It’s so exasperating that it’s funny again. This is often the case with Thomas Spitzer. This is this Austrian who stayed in a hotel at the New Munich Trade Fair on July 8, 2005, although staying here wouldn’t be a poetically sufficient description for him. “The hotel has the Tetra Pack charm of a sports hotel in Lower Austria called ‘Tennisfarm – Ternitz’, or something like that,” he writes. So while he thinks up punishments that will prevent the building’s architect and decorator from working in the future, he draws himself.
The man draws himself standing “naked” in front of the hotel room mirror and drawing himself with a hawk’s gaze. He can do it, he was a graphic artist in the early 1970s and then studied art in Vienna, where he became acquainted with the local creative scene and founded a wild rock cabaret group called first general uncertainty founded, which was to survive lyrically and graphically for five decades from Spitzer’s sharp pen. They were the comical anti-heroes of the nation, even “out there” with their German neighbors. The laughter about “Prince Charming” or the “Ba-ba-bank robbery” drowned out Spitzer’s laments.
Things were particularly bad around 2005. His sweetheart had separated. “Up until then I had never been abandoned. I had to learn: the most important exercise, being able to love someone without possessing them. I knew that decades before – but only theoretically,” he remembers in an interview with SZ, “I I crawled through the vale of self-pity.” In this “self-therapeutic mourning process” the “love idiot” wrote 500 letters full of vows, poems, stories and drawings to his “deadly nightshade”, his “rose blossom”, his “pantha deer”, all intertwined with memories and rock’n’roll -Touring life. Spitzer turned inside out, blunt, but also very flowery: “You stick to my tongue like an icicle that can’t be sucked to death.”
Back then there were still faxes. Lucky. Although he sent the letters, he kept the originals (some of them on hotel paper). And they were moldering away in a box – until Spitzer’s new wife, Nora, who is 42 years younger than her, found them. She wanted to bundle all the heartache into a book: “You have always been the country’s star humorist, the politically correct social critic, now we could show your vulnerability.” Spitzer initially found the suggestion revealing, then he said: “Who am I supposed to bluff? So, why not!?” So Nora Spitzer sought out the most beautiful abysses in his Misery Mountains; it was to be her gift for Thomas’ 70th birthday. It was there in front of him on April 6, 2023 as a powerful “proof of love”: open, 70 centimeters wide, 200 pages, with a CD (although he had to sing and record some of the lyrics himself).
The sufferings of the old rocker: Even when making music with the EAV, Thomas Spitzer is plagued by lost love, as he described in one of the letters to “Rona”.
(Photo: Thomas Spitzer Ideas Verlag)
“An old heart goes on a journey” (Ideas Edition) really takes the viewer with him: to St. Charles de Peralta, where the self-confessed “chaotolic” returns after a “dwarf sermon” from an “island-known exorcist” and “shriveled shaman”. wants to have his obsession with his goddess exorcised; or to Kenya, on a night drive into the Shimba Hills, where potholes make his otherwise flawless line tremble and shake up old stories: in a meandering text between Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Rum Diaries” he fabulates for Nora (and today’s reader) the true story of the “Sandler King Eberhard”.
Spitzer says today that it was one of the few EAV hits in which he was allowed to describe something like feelings. He had thought a lot about the essentials, namely the nature of human beings, that men can also show feelings, and would have “preferred to write love songs”, but his “congenial partner” wouldn’t let him. Some motifs and rhymes from the big breakup phase at least made it onto the album “Amore me not.”
Thomas Spitzer has had flawless handwriting since his time as a graphic artist – in retrospect, nothing was embellished in his letters.
(Photo: Thomas Spitzer / Ideas Verlag)
Despite “all the blessed successes”, the founder saw his band as a “corset”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/.”That’s why I was always grateful when I was allowed to do for others what was not wanted at the EAV. ” And there were already many of them back then, not least Udo Jürgens, for whom he wrote “Café Großenwahn” or his only hit in the 1990s, “Na und”.
And he remained loyal to another of the great Austrians: Gert Steinbäcker. It wasn’t just the first S of STSbut also the second singer of the EAV from 1979 to 1983, and before that he had already done three “real plays” together with Spitzer (“such a no-future fairy tale”) and, first of all, played with Mephisto, “not the best”, but probably “the first and loudest rock band in Styria”.
When Steinbäcker asked Spitzer before his “farewell tour” through Austria: “We started ingloriously together, let’s finish it together with dignity,” his old companion said: “I’m there.” Even now, at the postponed farewell dates in Bavaria, Spitzer plays the rock guitar on three pieces (such as “Totally unsettled” from the EAV period together). “Afterwards I can go straight back to my red wine and a cigarette,” and then he also enjoys sitting with his Haberer: “I’m always happy to see this reluctant Grantler. Nobody can write love songs as good as him be a bad person.”
“Bring it to an end with dignity”: Gert Steinbäcker, the first S of “STS”, invites his old companion Thomas Spitzer on stage for three songs on the farewell tour.
(Photo: Christian Jungwirth)
Of course, this also applies to someone who writes such beautiful love letters. Although, it’s still better. “You should never give up hope that you can become a better person shortly before the election,” says Spitzer, who “may now be a better father” to his daughter. And he still has 50 or 60 unreleased songs in the EAV final storage, for which he “certainly won’t” reactivate the old band, but would rather “find a young musician with a gift for humor” like his musical foster son Klaus Pizzera. If his Nora ever convinces him to make a solo album, then he will “live out his emotional side”. But above all, he wants to continue with his favorite pastime “until the scythe father mows me down”: “Drawing, thinking and, above all, suffering is excellent.”
A fear that creeped up on the naked man in front of the hotel room mirror at the time when, for lack of a base, he scribbled on his “luxury body” as if it were on a limp pizza is probably unfounded: “In any case, I can already imagine what a furious line I will have “When I’m 75, I’ll be holding a painting course for pensioners at the (late) summer academy in Fieberbrünnl. And then, my dear, you’ll be 47. It’s despairing.”
Thomas Spitzer on Gert Steinbäcker’s farewell tour, November 8th Rosenheim, 10th & 11th Munich, Circus Krone, 13th Regensburg, November 14th & 17th Regensburg, 16th Bamberg, 18th Passau