ARGUMENTS YARD

by ATTILA; THE STOCKBROKER

  Our second tour was very different, being the annual Political Song Festival I mentioned at the start of this chapter, a huge event with many different performers from all over the world. The format was the same every year: the first week was spent doing gigs in East Berlin, then in the second week a selection of the acts went on tour to six different cities. Given that it was held in February the weather was as different as it could be as well: the sun-kissed memories of our first visit were replaced with sub-zero temperatures, treacherous pavements and even more defunct Trabants at the sides of the roads. This time the border crossing was a piece of cake - with our multi-entry visas and our invitation to the Festival we were almost welcomed by the Grenztruppen, and the West Germans didn’t seem as bothered as last time either.

  But there had been an interesting prelude to the tour. The GDR Artists’ Agency had contacted the Sokolov Festival, a political song festival held in the Czech (at that time of course Czechoslovak) town of that name immediately before the start of their one in Berlin, asking them to put myself and the Neurotics on there. There were strong links between the two, and many performers were booked for both. I got a phone call a few weeks after our return to England asking me if we were interested, and we were booked: then, a couple of weeks later, the invitation was cancelled. On arrival in East Berlin the second time I found out why. The Czechoslovak communist youth organisation thought they’d won the argument with their elders about punk, but it turned out that they hadn’t. Punk rock was still officially decadent and reactionary over there: the Sokolov Festival went ahead with the usual acoustic stuff, and we went straight to Berlin. Bunch of hippies.

  And there, of course, was George to meet and translate for us once again: this time we got to meet his then partner, the talented singer Ilona Vildebrand who had helped him translate my songs, and stepdaughter Fanny as well. Apart from some fantastic gigs, for me the most memorable aspect of the February festival week in Berlin – events took place in different venues all over the city centre - were the hours of discussions long into the night in Berlin’s Haus der jungen Talente (literally, House of Young Talents) opposite the Ministry building. This was the post event ‘party zone’ where festival organisers and musicians, party activists and, yes, some cynics and dissidents all gathered to drink copiously and share ideas and experiences. In seven days of intense conversation my desire to learn as much as I could about what was going on in the GDR forced my German into previously uncharted areas: in purely linguistic terms, I’ve never looked back. When I tell my German audiences that I learned their language in East Germany, it’s that week that truly sticks in my mind.

  An awful lot was talked about how the changes which were beginning to happen in the Soviet Union would affect life in the GDR – at the time, we naively thought, these changes could only benefit socialism, making it more flexible and democratic. At the Central Committee Plenum of the SU just a month earlier the groundbreaking Soviet reforming leader Mikhail Gorbachev had reinforced his modernising message, and this was resonating with young East German activists, often to the dismay of older comrades and certainly that of the leadership, led by Erich Honecker. The old SED Party slogan ‘Von der UdSSR lernen ist siegen lernen’ (Learning from the USSR is learning to win), which had been trotted out for years by the old guard as a symbol of the GDR’s subservience to the Soviet line, had gained a new significance: for the first time the Soviet Union was ahead of the GDR in the modernisation stakes, and the new generation had turned that slogan on its head. But of course we didn’t just talk about politics: we discussed everything under the sun, very much contrary to the received Western wisdom that there was no freedom of expression in the GDR and that people were scared to voice their opinions. I’d stagger back to the Hotel Stadt Berlin every night in the small hours with a head full of ideas and a belly full of beer: sometimes the Neurotics would be with me, sometimes, I’m sure, they were lying under a table somewhere! An absolutely inspirational time, and one I’ll never forget.

  As for the gigs themselves, each one grouped together a number of performers and bands from all over the world in a single event. The Neurotics and I were always together – we came as a package – and fellow performers at our gigs included radical Sandinista-supporting singer Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy and his band, the brilliant West German satirist Dietrich Kittner (father of the late Konrad from seminal Hannover punks Absturzende Brieftauben) the Kalahari Surfers from South Africa, Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa and radical singer/songwriter Heber Bartolome from the Philippines. Heber and I bonded over the chessboard one night, and in the second part of the tour, which took us by bus all over the GDR, we played endlessly on the journeys. He was (still is, I’m sure) a lovely bloke, and a very good chess player indeed…

  Some of the venues were more formal than on our first tour: audiences older, more Party functionaries present, fewer young music fans. Without doubt the most impressive concert venue we performed at in Berlin was at the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), seat of the East German parliament and symbol of German socialism. It has now been demolished, despite the fact that a majority of East Germans wanted to keep it: as I say, winners write history. We also played at the Volksbuhne (People’s Theatre), the Congress Hall, the Sports Hall and at Humboldt University Audimax Theatre, and it was at the last of these that I met Robert Richter, a lifelong friend to this day.

  Robert, then a teenage officer cadet in the East German army, the NVA (National People’s Army) had seen Billy Bragg at the previous year’s festival, then at his summer gigs with us: having enjoyed our sets, he turned up early to see us at the Political Song Festival and after our soundcheck came up and said hello. The fact that he did so showed his independence of spirit, because members of the armed forces weren’t supposed to have unsupervised contact with people from the West, even supposedly ideologically sound ones like us. We got chatting and, among other things, he told me that part of his training was learning to drive a tank for 24 hours non stop! (Years later, when he drove my band Barnstormer and me around Germany and I’d marvel at his ability to stay awake, I’d remind myself of that.) Robert joined us at the evening discussion/drinking session after the gig that night and came to some of the other Berlin shows we did, including a much less formal affair on an island in the river Spree called the Insel der Jugend (Island of Youth). His intelligence and willingness to be absolutely open about all aspects of life in the GDR, the good and the bad, and our shared love of football (he supports the Berlin workers’ team Union Berlin, in the 1980s sworn enemies of the Stasi-sponsored permanent GDR league champions Dynamo) meant that his conversations were an absolute ‘window’ to me. We got on like a house on fire.

  Before we left, I swapped books with him; I gave him a copy of my first poetry collection ‘Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters’ and he gave me ‘Vom Militarischen Beruf’(About the Military Profession’) the handbook given to all young NVA cadets. Weirdly interesting it was too. Robert took my book into his barracks - you weren’t supposed to have books from the West either - and, when told by the officers that he wasn’t allowed to keep it, informed them that he had been given it as a present at the Political Song Festival by his friend Attila, an invited performer from England! They didn’t argue with that. What they’d have said if they’d known that he’d given me their handbook, I can only guess: it must have been classified. Even at an early age he was made of stern stuff, was Robert.

  We did one other gig in Berlin – at lunchtime, in a transformer factory. Part of the ethos of the festival, and indeed of the GDR, was to make culture available to all: one of the things which struck me on my travels round the country was the amount of arts centres and performance spaces there were, and work-related cultural activities were very much part of the norm. Moreover, there can be no doubt that the workers whose lunchtime we invaded that day were genuinely interested in the performance and the ideas I was sharing: I could tell by the questions they asked about songs they had obviously never hea
rd before. It wasn’t a showcase put-up job. This was a country where you walked down the street without being confronted with advertising for stuff you didn’t need, where education was valued and available to all, especially to clever people from a working class background, where ‘celebrity culture’ didn’t exist…it was a completely different way of living, of doing things. There were always nagging doubts, mainly about just how much of the bad stuff I simply wasn’t encountering, despite my best efforts, because of the circles I was moving in, but in many ways I felt very much at home, for the first time in my life in a country where so many of the fripperies of Western life just didn’t exist and the values of the State seemed to match my own.

  Then came perhaps the most memorable day of the whole trip: our visit to the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp memorial, 35 kilometres north of Berlin. It wasn’t simply its location so close to the capital which made it an important site in the GDR: it was one of the main camps for political prisoners, including the Communist leader and GDR icon Ernst Thalmann, and therefore had a particular significance. It was a specialist SS training camp where up and coming Nazi thugs learned the brutal methods they would take with them to camps elsewhere - torture, medical experimentation, execution, a ghastly place indeed. But rather than simply document the awful abuses that had happened there, the whole memorial was presented in the context of the victory over fascism – so that you walked out feeling at once humbled by the sacrifices made, and angered and inspired to carry on the anti-fascist struggle in the modern era. Learning from history.

  For the second week of the Political Song Festival we set off on tour to six GDR towns and cities: Potsdam near Berlin, Dresden, Freiburg, Mittweida, Leipzig and Halle. We’d already visited three of these six months earlier, of course, and found a fair few fans waiting for us, which was great: once again the gigs on this part of the tour were in much more formal locations than on our first one, although since many of the former had been open air gigs in high summer and the temperature was now about ten degrees below freezing, this was hardly unexpected. I saw the occasional pained expression on the faces of some of the more elderly attendees when the Neurotics were in full flow, but once again we were very well received, and for me the political discussions continued apace. I heard talk of a new beginning for the GDR music scene, a vibrant new ‘youth radio’ station and loads of new bands, although we didn’t meet any at that point.

  One of the most interesting gigs I did in that second week was at the ‘Ernst Schneller’ SED party school in Mittweida near Karl-Marx-Stadt (now of course reverted to its pre-war name, Chemitz). I did an acoustic performance of my songs to a middle-aged to elderly audience and then had a fascinating discussion with all and sundry about punk rock, culture under socialism, the history of the GDR, the Wall and its implications, and the much neglected history of the internal anti-fascist struggle in Germany during the Second World War. It was my first serious discussion with members of the older generation in the GDR and once again stretched my German to its limits and beyond, but it was incredibly worthwhile. I met people committed to the system, not though timeserving or the search for a quiet life, but because of personal and political experience and sacrifice. The Western (especially West German) commentators who dismiss the GDR and its history out of hand should have heard that discussion: it might have given their black and white mindset a bit of a jolt.

  We travelled by bus through a frozen landscape, and on more than one occasion the bus broke down or got stuck in the snow, but we took it all in good heart and I had the aforementioned chess lessons from Heber Bartolome as a bonus. I also had a musical surprise from way outside the word of punk rock which warmed the cockles of my heart. In George’s home town of Halle we did a gig with his friends Horch, the first band I had encountered who mixed medieval music and rock since Focus and Crucible in the Seventies. As mentioned earlier, I have always loved early music, and Horch were brilliant, another of the inspirations for the medieval punk band Barnstormer I formed a few years later. We became good mates, and egged on by George I started to hatch a plan to get them over to England. As it turned out, that would eventually be a whole lot easier than I expected…

  At the end of the tour the most difficult aspect of the GDR hit us full in the face: the fact that the freedom to travel we took for granted was denied to its citizens. Tearful farewells at the border this time: we had made some proper friends now, and we knew that although we could visit them, they couldn’t come and see us. But we all knew the short term solution to this, and later in 1987 came yet another invitation, this time for the Rocksommer Festival in Summer 1988. We kept in touch, of course. Letters. Remember those old things?

  When we came back for the third time, about sixteen months later, things had moved forward apace both politically and musically. Gorbachev’s reforms were in full effect in the Soviet Union and all kinds of impassioned discussions about how (and whether or not) to implement them in the GDR were taking place in the SED and FDJ. The GDR youth radio station DT 64, which had started as a programme on the state network and had become a station in its own right in 1986, was playing the kind of stuff that would have seemed unthinkable a few years before. Broadcaster and DJ Lutz Schramm, best described as the John Peel of the GDR, was using his programme called ‘Parocktikum’ to give airtime to the a swathe of new bands I’d first heard about the previous year, collectively known as ‘Die Anderen Bands’ (The Other Bands). At a Rocksommer gig at the Insel der Jugend in Berlin on the 20th of July, the Neurotics and I got to meet and perform with two of the leading ones: Die Skeptiker from Berlin and Die Art from Leipzig, all recorded for transmission by Radio DT64. As befitted the new and changing times, this recording ended up as a bootleg cassette…

  Die Art and Die Skeptiker were a completely different kettle of fish from the frankly insipid pop (or Mario’s awful tuneless shouty ‘punk’ noise!) which constituted the homegrown stuff we’d encountered previously. Die Art were measured and, well, arty, definitely influenced by Joy Division: not my personal cup of tea but polished and professional. Die Skeptiker, on the other hand, were quite simply the GDR’s very own Dead Kennedys, right down to singer Eugen Balanskat’s Jello Biafra-like vocal inflections and theatrics, and we loved them. When Eugen asked me if I knew the words to ‘Holiday In Cambodia’ I wasn’t surprised at all, and I took the mic with gusto! Both bands were developing a large and enthusiastic following, their new-found opportunities a reflection of the changing times.

  But however much things were changing, it still remained the case that in order to do official gigs and not risk hassle from the authorities, bands had to seek approval and a licence from the FDJ. Some people had never been prepared to do that, and from the early 80s onwards there had been an underground anarchist punk scene completely at odds with the authorities and harassed by the Stasi, as Mario had described. Many of those people regarded anyone who worked with the system in any way as a traitor: in Leipzig on this tour I was to meet one such person. And thereby hangs a tale…

  I remember the encounter for lots of reasons: his name was Imad, he was a dark skinned punk in a country where there were very few people of colour (and not that many punks) he was a member of a legendary Leipzig anarchist punk band called L’Attentat and he was very loudly critical of the system and even more so of me. I met him after our gig. ‘What are you doing playing in this shit state (Scheissstaat?) Call yourself a punk rocker? You’re just playing for a bunch of state hacks, and you’re probably only here anyway because no-one likes you in the UK.’

  I shot straight back. ‘Well, mate, I’ve earned my living in England as a poet and musician for seven years, done sessions for John Peel and been on the front of Melody Maker, I’m here because I want to be, I say what I want, and there are many aspects of life in this country that I prefer to life back home, actually…’

  Cue raging argument. Loads of people stood around listening, some joined in on either side. I didn’t agree with his seemingly cartoon-punk an
d nihilistic dismissal of everything in the GDR as ‘shit’ (I don’t have any time for a similar ‘anarchist’ attitude over here either) but I did respect his spirited and confrontational approach, very different to anyone I had met there at that time. I remembered the encounter, and the band name, and back in Leipzig some years later I asked what had happened to him. Turns out he was a Stasi agent provocateur. I immediately thought: what did the GDR authorities gain from that? Punk had and has a progressive world view which certainly isn’t at odds with the basic ideals of socialism: what was the point of employing someone to drive people attracted by the punk ethos into, literally, crass oppositional nihilism? Ridiculous.

  I must have a Stasi file after the amount of gigs and discussions I had there: I know for a fact that one of our local entourage back then was an IM, or Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (Unofficial Co-Worker). I’d love to see that file: maybe I will one day. Whenever the GDR is mentioned in the Western media these days, the word ‘Stasi’ is normally not far behind, in the world of Rupert Murdoch and his minions a monster so unspeakable that any worthwhile aspects of the society associated with it are rendered meaningless. Countless thousands of IMs quietly reporting on their fellow citizens, mostly about things which weren’t remotely a threat to the state, for reasons varying from a desire for social advancement to personal vindictiveness to, in most cases I’d say, a genuine although misguided belief that by doing so they were somehow protecting socialism. As has often been pointed out, an early, very primitive, far less effective version of the North American Security Agency’s Prism surveillance system.