textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp000270.txt

	"Eine Kurze Geschichte des Autonomen Kultur Zentrums"
		or
	"A Little Story of the Autonomen Culture Center"

	This is the first installment in my little series.  I don't
know how generally pertinent it may be,  but it's about a place and
time which I consider formative in my thinking.
	It may seem odd that a US soldier in a military intelligence
battalion becomes a regular at an Autonomen bar in Wuerzburg,
Germany,  but that's how it happened.


	I arrived in Germany in January of '87,  and spent a long time
being aimless in my off-duty hours.  Although I spoke German rather
well I had not yet found the people I wanted to spend time with,  and
I avoided other soldiers whenever possible when I saw them in town.
Many a time I got away with pretending not to speak English.
	After several months of this I made friends with a fellow who
had been transferred over from the states.  We met at some kind of drinking
function on the barracks,  and then decided to go downtown and look
for something to do.  This remained  a favorite game of ours even after we
discovered the AKW.
	Actually I had occasionally seen flyers for events at the AKW,
and even walked by the place before,  once or twice.  But I was kind
of averse to long-haired bearded people at the time,  and that's all I
saw when I peeped in the windows.  I had always figured it for some
kind of hippy jazz club and kept right on going.  But the night I met
Tim,  we were both so hard up for amusement that he said to me,
"Let's check out that hippy jazz-club place" and in we went.
	  We got beers and pulled up at one of the bars against a
wall.  I found a little pile of offset print newsletters and started
paging through one.  The thing was called KULT,  and it had a calendar
of events some of which were bands playing,  one of which was
'Frauenabend' (women's night),  others I couldn't tell or can't
remember.  I brought back a number of Kults that I picked up over the
years,  but I wish I had that first one.  In addition to the calendar
there were political articles that I didn't really understand,  but
that I would learn to with practice.
	From our stools at the bar we noticed a short-haired blond
woman with her nose in a book,  but didn't really pay attention to her
at the time.  She later introduced us to many friends in Wuerzburg.
Part of her name is now part of my password.

	It was a Friday night,  one of the two nights a week that they
had a dance floor going;  and they actually played some good,
unpopular music.  I had never been in a bar such as this;  my ideas
about it being a hippy jazz club got quickly swept under the rug.
	At the time I did not even know what "autonomen" was;  like
the pun of the bar's name,  I sort of figured it out as I went along.
They called it AKW for Autonomen Kulturzentrum Wuerzburgs.  Little did I
know that AKW is also their abbreviation for Nuclear Power Plant;
Atom KraftWerk.  For a while I had been utterly baffled as to why
there was an "anti-AKW movement."

	So Tim and I had found a home.  We hated the Army;  they hated
the Army.  It took no time at all to become accepted there,  really,
once we got over ourselves.  The fact that we always spoke German
helped a lot.  
	The AKW was not just a bar,  although I call it that because
if you walked in off the street that's what you would see.  There were
two large rooms,  one of which was the bar proper,  the other of which
was usually sealed off by a large sliding door (it had once been a
mechanics' garage).   This space had the stage,  and could be opened
up for dance night and bands,  or it could be sealed off again for
meetings or plays to take place there while the bar part did its
normal routine.  
	In addition to this space,  they also had part of the building
adjoining their rear.  It blew my mind when I first went back there;
I had always imagined that Kult was written under candlelight,  by
someone pecking on an old cobweb-encrusted Remington manual
typewriter.  But the offices maintained by the collective were better
equipped than my battalion's headquarters.  Computers.  Copy machines.
Racks and racks of office supplies.  There were a few small rooms back
there too,  usually just a table and chairs.  The Wuerzburg Greens
(these were Fundi greens,  not Realos) met there from week to week,
as did the Marxistische Gruppe,  and other groups which I can't
remember.  They had a sizable kitchen as well,  as I recall,  and on
some Sundays they charged admission to a big smorgasbord for brunch. 


	The space officially opened in early 1982,  after a particularly
unsucessful street festival at an abandoned slaughterhouse near the river.
It was decided that an independent venue or space was needed to
provide constancy to the politicized elements in Wuerzburg,  which up
to that time had essentially just seen each other around at demos and
in bars.  The election of Ronald Reagan is what had engendered all this
political sentiment in the first place,  or so the story goes.
	A foundation was formed,  and space for rent was hunted up.
The AKW in this sense had more in common with the thinking being done
in the Midwest at present about collective space than with the
squatting culture in Berlin or Hamburg.  Those places were
romanticized of course,  but Wuerzburg is small enough and the social
"safety net" extensive enough that working within the existing
property structure was more plausible than going outside it.  
	The AKW was even funded in part by some kind of civic
grant.  I recall an incident where one of the local politicos
pointedly asked why an "autonomous" culture center should be given
outside money.
	There were other differences as well;  Wuerzburg is a
university town,  more or less,  and the AKW was a little milder in
its rhetoric than the more famous places.  Also,  according to Army
intelligence,  Wuerzburg is used by violent elements of the German
left as a rest-and-relaxation  site,  so there's not much overt
trouble there.  
	   How much the AKW people actually had in common with
the Autonomen people as a whole,  I have not been able to make out.
It didn't really interest me at the time.  But it seemed that the
space had a lot in common with some others I visited,  like EX in
Berlin,  Rote Fabrik in Zurich,  and Cafe Normal in Muenchen.

	I don't know much about the intervening seven years.  They
pretty much just did their thing,  I guess.  Tim and I were what they
called "Stammgaeste,"  meaning regulars,  but we were not part of the
collective as such and did not go to their business meetings,
although with hindsight I would have liked to.  We spent virtually every
Friday and Saturday evening there.  During the week I sometimes went
to see bands,  films,  and the occasional speaker.  Once I saw Morton
Sobel,  indicted in the 1950s as one of Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs'
co-conspirators,  speak on the topic of political prisons in the US.
	In 1989,  there was a celebration of the AKW's Seven-Year
anniversary.  This seems to have been part of a publicity campaign to
find new quarters for the space,  since early in the year it had
been learned that the original site was scheduled for demolition and
gentrification.  
	So another hunt was started.  In addition to not
having my first-ever copy of Kult,  I am also missing the May '89
installment which described part of the history of the AKW,  and the
search for new quarters.  But I will try to recollect it as best I can.
	Early in the process,  they asked the city of Wuerzburg to
help them find a suitable property.  The city suggested an old
harbor building by the water front (Alter Hafen),  but the AKW soon found
that the Alter Hafen was a historically protected example of a certain
rare architecture,  and that they would not be able to knock out walls
and make other needed modifications.  It was a huge building,  and it
would have been great,  but the AKW either rejected it or the city
withdrew it,  I can't remember which.  
	1989 was a strange year in Wuerzburg politics,  because there
was an unusual three-way race for the mayor's office.  The SPD
and CSU had candidates,  of course,  but there was also a CSU splinter that
decided to run.   In the midst of this,  finding space for the
Autonomen Kultur Zentrum inexplicably became a public campaign issue.
Maybe the idea was to cow the collective by incurring some kind of
political debt.  Or maybe the SPD reached out to them as a reaction to
the rightist CSU splinter.
	At any rate,  an old brewery on the other side of the river
was finally located.  When the residents of that neighborhood found
out,  they all signed a petition that the AKW not be located there
because of the noise associated with bands and so forth.  The AKW
didn't like it much themselves because the natural lighting was so
bad.  	
	Memory fails here again.  They took either that place or
another one nearby.  Then the walls closed in.
	After they had signed the lease and made some other payments,
the city informed them they would have to wait for some certain
period while permits for beer or whatever were being approved.  Beer
and music nights were essentially their livelihood,  and maybe they
got forced out of the music business by the residential location.  I
don't know what all got thrown at them,  it was explained to me in
German and I think I didn't exactly understand even at the time,  but
the result was that the AKW sank under the weight of the various
formalities.  They literally went broke running the legal gauntlet.
The crash came in late 1989 or early 1990,  several months after I was
back in the US.  


	What's doing in Wuerzburg now?  I wish I knew.  *sigh*
Writing all this down has brought a lot back to me. *sniff*  One AKWer
had moved back to Nuernberg and was involved in some kind of Mothers'
Co-op,  last I heard.  Another is probably still with his "hardcore
blues" band,  the Daltons.
	The last contact I had with Wuerzburg was a letter I got in
late 1992 from the woman I mentioned early in the story.  She was
really into art when I knew her in the past,  but now tells that she's 
considering studying computer science.  I wrote back and included my
email address but as yet no reply.