Hey, Boomer – stay a little longer!

In the 1980s, West Boomers and East Boomers parted ways. In the West, AIDS and Chernobyl were formative experiences; in the East, the turning point was the decisive turning point in their collective biography. For a young person from Bonn or Tübingen, AIDS was a threat that one could not escape even if one did not have gay sex. Many boomers knew someone in their world who had contracted HIV and died from it. Prominent names were: Michel Foucault, the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, Freddy Mercury, Arthur Ash, the tennis player, Keith Haring, the inventor of the “Subway Drawings”, Klaus Schwarzkopf, Inspector Finke from the crime scene “Maturity Examination” with Natassja Kinski. “Don’t give AIDS a chance” was the name of the campaign run by the Federal Center for Health Education. AIDS was a global pandemic that could only be stopped through individual behavioral changes, especially among young people in the “psychosocial moratorium” stage with all sorts of “psychosexual” life experiments.