+++AUSVERKAUFT +++ Wir waren hochgemute Nichtskönner

The intoxicating years of Cologne's subculture 1980 to 1995

Gisa Funck and Gregor Schwering in conversation with Ralf Niemczyk

Today, creative artists flock to Berlin in droves, but in the 1980s and 1990s, the undisputed center of the German art and culture scene was somewhere else entirely: Cologne.

It was here that a whole new kind of music journalism came to the fore in the form of SPEX, whose cultural studies analyses and steep theses were penned 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 from that 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.

Gisa Alexandra Funck, born in 1968, lives in Cologne and works as a literary critic and author for Deutschlandfunk and WDR. Before that, she worked for many years as a feature writer for various newspapers(FAZ, SZ, Tagespiegel, taz) and was Denis Scheck's assistant on the ARD literary program"Druckfrisch". Her book "Echt fertig - Tagebuch einer Examenskandidatin", became a longseller.

Gregor Schwering, born in 1962, lives in Cologne and attended a Joy Division concert there in 1980. In the mid-1990s, he was head of the Cologne Authors' Workshop and worked as a journalist and for various Cologne galleries. Today he works as a literary and media scholar at the University of Bochum.

Ralf Niemczyk was born in Cologne in 1962. As a journalist, he writes about music, pop culture, travel and occasionally sport. He is a writer for the German edition of Rolling Stone and works for journals, magazines and the Goethe Institute. From 1985 to 1996 he was co-editor of the pop magazine SPEX. He has also been involved in various radio and television projects, such as the development of the TV music magazine"Lost in Music".