Episode 08 The beginnings of their Club
It was early November. The group was advancing in its business. Sandra had found a club that was for sale in Weinheim near Frankfurt.
As is often the case, these clubs with hostesses offered sexual services within a family environment that wanted to be refined. The one found by Sandra in a residential area, was located in an old mansion. The club’s owners had converted only a few rooms for a dance floor, bar and more intimate areas. The outdated decoration indicated that the club had had little success. True, there was strong competition with real couples clubs like the one in Amadeus and Regina that they met in. On the other hand, youth also preferred naturist water bodies and gravel pits where FKK remained largely possible.
The traditional activity of the few clubs in the city for single men had allowed a clientele in search of novelty to run out of steam. An opportunity to position themselves by a differentiated offer thus presented itself advantageously for their group. Their target audience was very broad and in reality concerned anyone seeking sexual and probably also spiritual and initiatory fulfillment within a limited group dynamic.
In two weeks the opening would take place and Anke would lead the show they had titled “Emotions ”. They quickly decided not to do any major renovations to the space. The many rooms have kept their old-fashioned decor. This didn’t matter. The idea was to develop small groups of couples, if possible, to carry out sexual activities, but not only sexual ones.
The group’s weekend meetings
Since the first weekend of Baden-Baden, they had been meeting every two to three weeks. Following up on Patrick and Carine’s invitation, they decided to undertake a tour by visiting each couple. Frantz had a little trouble coming up with this organization through his phone interviews with each of the other six couples. To meet in Karlsruhe immediately did not seem to them to be the best formula and after having had the agreement of Pierre, they fixed the place of their second weekend in Strasbourg.
Weekends in Strasbourg
Pierre and Frantz decided which hotel the seven couples would stay in. They booked an extra room for Christine to take care of the children. Frantz decided for everyone and set each couple’s contribution at half the price of an evening and a night spent at Amadeus. The remaining costs would be paid out of their company’s capital. They would not abuse the evening out in the restaurant or the evenings in chic and expensive places but the couple who hosted in his city had to show them around his home.
Dominique’s initiative to use a questioning pedagogy prompted them to anticipate that the host couple would be subjected to an hour of free questions on all conceivable topics. This session would take place at the couple’s home and all participants would have to get naked. This same couple had to organize an individual and common prayer hour in a chapel or church where the group would be alone for this mystical spiritual experience. The group’s expressed wish was to find a remote or even abandoned place. Likewise, a meeting with people immersed in misery, injustices, atrocities present or past was planned so that they keep in mind, the ultimate purpose of their business. Gérard, taking up another idea from his wife, told the group that the organization of these weekends should in fact be part of a true project pedagogy. Finally, to an insistent question from Sepp, Frantz managed to gather a majority of votes to decide that if there were moments of sexual intimacy, they would take place exclusively outside the hotel or the home of the host couple. Each couple was free to organize such moments or not in an unusual place of their choice but it was not mandatory. By exchanging phone calls with Frantz, this draft bylaw was about to be completed when Anke woke up to demand that two hours per weekend be set aside for show training in their new dating club.
During the weekend in Strasbourg, Françoise and Pierre had taken them out to the tourist districts.
In Kleber Square, Peter invited them to meditate a few minutes in front of the monument to the general, the architect friend of Bonaparte with whom he received the highest initiation in the great pyramid of Cheops before leading the lodge Isis in Egypt. They had dined in a winstubby near the cathedral. Evelyne had shown them her office that she had recently occupied in the European Parliament and on Sunday, by Obernai, they had climbed to Mont Saint-Odile
Then Pierre wanted to show them the Nazi extermination camp of the Struthof. They had prayed in a small isolated chapel in the middle of the vineyards on Barr’s side and had lunch in an inn on the wine route.
In the afternoon, they had visited the old spinning plant that Patrick and Carine were planning to buy for their own club. Despite being located at the end of a street in a small Vosges village, the group gave a favorable opinion in support of the initiative. Patrick with his severance pay and the help of friends could directly finance half of the project. The club would finance the other half of Patrick’s charge to gradually buy back that share through the services that the club would render to their business. All, Patrick included, admire that this club could only serve as a place for the first meeting with their movement because the proximity to the village prohibited certain activities. This club would serve as a place of recruitment and contact with future members who would come from the Burgundy and Lyon region, from the far east or from the north and who do not speak German and do not speak enough English to be comfortable in the other two clubs in Germany. Since no expansion project was possible, Patrick agreed that he would leave the management to his friends and that most often he would participate with Carine in the activities of the other two clubs of their movement.
In the late afternoon, they went to Pierre and Françoise’s house. The questions focused on conventional topics: how Pierre and Françoise met, how they loved each other today, what they thought they would pass on to their children. Soon the fire of questions rolled over what Pierre expected of their company. How did he expect to exploit and share with them this gift of questioning the dead, of unabashedly celebrating the mystery of the transsubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ? In response to one of the questions, he distributed copies of his teenage poetry book to them. Werner and Laurie were putting him under pressure by harassing him to find out whether, with such ideas in mind, he felt well in his job as a human resources manager, whether this anachronism between his ideas and the policy he wished to pursue, would not play bad tricks on him in his professional life and whether he had every interest in becoming quickly a permanent member of their company too. Peter, who dodged this question, was saved by the gong. The hour had passed and they did not know what the poet was going to do at the professional level. The group admitted that given the short time that Françoise and Pierre had had, the Struthof’s visit could be validated in terms of an intervention on the subject of misery, injustices, atrocities. Anke’s training at Pierre and Françoise’s home didn’t really start. Apart from Frantz, who with his past would have had trouble shirking the show, no man saw himself naked on the stage of their dating club even to earn his own money.
On the other hand, they discussed at length to agree that the differentiation of their positioning consisted in offering an audience moments of intense emotions conducive to arousing at home a questioning of its behavior towards sex, love, its own identity of human being. Above all, there had to be a safe way of organizing meetings and of preventing people from standing side by side in catastrophic silence, which was often the case in fledgling clubs. The demonstration of the Friedrichsbad remained present in their heads and at the end of these first two hours of training, they had reached the point of saying that the evenings at the club could serve as a place of information or selection for another meeting in a more suitable setting: the Friedrichsbad, why not, a wild gravel pit along the Rhine, an island on the Rhine, a clearing by a stream. Anke finished this census by quoting the castle merry-go-round of the one who ran the elders’ club but the hour had just come and they interrupted the session.
Dominique and Gérard took note and summarized the debates. The group’s suspicion towards them quickly disappeared in the face of the quality of their restitution and everyone became aware of the interest of the educational approach they were instilling in their enterprise. Teachers rejoiced in the activity of their great students, which reconciled them with their profession! Overall this weekend in Strasbourg was considered positive and constructive. As an example, each couple can organize their weekend more easily. For their part, the children had also visited the old town; they had gone to the swimming pool and to a theater performance for young audiences. Christine had started with them a learning of the microcomputer, helped in this regard by the greats who practiced this tool in their schools. Evelyne had given them five hours of language classes in French, German and English and they were starting to talk better to each other.
During the following weekends in Basel, Mannheim, Nancy, Pirmasens and Karlsruhe
the initial organization was maintained and it allowed a rich collection of data on the fourteen members of their company.
They also collaborated on many of the issues that have since remained unresolved. The first concerned the total or partial break with their professional activities. Gérard and Dominique, who could ask for a one-year lay-off, did not plan at the moment to invest full-time in the company and everyone had to respect this choice without asking them any other questions. They had just solved an already difficult problem for their attendance. As senior teachers, they had managed to ensure that the deputy principal of their high school did not give them classes on Saturday mornings. These hours, as well as those on Monday morning, which by tradition no one wanted, were allocated to trainees or the least senior. However, their 15-year-old boy was going to have classes on Saturday mornings. At the beginning of September, in a disaster, they decided to enroll her in a private school where the students never had classes on Saturday mornings, this to promote their family life. Already, they had to avoid discussing this topic with their fellow teachers, although they suspected that many of them were doing the same.
The group appreciated this commitment, particularly as regards its regrettable financial implications for the household budget of Gérard and Dominique. Frantz and Anke wondered if for the first year they should not reduce their business ambitions and open the club only on weekends with the help of the three couples who in Baden-Baden declared themselves ready for full time. Every weekend, this issue was taken up, but a solution did not emerge from their discussions. They made little love together.
In Basel, Werner, on Saturday afternoon, showed them the chemical production unit and part of the control and development laboratories of his product line in his business team. Peter, in front of these programmable automata which the workers commanded by pressing their fingers on the touch screens of the control stations, insisted to make them aware that they lived in a society where for the first time the machine was able to take almost itself in charge and that therefore, its development had reached the point of replacing once and for all the man of production. Werner explained to them that these facilities had been set up between 1985 and 1990, and since then the staff on these platforms had been divided by three, knowing that of the remaining third, about half had been transferred to less technical sectors and replaced by young technicians with higher degrees. Since the establishment of this human organization, there had been no more hiring and if these reunited teams remained in place, the first hiring to fill retirements would take place in 10 years at the earliest. Werner added that ten years from now, it was not clear that such investments would still be made in Europe. He and his colleagues fought every day to keep the plant, but global economic uncertainty did not guarantee that future. The two professors stalled on these perspectives but they could not deny the manager of the industry.
Dan also gives them an opportunity to question themselves by inviting them, during the weekend in Pirmasens, to put on fatigues, helmets and to climb into the two Huey helicopters that he had brought from the collectors’ club, whose geographical location he did not give the official.
This paramilitary exercise shocked many, but when they watched the videotapes that Laurie and he had brought back from the former Yugoslavia at night, as well as some of the tapes filmed with the psychologist’s patients, they had to mute their primary reactions to convince themselves that non-violent methods had their limits outside a certain context and that too many victims were dying because they had not been able to defend themselves properly. The spirit with the purest faith could not tolerate the unpunished abuses of the sword. The sword had to be kept under the guard of the mind.
Laurie pushed the question even further by inviting them on Sunday afternoon to meet during a walk, some of her patients almost getting back on their feet and who were about to return to their families in the States. These people were now able to speak out about their suffering and to advocate to raise awareness about the atrocities of tyrants and other warlords or gangs running around the world. This encounter in the palatine forest left a deep impression on them and that weekend, before leaving, they asked themselves whether or not they were called to become knights to fight the lords of war, hatred and misery or whether, on the contrary, like those wounded who had returned from torture and death, they were only able to disappear in the anonymity of the crowd to measure these moments of their lives.
They were also impressed when on another Saturday afternoon Sepp showed them the large satellite tracking room of the E.S.O.C. in Darmstadt where he worked.
He simply explained to them where space technologies had come to and what he expected from future developments in telecommunications so that he could live more clearly on the significant facts that are changing our environment. The engineer called for new ways to ensure freedom of information about the planet despite the grip of certain private interests thriving under the law of silence.
Anke’s training sessions gradually began; all the women participated first, then the men attracted to the erotic side of the affair, also subscribed to it but they still did not want to go on stage in the club… however, participating in other animations during meetings in the open nature no longer posed any case of conscience.
The children had visited Sepp’s workplace, boarded the helicopters, and were kept informed of what their parents were doing. The greatest had been earning excellent grades in languages since Evelyne and Laurie helped them prepare their homework. Dominique and Gérard were not involved by the children because adapting to the Swiss or German programs was not their priority. Sometimes these weekend schoolchildren slept in class on Mondays. Dominique and Gérard were the first to be alerted by colleagues that their children had changed greatly, matured and had a new depth of thought. Soon other couples reported the same remarks: their children worked more and better, often outside their classroom programs as if they were now pursuing higher ambition as an adult can.
The group questioned its own changes. Frantz quickly agreed: they had already spent 6,000 Euros! After listening to Sandra repeat the budget planned for the start-up of their club, they found that this problem could no longer be avoided. They had to take action to generate revenue and some profit or stop.
THE WEINHEIM CLUB
On the first Friday evening, the opening day, the last of the group arrived around 9:30 p.m., half an hour before the club opened. The seven couples were there. Sandra had been in the area pasting posters and distributing flyers. She had paid for a local radio station to broadcast a few radio spots. With Sepp, they were the closest to the Frankfurt area and it had done so with good will. In the joy of meeting, they waited for their first customers.
The first customer.
An hour later, a shy young man pushed the front door and saw the desolate scene and a group happily turning around the bar, took the side to flee. Laurie, the first, measured the situation. She interrupted their discussion, told the group that their first client had just run away! Anke immediately decided to go and catch up with this young man and with Laurie, they ran down the street in pursuit of him. They had not changed their outfits and were dressed as if to go to their daily work. After a few minutes, they came back with the young man in question.
Sepp put him at ease by telling him that they were waiting for their first customer to open the first bottle of champagne and that he was entitled tonight to a free admission and that everything he would do would be free. The young man didn’t understand. Sandra asked him: he was nineteen years old, living in the neighborhood and returning from the cinema where he had accompanied one of his classmates. His curiosity had led him to open the door because he had seen the poster in the window and had been attracted by his ambiguous message. The women in the group had circled around him. Werner came to the young man’s aid.
Was it possible for him to reach his girlfriend and invite her to finish the party with them? She lived in a studio not far away and it was possible to phone her but she was just a fellow student… obviously he had never kissed her! Sandra put the phone in her hands and intervened in their conversation to introduce the club. The girl hesitated and Sandra decided that Frantz, Anke and the young man would go and get her right away. That evening was their only customers and they decided to act as if this young couple were joining them in their group.
Around one in the morning, they closed the front door. Anke, rediscovering her stripes as captain of girls, decided to celebrate a primitive initiatory dance on the one hand to let off steam in front of the relative failure of their opening and on the other hand to call through their magical invocations the future and many hosts of their upcoming evenings. The young couple entered the dance and later, without understanding what was happening to them, they found themselves between Sandra and Sepp, Frantz and Anke, following exactly their every move. The two couples began to make love slowly and tenderly. The sighs began to be heard, the young man and the girl went beyond their inexperience to discover all the magnificence of the sharing of love among themselves and among others. The three couples were exhausted to sleep tired and the others retreated to the upper rooms to sleep on makeshift folding beds as well.
The next morning, at breakfast, they laughed at the embarrassment of the young man who was going to have to explain to his parents that he had just dropped out. He had to admit that lately, he had often dreamed of being able to love his girlfriend and that now that it was done, and in front of witnesses, he had no reason to complain about it. But this realization of his dream had been very fast, too fast! The girl did not want to complain about it and the release of her feminine powers gave her a new maturity that she appreciated to her true value. He could continue to love him, and if they already wanted to live together and not separate, the club could help them: they could just come on weekends to serve champagne and later, they could participate in the animation of the club, perform.
Anke explained to them how a “normal ” evening should take place and what the purpose of their business was, its cultural and spiritual dimension. Frantz enumerated the fundamental distinctions between their enterprise and any cult, and he emphasized the originality of their approach. He was convincing enough that the boy and girl decided to come back the next night to help them hold the bar. The group beat the campaign all Saturday to broadcast the announcement of the opening of their club and in the evening, as soon as the opening, more groups of young people rushed to the entrance.
Electronic communication to get to know each other quickly.
Sepp can finally test its electronic machine to manage questions and answers. It was their weapon to definitely foster dialog and meet them.
Sepp, in its satellite management and space research center, and its colleagues had the latest and best-performing equipment in flat-panel displays, the most powerful computers and local Ethernet networks. He had put a few friends in confidence and their small team had set themselves other goals than those of their institution. They understood that most satellites were used in the new electronic warfare for surveillance, or espionage called economic intelligence. They did not, of course, have access to the EW centers of their societies’ member states, but they had dared to dream of one day creating them for themselves. Sepp obviously thought that this electronic warfare center would be used for the political, economic, social, cultural movement that their group of couples would develop to change Life and the world.
Sepp and his colleagues had set aside old equipment and were in contact with suppliers and subcontractors, who were also in the confidence of their project, to produce electronic and computer systems that would later enable them to compete with the military electronic warfare capabilities of the states.
Pierre and Frantz, joined Sepp’s group with his electronics and computer specialists. Quickly all together developed a local area network to connect the different parts of their club with a server capable of managing multimedia e-mail. One afternoon, this team came to lay the computer wiring in the club and see if the telephone network with its copper cables could also be used.
The necessary software came from copies either made at the workplace or given by suppliers or subcontractors. The multimedia part had been simplified by the choice to use several VHS camcorders. Tape cassettes were a convenient way to move from one room to another. Records could easily be deleted and used for new records. The recorded images were going to be presented internally but never left the club and every evening they would be erased or destroyed.
With the help of a video projector installed in the large common room, Sepp was able to project on the large screen the image of its computer control screen and VHS video with the video recorder. From the first profits of the club, the video projector would be purchased and no longer rented. Sepp had defended his idea of using cheaper table telephones.
On the screen was the percentage of people who wanted to dance, listen to soft music, talk about a chosen theme, participate in an erotic moment, see the girl or man of such and such table do this or that, dance, sing, kiss a partner, show naked, etc.
The few rooms of the premises thus saw groups with varied activities parade. One night, at around two in the morning, when no one wanted to leave the premises, Anke decided with Sepp to launch the idea of a special meeting next weekend where all present should participate. The idea was accepted. Thus, in one evening, the objective of their group meetings was transmitted to this curious audience.
Three sequences were programmed to animate the entire audience.
Sepp perfected its much-needed equipment from the first evening. He began with a passion to design microprocessors dedicated to the functions of his electronic installation. Frantz accepted the quotes presented and the evenings were even more lively as the speed of the communications resisted the saturation of the links. The integration of video into the electronic system made it possible to create a kind of virtual, dual world. From evening to evening, at the same time, 3 sequences were programmed to animate the entire audience.
The first sequence.
The first allowed a boy and a girl to meet by courier and decide to go to one of the three video studios upstairs to be filmed by Barbara, Carine or Dominique. The theme of this sequence was imposed: the couples, entirely naked, after having taken a shower, had to form a 69, the girl had to settle on the boy to make love once in front then presenting his back and his buttocks to the boy, finally the latter had to take her by doggy. Ejaculation was not necessary, but it was evident that it was important to the success of the couple among the public. To do this, the boy could remove his condom and ejaculate on the place of the body that the girl had chosen.
The images were edited for 4 minutes with the original soundtrack and thanks to the image retouching on the computer, Sepp or Werner hid the couple’s faces with a mask to make them anonymous or else the makeup gave them another identity.
The purpose of this workshop was to show images to support that young people who did not know each other when entering the club could, if they liked, organize themselves until they shared a real sexual pleasure, without taboos and in the eyes of all. The contact was made directly by interposed screens and no one was able to guess anything between a couple who had just formed in this way and images of couples with anonymous faces who loved each other. In addition, the use of pseudonyms could allow the relationship to remain without aftermath. Everyone was free to follow what they wanted, to commit or not but all were tempted by this way of establishing a meeting, to share a carnal relationship.
On those evenings, it was the only opportunity to have sex in the club; the other lounges were closed. Pierre explained to Laurie and Anke that the rest of this workshop would be an awareness of sexual freedom to seek out his soul mates and enrich himself with his loves as in the culture of the Moso people in Yunnan.
Soon, several couples formed and their video images emboldened others. It happened that a couple confessed to having been tempted to be filmed as early as a Friday evening to hesitate again on a Saturday evening to finally return on Sunday evening and without their partners noticing, to finally love themselves a few naked minutes in front of the camera. This couple wanted to appear unmasked at the end of the video to invite their spouses to be filmed with them in a future video sequence. This one took place the same evening and the four with uncovered faces had carried out an exchange of couples in front of the camera while respecting the imposed figures. There was some public enthusiasm about their example, and those who were shy were starting to get back into the internal telecommunications network. The top seven couples among the top fifteen who had been able to make it to the big screen won a dozen free tickets and the top three couples in the final vote by the audience were selected for a later final.
The second sequence
The second sequence offered the possibility for anyone to present themselves naked for a minute in front of the camera, the image of the body was then truncated of the head as well as the feet. 20 girls and 20 boys were selected by a first jury from the public to go on the big screen. The audience then matched the 20 couples. By drawing lots, each couple received an exercise to be performed in front of the camera, except for one that was to take place on the stage, directly in front of the audience. Anke was setting the stage and preparing the actors.
This workshop prepared theater, dance and cabaret activities. At first, there was no love search. The mere integration into a couple or group that played the comedy was enough. This limit was suitable for most of the public as a first step towards building a more developed and integrated cultural and social movement.
The third sequence was more artistic,
a person or a couple or several people could register for the next weekend and present either a lascivious dance, a cabaret or theater sketch about love or sex, a song or recite a text. A rehearsal was organized on Saturday afternoon before performing during the evening. Amateur artists could resort to provocation, lyricism, emotion, nothing was forbidden except gratuitous obscenity.
The actors in this sequence, in addition to receiving free tickets and drinks for 12 parties, were paid a percentage of the evening’s receipts. They could invest all or part of the gains in the company in the form of shares. Trips to the tropics rewarded the winners who each month had earned the most points during these games. Finding cheap trips was not a problem in this country where you can buy your tickets at the road service stations or at the press houses.
Dominique and Gérard had insisted on introducing this kind of educational progression between initially anonymous clients and then meeting in pairs until later forming a small group capable of an artistic production to finally become shareholders. Then, these few elected representatives would be offered the opportunity to take a more spiritual approach in the company of the seven founding couples. Finally, each evening invariably ended with the public erasure of all video images. A jury formed at the beginning of the evening monitored the video activities and guaranteed this compulsory erasure. No purchase of videotapes or video footage was possible.
Three months later, through these efforts of communication and loyalty,
the club had found its pace of cruising and more than a thousand customers, or for forty evenings, an average of 25 people.
Nearly 400 couples were filmed by the end of the second month, an average of around 15 couples per evening. This turnout was very encouraging and was a good illustration of the club’s future. Party participants were co-opting new members, but they did not want to turn the audience into a mass of anonymous spectators. The goal was to form active groups, networks of exchanges.
Most of them came at regular intervals, the same days at the same times so as to find each other more easily and it was between them that the discovery games, seduction games took place with confidence. There seemed to be a norm that at some point everyone had to find a person to have sex with in front of the camera and show the image of their couple to the public. In the audience everyone was trying to find out who had or had not shown up on the giant screen and now every week Sepp using its certified pseudonym management gave the rate of members who had shown up on the screen.
A rule was introduced so that it is not always the same with different partners who monopolize the camera. A slogan had been circulating during the third month to stop co-opting new members and to make sure that everyone passed on the screen. During the last two weekends, the list of pseudonyms not yet filmed was circulated and the last ones were entitled to choose their partner from the couples elected the previous times. Apart from a residual absenteeism, more than 90% of the members showed up on the screen at the end of the third month.
Pierre during this period, had tried to intervene to present a conference-debate on the sexual life of the savages of northwestern Melanesia, the book by Bronislaw Malinowski, published in 1929.This proposal was unanimously rejected by the founding group. But the poet secured a promise that Anke, Laurie, Dominique, and Sandra would read the book and share a discussion with him. Readers understood the value of these rites of sexual freedom in channeling and eliminating domestic violence within a social group. Anke and Laurie began to introduce these rituals into their new club’s animation programs.
The school of love
This success called for a new development of the club. Taking up Amadeus’ recipe, Anke and Laurie had already set up a love school that operated on Friday evenings above the club room as well as on Saturdays all day. Once a month, on Friday night from midnight, in the cellars of the building that had been fitted out, Anke led a fake black mass reserved for all couples who could produce a medical certificate of sero-negativity.
Frantz and Pierre had long concurred on the words of the rite of this celebration. The idea was to explain that the term “black mass” was used to inspire a fear in the imperial.
Communion around the body of a very desirable woman was to end on the promise that a more spiritual communion was even stronger in immaterial discovery and wealth, once the crucial moment to provoke fear, fear and a personal existential question had passed. The purpose of this ceremony was to overcome certain limits and apprehensions in order to develop the self-confidence necessary to progress on the spiritual personal initiatory path from the ecstasy of love and the fusion of the carnal bodies.
During the ceremony and to please Laurie, an evocation of tantrism raised awareness of the fact that they had within them the power to transform evils into remedies, the most unseemly situations into a source of beneficial and regenerating primary energies.
At the end of February, they decided to present the results of the first three months in order to identify development prospects.
They offered the fairest public the possibility of continuing their activities under a favorable subscription, materialized by the delivery of a bar code card bearing the pseudonym of its owner and which could eventually be converted into shares as part of a capital increase of the club. This group of clients represented about 50 couples of all ages and about 100 people selected from their activities in the various workshops, i.e. 50 women and 50 men. In total, the group that would become members of their club included 200 people. For three months of intense activities, the seven founding couples found that this great success required an expansion of their premises and an increase in their equipment and other cultural activities.
The construction of their new club bigger and more comfortable.
The entire club was tasked with selecting the investments for half the profits. They decided to set aside this money for the construction of a new club capable of meeting their expectations and whose idea had been presented by the founders’ group. In a survey of messaging conducted by Sandra, they discovered that the majority of them accepted the idea of gathering in buses to spend a day or a weekend in this club if it was located, for example, at the bottom of a valley at the foot of the Black Forest, near Baden-Baden. They also accepted the idea of meeting in this new club young French, Swiss or other countries.
Frantz included in the plan of investments for the new club planned on the site of an old sawmill, a garage for two buses with a workshop for maintenance of buses and cars. Sandra insisted on also registering a large, restaurant-like kitchen to prepare meals for about 200 people to serve in the club’s dining room or to take with the necessary equipment on buses during excursions to the club’s program of activities. Volunteer members would receive training in cooking, catering and hotel services and were expected to be hired on a full-time or part-time basis to ensure the opening of their new club every day of the year. A good table could also attract a new audience who would also benefit from the club’s facilities, notably its indoor swimming pool, spa, sauna, hammam, relaxation rooms, sports, etc.
Frantz specifically monitored the changing composition of the clientele. After three months, the proportion of couples over thirty years of age grew and people came further and further. Each couple left with a batch of brochures ranging from the most innocuous messages to the most explicit ones. Depending on who they spoke to, customers could present one or the other brochure to their friends and family and thus generate new participation.
The American soldiers started to arrive for the youngest with their German girlfriends, the others with their American wives. All these developments necessitated new structures. Werner supported the idea of recruiting from among the most faithful and participative of their new members, the team that would manage the club apart from the permanent presence of all 7 founding couples, but the other founding couples felt that it was too early and that everything was not up to date in this Weinheim club!
Sports activities to strengthen the union of participants in their social and cultural movement.
Anke asked the group of fourteen founders what they planned to do with the other half of the profits. She suggested that not everything should go in the construction of this new club on the ground of the recently acquired sawmill near Baden-Baden.
The month of March is still suitable for ski trips in sealskin on average mountains. Anke knew that all the couples in the founding group were downhill skiing or cross-country skiing, but certainly on different levels. She decided to buy them ski touring equipment and the appropriate clothes. Their first outing would be from the bottom of the Val Ferret and they would climb to the hospice of the Great Saint Bernard by this very aerial and delicate slope. For the equipment of the 12 people, she gave a provisional budget of 7,000 Euros. Frantz startled and Sandra. This amount was almost equivalent to the full profits of the first three months.
But the gym teacher didn’t let go. They were to take part in the activities of the first road, and from the time of their meeting in Baden-Baden, all had recognized the historical significance of their first night in the mountains. It was from this point of departure on this first track that they had the best chance of reaching the end of the journey on the third track! After three grueling months of professional work and club management on weekends, they had accumulated fatigue and stress. They needed to get some fresh air, redo sports and this had to come before an investment in building a new club.
Frantz agreed with his wife that he respected the tacit agreement between them when it came to money to give his opinion, which had the force of law. Half of this investment in ski equipment would be taken from the profits for which they had free allocation and the other half of the cost of this equipment would be taken from the profits of the coming months, the cash advance being drawn from the capital. On the other hand, this equipment would be profitable by alpine ski trips the following weekends and until June for the most experienced skiers among their new members or their volunteer customers. 12-member groups accompanied by 3 guides or racing leaders, or 15 people, could quickly form for the 10 weekends following their first alpine hike either at the Grand Saint Bernard or for shorter and easier routes in Switzerland or France. The goal of 120 people, or about half of the new members, was achievable and it showed all members and future clients that the activities offered were not limited to those in the club buildings. In the summer, excursions into nature and the mountains by the water would continue these winter activities.
They had to think about creating an offer on the first spiritual initiatory path, the overcoming of the limits of our fleshly body, and the idea was all found. Frantz advanced his argument to ensure that the couple of friends they had known as students, who had an excellent practice of mountaineering and ski hiking, would agree to supervise these outings every weekend for a minimal remuneration as soon as their expenses were covered by the company.
Finally, it was interesting to let the new managers chosen from the new members, organize during a weekend, the life of the club. As Anke was saying, they were all exhausted, after this significant investment in time and availability. They had to be able to pass on their hand and take care of the building of the real club which was above all a human community full of energy and openness to the outside. Before thinking of opening up to others, a very difficult task, they had to open up to nature, to themselves, to their overcoming of the limits of body and mind!
They did not have to discuss much to agree on a few names of future club managers. By the time Anke went shopping in Austria, a country with a weaker currency and more advantageous exchange rates and also, the excellent ski equipment, the time they formed the replacement team, they trained on a Sunday on the Hornisgrinde side above Baden-Baden, this outing could take place in the second half of March.
On returning home this Sunday evening, most agreed that they needed some freedom and that this ski ride was welcome. However, Dominique still had urgent work for Pierre. The letter teacher, who was very interested in seeing a poet, had planned to have him speak one evening at a conference organized by her high school. Peter had only to talk about poetry! The date was the Thursday of the following week. Pierre, despite Francoise’s fears, could not refuse.