by Tim Mohr
One day she decided to try to dye her hair with the ink from some felt-tip markers. She combed it into her hair and left the brush in the bathroom. Apparently the ink clung to the bristles: her mother went to brush her own hair and suddenly Jana heard her screaming in the bathroom.
Her parents had reached the breaking point. They had been hammering her about her looks, repeating the same phrase over and over: “Either you dress like a normal person or you get out.”
Now it was just Get out.
“Get out!”
Leaving wasn’t difficult for Jana.
She thought back to the article she’d seen about punks hanging around at the Plänterwald amusement park in Berlin. She wanted to see that. Maybe she could find a community there, a group where she’d fit in. At the very least she wanted to explore the possibility. Through his family, Moritz Götze knew some artists and artisans in East Berlin and gave Jana an address in Prenzlauer Berg. He said she could just knock on their door and they’d let her sleep there.
She packed a few things and headed to the train station.
17
In Berlin, Jana went straight to Plänterwald, walking the fifteen minutes from the S-Bahn station toward the Ferris wheel in the woods.
She sat down on a bench in the amusement park and waited. No punks.
People kept walking by and insulting her.
“Hey, the haunted house ride is over there—get back to work!”
Eventually somebody told her that the punks met there only two days a week. Two other days. The West German magazine hadn’t mentioned that.
Shit.
She got back on the S-Bahn and went to Alexanderplatz.
As she wandered around the bleak, concrete plaza she spotted two punks. The two Berlin punks obviously had the same thought that she did.
Aha, a fellow punk!
The pair of punks took her around that evening and introduced her to others. Jana had made her first links to the Berlin scene.
Back in Halle but unwilling to go home, Jana squatted an apartment downtown. She found a three-story building, completely empty. There was no electricity or water, but she moved in anyway—alone.
She also continued to go to work for a time, though she had to carefully hide her hair now that it was shaved on both sides and dyed bright colors. She wore a scarf on her head and didn’t put on any of the outlandish eye makeup she’d started wearing.
One day a child tugged playfully at her scarf and it came off.
Oh!
The children all shrunk back, some gasping, some snickering.
“What happened to your hair?” they asked.
She told them she had a scalp condition.
She didn’t last much longer at the children’s hospital.
One weekend afternoon, strolling through a street fair, she encountered her parents and the family dog. The dog pulled at the leash and tried to come over to Jana; her parents pretended she wasn’t there and walked past without a word.
Another day she ran into two punks on the street. She knew the handful of Halle punks and these guys were unfamiliar, so of course she started talking to them. It turned out they were from Berlin and had just escaped from a juvenile detention center. They were on the run.
“I have three floors in a house I squatted,” she told them. “You can stay with me.”
All three of them were excited. The punks started exploring the grounds of the house and discovered an apple tree in the overgrown yard. They built a campfire and roasted apples. They painted an anarchist slogan on a wall:
macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht
Translation:
destroy what’s destroying you
But the authorities were looking for the two Berliners, and now Jana was involved. One day the three punks spied the cops snooping nearby and decided they better split. They climbed over a garden wall behind the house. In the adjacent yard was a theology student. He hid the three of them.
The house was now burned for Jana—she couldn’t go back to living there.
And she knew that the authorities would eventually come for her, too.
Going back to her parents’ house was out of the question. She wanted to do the things she wanted to do, the things she thought were fun, as often as she wanted and for as long as she wanted.
I don’t want to have to listen to the radio under the covers.
She snuck into her parents’ place to collect a few things and hopped a train back to Berlin. She locked herself in the bathroom when the ticket-taker came along. She didn’t care if she got caught—her identification papers still listed her parents’ address, so any fines she got would be sent home to mom and dad. In Berlin she returned to the place where Moritz’s family friends lived.
She knocked.
A girl about Jana’s age answered. She was small and skinny, almost boyish, with wavy dark hair. She had on black overalls covered with patches and strange high-top boxing sneakers that were falling apart.
She said her name was Mita. She said she was new there. Come on in, she said, absentmindedly tapping out a beat on her hip.
18
Mita Schamal grew up in a village just outside Berlin. Her mother was an artist who had been trained in structural ceramics and her stepfather was a potter. In fact, she was from a family of potters—all her aunts and uncles were potters, too.
Mita finished school in the spring of 1982 at the end of tenth grade, with no desire to continue. She was sixteen. She didn’t know what she wanted to do next.
The most sensible solution was to stay in what was essentially the family business and become a potter.
Artisans and artists had a level of freedom that came with not being part of one of the large state enterprises. For instance, as head of her own workshop, Mita’s mother was permitted to take on apprentices. She was also able to arrange an apprenticeship for Mita that would pass muster with authorities. But Mita insisted on one condition: she didn’t want to have to stay in her little village on the outskirts of the city. So her mother agreed to have her spend three weeks of every month in Prenzlauer Berg and work as a guest apprentice at her aunt’s ceramics atelier; for the fourth week of every month Mita would be at home under the tutelage of her mother.
In September 1982, Mita moved to her aunt’s on Schönfliesser Strasse, which became her official place of residence. Mita had a tiny room, more like a closet. She slept in a loft bed, which took up almost the entire footprint of the room. She stowed her things beneath the bed. Her room was actually part of the apartment where her aunt’s husband lived; they had recently split up. Mita’s aunt’s husband lived at one end of the atelier and her aunt now lived at the other end with her new boyfriend, Sascha Anderson, the dissident poet who worked with the art-punk band Zwitschermaschine.
Not long after her move, Mita was standing on the platform at the Schönhauser Allee U-Bahn station when a mob of punks came streaming up the stairs and along the platform. One of them walked over to Mita. He struck her as a friendly, funny guy.
“Hey, sweetie,” he said, “do you want to tag along with us?”
“Sure!” said Mita.
The guy’s name: Colonel.
She hopped onto the subway with Colonel and his gang. They headed to Alexanderplatz. Mita was thrilled. She’d only just arrived from the boonies and here she was exploring the city with a gang of punks.
Mita was already friends with some other teens involved in the alternative scene. Though she considered herself basically apolitical, together with her family she had gone to church-sponsored events, traveling as far afield as Dresden to protest the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in East Germany. If, like Mita, you were raised in a family with any sort of outsider leanings, you ended up spending time in churches and getting to know other kids from similar backgrounds.
In the ninth grade Mita had attended an arts camp to learn gravure printing, where she befriended a kid named Moritz, who had a school band in Halle. It had turn
ed out Mita and Moritz’s families also knew each other through the informal network of East German artists and artisans: Moritz’s father, a painter, knew Mita’s mother as well as her grandparents.
Mita had started traveling to Halle once in a while by train to hang out with Moritz and his friends. For Mita’s parents it was natural—Moritz was practically family anyway, and nobody worried about kids traveling on their own in the DDR.
Moritz had been in the process of transforming his school band into something more serious. Mita got to know the other guys in the band and took a shine to the drummer, Mike. The drums fascinated her, and Mike taught her some basic rhythms. Back home in her village outside Berlin she took to practicing the patterns anywhere she could—on pots and pans or an old suitcase, on her knees while riding on the school bus. She became obsessed with learning the drums, picking up fills she could add to the basic rhythms Mike had taught her.
At Christmastime in 1981, Mita spotted a kiddie drum kit for 100 East German marks and begged her parents for it. They bought it for her: a cute little kick-drum, a snare, and a cheap clattering high-hat. She played it incessantly. Fortunately, living out on the fringes of Berlin, the closest neighbor was hundreds of yards away. When Mita moved to her aunt’s in Berlin in September 1982, she took the kit with her and stashed it under the loft bed.
When Jana knocked on the door at Schönfliesser Strasse in the fall of 1982, she and Mita quickly realized that Mita’s friend in Halle was the same guy Jana had ended up getting together with just before fleeing Halle—Moritz Götze. East Germany was often a small world.
Jana and Mita instantly hit it off.
19
Mita told Jana she could crash with her in her tiny closet-like room.
Together they started to go to the punk hangouts and work their way into the scene. Jana found the punk scene in Berlin so much bigger and cooler than she had ever imagined, hundreds of people, hundreds of people like her.
Jana decided she wanted to meet Pankow, whom she’d heard so much about. Tall and willowy with a distinctive way of walking, a big puff of dyed blonde hair, the singer in a band called Planlos. She found out he worked the early shift at a cigarette factory, and one afternoon she waited outside the factory for Pankow’s shift to end.
Pankow walked out and saw a woman with a massive Mohawk and a totally destroyed trench coat that was splashed with paint. He’d never seen anybody like her before. Suddenly he didn’t feel like such a badass after all.
What the hell is she doing here, of all places?
She made a beeline for Pankow.
Huh?
“You must be Pankow,” said Jana.
“Yeah,” said Pankow.
“You look cool,” said Jana.
They became a couple.
They became inseparable.
Sure, once in a while it bugged Pankow that everyone stared at Jana when they were out together; he was used to getting the biggest reaction wherever he went. But there was no way to top Jana. Forget it. When it came to winding people up based solely on looking extreme, Jana was in a league of her own.
By her own description, Mita followed along behind the new couple like a puppy. Jana, Pankow, and Mita began to spend all their time together, day after day, night after night. Mita was quite innocent and naïve, and wasn’t self-conscious about being a third wheel. Even in the bed all three of them sometimes had to share in Mita’s tiny room. Sometimes Jana and Pankow would be having sex and they would realize Mita was staring at them with wide eyes.
“Hey Mita,” Pankow would say, “we’re trying to fuck here.”
“I want to try!”
“No, Mita, for god’s sake!”
The three of them spent several weekends just bumming around, scouring the country for other punks. They went back to Halle and found the punk scene blossoming, with parties being held in squatted buildings on Wolfstrasse, Spiegelstrasse, and Wallstrasse. They took trains to Leipzig, Magdeburg, and towns along the Baltic Sea. They went to Erfurt, where they wandered around town and met one punk and then another and finally met a big guy named Otze, who had a band called Schleim-Keim that had played church concerts. The local punks treated Otze like god—a god prone to heavy drinking and random violence, but a god all the same. There were pockets of punks all over the country, it seemed.
Jana, Pankow, and Mita were unknowingly creating something like a national network.
For a few weeks the three of them lived as if there were no rules. They traveled without tickets, they stole food off people’s tables in restaurants, they hid in dumpsters in dipshit towns and jumped out to scare passersby. They hung out with people like Chaos in Leipzig and formed friendships that would last their entire lives. The circle of friends who made up the original core of the Leipzig scene included members of another fledgling band, HAU, formed by Wutanfall guitarist Imad—the initials stood for a made-up German phrase, Half-baked Anarchist Underground-movement. The two bands actually had intertwining, almost interchangeable members for a time. The singer in HAU, Stracke, had been at the first Wutanfall rehearsals and even sang with the band on occasions when Chaos couldn’t make practice. HAU also included Chaos’s friend Ratte on bass, who became very tight with Jana, Mita, and Pankow during their visits.
Jana was determined to stay in Berlin now, which she saw as the center of the punk universe. She wanted to stay more than anything. But there was a problem: you couldn’t just move where you wanted in East Germany. That was illegal. She was in essence a fugitive in the eyes of the law.
To live in Berlin, Jana needed an officially recognized job and she needed to register with the local police precinct to establish legal residency. She found a job as a cleaner at a church. It was really the only place she could work looking the way she did at that point. To register with the police you needed a rental contract, and Mita was happy to provide a bogus sublet contract stating that Jana was living at her place.
One morning Jana took the bogus rental contract and headed to the local police station.
To the local cops, Jana looked as if she had dropped in from outer space—Mohawk, chains, earrings, fucked-up clothes smeared with paint and stuck with pins.
“You are not recognizable in the photo on your ID,” they said. “Come with us.”
They threw her in a car and drove her to another police station. At the next station they photographed her from multiple angles and then interrogated her until nighttime. To be released, she had to promise to return to Halle.
She was released and returned to Mita’s place. She sat there trembling.
I want to stay here.
I will not let them stop me.
Then she began to think.
Okay, they are looking for me now. But they are looking for a punk.
There was an easy solution.
She knew how to disguise herself. She’d done it at the children’s hospital back home. So Jana started to wear a scarf over her head. She wore long dresses. She wore a pair of serious-looking metal-rim glasses.
Then she tested it out by walking past a police station. No reaction from the cops out front.
One day, in her new disguise, she and Mita ran into a punk Mita vaguely knew. The guy had already attracted a lot of attention from the police and one of his closest friends was serving her second stint in prison. The guy came across as cerebral—and hyper-political. Jana had never heard anyone talk the way he did.
It was A-Micha.
A-Micha’s gravedigging days were over. He and some of his coworkers had tried to get their boss—the one who spouted Nazi rhetoric—ousted from the cemetery. It had not gone well. Instead, several of the workers, including A-Micha, lost their jobs. Fortunately, by then he had gotten to know deacons Uwe Kulisch and Lorenz Postler, and they realized A-Micha would probably be thrown in jail very quickly if he didn’t find a job. They helped him land one as a handyman at a church facility on Göhrener Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg—the rectory and meeting halls of the nearby Elias Ch
urch, the same place where Pankow had crashed when he first fled his parents’ home. Postler, whose father had also worked for the Lutheran church, had grown up in Elias Church.
A-Micha had a band, too. Or used to. Sort of. He played guitar with a few other guys in a combo they called Alternative 13. The drummer lived in Rostock, several hours away, up on the Baltic Sea coast. That made it difficult to function as a proper band.
Mita had always been impressed with A-Micha—in addition to his various musical interests he was into archeology, which she thought was cool. And he was funny. The day she and Jana ran into him, A-Micha totally ignored Jana in her glasses and dress and scarf. But Jana, too, was impressed with him.
Still, Jana’s new look served its purpose. She went to the local police station again and presented her rental contract. Luckily they had failed to jot down her name the last time she’d come—they’d been in too much of a hurry to whisk her off to the other station for interrogation.
This time, it went like clockwork. She got the necessary stamp on her ID papers and she was officially a resident of East Berlin.
She didn’t waste any time digging into her new home in the way she knew best—by causing chaos. One night she and Mita ran out of matches while walking around in Prenzlauer Berg and went into a bar to buy a pack.
“Let’s see your papers first,” said the proprietor.
“Are you crazy?” said Jana, “We just want to buy matches!”
“You’re not getting anything here,” said the proprietor.
These assholes, they just want to fuck with us because they feel like they get fucked with all the time. People just want to pass the pain on to anyone they have a chance to lord it over.
This kind of shit happened to them all the time.
People hissed at them on the street or on the S-Bahn, people said Adolf must have forgotten to have taken care of them, people got in their faces and threatened them.
Jana and Mita went back out of the bar again, angry, with no matches.
