Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney

The Quarry Men played hardly any gigs during the remaining months of 1958, and performed only sporadically in the first half of the next year, including an audition for a bingo evening. The boys were to play two sets with a view to securing a regular engagement. The first set went well enough, even though the MC got the curtain stuck, and the management rewarded the lads with free beer. They were all soon drunk, with the result that the second set suffered. ‘It was just a disaster,’ laments Colin Hanton. John started taking the piss out of the audience, as he had a tendency to do, and the Quarry Men weren’t asked back. John was often sarcastic and downright rude to people, picking on their weaknesses. He had a particularly nasty habit of mocking and mimicking the disabled. On the bus home that night, this same devilment got into Paul, who started impersonating the way deaf and dumb people speak. ‘I had two deaf and dumb friends in the factory [where I worked] and that just got me so mad I sort of rounded on him and told him in no uncertain terms to stop that and shut up,’ says Colin, who picked up his drums and left the bus, and thereby the band. Steady drummers were hard to come by – few boys could afford the equipment – and the loss of Colin was a bigger blow than they realised. John, Paul and George would struggle to find a solid replacement right up to the point when they signed with EMI as the Beatles.

WHY A SHOW SHOULD BE SHAPED LIKE A W

After George Harrison left school in the summer, without any qualifications, to become an apprentice electrician, the drummerless Quarry Men started playing the Casbah Coffee Club, a homemade youth club in the cellar of a house in Hayman’s Green, east of Liverpool city centre. This was the home of Mona ‘Mo’ Best, who had turned her basement into a hang-out for her teenage sons Pete and Rory and their mates. The Quarry Men played the Casbah on its opening night, in August 1959, and regular Saturday evenings into the autumn. It was at one of these rave-ups that Paul met his first serious girlfriend, Dorothy ‘Dot’ Rhone, a shy grammar school girl who fancied John initially, but went with Paul when she discovered John was going steady with fellow art student Cynthia Powell.

While playing in the band with Paul and George, John maintained a parallel circle of college friends, headed by art student Stuart Sutcliffe, who becomes a significant character in our story. Born in Edinburgh in 1940, Stu was the son of a Scottish merchant seaman and his teacher wife, who came to Liverpool during the war. John and Paul were both artistic, with a talent for cartooning. Paul was given a prize for his artwork at the Liverpool Institute speech day in December 1959. But Stuart Sutcliffe was really talented, a true artist whose figurative and abstract work made Paul’s drawings look like doodles. Around the time Paul won his school prize, Stuart had a painting selected for the prestigious John Moores Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. What’s more, the painting sold for £65 ($99), part of which John and Paul persuaded Stu to invest in a large, German-made Höfner bass guitar, which he bought on hire-purchase. So it was that Paul found himself in a band with John’s older, talented and rather good-looking college friend, someone John grew closer to as he and Stu moved into student digs together in Gambier Terrace, a short walk from the Inny. There was naturally some jealousy on Paul’s part.

Still, John and Paul remained friends, close enough to take a trip down south to visit Paul’s Uncle Mike and Aunt Bett, who, between theatrical engagements, were managing the Fox and Hounds at Caversham in Berkshire. Mike regaled the boys with stories of his adventures in show business and suggested they perform in his taproom. The locals could do with livening up. He billed John and Paul the Nerk Twins – meaning they were nobodies – asking his young cousin what song he planned to open with. ‘It’s got to be a bright opening,’ Mike told Paul. ‘What do you know?’

‘I know, “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise”,’ replied Paul, citing an old song. ‘Me dad used to play it on the piano.’

Uncle Mike sanctioned the choice, giving the lads some advice. ‘A good act is shaped like a W,’ he lectured, tracing the letter W in the air. It should start strong, at the top of the first stroke of the W, lift the set in the middle, and end high. ‘Too many acts are shaped like an M,’ Mike told the boys: they started quietly at the foot of the M, built to a climax in the middle, then faded at the end. With this advice fixed in their heads, the Nerk Twins did well at the Fox and Hounds, and Paul never forgot Uncle Mike’s alphabetical advice. All his shows from now on would be shaped like Ws.

THE MAN WHO GAVE THE BEATLES AWAY

One of the places Paul and his friends hung out in Liverpool was the Jacaranda coffee bar on Slater Street, managed by an ebullient Welshman named Allan Williams. Born in 1930, Williams was a former encyclopaedia salesmen, who sang tenor in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, and had recently begun to dabble in concert promotion. His first big show was to feature the American stars Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Cochran died in a car crash before he could fulfil the engagement. The concert went ahead with Vincent and a cobbled-together support bill.

Williams’s partner in this enterprise was the London impresario Larry Parnes, known for his stable of good-looking boy singers, one of whom nicknamed his parsimonious manager ‘Parnes, Shillings and Pence’. Parnes’s modus operandi was to take unknown singers and reinvent them as teen idols with exciting stage names: Reg Smith became Marty Wilde, a fey Liverpudlian named Ron Wycherley was transformed into Billy Fury. When he came to Liverpool for the Gene Vincent show, Parnes discovered that hundreds of local groups had formed in the city in the wake of the skiffle boom. These were mostly four-or five-piece outfits with a lead singer, typically performing American blues, rock and country records they heard in advance of other people around the country because sailors working the trans-Atlantic shipping routes brought the records directly from the USA to Merseyside. While Parnes had plenty of groups in London to back his singers on tours of the southern counties, he wasn’t so well provided with backing groups in the North and Scotland. So he asked Allan Williams to line up a selection of local bands with a view to sending them out on the road with his boy singers. John Lennon had been asking if Williams could get the Quarry Men work, so Williams suggested the Quarry Men audition for Parnes.

At this juncture, John Lennon’s group didn’t have a fixed name, being in transition between the Quarry Men and the Beatles. Lennon’s friend Bill Harry recalls a discussion with John and Stuart about wanting a name similar to Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They worked through a list of insects before selecting beetles. During the first half of 1960 the band would be known variously as the Beetles, the Silver Beetles, Silver Beets, Silver Beatles (with an a) and the Beatals, before finally becoming the Beatles. The precise sequence of these names and how exactly they decided on their final name has become confused over the years, with many claims and counter-claims as to how it happened. An obscure British poet named Royston Ellis, who spent an evening with John and Stuart at Gambier Terrace in June 1960, says that he suggested the spelling as a double pun on beat music and the beat generation.

There have been several explanations advanced about how the Beatles got their name. I know, because it was my idea. The night when John told me the band wanted to call themselves ‘the Beetles’ I asked how he spelt it. He said, ‘B – e – e – t – l – e – s’ … I said that since they played beat music and liked the beat way of life, and I was a beat poet and part of the big beat scene, [why didn’t they] call themselves Beatles spelt with an a?

Yet Bill Harry says nobody used terms like ‘big beat scene’ on Merseyside before he started his Mersey Beat fanzine in 1961, and he chose the magazine’s name because he saw himself as a journalist with a beat, like a policeman’s beat, covering the local music scene. ‘Once we’d started [publishing] Mersey Beat, after a while we started calling the [local bands] beat groups,’ says Harry. ‘That’s where the ‘beat group’ [tag] came about, after the name Mersey Beat, the paper.’

However, the phrase ‘big beat’ had already been used: The Big Beat was, for example, a 1958 comedy-musical featuring Fats Domino. Paul himself says that it was John Lennon who dreamed up the final band name, with an A. It was certainly John who explained it best by turning the whole subject into a piece of nonsense for the début issue of Mersey Beat, published in July 1961, writing:

Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an A’. Thank you, Mister Man, they said, thanking him.

Even this explanation gives rise to debate, because Royston Ellis further claims that the night he gave John and Stuart the name Beatles he heated up a chicken pie for their supper, and the pie caught fire in the oven. Thus Ellis was the man with the flaming pie. All that can be said for sure is that John’s band didn’t call themselves ‘the Beatles’ consistently until August 1960.

Three months prior to this, at the Larry Parnes audition, they were the Silver Beetles, a band without a drummer. To enable his young friends to audition for Parnes, Allan Williams hooked them up with a part-time drummer, 26-year-old bottle-factory worker Tommy Moore. As it happened, Moore was late for the Parnes audition, so the boys borrowed Johnny Hutchinson from another auditioning band, Cass and the Casanovas. In the end the Silver Beetles were not selected by Mr Parnes to back Billy Fury on a northern tour, as they had hoped, but they were offered a chance to back one of the impresario’s lesser acts, Liverpool shipwright John Askew, who, in light of the fact he sang romantic ballads, had been given the moniker Johnny Gentle. The Silver Beetles were to go with Johnny on a seven-date tour of provincial Scotland. It was not what they wanted, but it was something, and in preparation for this, their first foray into life as touring musicians, the boys chose stage names for themselves. Paul styled himself Paul Ramon. In mid-May 1960 they took the train from Liverpool Lime Street to the small town of Alloa, Clackmannanshire.

There was only a brief opportunity to rehearse before Johnny Gentle and the Silver Beetles went on stage for the first time in Alloa on Friday 20 May 1960. Johnny explained his act to the boys: he said he came on like Bobby Darin, in a white jacket, without a guitar, and stood at the mike singing covers such as ‘Mack the Knife’, before ending with a sing-along to Clarence Henry’s ‘I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do’. Paul was the first to grasp what Johnny required from his backing band. ‘He just seemed to know what I was trying to get over. He was one step ahead of John in that sense.’ After Johnny’s set, which went over well enough, the star signed autographs for his girl fans. The Silver Beetles played on, so everybody could have a dance. Johnny noticed that, as he signed, the girls were looking over his shoulder at his backing band, as much if not more interested in them than him.

On tour, Johnny’s hotel bills were paid direct from London by Larry Parnes. The Silver Beetles were not so well looked after, and soon ran out of cash. Lennon called Parnes, demanding help. The promoter referred him to their ‘manager’ Allan Williams, who belatedly sent money, but not before the boys had been obliged to skip out of at least one hotel without paying their bill. Talking with Gentle, Lennon asked if Parnes would be interested in signing them permanently; he seemed more professional than Williams. Gentle asked Parnes, but he declined: ‘No, they’ll be fine for any gigs I get for you lads up North. But I don’t want to take on any more groups. We’ve got enough down here [in London].’

‘At the moment he’s a bit tied up,’ Johnny reported diplomatically.

‘Never mind,’ replied Lennon. ‘We’ll make it some other way.’ It was that confidence again. Not just with Paul. The whole band possessed remarkable self-assurance. They didn’t have a regular drummer ‘and they had a bass player that was fairly useless’, as Johnny observes of Stuart Sutcliffe, ‘[but] they had that belief that they were going to make it’.

Driving from Inverness to Fraserburgh on 23 May Johnny crashed their touring van into an oncoming car, causing drummer Tommy Moore to bash his face against the seat in front of him, breaking some teeth. The boys took the injured man to hospital, but Lennon soon had Moore out of bed, telling him: ‘You can’t lie here, we’ve got a gig to do!’ Tommy played the Fraserburgh show with his jaw bandaged but, not surprisingly, quit the Silver Beetles when they all got home to Liverpool a few days later. He went back to his job in the bottle factory. The boys went round to Tommy’s to plead with him to change his mind, but his girlfriend gave them short shrift. ‘You can go and piss off!’ she shouted out the window. ‘He’s not playing with you any more.’

Broke and drummerless, the boys asked Williams if he had any more work, and were rewarded with perhaps the lowliest gig in their history. Allan had a West Indian friend, nicknamed Lord Woodbine for his partiality to Woodbine cigarettes, who was managing a strip club on Upper Parliament Street. Lord Woodbine had a stripper coming in from Manchester named Janice who would only work to live music. The Silver Beetles were persuaded to accompany Janice. ‘She gave us a bit of Beethoven and the Spanish Fire Dance,’ Paul recalled. ‘… we said, “We can’t read music, sorry, but instead of the Spanish Fire Dance we can play the Harry Lime ChaCha, which we’ve arranged ourselves, and instead of Beethoven you can have “Moonglow” or “September Song” – take your pick … So that’s what she got.’

The boys got a little more exposure when they filled in at the Jacaranda for Williams’s house band, a Caribbean steel band, who had upped-sticks and left one night, deciding they could do better elsewhere. The band eventually called Williams to tell him they’d gone to Hamburg in Germany, which was pulsating with life, the local club owners crying out for live music. Allan and Lord Woodbine went to see for themselves. In the city’s red light district they met a club owner named Bruno Koschmider, a former First World War airman and circus clown with a wooden leg (some said his leg had been shot off in the war). A sinister impression was emphasised by the fact that Koschmider’s staff addressed him as Führer. Herr Koschmider told Williams that his Hamburg customers were mad for rock ’n’ roll music, but Germany lacked good, home-grown rock bands. He needed English bands. No agreement was reached at this meeting, but some time later Williams ran into Koschmider in London and this time Williams persuaded the German to take a young Liverpool act he nominally managed named Derry and the Seniors, featuring Howard ‘Howie’ Casey on saxophone. Derry and the Seniors did so well in Hamburg that Koschmider asked for an additional Liverpool act. This time Allan suggested the Silver Beetles. Howie Casey, who had seen the boys give their amateurish audition for Larry Parnes, advised Williams against sending a second-rater over in case they spoilt things. The matter would be moot, anyway, unless Allan could persuade the boys’ guardians to let them go.

The Silver Beetles were all under 21, and a trip to Germany would disrupt what plans their families had for their future. Paul had started out as a promising student at the Liverpool Institute, passing O-level Spanish a year early. But music soon displaced hard study, and he did so poorly in his main O-levels he was kept back a year. Paul had just taken his A-levels, with half a hope of going to teacher-training college. It was an ambition Jim McCartney wanted to hold him to. ‘All the families were against them going,’ says Allan Williams, who drew upon his experience as an encyclopaedia salesman to talk the adults round. ‘I sort of described Hamburg as a holiday resort!’ Jim McCartney was a particularly hard sell, knowing Mary would have wanted her son to get on with his studies and become a teacher, or something else in professional life. Still, if Paul really meant to go, his father knew it would be a mistake to try and stop him.

Before they could go anywhere the band had to find a new drummer. Mo Best’s son Pete had taken up the drums, playing in a group named the Black Jacks. Approaching 19, Pete Best had been thumping the skins for the best part of two years, merely as a hobby. Like Paul, Pete was planning on going to teacher-training college. Paul and John watched Pete play at the Casbah, then Paul called the boy on the telephone. ‘How’d you like to come to Hamburg with the Beatles?’ he asked. Pete said he’d love to.

On Tuesday 16 August 1960, the Beatles, as they were now finally calling themselves, assembled outside the Jacaranda in Slater Street where Williams was loading his Austin van for the road trip to Germany. Into this puny vehicle would be crammed all five Beatles (John, Paul, George, Stu and now Pete), their baggage and musical equipment, plus five additional passengers: Allan and Beryl Williams, Beryl’s brother Barry Chang, Lord Woodbine and an Austrian waiter friend of Bruno Koschmider’s to whom they were giving a lift. As they waited for the off, the boys cut out paper letters spelling THE BEATLES and stuck them to the side of the van. When all their belongings had been stowed, the overburdened vehicle pulled away from the kerb and trundled down the road. Among the small crowd waving them off was John’s sweetheart, Cynthia Powell, ‘tears running down my cheeks as the van disappeared around the corner’. Further back, not wanting to embarrass her son, was Millie Sutcliffe, who had said goodbye to Stuart at home, but felt compelled to see him off in person. As the women wept, the boys were beside themselves with the excitement of what was going to be a great adventure.

* When James approached retirement in 2006, and his pension fund wasn’t as healthy as he’d hoped, he asked Paul to authenticate the Rex as the guitar he’d learned on, and with that endorsement he sold the instrument at auction for an astonishing £333,000 ($509,490).

* Julia later had other children by other men.

CHAPTER 3 HAMBURG

MACH SCHAU!

The 760-mile drive from Liverpool to Hamburg took Paul and his friends more than 24 hours, driving south through England, catching a ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, then travelling east to the border of what was then the Federal Republic of West Germany, where the boys had to pretend to be students, because they didn’t have work permits, before pushing on to their final destination.

Like Liverpool, Hamburg is a northern port on a river, the Elbe, which flows into the North Sea; and, like Liverpool again, Hamburg was bombed heavily during the Second World War, worse hit than Merseyside in fact, one devastating night of British bombing killing 42,000 people. Bearing in mind the history it is surprising how well treated the Beatles were in Hamburg only 15 years after the war. Equally remarkable is the fact that, despite being on the losing side in that recent war, Hamburg had been almost completely rebuilt by 1960, part of the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, that saw a defeated Germany rise again as the richest nation in Europe. Indeed, Hamburg already presented a more prosperous face than Liverpool.

The boys arrived after dark on Wednesday 17 August 1960, leaning out of the windows of Allan Williams’s van to ask directions to the Reeperbahn, a road which everybody could point them towards. This most infamous of Hamburg streets lies a couple of miles east of the Hauptbahnhof, parallel with the docks in St Pauli, a neighbourhood renowned for uninhibited night-time entertainment. Men flocked here then as now to drink, eat and have sex, sex being treated more candidly in Germany than in England. Indeed, much that was and remains illegal in the UK, notably prostitution, was and remains legitimate in the red light district of Hamburg. Regulated and sanctioned by the authorities, whorehouses, sex cinemas, pornographic bookshops and lewd clubs lined the Reeperbahn and its tributary streets, such as Herbertstrasse, where hookers sat in brothel windows touting for trade. Amazing sights though these were for the boys, there was also a familiar vulgarity to St Pauli, putting Paul in mind of the Lancashire resort of Blackpool, ‘but with strip clubs’.

Their van turned off the Reeperbahn into Grosse Freiheit, a side street the name of which translates as the Big Freedom. The street was lit up with lurid signs advertising sex, beer and music. They parked outside the Kaiserkeller, Bruno Koschmider’s underground club: a big old joint fitted out with a nautical theme, like an underwater world. Derry and the Seniors were on stage, blasting out rhythm and blues to an audience of enthusiastic Germans, including Horst Fascher, a former featherweight boxer who’d served time for accidentally killing a man in a fight and now worked as a pimp. Horst spent much of his free time in the Kaiserkeller listening to rock ’n’ roll. Hearing that a new group had just arrived from England, Horst rushed upstairs to greet them, finding ‘five tired guys’ in a van, rubbing the grime from the windows with their elbows as they peered out at this new world. Horst, or Horsti as Paul called him, became firm friends with the boys, a pal and protector in the rough-and-tumble world of St Pauli.

The reality of their engagement came home to the Beatles the next day when Koschmider informed the band that they weren’t playing the Kaiserkeller, but a smaller place he owned up the street, a former strip joint named the Indra which he wanted to turn into a club catering to the new rock ’n’ roll craze. The Indra had the dimensions and charm of a large shoebox, closed in by a low ceiling and fitted out with whorehouse-red booths. Further disappointment came when the boys were shown their digs. Further up the same road, on the corner of Paul-Roosen-Strasse, was the Bambi Kino, a fleapit cinema also owned by Koschmider. The Beatles were to be accommodated in the windowless back rooms, without proper toilet facilities or even hooks to hang up their clothes. They might have been forgiven if they had turned around and gone home to Liverpool, but with the tolerance of youth the boys unpacked and made the best of it, beginning their Indra residency almost immediately.

The regime at the Indra was punishing, even slightly mad. The Beatles were contracted to play every night, starting in the early evening, a total of four and a half hours in the week and six on Saturdays and Sundays, which meant they worked into the early hours of the following morning. Even with 15-minute breaks between sets these were musical marathons. Essentially the Beatles were playing to attract customers who would spend money on drink, but the Indra’s patrons seemed disappointed at first that the strippers had been replaced by five amateurish English boys – more or less fresh out of school – dressed in silly, lilac-coloured jackets (made by Paul’s neighbour), performing a limited repertoire of songs with the tentativeness of beginners. ‘When the Beatles came they knew about 15 songs,’ recalls Rosi Haitmann, one of Koschmider’s barmaids. It was hardly enough to fill half an hour, let alone four and a half hours, yet the Beatles somehow managed to play nightly at the Indra for the next seven weeks, during which time they enlarged their set. Then, after 48 nights of this apprenticeship, Koschmider closed the Indra, because of complaints from neighbours about noise, and moved the Beatles down to the Kaiserkeller to replace Derry and the Seniors.

In a bigger room, the Beatles’ lack of experience became more apparent. Koschmider grumbled to Allan Williams, who wrote to the boys advising them to put on more of a show. Koschmider picked up on this advice, barking encouragement in German: ‘Mach Schau! Mach Schau!’

Over-worked, over-tired, and now taunted by their German boss, the Beatles turned Koschmider’s order into a joke, yelling ‘Mach Schau!’ in parody of the impresario as they threw themselves into an increasingly madcap performance at the Kaiserkeller. Paul hollered in uninhibited imitation of Little Richard, while John became a character from the Goons, singing comic songs, using funny voices, saying any outrageous thing that popped into his head, sometimes pretending to fight the others on stage. The crazier John became, the more the crowd liked it. Lennon went further, wearing a toilet seat round his neck, also Nazi insignia he’d bought from an antique shop, even shrieking ‘Sieg Heil!’ at the audience, which was forbidden in post-war Germany. The audiences loved it all, sending up beer and cheap champagne, which the boys guzzled greedily, though their favourite drink was Scotch and Coke, which remains Paul’s tipple.

To stay awake during these seemingly endless gigs, the boys started taking Preludin, an over-the-counter slimming aid which had an effect similar to that of amphetamines. They consumed the pills recklessly, quickly building up a tolerance. ‘I took half of one once,’ says former Kaiserkeller barmaid Ruth Lallemann. ‘I know they put like ten in a bottle, smashed them all up with Coke, and then they share it between them. So they were right away! That’s why John Lennon got sometimes so wild.’ Drunk on beer and speeding on pills, the boys played on hour after hour, taking requests from their audience, telling jokes, Lennon lying down under the piano for a nap when he became too exhausted, the others playing on with bemused smiles, pausing to smoke cigarettes, drink and even eat on stage. Pleased with the Beatles’ schau, Koschmider extended their contract.

In the wee small hours of the morning, after most of the patrons had left, the Beatles slowed into a semi-somnolent blues jam, playing for themselves and their friends, that is musicians from other visiting bands and club workers like Rosi and Ruth, the girls coming round from behind the bar to jive. Despite being engaged to one of the waiters, and even though Paul had Dot waiting for him in Liverpool, Ruth Lallemann says she began to date Paul, and continued to do so throughout his time in Hamburg, though they never actually had sex: ‘I never slept with him. Just kissing.’ There were, however, other German girlfriends.

At first the barmaids struggled to communicate with the boys. Paul spoke a little German, having studied the language at the Liverpool Institute, but it was English they mostly all spoke, the girls’ stilted questions met by the Beatles’ outrageous cheek, which the barmaids gradually began to understand and laugh at, copying their Scouse phrases and swear-words. Soon they were bantering back and forth in cheerful obscenity. ‘We were all fucking this, fucking that,’ laughs Ruth. ‘We asked them to write the song lyrics down, and they wrote really dirty words, and they were singing them on stage.’ After work the friends sometimes shared a cab to the beach, where they spent the last days of summer together, returning to Hamburg for work in the evening. It was a happy time. Then the Beatles found a new set of German friends.

THE EXIS

There was a breath of autumn in the air when a fey young graphic artist named Klaus Voormann descended to the Kaiserkeller, taking a seat in one of the quaint half-boats arranged in front of the stage. He looked up to see the Beatles performing ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’. Delighted by this exuberant music, Klaus rushed home to tell his sweetheart, Astrid, with whom he had just had a fight. They patched up their differences and returned the following evening with their friend, Jürgen Vollmer.

Klaus Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr, both 22, had known each other since art school in Hamburg, where they also met Jürgen. Klaus made exquisite line drawings in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, whose androgynous figures he and Jürgen resembled. Astrid was striking in her own way, a slim woman in black with cropped blonde hair, a wide mouth and a chilly Teutonic manner. One could imagine her barking ‘Sieg Heil!’ and indeed she had done so at school during the Second World War, thinking it meant something like ‘How do you do?’ As with many Germans who were children during the war, Astrid, Klaus and Jürgen had little understanding of the politics of the recent conflict, though it had affected all their lives profoundly: Jürgen’s father was an army officer killed during the Siege of Stalingrad, for example; Astrid’s brother died of dysentery as the family fled the invading Soviet army in 1945. After the madness of the war, the adult survivors rebuilt a Germany that was subdued and conservative, where everything worked efficiently, and where to say something was in ordnung (in proper order) was to give high praise, but where there was precious little excitement. Germany had had enough excitement. To younger people coming to adulthood, the generation of Astrid, Jürgen and Klaus, this new Germany seemed dull. ‘Like every teenager, we wanted to have fun,’ notes Jürgen. They looked to neighbouring France, especially Paris, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet led the existentialist movement, and styled themselves Exis in honour of these free-living French intellectuals, though they understood little of existentialist philosophy. It was more a shorthand for dressing in black and adopting bohemian ways.