by Tim Mohr
The idea to make an album and release it in West Berlin had a long backstory. In early 1982 a West Berliner named Dimitri Hegemann had gotten to know the members of the band Rosa Extra at a party he attended in the East. A musician himself, Hegemann almost immediately became obsessed with making an album of DDR punk. The problem was making the recordings—any proper music studios in the East were part of the state’s media monopoly, and the equipment for an illegal home-studio was hard to come by. Hegemann checked in with Rosa Extra every once in a while, but from the other side of the Wall he couldn’t really do anything practical to help them. Rosa Extra finally approached Sascha Anderson, who was a major figure in the underground, connected to artists, poets, and musicians in Dresden, Weimar, and in Berlin. Anderson loved the idea and, in exchange for having his own band get in on the project, he connected Rosa Extra to a guy in Dresden who was known for throwing great parties. The guy worked as a roadie and driver for officially sanctioned bands. He also had access to an isolated house a few miles outside Dresden, where he was able to set up a drum kit, microphones, and an antiquated Eastern mixing board and tape recorder and record music without any nosy neighbors complaining or snooping around.
The one thing missing from the project, in Anderson’s eyes, was a wildly aggressive, abrasive punk band, something people in the West wouldn’t believe was possible on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Both Rosa Extra and his own band, Zwitschermaschine, were more arty than, say . . . that band he’d seen in Erfurt! The one that sounded like a pig being slaughtered! Schleim-Keim!
That was when he called Otze.
On a weekend in early January, 1983, Otze and Schleim-Keim traveled to Dresden to record in the makeshift studio. Anderson assured Schleim-Keim that he would take the heat if anything went wrong, but the trio was skeptical what that would mean in practical terms. They decided to use a pseudonym, Saukerle—in essence, “Pig-dudes.” But it didn’t matter, because unbeknownst to them, there was a Stasi informant in their midst. The recordings wouldn’t remain so secret after all.
Soon after that weekend in Dresden, the Stasi visited Rosa Extra singer Günther Spalda and told him a story they’d heard about a Western record label, some Eastern punks, and an album. “That sort of thing could land a man in jail for five years,” they said, “maybe ten.” Just saying.
Rosa Extra backed out of the project.
Sascha Anderson arranged for a West German diplomat to smuggle the remaining tapes of his band and Schleim-Keim across the Berlin Wall for him—Anderson had contacts everywhere, it seemed—and the albums were quickly pressed. Only 1,500 copies of the album DDR von unten were manufactured and very few made it back into the East—though cassette copies circulated widely. Its existence, however, hit Eastern authorities like a nuclear bomb.
The money Sascha Anderson had promised Otze never appeared, but the Stasi quickly did—even before the release of the DDR von unten LP. Anderson, it turned out, was an IM, a Stasi snitch. Thanks to Anderson, the Stasi had been following Otze closely since December. Otze’s parents had been felt out about becoming informants but had declined; Otze’s mother wasn’t much more friendly to the dictatorship than he himself was, and she was famous among punks for having once yelled at them out the window, “If the goddamn Stasi wants to treat us like antisocial elements, we might as well act that way!” His neighbors, fellow musicians, and punk peers had likewise been approached. Surveillance sites had been set up to keep tabs on the family home.
When the Stasi’s Department XX confirmed Otze was away from home for a few days in March 1983, a group of non-uniformed government employees arrived at his family’s compound. They presented themselves as agents from the employment office. Otze hardly ever went to work, which was illegal. The agents said they needed to search the grounds. There were armed sentries posted outside the house, and Otze’s mother realized what was really happening. As soon as she realized it was a Stasi raid, she took care of the most damning piece of evidence she knew about. She called to Otze’s little sister, Heidi. The little sister was handed a shopping basket and sent shopping—with Otze’s lone promo copy of the DDR von unten album stashed beneath a cloth in the bottom of the basket.
“Don’t come home until all the cars out front are gone,” Otze’s mother whispered to Heidi.
Department XX agents rifled through Otze’s room and belongings, the band’s shed rehearsal space, everything. They took photos of all his posters, buttons, stickers, sketches, notes, and homemade T-shirts—including the one that said fresst scheisse, the shirt he’d worn at the band’s first concert.
But they never found his lyric sheets, which he kept carefully hidden in a chimney flue.
The Stasi did not relent. At the end of March, 1983, Otze was arrested. If nothing else, they could hold him because he hadn’t turned up to work since October. Otze landed in pretrial detention, subject to the usual routine of humiliation and control: stripped, a body-cavity search. During the interrogations that followed, the Stasi agents made clear they knew the words to at least some of his negative, hostile songs, and accused him of seeking to cause international damage to the country by conspiring to get recordings to West Berlin.
“You’ll get ten years,” they told him: Unauthorized recording for a foreign power.
After the initial interrogation, they threw him in an isolation cell. He spent two weeks in solitary confinement.
Ten years.
Ten fucking years.
Otze stared at the walls. During the day, he was not allowed to lie down on the hard wooden cot. Not allowed to do calisthenics. He was not allowed to do shit. He just stared at the walls. For many people, that was enough to change them.
After two weeks, he began to be interrogated by a team of four men.
He was just happy to be talking again.
That changed as the first interrogation dragged on for thirteen hours.
Otze never equivocated about the band itself.
Stasi officer: “Are you aware of a punk rock music group by the name of Schleim-Keim?”
Otze: “Ja. Such a group was founded in 1981 by me and my brother . . . We founded the group because we had fun making music and we thought that there were far too few punk bands in the DDR. In my opinion, young people want to hear something different from the usual disco music and old blues.”
Stasi officer: “Is the punk rock group you founded by the name of Schleim-Keim registered or licensed?”
Otze: “No, that is not the case. We have never sought government recognition as a music group.” He explained that they didn’t believe they needed a license because they had never played in a public space; he told them about a couple of church gigs.
But when they asked whether the band ever used any other aliases—fishing for Saukerle, their pseudonym from the DDR von unten LP—Otze denied it. And when they asked whether he and his band mates had ever tried to publicize their music—with recordings, for instance—he said never.
Finally, they played some of the home recordings of the band they’d confiscated during the raid of his home, harping on the lyrics, that expressed a “pessimistic outlook on life, with anarchistic traits, general discontent, and a fundamental opposition vis à vis the governmental order.”
Ten years.
Otze refused to admit the anti-government lyrics were about the DDR.
“It’s about South Africa,” he said.
“Then say that in the song!” screamed the interrogator, pounding his fist on the desk.
Still, without sufficient hard evidence or a confession, Otze was released again after four weeks in detention—despite the offensive lyrical content of his songs, despite the obvious illegal Western contact necessary to get the recordings out, despite playing concerts without a performance license, despite it all.
Otze now realized Sascha Anderson was a snitch and harbored a simmering rage against him for several years—until 1985, when together with original Berlin punk Colonel, he was able to burst in on An
derson at home in Berlin. Otze and Colonel tied Anderson up and turned his place over until they found some West German money—about 400 marks—to make up for the cash he had promised Otze back in 1983.
“This is for all the shit you put me through,” Otze said to Anderson as he left with the money.
Anderson did not report the robbery to the police.
Otze may have gotten ripped off by Sascha Anderson, but he had pushed the envelope: everyone seemed to know that a band—one of us—had released music on a bona fide vinyl album, in the West no less. He quickly became an underground folk hero.
Otze and Schleim-Keim made the scene international. And between the embarrassment to the state of the release of Otze’s music in the West and the increasingly alarming size and scope of the punk scene by that spring of 1983, it was just a matter of time before the shit really hit the fan.
22
In early 1983, Moritz Götze—Mita’s friend and Jana’s ex-boyfriend—had approached Siegfried Neher, the minister at Christus Church in Halle. The church already hosted a weekly meeting where punks could gather, drink beer, and talk, though as far as Neher could tell they weren’t a very chatty group. There was more grunting than talking; most of what they wanted to say was scrawled on their clothes. Now Moritz wanted to put together a punk music festival and asked Neher to provide space at the church.
Neher was in his early thirties, with long hair, a generous heart, and a conscientiously open attitude. To the teens in his youth programs, he was known as Siggi. He’d learned guitar while fulfilling his military service in the nonweaponized Bausoldaten, and since his discharge in 1972 had continued to organize and play in church bands while he worked as a minister in a village outside of Erfurt. He had moved to Halle in 1979, where he found a vibrant scene orbiting the activist deacon Lothar Rochau. Siggi admired the way Rochau went out looking for people to join him, and the blunt way he spoke. Rochau would wade into a group of young people and cajole them into coming back to his church: “We’re really doing things, not just standing around and bitching, we’re thinking about how we can change this shithole of a country!”
Most of the forty or so members in Rochau’s group, though, were in their late-twenties or thirties. Rock music was important to the cohesion of his group—but Frank Zappa represented the litmus test for his adherents. When a group of four punks went to Rochau’s group one evening and were asked whether they knew Zappa, they shrugged, “Never heard of it.”
The punks just didn’t fit in with the older hippie types there.
The part of town where Siggi’s church stood was populated by the families of workers from two nearby petrochemical plants. They weren’t folks who were into Zappa, and it wasn’t exactly a hotbed of environmental activity, either. There were none of the children of teachers or artists you might find in other parts of town. But the kids were nonetheless disaffected. And Siggi quickly felt a sort of connection to the punks who straggled into his church for this or that event. In Siggi’s eyes the hippie types were somewhat pompous. The punks, by contrast, were far more open. But there was something more, something that had to do with his religious beliefs and his sense of duty as a minister: he saw punk as an existential scream, a desire to make contact with something that wouldn’t otherwise react—and his mind kept calling up a passage of the Bible. Psalm 22: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
Siggi had always thought that Old Testament translations were too mild, written by hoity-toity people; in his eyes, the language in the Old Testament should have been raw, stripped—a scream; grammar and order would have gone out the window; people in anguish back then would have expressed themselves the same way the punks did now.
For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me.
That, thought Siggi, was a punk Psalm.
Wutanfall or Schleim-Keim could have written that, he thought, thinking of groups he’d seen at various church events in the last year. Müllstation, a punk band that practiced in the basement of Christus Church once in a while, could have written that.
Siggi said yes to Moritz.
And so, on Saturday, April 30, 1983, the evening before the annual official Mayday parades and festivities all over the country, East Germany was going to witness its first ever national punk festival.
23
Moritz Götze was something of an organizational genius, and even though there was no easy way to get information out in a country where the media system was completely locked down, he worked word-of-mouth networks to assemble a lineup of bands and to start the buzz about the concert among punks. He reached out to Jana and Mita in Berlin, who brought in Planlos as well as their own band, Namenlos. It would be the first ever public performance by Namenlos. Moritz was also able to get Wutanfall to come from Leipzig and Restbestand from Magdeburg. These bands in turn spread the word. By late April, hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the country were planning to come to Halle.
In early March, 1983, the authorities finally overcame deacon Lorenz Postler’s fierce determination to continue to provide a meeting place for punks and succeeded in evicting the punks from Pfingst Church in Berlin by declaring the chimneys of the tower structurally unsound. All Open Work activities there were suspended with just one day’s notice to pro-punk church leaders; other church officials had conspired against the punks to the point of letting security forces into the tower to photograph the staatsfeindlich—subversive—graffiti and general mess.
The first Friday after the closure, March 11, would normally have been a punk meeting night. Instead, punks—many still unaware of the closure—were greeted in front of the church by uniformed and plainclothes officers checking identification papers. A surveillance vehicle was set up across the street with telephoto lenses sticking out. Several troop transporters full of cops were parked in the area, and a mobile police command center had been set up in a nearby grocery store. Police dispersed nearly a hundred punks who gathered in front of the church, hoping the doors might still miraculously open. After all, the doors had reopened the year before. But not this time.
There were, however, two upsides to the situation. First, as tensions had risen during early 1983, the punks had founded a Punkrat, or punk council. Up to then, organizational questions had been handled by church representatives like Deacon Postler. Now the punks could run their own affairs, creating groups to tackle issues, implement ideas, and solve problems. Among their first accomplishments was a proclamation stating, among other things, that “we” are faced more and more with “the alarming impression that almost the entire young generation, but not only them, are consciously or unconsciously deeply disappointed in our society.” The punk council met the day after the closure of Pfingst was announced, vowing to continue activities.
And the second upside? With Berlin punks suddenly starved for a chance to hang out together, a huge contingent now planned to make the trip to Halle for the festival at Christus Church.
Namenlos had been practicing feverishly in the run-up to their first gig in public. But with the day of the show approaching, Jana worried that the police and the Stasi would try to keep fans and bands alike from reaching the festival. She figured they’d pluck punks off trains and ring the train station in Halle on Saturday to prevent any odd-looking characters from getting to Christus Church. So she rounded up a bunch of friends and proposed they go on Friday instead.
“We can have some fun,” she said. “We’ll already be there on the day of the show. And I know a squat where we can crash.”
The plan worked. Or at least they thought so. They partied on Friday night and slept at the squat, just as Jana had promised. But a gang of punks couldn’t swarm into town without attracting the attention of plenty of people who were more than happy to squeal to the police about it. And on Saturday morning, as everyone was still sleeping off their booze, cops burst in and emptied the building.
The cops t
ook the gang of Berlin punks to the train station and put them aboard trains back to the capital. All except Jana. They knew from an informer that she had helped wrangle the bands, and they tried to squeeze her. They had also figured out she was from Halle. They told her they had reached her parents and her mother was prepared to come to the station with a change of clothes for her. Then Jana could stay in town, dressed like a normal person. Jana demurred. They stuck her on the next train to Berlin, alone, since her friends had been put on an earlier one.
I am not going to miss this concert.
It was the band’s first real gig. And she was on a train heading the wrong way.
She knew Mita’s mother and brother were planning to drive Mita down to Halle to watch her play, but she had no way to get in touch with them.
When her train stopped to switch locomotives at Jüterbog, a station between Halle and Berlin, Jana slipped out and waited for the next train heading in the opposite direction—back to Halle. She wasn’t sure what she would do when the train actually arrived in Halle, with cops on the lookout for punks in general and her in particular. But she had to give it a try.
Back in Halle, the police had indeed poured into the train station to try to keep punks from getting to the church. The Stasi had an informant snitching on Siggi Neher as well as a few snitches placed among the young Halle punks themselves; they had learned of the Christus concert by February 11, 1983, when a punk informant described a meeting with Siggi that he had witnessed. But the Stasi had miscalculated the scale of the punk invasion, and the police weren’t out in sufficient force to control the situation. Individual punks and small groups were detained or forced onto trains headed back to wherever they’d come from. But the cops seemed unsure what to do about the larger groups. Fortunately, most of the punks had come in groups—not to do things alone was something punks had learned the hard way in every town. The police had set up another line near the station exit, but again found themselves overwhelmed. Once out of the station, the masses of punks either walked or boarded trams to the church. They encountered one final police blockade right in front of the church itself. But there the police just tried to get the punks off the street and herd them into the fenced church grounds.
