It all starts in a ski camp. You may remember it from your own school days: two middle school classes are taken to Austria in a bus, dumped in front of a youth hostel and too much exercise in the fresh air during the day is condemned. Above all, the hormones are in constant rollercoaster ride, which leads to even more movement and giggling between boys’ and girls’ bedrooms at night.
Tiny Stricker witnessed all of this back in the mid-1960s. Anyone who reads his new book “London, Pop and Early Love” will be amazed at the level of detail with which the Munich writer not only remembers this journey. But perhaps the embellishments are just well invented, after all, with everything known about Hang Stricker’s autofiction, the first-person narrator is not called Tiny here, but Henry.
So Henry, a student from L. (which, if you like, could be interpreted as the small Bavarian-Swabian town of Lauingen), feels quite uneasy about the prospect of a week under the thumb of a ski instructor who is not exactly well-disposed towards him. The concern is understandable from a criminal point of view, but unfounded from a biographical point of view. Because the ski camp gives Henry the opportunity to meet a graceful Englishwoman named Catherine, who does not end in a kiss, but at least in a pen pal. The letters, in turn, lead to an invitation to London, which doesn’t immediately entail kisses, but rather an initiation into a vibrant, foreign world: Swinging London, a city in the rhythm of (pop) music, in the smooth transition to hippie -Era.
Tiny Stricker has written a number of books about this era; his debut “Trip Generation” made the former beatnik a cult author in the seventies, and “Soultime” or “Unterwegs nach Essaouira” also revolve around the time around 1968. “London, Pop and Early Love” is now a kind of forerunner. A student who wants to escape the cramped middle-class conditions at home with the help of music and trips to London – this is also reminiscent of the novel “The Wild Rage of the Budgie”, with which the Munich colleague Peter Probst described the seventies. With Stricker, however, it’s the sixties, which means one thing above all: the basic tone is similar, the music selection is different.
How important it was then – and still is today – as a young person to only listen to the right music and thus to set oneself apart from the other philistines is made clear by the album covers, which are shown in color scattered over the pages. From Ray Charles about the Beach Boys or the Kinks The references range all the way to Yusef Lateef, and all the songs are commented on by the young people, whether at school in little L. or on a summer vacation in big London.
Told with humor and empathy
It’s all very entertaining to read, even if you weren’t socialized in the 1960s. This is due to the fact that Tiny Stricker writes with a sense of style and caressing, and incorporates a good deal of humor and empathy for the behavioral problems of pubescent boys. His descriptions of some class nerds, for example, are probably apt across generations; For example, Henry admires a certain “Meyer” who goes skiing in corduroy trousers and desert boots as a protest at the ski camp, who reads Sigmund Freud and only appreciates remote jazz.
And what will become of Henry’s first love for Catherine? Ultimately, that is not as important in this book as the burgeoning awareness of being part of a new beginning. On a joint visit to London’s Hyde Park, for example, when the early flower children can be admired in a meadow: “They seemed to be in a kind of trance or to fly along this meadow like on a green cloud,” writes Stricker. “In fact, some were stroking the grass as if taking off slightly.” Something new is happening here, and it’s going to be big.
Tiny Stricker: London, pop and early love, Verlag P. Machinery 2022, 132 pages, 13.90 euros