The following report is courtesy of Tony Paterson from nzherald.co.nz:

She boasts about her drug orgies and her affairs with JIMI HENDRIX, MICK JAGGER and KEITH RICHARDS, and a fortnight ago, at 60, she had herself photographed naked - but wearing a pirate's hat - for one of Germany's most popular magazines.

Uschi Obermaier was and, many would say, still is the beautiful, albeit surgically improved face of Germany's chaotic 1960s era of student rebellion. It was a time of free sex and mass protest that gave birth both to the country's celebrated Green movement and its once feared Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist gang.

This month she has been thrust back into the limelight after nearly 40 years, with the publication of her memoirs and a new feature film, Das Wilde Leben (The Wild Life), recounting her colourful exploits as an icon of the student left, groupie, street-fighting woman and reluctant inhabitant of Berlin's legendary free-sex Commune 1.

The film and her book, which coincides with plans by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to free the last remaining members of the former RAF terrorist gang after decades of incarceration, have inevitably sparked a collective look back at Germany's era of 1960s youth protest.

The events of 40 years ago have also begun to raise questions about whether the upsurge of popular youth protest against a generation of German parents still heavily implicated in the horrors of the Nazi era succeeded in achieving its aim to fundamentally change post-war society.

Obermaier now lives as a virtual recluse. She works as a jewellery designer from her home in Topanga Canyon just north of Los Angeles and rarely receives visitors.

Read more here.