by Tim Mohr
The problem for Pankow with that first apartment was that the Stasi turned up, thinking Pankow was an accomplice to his friend’s escape. Pankow had to find another place, and fast. This time Pankow squatted a derelict building—the more common idea of squatting.
It was around this time that Pankow first met the punks in PW. And it was also around this time the PW punks decided to make a foray to Alexanderplatz, the central square of East Berlin surrounding the Fernsehturm—the signature building on the skyline that soared above the city, its bulbous disco-ball-like lounge skewered on the needle-like TV tower. The PW punks had heard that West Berlin punks occasionally hung around Alexanderplatz, and they wanted to see for themselves.
As Major and the gang wandered around the square, they stumbled on a self-serve café at the foot of the Fernsehturm. Outside the café were a punk and two long-haired girls. The punk took one look at Major and the PW punks and said, “Are you guys from West Berlin?”
“No, we thought you were!”
Everyone started laughing.
For the rest of the day, and the next day, the PW punks hung out there and met all sorts of punks from other parts of Berlin as well as from villages on the outskirts of town. Now they all knew about the meet-ups in Plänterwald. Soon the Wednesday and Sunday gatherings at PW began to attract a hundred people. And smaller groups of punks now met daily at Alexanderplatz or nearby Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
Word about Major’s apartment also spread, and at times she would have more than twenty people crammed into her place, hanging out, drinking, listening to music, sleeping over. Her neighbors began to track the comings and goings and work with the police. Often as soon as people showed up, so did the cops—hammering on the door and forcing their way in, asking everyone for ID and clearing the place, often by force. Sometimes the kids then had to spend the night at the police station being interrogated.
Punk kids were used to being asked for ID. Authorities could stop anyone, anytime, and demand to see papers. Because punks stood out, they could hardly leave home without being hassled by the police. If you didn’t show your papers or didn’t have them with you or, as happened to punks a lot, you no longer looked like the photo on your ID, it was off to the police station for up to forty-eight hours. Sometimes it was straight off to the police station anyway.
Major and her gang hated the cops and the cops hated Major and her gang. And even though she was afraid—getting arrested or physically roughed up was scary—she never showed it. As a point of pride.
I will not be intimidated!
She was determined to remain an ugly pimple on the face of real existing socialism. She wanted people to notice her and wonder if maybe there was something wrong, something false about the glorious image of society perpetuated by the dictatorship.
Scared, yes, Major was scared. But her rage was stronger than her fear.
One time the cops showed up at Major’s place and kicked in her door so violently that they splintered the bottom half of it. It was hard to find a carpenter in the DDR and for weeks her apartment was just open for anyone to crawl in, including the cops. Another time the pigs gathered Major’s visitors, took them one by one into her kitchen, and beat them so savagely that when she finally got home after her own detainment and interrogation, the walls and cabinets and floor and even the ceiling were splattered with blood.
It just made Major more determined.
I will not quit.
A-Micha’s parents kicked him out of their home in late 1980. He started to crash at Major’s full-time. It was A-Micha who cleaned up the blood in her kitchen after the savage police beating.
Pankow meanwhile started spending more time at Alexanderplatz, getting to know the punks there. They got detained a lot, but their philosophy was similar to Major’s: we’re here, motherfuckers. They wanted to be right there in the center of town for everyone to see. Which was exactly what the cops didn’t want—they didn’t want those eyesores mucking up Alexanderplatz, they didn’t want tourists gawking at those disgraceful negative-decadent teens, those no-good kids trying to piss everyone off and embarrass the government.
One afternoon Pankow walked into a café everyone referred to as “the Tute” and spied a baby-faced punk, one he’d never met before. Pankow had just shaved part of his head—he was always trying new styles, aiming to rattle people as much as possible—and was wearing a homemade Cockney Rejects T-shirt. Pankow walked up to the round-faced guy and said, “Hey, babyface!”
“What do you want, skinhead?”
The two of them struck up a conversation and immediately hit it off. The baby-faced punk was named Kaiser and he lived with his parents in one of the hulking apartment blocks right across from Alexanderplatz, facing the Fernsehturm. Kaiser’s father was a journalist; his mother, an academic researcher.
Kaiser had gotten into punk music a few years earlier because of the sheer speed of it. He loved hard, fast music; he loved the fact that Ramones albums didn’t have any slow songs on them. He loved the Dickies and the Sex Pistols, fast, fast, fast. After he discovered punk he spent hours with his finger on the record button of his tape recorder, waiting to catch something worth taping on one of the West Berlin stations he could pick up on his radio. He’d been emboldened to start to dress punk by a girl in his school named Jeanny—she was the first person he knew to give herself a punk haircut and wear ripped-up sweaters like Johnny Rotten of the Pistols. Jeanny’s extreme look had shocked everyone at school, but she said she felt a sense of confidence when she walked down the street and people swore at her and spat at her feet and said she should be gassed. Lade, a boy Kaiser had been friends with since kindergarten, was the next classmate to go full-on punk. He hacked his hair off and then stood it up with a mixture of shaving cream and water, and he wore a ratty trenchcoat he decorated with punk symbols and hand-painted slogans. Together, Lade and Kaiser began to delve into punk philosophy, getting their hands on illicit copies of books by Bakunin, the nineteenth-century father of collectivist-anarchism. What started out as simple teenage rebellion quickly became pointedly political for Lade and Kaiser. For them, punk and anarchy were inherently fused, and in this musical-political Weltanschauung the two boys felt they had found the means of self-expression they’d been looking for. They were also convinced that they were pretty damn smart.
Now, over cups of coffee on Alexanderplatz, Kaiser impressed Pankow with his political knowledge. He and Pankow laughingly began to dream up a terrorist organization.
“We’ll blow up the People’s Congress!”
They named their imaginary teen terrorist cell SA 80.
Kaiser also told Pankow he played in a band. The band was called Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, or AFS for short. Antifaschistischer Schutzwall was the East German government’s official name for the Berlin wall: the anti-fascist protection barrier.
Whoa, thought Pankow, that is cool! An actual band!
Pankow could hardly believe it, it seemed so far from the world he knew in his sleepy neighborhood. An actual punk band—in East Berlin!
Kaiser could tell Pankow was impressed, so he dashed off the address of the band’s practice space on Metzer Strasse and invited Pankow to drop by and check it out if he wanted to.
To call AFS a band was a bit of an exaggeration on Kaiser’s part—not that Pankow cared. But so far AFS had mostly stood around looking cool in a moldy basement space they’d squatted and lined with egg cartons and rotting rags to muffle the sound they generated—when they played at all.
A number of garage bands had sprouted up in the East Berlin punk scene, but none of them amounted to much. Typically a group of kids would agree to form a band and then spend the next few weeks or even months celebrating the fact that they had formed a band before even picking up their instruments together. AFS was a little further along than that, but only because AFS had formed out of the ashes of a couple other garage bands. One was called BetonRomantik, or Concrete Romantic, a send-up of the government’s love of po
ured-concrete construction. That band was formed around a guitar player named Micha Kobs, one of the few people in the scene who could actually play an instrument properly. Kobs had grown frustrated with his bandmates. None of them had learned to play well enough to get beyond the first three bars of “Anarchy in the UK” by the Pistols. Kaiser’s experience up to then had consisted of playing the bass line of Public Image Ltd’s “Public Image” for a few hours together with a drummer he knew named Alexander Kriening. But as a result Kaiser figured he had all the skills he needed. Kaiser had then joined forces with his school buddy Lade, whose own brief-lived band had imploded when his guitar player and bassist decided they only wanted to play songs by the Police, who released their third album in the fall of 1980. “You can do that punk shit by yourself,” they’d shouted angrily at Lade when they quit. At that point Kobs joined Kaiser and Lade to form AFS. The original plan was to have Lade sing while playing the drums, but it was all somewhat less than ideal—Lade could barely play the drums anyway, and then to have him sing as well, though he had only started singing because he couldn’t really play an instrument . . . . The band needed something else. A different drummer or perhaps a different singer. Something.
Kaiser wasn’t there when Pankow went around to Metzer Strasse a few days later, and neither were the other band members. But another punk named Lobethal was there. Lobethal and Pankow hung out in the dingy basement for a while. Lobethal played drums and would eventually get a band together with some PW punks including Special, Jerry, and Fatzo. He started playing and had Pankow pick up the mic and sing along. Pankow didn’t realize it, but Lobethal was running a crappy tape recorder, as he often did when he played.
“Donnerwetter, Donnerwetter,” shouted Pankow—it was an exclamation used like “holy crap”—“Alle Leute werden fetter!”—everybody’s getting fatter. “Jeder ein Versager ist, der nicht seine Scheisse frisst!”—Everyone’s a loser who doesn’t eat his own shit!
The next time Lobethal saw the members of AFS, he played the tape of Pankow.
Whoa.
This guy!
Suddenly, all the wrangling over who should play which instrument and what the band needed seemed unnecessary. They had found a frontman. His lisp, his aggression, the way he screamed—Pankow was the shit.
AFS had a real singer now, and maybe, just maybe, they could become a real band. The name AFS, however, was too dangerous.
Soon they had a new name to go with their new singer: Planlos—No Plan.
Fuck the rules, fuck the youth organizations, fuck the factory jobs.
Fuck the system.
We’ll do what we like—or nothing at all.
We have no plan, and we like it that way.
6
By the beginning of 1981, as punks became more visible, the authorities concluded they needed to get more aggressive. The Kriminalpolizei’s political division, K1, and then the Stasi’s Abteilung XX—Department XX, the division responsible for subverting underground political activity—stepped in to institute a cohesive policy of repression.
Groups of punks started to attract attention from security forces everywhere they went. When caught in public they were subjected to threats, physical intimidation, and arbitrary detainment. Many were expelled from schools, training programs, and jobs, all of which led to strife at home. More and more of them sought out living space between the cracks, occupying legal apartments illegally or squatting in Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain. In order to live outside society, as they were being forced to do, they had to create space beyond the dictatorship’s web of do-gooders and their snooping ears and eyes. Many of the punks started to receive regular summonses to police stations, where they were questioned about their political beliefs, the slogans written on their buttons and clothes, and their circle of friends. Over and over again.
One fourteen-year-old girl was kicked out of school and told she could return the following school year only if she wore “normal” clothes. Her parents told her she would alter her look or they would have her committed to a juvenile detention home. When she would leave the house, they would insist on first seeing the ID papers of whatever friends she was going to be with—presumably to pass the details on to the cops. After all, they told her, “We’re not going to end up in court because of you!”
She told her parents she’d rather die than be “standardized.”
About 250 punks were forced to sign documents identifying themselves as potential criminal elements, which automatically added them to a registry of such elements. They were ordered to stay away from other punks and warned about consequences if they didn’t. Most chose to ignore these warnings.
A-Micha had finished his training program and started working as a janitor. He had been forced to sign one of these documents stating that he was a potential criminal element and told he could not fraternize with a long list of people—basically every punk the security forces knew about. He thought about the ultimatum for two days and then decided: Fuck it, I’d rather go to jail than stick to it. He kicked himself for being so naïve as to report to the police station in the first place. From then on he knew better; he just ignored the summonses. If they wanted him, they could come get him.
And then one day the Kriminalpolizei did pick A-Micha up at work—he had ignored a summons—and took him in for an interrogation. When they dropped him back at work a few hours later, his boss fired him.
A-Micha knew he needed to work or else they could send him to jail as asozial—for not working. He was becoming increasingly reconciled to the idea that he would probably go to jail at some point, but he wanted to go for the right reason, for something he valued—for voicing his political opinions—not for some stupid bullshit. He started to go to the central post office at the main train station. The postal service hired day labor. A-Micha went each day at seven, and when he was lucky he was able to get a day’s work. This kept him legally employed and put money in his pocket.
It wasn’t long before the police did indeed try to pick him up as asozial. But A-Micha told them he had been working at the post office, go check it out. And sure enough, he had signed in on many occasions and a post office administrator told the investigators that A-Micha had worked hard. The police found a solution: the next time A-Micha went to the post office, the personnel director said he had been barred from hiring A-Micha ever again.
Now A-Micha was really in a vulnerable spot. He had only a few weeks to find something again or he would almost certainly get thrown in jail. Desperate, he finally landed a job as a gravedigger in a cemetery in Baumschulenweg, not far from where he had grown up. Crisis averted. But not for long: the boss at the cemetery was an old Nazi who rhapsodized about the German Forest and the German Oak and told anti-Semitic jokes. And as a manager he was so spiteful and petty that one person on A-Micha’s shift eventually tried to kill the guy with a shovel, chasing him all over the cemetery.
Pankow sometimes got hauled in multiple times over the course of a single day. He’d be detained, and then once he was released, the first cops to drive by would take one look at him and stop. “Papers, please.” Off to another police station. He soon realized that in a place like Alexanderplatz he had some leverage. The police mostly wanted the punks—who with their ripped clothes and safety pins and outlandish haircuts stood out so provocatively against the conformist masses—out of sight. Especially out of sight of tourists, and Alexanderplatz was full of tourists. Typically a couple of plainclothes officers would walk up and clamp a person’s elbows and then walk them away. Most people went quietly, allowing arrests to happen without much of a commotion. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, his famous 1973 exposé of the Soviet Union’s institutionalized system of repression, “You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested!” Pankow did just that. He would cry out when the police grabbed his arms. He would go limp or flop to the ground. He would do everything to draw attention to what was happening. They woul
d have to drag him, screaming, across the wide open space. And Pankow found that when he created a scene, sometimes the arrest would be aborted.
Ordinary citizens also continued to attack punks. One night Pankow, Colonel, Fatzo, and another punk found themselves alone in FAS, the club in the Lichtenberg district. The place was packed with soccer hooligans. At one point the DJ came over to Pankow and whispered to him.
“Something’s up,” he said. “You guys better get out of here.”
Pankow and the other three left the club. But just behind them the door slammed open again and a horde of hooligans came racing out, looking to chase down the punks and beat them to a pulp. Pankow and the others ran for their lives, eventually hiding in a dark courtyard to evade the fifty or so would-be keepers of the socialist order. The following week Pankow returned. He and about fifty punks strutted down Frankfurter Allee, went into the FAS club, and trashed the place. A-Micha arrived at FAS later that same night, after his friends had left. When he walked in, the crowd parted—nobody wanted a piece of a punk after the show of force Pankow had mustered.
Shit was getting out of hand.
Meanwhile Pankow’s band, Planlos, started to rehearse and write songs. You might say they were disciplined—they practiced every day. But then again it was fulfilling a need. This was the music they wanted to listen to when they hung out, and they couldn’t make that music without each other. This was their gang, these were their best friends. They hung out together constantly, whether it was at PW, the fountains at Alexanderplatz, or their rehearsal space. It was all about camaraderie and solidarity.
