by Tim Mohr
Create your own world, your own reality. DIY.
Punk.
Revolution from below.
13
Throughout 1981 Planlos had regularly performed in front of people in their dank cellar rehearsal space—inviting friends over from the Pfingst Church, hosting out-of-town punks, and staging parties that were little short of public gigs. But they had yet to play out. After rehearsing obsessively for an entire year, Planlos were satisfied with their sound and ready to make their live debut—at a blowout on the final night of 1981 in an artist’s atelier on Lychener Strasse, in the bohemian Prenzlauer Berg district.
As the punk scene had exploded over the course of 1981, artists and alternative literary figures all over the country had quickly taken an interest in adorning themselves with punks. Avant-garde poets like Sascha Anderson and Bert Papenfuss turned up at the bell tower of the Pfingst Church on occasion, reading their works over distorted electric guitar. Anderson, who was originally from Dresden, started performing with an art-punk band from Dresden called Zwitschermaschine, and Papenfuss eventually collaborated on song lyrics with Berlin’s Rosa Extra.
The problem was that punk was all about simplicity and confrontation. Punk bands did not mince words. The poets, on the other hand, crafted opaque neo-dada verses that nobody could understand. Their work was considered decadent and subversive by the dictatorship because it didn’t conform to officially sanctioned standards, but what did it fucking mean? Every satellite has a killer satellite—that was Sascha Anderson. Go across the border / on the other side / stands a man and says / go across the border. Huh? The dictatorship might not have loved that kind of stuff, but, some punks wondered, did it really hurt the authorities?
Of course, the punks didn’t object to being invited to the parties these artists hosted. After all, free booze was free booze. And free space was pure gold. Many people in the alternative arts and literature scene seemed to have an almost inconceivable level of autonomy, able to publish or exhibit in the West—and as a result, were much less economically tethered to the state than most people. And they apparently didn’t get knocked around all the time by the police. There were other differences, too: Most punks lived either with their parents—often in intensely hostile conditions—or in transient situations: crashing with friends, illegally occupying vacated apartments, or squatting in ramshackle buildings. Artist ateliers seemed swank by comparison.
For Pankow, the upcoming New Year’s Eve gig represented the fulfillment of everything he’d been trying to do. But he also knew it was dangerous. He’d been arrested almost daily during some stretches in 1981, and that was just for walking around near Alexanderplatz. Who knew what would happen when he started screaming the band’s anti-state lyrics in a semi-public setting.
He was extremely nervous in the lead-up to New Year’s Eve. On the day of the show, Pankow told friends, “I might be going to jail after tonight.”
But he was still looking forward to the gig. And if he was going to get locked up tomorrow, he planned to make the most of tonight.
This is it.
This is THE night.
And it was. It was epic.
The artist who threw the shindig on Lychener Strasse had wanted one band—Rosa Extra—and expected about fifty guests. Rosa Extra had invited Planlos; Planlos had invited Unerwünscht—Unwanted—a band Planlos shared their basement rehearsal space with; then the brother of Rosa Extra drummer Ronald Lippok insisted on playing a set with a noise act he had put together on the fly.
More than three hundred people turned up.
The party was insane.
The atelier soon looked like a war zone. Glass got smashed. Wild dancing dislodged the chimney pipe several times, filling the atelier with coal smoke.
Planlos had a batch of eight or nine fully formed songs, and their playing was tight. It paid to have practiced the songs to death. Because now they absolutely killed it. Another advantage: many in the audience that night already knew the songs. They’d been to Planlos’s rehearsal space or seen the band rough their way through a song or two in the bell tower of the Pfingst Church. So now, as the band launched into their songs, the audience not only went crazy, bouncing off each other and pogoing and creating a seething, swarming mass of bodies all united in sweat and smoke and solidarity, they also sang along with almost every word.
In fact, throughout the show, audience members grabbed the mic from Pankow and sang verses themselves. He found himself constantly running after the mic. The crowd shouted along as the band ripped through “Überall wohin’s dich führt”:
Wherever you go
You’re asked for ID
If you say a false word
You know what happens next . . .
Were you really born
To be subordinate to it all?
The crowd shouted along as the band cranked out “Ich stehe in der Schlange am Currystand”:
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
In Kobs’s “Modern Times,” the band sang about how people just kept their mouths shut. But the kids at the party—hundreds of them—were not keeping their mouths shut. They were singing and screaming against the system along with Pankow.
As the band left the premises, they looked with amazement at the state of the place. Inside the atelier, in the staircase, out in the courtyard, everything was a mess.
Holy shit.
The band members had been punks for about two years when at midnight the calendar switched to 1982. They’d all had their troubles, at home and at large, and they’d all been harassed by the police for nearly all that time, slugged by fellow citizens and cops alike, interrogated by the Stasi. Their suspicions about the rotten nature of the DDR had long since been confirmed, and now, they felt, they had done something concrete about it. They had raged against the system, out loud, publicly.
Were you really born
To be subordinate to it all?
Not tonight.
14
On January 27, 1982, China, a punk who had been at Major’s trial back in 1981, was arrested, subjected to multiple strip searches and body cavity searches, and placed in pretrial detention for five weeks. The charge, according to the arrest warrant: she had distributed a total of twenty hand-typed statements saying, among other things, that she lived in a “mousetrap” where “no freedom of opinion existed.”
The statements, it turned out, were from her diary.
She was sixteen.
On February 16, 1982, Major was released from prison. Upon release, the terms of her Berlin-Verbot were explained: for the next five years she was forbidden to visit Berlin or any towns bordering the capital. Her compliance would be monitored by the authorities. She would be “rehabilitated” in Turnow—an isolated village about fifty miles southeast of Berlin—where she would be expected to work at an industrial textile cleaning facility. She had to report to the local council every week, and could not leave the town of Turnow without permission. She was barred from trying to change her job or her place of residence without written permission of the authorities.
She was taken directly from prison to Turnow. She was not just the stranger in town, but the criminal. The place she was supposed to live was a decrepit cabin with an outhouse instead of a toilet.
Major didn’t wait a single day before hopping a train back to Berlin. She stayed until the following day, February 17, before returning to Turnow. She did not, however, report to work.
On March 3, 1982, the local mayor of Turnow sent officers to Major’s residence to find her and demand she report to work. As soon as they had left, she again joined her friends in Berlin for three days.
Four weeks after her initial release from prison, Major was arrested again. This time she was quickly sentenced to eighteen months. When this second prison term ended the following year, she would be take
n directly to the border and sent to West Berlin.
The vise was tightening.
The punks’ haven in the Pfingst Church was imperiled as well.
Imperiled from within, it turned out.
In a series of reports from late March, 1982, the security organs boasted of twenty-five visits by informants to various Pfingst events just since January. The state basically succeeded in creating a split within the Pfingst Church that eventually had to be arbitrated in a church court. In the simplest terms, the local parish council tried to unilaterally kick out the punks by simply padlocking the tower rooms in early April, and other factions within the church sued the local parish council to reopen it.
For several weeks in April, it was unclear what would happen. Punks gathered in front of Pfingst each Monday and Thursday, unable to get in.
After a few weeks, good news came: the local parish had lost its case and Pfingst would reopen to the punks. There was a downside, however. The church court had decided to let the parish undertake some renovations for a few months, meaning for the immediate future the punks remained on the street.
The closure affected all participants in Open Work programs, not just the punks. But by then most people associated with other subsets of Open Work had come to develop respect for the way the punks dealt with the authorities. The long-haired peaceniks, for instance, were in the midst of a struggle of their own with the government. Beginning in November 1981, church-based peace groups had started to wear circular white patches embroidered with the Biblical citation Schwerter zu Pflugscharen, or swords into plowshares, and a depiction of a statue called “Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares,” by Yevgeny Vuchetich, which the Soviet Union had presented to the United Nations in 1959. Despite the image of the officially sanctioned Russian statue, the patch had drawn the immediate ire of East German authorities—the government had its own peace initiatives and did not accept the legitimacy of this nonsanctioned activism. The government crackdown on the patches reached its peak in March 1982, with police forcibly removing them from people’s clothing. For the peaceniks, this was a new and shocking level of harassment. But by then they had witnessed firsthand the more severe treatment the punks experienced—and were still experiencing. So rather than creating a wedge between the different groups, the closure of Pfingst Church contributed to a growing feeling of common cause between them—a feeling that would have great consequences in the future.
In the fall of 1982, six months after it was closed for “renovations,” the Pfingst bell tower reopened. When the punks came streaming back, now on Mondays and Fridays, a church official who had supported the continuation of Open Work and of taking in the punks came to survey the scene. She was struck: the ranks of punks seemed to have actually grown during the lockout.
The Stasi apparently agreed. In a report from August 1982 detailing connections between the church and punks in the southern city of Erfurt, the secret police estimated the nationwide number of punk “adherents” at one thousand. Punk “sympathizers,” however, who were likewise “recognizable by their appearance,” ran to ten thousand.
In a country of just fifteen million, ten thousand was a hell of a lot of troublemakers.
Jana Schlosser performing with Namenlos at Christus Church in Halle, 1983
Christiane Eisler / Transit Agency
II
Oh Bondage
Up Yours!
15
Jana Schlosser left home in 1982. She was seventeen.
She had just finished the tenth grade and was about to start a job-training program to become a nurse in the psych ward of a local children’s hospital in Halle, where she had grown up, a hilly, crumbling, soot-choked city about a hundred miles south of Berlin. Halle was in the most toxic region of East Germany, surrounded by massive open-pit coal-mining operations and petrochemical plants; the mounds of smelly yellow-white foam that floated along and lined the banks of the slow, dark river that ran through town made it that much harder to ignore the stench of the poisonous water.
Home had not been a happy place for Jana. Her parents were very strict, obsessed with tidiness and order. Her father chauffeured apparatchiks around as a professional driver, and her mother took inventory for the official trade organization for hospitality enterprises—bars, hotels, restaurants. Her parents weren’t party members but they didn’t oppose the state, either. They were ordinary workers; politics was not important to them. When Jana started to experiment with her look, they didn’t view it as a political act, they just didn’t think it was proper.
Towards the end of school, Jana—who had straw-colored hair, a razor-sharp nose, and a willful chin—had started to cultivate a sloppy sort of hippie look, wearing long batik skirts in bright colors, and had sampled the alternative scene in Halle. Because of the local arts college, there was a vibrant community of artists—though Jana thought a lot of them were a bit aloof. The city had also been a hotbed of environmentalism and peace activism for several years, with a lot of the action centered around a young, impulsive deacon named Lothar Rochau, who worked at a church in a high-rise section of town. Rochau had arrived in Halle in 1977, just twenty-six years old, and built up a youth group that began to attract attention both from less tolerant church leaders and from the Stasi. As a lay employee, Rochau’s position was somewhat more perilous than it would have been as a minister, and local church authorities disagreed about whether his activities should be permitted and protected. Rochau’s critical misstep—for which, in 1983, he would actually be cut loose by the church, arrested, jailed, and then expatriated—was to take his activities beyond the church walls. He organized public demonstrations, candlelight vigils, and bicycle rallies, among other things.
Jana found herself drawn to the freaks, the dropouts, the long-haired activists. Some of them had squatted apartments among the derelict buildings in the bombed-out old town center. In Halle, as in other cities in East Germany, the government had opted to throw up new high-rise blocs around the edge of town rather than rebuild the war-damaged old center. Jana sometimes wandered around the hollowed-out downtown and looked into empty buildings and squats.
Whoa, look at this place!
Some still had pieces of furniture in them.
It would be cool to move into a place like this!
To live my own way!
She was trying to figure out where she fit might in, seeking a way to express her strong sense of individuality. She was curious, and she wasn’t the type of person to quash that curiosity.
Then one day near the end of school her mother gathered up Jana’s bohemian clothing and burned it all.
If you didn’t like that look, Mom, I can definitely be more extreme.
Jana had read an article about punk in a West German magazine she’d found. It was a piece was about Nina Hagen—the East German émigré who’d become a West German star—and included a sidebar about punks in East Berlin. It said they hung out at an amusement park called Plänterwald along the banks of the river Spree.
Punks.
A whole community of them.
In East Berlin.
One night, secretly listening to a West German station she could pick up on the radio she had in her bedroom, huddling under the covers so her parents wouldn’t hear, Jana’s ears perked up. It was a show about punks in England, and Jana found herself riveted even before the music came on. Punks got their clothes out of garbage dumps, they reported, and decorated them with safety pins. The report talked about punk ideology. Jana had only the vaguest idea of what anarchism was, but some of the slogans sounded cool.
And then came a song by the Sex Pistols.
Even playing softly under her covers, the song gripped her. It felt like something from inside her, something that had always been there.
This sounds exactly the way I feel.
That is when it all started.
16
Jana roped a friend of hers into becoming a punk. Together they made things she thought they needed to be
punk. Using clay and safety pins they shaped homemade buttons and baked them in the oven so they could paint slogans on them. Jana found a discarded old striped jacket. She took a white pair of pants and splashed paint all over them.
This is what a punk looks like . . . I guess.
Her friend’s parents freaked out immediately. It was too much for the other girl, who promptly gave up.
Jana was now the only punk girl in Halle.
She soon learned there were about a half dozen punk boys. One of them was Moritz Götze, who had started a band.
They briefly became a couple.
Moritz’s band had come together under the auspices of a local church youth group.
“We’re starting a band,” Moritz told Siegfried Neher of Christus Church in the industrial eastern section of Halle, not far from the main train station but very much on the wrong side of the tracks. The minister was a rock music fan and himself a guitar player.
“But you don’t know how to play instruments or read music,” Neher had replied.
“That’s exactly why we’re starting a band! We’re going to play worse than anybody in the entire country!”
On Saturday, June 19, 1982, the band played a youth workshop at a church on the outskirts of town. Neher, who was in attendance, had to tune the instruments for them. It was pure chaos, screaming and noise, and Moritz called the group Grössenwahn—Delusions of Grandeur. Wutanfall followed Moritz and Grössenwahn that night and the Leipzig band blew the crowd away with their speed and intensity and their no-holds-barred lyrics. At that point even the Berlin bands would admit that Chaos was the best frontman in the DDR. And everywhere Wutanfall played, new kids were inspired to challenge the boundaries in their own lives. Punk ranks were swelling.
Jana kept pushing her look further and further. She took to wearing lots of earrings and chains. She started to experiment with her hair and began to inch toward the full-on Mohawk she would eventually wear.
