Anna Mika:

“Can’t imagine living without music”

Anna Mika has been a fixed star in the Vorarlberg cultural scene for over three decades. She also regularly writes music reviews for the "Krone" newspaper.(Bild: Mathis Fotografie)

Her ear is unerring, her taste is based on profound expertise: Anna Mika is probably the most renowned music journalist in the country. Robert Schneider interviewed her.

For decades, music journalist Anna Mika has enriched the cultural scene in Vorarlberg with her reviews, which impress with their high level of expertise and dedication to the subject matter of music. However, the path to music was not open to her from the outset. She had to fight hard for it because her father, a master gardener in Weihenstephan, wanted his daughter to become a chemical laboratory technician, and her mother "suggested a medical profession so that I could marry a doctor one day," Anna Mika recounts. "I then became a qualified librarian. But I've only really come to understand what shaped that time," she continues, "in recent years. My parents' generation was still far too influenced by National Socialism and its authoritarian spirit. My parents were certainly not Nazis, they were politically rather red, but their style of upbringing was still influenced by that time. Gender roles in particular were fixed, so a man had the say in a family and the women had to kowtow." Nevertheless, she did not allow herself to be driven away from music, which had already become increasingly important to her as a young person.