A can of punk!
This column only exists because I recently drank a wheat beer in a pub for 7.20 euros. Pretty expensive, I thought, even for Munich, and unless you calculate that you'd just ordered a beer for the equivalent of more than 14 marks. Anyway, I tried to savor every sip as my thoughts wandered, as they so often do, into the past, deep into the past century. And suddenly there was this song, no, this anthem: "The way to Aldi isn't far. And I'll be with you in a heartbeat. For 10 marks, I'll knock back a whole pallet of that brain-shredding beer." Ever heard of it? It's by the Hamburg punk band Slime. A homage to Karlsquell Pils, the Aldi bargain beer from the 1980s, which enjoyed cult status in the punk scene because a can cost 49 pfennigs, and from the early 1990s – inflation apparently hadn't been invented yet – it only cost 45 pfennigs. So someone who wasn't particularly interested in the future could actually buy a pallet of 24 cans for a tenner plus change, thus escaping reality for a day.
I was six when the song came out in 1981, and even after that I wasn't a punk, but I remember the day I decided to become one. It was in the late '80s when, on a dreary small-town Sunday, I ran into an old classmate who'd been so disruptive at school that his parents had sent him to a convent boarding school. I hadn't seen him for a year. And yes, he had obviously changed—unfortunately not in the way I'd hoped. He was now wearing a battered black leather coat with the atomic symbol sprayed on the back. He'd shaved the sides of his hair and was talking about things I'd never even heard of. He handed me a mixtape that day. It included songs by Daily Terror, Dead Kennedys, The Exploited, and Slime. I heard this music and I was thrilled. Punk, for me that was Die Toten Hosen and Die Ärzte, a bit of defiance, a bit of partying, but now everything would be different, real anger instead of childish nonsense, I felt initiated and enlightened.
It became clear a few weeks later that I wasn't a punk. Instead of just doing it, I asked my parents if they wouldn't mind if their son started running around with a blue mohawk. Their answer was unequivocal: "You're a bit crazy! Out of the question!" And that was pretty much the end of my punk career. Admittedly, I continued cutting holes in my wool sweaters for a while and letting my hair mat, but I still went to piano lessons diligently, and my Latin grades were a bit too good, too.
I have no idea what Karlsquell tastes like; probably: horrible and stale. I did get drunk, but in the evenings in the pub, not during the day at train stations, and I never went to Aldi either. I wasn't a rebel, I had no reason to be, and if I did cross a line, I regretted it the next day. But in my imagination, things were going wild; I listened to the songs at deafening volume, and when no one was around, I'd even roar along: "I need you, preferably every day, because you cheer me up when I'm down. I think it's the alcohol I like about you; with you, the weekend has meaning" – I thought lines like that were terrific, but I spent a meaningful weekend on the tennis court, followed by a bath and then a trip to the village disco, from which my father picked me up as a precaution – "at the phone booth at midnight sharp."
süeddeutsche
