Z0S0 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 19, 2021 1:52 am
* interesting to see quite a few of you are in the vicinity of Bad Nauheim, have you all visited the relevant elvis sites ?
i guess most of us have.
bad nauheim is the place, where many fan-meetings of the biggest german fan-club (elvis-presley-gesellschaft e.v.) happened and are still happening (usually one or two times a year).
those meetings started very small in the late 70s, mostly in the parkhotel am kurhaus, (not to be confused with hilberts parkhotel, where elvis resided shortly, before moving to the hotel grunewald) and became more established year by year in the 80s and 90s.
of course, (guided) city tours to the hotel grunewald, goethestraße, the ray barracks among other places were often part of the supporting program.
those "familial" one-day "epg"-meetings at the parkhotel had maybe 200 or 300 fans attending.
in the late 90s/2000s times were changing, elvis became more widely accepted and a new generation came in (political) headships were they were able to make decisions now. as a result, places and streets were named after elvis, which had been unthinkable in the 1970s and 80s (they even installed "elvis"-traffic-lights in friedberg, bad nauheim copied the idea in 2019). the whole city of bad nauheim and the neighboring friedberg became involved now, and the former small meetings grew into the "european-elvis-festival", which started officially in 2002. the festival is held over 3 days every year on the weekend closest to the anniverary of elvis´ death, with thousands of international visitors nowadays. it is a little bit like disneyland now, compared to the 80s and 90s.
https://www.bad-nauheim.de/de/erlebnisreich/festivals-kulturelles/european-elvis-festival
but i´m rambling.
all i wanted to say, was, that bad nauheim was and is the capital of the german fan scene (when it comes to "meet & greet").