Breaking News: Tokio Hotel Fans Skipped School Like Over A Year Ago.

Young fans skip school to camp out at concert halls, sometimes for extended periods, to land good spots at Tokio Hotel concerts. There hasn’t been an actual Tokio Hotel concert in over seven months, but this issue has been covered in two media outlets in the last few days. 

I believe the video, a ZDF Reporter report, is part of a longer documentary on truancy, which, to be fair, is probably why it’s about year-old events but aired on June 11th 2009. 

On June 12, a related opinion piece was printed in RP Online:

Wie die Band Tokio Hotel die Schulschwänzerei toleriert!

Of course, it’s true that Tokio Hotel fans sometimes go to extremes – that’s always timely. And things probably won’t be any different for the next tour, whenever it happens. It seems odd that concert campouts are in the news now, is all.

Partial translation below the fold.

The TH part of the RP Online article, translated by Artax:

Apparently, the young ones have lots of freedom today: When the band Tokio Hotel plays in Dortmund, there’s not much criticism from the parents, when they grab tents and sleeping bags in order to camp out for days in front of the concert hall to be as close as possible to their idols in the front rows. Only three parents could be bothered to come by and look what their kids are doing, and if they at least had taken their school stuff with them. 

Whoever felt like it then just went on to follow the band to Holland, where they had their next concert. 

Of course this raises the question why the youths are allowed to camp without restrictions on public grounds, and why there aren’t any controls – after all, going to school is mandatory in Germany. The team of the TV magazine “Reporter” also asked singer Bill of TH about his opinion on fans who skip school in order to camp out for days in front of the venue. According to the young man, the roots of the problem lie elsewhere, he thinks that “the teachers shouldn’t pee their pants/make such a fuss” – after all, they’d perform only once in Germany. 

Bill and twin brother Tom had started out their lifes in a pretty messed up way at first: they had dropped out of “Realschule”, and only after they had become rich, they engaged expensive private teachers in order to finally get their highschool diploma. 

Someone who skips school but wants to change won’t have it easy. But it’s still possible, there are special courses in some cities. In small groups, the missed material is made up with the help of teachers who do this in their free time – after all, not everybody is in the position to pay for expensive private teachers.