Class of 1987...

Oh yeah, they're celebrating tonight... 25th anniversary of my high school graduation class...

It feels really good, missing that on purpose. There are people from my high school days whom I care about and I stay in touch with them. But there are people from those times, whom I'd rather not want to see again - like a certain arrogant blue-blooded aristocratic side-line member of the von Schwerin family, ultra-conservative on the brink of right-wing... he chose to make fun of my father and his peace movement and anti-racist engagements, even when he knew that my father was hospitalized with his first cardiac and I had to call the paramedics on that morning before going to school...

Seeing that person again might make me lose my good mood and tempt me to go medieval on his aristocratic ass...

Ah, well... browsing the web about my old high school, I found a picture of the teachers from the 1970s... and those people were part of my academic upbringing from 1977 onwards... including our coal mine suburb's protestant church organ player, who was part of a bomber crew in the German Luftwaffe in WW2... he was one of my musics teachers...

Bottom row, 7th from the left: my old musics teacher... the late Heinz Nowak - Top row, 7th from the left: one of my maths teachers... who always called me "Michael", mistaking me for my elder brother (funny, since he was the math genius in our family, not me)... Mr. Wolfgang Wendl, who was famous for world-travelling, partly by bicycle. On the last day of the term, before the summer break, he would show slides from his travels. Most famous: him astride a llama in the Andes, grinning broadly into the camera...

Yep, my high school days were interesting, for sure. One of my arts teachers (Alfred Grimm - a former student of fluxus artist legend Joseph Beuys) is missing on this picture. The other Beuys student (we had two of them at our high school!) is there, hoewever... looking almost like a conservative person, without his trademark shaggy beard, which he grew later... he's in the bottom row, all in white: Karl Angelstorf.

It seems, that Alfred Grimm is not too attached to his days as an arts teacher on my old high school either... in his C.V on his own web site, thers no mention of his teacher's days at all...

Perhaps we're slightly kindred spirits in that respect...