A few weeks ago, Matthias and I stood in a yellow candlelit passageway papered with Soviet-style posters and invitations to seances. To our left, the front of the shuttered Albertus Magnus Church was draped with large colored-paper banners decrying police brutality and calling for some kind of new order – starting here, at the Soziales Zentrum Avanti, Dortmund’s very own communo-anarchist enclave.
Word was getting around that the Avantis would be evacuated, kicked out, or otherwise made to scram in only a few days. Matthias and I had rolled up with Pete and Roman (of Blue Elephant) with instruments in hand because we heard that there would be a jam, an epic swirling carnivalesque and kind of funky communo-anarchist kind of jam. The sunset jam of a doomed quasi-neo-hippy compound? This was not one to miss.
Strange types clustered around the doorway, and on the sidewalk in front. They looked disparate, not held together by any interest or activity – unless, I wondered as I got closer, they met every month or so to cut each other’s hair using plastic zig-zag scissors. Dressed in dusky button-ups and leather jackets and carrying our hardbody cases, we stood out; they watched us as we passed.
