Biography

Born in 1987 in the quiet town of Wermelskirchen, I learnt early on to fight and stand up for my beliefs. I first came into contact with the arts through the Waldorf kindergarten in Remscheid-Bliedinghausen and the Waldorf School in Remscheid-Bergisch Born. But from Year 6 onwards, I moved to the grammar school in Wermelskirchen – back to my roots. And the artist Michael vom Stein, aka Michael Clap, was born. A first rap song about my class teacher at the Waldorf School at the time, followed by an apology rap, laid the foundations.

I then moved to the grammar school in Wermelskirchen in 2000, where I repeated Year 6. Even though art, music and languages continued to fascinate me most, I was mainly confronted with chemistry, physics and Latin, and over the years with mathematics too – in other words, the traditional sciences and a dead language – and was being steered in a direction that didn’t match my interests and talents. So, in the end, I had to give up in 2007 and left the grammar school to start an apprenticeship as a pharmaceutical sales assistant at my father’s pharmacy. I went to the Barbara-von-Sell vocational college in Cologne-Nippes and really just wanted to obtain my university entrance qualification through this route so that I could study languages in Italy. However, it took seven years before I actually put this into practice in 2014.

I had got to know an Italian family from Bergisch Gladbach during my apprenticeship and visited them once a year for those seven years in Enemonzo in Friuli. So I fell – how could it be otherwise – hopelessly in love with Trieste. The pearl of the Adriatic. As early as 2012, the idea took root of moving there so as not to have to maintain a long-distance relationship. And then, two years later, the time had finally come. I applied to sit the entrance exam at the SSLMIT in Trieste (Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori). Even though I didn’t pass it, I lived in this beautiful port city for four months and got to know lots of wonderful people.