Gallery-Café Adler
The Galerie-Café Adler was a restaurant founded by Dieter Bockhorn around 1970 . It was located in the rooms of a former drugstore at Weidenstieg 17 in the Hamburg district of Eimsbüttel . In the 1970s, the restaurant was a center of alternative and counterculture , but it also attracted numerous guests from Hamburg's red-light district . It was closed on June 18, 1979 after repeated drug discoveries by the authorities.
meaning
The eagle became famous for its numerous extravagant decorations. These ranged from conventional painting exhibitions to actions far beyond all bourgeois ideas and morals. For example, Bockhorn decorated the eagle with fictitious traces of a rape by exhibiting posed photographs in the restaurant, in which he himself could be seen as a rapist, next to torn slip and leaves from the forest in which the rape allegedly took place. Another decoration consisted of straw and cow dung displayed in candy jars - which, according to Bockhorn's account, should bring the Hamburg city dwellers closer to rural life, but after a few days was forbidden by the health department for hygiene reasons .
Café Adler attracted particular attention after Bockhorn had succeeded in decorating its notorious drug consumption establishment with several showcases made available by the police for the purpose of drug prevention, in which samples of almost all drugs used at the time were located. The absurdity of the alleged anti-drug exhibition was underlined by the fact that Bockhorn had designed a drug-glorifying flag for the café. This was derived from the flag of a Hamburg shipping company and showed an eagle that did not hold laurels in its claws like the original , but marijuana plants .
history
In the first years of its existence, the restaurant was a great commercial success. Over time, it also attracted more and more guests who came neither from the alternative culture nor from the red light district. The visitors included, for example, the rock musician Alvin Stardust , the Boomtown Rats with lead singer Bob Geldof , the Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein , the later First Mayor of Hamburg Hans-Ulrich Klose and the photo model Uschi Obermaier , Bockhorn's partner at the time.
After Bockhorn and Obermaier set out on a nearly two-year trip through Asia in 1976 and no longer looked after the restaurant personally, Café Adler began to descend from an exotic hotspot to a location that almost only attracted drug addicts, dealers and criminals. Accordingly, the restaurant came more and more into the sights of the police and was the subject of police investigations on several occasions. After a largely open drug scene had formed in and around the restaurant , the Café Adler was closed by the authorities in 1979 after several raids .
literature
- Uschi Obermaier: The wild life , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-455-08603-9 .
- Uschi Obermaier, Olaf Kraemer : High Times. My wild life. Heyne, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-453-13010-3 .
- Michael Rauhut : I've had the blues a little longer: Traces of a music in Germany , Ch. Links, 2008, p. 48, ISBN 978-3-8615-3495-2
- Der Rabe , Haffmans, Zurich, 1999, No. 55-57, p. 224, ISBN 978-3251-10055-2
Web links
- Markus Wanzeck: Lord, forgive me my tax sins in: stern of February 26, 2008
Individual evidence
- ↑ Uschi Obermaier, Olaf Kraemer: High Times. My wild life , p. 106ff
- ^ Scene under plush and palm trees ( Memento from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) in: Hamburger Abendblatt from July 26, 1975
- ^ Café Adler closed ( Memento from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) in: Hamburger Abendblatt from June 19, 1979