Around 1992 things started to lose their easiness in the commune. One reason was the economical crisis caused by the fact that everybody was going out more and more in the former Eastern districts of Berlin and all clubs in the West closed one after the other. The other problem was that we all were used to our comfortable life and there were slowly power structures that didn’t exist before due to the rotation of jobs we cultivated. Slowly a few figures started to dominate other people because of their office job for example.
For me, it was a worrying development that I tried to fight where ever I witnessed it. I had gained certain self-esteem WITHIN the commune but was super insecure whenever I had to leave the familiar territory of our neighborhood. A night out in Kreuzberg scared the shit out of me, even though I was a DJ and should have loved to go and explore the nightlife. It was March 1993 when suddenly I met a person crucial to my further path in life: Saeeda.
I was actually still in a very unhappy relationship with another woman in the commune and then I saw this beautiful woman, half Indian, half British in the Far Out. She was there with her brother who started a conversation with me and later introduced me to his sister. We had a good time and when the club was closing in the morning she asked me to join them for breakfast. “I will fall in love with you if we do that”, I told her, regretting my stupid answer right away. She laughed and said, “dude, I just wanted to grab a bite” and left.
Thank god we had exchanged numbers before so I called her the next day and we met, fell in love as expected and I broke up with my girlfriend. And that was the beginning of the end of my wonderful time in the commune. One would have expected more understanding for a new love story from a bunch of “free love” Osho freaks but they just showed me the cold shoulder.
Good old friends turned to enemies, acting like school kids. They would not even greet Saeeda, shut the door in front of her nose, and talk nonsense about her or us. She first tried to understand but then as they continued their weird behavior she was annoyed and asked me why the fuck I was wasting my talent in such a horrible place? Even though I wanted to play just techno I could not imagine leaving my comfort zone and security of our community at all. I didn’t have the guts to leave.
This phase of my life happened to be also the time I messed around the most with drugs, the more I experimented with mind-expanding substances, the less I could accept the standstill and stuffiness of the commune. To me, it seemed that all life had escaped that once so vivid place.
In September 1993 I had enough and sold my share of the club for a very small amount (Which years later proved to have been the best decision!), quit my job, and left the commune once for all. Saeeda and I decided to go for three months to South America on a backpacking tour and then start a new life in Berlin. It was during that journey when I turned from an insecure boy to a fearless man.