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A brush with German counter culture in Mexico City


It was 1984, a year before the earthquake in Mexico City. On Christmas Eve, at the taco stand in the Alameda, pale meat scraped off the skull of a sheep - barely thick enough to dice - was frying on a griddle. Little heaps of nopalitos and onions were swept up into three tacos with a quick cleaver under a string of bare lightbulbs. I added coriander, a few spoonfulls of a dark red chilli sauce, a squeeze of lemon and a dash of salt. The tacos were ready to eat: tacos de cabeza.


The old Hotel Regis that would later collapse in 1985, killing everyone in it, loomed to the right. The Teatro de Bellas Artes was lit up and visible through the trees to the left and, if I had bothered to look up, I would have seen the tall blocky shape of the Torre Latinamericana rise in the direction of the Zocalo.

Next to me, eating his own tacos, was a young European man - perhaps around 32. He wore light blue jeans and a blue shirt and sported a thick blond beard that covered a large part of his face. He seemed slim and healthy and he wanted to talk. It was Christmas Eve, after all.

Where are you from? he asked. And so I told him I was a student at the university of Vera Cruz in Xalapa.

"Ah." He said. He may have wanted company, but he didn't say much.

"And where are you from?" I asked him.

"Germany", he said.

"I see."

But he wasn't forthcoming. What he was doing here? Something didn't fit. He was on his own. He wasn't a student or a tourist. But I didn't want to talk about Mexican beaches. I was fed up with meeting Britons and Americans who were here not to learn, but merely to have fun.

So I kicked off with a little criticism of the denazification process following WWII. But this didn't put him off at all. Now he looked at me with interest. He asked about my family and asked about my political opinions and experiences. I gave him a potted personal history; told him that I was studying Russian and that I was a socialist.

His lip curled. He was hooked. As he listened to me he volunteered very little about his own views. We continued, and he offered me tea at his hotel and then began to tell me about German counter-culture. I pressed him to explain. The ideas behind German counter culture sounded ridiculous. He was coming out with half baked revolutionary dogma and using the implied threat of state persecution to try to legitimise.

I said just that to him, He became cagey and mysterious.

It became obvious now that he despised my conventional socialist politics, but that he couldn't come clean and explain why or how. "Actions speak louder than words," he said. He couldn't speak because he would reveal too much. There were things he could not talk about. It was too dangerous, he said.

In a final effort to flush him out I went back to discussing the denazification process. Many of the German people had been complicit in allowing the Nazi atrocities. The East German Brown Book detailed how the whole Nazi infrastructure had been left in place by the Americans and the British as a bulwark against communism. Only in East Germany had the country been sufficiently denazified.

"Not quite," he said. "East Germany wasn't denazified either - that's a myth."

Finally he said: "There are who oppose the capitalist system in West Germany and they are fully aware of the failure of denazification and they are Doing Something About It." I could hear the capital letters as he said it.

"But what?", I asked.

"Aha!" he replied and that was that.

We reached his hotel and he made me a tea in his room. It was the basement room of a people's hotel - the shambles of an old house. I imagined it brim full of Raskolnikovs. The room was badly lit and occupied by a whirring cricket or two. Next to the pillow of his bed was a door and behind the door a toilet flushed loudly from time to time. The only window was high up and it had bars set into it.

After taking tea, he said,"You really must stay here. It's much cheaper than your hotel. I am leaving tomorrow. Feel free to take over the room. I've already paid for tomorrow, so give me the money and we'll call it quits"

It was so little and I had so little money left that I decided to accept. He took out an avocado and split it in two to share half with me. That was Christmas Eve in Mexico City.

Finally, I thanked him for the tea and avocado, got up and started walking back to my Hotel in the direction of Hidalgo. By then it was about 1 am and the streets were quite empty. I heard the sound of a police car siren in the distance.

The car sped by me, then suddenly swerved and two policeman jumped out - one pointed his gun at my chest.

"Manos arriba.", he shouted.

I stood stock still and raised my hands. "I am a tourist - a student." I said."

"Lift the edge of your jacket very slowly." he said.

And I saw what he was looking at: a colourful shoulder strap I had bought for my new camera. I felt like laughing. I was very calm and relaxed.

"Arsehole. Fool.", I thought. And slowly pulled my leather jacket to one side to allow him to see the camera.

"ID" he shouted" and, again. I slowly took out my wallet opening it to show him my passport. He tugged at the wallet, which I wouldn't let go.

He lowered his gun. "There was a robbery back there and we are looking for the thieves." he said. They both leaped back into the car and sped off.

I continued with my walk back to the hotel.

The next morning I went back to the German's hotel. He was gone, as he said he would be and that night I brushed crickets off my bedding and looked out at the sky through a barred basement window. I wondering if I had been really been talking to a member of second generation Red Army Faction, and if my presence in that hotel room wasn't part of an elaborate way of confusing anyone on his tail.

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