Astrid Korsch's early life

Astrid Kirchherr was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1938. Her father was a manager of the German branch of Ford Motor Company at the time. During World War II, Kirchherr was taken to the Baltic Sea for safety. She still remembers seeing corpses on the coast there (the Cape Icona and SS Deutschland were bombed and sunk here in 1945), and she remembers that Hamburg was destroyed after returning home. Scenes of destruction.

After graduation, Kirchherr wanted to study fashion design and signed up for the "Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Graphik und Werbung" in Hamburg (Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Graphik und Werbung), but she showed black and white Talent in photography. Reinhard Wolf, the school's photography teacher, convinced her to switch to photography and promised to hire her as his assistant after she graduated. Kirchherr worked as Wolf's assistant from 1959 to 1963.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kirchherr and her art school friends became involved in the European existentialist movement (its followers would later be nicknamed the Exys by John Lennon). She told BBC Radio Merseyside in 1995: "Our philosophy at the time, because we were just a bunch of kids, was to wear black and make emotional faces. Of course, we knew who Jean-Paul Sartre was. We took inspiration from all the French artists and writers because that's the closest we could get. The UK was too far away and the US wasn't considered, so all our information was from France. Try to dress like the French existentialists... We want to be free, we want to be different, we want to try to be cool, as we say today."

The Beatles

Kirchherr, Voormann, and Vollmer are friends who went to technical school together and have similar views on fashion, culture and music. Voormann became Astrid's boyfriend and moved in with Kirchherr, where he had his own room. In 1960, Kirchherr and Vollmer had a dispute with Voormann, who was wandering around the Reeperbahn (in Hamburg's St. Pauli district) and heard music coming from the Kaiserkeller bar. He walked into a show by a band called The Beatles. Voormann invited Kirchherr and Vollmer to listen to the new music. After being persuaded to go to the Kaiserkeller bar, Kirchherr decided to do whatever he could to get close to the band. The three friends had never heard this kind of music called rock before, only traditional jazz mixed with some Nat King Cole and The Platters. The three of them went there almost every night from then on. Kaiserkeller, arrived at nine o'clock and sat in the front row. Kirchherr later said: "It was like a merry-go-round in my head, and it certainly seemed amazing... My life changed in a matter of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and get to know them." "

Kirchherr later said that she, Voormann, and Vollmer felt guilty about being German and about Germany's past, and that meeting The Beatles was something special for her. Although she knew the British would think she ate sauerkraut (a kind of German sauerkraut) and spoke with a thick German accent, they joked together. Lennon would make some sarcastic remarks on stage, saying: You Krauts, we won the war, (You Krauts, we won the war.") Those German audiences who spoke English rarely understood it, but Any British sailor would laugh wildly after hearing this.

Sutcliffe was attracted to these three people, especially Kirchherr, who thought they were "real bohemian cultural people" when Kirchherr left. Every head turned to her when she came in, and she always captivated the whole room. Sutcliffe wrote to a friend that he could hardly take his eyes off her and wanted to talk to her during the next intermission. She had already left the house while Kirchherr was chatting. This was because strict German laws at the time prohibited young people from frequenting bars after ten o'clock in the evening. Sutcliffe finally managed to get to know them and learned that all three of them were attending technical schools. It was the same type of art school that Sutcliffe and Lennon attended in Liverpool (the kind of technical school that is now called the University of Technology). Kirchherr asked The Beatles to let him take some photos for them to attend a photography conference, which attracted them because. Other bands only have small photos taken by friends.

The next morning Kirchherr took some photos (using a Rolleiflex camera) in the open square of a municipal park called der Dom (German: church) near the Reeperbahn. In the afternoon, she took them all to her mother's house in Altona (except Pete Best, who decided not to go). Kirchherr's bedroom (all black, including the furniture, with metal sheets on the walls and huge tree branches hanging from the ceiling) was decorated mainly by Voormann, who had been lovers but whose relationship had changed since visiting the Kaiserkeller bar. It became a platonic and purely spiritual friendship. Kirchherr began dating Sutcliffe, but she and Voormann remained friends.

Kirchherr later provided Sutcliffe and other Beatles members with Preludin (preludin), which when taken with beer put them in a good mood and kept them awake until the performance the next morning. The Beatles had taken Preludin before, but at the time it was only available with a doctor's prescription, so Kirchherr's mother got it from a local pharmacist who didn't ask the right questions. After meeting Kirchherr, Lennon always wrote to Cynthia Powell (who was Lennon's girlfriend at the time, and they later married) about what Astrid said and what Astrid did. Powell was even jealous before learning about Kirchherr's relationship with Sutcliffe. When Powell and Dot Rhone (Paul McCartney's girlfriend at the time) went to Hamburg in April 1961, they stayed at the Kirchherr home. Kirchherr met Lennon and Cynthia in Paris in August 1963, while they were on their belated honeymoon and Kirchherr was on vacation with a girlfriend. The four went to one bar after another before finally returning to Kirchherr's rented apartment. Four people slept in Kirchherr's single bed.

The Beatles met Kirchherr again in Hamburg when they traveled back to Germany in 1966. Kirchherr gave Lennon the letters she wrote to Sutcliffe from 1961 to 1962. Lennon said it was "the best gift I've gotten in years." All the members of The Beatles wrote many letters to Kirchherr: "I only have a few letters left that George wrote to me. I won't show them to others. He wrote so many, and so did a few others. I may have They throw it away, and when you do that when you're young - you never think about the future." George Harrison also later asked Kirchherr to design the cover for his 1968 album Wonderwall Music.