By Cadence Chua
This article is part of a series of portraits of graduating students.
Robert Stampa, a third-year Humanities student, is a familiar face to a lot of students. Walking with Robert from the Academic Building to the dorms would mean seeing him stop, wave, and have conversations with at least ten other people. The graduating student’s youthful demeanour would make many assume that he is of the same age group as most others in AUC; however, he has actually just turned 33. Before AUC, he worked for more than ten years in the German underground and counterculture scene, while also doing other jobs on the side, including carpentry. Many fixtures in his dorm room, including his platform bed, were built by Robert himself.
Robert spoke to The Herring about his life before AUC. After his A Levels, Robert moved from Dresden to Leipzig and was there for almost a decade. He tells The Herring that when he first moved, there were a lot of abandoned spaces, which he and others in the community renovated to open clubs and other cultural venues. He then also lived in such a place, renovating it himself. “At the beginning, the landlord had only put in bath facilities,” he describes. “So [after renovating it] I lived like that for seven years, and it was the most beautiful house I had ever lived in.” Robert says that his place was also on a lively street, with “a lot of life outside”.
In Leipzig, Robert and his friends organised parties and festivals, but his contact with the underground and nightlife scene began in Dresden. “The first people I got to know in Dresden, where this started, [have done] outdoor raves since they were 14 years old,” he says, and he was 18 when he got to know them. “And that’s how it started.” He highlights some of the biggest events he was involved in, with “some of the biggest parties having maybe 1200 people throughout the night”. He smiles as he describes the process of event organisation: “It was still not that commercial, […] so in the beginning you would send coordinates [to the venue] via SMS.” The more he and his friends organised these festivities, the more professional they became.
He mentions that some people owned clubs, but had to close them, expressing melancholy at how nightlife culture has evolved. “Everywhere, club culture is going down […] because the people who are the main audience don’t have enough money.” Meanwhile, back in his day, he “could party for 10 euros a whole weekend”. “You could just collect bottles from the clubs and get the deposit and buy your own drinks,” he laughs.
When asked about stories from his time in Leipzig, Robert laughs. “I think the nicest thing I experienced was a festival I became part of, called the Camp Cosmic Festival,” he ends up saying. “It’s a very, very nerdy European collection of people that started from a disco nerd who was really into unknown, cool records, [and it gathered] a crowd who was into the rarest 70s, 80s disco cosmic post-punk stuff and all that.” He says the whole experience was great, as it was “such a cool collective” and he was part of two iterations of it. “The first time, we were responsible for the bar, and it was a whole mess. We ended up not making a profit!” he guffaws. “That’s the worst thing you can do with a bar, because the bar should always make a profit.”
However, despite that, he found the event exciting and fun, especially seeing the growth over the two festivals he worked on. The second time, there were almost 2000 attendees. “It was crazy! […] A lot of people from different countries on this weird East German farm,” Robert says, smiling while shaking his head. He says he made 500 euros in that year from only collecting drink bottles from people. “We opened all the trash bags because there were so many internationals and they didn’t know we had that [system of recycling] in Germany.” He also sold toasties with a friend and made quite a bit. “I was not responsible for anything [like the bar], and I could just party with the same cool people and other [newcomers], so that was really nice,” he sums up the experience.
Apart from working on individual events, Robert was also the shift leader in clubs for a while, where he was the “person in charge of the evening, coordinating all other people, around eight to 16 people, I would say”. This role was interesting for him, as he was “so much in charge of the general vibe of the night” as he opened and closed the club. When each night started, Robert would greet his team and make sure they were “getting a good vibe”, so that when they encountered the guests, they also passed this on to them. He became aware especially of this responsibility when he worked under other shift leaders who operated on an opposite understanding, and thus changed the atmosphere negatively.
In Amsterdam, Robert continued working in the clubs while balancing studies at the same time. He worked at Garage Noord and started as a barkeeper. “[So that meant] sometimes sitting at the door, doing security work where you walk around and make sure everyone is doing well,” Robert illustrates. He also did some carpentry work in Amsterdam, with skills he gained while living in Leipzig. Here, he worked for an interior design workshop and even worked on campaigns for Karl Lagerfeld, the eponymous German fashion brand. He describes a project he was involved in – “There was a huge steel frame with light, and Paris Hilton was the model for the campaign. […] And also an LED sign with ‘From Paris with love’ on it, and huge screens with the advertisement,” he reminisces.
About the decision to study at a university level, Robert says that he “wanted more options”, which a Bachelor’s degree could give him. “I also want to acknowledge that I could get jobs [like the Lagerfeld project] from what I already knew, but there are other jobs I would like that I could not get [without a degree].” Apart from giving him more career options, moving to Amsterdam was also important for Robert’s self-development and understanding. “There was just the feeling that I needed to leave Germany […] to understand the ‘Germanness’ inside of me. […] I feel like [now] I have a bit more distance [from that] and I became more aware of the very German things that made me who I am,” he explains.
He also elaborates on his experience growing up and living in East Germany. “At some point, I was just walking through the city, and I felt like there was some melancholy [in it]. […] I don’t know if I realised it back then or when I moved here, but especially for people from East Germany or a post-Soviet person in general, there’s a lot of misery.” He says that many people he knew and his family were affected by alcoholism and other issues, and “that’s because so many people were so lost after the [East-West reunification].” He believes that Leipzig, in particular, “carries this time [of reunification and economic problems] inside it”.
As for how this experience has shaped his study focus in AUC, the Humanities major says that he always liked thinking about the idea of “free will”. “Our world is so much designed by an idea of how you choose freely, but there are so many conditions where I think, if you look at it, it’s not really free will,” he explains. From there, he got more into media and culture in general, and ended up doing a lot of research on gay culture. In particular, Robert’s capstone was on how certain pornography-related beauty tropes or ideas on what is desirable are integrated into the gay online scene. He was wondering about what formed gay desire and influenced the kind of bodies and sexual practices that are constantly shown.
Robert will be moving to Paris after graduation, to study a Master’s in Political Science, majoring in political behaviour. “I plan on going deeper into media psychology and social behaviour, and also working with statistical methods,” he says about his research plans. “I also seem to be naturally interested in gay media and what it does to gay life and connection in general.” Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, the only gay media that was accessible to him were in catalogues that his parents would order. “This was very old-school,” he remarks. “But these books had everything from clothing, household essentials, technology, et cetera, and I would always get stuck on the male underwear pictures.” He also comments on media heteronormativity, especially back in his day. “There were a lot of ideas on what I could do with a girl on a first date,” he says, but not the opposite. Now, contemporary media looks different from what it was in Robert’s youth, with gay representation being more prevalent. However, Robert still believes that a lot of it is very stereotypical. He brings up the popular gay romance television series, Heated Rivalry. “[It’s about] young, sporty, sexually available guys, and I know it’s probably more complex than that, but still that’s the first imagination many have of gay life.” He also comments on the value of the humanities in his research and his life, saying that these research interests have helped him process his own background better.
Robert points out that he applied to AUC three times, the first two times as a Social Sciences major, and the last time for the Humanities track. The first time, he missed his interview, as he was still deciding between staying in Leipzig or moving. “It was very hard for me to take the step because I was very grounded before, with a beautiful, stable home.” The second time, he was on the waiting list and got accepted a few weeks before the start of the semester. However, he was unable to accept the offer then as he was not prepared financially. The third time was the charm for Robert.
Moving to Amsterdam then was a different environment from what Robert was familiar with, and it has intimately changed him. “I got probably calmer and […] I feel more grown up now,” he reflects. He says that he also had to let go of his house in Leipzig during the move, which affected him deeply. “This moment of detaching from my house in Leipzig […] was kind of taking into presence something that happened when I was 11, when my parents divorced. You know, when you’re 11, you cannot really process it, but […] I felt like just by going to Amsterdam I worked on that period of my life.” He says that now when he goes back to Germany to visit, he feels like “it’s more soft and accessible emotionally, but [it] still gives [him] a melancholic vibe, even in West Germany”.
The Herring 