Icon: Uschi Obermaier

Uschi Obermaier

Uschi Obermaier was an actress, photomodel, protagonist of the 1968 left-wing movement in Germany and is regarded as an iconic sex-symbol of the 1968 generation in Europe. She was born in Munich on September 24th, 1946 and was discovered by TWEN magazine. Thin and petite just like Twiggi, she represented a new type of model. Obermaier moved from Munich to the Berlin-based Kommune 1 after she had become Rainer Langhans' girlfriend. Langhans and Obermaier freely talked to the media about their relationship, becoming symbols of the sexual revolution.
Uschi is considered one of the first and best known German groupies of the 60s (she's had affairs with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones as well as Jimi Hendrix - it even went so far that Keith and Uschi ended up falling really in love and he is said to even have considered leaving his common-law wife Anita Pallenberg for Uschi).
In 1973, Uschi Obermaier fell in love with Dieter Bockhorn, the wealthy owner of a club in Hamburg's Reeperbahn red-light district (she now was in love with two men at the same time, Dieter and Keith, and was always torn between the more personally fulfilling relationship with Dieter and the exciting and very sexual life with Richards). Together, Bockhorn and Obermaier traveled the world in a customized bus, first spending three years in Asia, then going to Mexico and the US for another three years. In an Interview (Galore, Issue 25) Obermaier marked reports that she and Bockhorn had a traditional wedding in every country they traveled in as completely fictitious. They only married once, in India. After ten years their relationship ended abruptly. On New Year's Eve 1983, Dieter Bockhorn died in a motorcycle accident in Mexico. About a week earlier she had met Keith Richards at the beach they were staying at in Baja - the first time since she had eventually left and abandoned him crashed out in a Chicago hotel room 8 years earlier, in 1975, after Bockhorn had called to invite her to join him on his trip to Asia. Richards had come to Mexico to get married to Patti Hansen. Uschi would later say "in that single week in Mexico I have irrevocably lost the two most important men in my life."
By then, Uschi Obermaier had been granted American citizenship. Today, she lives in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles, working as a jewellery designer.
Her life has been depicted in a biopic called Das Wilde Leben (the english title is Eight Miles High), based on the bestselling book High Times: Mein Wildes Leben, an authorized biography of Obermaier's life, written by Olaf Kraemer, who also wrote the screenplay to Eight Miles High.

The movie, in which German actress Natalia Avelon portrays Uschi, was directed by Achim Bornhak and was released in February 2007.