Star Trek and me
Dirk Bartholomae, Augsburg, Germany
Chairman of The Official German Star Trek Fanclub
Chairman of FedCon – largest Star Trek convention in Europe
I was born in 1964 and 10 years later, I started watching Star Trek: The Original Series at home. I always had some struggles with my dad, because he always wanted to watch soccer games on the other channel. But most of the times I won the fight.

A few years later I was getting more into SciFi and read lots of books, watched lots of movies, but the best movies was still the Star Trek movies. So I checked out if there was anything around in Germany and I found this local Fanclub called Star Trek Central Europe. I became a member and received some newsletters (which barely came out 2-3 times a year with only 8 pages or so). In 1984 I decided to found my own fanclub, because I missed something, I missed a kind of magazine with all the information. So I founded my Star Trek Fanclub and published Trekworld – a copy fanzine with some 40 pages. I filled it with fanstories, news, pictures and gossip, which I gathered from around the globe.
Later on, the ladies from Star Trek Central Europe offered me to take over their members, but keep the clubname. So I now had some 400 members and the fanzine grew in pages.

Then we got Star Trek: The Next Generation and some German TV stations asked me, if I would appear in costume for Star Trek related interviews and shows. So we did and then something unbelievable happened, we got almost 1000 letters a week, all Star Trek fans, who wanted to join the club, and in 1992 we had more than 5000 members and we established the Official German Star Trek Fanclub. In 1992 we also did our first convention in Augsburg (a 2000 year old city close to Munich). We had Walter Koenig (Chekov) as guest star and we were sold out (300 fans showed up). The next convention was held in Munich and we had George Takei there as a guest and the same phenomenon happened, we were sold out and had more than 600 fans in the venue. For 1994 we moved to Bonn, where we rented the largest convention hotel with a venue and had about 6 guest stars and 3000 visitors. From that moment on we stayed there and had almost some 4000 or 5000 visitors there.

So right now, Star Trek slowed down a bit in Germany, but the fans are still strong and working for numerous fanmovie projects and we hope, that a new movie will come soon…