“THAT’S HOW I GOT INTO NAZI & DRUGS”: AN INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN OHLER

NORMAN: Yes, because in my hometown, American was normal. We had 30,000 Germans and 10,000 Americans. We also had American culture, like McDonald’s, when other German small towns did not have it. So we thought that was kind of cool. You know, we were part of the Western world in a way. Sleepy German town, but at least it was the military headquarters of Europe, of the United States forces for logistical planning.

So it was quite a thing. It had an airport, it had nuclear weapons, it had poison gas, it had everything.

I remember nuclear weapons being driven through the small streets of my hometown. So I grew up very anti-America and pro-America at the same time, because I rejected the American politics, but I very much embraced the coolness of the American culture, and that hasn’t changed until this day. I was in the States in the summer, in New Mexico and California, and I really liked it. I feel very close to the American culture.

NORMAN: I mean, in my tennis club, the coolest player was a 20 year old Air Force pilot named Tom. He became a good friend of mine, and he had this incredibly attractive wife. I forgot her name, but they were both very attractive, funny and nice, and we played tennis together. They came from, I think, Arizona or something. For me, that was like WOW, because I was a young teenager.

NORMAN: Well, that has been then the primary influence. In my hometown there was an American Force network, like a radio station that had actually been influential for my father, because when he was a teenager, he had listened to this AFN and go dancing with my mother, in the American officers club on the Kreuzberg. Just like Berlin, my hometown also has a part of town, which is called Kreuzberg. The Kreuzberg was the part of town where the Americans were.

Also, they had an ice hockey team, which was one of the best in Germany. I mean, it was a team of my hometown, but everyone in it was like an American soldier, you know, because they’re all very good in ice hockey. The Americans brought a lot there and they also brought a lot of culture.

To my father, rock and roll music was very influential for his lifestyle, for his choice of partner, my mother. So American music also has an influence on my genetic pool, I guess.

One time, I had been an exchange student in Flint, Michigan when I was 16/17, and I stayed one year over there. It was a program called the PPP (Parlamentarisches Patenschafts-Programm für junge Berufstätige).

It was financed by the German Parliament and the American Congress to increase the friendship between West Germany and America, which I think is a great thing. It’s very good if countries exchange their youth, and you actually learn a lot from it.

NORMAN: Through him, I got to know Elvis Presley. He was also an American soldier in West Germany, not in Zweibrücken, but in another town. So even Elvis was there, basically. And from Elvis, you know, I went to the Beatles as a child. So it’s a very anglophile, Anglo American, British American influence. And that then goes all the way to Nirvana. And then when Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head, which I overheard in an organic grocery shop in lower Manhattan, for me that part was over. That was like, for me, the end of this intense identification with American culture, because that same week or so, I received a tape that a friend of mine had sent from Berlin with electronic music.

And so I switched, and that’s how I got into Nazis and drugs basically. (laughs)

NORMAN: They went from amphetamines to LSD later on, so they opened their mind. I mean, they made a big leap at changing their drug. They reinvented themselves.

NORMAN: Probably the only person you could ask about this would be Paul McCartney.

NORMAN: I was at KitKat club in Berlin in 1996 and I came home and on the answering machine there was the voice of Wim Wenders. I knew Wim Wenders, but he said:” This is The Wim.” in German”Der Wim” to make sure that I understand, is actually the WIM.

He said he liked my first book ( Die Quotenmaschine,1995), so I was invited by Wim Wenders to his terrace where he lived in Kreuzberg at the time to discuss the filming of the book.

I was with my girlfriend, Sarah at the time, and we were both on LSD because we were using LSD a lot and I wouldn’t go to Wim Wenders not on LSD! What a wasted moment would have been! I was wearing these kind of cheesy sunglasses, and it’s very strange, because I had the hallucination that I was Dennis Hopper when I was sitting next to Wim. And I didn’t know Dennis at the time, I just thought, like: “I’m Dennis Hopper.” Wim was talking about how this could be turned into a film. And basically he wanted me to write the screenplay, which I think it’s great if a director wants this.

But I wanted to write my second novel (Mitte, 2001), so I declined Wim Wenders’s offer, which was probably stupid, but that’s what I did.

I mean, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have written this book that is way more important to me. Maybe not, you know, because the movie would’ve been great. I don’t know, I was very radical at the time.

NORMAN: So in ’96 I said no to Wim and then we didn’t meet for a long time. And then my sister got married in Zweibrücken, in the Rose Garden, which is Europe’s biggest rose garden, and next to me was sitting Donata Wenders, Wim Wenders’s wife.

She’s a friend of my sister’s then -husband, the one she married that day. And also I knew her a little bit, and my sister knows her a little bit more. While we were eating, during the wedding, she said: “Wim is working on a new movie called Palermo Shooting, and he needs someone to help him with the script. Maybe you want to do it.” It’s kind of weird. Probably he told her: “If you see Norman, maybe say, let’s work again together.”

So I said sure, then I met his producer in Berlin, he gave me this fragment, and I said: “That’s not a movie, we can’t make this. But I mean, maybe if I work on it for one or two years, it could be a script.” And he said: “No, we start shooting in three months.”

And you know, it’s like the fire police coming in, yeah? I was like Mr Wolf in Pulp Fiction.

NORMAN: Well, because there were only three months time before shooting, there was basically no chance to do anything, that’s not enough time. But the movie machine, you cannot stop it, you know, it just happens like this. During the whole production, I was on set, still trying to write the movie as we were already shooting it. But it takes longer. It’s complex, it’s about Death. Photographer meeting Death.

I was on my boat going down the canal towards Poland, and then Wim called me, and he said: “You have to write especially the dialog for Dennis Hopper, that is going to be in the movie”. That was Wim’s wish, but he wasn’t sure if Dennis would really play.

And then Dennis came into the set. I was sitting with Wim on the terrace in Palermo, the day he was supposed to arrive, and Wim got a call from the assistant. He said to me: “That’s not his assistant, that’s his drug dealer”.

Then in the evening, after the first day of shooting, I saw his assistant, aka drug dealer. He’s walking around, a really funny American Indian, hat on, and he asked around if anybody had weed, because Dennis needs to smoke in the evening.

That’s the only drug he takes one after a day of work. He sits on the terrace of his beautiful hotel room and smokes a joint. I was the only one who had weed, so he said: “Okay, come tonight, 8 PM, terrace in the hotel”. So I was quite nervous actually, but Dennis was coming out of the bathroom, zipping his fly.“I’m just normal you know? Let’s be normal. Let’s smoke a joint.” he said.

NORMAN: Well, I would definitely say David Lynch hugely influenced me, starting with Blue Velvet starring Dennis Hopper. And maybe that’s how I became a Dennis Hopper fan, because I think that is a very good movie. And then he made Wild at Heart. And I even wrote, I was like 20 at the time, a film critique for a German weekly newspaper in the town of Göttingen, where I was doing my social service – we had a draft back then in Germany, and I refused to fight or go to the army, so I had to do social service. So I wrote a review. It was very challenging to understand Wild At Heart, but I think it was like THE movie of the 90s. It kind of showed the 90s. That was my thesis of this critical review. And then I watched Twin Peaks when I was with my girlfriend, Sarah, that I mentioned before.

NORMAN: think we saw the movie first and didn’t understand it, but it looked great. And then we saw the series, and we saw it in Manhattan, in downtown Manhattan, and we started on a Friday night. It was binge watching, which was not known at the time, like we all had to go to the video store and get the new copies, but it was great, you know. And we didn’t leave except go to the video store and get more.

Then, when I stepped outside, I was in an altered reality, and I’m still in that reality that David Lynch created, which is a magical world, basically where anything’s possible, and also dark things happen.

I met him once, and I was so nervous, I actually did not know what to say to him, like, I’m so happy just to be at a party with him.

I spoke with Wim Wenders about it once, and he said that the best director is Stanley Kubrick. So we can take Wim’s word for it.

I think Stanley Kubrick has influenced me. I just feel very close to this aesthetic, and also that he changes aesthetic so radically from project to project. That’s what I also do with my books. Every book is different. And also for him, every movie is different. And that’s a type of artist. There’s another type of artist who always does the same thing, which is not worse or anything. I think Kubrick is amazing. Maybe David Lynch always makes kind of the same thing in a way, you know?

NORMAN: Well, of course. But it’s not so easy. I fucked it up with the first one, by giving Wim Wenders the finger.  Maybe that’s my bad karma.

NORMAN: I’m working for over a year now with a very good German director who’s obsessed with this book, and he tries to turn it into a four season TV series, like a big one, because he wants to get really close the characters. There’s so many dramatic moments and normal moments which are dramatic just because they occurred back then. It’s amazing stuff.

NORMAN: Is it good or bad ?

NORMAN: Why so harsh ?

NORMAN: Bowie is like a real Superman. But I wouldn’t imagine that he would say that. Maybe he was analysing Hitler, I don’t think he had sympathies for him. But I mean Hitler & the Nazi movement have a place in pop culture, and I still haven’t understood where it comes from. We know some things, like Hugo Boss made SS uniforms, but about the whole aesthetic, I don’t know if there was a mastermind behind it or whether it just evolved, you know? I mean, it comes from Italian fascism, which was the first fascism, and they were very much connected to the avant-garde Italian art scene. So that’s where the design comes from. Hitler probably looked a lot at Mussolini in terms of aesthetics.

The only thing the Nazis did well is design, for everything else they were fucking assholes, murderers.

But design, they had a good taste for it, even though Hitler was such a bad artist. I don’t think that was Hitler’s taste, because Hitler was a small minded person and I think it was people around him, probably Goebbles knew quite a lot about design. That’s why they were so effective, they were very good at propaganda.

Reading that, I thought: “This is a great story”.

Those two elements of the bad hygiene and Hitler getting injected with something, and the arrogance of the doctor coming in. So that whole, that was basically the whole book in a nutshell, and that’s why I felt very excited, because I love writing, but it doesn’t really matter what I write about. I just have to be excited by it. I mean, it has the additional kick of being on Nazis and drugs, which makes it also for me, while I was writing it, very exciting.

NORMAN: I’m more like unmasking them, I think.

NORMAN: Um, yeah, the book is pretty well accepted. I mean, sometimes I read like that the book is very controversial, but it’s not really controversial. There’s, like, one historian who’s jealous, and some people parrot him. I mean, let’s put it this way. There’s a stream of historians, or, like, a part of historians, which are conservative, left wing historians that they think that it’s not proper to give drugs such a big role in the story. So they disagree, which is totally fine.

Most people who read it like it. I play a funny role in the world of historians, because, like, the biggest German magazine in Spiegel, immediately called me a non-historian, and I would never claim to be an historian. Why would I say that I’m a historian? I’m a writer, but I play in their field, with Blitzed and Tripped, you know? And I do it in a different way than they usually do it because they’re academics, and they have certain styles and rules, so they must feel a bit threatened by me. So some embrace that, and some reject that. I’m like an outsider, so I think outside of the box. And I think if I was a historian, and someone new would come in, I would think that’s good, because it kind of shakes up, stirs the waters. 

The British Royal Historical Society, they also wrote on Blitzed, that from now on, the historical canon also has to look at drugs. It has been widely acknowledged that.

NORMAN: I think it’s a big trend to legalize drugs, and the population, especially in America, is ready for it. Even the right wing wants to legalize it. And when Donald Trump was on Lex Fridman on the podcast, Friedman asked him about medical marijuana, Trump would immediately say: “That’s great. We have to legalize it, be the best in the world with medical marijuana”. I mean, maybe he doesn’t mean it, but he thought in that moment in the podcast, it’s good to say it.

And then again, I was interviewed by Fox News, by a right wing guy, and he also loves the book Tripped and the legalization of LSD. I think religious fanatics would still be against it. Trump wouldn’t say this at the annual meeting of the Christian society, or whatever, because Christians are very much against drugs, like all religions.

Not all religions, but Islam is against drugs, Christianity is against drugs. Judaism, I think, is not so much against alcohol. I think they’re probably not so anti-drug as Islam and Christianity, but I’m not sure. Christianity only accepts the wine. I mean, they made the wine the Holy Blood of Christ. That’s a drug choice, basically.

But also the beer made by the monasteries in the later Middle Ages. German monasteries perfecting the beer, making the Reinheitsgebot as the first anti drug law in Central Europe, because before you had all kinds of psychoactive compounds in beer. Beer is perfect for putting, like, Nightshade plants in it, and so you can make a really psychoactive beer. It’s quite easy. The church basically legalized it.

NORMAN: Well, you need, like, a belief system in which you have this ritual. For the Greeks, the ritual was embedded into everything.

NORMAN: I think society should obviously help people to make psychedelic experiences. I think there should be, like a mandatory psychedelic year after high school, where you can we get the opportunity to try it out.

NORMAN: Maybe someone who’s psychologically unstable shouldn’t use it. But still it could be part of the psychedelic experience. I mean, the psychedelic experience is a vibration, let’s put it this way. It’s just about seeing the world in a different way than in the non-psychedelic way.

NORMAN: Yeah, maybe it’s true. I mean everyone needs to take it once, that’s for sure.

I think many people probably need it more, but theoretically drugs are like a vibration, so if you have the vibration once, you know it. You need only be stoned once, but you probably forget, you know, so you need to be stoned again.

NORMAN: LSD has very high vibrations. DMT. I think alcohol is quite low vibrational. I think cannabis has a higher one than alcohol. Speed, methamphetamine and amphetamine, they make you very high, and can also make you extremely creative, but they’re so harmful physiologically, at least to me, that I would say that the vibration must be lower. You know, it’s not good.

NORMAN: I think cocaine is very low. Cocaine is probably the lowest frequency. Then again, if you have pure cocaine – Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis on cocaine, and I believe that, because it’s a stimulant, but the cocaine we get today, that’s shit, you know, it’s terrible, and not just about taking it but also about how it’s produced.

I’m not part of this world, you know, I respect people who take it, but it’s not organic. There’s blood on every line, basically every line should be red, not white. And most products are usually dirty. So it’s not just about cocaine, but LSD is not dirty. LSD is a pure thing. It’s usually not even made for money. Of course people make money when they make it but it’s quite cheap, actually. For the effect you get LSD is very cheap drug. You get your value, because is very healthy for you. You have a great trip. It’s amazing.

NORMAN: Taking psychoactive compounds makes neuronal growth, so your consciousness changes. So obviously these drugs helped us develop the frontal cortex, which enables us to have abstract language.

I mean, what is spiritual? It’s just a word. It’s consciousness changing. I would call it spiritual, but I mean, maybe also apes have spiritual experiences. I don’t know if it’s necessary to have a consciousness for spiritual experience. Maybe it even blocks you from having more spiritual experiences.

NORMAN: The Thomas Mann novel, The Magic Mountain is 100 years old in November, and I was in the same place where he envisioned it. This was in Davos, Switzerland, in the mountains, May 1911. I think he was there visiting his wife, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The book is quite interesting. It’s considered the best novel in German language, I don’t know if that’s true. It’s quite heavy and long. The Nobel Prize Committee almost didn’t give the Nobel Prize to Thomas Mann because of the Magic Mountain, because they said it was too lengthy.

It’s basically a white man, you know, rambling on. It’s very philosophical, and it’s kind of heavy, but it’s also very good. The figure of Thomas Mann is very interesting to me, he is like an archetype of the writer, but he also represses his sexuality, like he was bisexual, but he didn’t accept it.

NORMAN: Because he was managing to be this famous writer that was considered like the conscience of the nation. When Hitler came to power, Thomas Mann was in Switzerland at the time, he didn’t even come home to Munich to pack his things. He just said: “I’m never going to go back there.” He stayed in Switzerland for a few years, then eventually moved on to California, and kind of worked with his voice against national socialism. He did radio programs, things for the BBC, like addressing the German people. So he’s this grand figure of a writer, he always wore great suits, not like me, with t-shirt & shorts. But we’re going to change that, because I’m going to replace Thomas Mann with my Magic Mountain, which is much better. It goes deeper, and it goes back in time more, and actually tells the true story of the Magic Mountain, while Mann told his own kind. In German we say gehirnfickerei, when your thoughts fuck themselves, brain fuckery. Well, my book is very much on point and much funnier.

I do tell a lot more stories about this village, Davos, was dirt poor, and now it’s the host of the World Economic Forum. So from dirt poor in the mid 19th century, when there was a child slave trader going through the village and other poor villages in that area, taking the children, giving the parents some money, and then bringing the children to the child slave market in Ravensburg, which is in southern Germany, where the children were sold to more wealthy German farmers for the work on the fields. No one knows about this, obviously. And then how did Davos made it to become host of the World Economic Forum, that story is very interesting, but I can’t give it away.

You have to get the book. September 27th.