The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

11 Große Freiheit 1960

And then there was Peace-Jón.

After ordering the cab for Pre-Jón, I left my newborn son with my mother and Fridrik Johnson, her second husband, and travelled to Hamburg, where I stayed for two years, as I recall. I was still too young to settle into the humdrum of Icelandic existence and needed to savour more of life before surrendering to ‘infant mortality’ – because women know that as soon as their children are born, they themselves die. I’d actually had a child before and refused to die for it and instead went on living, which was the biggest mistake of my life. I hadn’t planned on repeating it, but after six months of ploughing against the gales of northern sleet, I’d had enough. I wasn’t made for greyness.

This was my last attempt at making something of myself. I was almost thirty and had learned nothing from life, apart from how to handle a hand grenade and dance the tango. In Hamburg I’d intended to study photography. I’d always enjoyed drawing, and in New York, Bob, who was my boyfriend at the time, had introduced me to this new art form. His father owned an original picture by Man Ray and books on the work of Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï, which caught my eye like ink-black claws. Back home in Iceland, there wasn’t much worth seeing, so I did my best to keep up and sometimes bought Vogue and Life when they were available. Few Icelandic women had made careers as photographers back then, and my father said that if I had a talent for anything, it had to be ‘the art of the moment.’

I had stayed in the Hanseatic city back during the war. In those days it lay in ruins, but now it had all been cleaned up and rebuilt. Always quick to pick themselves up, those Germans. But there was a housing shortage and I soon found myself sharing a room in the Schanzenviertel, the District of Chance, in an apartment with a German girl and her French girlfriend Joséphine. They were a lot younger than I was, pleasure-seeking girls, who lived fast at night and slow during the day. Nevertheless I got sucked into the bright lights with them, and my memory of my time in that city is pretty hazy, as I roamed between the nightlife and the darkroom.

Josie was one of those city girls who knew only the ‘people who mattered.’ And Astrid Kirchherr had by then become something of a star among the young people in the clubs, a short-haired blond of delicate beauty who, like me, was smitten with photography. In those days the main venues were the Kaiserkeller and the Top Ten Club, and one night we popped into the former and saw the boy band from Liverpool playing their electrifying numbers. There was no explosion in the cellar – that came later – but you could see how this music was ushering in a new sensibility. They played American rock music in a European way. The youth of Hamburg, who had been brought up on Bach and beer jazz, had never heard anything like it. I didn’t know much about pop music, of course, but I fell for these long-haired lads’ innocence and joy in playing. They radiated a kind of newly won freedom: finally we had put the war behind us.

Große Freiheit – Great Freedom – the street was called. They played the Kaiserkeller eight days a week. And I read somewhere that this was how they honed their craft. They were kept in constant training because there was plenty of competition. Entry was free and people were quick to leave if they got bored. There was a strip club next door, so it was probably a rivalry with sex that brought all those tunes into the world. That’s the secret of the Beatles. You could probably say the same about Shakespeare and the tons of genius he left for us to enjoy. While he didn’t have striptease to compete with, there were all those bear and dog fights in the next building. And to think people say that sex and violence are the enemies of art.