This is the story of Astrid Kirchherr and Stuart Sutcliffe. Just in case: Kirchherr was the Hamburg photographer who styled the Beatles in their very early years. And Sutcliffe was the initial bass player in the band. But the “German Girl Meets English Boy” story went tragically wrong as Sutcliffe died of an undetected aneurysm after he had left the band and took up his studies at the Hamburg art academy. The format of the graphic novel seems to be ideal for this story, appropriately told in English and German . Arne Bellstorf (nice blog, btw) recounts it in quiet, monochrome pictures, not only depicting a young and befittingly impudent band on beer and pills but also drawing a subdued, yet poignant portrait of Hamburg in the early 1960s. (Reprodukt Verlag, 2010)

I had known his name but never bothered to read any of Hobsbawm’s works apart from the odd article. Working on an essay on the “Invention of Tradition” offered a first serious point of contact. Any biography covering the life of a person born 1917 in Alexandria with a childhood in post-war Vienna, adolescence in pre-Nazi Berlin and studies in Cambridge in the 1930s plus membership in the Communist Party would make for a fine reading. But Hobsbawm’s autobiography published in 2002 is far more than an excellently written chronicle of “Interesting Times”; Weiterlesen →