Günter Amendt

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Günter Amendt (born June 8, 1939 in Frankfurt am Main ; † March 12, 2011 in Hamburg ) was a German social scientist and author . He mainly dealt with the topics of sexuality and drugs .

Life

Günter and his twin brother Gerhard Amendt were the sons of the married employees Wilhelm Amendt and Paula Amendt, b. Zielfleisch, born and raised in Frankfurt am Main with a single mother. The father died in 1942 as a soldier. Günter Amendt described problems with his recognition as a conscientious objector in the 1950s as a “formative experience” of his youth and the beginning of his politicization . After high-school diploma and training as a mineral oil clerk, he graduated from high school on the second-chance education at Hessenkolleg and then studied at the University of Berkeley , the University of Frankfurt and Giessen University sociology , psychology and German . In 1974 he received his doctorate in Giessen with an empirical study on the sexual behavior of adolescents in the drug subculture . Politically he was active during his studies first in the Socialist German Student Union (there temporarily as spokesman for the board) and after its dissolution in the newly founded German Communist Party .

In the 1970s he was a freelancer at what was then the Institute for Sexual Research (today: Institute for Sexual Research and Forensic Psychiatry ) at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and was a member of the board of the German Society for Sexual Research . His best-known books Sexfront (more than 400,000 copies since 1970) and Das Sex-Buch (1979) date from this period . Amendt described himself as "a man who makes no secret of his homosexuality ".

From 1976 he was specifically active as the author of the magazine and published more than 130 articles. For some time he was also its editor. In 1978 he accompanied the singer Bob Dylan and his band on part of their European tour at the invitation of the impresario Fritz Rau . He was supposed to give the musicians information about the Federal Republic of Germany during the trip.

In the early 1990s, Amendt withdrew from the sex science and sex policy discussion. The focus of his later work was drug policy and the drug problem . He worked as a therapist in a drug clinic in Hamburg and published several books on the subject, including No drugs - no future . He was a critic of the no-power-the-drugs campaign.

For the radio he wrote numerous radio features , radio plays and essays , such as the three-hour long night for sixtieth of Bob Dylan (June 2001) and The Long Night of LSD (March 2008) - both from Germany radio broadcast.

In 2002 Amendt, together with actor Martin Semmelrogge and musician Smudo , read the novel Fear and Loathing written by Hunter S. Thompson in Las Vegas in 1971 . The session was recorded, lasted 3:57 hours at the end, and was released by Kein & Aber Records . Together with Semmelrogge and Smudo, he went on a reading tour through Germany in 2000/01 with a slightly shortened version of the work.

Amendt lived and worked in Hamburg . There he was killed on March 12, 2011 when he and other people were hit by a car on the sidewalk. Dietmar Mues and his wife Sibylle, who were close friends with Amendt , also died in the accident , as did the sculptor Angela Kurrer; the actor Peter Striebeck and his wife were injured. The person who caused the accident, suffering from epilepsy , had already caused several serious traffic accidents in previous years. The defendant was sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment for negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm. The court ordered the driver's license to be withdrawn.

On the occasion of his 75th birthday, Andreas Loebell posthumously published a collection of amendt's drug policy lectures in May 2014. Some of the lectures are available as audio samples on the publisher's website.

A few months before his death, Amendt gave a lecture at the 19th annual congress of the German Society for Addiction Medicine (DGS) in November 2010 under the title The pharmacologization of everyday life - How the readiness to chemically stimulate body and soul creates a new drug reality . With the consent of the younger sister Doris Amendt-Gielau, the DGS published the original text from the estate.

Legal situation to the sex book

Two German district courts classified a photo printed in the sex book as " child pornographic ". This means that the mere possession of one of the approximately 200,000 copies of this popular educational book sold could be a criminal offense. In December 1998, the Mannheim District Court had the publisher of a school newspaper in which the picture was printed confiscated , in addition to the remaining copies of the magazine itself, the copies in his possession of Amendt's books Sexfront and Das Sex-Buch . In another case, the district court of Mühldorf am Inn described the picture as “clearly child pornographic material” and in November 1999 obtained a house search against a private person for possession of the same. However, up to now there is no nationwide judicial confiscation order according to § 184b StGB and no indexing has been given by the federal inspection agency for media harmful to minors. The book is therefore offered in book and antiquarian bookstores and is available for loan from public libraries for people of all ages.

Sex front

Fonts

  • (Ed.) Children's Crusade or Does the Revolution Begin in Schools? Rowohlt, Reinbek 1968, ISBN 3-499-11153-5
  • Sex front . March, Frankfurt am Main 1970; most recently in: The great March cassette . Area, Erftstadt 2004, ISBN 3-89996-029-7
  • On the sexual-political development after the anti-authoritarian school and student movement. In: Hans-Jochen Gamm , Friedrich Koch (Ed.): Balance of Sexual Education. Frankfurt am Main / New York 1977, p. 17 ff.
  • Sex front. Revisited. In: Journal for Sexual Research . 19th year, 2006, issue 2, p. 159 ff.
  • Addiction, profit, addiction. Political Economy of Drug Trafficking . March, Frankfurt am Main 1972; Rowohlt, Reinbek 1990, ISBN 3-499-18777-9
  • Hashish and sexuality. An empirical study of the sexuality of adolescents in the drug subculture. Enke, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-432-01836-3
  • The sex book . Weltkreis, Dortmund 1979; Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-19945-9
  • Reunion Sundown, Jokerman 84 revisits Highway 61. A Robertage about Dylan's 1984 European tour . Two thousand and one, Frankfurt am Main 1985
  • The big white bluff. US drug policy. A report . Konkret, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-922144-65-9
  • (Ed.) Different, of course. On the discussion of homosexuality in the GDR . Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-7609-1293-1
  • The Never Ending Tour. Günter Amendt on Bob Dylan . Konkret, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-89458-104-2
  • The drug - the state - death. On the way to the drug society . Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1992; Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-19942-4
  • XTC. Ecstasy and Co. Everything about party drugs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-60425-6
  • Back to the sixties. Bob Dylan at the sixtieth . Konkret, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-89458-199-9
  • No drugs - no future. Drugs in the age of globalization . Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-203-75013-9
  • The legend of LSD . Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-86150-862-5
  • with Gunter Schmidt and Volkmar Sigusch : Sex tells . Sex research as social criticism . Konkret, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-930786-61-9
  • Legalize! Lectures on drug policy . Edited by Andreas Loebell. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2014 (with enclosed CD: Günter Amendt speaks), ISBN 978-3-85869-590-1

Obituaries

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless otherwise documented, biographical information on family origins and the training and study time is based on the entry Günter Amendt in the Munzinger Archive , online , accessed on October 31, 2016.
  2. ^ Gunther Schmidt : Günter Amendt, June 8, 1939-12. March 2011 , Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, 2011, Volume 24, No. 2, pp. 187–190. here p. 167.
  3. ^ A b Günter Amendt: A rejection as an afterword. In: Werner Pieper (Hrsg.): Everything seemed possible ... The green force, Löhrbach 2007, p. 246.
  4. ^ Institute for Sex Research and Forensic Psychiatry. UKE Hamburg, accessed on September 2, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Sex Front (1). The publisher Jörg Schröder in the taz blog, August 7, 2007.
  6. ↑ Manfred Helfert: Renowned Dylan author Günter Amendt & actor Dietmar Mues among four dead killed in freak accident . bobdylanroots.blogspot.de, March 14, 2011.
  7. ^ G. Amendt: Kicks, Koks, Kohl. The mendacious campaign “No power to drugs” . In: Die Zeit , No. 17/1998.
  8. ^ A Long Night on the Sixtieth by Bob Dylan on Deutschlandfunk, May 19, 2001.
  9. ^ The Long Night of LSD on Deutschlandfunk, March 8, 2008.
  10. ↑ Amendt and Mues die in a horror accident . Spiegel Online , March 13, 2011
  11. ^ Tragedy in Hamburg. Eppendorfer mourn four personalities . Hamburger Abendblatt , March 14, 2011
  12. ^ Accident in Hamburg . World, March 13, 2011
  13. ↑ Death trip with announcement . Spiegel Online , November 10, 2011
  14. ^ Accident in Eppendorf: three and a half years imprisonment. ndr.de, June 5, 2012 ( Memento from November 24, 2016 in the web archive archive.today ).
  15. ↑ Legalize! Lectures on drug policy . Edited by Andreas Loebell. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-85869-590-1 .
  16. ↑ Andreas Loebell: Supporters. In: Legalize! Lectures on drug policy. 2014, accessed August 11, 2019 .
  17. ^ Amendt, Günter: Legalize! Lectures as mp3. rotpunktverlag.ch ( Memento from July 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
  18. ↑ Christian Wickert: dgs-info, special edition for the 75th birthday of Günter Amendt (June 8, 1939 - March 12, 2011). In: German Society for Addiction Medicine. September 20, 2018, accessed August 11, 2019 .
  19. ^ Günter Amendt: Sex Front. fluter - the youth magazine of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, July 29, 2003 ( memento of August 2, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ).
  20. ↑ Pretty extreme. Because he published a picture from an age-old educational book, the publisher of a school newspaper is investigated in Mannheim. the daily newspaper , January 22, 1999, p. 16.
  21. ↑ Johannes Glötzner: “The censor is about” or “In what time do we live?” In: Mitteilungen der Humanistische Union , No. 116, 2000, p. 16; Retrieved February 19, 2007.
  22. ↑ In this 13-volume edition as Volume Reader Sexualität , together with Gunter Schmidt's work Das große Der die Das. About the Sexual from 1986.
personal data
SURNAME Amendt, Günter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social scientist, sexologist, drug expert and author
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 2011
Place of death Hamburg