by Tim Mohr
Chaos had never been one to sit around.
He had always hated the drabness and boredom of his surroundings and was looking for an outlet for his frustrations. In his early teens he’d gotten into boxing and had plenty of scrapes in and out of the ring, but he’d always been interested in music, too. He caught a glimpse of the Pistols on a West German TV show in eighth grade and it was as if a match had been struck inside him. He wasn’t sure what punk was, really, but it was obvious that this was the music he’d been looking for, quick and powerful, bam, like a punch. Not long afterward he’d been barred from a school trip when he showed up with safety pins stuck in his clothes and his eyes smeared with black makeup like Dave Vanian, the singer of the British band the Damned. He’d been sent home that day, but he also knew for sure he’d found his thing. Punk.
Chaos’s parents weren’t happy with his look or the troubles he started to encounter as a result of it. They screamed at him and beat him. His home life became unbearable. Chaos took to leaving home in relatively normal outfits and changing into his punk gear at a new friend’s house, another punk named Ratte, who was politically tuned in and conversant in anarchist philosophy. Chaos perused the Weimar-era writings of prominent anarchist, military critic, and Nazi opponent Erich Mühsam, but he didn’t see himself as political—for Chaos, punk was about teenage kicks, about doing what he wanted to do. He eventually left home at seventeen and squatted in a rundown hole of an apartment in eastern Leipzig that had been vacated when a friend of a friend left for West Germany. Chaos’s new place was in a particularly grim section of the city, a neighborhood distinguished by its high quotient of misery, destroyed buildings, and drunks. As in the centers of all of the cities of East Germany, the streets in central Leipzig were lined with empty storefronts, vacant lots, and buildings with their guts spilling out the doors and windows in the form of bricks and rubble; some of the roads were in such a state of disrepair that they could barely be called paved. On the rare occasions Chaos ran into another soul on the street, as likely as not he’d hear, “You should have been gassed!”
The aggressiveness of ordinary people toward him and other punks surprised Chaos at first. But at the end of the day he wanted to provoke a reaction. He’d taken a trip up to Berlin earlier in 1981 after he heard rumors about the meet-ups at Plänterwald. The rumors, he’d found, were true. In fact, the scale of the scene in Berlin had blown him away. He befriended a few of the Berliner punks and started to feel as if he was part of a snowballing scene, as people from all over the country met at PW or the ferris wheel in Plänterwald and then started to visit each other in towns across East Germany. The number of punks visiting Liepzig was about to spike, too, because Wutanfall soon took the scene by storm with their fast, aggressive sound—basically DDR hardcore.
Together with Imad and Typhus on guitar, Zappa on bass, and Rotz on drums, Chaos went at the band the way he went at everything, attacking it full on. The band assembled a couple of homemade guitars and an assortment of pots and pans and pickle barrels as drums, and set up shop first at Imad’s apartment and then in a half-exposed attic on Sternwartestrasse—Zappa and some other punks lived there, in the building below.
Working with a friend named Ray Schneider, Chaos co-wrote the lyrics for the first song Wutanfall cranked out, a sonic gut-punch that would remain an East German punk anthem for the rest of the decade: “Leipzig in Trümmern,” or “Leipzig in Ruins.”
When the Combat Groups of the Working Class
march before your house,
and the children in school
are trained for war,
the father of the nation speaks by torch light
of freedom to the German youth,
the police won’t leave you alone . . .
Leipzig in ruins, Leipzig in ruins
Open pit mines scrape away villages
and government officials toast it with champagne,
nobody cares about nature and forests
everything flattened and covered with concrete . . .
By the time Wutanfall had a couple of rudimentary songs, they decided to play a show. It was the opposite impulse of Planlos, who spent all of 1981 writing and rehearsing their songs—though sometimes there were as many people hanging out in Planlos’s basement rehearsal space as would attend the first Wutanfall show.
Near drummer Rotz’s apartment, in an area on the northern edge of town packed with typical East Bloc high-rises, there was a garage-like structure that functioned during the week as a communal laundry-hanging center. On weekends, people could rent the building for parties for next to nothing. Wutanfall rented it for their first ever gig, falsely registering the event as a birthday party.
On the day of the show, Chaos went over to a friend of a friend’s apartment and cajoled him into rejiggering a radio into an amp for his vocals. The friend, Reudnitz, was new to the punk scene but handy with electronics, and he came through. The band dragged their scrappy instruments to the laundry building and set up. The band also strung bread rolls from the rafters with twine.
By show time, the place was packed. They had invited a couple dozen friends, and everyone came. Just to be safe, they locked the doors before they started playing. And then all hell broke loose.
As the band attacked their instruments, Chaos started singing—or rather, screaming like he was being flayed alive. Like he was possessed.
This is the most liberating feeling I’ve ever had, thought Chaos as he howled and the crowd throbbed and pogoed.
He hadn’t expected the listeners to go so crazy, and he hadn’t expected the band to sound so good. They were rough and raw and noisy, but it worked. It really worked. It was magical.
We have to keep this going.
What had started out as a lark suddenly felt important to Chaos.
During a song called “Hunger,” Chaos jumped up, teeth bared, and ripped chunks out of the dangling bread rolls like a starved animal. When the jerry-rigged radio he was using as his vocal amp quit near the end of the show, Chaos grabbed an axe and violently hacked it to bits.
All of Chaos’s frustration and anger—his white hot RAGE—roared out of him when he sang.
We have to keep this going.
It was an insane gig. Nobody had ever seen or heard anything like it. This was something new, something different, something none of them—Chaos, the rest of the band, the people in the audience—had ever experienced.
Kids ran out of the building chanting, “überall, überall Wutanfall.”
And almost immediately, the band logo turned up in graffiti all over Leipzig, with its lurid, dripping anarchist A.
Wutanfall was a bona fide sensation—after one gig.
Before Wutanfall, Chaos had a better idea of what he didn’t want to do than about the things he did want to do. He wasn’t thrilled that he would be starting his apprenticeship as a carpenter that fall of 1981—he had always hated the way his whole life was predetermined by the state. Too much future. No matter what happens, he thought now, I will not end up like that, in that pack of lemmings, pissing my life away in this gray hellhole, everyone informing on each other, everyone working for nothing, and then keeling over at seventy, no way, no fucking way.
Now everything was different. Now he had the band. This was something Chaos wanted to do, something he had to do. He had always felt hemmed in when he got angry, unable to run, unable to escape the rage and creeping dread. Now he could burn all of that out of his system. Give him a mic and he could channel that incandescent rage into a laser, leaving scorched earth around him, and at least a brief calm inside him.
We have to keep this going.
Wutanfall continued to meet up in their rehearsal space and write songs. They slowly accumulated better equipment. First some real guitars, later a small kit of proper drums, at some stage even real amps. Chaos continued to write with Ray, describing the ills they saw around them and scrawling lyrics in a notebook. But Chaos was careful. Nothing he wrote ever said stra
ight out “fuck the DDR” or “fuck the Stasi.” Still, at times he worried that what was in his notebook could come back to haunt him. But it took time to write and then memorize the songs.
The next time the band booked the laundry building and started to play, the police immediately descended on the place and busted up the gig. It didn’t matter. For Leipzig’s punks, the flame had been lit. And as for the police, well, Chaos had always wanted to push against the boundaries of the system. He knew there could be consequences. But Chaos hadn’t reckoned with the force of the blows that would eventually rain down on him and his friends.
The police would be back.
9
The K1—the political division of the criminal police—had expected to be able to dismantle the punk scene by April 1981. It hadn’t worked out that way. April had come and gone and if anything, from a police perspective, things seemed to be getting worse. Despite the examples they’d made of Major and others, despite the expulsions from schools and apprenticeships, and despite the constant detainments, hassles, and beatings, the punk movement was not only hanging on but growing, all over the country. In fact, the harsh treatment had hardened the punks’ convictions and further convinced them of the injustice and hypocrisy of the system.
Working in conjunction with the Stasi, the K1 now sought to solve the punk problem by eliminating punks from public view. They instituted a blanket ban of punks in bars, cafés, restaurants, and youth clubs. And they made it clear that any establishment caught ignoring the ban stood to lose its license.
Suddenly East Berlin’s punks had no place to meet, and any group spotted on a street or in a subway station, no matter how small, had to reckon with a speedy police response.
Then in July 1981 a deacon named Uwe Kulisch, from Pfingst Church in the central East Berlin district of Friedrichshain, bumped into a few punks—led by Colonel—on the street. After hearing about their struggle to find places to meet up without being dragooned by the police, deacon Kulisch suggested the group drop by his church during what he called an open evening. The deacon explained that as part of a program called Offene Arbeit, or Open Work, the church opened space for use by young people who were not part of the congregation.
Pfingst Church had been built at the turn of the previous century, situated mid-block on Petersburger Platz, flush with the apartment buildings on either side. The brick building had once been handsome, with flame-shaped High Gothic flourishes, but it was now blackened by a thick layer of soot.
At the next open evening, about ten punks, including A-Micha and Colonel, showed up and drank tea uneventfully with a few other freaks—regulars at the Open Work evenings.
“Could we bring some friends with us next time?” they asked at the end of the night.
“Sure.”
It was a fateful decision.
More than twenty punks turned up at the next open evening. And a church out in Friedrichsfelde—close to where Major and the original pocket of punks had cropped up—told a group of punks who showed up on its doorstep that they should try the Pfingst Church, too. That doubled the number of punks again at the next Open Work evening.
By the dawn of the 1980s, the country’s Lutheran churches had come to host a lot of youth activity—much of it oppositional in nature, at least as far as the government was concerned. It wasn’t that East Germany had experienced a renaissance of religiosity. On the contrary, most of the church-based activity had little or no direct connection to god or theology. And it wasn’t that the Lutheran church as an institution stood in opposition to the government—a full 5 percent of church officials would turn out to have been working as Stasi snitches; others just wanted to avoid conflict with the state; still others saw the church’s proper role as strictly limited to spiritual matters. What was true, though, was that the church was so decentralized that individual congregations or ministers or even lay deacons could pretty much get up to whatever they wanted, regardless of what regional or national church leaders might have liked.
The East German Church had recently achieved a unique and unprecedented level of autonomy: in March 1978, dictator Erich Honecker had met for the first time with a national church delegation and settled on a new status for the Lutheran church, described as Kirche im Sozialismus, or church within socialism. As a practical matter, the agreement granted the church formal independence and acknowledged it as beyond the reach of uniformed security forces—and thus, even if it wasn’t the intent of the new understanding, any rogue oppositional activity within church walls was largely off-limits to police. From 1978 on, churches could in theory operate as free spaces where people were able to discuss politically taboo topics and speak their minds. The question was, how far would the government let churches go before they ignored or even revoked this autonomous status? It wasn’t necessarily a question most church leaders wanted answered, but when Pfingst Church opened its doors to the punks, the risk of confrontation spiked.
Prior to 1978, the church’s role in society—particularly its role in the lives of young people—had a fraught history in East Germany. Quite aside from the communists’ distaste for religion as an ideological tool of capitalism and imperialism, the Party didn’t want the church to undermine the government’s monopoly on youth activities. During the Stalinist era, DDR authorities had hounded the church relentlessly. In 1952, the Communist Party tasked Honecker—then still a rising star and head of the Free German Youth—with cracking down on the church, and in particular on church youth groups. Chaplains at schools and universities were barred from carrying out their work, and some of them were among the first arrested in a wave that saw more than seventy theologians detained and thousands of students expelled from school. An array of sanctions against church youth groups were announced, and a propaganda campaign insinuated that the church was being steered by sinister Western forces. The government eventually reversed course, but the damage was done. People worried—correctly, as it turned out—that there would be subsequent crackdowns, and church youth groups never regained much membership.
By the beginning of the 1970s, however, the political climate had changed. Honecker was now the head of state. Despite his hardline mentality, Stalinist tactics were out and the desire for international legitimacy was in. Also, the population was far less religious by then—just 7 percent of East Berliners were churchgoers—and many religious traditions and rites of passage, like confirmation and first communion, had been successfully displaced by politically palatable alternatives. More than 90 percent of East German fourteen-year-olds, for instance, had a Jugendweihe, a secular initiation party that effectively replaced religious coming-of-age rituals.
The church, too, had changed. Or at least a handful of innovative pastors had. Under their leadership, some churches began clawing their way back into the youth-culture scene. Beginning in the early 1970s, a new kind of youth outreach had taken root, particularly in the southern state of Thüringen. To liven up their moribund youth ministries, pastors there began to bring in young outsiders of various stripes—hippies, freaks, objectors to mandatory military service, even alcoholics. The newcomers were not members of the congregation, and often not religious at all; in fact they were almost all atheists. Rather than try to integrate these new groups into traditional youth ministries, the pastors invented a new category of service: Open Work. Eventually Open Work evolved into something more formally oppositional: rather than simply opening church space to a broad range of troubled kids and trying to help them with their problems, the new vision held that it was perverse to try to reintegrate troubled youth into the society that was breaking them down in the first place. That is, it was society that needed to change. The church hierarchy was not receptive to this series of innovations and constantly tried to force more overtly religious content on these increasingly independent entities and schemed to find ways to bar Open Work groups from access to church facilities. Even so, by 1976 an East Berlin church institute had started training deacons specifically to work with marg
inalized youths—Kulisch, who brought Colonel and the others into Pfingst Church, was one of them—and by the late 1970s Open Work had taken hold in parishes all around the country.
Friedrichshain was a hotbed of youth outreach in East Berlin, with programs in several churches, including Galiläa, Samariter, Auferstehung, Advent, Andreas-Markus, and Lazarus. Eventually Pfingst Church became the focus of Open Work in Berlin. But it was a slog. Through 1978, Pfingst was led by pastor Hans Reder, a vehement opponent of Open Work—and a Stasi snitch under the code name “Beier.” He later became the superintendent of churches in Weimar, where in 1985 he had the Open Work group in that city thrown out of its church quarters and criminalized; in 1988 he violated the 1978 agreement shielding the church by calling in police to forcibly remove a small group of protestors who had barricaded themselves in Weimar’s Herder Church. Subsequent pastors at Pfingst were not much more enthusiastic about Open Work, though an activist congregant successfully steered a group of marginalized youth into the church.
After much haggling with wary church leadership, Open Work took up residence in a three-room apartment in the bell tower of Pfingst in May 1979. Complaints began immediately, both from within the church and from neighbors and local authorities.
Despite the 1978 arrangement with Honecker, the Kriminal Polizei had opened a file in 1980 called Kreuz, or Cross, to monitor and undermine youth activities in several local churches. They had snitches and even plainclothes officers with recording equipment at many events, all in an effort to stifle the “political-ideological influence” of the church that was, as they saw it, “defaming and misrepresenting socialist conditions in the DDR.”
The K1 and Stasi kept particularly close tabs on church officials they disliked. Lorenz Postler, another deacon who began to work with the punks, was eventually surrounded by more than a dozen Stasi snitches. Stasi meddling in state housing authorities also ensured that Postler would have constant trouble getting and retaining living space for his family, which included three young children.
