Lives in Transition: Trans Cinema Matters.International Documentaries Competition - Stranger Than Fiction.Perhaps Obermaier's objective was less political: by having a good time (almost) all of the time, she showed by example that one could be a hippie and still have a door on the lavatory. "Society is freer, women are equal and children are allowed to contradict their parents." At a time when Angela Merkel is arranging for the release of the remaining jailed Baader-Meinhof members, Obermaier has remained a photogenic symbol of the new freedom Germany has come to define itself by. Eight Miles High was a hit when it came out earlier this year and High Times, the biography on which it is based is a bestseller. Obermaier now lives as a recluse in Topanga Canyon in California, but in the mother country her fame has never been higher. Ten years of traveling the world in a customised bus together ended abruptly when Bockhorn drove a motorbike into the back of a lorry in 1983. After a stint as a full-time groupie, a flirtation with acting and an unspecified role in the underground rock band Amon Düül II she took off on an interminable hippie trail with her new man, a former pimp, bar-owner and general bad egg Dieter Bockhorn. Whether due to increased police hostility, association with violent radical groups such as Baader-Meinhof or a lack of make-up remover in the bathroom, life in Kommune 1 got too much for Obermaier. Nonetheless a touch of radical chic worked wonders for the model's profile: Obermaier and her right-on boyfriend Rainer Langhans became the pin-up couple of the revolutionary left Germany's own John and Yoko. Her love of the good life didn't go down too well with her fellow comrades: "The fact that I smoked menthol cigarettes meant that I was playing into the hands of the Imperialists," she remembers. Obermaier came into this world as a teenage runaway from a dull village near Munich, having already achieved a degree of notoriety for posing nude on the cover of Stern magazine. And for all its proclaimed freedom Kommune 1 had a lot in common with the working methods of the Stasi on the other side of the Berlin Wall: even letters home had to be approved by Kommune consent. Everyone slept in one room on mattresses on the floor, which meant that if one stoned hippie was in the mood for a rambling monologue on the tenets of Maoism everyone had to endure it. There were no doors on the lavatories (modesty while crapping being viewed as a bourgeois conceit) and all telephone conversations were run through a loudspeaker to ensure no secrets were kept. Obermaier was a brief inhabitant of Berlin's Kommune 1, an alternative hippie encampment that, for all of its free love, doesn't really sound like it was much fun. "She was the most spectacularly sexy girl I think I've ever encountered," remembers the American writer Glenn O'Brien, a former boyfriend, and one guesses that part of Obermaier's appeal is her very non-Teutonic refusal to take anything too seriously. Obermaier had famous lovers (Mick Jagger and Keith Richards), a high-profile career (as a frequently nude model) and a lifestyle that epitomised the dreams of a generation (commune-dweller, groupie, naked person, nomadic hippie). It's all encapsulated in a new German film, Eight Miles High, the story of a stunningly beautiful icon of rebellion called Uschi Obermaier. West Germany hippie revolution, complete with free love, communal living and loud rock music - albeit filtered through a Teutonically serious sensibility. For a generation growing up under the shadow of the Nazis, the 1960s was always going to be about more than putting flowers in your hair.
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