by Tim Mohr
The band had a melodic quality that distinguished them from the chugging discord of a lot of the other garage bands. In part this was because Kobs, their guitarist, turned out to be a gifted musician and had an ear for a catchy tune; in part it was because the entire band seemed to have set themselves a high standard. There were bumps along the road. Lade couldn’t keep time very well, and still seemed to want to sing. At some point he came out from behind the drum kit and Pankow played the drums. Kaiser and Kobs liked the original lineup better. Lade had a good voice, but he wasn’t the frontman that Pankow was. Lade went back behind the drums.
The first song they put together was called “Überall wohin’s dich führt,” or “Wherever You Go.” Lade wrote it.
Überall wohin’s dich führt
wird dein Ausweis kontrolliert,
und sagst du einen falschen Ton,
was dann geschieht, du weisst es schonn . . .
Wherever you go
You’re asked for ID
If you say a false word
You know what happens next
It doesn’t matter where you look
Cameras are everywhere
Accompanying you step for step
“Security” always follows you
You speak your mind openly
And what will happen?
You can only hope
Something has to happen
Who wants to stand around passively?
Were you really born
To be subordinate to it all?
Observations like that were the sort of thing that got people sent to jail. The members of the band knew that. But as far as Pankow was concerned, this was the logical next step. He knew the country was fucked up and wanted to do something about it. Being a punk was cool, but being in a band like this, with lyrics like this, was exactly the outlet he had been looking for, a forum where he could speak his mind and vent his rage. But he wasn’t crazy. After he’d memorized the words of a song he always burned the handwritten lyric sheets. He didn’t want to leave any physical evidence around.
Kobs wrote a lot of songs, too, and he stored his notes beneath a false bottom in his lowest dresser drawer. One song Kobs wrote was “Ich stehe in der Schlange am Currystand,” or “Waiting in Line at the Currywurst Stand,” about being followed by agents of the state. The lyrics translated:
Waiting in line at the currywurst stand
I don’t turn around—I’ve already seen you
You are my shadow wherever I go
A dark spot on the sun
If I think too loud, you are there
Where’s the monitor? Behind the camera
In the bathroom you piss next to me
I may not see you, but you’re there
You’re breathing down my neck
In the U-Bahn you strafe me with your gaze
Another Kobs song translated as “Modern Times” and inveighed against complacency: “Modern man keeps his mouth shut and is silent” despite a list of problems Kobs touched on in the song, including environmental degradation and the looming threat of nuclear war. In another song Kobs mentioned the dead pigeons that fell from the sky—the East sometimes undertook aerial pesticide campaigns and it would literally rain dead birds.
As soon as bands started to write lyrics like that, punk in the DDR transformed into something uniquely Eastern, even stridently Eastern. The social conditions for punk in Britain didn’t exist in East Germany anyway—there was no unemployment or homelessness, no anxiety about basic needs. The problem in the DDR wasn’t No Future, the rallying cry of British punk. As Planlos guitarist Kobs liked to say, the problem in East Germany was Too Much Future. Your whole life was planned out for you almost from birth and it felt unbelievably stifling; there was no space, literal or philosophical, to live outside the system or even to express criticism of it.
Planlos—No Plan—was the exact opposite of Too Much Future.
7
At 7 a.m. on February 17, 1981, Major, now eighteen, heard banging at the door, violent banging. Three friends had stayed the night: Major’s boyfriend and another couple. Now the four of them found themselves being taken down to the police station—police, not Stasi. Lieutenant Müller had never relinquished his feeling that Major was a dangerous enemy of the state. The other three were asked about Major, about her habits, even her sexual habits, while Major herself was interrogated for forty-four of the next forty-eight hours. She lost five pounds during that time, fed only a cup of mint tea and two hardtack biscuits—the emergency rations given to soldiers. They took all the buttons and safety pins out of her clothes and removed her shoelaces. When she had to use the bathroom she was accompanied by a male officer who never let her out of his sight.
While she was in custody, they searched her apartment. They brought all the punk stuff they found to the police station—posters, articles, song lyrics, her own poetry and notes and sketches—and made her watch as they burned it all. Nobody told her what she was being charged with, but burning all the punk materials seemed designed to ensure she wasn’t charged with a political crime of some sort. If the police had evidence of political motivation for her crimes, they would have to turn the case over to the Stasi. Lieutenant Müller wasn’t going to let that happen. He wanted her in jail on his terms.
The cops began to grill her about workdays she had missed—twenty-one in the space of three months. They said the unexcused absences were enough to charge her with asoziales Verhalten, the crime of failure to work.
In addition to asoziales Verhalten, the cops piled on other charges. Initially they wanted to try to charge her with prostitution. A guy who had crashed at Major’s place had tested positive for a venereal disease and the cops knew it. They took Major to a place people jokingly called Gonorrhea Castle—the central registration office for sexually transmitted diseases, in Christburger Strasse—and forced her to have a gynecological exam. They wanted evidence to make the bogus prostitution charge stick. No dice. Major didn’t have any sexually transmitted diseases. Next they decided to charge Major with “incitement to antisocial lifestyle.” The woman who had stayed over the night before the arrest had run away from home and stopped going to school; she was a minor. Major could take the fall for her truancy.
The forty-eight-hour time limit came and went, and Major realized she was really being charged this time. They led her out to a windowless van and shoved her into one of several cramped, pitch-black cells in the back of it. They drove her around for a while and then dropped her at a pretrial detention center, somewhere, who knew where, never telling her what day or what time it was; she was totally disoriented and still didn’t know what exactly they had charged her with.
In pretrial detention she was treated roughly, always addressed as “prisoner” and had to go to the bathroom in the presence of male guards. The cell was poorly heated in the cold early months, and she found herself spending entire days pacing back in forth in the tiny room. She was lucky to get fifteen minutes outside every second day, when she and other prisoners were forced to silently goosestep up to a pen on the roof of the prison called the Schweinebucht, or the Bay of Pigs. Sometimes the guards forced her and other prisoners to stand for hours on a line painted in a hallway—if she lost her balance and stepped off the line, she was pummeled with a baton.
She would end up spending three months in this place before her case went to trial. In court her lawyer wouldn’t call any witnesses who might offer statements in her defense. Despite being paid well by Major’s mother, the lawyer showed no interest in trying to mount a real defense. The trial ended quickly.
The verdict: one year in prison followed by five years of Berlin-Verbot, meaning Major would be strictly barred from entering her home town when she got out of jail; she would not be able to see her family and friends; the nightmare would continue.
At the close of the process, the judge asked the obligatory question, “Does the defendant have anything to say?”
Not to be cow
ed into silence, Major stood up and began to state, “I wish before witnesses to . . .”
The judge interrupted her, trying to cut Major off.
A punk girl named China, who had managed to get a seat in the courtroom, gasped.
Major continued. “Before witnesses to state—”
“Silence!” shouted the judge.
Now Major was shouting, too, not to be drowned out: “—to state: I hereby renounce my DDR citizenship!”
The judge did not answer.
Major was shipped off to a women’s prison in Dessau. The complex was ringed by a double wall topped with barbed wire, with menacing dogs roving the strip between the two walls. There were half a dozen barracks. Major shared a room with thirty other women, all of them stacked tightly into ten triple bunks. Elsewhere on the grounds was a set of buildings where the prisoners had to work. The prison laborers worked around the clock, with the prison population divided into three shifts, waking and sleeping according to their work schedule. A normal shift was eight hours, but sometimes Major had to work ten or twelve hours—with just a five-minute cigarette break and a twenty-minute meal break. On top of all the other humiliations, the women frequently had their underwear stolen from the prison laundry line.
Major and other inmates were forced to get injections. Medical staff told her the shots were vaccines, but Major always suspected they were something else. It was certainly possible—it emerged after the fall of the Wall that doctors were complicit in the systems of control, administering phenobarbital and antipsychotic drugs, among other things, to inmates with no medical need for them, as well as attesting at times that a person’s unwillingness to comply with authorities indicated a mental disorder.
The prison authorities also coopted the inmates into a military-style self-policing hierarchy—one top prisoner oversaw six others, each of whom oversaw one of the barracks; those women in turn oversaw a series of lieutenants who served as foremen in the work camp and marshals in the barracks; there were also lieutenants in charge of specialized things, like dragooning fellow inmates into sticking to the official hygiene regimen. Basically, the authorities had recreated inside something like the system the government used outside—with its army of informants—to enforce conformity: a third of the inmates voluntarily conspired to keep the other two-thirds in line.
Sometimes it’s difficult in retrospect to understand the government’s paranoia about teenage punks, but then again Major’s arrest came just months after Alina Pienkowska, a young nurse at the Gdansk shipyards where Poland’s Solidarity strikes began, took on a leading role in the ongoing drama, first by alerting union groups further afield to the strike and then with an impassioned speech that kept the strike going at a critical juncture. The threat represented by Solidarity was deemed so dire that later that year, in December 1981, Poland would declare martial law, rolling out tanks in scenes reminiscent of crushed uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In any event, the constant hassles and violence, the attacks and beatings and arbitrary detainments—and now the harsh jail sentence against Major—further politicized the East Berlin punk scene and made what had been something of a nebulous cause into an all-out crusade against the dictatorship.
In the wake of Major’s arrest, a newly urgent rage started to burn inside A-Micha, a rage against the state and its henchmen, a rage that burned in a way it hadn’t before, a hot rage. A-Micha had already been a radical, but now, perhaps, he was a revolutionary.
8
While Major was shut away being interrogated day after day, the first public punk show in East Berlin took place, in March 1981. Or rather, the first ever semi-public punk show: it was staged in the Yugoslavian embassy by a diplomat’s son who had started a band called Koks, slang for “cocaine.”
The diplomat’s son was named Ilja, and Kobs knew him from school. Planlos went to the Koks show together as a band—Pankow, Kobs, Lade, and Kaiser. They were still working on songs at that point and had yet to play a gig. Where would they play? They didn’t have an amateur license and they sure as hell wouldn’t get one singing about being tailed by Stasi agents at the currywurst stand.
That night the room in the Yugoslavian embassy was packed with dozens of East Berlin punks.
This is going to be legendary, the Planlos gang agreed, a real punk show!
One of the kids at the show was Ronald Lippok, the drummer in a school band called Vitamin P. Ronald considered himself “anti-political” rather than “apolitical.” For him punk was primarily about having fun, and he didn’t think of himself as a dissident. He was just sick of the expected regurgitation of political incantations at every turn, sick of professing love of state and party, sick of all the bullshit.
He had been particularly repulsed by his mandatory military training in school. During weapons training his teacher had shouted at him while they were shooting at human-shaped targets: “Shoot him in the nuts! In the nuts!”
No fucking way.
I’m not shooting anyone in the nuts.
And especially not for you assholes.
He had gotten into the Sex Pistols and Ramones while listening to British military radio—he taped DJ John Peel’s show every week. At first Ronald thought punk was just a new version of the hard rock he loved, stuff like Black Sabbath. Then, however, he ran into real live punks in East Berlin, people like Colonel, and it hit him: Okay, something is happening here, this is interesting.
He realized punk was much more than a twist on hard rock. It was something completely different. Punks all seemed to know each other, they automatically talked to one another on the street or the subway when they ran into each other, whether or not they’d ever met. Punks were rejecting all the bullshit Ronald hated and creating some kind of parallel world.
Soon both Ronald and his brother Robert cut their hair, the talismanic ritual that marked a rejection of hippie culture and blues-rock and entry into the punk subculture. Almost as soon as he changed his look, Ronald began to get arrested and hauled off to police stations for questioning. This new world was the most exciting thing he’d ever experienced. In those early days of punk, all sorts of people came together under the punk banner—blue-collar kids and kids with educated parents, soccer hooligans and would-be intellectuals. The scene was a total social mashup: some of the kids just wanted to get drunk and go looking for fights, others were into dada and surrealist art, others were into politics—whether that meant joining church-based peace groups or becoming self-styled anarchists like Lade and Kaiser and A-Micha.
Ronald’s father worked as a blasting engineer with the state road-building Kombinat. He tolerated his sons’ new enthusiasm, even if it did affect him at work. One day, in fact, Ronald’s father was called into the office of the Kombinat’s Stasi agent and asked to sit down. The agent threw photos down on the table. They were surveillance shots of Ronald and Robert with their punk haircuts.
“Your sons seem to be under a bad influence,” the Stasi man said.
“Hmmm,” said the Lippok boys’ father noncommittally. He didn’t like the pictures, but he wasn’t going to condemn his boys or ask them to change. In fact, he was about to help them. His Kombinat had an official band, like a regimental band in the military, and when the state-road-building Kombinat had some surplus instruments, he managed to snag Ronald a drum kit.
Ronald started a school band, which covered the Pistols and Ramones and even wrote a few elementary songs of their own. The other thing Ronald got hold of from the Kombinat band was an East German rhythm box, and soon he was getting into synth-punk pioneers like Suicide and Throbbing Gristle. Later in the year he would join forces with a band called Rosa Extra—named for a brand of East German tampons. Their first gig together was at a school cafeteria; the school administrator who allowed the gig was subsequently relieved of duty. Rosa Extra played just three more gigs before Ronald was called up for army duty, and the cops broke up every one of them before the band could finish their set. Still,
kids were finally getting their first tastes of live punk rock.
As pockets of punks elsewhere in East Germany caught wind of developments in the capital—usually by making their way to Plänterwald, based on rumors of weekend punk meet-ups—bands began mushrooming all over the country: Schleim-Keim in Erfurt, Müllstation in Eisleben, Restbestand in Magdeburg, Virus X in Rostock, Rotzjungen in Dresden. The singer in Rotzjungen was the first person in the city of Dresden to wear his hair in a Mohawk.
An informal national network was starting to take shape.
Nowhere was there more happening than in Leipzig, the country’s second city, home to more than half a million people. A small punk scene had been smoldering there and punks in Leipzig—still barely more than a dozen brave souls in early 1981—had experienced much the same response as punks in East Berlin: they were constantly shouted at and insulted by the citizenry, punched around whenever those people were drunk enough to get belligerent, and regularly harassed by the Polizei. But then in the summer of 1981, graffiti went up on the walls of crumbling buildings in the decrepit parts of town announcing the arrival of a band: Wutanfall. The name meant Rage Attack and it was spelled with a big fat anarchist A. Sometimes it was shortened into a sort of logo—a big W with the anarchist A formed out of the peak in the middle of that W.
The members of the band had met only recently, at a concert by an officially-licensed group, Keks, that played a few Sex Pistols covers as part of their live set. Once they started hanging out together, Chaos, who would end up being the singer in Wutanfall, quickly started pushing the idea of a band.
