50 years of “rockers”: tough guys – culture

“You can’t imagine that anymore, of course,” says Klaus Lemke, while targeting a few of the overbred high earners with their plantation owner gang who have now taken over the university district. “But Munich used to be paradise.”

On a sunny day in early summer, Lemke is sitting on the terrace of a café on Türkenstrasse and doing what nobody else does here: ordering a normal black coffee. The service, accustomed to requests for soy milk foam, looks very irritated. Perhaps also because, as always, he has pulled his peaked cap so low over his face that only Lemke’s very large nose is sticking out.

The reason for the meeting: “Rocker” came out 50 years ago. In the meantime, the film has become a personal world cultural heritage for many and is running in some cinemas in continuous rotation like the “Rocky Horror Picture Show”. It was originally filmed for ZDF and first shown in 1972. In “Rocker” Lemke tells the story of 15-year-old Mark, whose role model is his brother Uli, who is a loafer. When his brother is killed by a pimp in an argument, Mark finds a kind of elective affinity in the Hamburg rocker gang “Bloody Devils” and in their biker boss Gerd a new father figure.

“Every cow farmer here in Germany drives a Mercedes,” is a key sentence in the film

Of course, some smartass could now ask whether there aren’t more important films from the year of upheaval 1972, the history of which could be told on the occasion of the anniversary. What about “The Godfather”? you can hear the film fans shouting angrily. But that would be very boring because Klaus Lemke wouldn’t appear. Because while many filmmakers of the time, above all “The Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola, eventually became more interested in their wineries than in films, it is difficult to imagine Lemke tasting his own Zinfandel.

Not that he doesn’t appreciate a good red wine. Unforgettable is the date in the summer of 2014, when he was shooting in Berlin and ordered the reporter to his favorite Italian restaurant in Mitte. Supposedly because there are always a lot of beautiful women to be found there. Ultimately, however, only he, the reporter and the Berlin waitress were there, who constantly wanted to know “whether the Signori are all doing well”. At that moment, a nice Chianti helped, of course, and Lemke stuck his big nose into it with a sigh.

Otherwise, at the age of 81, he has not succumbed to the development of wine estates. But still the wild dog who was shooting “Rocker” in his early thirties. No German director came closer to the “Easy Rider” feeling of freedom and madness than he did. If you want to be mean, which you sometimes have to do as a film critic, you could summarize the German wild film history of the post-war period as follows:

Nothing.

“Rockers” (1972).

Nothing.

Hence a meeting with Lemke. To clarify the question of how a hardcore Schwabinger by choice came to shoot the film of his life in St. Pauli between leather jackets and pimps. Which brings us to “Fotzen-Ole”. The name should have been at the beginning of this story, because it gave the impetus for “Rocker”. But Lemke, concerned for the well-being of the reporter and his favorite newspaper, warns sternly: “You can’t do that, fat man. People will immediately unsubscribe if you start with Fotzen-Ole. You’ll have to introduce that later in the text. “

So let’s put things in the correct order in terms of film and neighborhood history. Because, according to Lemke, Munich was once paradise, as I said, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, before the idiots came, it was a gross insult for him to be told that Munich wasn’t paradise at all. But Hamburg. And it was Fotzen-Ole’s fault.

This man, who was simply called Ole Jürgens and was a formative member of the rock group “Bloody Devils”, had fallen in love with a girl who played a small role in the musical “Hair” in Hamburg. So the rocker, who had a romantic streak that one would not have guessed from his nickname alone, sat in every performance. And brought flowers. Well, they were stolen. But it’s the gesture that counts.

The rockers had occupied the piano nobile. The worst toilets he’s ever seen, says Lemke

Lemke knows all this because at the time he was in a long-distance relationship with this girl from “Hair”, her name is Christine. And of course that was a problem. Less because he would have insisted on monogamy (“Back then, everyone had several girlfriends!”). But because this Christine, very impressed by the rocker who was courting her, called Lemke in Munich and said: The really tough guys are in Hamburg.

Lemke could have dismissed that as an individual opinion. Hadn’t Iris Berben, his other girlfriend at the time (did we already mention that everyone had several girlfriends at the time?), not shared this opinion almost at the same time? So Iris Berben also said: The really tough guys live in Hamburg.

So Lemke got on the train. In Hamburg he met his girlfriend Christine again in a squatted villa on the Alster. Or his ex-girlfriend Christine, because Fotzen-Ole, as one of the few participants in the early 1970s, didn’t really believe in the multiple girlfriends.

Open detailed view

But that didn’t matter, because Lemke got to know enough new staff in this villa to be able to distract himself from this amorous loss. According to Lemke, influential parts of the RAF and a local drug czar resided there at times. And of course the rockers. The rockers had grabbed the piano nobile. The toilets on the first floor, says Lemke, were the worst he had ever seen in his life.

In any case, it was immediately clear to him that he had to make a film with these rockers. Lemke hates everything that has to do with the classic film business. scripts. casting. location search. permits. He shoots where he is, with the people who are there, until the police come. And if no one is there at the moment, or stupidly only the police, then it just doesn’t shoot. And this real rocker gang was the ideal alternative to the other characters in German film.

Luckily there were just a few editors at ZDF at that stage who were willing to finance this kamikaze action. He got almost 400,000 marks for “Rocker”, says Lemke. A lot of money back then. To calm the editors’ nerves, he graciously wrote them an alibi script to show their bosses. What was in there? “Oh, I don’t know. Something with prefabricated buildings. The main thing is not what happens in the film afterwards.”

C’est la vie: Christine left the rocker and married a polo pal of Prince Charles

The disadvantage of this way of working without real actors: “We were terribly afraid of the rockers. Everyone would have been afraid of them. They came and went when they wanted. If a motorcycle broke down on the way, which happened all the time, because they were all out 500 scrapped bikes were assembled at a time, then the whole gang stood and waited for the thing to get fixed.”

The advantage of this way of working: Scenes that have more life than almost anything that screenwriters can dream up in their writing rooms. The rockers played themselves, Fotzen-Ole also got a small role, and Lemke built his film into their world. He also met the 15-year-old Mark’s actor, Hans-Jürgen Modschiedler, on the street. When Lemke saw him for the first time “with his Prince Eisenherz hairstyle”, he thought of the story for “Rocker” “out of nowhere”.

Many sentences from the film have long been part of cultural history in Hamburg and beyond and are spoken to by fans at screenings. “Straighten up”, for example. There are sentences that just had to be said like “Mercedes drives every cow farmer here in Germany”. And sentences that you have to think about every Monday morning in the weekly conference of the feuilleton: “I’ll buy myself a stove and then we’ll get out of here”.

Open detailed view

Although the bands that Lemke put in the soundtrack had little to do with German sensitivities, the songs of the Rolling Stones and from Led Zeppelin as if they were created in this neighborhood. In one scene, just before his death, Mark’s brother presses 11-6 on the jukebox in a pub, and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (in the version by theme) has never fitted so perfectly into a film before or since.

On June 19, “Rocker” will be shown in 16 Hamburg cinemas as part of the series “A City Sees a Film”. Lemke will be there and present the film. He owes that to the city that gave him this film, because Lemke says that it’s not the director who chooses the film, but the film who chooses the director. Even if it took “about a decade” for the people of Hamburg to accept that a man from Munich, of all people, shot the ultimate Hamburg film.

So now he’s getting back on the train for the anniversary event, five decades after it first aired. A lot has happened since then. Iris Berben became a star. Christine, the girl from “Hair”, left Fotzen-Ole and married a polo friend of Prince Charles. Fotzen-Ole died in a brothel. Lemke can’t remember how, except that nobody was surprised. Some of the “Bloody Devils” went to California and were never seen again. The rest got problems with cocaine (use and sale).

Does he still remember the last day of shooting? “Of course, fat.” After the last take, the rockers just drove away without a word. But one threw his leather jacket over his shoulder. Lemke doesn’t even know who exactly, but it was the ultimate accolade. He wore the jacket every day for two years – then it was stolen from him. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.

Read more episodes of the column “1972: The Year That Remains”. here.