The disciplinarian sports-academies of his youth: living inside the court; the opera-sleep

texture · UNDATED (boyhood, B.S. era, Kaiserslautern / Austria)

• When: UNDATED (Schtitt's "privileged boy" school years; the opera-sleep is a standing present-day habit)
• What: At "Gymnasium Kaiserslautern," where he was a "privileged boy who whining about cold wind," Schtitt says the boys were made to live inside a tennis court for months, "to learn to live inside" — never crossing a line, meals brought only on "very lucky days." He also cites "grim childhood experiences at a BMW-sponsored 'Quality-Control-Orientated' Austrian Akademie" to account for his adult REM-peculiarities: he can sleep only amid deafening European opera (see event 19). The through-line: an ascetic, deprivation-based pedagogy he now half-jokingly threatens the E.T.A. kids with.