“There was probably no Swiss radio station that played Patti Smith as often in the 1980s as LoRa in Zurich. I also often slid her records from their worn sleeves for my broadcasts—that typical elaborate process back then.”

At a nighttime demonstration (September 8, 1989, I believe after the murder of a woman in an underpass), women sang the chorus of “Because the Night” together. We demanded that women's safety be better considered in urban planning and architecture. We changed just one word: “Because the night belongs to women, because the night belongs to us!”

I remember Patti Smith’s 2010 concert at the Rote Fabrik particularly well. I rode my bike there—I was living in Kreis 5 at the time. We were almost the last ones to arrive and stood at the edge of the tightly packed crowd. Louis from the Ziegel restaurant waved us over and showed a group of about twenty of us a winding, narrow path to the roof above the restaurant. Someone tried to stop us, saying it was forbidden, but who cares about rules when you’re climbing to the VIP seats for a Patti Smith concert... For short people like me, that view of the stage was incomparable.

In 2018, my husband Reto and I were in Paris buying for his boutique during Fashion Week. As we sat outside a bar, Reto looked through the open window and noticed a stack of books. “That woman sure has a lot of Patti Smith books!” he said. I followed his gaze into the bar and saw the distinctive long braid. “It’s her!” Patti Smith turned to me kindly as I timidly approached her with the bar’s business card.
“I saw your concert at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich from up on the roof. It was fantastic!” She smiled and wrote “People have the power” above her signature on the card.

Brigitta Fischer, also known as “Fischerin,” is a therapist, musician, and artist from Zurich. Since the 1970s, she has written song lyrics, including for the rock band Dragonfly. She studied at the Zurich School of Applied Arts from 1972 to 1977.