Severi, continue to link Stadt und Himmel with the tireless grace of tall trees. All around Erfurt, from the big outdoor theater at Domplatz square to yet another dance stage at the baroque Petersberg Citadel to public sculpture placed here and there, almost helter-skelter, you find evidence of a city embracing culture and history, and doing its best to happily blend the two.
Indeed, wherever you look in Erfurt, all seems ganz normal , entirely normal β and why not? As that afternoon last July turned into evening, and then into what felt like a second, only slightly darker evening β at nine p. Down a few blocks, some 20 or so people mingled outside Kunsthaus Erfurt, a contemporary art gallery and project space housed in a four-story brick building.
Glasses of wine and small open-faced sandwiches in hand, they were a mix of young and old, dressed casually but conservatively β this was no Berlin or London or New York art crowd. The exception may have been Dirk Teschner, staff curator at the Kunsthaus and an echt Berliner. Lean with a slicked crop of black hair, short back and sides, and a thin strip of moustache, Teschner, 50, could be a distant cousin to Ron and Russell Mael of the band Sparks, only with wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a black sport coat, skinny black jeans, and a white shirt, open at the collar.
It was another warm July 13, an unlucky Friday. They were about to shut the gallery and head to a restaurant for dinner when from out of a whiskey bar a few doors down, the Johnny Worker, came a young woman and a man whose demeanor and attire did not bode well. Basically, the German version of our hate speech.
At this point another five men and a woman exited the same bar and joined their friends in front of the Kunsthaus. The eight ranged in age from 19 to 31, police would later determine, and had alcohol intake levels ranging from 0.
