One day in March 1984 we decided to have a party next to the outdoors swimming pool (the excuse was the birthday of someone called Franz who worked at nearby Schloss Kranzbach, although none of us really knew him anyone would have done of course). We built a bonfire next to the stream, and sat there for a few hours discussing life, the universe and everything. I went to get some tomato soup and listen to my Sex Pistols tapes, together with Andrew MacFarlane (a Suffolk punk who later became a stock broker … before getting bored and chucking it in to rent out jetskis on Cote d'Azur beaches). Our backgrounds and characters were quite different, but once he discovered my taste for tasteless music we got on fine! At 3 a.m. we went and woke some other Helfer / Helferinnen from England, Germany, France, South Africa, Zimbabwe and the Netherlands, and headed up the Alm (a little "mountain" just opposite the Schloss, with a wicked toboggan run in winter!) to watch the sunrise.
The view was stunning, in fact one of the most memorable of my life. The wall of the Wetterstein behind the Schloss gradually emerged from the darkness as though it were a two-dimensional model just an arm's reach away, and only later did it take on any sense of solidity. My perceptions may have been distorted by the strange feeling of harmony I got from the friends I was with, from the beauty of the valley where we lived, or indeed from the sense of idealism at Schloss Elmau or maybe it was just thanks to the Weizenbier! But even the arch-atheist Andrew was prompted to say "Perhaps there is a God after all", and I had to agree, although this opinion unfortunately offended one of those with us, a strongly religious South African called Kristin Wilckens.
I do not know for sure why Johannes Mueller chose the site, but Elmau certainly helped those of us privileged to work there to appreciate nature. In fact I have to say that the mountains, streams, waterfalls, lakes, Alpine flowers and deer totally dwarfed anything man had achieved there, including both Schloss Elmau as a building and the ideology behind it. For me, this photo shows that and more it was taken when Andy Landers left the Schloss to hitch-hike around the Alps and the South of France for a few months. Some Helfer / Helferinnen left by car along the narrow road from the main entrance, but Andy just headed off into the forest with all he needed in one backpack.
Elmau was a great place to have parties. At any one time there would be thirty or more young people from all over Europe, Africa, North America and various other countries working there, most of them well educated and ("but"?!) idealistic, and all eager to share their thoughts with others. Over the many years that I visited, I noticed a trend that each generation of Helfer / Helferinnen told the next how much better the parties had been in "the good old days" (even if this was a mere three months before). Well, maybe I did miss the lake of wine (3 inches deep on the floor of one of the smaller bars everyone had a shower first and came barefoot in togas, and the bar had to be closed for three weeks afterwards); and it is true that in our time we didn't manage to drag any crates of Weizenbier up onto the roof, which was probably just as well; but as four of us shared birthdays in June (most of them 18th birthdays, too), we arranged an unforgettable party in a gravel pit near Gut Elmau with light provided by some wax torches stuck into the gravel.
Not everybody found Elmau as liberating an experience as I did. Nevertheless, it was there that I spent some of the best days and made some of the best friends of my life, and I somehow always manage to recapture that spirit when I visit. If you the reader are an ex-Helfer or Helferin I would love to hear your views one person told me the following, which tied in very closely with my own feelings: "I arrived at the end of August 1992 crying because I 'had to' stay there for ten months as a Helferin. In January 1996 I left Elmau, crying not only because I had to leave a lot of friends, but also because I realized that I in that very moment closed one of the best 'chapters' of my life."
If you have never been to Elmau, I would still recommend it, although the Helfer/Helferin scheme has ended and Dietmar has changed it into a rich hedonist's paradise far removed from any original ideals.