Fate or Chance?
Strange connections with a friend
Every once in a while I feel compelled to share something from my personal life. When one is 77 years old, one should have some interesting stories to tell, and I was rather adventurous when I was younger. So, here goes; this one is about my friend Isot. We never were “best friends” and didn’t really spend all that much time together, and yet – fate or chance, whatever, made our paths cross several times.
We met because her mother was friends with the mother of Regine, a highschool friend of mine who, like me, ended up at the University of Munich. The two mothers encouraged their girls to get together; over 50,000 students are currently enrolled, and I doubt the number was a lot smaller in the late 1960s. By contrast, most German highschools had no more than 300 or so students. Compared with the cities where we had grown up, Munich was a metropolis where everything was new and exciting, but also a bit intimidating and unknown; a familiar face was certainly welcome. So, I hooked up with Regine, and through her I met Isot.
Isot and I discovered that we took some of the same classes: Theater Wissenschaft, “science of theater” – something that doesn’t exist here but that you had to study in Germany if you wanted to get a job at a theater but were not an actor. We took a trip together to Avignon/France; the Chair of our university department organized a visit of the Festival d’Avignon which took place at a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Palace of the Popes.
It was a fantastic week: during the day, we visited famous sites such as the Pont du Gard, the Roma pilgrimage site Les Saites-Maries-de-la-Mer, remains of ancient Roman baths in Aix-en-Provence, the Amphitheatre in Arles, and more. We went horse-back riding in the Camargue, on one of the oldest horse breeds in the world. And at night we saw some stellar performances in a unique setting.
After we returned to Munich, Isot and I didn’t see each other all that often. Our professor had encouraged us to visit the many independent little theater venues that existed in Munich, and I happened upon the Action Theater, where Rainer Werner Fassbinder was an up-and-coming, if controversial, actor and director. The chaotic, anarchic atmosphere there (it must have been the first half of 1967) attracted me immensely. I had grown up in a strict, bourgeois household where I always felt stifled, and I was totally ready to rebel against it. I started to hang out at the Action Theater, and when Fassbinder asked me if I wanted to be in the play he was working on – Axel Ceasar Haarmann, combining the names of the conservative newspaper publisher Axel Springer and a German serial killer Fritz Haarmann – I gladly agreed.
The rehearsals were fun, things always changed. But once the play opened, each performance had to be like the one the night before, and I got bored. When Fassbinder asked me if I wanted to be in his next play (that was after the Action Theater had broken up and he had founded the Anti-Theater) I said No. So much for becoming famous.
While I soon had enough of the crazy, outrageous setting at the Action Theater, one event there was crucial because it radicalized my political outlook. Fassbinder sometimes wore an Iron Cross around his neck, a German military decoration which he clearly had not earned. The owner of the pub across the street from the Action Theater, where Fassbinder sometimes went for a beer, was offended when he saw the medal and ordered Rainer to leave. Which he did. Soon after, the police showed up at the theater. They asked Rainer to come outside and show his ID. Which he did; a few of us followed him outside to face the police. Before I knew it, the two officers threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and drove him away in their police car. He was released the next day without much harm done to him, but the Munich newspapers told a tale 100% opposite from what I had witnessed: that he had resisted arrest, that other members of the theater had physically threatened the officers. WHAT? I learned that Justice wasn’t there for everybody.
But back to Isot. We didn’t see all that much of each other during the next couple of years but we stayed loosely in touch. In 1970 I drove overland to India. In 1971 I ran into Isot on a busy street in Bombay (Mumbai). I didn’t know she was in India, she didn’t know I was in India, and if you have any idea of a gigantic city like that – the current population is more than 22 million people – you can imagine what the odds for such an encounter were. It seems hard to believe, but it did happen!
Our next meeting wasn’t any less weird. It was in 1982 or so, when my daughter was enrolled in the first class of the first Waldorf School of Berkeley/California. I did face-painting at a spring festival in a lovely Berkeley park, and somebody walked up to me and asked “Jessica?” It was Isot – her hair was silvery-grey, almost white, and it took me a second to recognize her, it was like an overlap of the face I remembered with the one in front of me, and slowly they merged, morphed together. Her son, a year younger than my daughter, had just joined the Waldorf School kindergarten. Another coincidence…
She lived in Berkeley as did I; our kids went to the local Waldorf School. No wonder we kept in touch and saw each other every once in a while, never regularly, though. One morning she called me, completely distressed. Her mother was coming for a visit from Germany, the first time they’d see each other in many years, and Isot was supposed to pick her up from the San Francisco Airport. But her car had broken down! Could I please drive to the airport to get her mother? Well, as it happened, I was driving to the airport anyway. My aunt was coming from Germany to visit me and my daughter – and she was on the same Lufthansa flight as Isot’s mother! Another weird twist of fate.
The last time that I saw Isot was in 2005. I had moved to New Mexico in 2000, but for a few years I flew to California in the fall to teach some classes at San Francisco State University. And then I would visit her in Berkeley and we would catch up. After that, we talked on the phone, wrote emails, sent Birthday- and Holiday cards. We planned for her to come visit me in New Mexico, but that never happened. She died in 2018 after getting ill with cancer.
Grand story. I put my stock in fate coming to us by chance. We are the planet of free will. Chance can be or not to be.
That meeting in India, just fateful probably. The stories everyone has are amazing.