The wish she expressed in the later autobiography and in interviews — to be allowed to live her later years without being constantly returned, in the public narrative, to the worst experiences of her earlier life — is a reasonable human desire and one that had not been fully granted her. The story of Tina Turner leaving Ike Turner, as told and retold across forty-plus years of retrospectives, profiles, and dramatizations, had taken on a life that was in some respects separate from the person it described. She had moved to Switzerland, married Erwin Bach, settled into a private life of considerable peace, and yet the public appetite for the story of the departure and the comeback was not satisfied.
## Erwin Bach: The Private Life After the Public Comeback
Tina Turner met Erwin Bach in 1985 or 1986, depending on the account — sources differ slightly on the year, with some placing it in 1986 at an airport in Germany and the most detailed sourced account saying he was sent to pick her up from an airport. He was a German music executive, working in the European record industry.
They dated for approximately twenty-seven years before marrying. This is an unusual duration by the standards of entertainment industry relationships or any other standard, and it reflects something specific about Tina Turner’s relationship with marriage and commitment after the experience of her first marriage. She had described her years with Ike Turner as years of abuse. She was not in a hurry to marry again.