As a teenager in the GDR I dreamt of going to San Francisco. I was inspired by the hippie pop-song “San Francisco”. But the road to fulfilling this dream was rocky.In school I was an award-winning canoe athlete but I did not know what I wanted to be later. I ended up training as a dental assistant which bored me. I found the restrictions in the GDR oppressive so, in 1987, when I was just 17 years old, I planned to escape to West Germany with a friend. We packed our backpacks and took the train to Meiningen. A ticket conductor there saw we had no permits for the restricted zone at the border and alerted the police. We were charged with ‘desertion from the republic’ and imprisoned. The term was up to two years! The conditions in prison were inhumane: handcuffs, endless interrogations and machine guns to our backs. It was then that I started to draw to help me deal with those traumatic experiences. It boredered the miraculous that we were released after five weeks. I then had to resume my training as a dental assistant. What I actually wanted to study was art, but as a deserter of the republic, this was denied to me.
After the wall came down I immeditaley “went over” again. Without money or any real plan I ended up with my aunt in Reutlingen. With my Begrüßungsgeld (welcome money), I bought Puma shoes which, for me, epitomised coolness and the promised freedom of the West! Thereafter, I completed my training as a dental assistant in Koblenz.
My oddessy to escape ended happily in two ways. With my vocational diploma as a dental assistant I could study at Johannes Grützke in Nuremberg even without a high school degree. Further, with the compensation money I received as a victim of the GDR regime I was finally able to fly to San Francisco! Today, I live as an artist in Berlin. I work in film and television and regularly exhibit in galleries.