Tempodrom in Berlin: Circus tent of dreams

On the stage stood a pale boy from West Berlin, who called himself Blixa Cash. In rubber boots and rubber coat he screamed in the Tempodrom, a circus tent on Potsdamer Platz right on the wall, the soul of the body, the Einstürzende Neubauten made to grandiose noise. It was September 4, 1981, the "Great Doomsday Show" at the "Festival Genialer Dilletanten" - out of conviction amateurish and therefore immediately with spelling mistakes on the flyer.

Other artists of the festival should still be heard. The deadly Doris, the later Techno-DJ WestBam with a Munster punk band, the later Loveparade-initiator dr. Moth with the band German-Polish Aggression. Around the big green tent lived the staff in a circus car, among them a young woman named Irene Moessinger: the mother of the Tempodrom.

It's a long time ago. Berlin was a divided city with surreal features. The cabaret artist Arnulf Rating remembers: "Here you lived in an intermediate world, hard on the border - West Berlin, the city with only one direction: all around the east."

How was that exactly with this tent? According to the motto "Who should write down our history, if not ourselves" Irene Moessinger visited many locations and actors once again. The result is an autobiography.

What to do with so much money?

She tells of her childhood in Andalusia by the sea, of youth in southern Germany, how she becomes a sixties hippie. And in March 1971 moves from Munich to West Berlin. Moessinger writes: "When I looked out the window of my first apartment on the Kottbusser bridge over the Landwehrkanal and watched the gulls circling in the air, I imagined Berlin is on the sea."

She works in a children's shop and joins the neighborhood group Kreuzberg. Together with other young people and musicians of Ton Steine ​​Scherben, she occupies a factory building as a youth center. The police arrest everyone, they sing happily in the cell. Soon after, 200 young left-wing radicals, Moessinger in the middle, occupy part of the empty Bethanien hospital and call it "Georg-von-Rauch-Haus". The anarchist Rauch had been shot dead a week earlier by a plainclothes police officer.

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Two friends of Rauch, called Müller and Schulze aka Peter Knoll and Bommi Baumann of the movement June 2, want to recruit Moessinger for the armed struggle. When dismantling pistols in a factory floor, a shot is released. For Moessinger a warning shot. She is afraid of going underground and considers it politically wrong to start a civil war. Instead, she begins training as a nurse.

Moessinger lives in the smokehouse when she learns by telegram that her father died of a stroke in Italy. With her sister, she inherits "money in the millions" and first buys a tenement in Frankfurt am Main, the rest goes to left projects.

One night she lies awake and, inspired by a "Festival of Fools", has a circus in mind: cars, animals, many people. Music, laugh. That's her dream. Should she try to make it a reality?

Moessinger meets Holger Klotzbach, who, as a trained teacher, has been touring around the country with the Busch Circus and today runs the "Bar jeder Vernunft". He proposes a fixed location for a tent. She buys from the Circus Busch in Hannover a big green tent for 2500 spectators.

A wild, unique mix

A TV presenter begins an interview with her: "Once upon a time there was a nurse who inherited a million and instead of buying a condominium she made a dream come true." She founded a circus. "

The Sterntaler fairy tale with the Kreuzberg nurse is running, in Berlinian terms, "like Bolle". Moessinger explains to journalists that she wants to "create a new form of circus that combines cabaret, artistry and music into a modern revue". Arnulf Rating of the Sponti Cabaret Troupe The 3 Tornados are brainstorming the name - Tempodrom. "It was the time when today's business lobbyist Joschka Fischer stood in the Blaumann at Opel on the assembly line to revolutionize the working class," he writes in the epilogue to Moessinger's book.

With her friend and business partner Norbert Waehl she rents the place where before the war the coffee homeland, once part of the amusement palace Haus Vaterland, had drawn pleasure-seekers from the province.

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Irene Moessinger:
Berlin is located on the sea

Galiani Berlin; 464 pages; 26,00 Euro.

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The opening revue is sold out and still brings losses. The revues in the Tempodrom are a wild, unique mix. Coming: Buster Edwards, one of the legendary postal robbers from London. The Transis Romy Hague and Zazie de Paris. The pop singer Manuela, Ton Steine ​​Scherben, the punk Nina Hagen ,. There are also classical music.

The tent is the scene of political meetings. When the Republic of Free Wendland is evacuated at Gorleben, 3000 nuclear opponents crowd the protest in the green tent.

But nothing lasts forever. After four years, noise complaints from residents have accumulated so much that the Tempodrom has to move from Potsdamer Platz to the Tiergarten on the Spree. In addition to the congress hall, there are again great concerts, such as under the rubric "Heimatklänge" world music of all kinds. Monika Döring, one of the initiators of the Tunix Congress, provides festivals such as "monsters, myths, mutations" on its feet. Bob Dylan also plays in the Tempodrom.

An expensive concrete tent

Then Helmut Kohl bends over the plans of the future government district. The fat is located, the circus tent must because there, because right on the other Spree bank should arise the Chancellery. After long negotiations, there are six million marks in compensation for the move to a new house.

In 1995, Moessinger and friends began collecting money for a permanent home with the Tempodrom Foundation, without constant annoyance because of noise. The design by the renowned architects Gerkan, Marg and Partners is selected by competition: a stylized concrete tent, pointed into the sky, including a circular hall for 2,000 people.

What Moessinger did not expect: Large parts of the Tempodrom audience do not want to go the way. The temporary tent symbolized nomadism, improvisation, freedom - and now the concrete hall at Anhalter Bahnhof. Friends of Utopia see Moessinger's monument as an expression of hubris, if not of megalomania.

It happens, what happens so often in construction projects in Berlin and elsewhere: The construction costs get out of hand. Instead of the planned 15 million costs the concrete tent in the end about 33 million marks. Urban Development Senator Peter Strieder has also made a strong commitment to the project. Now he is in the Berlin subsidy swamp as a social democratic swamp blossom - and the Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit (also SPD) can get rid of a rival.

The big dream has a bitter aftermath. Moessinger is once again undergoing a house search, the prosecutor's office is investigating for infidelity: She and Norbert Waehl are said to have paid excessive salaries. Both had worked for three years in vain, then paid off 8,000 euros a month, her successor got three times as much. At the end is the acquittal. And in 2010, the state of Berlin is selling the Tempodrom for around six million euros to a private investor.

It begs the question: What went wrong? But self-criticism is not the job of Moessinger. She still defends the building, though she can not really argue that it was so much more expensive than planned.

Today, Irene Moessinger lives in a Brandenburg village east of Berlin in an artists' colony and does therapeutic horseback riding with children. That's the way to do it with dreams.