Bruno Koschmider, the owner of the Indra, who had brought the boys from Liverpool to spur them on during their four-and-a-half to six-hour performances, called out to them: “Make a show.” It’s no longer clear today whether the red light giant meant that the Beatles should put on a good show and not just stand around making music, or whether he was asking them to play especially showy. The adjective schau existed in the West German youth language of the early 1960s in the sense of “great, great, particularly good”.
It is clearer how the word Exi is to be understood, which also haunts the Beatles’ memories of their time in Hamburg. The four Englishmen, of all people, testify to the existence of the abbreviation Exi for existentialist, which is otherwise not very often documented in written sources.
