around 15 years.

Gisa Funck and Gregor Schwering met people who were involved at the time. They collected stories, studied contemporary documents and dug into their own memories. Their book is a portrait of a bygone era and the last pre-digital bohemia.