by Tim Mohr
It’s so fucked up.
Jana and Mita smashed in the front window of the bar.
Then they ran.
20
Jana had always written down the feelings and thoughts going through her head. Sometimes these notes took the form of poetry.
Now when she listened to Mita drumming, whether it was on her little kit at home or tapping out a rhythm when she and Jana were out and about, she started to mouth her poems to the beat.
An idea was starting to take hold in Jana and Mita’s heads: they should start a band.
Jana and Mita had also gotten to know Lade, the drummer in Pankow’s band, Planlos. Mita now traded her only punk record—a compilation LP from West Germany—to Lade for two tom-toms to flesh out her own little kit.
Jana and Mita ran into A-Micha again, and this time, with Jana back in her normal look—that is, looking like the most badass motherfucker in the DDR—A-Micha took an instant interest in her. He struck up a conversation and told her about his band, about practicing in a garage near a high-rise apartment block in Rostock, about how impractical it was having a drummer in another city. Then he went on to talk about the lyrics he wrote, which led to his anarchist politics. Jana shared at least some of the same explicitly political feelings as A-Micha, even if she expressed them differently. Jana constantly got stopped, asked for ID, taken to police stations for questioning, interrogated, quizzed about her “associates,” asked to identify people in photos, insulted, threatened, all for not sticking to the preordained path, for daring to look different, for doing her own thing. And while the attention from the authorities was frightening, she would never admit it, maybe not even to herself, no fear, and anyway, who knew whether there was really anything to be afraid of, anything serious, though she sure as hell tried to avoid being alone in public. Papers, please . . . come with us. Once when the Berlin transport police had ordered her to come along, she had just sat down and refused. I wonder what they’ll do, I wonder whether anyone else will say anything? They called for backup. Only one bystander had told them to leave her alone. That man was shoved aside by the cops and all Jana got out of her refusal to cooperate was an extra hour of interrogation, well, that and they’d confiscated her spiked bracelet. And it all fucking pissed her off.
“I write, too,” Jana told A-Micha.
They began discussing lyrics, trading phrases and ideas.
When A-Micha wrote, he tried to flay the system—to peel everything back and expose what was festering below. He was blunt and politically focused. Jana touched on political themes but tended to couch them in human terms. She focused on the impact of the system on individuals. Of course, either way, what they both said and wrote would have made most people gulp and look over their shoulder in case someone nearby might be straining to listen; what they both said and wrote would cause panic in an average East German citizen—the mere act of hearing it uttered would make you suspect. But for Jana and A-Micha, what they said and wrote was both a protest against the system and a reaction to the system’s attempts to crush them—every hiss and insult and arrest and interrogation just made them and their statements harsher and more resolute. And every hiss and insult and arrest and interrogation made it more fun and daring and rewarding to keep going. Despite the creeping fear instilled in everyone, the feeling that you really had better censor yourself to ward off unseen and unknowable consequences, Jana and A-Micha both loved to speak out, to break the rules, to speak and write as if there were no consequences at all, or at least none that mattered, or none that scared them. Silence was not an option. They had to speak and write and sing and scream. They had to direct their rage outward, like the spikes on their bracelets.
Jana and A-Micha clicked. And, Jana was quick to remind him, Mita was a drummer. With A-Micha on guitar and his buddy Frank Masch on bass—they’d been friends since they’d spent so much time bar-hopping together talking politics, and Frank had also played with A-Micha in Alternative 13—they had the makings of a band.
Beneath Mita’s aunt’s workshop was an empty basement.
The new band set about soundproofing part of the basement to use it as a rehearsal space, lining it with egg cartons, old clothing they found in dumpsters, cardboard, and whatever else they could scrounge up. They wrapped a few pipes that ran through the space with old rags; twine and more rags soundproofed the old wooden lattice-work door to the space. The problem was that Mita’s aunt and uncle and Sascha Anderson weren’t the only residents in the building. There were normal people living there, too, and they didn’t want to hear drums banging, regardless of what sort of band they were accompanying. Despite the soundproofing, the band usually practiced only for an hour or two in the early evening so as to avoid attracting attention.
It was a rush to start to put together songs. They worked well as a team, everyone could understand the goal of finishing a song, of getting all the parts to fit together, hey let’s try this, coming up with a chorus, man this is cool. What a feeling, creating their own music, screaming their protests at the brick walls of the basement. One chorus went:
Aufgepasst, du wirst bewacht vom MfS
Translation: Watch out, you’re being surveilled by the Ministry of State Security—the Stasi. But that wasn’t enough for the band. They altered the final chorus:
Aufgepasst, du wirst bewacht vom MfMfSSS
That final repetition, SS, drew an implicit comparison between the DDR’s Stasi and Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, the notorious SS with its logo of two lightning bolts. To a regime that styled itself as the political opposite of Nazism, this was the ultimate insult.
Another song was called “Nazis wieder in Ostberlin,” that is, “Nazis back in East Berlin.”
After the minister of Elias Church, where A-Micha worked, told him he feared there would be a crackdown on the punks, the band wrote a song called “Der Exzess.” The lyrics sounded like a manifesto and translated, in part:
Is it worth it to march for a man who doesn’t love you
Is it worth it to march for a man who just kicks you
Is it worth it to march for a man who hates you
Is it worth it to march for a man who jails you
Say it, speak it, shout it out loud, the truth is so distant
Say it, speak it, shout it out loud, and let the informant listen
If we go to prison for [saying it, speaking it, shouting it out loud] you can all be sure,
We’ll be out again eventually and then we’ll be terrorists
Working together, Jana and A-Micha made two-minute Molotov cocktails that the band took glee in lobbing into the world. Fuck reform. This wasn’t about tinkering with the system, it wasn’t about wheedling the dictatorship into taking military education out of middle school or stemming the tide of unacknowledged pollution. This was about rage. Fuck the system, fuck every last one of them.
They called their band Namenlos—Nameless.
They were careful about hiding any lyrics they wrote down. In Mita’s aunt’s atelier was a shelf with lots of pots and vases, and they stashed any scraps of paper with lyrics in one of the pots with a top.
Still, people close to Mita’s family quickly caught wind of the kind of music and lyrics the new band was making. A lot of artists harbored dissenting opinions; a lot liked to have punk bands perform at their parties. But artists and literary types didn’t risk public anger and police harassment just by walking down the street. Being a punk was completely different. Every fiber of your being was a dissenting opinion, an open affront to the system, a break from the future planned for you and everyone else, you were protest incarnate, twenty-four seven.
One day a friend of Mita’s aunt, a woman from the art scene, pulled her aside and said, “Mita, do you understand how dangerous what you’re doing is? You’d better think long and hard about it.”
“I don’t have any choice,” Mita told her. “I have to do it.”
And in her head she said, If your generation isn’t going to do anything, then we’ll have to
.
For Mita, playing a song like “Der Exzess” was the best form of protest she could imagine. She felt compelled to do it.
Say it, speak it, shout it out loud.
Let the informant listen.
Mita and Jana and A-Micha and Frank knew it could be dangerous to say the things they said in their songs, but they didn’t yet understand just how dangerous it could be.
21
Berlin was the undisputed capital of East German punk rock and Leipzig its second city. But in this mostly communal scene, the only true star was a hard-drinking farm boy named Otze, whose music took shape in a pig stall miles away from those urban centers. The spring of 1983 would mark a turning point for him, too.
Otze was born Dieter Ehrlich in 1963 in the hick town of Stotternheim, a hundred and fifty miles south of Berlin, in the state of Thüringen. He had three brothers and a younger sister, all of whom lived within the walled yard of an old farm complex, where his parents and grandparents also lived. His father was a butcher. Dieter Ehrlich had his first run-in with the law at age eleven, when he was nabbed for stealing a bottle of cheap liquor. He wasn’t particularly successful as a student, and at the end of the sixth grade, having already been held back twice, he was pushed toward an apprenticeship in a metal shop that built equipment for strip-mining operations.
“Ehrlich is barely able to write his own name,” wrote his supervisor in a report for the criminal division of the police, who were keeping tabs on him. “He is very unstable, and shuns work . . . he tried to craft wire into safety pins of approximately 50 cm in length, about which his work colleagues could only shake their heads. They think Ehrlich is not normal for making such things.”
Dieter Ehrlich started to become Otze one day in 1978, when he heard Sham 69’s “If the Kids Are United,” taped from a West German radio station by his brother Klaus. Dieter and Klaus listened to the song nonstop for weeks.
Soon Otze started to dress punk. He stuck a safety pin through his earlobe and another through his cheek. Using a needle, he crudely tattooed the word punk on his arm. At the metal workshop he made himself a big skull-and-crossbones medallion and started wearing it, dangling from a thick chain. He and a couple friends scavenged the local dump for leather jackets. It took a few days for the half-rotted things they found to soften up, and even then the boys looked and smelled like swine. But that was the idea—the ideal even.
Over the next few years Otze started hanging out with other punks he found in Erfurt, the nearest town and, with about 200,000 residents, a major metropolis by the standards of the state of Thüringen. The gang of area punks hung out at the biggest café in central Erfurt, and other highly visible locations—as well as at church events, and, eventually, in derelict buildings some of them began to squat. They were always putting themselves on public display.
Otze was big and stocky and became a one-man wrecking crew whenever he or other punks were challenged or attacked. Otze would physically remove bartenders from their own bars—pluck them out from behind the bar and launch them bodily out the door—if they refused to serve him for being too ostentatiously punk. And his metallurgical skills never abandoned him, whether that meant arming himself with handmade brass knuckles or equipping his buddies with metal rods he had swiped.
The punks from greater Erfurt quickly developed a reputation for brutality and were in constant rumbles. It was always about confrontation for these backwater punks, about revealing the open sores on the body politic. They constantly forced the cops to hide these sores—meaning to detain, chase off, or beat down Otze and his mates.
Otze gained local notoriety long before his legend spread throughout the workers’ republic. Neighbors in his tiny village were scandalized by his appearance and behavior. One night he and his brother Klaus came home in the middle of the night, kicking a beer can in the middle of the street. Beer came in bottles in East Germany, and to get a can of the stuff you had to go to a special shop where they sold Western goods for Western currency. So the sound alone piqued the interest of village residents as the pair stumbled along the street, waking everyone up.
As one of the Ehrlich boys tried to kick the can, he missed and put a boot through the basement window of one of the houses on the street. They continued home.
The next morning, the occupant of the house with the broken window—a middle-aged man named Bernhard—knocked on the door of the Ehrlichs’ family compound. Otze and his brother were hungover, still in bed, but Klaus answered the door.
“Are you guys crazy, kicking in my window?” shouted Bernhard. “The basement is going to be full of mice by the time I’m able to get a replacement window.”
Klaus waved his hand dismissively and stumbled back into the family house. Then Otze appeared at the still-open door. He pushed the angry neighbor aside and walked out into the street.
Bernhard followed.
Next door to Otze’s house, a cat was dozing on another neighbor’s postbox. Otze grabbed the cat, walked down the street to the broken window in Bernhard’s house, and flung the creature into the basement.
“There you go,” growled Otze to Bernhard. “No more mice.”
By late 1980, Otze had travelled up to Berlin to find kindred spirits there, too. He and a friend took a train to the capital and went out to Plänterwald, where rumor had it the punks hung out. There they ran into two punks who took them to a squatted apartment. The door opened and Otze could not believe his eyes: there must have been fifteen punks lying around the filthy, graffiti-covered apartment.
Back home, with no access to albums and no local punk bands to go see, Otze decided to make his own music. He began to teach himself to play various instruments, beginning with drums—they were the easiest thing to come by, since he could make himself a primitive set using buckets, pails, and tubs from around the farmyard. His first bass drum was fashioned from an old desk drawer. Otze’s brother Klaus took up guitar. They ripped the headphones out of a tank driver’s helmet to create microphones, retooled a radio into a rudimentary amp, and started playing together, eventually bringing in buddies to play bass. Inspired by a famous West German punk band called Slime, they called themselves Schleim-Keim—basically, Slimy Germs.
Soon people from Weimar were stopping by, members of a couple of bands called the Creepers and the Madmans. Otze’s parents and other siblings had never seen so many freaks before.
As Schleim-Keim began creating songs, Otze wrote all the lyrics and sang, but he remained seated at the drums. By 1981 Otze had financed some Czechoslovakian-made drums by becoming a two-bit version of an arms dealer: on the rare occasions he showed up for work, he surreptitiously crafted brass knuckles, which he then sold to soccer hooligans.
In December 1981, Schleim-Keim played Thüringen’s first major punk show, in the Johannes-Lang-Haus, a church facility in Erfurt. Otze wore a homemade T-shirt for the occasion that read fresst scheisse, or eat shit. The show drew every punk in the region, but nobody had seen anything like Otze before.
Despite the huge impact of Schleim-Keim’s first public performance, shows were hard to come by. At first the local church leadership hadn’t known what to make of Otze—or of the punks who had started to make up more and more of the crowd at their youth outreach programs. They’d never seen pogo dancing, for one thing. But as Otze started coming to outreach nights to meet up with friends and drink—there was no hard stuff, but beer was always available—he and Wolfgang Musigmann, the clergyman who set up the concerts at Johannes-Lang-Haus, got on fairly well, despite the rumors floating around that Otze had punched some other minister in the face.
In the summer of 1982, Musigmann staged another punk concert at Johannes-Lang-Haus, lining up Schleim-Keim as the local act alongside Wutanfall from Leipzig and Paranoia from Dresden. Otze took an instant dislike to the guys in Paranoia. They had on nice leather jackets and pants. They didn’t smell like real punks to him.
They must have rich relatives in the West.
Wutanfall played
first. As singer Chaos writhed and spat the lyrics and the band careened through its songs, the crowd went off, bouncing wildly around the church hall.
Paranoia played next, and during their set they somehow broke one of Otze’s homemade amps—before Schleim-Keim had a chance to play. Just as bad, the guys in Paranoia didn’t even apologize. Otze was furious. He started throwing punches. Show over.
Later that night—one of those warm June evenings when the dying light lingered—a bunch of Erfurt artists and literary types threw a party in the courtyard of their building. Zwitschermaschine, another Dresden band, a bit older and artier, were playing the party, and a lot of people from the Erfurt and Weimar punk scenes showed up, along with people from the church show earlier in the day. Otze and his band went, too. After Zwitschermaschine finished, Wutanfall played a few songs. But their set began to fall apart, and Otze and Schleim-Keim would not be denied a chance to play. They pushed Wutanfall aside and ripped into their songs on what was a much better PA than at the church facility.
Schleim-Keim’s performance that night, with nothing to contain them but a few decaying walls and the night sky, was no less staggering than their first show six months prior.
It sounds like they’re slaughtering a fucking pig, thought Conny Schleime, the singer of Zwitschermaschine. It’s like Otze is trying to use his drumsticks to pummel the entire shit pile that is this country.
The mastermind of Zwitschermaschine was Sascha Anderson, the dissident intellectual who was living in the same Berlin atelier where Mita of Namenlos would soon move in—Mita’s aunt’s place. Anderson had been impressed with Schleim-Keim, too. Six months later he contacted Otze and asked him and his band to participate in a secret project he was working on—getting an album of East German punk music released in West Berlin. The album, Anderson said, would be called DDR von unten—East Germany from below—and the West Berlin label Aggressive Rock Productions was going to put it out. Otze was intrigued, not least because according to Anderson it would mean getting paid in hard currency: West German marks. And West German marks meant the chance to buy better music equipment.
