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BERLIN - She boasts about her drug orgies and her affairs with Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and a fortnight ago, at 60, she had herself photographed naked - but wearing a pirate's hat - for one of Germany's most popular magazines.
Uschi Obermaier was and, many would say, still is the beautiful, albeit surgically improved face of Germany's chaotic 1960s era of student rebellion. It was a time of free sex and mass protest that gave birth both to the country's celebrated Green movement and its once feared Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist gang.
This month she has been thrust back into the limelight after nearly 40 years, with the publication of her memoirs and a new feature film, Das Wilde Leben (The Wild Life), recounting her colourful exploits as an icon of the student left, groupie, street-fighting woman and reluctant inhabitant of Berlin's legendary free-sex Commune 1.
The film and her book, which coincides with plans by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to free the last remaining members of the former RAF terrorist gang after decades of incarceration, have inevitably sparked a collective look back at Germany's era of 1960s youth protest.
The events of 40 years ago have also begun to raise questions about whether the upsurge of popular youth protest against a generation of German parents still heavily implicated in the horrors of the Nazi era succeeded in achieving its aim to fundamentally change post-war society.
Obermaier now lives as a virtual recluse. She works as a jewellery designer from her home in Topanga Canyon just north of Los Angeles and rarely receives visitors.
She claims that she recently learned to cook for the first time and has stopped using her fridge merely to store Manolo Blahniks shoes. In the old days, she claims, her breakfast consisted of "apple juice, a line of heroin and a joint."
Born in a dreary working-class suburb of Munich, Obermaier grew bored with the succession of "dead Sundays" in her early teens while being brought up by her solo mother.
"I used to wish for a plane crash, just for a bit of action," she said in an interview last week. "Where I lived, I felt nothing happens and nothing ever will happen."
Salvation came with the arrival of the "sex, drugs n' rock and roll" era. The young Uschi became obsessed with rock music and made frequent pilgrimages to Munich's Big Apple Club where bands such as The Lords, The Rattles and, on one evening, Jimi Hendrix played. Donning false eyelashes, a micro skirt and swigging back a few Captagon tablets, she spent every available evening at the club dancing the night away.
Drug-taking soon became routine. Obermaier admits that she became so dependent on Captagon, a form of speed, that she needed it to get up in the morning. To calm herself down she smoked joints. Later she took LSD until she experienced a trip so bad that it was "a near-death event".
Obermaier's outrageous behaviour and stunning looks rapidly helped to find her work as a model when she was not playing the role of the nation's most famous groupie.
She still talks tenderly of her brief affair with Jimi Hendrix, who took her to his room in West Berlin's Kempinksi Hotel after giving a concert in the city. "He was the most beautiful of all my men," she said. "Making love with Jimi was one of the most profound experiences for me."
Flings with Jagger and Richards followed. She recalls how at one meeting both Stones vied with each other to get her into bed. Jagger conceded. Obermaier says she is still on good terms with Richards and that they often speak on the phone.
But being simply an upmarket groupie was not enough. By the late-60s she was ensconced in capitalist West Berlin with impish looking, bespectacled and Struwelpeter-haired new boyfriend Rainer Langhans.
The two were soon to become the star protagonists in a bizarre political experiment involving group cohabitation that was explicitly designed to shock Germany's conservative establishment.
Commune 1 was Germany's answer to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury, but it had a seriously Teutonic streak. The group of long-haired, dope-smoking Maoist students who began the experiment were out to explode and revolutionise the moribund values of post-war German society.
A surviving photo shows seven of founder members standing naked with their backs to the camera, their hands spread against a wall. A small boy on the right of the picture is the only one to face the photographer.
Free sex, political stunts, drugs and endless political discussion dominated life in Commune 1, where the inmates slept on mattresses on the floor. All available cash was shared, doors were torn off lavatories and phone calls were piped through a loud speaker. Letters home were read out in full to the assembled communards.
Obermaier recalls in her memoirs how the discussions about the difference between capitalism and communism seemed to her at the time like "pure brainwashing sessions". "Anyone who drank a Coke rated as a counter-revolutionary. The fact that I smoked menthol cigarettes meant that I was playing into the hands of the imperialists."
The Commune 1 phenomenon, nevertheless, succeeded in attracting the attention it so desired. Raunchy photos of the semi-naked Obermaier and Langhans were splashed across newspapers and magazines as the two became icons of an era of student upheaval.
Celebrated philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse visited and declared afterwards that the experiment heralded the "end of one-dimensional man". A largely hostile conservative press insisted that Commune 1 was little more than an attempt to subvert German youth: "They want to recruit the girls and boys from beat clubs who are potential supporters of their idea and turn them into shoplifters who can steal in department stores and supermarkets," said Stern magazine - the publication that last month pictured Obermaier naked in a fanfare of publicity - then of the commune's inhabitants.
Langhans now says the commune's endless political discussions, which included self- analysis, were simply an attempt by its members to come to terms with the legacy of the Nazi era of their fathers' generation. "Ultimately it was about the fact that society was built on mountains of corpses and the fact that nobody spoke about it."
The political japes of Commune 1 were first confined to demos at shopping markets, but the growing climate of student rebellion and anti-Vietnam war fervour encouraged members to plan a cake and jellybaby attack on the then US Vice President Hubert Humphrey who was scheduled to visit Berlin. Plans for the attack were unearthed by police shortly before the visit and several commune's members were briefly jailed.
But what was to happen a few months later brought a swift end to the experimental nature of Commune 1 and the German media's fascination with free sex a la Uschi.
On June 2, 1967, a group of revolutionary Berlin students had assembled on the city's streets to protest against a visit by the Shah of Persia. German police looked on as the Shah's bodyguards waded into the demonstrators and beat them with sticks. Minutes later a shot rang out. The bullet, fired from a policeman's pistol, shattered the skull of student Benno Ohnesorg, 26.
Ohnesorg died instantly. Black and white TV pictures of the young man lying prostrate and bloody on the street were flashed across Germany, sending the nation's youth into a state of shock.
The event not only helped to confirm many of the fears Commune 1 members held about a "latent fascist state". Its effect was to enrage and engage large sections of Germany's left-wing student youth.
Joschka Fischer, Germany's recently retired Green Foreign Minister, who was then a rebel leftwing activist, said of Ohnesorg's death: "I felt nothing but fury: fury that somebody could be shot dead simply for being a student at a demonstration.
"Looking back, Ohnesorg's death was a tragedy that more than anything else made me want to get involved in politics. I wanted to make sure that nothing like that could ever happen again in Germany."
Nowadays it is argued that Ohnesorg's death and the subsequent shooting of the legendary activist Rudi Dutschke less than a year later forced a split in the country's anti-authoritarian protest movement. One half, championed in its initial stages by Dutschke himself, formed Germany's ground-breaking, pacifist environmentalist movement, which went on to become the Green Party - the only environmentalist political group to share power in a European government.
However, from the other arm of Germany's radical left movement of the 1960s sprang the country's notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, subsequently known as the Red Army Faction. From 1968 to 1991, the radical leftwing terrorist organisation conducted an "anti-imperialist struggle" in which kidnappings, shootings and bomb attacks claimed the lives of 34 victims, many of them figureheads of post-war German society.
It was only a fortnight ago that a court in Stuttgart considered freeing Brigitte Mohnhaupt, one of the last RAF activists still in jail. Horst Koehler, the German President is also deciding whether to pardon her fellow RAF activist Christian Klar, who has served a 24-year sentence in prison.
Forty years on from the heady days of Obermaier and Commune 1, Germany is still debating whether the nation's student protest era heralded a dawn of enlightenment or a descent into fanatical terrorism. "Were the Communards political artists or terrorists?" asks this week's issue of Der Spiegel .
Obermaier left Germany in 1973 with a former Hamburg pimp named Dieter Bockhorn. She travelled with him around Asia and America in a bus, and eventually settled in California. Bockhorn died in a motorcycle crash on New Year's Eve 1983.
Many of the Commune 1's members today look little different from average German senior citizens. The lives of some have been wrecked by drugs, and periods in and out of jail. Only Langhans seems to have held on to the spirit of anti-imperialist protest. He still sports his shock of shoulder-length tousled hair - even if it is almost white - and he still espouses Commune 1 values by living in a spartan one-room apartment in Munich and paying court to a "harem" of women.
"We won," he declared last week, "we accomplished our mission. Society is freer, women are equal and children are allowed to contradict their parents." More than a few of today's Germans would not disagree.
- INDEPENDENT
