From a very first time and a regret afterwards (Part 1)

I was born and grew grown up in a small and innocent town somewhere in the north of Germany's nowhere. It was the time of the 1980s and whatever had happened in this decade, it had only reached my hometown at least two or three years later as the rest of the world but nobody there was sad about that.

Many things had happened. Important things. Things like Sony’s Walkman, Commodore’s C64 or Apple’s first Macintosh. And of course things like the Chernobyl disaster, the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the fall of the Berlin Wall. I guess the first ones were responsible for my later interest in technical stuff and I also think as well that I was too young to understand the importance of these last ones. What had in fact really gripped me at that time was that we got a couple of new private television programs beside the three public television channels which we only had. And so for many years my cultural horizon existed of such kinds of things. Opera was beyond everything that was thinkable in this small place. Off course I had heard about it but they had told me about Santa Claus and about the Yeti as well, and I'd never seen either none of them have I ever sawn in my town and so I had put the opera in the same drawer as those possible but highly unlikely things.