The first time Helene Hegemann meets Patti Smith is in a multipurpose hall in Vienna that’s serving as a rehearsal stage for Christoph Schlingensief’s Area 7. It’s an encounter that saves the then fourteen-year-old’s life in every sense. In her art, Patti Smith breaks all the laws and rules that are considered incontrovertible in Helene Hegemann’s gloomy native Ruhr area. From the day she is catapulted from a socially deprived neighborhood to Patti Smith’s side and into a theater where provocative artists completely renegotiate the doctrine of social status, she begins to realize that it’s possible to live a life that, instead of breaking down in the face of contradictions, draws an explosive, healing power from them. In this perceptive, worldly, yet deeply personal text, Helene Hegemann writes about her love for the musician, poet, performance artist, painter, and photographer Patti Smith, about people with pure hearts, and about a dead rabbit that was led through an art exhibition in January 1965 and buried by Patti Smith in Africa forty years later.
