Researching the Memory Hole Worldcon

I have two links to share today. To begin with, I have a story called “Queen of the Communist Cannibals” in Cliffhanger Magazine, a brand-new online magazine for adventure fiction. The story is an homage to the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and I used an actual men’s adventure magazine headline as a prompt. It’s also a Two-Fisted Todd story, though Todd is not the main protagonist this time around.

I’m also over at Galactic Journey again, reporting about Heicon ’70, the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg, (West) Germany. It’s still the only Worldcon ever in Germany and one of only three in continental Europe.

As Galactic Journey‘s resident West German correspondent, it fell to me to report about the Heidelberg Worldcon. There was only one problem. I obviously didn’t attend the 1970 Worldcon, because I wasn’t born yet. Of course, Galactic Journey has reported about several Worldcons we didn’t attend, based on information found online or in vintage fanzines. However, there is very little information about the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg available online. And no one in German fandom seems to know anybody who attended let alone was involved in the organisation. In fact, no one even seems to know why Heidelberg of all places was chosen as the location of the first and only German Worldcon (since it’s far from a logical choice), though I do have a theory, which I elaborate upon in the article. It’s as if the 1970 Worldcon has fallen into a memory hole.

We do know who the Hugo winners and finalists that year were, but even the photo of the 1970 Hugo trophy on the official Hugo Awards page does not depict the actual trophy, but one with a replacement base fashioned by Pro Artist winner Frank Kelly Freas. The Hugo section of the article was incredibly exhausting BTW, since I was not familiar with many of the winners and finalists – yes, I have read The Left Hand of Darkness and Slaughterhouse Five and know Bug Jack Barron by reputation, but I don’t know the other Best Novel finalists and very few of the novella and short story finalists. Which meant digging up the links to all the reviews of the respective works at Galactic Journey and comparing the Hugos to our person Galactic Stars. That said, I’m mostly in agreement with the 1970 Hugo winners, which is more than you can say for many other Hugo years.

I have only ever met two people (as far as I know) who attended the Heidelberg Worldcon, Robert Silverberg and Betsy Wollheim. My meeting with Betsy Wollheim was very brief and the topic never came up. As for Robert Silverberg, we were on a (virtual) panel together at CoNZealand and he actually told me an anecdote about the Heidelberg Worldcon and the idiot who accosted him about the Vietnam War, which made it into the article. And yes, I did apologise to Robert Silverberg for some guy being a jerk to him fifty years before.

Once I dug deeper into the subject, I did find more information about the 1970 Worldcon, though it was still a lot scarcer than with many other Worldcons. Fanac.org had some photos taken by a Swedish fan named Lars-Olov Strandberg, but they were not labelled and identifying the people took some effort.

More helpful was this con report with photos, dutifully labelled, by German fan Klaus D. Kunze. Kunze seems to have taken a turn towards the far right in later years based on his publication list, but in 1970 he was just a young fan and his con report is solid and was a helpful source, though I strongly suspect I would politically disagree on pretty much anything with him today.

Fancylopedia had a bit more information and also decscribes the “Battle of the Balcony” where con members drove off Anti-Vietnam protesters. They also led me to this brief con report by a fan named Tony Lewis, a detailed con report in the fanzine Munich Round-Up by “Fux” and “WK” (most likely Walter Reinecke and Waldemar Kumming) as well as to 1970 TAFF winner and Heicon fan guest of honour Elliot K. Shorter.

Elliot K. Shorter’s Heicon report and the beginning of his 1970 TAFF report (apparently, he never finished it) were another teasure trove of information. Elliot K. Shorter coincidentally was the first person of colour ever to be a Worldcon guest of honour. Heicon further boasted the first ever woman to win the Hugo for Best Novel with Ursula K. Le Guin and the first ever person of colour to win a Hugo with Samuel R. Delany. That’s a lot of firsts for a Worldcon few people remember and a big step forward for more diversity in our genre.

My article is based mainly on the con reports by Elliot K. Shorter, Klaus Kunze and the pseudonymous Fux and WK. The all focussed on different aspects, but it was possible to piece together what happened, particular concerning a group of trolls, as we would refer to them today, doing their best to disrupt the con in the name of protesting the War in Vietnam. And though I suspect that Shorter, Kunze and Fux and WK would have agreed on very little otherwise, they all agree that those folks were idiots.

Which brings me to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Spekulative Thematik a.k.a. AST a splinter group of the Science Fiction Club Deutschland and the group that did their utmost to disrupt Heicon ’70. Now I’d never heard of AST before, though their chosen name sounds so very earnestly post-1968 left-wing. Their leader Albrecht Stuby who is mentioned in several Heicon reports actually went on to found a well regarded film festival Saarbrücken. I suspect we would get along very well today and I feel a bit bad to call him a troll, but that’s what he was in 1970. In fact, I should probably have tried to contact Stuby, except that I didn’t google him in time.

As I dug a bit deeper into AST, I realised that though I had never heard of them, I had encountered the group and their legacy before. One of their founding members was Hans Joachim Alpers from Bremerhaven (where AST was founded), co-creator of the RPG Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye), which was my and pretty much every other West German’s introduction to tabletop roleplaying. Hans Joachim Alpers also wrote that terrible article about Conan the Cimmerian for the AST zine Science Fiction Times, which I utterly eviscerate here. And regarding AST affiiliated zines, one of them, SF Notizen, which is still around and published by a local guy actually reported about my first Hugo nomination in 2020. I have a copy.

In general, the AST folks are also prime examples of the kind of 1970s West German pop culture criticism, which was the bane of my teen years. These people were the pioneers of pop culture criticism, the first generation of critics to actually seriously look at pop culture and their works were often the only critical works about SFF and other pop culture that existed at all, yet they were suffused by a very specific post-1968 leftwing fervour which condemned anything and everything as fascistoid, war-glorifying, violent American trash and worse.

I first encountered these early works of pop culture criticism in watered down form via teachers at school and the media which insisted that everything I enjoyed – Star Wars, Conan, US superhero comics, Perry Rhodan, Geisterjäger John Sinclair, Masters of the Universe, US cartoons in general, Stephen King, etc… – was trivial, worthless, bad, evil, wrong, fascistoid and would probably turn me into a Nazi war criminal and/or mass murderer.  It was of course all very, very stupid, but nonetheless it caused me to hide the things I enjoyed and feel ashamed about liking what I did, because there clearly was something wrong with me. At the same time, it also ignited the fervent wish to prove all of those teachers and media pundits and pop culture critics wrong, to show that yes, this stuff is good and yes, this stuff has value and no, it’s not just violent American trash (TM). In a way, I’m still doing that today, arguing back against a German teacher who is dead and one who’s still alive (or at least was the last time I checked), but probably doesn’t remember who I am and whom I’ve avoided for more than thirty years, because I know that if I ever saw him again, I would chew the guy’s head off about what a terrible person and teacher he was and how I would never forgive him for what he did to my friend Raphael (who turned out just fine BTW, better than any of us ever expected).

At university, I then found the primary sources in the library, these early works of pop culture criticism, which were so very much of their time such as the 1977 two volume Entertainment – Lexicon of Popular Culture, which is actually in my personal collection and which dedicates entire entries to various New Wave SFF authors who were no longer particularly relevant by the time I found the genre, while dismissing much better known golden age authors as – you guessed it – fascistoid.

Thankfully, science fiction and pop culture criticism has moved on since the 1970s and the teachers who used second hand versions of that same criticism to shame students for their reading and viewing choices are either retired or dead by now. And the AST people mostly moved on as well. Albrecht Stuby who gave a speech in 1970 accusing Worldcon, the Hugos, the masquerade, etc… of being frivolous, because there were people dying in Vietnam (and elsewhere) went on to found the Max Ophüls Film Festival and Award in Saarbrücken ten years later (which includes frivolous things like galas, awards ceremony and a trophy, even though people are still dying). Hans Joachim Alpers went on to co-create Das Schwarze Auge and introduce generations of (West) Germans to the joy of RPGs, though he is still wrong about Conan. An Austrian fan – not an AST member, but a former president of the Science Fiction Club Deutschland – named Axel Mehlhardt who gave a talk about sword and sorcery at the Heidelberg Worldcon (mentioned in several con reports, though I couldn’t find out what he actually said and since he died in 2024, it’s no longer possible to ask him) went on to found a highly regarded jazz club in Vienna. In short, the angry young men (and it seems they were mostly men) of 1970 grew up and mellowed. Not all of them remained active in SFF fandom, though several of them ended up in other creative fields such as running jazz clubs and film festivals.

I have even run across the theory that the disruptive behaviour of the AST people is the reason why there never was another Worldcon in Germany. This is nonsense. For starters, we know the reason why there never was another Worldcon in Germany. It’s because German fandom is balkanised – the Star Trek fans, Star Wars fans, Perry Rhodan fans, anime fans, gamers, even the Masters of the Universe fans, etc… all have their own cons, but there are very few pan-fandom cons. And the people who would be the logical choices to run a German Worldcon bid, namely longterm runners of literary focussed SFF cons, don’t want to do it. That said, things are changing in German fandom and I expect to see a German Worldcon bid for sometime in the 2030s, though it won’t be for Heidelberg again.

Not to mention that Heicon ’70 was far from the only Worldcons beset by controversy and disruptive trolls. Worldcon has a history of controversies from the very first one in 1939, where the Futurians were kicked out for allegedly planning to distribute a pro-Communist leaflet, on. A known pedophile was kicked out in 1964, which led to people (who I hope had no idea about the extent of his crimes) protesting the exclusion of this pedophile. We’ve had more than one case of people being kicked out or preemptively banned for disruptive behaviour. In fact, I’m surprised that the AST people were not unceremoniously kicked out. We had the Sad and Rabid Puppy drama in 2015/2016 and in 2018, we had a far right protest outside the San José Worldcon. So in short, drama and controversy have always been a part of Worldcon. If anything, the AST folks trying to disrupt Heicon ’70 to strike a blow against the war in Vietnam is one of the less remembered Worldcon controversies.

As for the rest of my Heicon ’70, I tried to write it like I would write a contemporary con report and that includes the trip to get there. I suspect 1970 Cora would have been no more likely to take the train than 2025 Cora, though the specific incident which turned me against trains (a teacher shaming me for politely asking where the baggage check-in at the train station was, even though I had only ridden on a train once by the point, from Bremen to Osterholz-Scharmbeck, which takes 15 minutes and required no luggage) most likely wouldn’t have happened to 1970 Cora. However, my Dad’s family were always car people – my paternal grandpa managed a gas station and had a car since the late 1920s.

As for which car to take for my fictional 1970 Worldcon trip, my Dad really did have a Mercedes in the early 1970s, though I don’t know if it was this particular model, though it’s likely based on production years. I have very vague memories of that car and my parents sold it, when my Dad got a company car from his employer. As a replacement, they bought a Volkswagen Beetle – with the small window, but not the pretzel window – to maintain the low car insurance premiums (in Germany, car insurance premiums go down the longer the insurance has been active without accidents), which was mostly driven by my Mom once she got her licence. For longer roadtrips, we always used the bigger car, because it’s more comfortable. Because cramming three people plus luggage into a Volkswagen Beetle is not particularly comfortable.

For the route taken, I first plotted a contemporary route and then checked which Autobahnen already existed in 1970. Figuring out which service stations already existed wasn’t all that easy either – the history of individual Autobahn service stations in Germany is not well documented – but thankfully I found some vintage postcards of service stations on route as well as vintage postcards of Heidelberg and Neckarsteinach, where the boat trip went. I honestly think that more Worldcons should have roadtrips.

Aunt Irmtraut, the relative who’s mentioned in the con report, is a real person. She’s my Mom’s cousin and lives in Heidelberg and really keeps asking me when I’ll come to visit her.

Meanwhile, while I was working on my Heicon ’70 report, it was announced that next year’s Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention is relocating to – guess where? – Heidelberg, since their regular venue in Neuss is undergoing renovations. So I will really attend a con in Heidelberg next year, though a very different con and 56 years later.