by Tim Mohr
Thanks to their conspicuousness—as well as to nosy neighbors and informants—it didn’t take long for the cops to take notice of the activity at PW and at Major’s apartment. Major frequently received letters inviting her down to the police station: zur Klärung eines Sachverhaltes, which meant “to clear up some facts surrounding a case.” What this usually entailed was being interrogated for up to forty-eight hours about the comings and goings at her apartment—after forty-eight hours the police needed a warrant to hold her any longer, so she would be released. During these sessions the police lectured her about the right and wrong ways to comport herself and made veiled threats about the consequences of doing it the wrong way—threats of arrest, beating, even threats of getting attacked in the dark, empty streets.
3
In October 1980 a guy named Micha Horschig turned up at PW—alone. He was of medium height and build with spiky black hair and a downy mustache, not as imposing as the tougher-looking Köpenick kids. Micha had grown up first in Treptow and then in Johannisthal, a neighborhood sandwiched between the river Spree and the Wall, out beyond Schöneweide.
Micha had first heard the Sex Pistols in 1977 while laid up in the hospital—the guy in the next bed had furtively played him a few songs on a portable cassette player. As his school years drew to an end, Micha got deeper and deeper into punk, listening to Western radio shows, dressing in ripped clothes and giving himself purposefully weird haircuts, and eventually digging into anarchist literature. In an old set of pre-War encyclopedias he was able to find descriptions and excerpts of since-banned writings by Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Max Stirner—the basis of an anarchist canon. Up to then, Micha had been a relatively happy member of communist youth organizations, despite elements of hypocrisy he found jarring—he’d been upset when a girl was barred from a Free German Youth event because she was a member of a church, for instance, and he could never understand why school teachers freaked out at the sight of a kid with a plastic bag with a West German brand name or logo on it. It was a plastic bag. Why would they care? Now, versed in anarchism and the history of anarchist movements, he began to have thoughts that were unthinkable in East Germany: Why had Karl Marx been willing to weaken the First International in order to seize power within the organization? Why had Marx been so intent on shutting out the anarchist factions that he stooped to using lies and intrigue? All of this ate at Micha. And it made him want to talk to other people as he tried to work things out.
Throughout 1978 and 1979, while working at an apprenticeship as a clock maker, Micha had spent all his free time discussing politics. He had found a willing partner in a fellow apprentice named Frank Masch. Frank identified himself as a social democrat, but Micha quickly realized that regardless of the label, most leftists—including a self-styled anarchist and a social democrat—could agree on basic philosophical principles like freedom, egalitarianism, solidarity, and the right of the people to participate in the political process.
Together with Frank, Micha began to go to bars and cafés and obsessively engage people in political debates. It wasn’t hard to engage in some sense—people always wanted to know why he ran around looking so fucking strange. And what the hell was all this bullshit about anarchism he was spouting? Conversation started. The problem was that some people very quickly took issue with the sort of talk Micha wanted to have. The Stasi and their unofficial snitches were everywhere, and people squirmed. Sometimes a potential conversation partner would whisper to Micha, “Hey, keep it down, the guy back there is listening.” Sometimes a kind bartender or fellow guest would whisper, “You better get out of here, that guy over there just made a call.” Off he and Frank would run, getting out of sight before the police arrived.
But Micha did not want to whisper.
On paper, East German law enshrined free speech as a right. The right to freedom of expression was also trumpeted in state propaganda. Micha had decided to take it literally: I will say what I want to say.
Micha never started fights. There were just so many helpful defenders of the status quo, and when faced with Micha’s maniacal drive to engage people on taboo subjects, they often answered with fists. After it happened a few times, something changed in Micha. He learned to go into beast-mode when attacked. If people wanted to fuck with him, they’d better be ready.
In 1979, Micha started a countdown to the end of the DDR: ten years, he thought, that’s how long it will take.
He was sure of it.
Even though Micha had already considered himself a punk for two years by the time he turned up at PW that fall of 1980, none of the punks in Major’s gang had seen him before, and they wondered whether he was a “real punk” or just dressed like one as a fashion statement. But when they started to talk to him, it quickly became clear that he was for real: Micha immediately took up the topic of politics, leading, of course, to anarchism.
This guy knows his shit.
The group immediately started to call him A-Micha—the “A” was for anarchy. Listening to A-Micha talk, Major realized he could articulate anarchist ideology with a clarity she had never heard before. Around his new friends, A-Micha was calm, level-headed, and responsible, and he came across like some kind of intellectual. He seemed more grown-up than Major’s other buddies, even though he was the same age as the rest of them. Major was fascinated by A-Micha and the two of them started to hang out together, sometimes talking through entire nights. A-Micha began to crash at her place regularly.
A-Micha also dressed in a very creative way. He liked to sew zippers into the rips he made in his pants. And instead of painting buttons or bottle caps and then decorating them with band names or whatever, A-Micha just cut out scraps of paper, wrote on them with pen, and stuck them on his clothes with safety pins. The phrases he wore sometimes seemed crazy even to fellow punks—this was a police state after all and here was A-Micha plastered with the phrase Haut die Bullen platt wie Stullen, which was basically “Beat the pigs to a pulp.” A-Micha was also among the first punks to wear the logo of Solidarity, the Polish trade union that came to international prominence in August of 1980 after staging a dramatic strike that spread from the port city of Gdansk to the whole country—among Solidarity’s demands of the Polish dictatorship were the restoration of constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms of speech and of the press.
Some people dismissed Eastern punks as teenage rebels in thrall to the latest Western pop cultural trend, no-good kids who wanted to wind people up—this was their idea of fun, of teenage kicks. But Major had always seen it differently. She realized that her idea of fun—and the idea of fun she shared with her new friends—deviated from the path the government demanded everyone stay on together. Major and her friends were being political by having fun. It was that easy to be political in the DDR. To think differently, to speak out, or to stand out was to be political. And to stand out the way the punks did—in such an open, ostentatious way—was to be a political radical.
Keeping people on a preordained path, keeping them moving along together as one glacial entity—marching them through the Young Pioneers, the Thälmann Pioneers, the Free German Youth, and military service; steering them into apprenticeships, factory jobs, and creating productive members of society—wasn’t as difficult as it might seem. In the DDR, as in most societies, conformity and complacency ruled the day. Everyone had a job and a roof over their head; everyone had refrigerators and 90 percent of households had TVs and washing machines; there was cheap booze and enough to eat. So people went about their daily lives and stayed within accepted sociopolitical boundaries without constant government coercion. Most people, anyway.
By the dawn of the 1980s, the physical brutality of the Stalin era was no longer necessary—or at least not as necessary—because once there was a “real existing socialism,” that is, a norm, people tended to stick to the norm. Membership in communist youth organizations was not mandatory, and yet membership rates hovered around 85 percent. There was a lot of self-censorship,
a kind of inherent sense of where the boundaries were and, Hey, I don’t want to go anywhere near them anyway, I’m happy just to fit in.
As for those few souls who weren’t inclined to fit in, people tended to encourage them to stick to the norm—nobody likes a person who makes things difficult for everyone else.
Still, it’s important to realize that conformity and complacency didn’t distinguish the DDR from other countries. For an entire century, most Americans went about their daily lives despite the gross injustice of Jim Crow laws: Not my problem. The total indifference with which most Americans reacted to Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass warrantless surveillance is another example: I’ve got nothing to hide. Or white America’s collective shrug at the militarization of its police forces and the ongoing flood of evidence of horrific police brutality: They’re not coming for me. People look away. It’s natural. People defend the norm without having to be prodded to do so. That’s just the way people are. Until they really do come for you. Until you have to defend yourself. Until you bear the brunt of injustice. Or in the case of the DDR, until you were arrested and interrogated on a daily basis and your parents lost their jobs and your brother or sister was booted out of school and you were banned from your hometown or imprisoned and and and, and all because you spoke your mind, you objected, you failed to conform—you listened to the wrong music.
But that was still in the future as the leaves dropped from the trees in the woods around the PW club in the fall of 1980.
For Major and other punks, encouragement from ordinary citizens to stick to the norm, however, started immediately. It came in the form of insults—“you should be sent to the gas chambers”—and beatings at the hands of those defenders of the status quo who sure as shit weren’t going to let a bunch of teenagers parade around like that, looking absolutely disgraceful, showing total disregard for society. No, those punks were going to learn a lesson.
Soon enough, groups of punks had to meet at the S-Bahn station at Plänterwald and walk to PW together—it was safer that way. Lone punks routinely got hunted down on the street by groups of law-abiding citizens out for blood. And often Nazi references flew along with the fists when people attacked the punks: “It wouldn’t have taken Hitler long to get rid of the likes of you!”
Though A-Micha was calm, level-headed, and responsible, his new friends quickly found out that he really knew how to fight. Whenever the shit hit the fan, A-Micha defended his friends like the hero of an epic poem. Beast mode.
All the antagonism drew the little gang of punks closer together, all for one and one for all. Like the British band Sham 69 sang:
If the kids are united,
they will never be divided.
4
The first punk to show up at PW from the northern part of East Berlin was Michael Boehlke, who had grown up in Pankow, a neighborhood in the north of the city. Most of the southern punks were eighteen by now—like Major—but Boehlke was just sixteen. He was tall and willowy with somewhat sullen, deep-set eyes. He talked with a slight lisp. He had just finished tenth grade that summer of 1980 and had recently started his assigned apprenticeship as a machine fitter—Facharbeiter für Anlagentechnik in official terminology—at a cigarette factory in nearby Schöneweide. Someone at the factory had told him about the Wednesday night punk meet-up at PW.
None of the southern Berlin punks had ever been up to Pankow, and they looked at Boehlke as if he came from a completely different city, even a different planet.
“Hey, it’s you,” they would say when he showed up again, “the guy from Pankow!”
It didn’t take long before they shortened the greeting to just “Pankow” and that became his name among the punks.
There were so few punks at that point that Pankow quickly got to know all of them by name. Not their real names, of course, as nearly everyone in the scene used an alias. Not just Major and Colonel and A-Micha, but also Erkner, Keule, Buzzcock, Fatzo, Special, and Spion. Taking on a new name was part of the ritual of becoming a punk. It was a rejection of a previous life and identity, a life and identity that had already been coopted by the regime—Michael Boehlke’s life was already planned out, but Pankow’s was just beginning, and he was the only one who was going to say where it was going. Using an alias was also extremely practical in a surveillance state bristling with informants, and in a scene where people would soon be subjected to constant police interrogation. “Give us a list of the people who were there!” Um, let’s see, there was Fatzo and Buzzcock and Pankow . . .
One afternoon Pankow took a train to go see one of his new friends. He wanted to make cassette copies of the guy’s records: Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols and No More Heroes by the Stranglers. On the way there, three guys attacked Pankow on the train—god damn punk!—and broke his nose. Pankow went and made the tapes anyway, black eye, bloody nose, and all.
Getting beaten up was nothing new for him. Pankow had been an outsider his entire life. He’d grown up in a violent home, where his father frequently beat him and his mother—he had shown up for the first day of first grade with a broken nose, compliments of dad.
The household was always on edge.
The contrast between the outward show his family put on versus the violent reality meant that Pankow developed a deeply ingrained sense of skepticism from an early age—things were not as they seemed.
Pankow was naturally left-handed, but when he started to learn to write in school they forced him to switch hands. He already had been made fun of for being so scrawny, and now he started to develop speech impediments, mumbling and stuttering. By the third grade everyone else could write properly but Pankow still couldn’t. Somehow he was never held back. He just sat there year after year thinking, I’m an idiot, there’s something wrong with me. Why am I unable to do the things everyone else has no problem doing?
Pankow felt more and more isolated.
He didn’t think of himself as political, but he definitely thought East Germany was a fucked-up place. Sometimes he sat out in front of his housing block and stared disdainfully at the neighborhood. Many party leaders and other prominent figures lived in the area, it was neat and leafy, with folks washing their cars on the weekend or taking strolls in a nearby park built around a Baroque chateau, and Pankow hated it all, hated the people and especially the other kids, and resolved not to be like them.
I feel different.
But what could he do?
By his early teens, his aggression began to boil over.
One night near the end of tenth grade he and a friend snuck out and smashed all the ground-floor windows of their school. When he showed up the next day, his name was called while the students were all assembled for a flag ceremony. Pankow was admonished in front of the entire school for wearing his denim vest with AC/DC scrawled on the back. On the way home that day he spotted a Mercedes parked on a side street—some well-connected party member’s car. He eyed the star on the hood. Then he went over and broke it off. That star would fetch a good price, he knew.
He started negotiating at school the next day—what could he get for a genuine Mercedes hood ornament? In the end he traded it for a West German music magazine—and it would change his life.
Inside the magazine: a photo of the Sex Pistols.
This was what he had been searching for.
I feel different.
I want to look different, too.
As his school career came to an end, Pankow began to change. He spray-painted an anarchist A on the back of an old suit jacket he’d found. He went into the woods in a local park and tore holes in some of his T-shirts.
Then one day Pankow grabbed the family scissors and bounded down to the cellar of his building. He gave himself a punk haircut, spiky and purposefully fucked up. When he went upstairs he impulsively decided to ring the doorbell rather than going straight in. His father answered the door, took one look at Pankow’s hair, and punched him in the face.
Pankow’s mother didn’t re
ally mind his new look—she even seemed to take a certain glee in the way he attracted attention, the way heads craned out of windows when her son walked down the street. But Pankow’s father could not stand it. He forbade Pankow to eat at the family table. He screamed at Pankow and smacked and punched him.
It didn’t matter. Pankow was committed to punk. Even though he had yet to hear much of the music and hadn’t met any other punks—he thought for a while he might be the only one in Berlin—he knew he had found what he had been looking for. After getting constantly hassled and beaten up by other kids in the neighborhood for his outlandish look, Pankow bought a spiky dog collar, thinking it would make him look more intimidating. Instead of shrinking from the attention and hoping not to get beat up, he went on the offensive: whenever someone started to mess with him, he would glare at them and shout, “You want to get your face smashed in?”
Things at home kept deteriorating. Shortly after he started his job training at the cigarette factory, Pankow decided he could no longer take it. He threw a few things in a bag, slammed the door shut behind him, and never went home again.
5
The first place Pankow fled to was a friend’s apartment on Göhrener Strasse, just down the road in Prenzlauer Berg. The friend lived in the rectory of Elias Church, which was run by an opposition-friendly minister named Georg Katzorke.
Things quickly got complicated there when Pankow fell for the minister’s daughter. The next place he landed was an apartment on Wörther Strasse, near the water tower in central Prenzlauer Berg. A friend of Pankow’s had just fled the country, so Pankow squatted the guy’s now-empty place. There were two versions of squatting in East Germany. In one version, people took up residence illegally—that is, without the mandatory permission of the state housing authorities—in an officially recognized apartment; this is what Pankow did on Wörther Strasse. But the more commonly understood version of squatting also took place. An official East German report put the number of empty properties in the country at 235,000; they were concentrated in the central parts of cities like Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and Halle. By the early 1980s the government estimated that 800 people were squatting in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood alone; that number would double by the end of the decade. It was one way opposition-minded youths started to carve out physical space for themselves, living inside East Germany but outside the state.
