Torsten Liermann was already nine years old when he entered the “ZDF hit parade”. Suzi Quatro or Kraftwerk – Liermann has immortalized them all on cassette. His collection is now secured in the Waldenbuch Museum of Everyday Culture, but Michael Jackson is missing.
Torsten Liermann created the core of the collection of music cassettes, which can recently be seen in the display case for new acquisitions on the ground floor of the Museum of Everyday Culture in Waldenbuch, in the early 1970s in front of the television at home: the family of the then nine-year-old watched the “ZDF- Hitparade” with Dieter Thomas Heck and “Disco” with Ilja Richter. “When a song came that we knew from the radio and that we liked to hear, I turned on the microphone and everyone had to be as quiet as a mouse,” says Torsten Liermann, who is now 62 years old and lives in Laupheim and his collection left to the museum. The microphone belonged to a Philips cassette recorder that could only record in mono and that the older sister had received as a confirmation present.
Torsten Liermann got a better cassette recorder a little later, “also in mono, but I could record directly from the radio with it, which was of course much better.” And at the age of 11 or 12 he realized: “Listening to music is one of my things. That’s when I got my parents to let me buy a simple record player and listen to music while I did my homework.” Soon after, however, he recognized a new problem: “I noticed that records are expensive, and my cheap record player made the records broken.”
From Heintje to the power plant
He bought a stereo cassette deck around 1977 so that his collection, which ultimately consisted of almost 200 music cassettes, could meet his high sound quality requirements: “Because I also had a good record player, I was allowed to borrow my brother’s records and record them.” His sister photographed the record covers and, with her pictures, enabled Torsten Liermann to craft pretty-looking cassette covers. He later studied mechanical engineering: “Back then, people still drew with ink, and I wrote on cassettes with stencils and ink.” years as well as his equipment: “As a child, Heintje was my favourite.” Torsten Liemann’s taste in music could be described as diverse: “Suzi Quatro inspired me. When Kraftwerk came out with ‘Autobahn’, it totally fascinated me. My favorite group is still 10cc.”
At the end of his studies, Torsten Liermann’s passion for collecting became global, as we would say today: he wrote his diploma thesis in Trondheim for six months. He also listened to the radio in Norway and then told his sister what to record at home. In 1984, “Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ just came out – the big hit at the time.” After graduating, he spent a year in China and then took part of his collection home on the Trans-Siberian Railway. At the Mongolian-Russian border, a Rolling Stones cassette and a Michael Jackson cassette were taken from him by Russian customs officers: “I had to sign a Russian document that everything was legal. And to this day I don’t know whether the customs officers simply wanted the cassettes for themselves, or whether this music was really forbidden.”
Collector in many disciplines
Torsten Liermann says he hasn’t listened to the cassettes in his collection for 20 years, but he takes them with him every time he moves. When his parents cleared the household, it became clear to him: “At some point things will be thrown away. The moment I die, nobody is interested in my collection anymore.” Since he not only collects cassettes but also other things, he had the feeling that it was “slowly becoming too much”. He left his cassette collection to the Museum of Everyday Culture in Waldenbuch, he donated his calendar collection to the German Calendar Museum, he gave his playing cards to the German Playing Card Museum in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, and his collection of analogue photographic technology was given a photographic museum.
He also wants to get rid of his theater programs, his beer coasters and his rulers: “A museum can judge whether it’s something worth keeping permanently,” says Tortsten Liermann, “if the museum in five years comes to the conclusion that my collection is actually nothing special and they throw it away, then that’s okay with me too.” He’s not a particularly sentimental collector: “Then people looked at it with an expert eye and said, ‘It’s worth it, and the rest is garbage.’ That’s just the way it is.” For him, the fascination of collecting lies in “finding things for free or very cheaply, because anyone can buy them.”
The fear of sticking prevents the music
At the beginning of the new millennium, Torsten Liermann copied his cassette collection onto a minidisk and then converted it into MP3 files. These days he listens to CDs at home and MP3s in the car from an SD memory card. He doesn’t use streaming platforms like Spotify: “That’s not enough haptics for me.”
However, the haptics somewhat limit the possible uses of the cassettes in the museum of everyday culture outside of the showcase. He has not yet listened to the cassettes, says Fabian Stöckl, the scientific trainee who is in charge of the collection: “We didn’t dare to do it because we don’t know what condition the tapes are in.” In the worst case, he says, everything could stick together inextricably if you tried to elicit music from the music cassette collection.