It feels like a Munich fairy tale from a good, old, distant time: an hour in the city museum makes you euphoric, memories of the Atomic Cafe and long nights are awakened.
Just in time for the turn of the year you need a decent boost of emotions, a little more ecstasy in life. One would like to stand next to oneself, no longer sit and wait, but laugh and dance – and certainly not go to bed at 10:15 p.m. due to the lack of alternatives. Maybe you should zap straight into the year 2023. Or better to go back to the time when you could celebrate with others as if there was no tomorrow? A visit to the city museum in the “Night” exhibition can work wonders. But be careful: it’s better to take a few handkerchiefs with you, because some visitors are so moved by a walk in their own past that they cry.
First you step through two metal doors with peepholes and stand in a familiar setting. Everything shimmers reddish, also the glitter curtain is back, the shell chairs and the lava lamps, the lonely column to support if necessary and the worn bar stools, the old Gemini spacesuit and the small space age collection behind glass. This is a piece of sparkling Munich city history, memories of the Atomic Cafe, which was handled in 2015 and kept in its remnants by lovers.
But can it really be true that in Neuturmstrasse 5, across from an ugly parking garage, you have unfortunately spent a much too small part of your adult life, with some Britpoppers on the guitar and songs like “Fuck Forever” by the Babyshambles, which they do something in the city museum play further back in a kind of sound bath? It feels like a Munich fairy tale from good, old, distant times.
The intoxicant memory works
Oh, when you visit this fantastic exhibition for the second and third time, you want to jump straight into the time machine and experience all of these Munich clubs, which are now sadly closed as a pandemic or which have long since fallen victim to a luxury renovation, in full bloom. You want to feel an adrenaline rush in a flash, take off on the dance floor in Paradiso and succumb to the retro charm in Pimpernel, you would then even fly back a little further, for example to the registry, to the Babalu or the bongo bar, even to the Pacha , where the day and night philosopher Michi Kern, who was already yogic at that time, stood at the entrance, as guardian of the double cherry.
Now, after just under an hour in the city museum, one is slightly euphoric, the intoxicant memory has its effect. You step out into the rain exhilarated. It may be that at some point it will be like we just experienced in the storm of nostalgia, that the clubs open again and life takes place live – and then we never, never go to bed again at 10.15 p.m.