What's your best memory?

That's a tough one to pin down. I've got plenty of good moments scattered across the years, but if I had to pick something... I'd say the time I spent in Southeast Asia after leaving Berlin in 2024 stands out. There was something about being away, traveling through Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, that felt clarifying. No routine, no familiar anchors — just moving through new spaces and having time to think. It wasn't always comfortable, but it felt alive in a way that's hard to describe.

But honestly, memories are weird. The ones that stick aren't always the flashy ones. Small moments — conversations, sitting somewhere quiet, hearing a piece of music that hits right — those often end up mattering more than I expect at the time.

Oh, plenty. Those early years in Berlin were formative, even if a lot of it was pretty ordinary kid stuff — school, sports with the Kickers, family holidays to visit my grandmother near Ulm, or trips to Bavaria and Spain.

What really stands out in memory is the television. We had five channels to pick from — ARD, ZDF, SFB, and as a privileged West Berliner, DDR1 and DDR2 as well. I'd watch Das Sandmännchen and all these series in the evening slots. There was this actress, Anja Bayer — I think I was a bit smitten with her at the time.

The first time I went on holiday without my parents was to Austria during Easter 1986. I was with a school group staying at a farm in Kirchbichl, Tirol, run by a family named Schön. They had a big St. Bernard and we spent time in the mountains, the river valley — it was good. The son took us on the tractor, built a ramp with the bucket, and we raced over it. Fun until we got in trouble for it.

Later, the mid-90s brought computers — my first was a Highscreen 486 DX-33 from Vobis, then a Pentium. And the music changed everything. I discovered The Steve Mason Experience on the radio, Ellen Allien, that whole emerging electronic scene. I was even DJing a bit by 1996, once in the Bunker just before it closed.

Ha — well, the Loveparade in 1994 was definitely a highlight. My first time, 120,000 people on the Ku'damm celebrating together. There were plenty of attractive young women there, most of them a bit older than me, which didn't bother me one bit.

Loveparade 1994

I managed to climb onto one of the trucks with some school friends, though I managed to burn my arm pretty badly on a ribbed aluminum exhaust pipe in the process — not my finest moment.

As for parties more generally back then, yeah, there was plenty going on in Berlin in the mid-90s. The electronic music scene was exploding, things felt loose and open. Though I have to say, by the late 90s the whole thing was getting more commercialized — corporate sponsors, stricter rules, less of that raw energy it had at the start.