Twelve

In the beginning, there was rust.

A Wanderer bicycle, parked and forgotten, its chain as stiff as a dried branch, its paint crumbling into islands. A twelve-year-old boy kneels in front of it. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is learning something that will never let him go: things can wait. Beneath the dirt they are not dead, only patient.

He sands, he greases, he trues the spokes, week after week. Then the bike stands there as if it had just left the shop. The boy looks at it for a long time, as if it had given him back something he never knew he was missing.

Kronach

Two crates nobody wanted.

A flea market in Kronach: trestle tables, coffee from thermos flasks. Two crates, heavy and oily, full of spare parts for a DKW Hummel. Nobody wants them. He does.

He cleans every single part until the metal is metal again, and sells them on. With that first money, earned and polished by his own hands, he buys himself a Victoria motorcycle, built in 1928.

At thirteen he takes its engine apart. He lays the parts out on newspaper in an order only he understands, and puts them back together. Then he pushes the machine around the yard. Lap after lap, arms aching, shoes full of dust. Until it fires, just like that, as if it had made up its own mind.

Once you have heard the first cough of an engine that has been silent for decades, you believe in things differently.

Metal, light, paper

A love of things.

Next come lamps whose shades he brings back to life, and briefly furniture too. Then the cars. Two Mini Coopers, from 1970 and 1971, like siblings. A 1959 Beetle with a fabric sunroof, the sky opening up the moment you fold the roof back. And before his eighteenth birthday, a Renault 4.

At an Aral petrol station in Bayreuth stands a 1972 VW 1600. He buys it and drives it every day for five years, until the car feels as familiar as a voice.

In between, he collects comics, enamel signs and the Motor Revue magazines of the fifties. He listens to the music of the sixties and at some point settles into the seventies and eighties, when shapes grew softer and colours warmer.

Then the Bauhaus gets hold of him. He studies everything that came out of Dessau: every chair, every lamp, every façade, every line that refuses to be superfluous. And he stands before Otl Aicher’s posters the way others stand before altars.

Munich

An image in a tunnel.

He lives in Munich and rides a fifties Vespa, its rattle echoing off the tunnel walls. In the Petuelring tunnel, a huge photograph slides past him: Naomi Campbell, shot by Peter Lindbergh. A few seconds, and the image is behind him.

He has no idea that years later he will sit across from that very man in Traben-Trarbach. They talk for hours about photography, about film, and about the inexplicable something that makes certain images immortal.

He is fascinated by how brands manage to become cool. Not just known, but loved. Like most of his generation, he leaves the video store every Friday with a stack of VHS tapes under his arm. The weekend belongs to crisps, chips, a beer and the flicker of the living-room screen.

2007

What exactly is cult?

Everyone says it, casually, almost carelessly. Yet when he looks for books, theories or a standard work, he finds next to nothing. A word everyone uses and nobody explains.

One evening a James Bond film is on, and everything about it is cult: the author behind the novels, the men in suits, the Bond girls, the whole scenery. He thinks: someone should honour them. For how deeply they have engraved themselves, and their era, into our minds.

In that moment, the word is there: CultAWARD.

2009

A woman reaching for the star.

A name demands a form. One day he sees her on his inner screen: a globe, and on it a woman reaching for the stars. She touches one star and holds on to it.

He draws the image, a first sketch. Short on time, and perhaps out of reverence too, he places the figure in the hands of his friend Illich Henriquez, an illustrator and comic artist who has drawn for The Lord of the Rings and Warcraft, among others. His trophy accompanies the CultAWARD from 2010 to 2022.

Only in early 2026 does he decide on the new figure that carries the award today. They call her Monique. Out of friendship, its predecessor keeps a place of honour.

2010 to 2012

The early years.

Together with Martin Ködel, his system administrator and lifelong friend, he builds the first CultAWARD website on TYPO3. It goes live. Certificates go to some thirty cult icons beyond any doubt.

His respect for the scale of it all grows with every step. The director of “Irgendwie und Sowieso” tells him that, for him, the CultAWARD feels like being knighted. That is when he realises what he is holding in his hands.

In 2012 he briefly steps into the spotlight with a nationwide press release. But he does not see it through. The scale is too vast, the reverence too deep, and so the project rests for many years.

Perhaps that was for the best. Rules and a jury have existed since around 2010, and in the quiet the idea could take deeper root than any quick launch would have allowed.

From the archive · 2010 and 2011

The first class.

Brands, programmes, musicians and personalities that have lost none of their radiance to this day: they were the first to receive a CultAWARD certificate. Their names read like a glimpse into another time, and like proof that true cult endures.

The years in between

Layer upon layer.

He works in film and television, with brands and in design. He comes into contact with politics, science, sport and music. Each field lays a new layer beneath the foundation, until the boy with the bicycle has become a man who no longer shies away from the size of his idea.

Today

Rules, jury, certificate and star.

What’s new is a kind of help that did not exist before: artificial intelligence researches deeper and wider than any single person ever could. What was once a hunch on an inner screen has become a body of work, with rules, a jury, a certificate and a star.

Some things only fire once you have pushed them long enough.

Chronicle

The milestones.