by Tim Mohr
For now, though, thanks to Uwe Kulisch, the punks had a new meeting spot, a seeming safe haven. Pfingst Church had replaced PW.
The punks started to meet at the church twice a week that July, and by the fall of 1981 more than a hundred punks would turn up every Monday and Friday night. They were allowed to make themselves at home in the bell tower rooms. What they did to the second-floor space wasn’t exactly in keeping with normal church style; it wasn’t in keeping with the bohemian coffeehouse style of a lot of other Open Work spaces, either, dominated as they had been by hippie-era aesthetics. The punks started by spraying graffiti all over the walls—using the same kind of slogans they sprayed on the walls of their squatted apartments. One was: don’t die in the waiting room of the future.
10
East German punks had already perfected the art of confrontation. A few had even started to play with Nazi imagery—the ultimate taboo in a country explicitly founded on anti-Nazi ideology. Faced with ever more brutal treatment by the police, some punks wore yellow star patches, making reference to the patches the Nazis forced Jews to wear. Others wore red armbands with white crosses on them and the word chaos written in black on the cross, meant to make people look twice because of its similarity to the armbands worn by Hitler’s SA and SS.
Then the authorities spotted some public graffiti they found particularly disturbing: ddr=kz, meaning East Germany = a concentration camp. A punk named Spion had spray-painted the slogan. He was the singer in a garage band called Ahnungslos, or Clueless. In the course of investigating the graffiti, the police also found drafts of Spion’s song lyrics, and he was thrown into prison for a year.
Despite the K1 crackdown, the East Berlin punk scene was exploding. It wasn’t just the number of punks turning up at Pfingst church each week that was growing, it was the overall scale of the scene. Everyone could feel it—people like A-Micha no longer knew every single punk in the city. There was a whole new generation. And it was huge.
Out in Grünau, beyond Plänterwald, a group led by a newly strident punk named Speiche also began to spray—using cans of rust primer. Speiche had recently been dragged out of a tram by police on his way to his job at a bakery; they had taken him to the station house, beaten him, and forcibly cut off his Mohawk.
Speiche was slightly older than most of the other first-generation punks—he’d come to it a little later in life, when he was already seventeen, though he was reading anarchist literature before that. One advantage of being a baker was that Speiche worked overnight, with very few people around. He listened to the radio all night, and some of the coolest music came on during those hours. Speiche was into hard rock—KISS, AC/DC—but also liked a lot of the more obscure stuff. He had started taking his cassette recorder and stacks of tapes with him each night and recording hour after hour off the radio. Soon he was known among his friends as the guy with the huge stash of music. Then one day, armed with his trusty handheld cassette recorder, he and two friends had been riding on a tram on the outskirts of East Berlin when four guys wearing leather jackets and chains all over their clothes got on—real live punks! They were huge—not just larger than life, but physically imposing. At the time, at seventeen, Speiche was the opposite. He was slender in the extreme: he weighed under eighty pounds. Speiche and his friends were listening to music from his stash of radio recordings. As some generic 1970s rock played through the tinny speaker, the punks growled at him to turn it down.
But a Sex Pistols song came on next.
“Hey, turn that up!” said the punks.
The next two songs on Speiche’s tape were by the Clash and the Damned.
“Where’d you get all that?” the punks asked Speiche.
“Recorded it myself,” he said.
The four punks invited Speiche and his two friends to join them at a nearby biergarten. Speiche let his cassettes play. And the punks kept hearing songs they didn’t have.
“Is there a jack in that recorder?” the punks asked Speiche.
There was. It was possible to run a line from his handheld cassette recorder to another one.
They asked for Speiche’s address. They wanted to come by and copy some of his music. This wasn’t ordinary rock and roll, they told him, it was punk.
“This is protest music,” they said.
Three weeks later the punks were at his door. Three days after that Speiche hacked and dyed his hair into a punk ’do. He fell in with other punks from the area and started to attract the attention of the police and his fellow citizens. The attacks—always by people who were far bigger than him—just hardened his beliefs; he also took up martial arts. Soon he was a force to be reckoned with in street fights, and within a few years he began to train others in the scene to defend themselves, too.
Speiche’s shift to punk was in keeping with the personality profile the government already had on him: he’d been judged a hopeless case at age ten, impossible to mold into a good socialist citizen. This despite the fact that he had always been quite politically aware: at age eight he had written a letter to American communist and civil rights activist Angela Davis, who was then awaiting trial on conspiracy charges related to an armed takeover of a California courtroom. Speiche wrote that if he could, he would free her and together they would free the world. This sense of mission never left him. He also became hyper-attuned to a sort of shakiness he began to sense in the East German system—a shakiness he first detected when he saw the fear he and his punk friends elicited from the police.
By 1981 he had an anarchist star tattoo to go with his Mohawk.
The graffiti campaign that Speiche and his friends undertook in Grünau that same year culminated in spraying a phrase on a wall directly across the street from the local police station:
revolution gegen die bullen gesellschaft
In essence:
overthrow the police state
Graffiti had become a major problem.
11
On August 12, 1981, a group of teens stumbled out of a basement bowling alley in East Berlin at closing time. Midnight. It was the night before the twentieth anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The streets were quiet and dark; the teens were loud and drunk.
One of these teens was Esther Friedemann. She had grown up in the northern neighborhood of Pankow. Her parents were both doctors; her mother worked at the Health Ministry and was a representative to the UN’s World Health Organization.
Though Esther had started dressing oddly at the end of school, she had encountered more trouble as a result of her mouth than her punk look. Esther wasn’t what you’d call diplomatic. Or quiet. Finished with school after tenth grade, Esther started an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker. She’d started hanging around with other punks as she met them—at parties, at Alexanderplatz, and less frequently at the occasional concert in a rehearsal space. She loved the concerts.
An entire room of cool people!
Among her friends were Pankow—who had grown up in her neighborhood—Colonel, and Kaiser. She’d seen those guys get hauled off by the cops at Alexanderplatz, but she herself hadn’t had much trouble with the police.
On that summer night of August 12, Esther, now seventeen, and a boy named Robert Paris peeled off from the others and headed home. Robert’s place, on Stargarder Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg, was on Esther’s way home.
Esther had recently seen a West German calendar at a friend’s place—it was one of those word-a-day type calendars, but in this case a funny political phrase accompanied each new day. She had flipped through a few pages. For August 13, the day the Berlin Wall had gone up back in 1961, it said, Zwanzig Jahre Mauer, wir werden langsam sauer, which was a rhyming phrase that meant: “Twenty years of the Wall, we’re starting to get pissed off.”
Ha.
Hey, now that it’s past midnight, that’s today!
Robert had a can of spray paint in his bag, bought at an auto parts store.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I sprayed that on a wall?
They knew it was technically illegal to vandalize, but on the other hand they didn’t think it was a big deal.
Come on.
On Greifenhagener Strasse, a quiet street one parallel over from Schönhauser Allee, a major avenue, Esther took the spray can and started to paint the phrase on the side of a building.
Zwanzig Jahre Mauer, wir werden langsam sauer.
Twenty years of the Wall, we’re starting to get pissed off.
Somebody walked by and looked at them. Esther and Robert realized they’d better scram. They took off running, first up Greifenhagener and then down onto the platform in the sunken S-Bahn train station. They ran to the other end of the platform and re-emerged up on Schönhauser Allee and then headed down that road, with the raised U-Bahn tracks looming above them.
A car screeched to a halt next to them.
Police jumped out.
Esther and Robert froze.
Busted.
The cops took them to a police station at Senefelder Platz, a big red brick building. But soon they were transferred in a police van to a facility in Pankow—a courthouse with a prison behind it. A prison for political prisoners and people who’d tried to flee the country.
Still, Esther wasn’t too worried. She wouldn’t turn eighteen for a few months. And all she had done was some minor vandalism.
Then they started to interrogate her.
Who was behind this? Who else was involved? Where did you hear that phrase?
She told them about the calendar. Why lie? What was the big deal?
They put Esther in a cell with a West German woman who’d been caught trying to smuggle silver out of the East, and an Eastern woman who’d tried to escape the country.
Esther was denied any visitors for the first month of her detention.
Why am I being treated like a dangerous criminal?
After a month her mother received a visitor’s permit. But when she came to see Esther all she did was scold her.
I don’t need this.
But she knew that was how her mother was. And though Esther didn’t find out until later, her mother had lost her position as a rep to the World Health Organization as a result of Esther’s political indiscretion.
Her trial started three months after her arrest—on the day of her eighteenth birthday. That way, they told her, she could be sent to a real prison instead of a juvenile detention center.
Esther was sentenced to eight months and Robert to six. But Robert’s mother, a prominent photographer, and father, a painter, both had plenty of connections; Esther’s mother also asked a famous writer she knew for a favor. In the end, the sentences were suspended and both Esther and Robert were released in late November, only a week after the end of the trial.
Prior to her release, Esther had to sign a bunch of paperwork. As she sat and signed various documents, an officer sitting across the desk from her said, “Don’t even bother to try to file a petition for an exit visa when you get out. For one thing, you’re not getting out of the country anytime soon. And for another, you’d better take your whole family.”
Esther thought she knew what he meant. Her sister had a coveted spot at a university and her parents had good jobs. Or at least they did when she had last been home.
When she got home she learned that her father, like her mother, had suffered professionally. He had actually lost his job. But unlike her mother, he never voiced a word of complaint to Esther. Even when she went back to hanging out with the punks and refused to join the straight world.
If anything, she thought, his eyes had been opened by the experience.
He seemed to understand.
Esther needed a new job, too. Even if she finished her apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker, she knew a job would be impossible to come by now. So she convinced her aunt—a tailor—to take her in as an apprentice. Soon enough she would be making pieces on the side out of things like mattress liners and fabric salvaged from decades-old dresses and selling them to artists and officially-licensed musicians who had plenty of money but no place to get cool clothes. She would become able to sustain herself almost entirely outside the system.
12
Attendance at Pfingst Church’s Open Work nights spiked during the second half of 1981. The members of Planlos, the PW gang, punks from all over Berlin and even from Leipzig, Dresden, and Magdeburg began turning up. Hundreds of punks. Even those who supported their presence in the church realized the punk nights created quite a spectacle, with beer bottles rolling down the stairs of the bell tower, puddles of liquid here and there, couples practically having sex in the open, loud music, wild dancing, and the occasional makeshift musical performance by a nascent band—those lyrics! But there were also at least somewhat structured discussions of everything from dealing with strict parents to a wide array of political topics.
And then there was the graffiti.
Outsiders had a particularly rough time when confronted with anti-Nazi graffiti, like crossed-out swastikas. Even negated like that, it caused chills down the spine—and, for the uninitiated, creeping doubts about the punks’ politics. Almost all of the graffiti in the church would have been regarded as criminal if painted anywhere outside. It was a ticking time bomb. There was a sign outside the punk rooms stating no photos, but if the Stasi could secretly secure photos of the space it could cause all kinds of trouble.
A report from an informant detailed one of the evenings on December 7, 1981: an estimated three hundred punks came, “predominantly 15-20 years old, and of them about 100 girls.” The rooms were filled beyond capacity, with, according to the informant, people packed in like sardines, lying on top of each another on old mattresses and broken pieces of salvaged furniture. “There were few meaningful comments and for the most part insubstantial conversations, punctuated by burps and vulgarity . . . the vast majority of these people come here because they can behave the way they want to. They can enjoy total ‘freedom’ here,” the report sneered. “Defamation of the government was no rarity.” Still, even while the informant denigrated the goings-on, the report went on to detail discussion groups that addressed such themes as freedom, anarchy, the desire to be able to speak one’s mind openly and without fear of arrest, and police brutality. “Overall, the so-called demands were mostly attacks on the People’s Police and other state and security organs.”
That same December night, about ninety punks got candles at the church and then, at the end of the evening, sat on the steps of the nearby Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn station with them—regardless of the intent or lack thereof, it was the sort of non-sanctioned mass public act that set off hysterical warning bells among DDR security services. Ten days later the church superintendent was summoned to a meeting with representatives from the Interior Ministry and from the government office in charge of liaising with churches. They reminded the superintendent that the church was responsible for everything that happened inside it, and insisted she do everything in her power to hinder the propagation of anti-state sentiments. Then the Ministry demanded that “youth dressed as ‘punkers’ be barred from entering the church” in the future.
“The church,” an Interior Ministry representative insisted, “cannot become a catchment basin for this element!”
The superintendent, however, had no intention of ending Pfingst Church’s relationship with the punks or altering its approach to Open Work.
The deacons who worked directly with the punks took their real-life concerns seriously, and helped them deal with trouble at work and in school and even with the police. Deacons like Uwe Kulisch and Lorenz Postler would accompany punks to meetings with employers and bureaucratic offices, and help deal with irate parents who sometimes showed up looking for their kids, who had left home and taken up residence in illegal apartments and squats. The deacons helped get lawyers for punks who continued to have constant run-ins with the police.
Still, many other church workers, not to mention congregants, found the presence of this horde of belching, boozed-up, foul-mouthed, ou
tlandish-looking teens utterly shocking, even scandalous. Perhaps a bigger problem was that the punks also cleaned out the beer and schnapps at nearby markets before every meeting, causing outrage in the neighborhood around Pfingst—well, that and the fact that the punks used surrounding buildings as urinals as they staggered homeward from the church at night. The solution to the first source of neighborhood ire was to make beer available at the church itself. That put off more of the Pfingst staff and congregation.
The punks, however, were in heaven.
They finally had their own space. Their own world. They could play their music, dance, drink, talk shit. All of this and no cops busting down the doors to detain them.
As the punks began to be exposed in greater number to the other oppositional groups and ideas being sheltered by the church—disarmament and peace groups, and, later, environmental and human rights groups—they began to see how different they were. It wasn’t that punks didn’t sympathize with the goals of those groups; they did. But they didn’t share the same attitude. Those groups wanted reform. Punks wanted more fundamental change: to cast off the system, to destroy it.
Trying to convince the government brass to change this or that was pointless.
You want to engage the Party in dialogue?
Count us out.
Top-down change?
Fuck that shit.
It was all about bottom-up politics.
The punk approach was also contradictory: they wanted to change the system, yes, but for the most part they also tried to operate outside of it, almost as if it didn’t exist. And the free space in the Pfingst bell tower, while allowing them to find common cause with other groups, also made it easier for them to operate outside the system.
They planned to live the life they wanted, not ask the Party to provide it.
