by Tim Mohr
Across the street from the church stood a handsome old brick school with tall, pointed eaves; the authorities always worried that subversive activities at the church would somehow breach the school by osmosis. The geography classroom, which was at the top of the school on the side facing Christus Church, had been closed all week ahead of the punk festival as the Stasi assembled surveillance equipment. Pupils had been warned that the minister across the street—Siggi—was an enemy of the state. The school was empty on Saturday afternoon, except for the team in the geography room clicking away with their telephoto lenses sticking out the window, aimed at the Christus Church grounds below.
The church doors opened at four in the afternoon. The event was scheduled to go until eight. Siggi knew what the punks were like—that they spoke very differently from the average churchgoer, for instance, and that they could look outlandish. But this was something else. There were hundreds and hundreds of sullen black-clad kids, a few with full-on Mohawks. They barely uttered a word to Siggi beyond, “Beer?” They were from Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, all over the country. Even if every punk in Halle was in the sanctuary, they would barely have registered in the middle of this hoard.
Then the concert started: Moritz and his band, Grössenwahn, took the stage—which was just the raised area of the altar. Siggi was surprised at the reaction to Grössenwahn, as out-of-towners quickly began shouting, “Get these assholes off the stage!”
When the better-known bands started to play, the church exploded as the punks, packed into the sanctuary, started to hurl themselves around and pogo up and down in a writhing mass of black. Siggi sat at the mixing board trying to make the rudimentary PA sound as good as it could given its low wattage, the tinny East German microphones being used, and the second-rate gear he’d been able to assemble. The music was relentless—two-minute song-bursts of anger, a sudden stop, then the band would hurtle into another one before the crowd could even catch its breath.
When Jana’s train eventually pulled into Halle, she caught a break. There had been a big soccer match that day, and now the station was crawling with drunken soccer fans. This was not a subculture that looked kindly on punks. But for once it worked in Jana’s favor as a bunch of them ringed her and started to tease her.
Using the soccer fans as cover, she managed to flee the station without any cops spotting her. Then she ran to the church.
Namenlos was already on stage when Jana finally arrived. They had played a couple of songs with A-Micha singing. Jana climbed up and took over the show.
Standing on stage, looking out at a churning sea of punks all pogoing and dancing and cheering, was an indescribable feeling, and the more crazed and euphoric they got, the more energized Jana got. She felt as if she were singing her soul right out of her body, screaming all the things she had always wanted to say, her rage glowing, the fire inside her stoked dangerously hot by her arrest earlier that day and the hours she’d spent trying to make it to this stage. This was all she had wanted to do—to express this perspective, this attitude, this philosophy that she and the band shared, to play their music loud and fast. Her need to freely speak her mind was so intense, so urgent, and now, here she was, with a room full of like-minded people bouncing off the walls. She felt . . . understood. She and her bandmates and her friends had always said the long-hairs were boring, just sitting around blathering for hours about this or that cause. That wasn’t her style. She was a bomb-thrower, and that April evening she blew up the church.
Say it, speak it, shout it out loud!
Let the informant listen!
Police cars waited outside the church. That was nothing new. They often sat nearby when Siggi’s youth groups gathered. But the police in the immediate vicinity had given up trying to hamper people entering or leaving the church.
The local residents, however, were horrified by the trail of degenerate youths in filthy, ripped clothing with fucked-up haircuts and offensive slogans scrawled on their jackets. One punk yanked his pants down and proudly walked around the churchyard naked from the waist down.
Even some of the church guests—particularly those from more hippie-like Open Work groups—almost fainted when they saw the scene. Hundreds of people jumping around like maniacs—pogoing—everybody smoking and flicking cigarettes onto the floor, one punk even took a piss in the corner of the church. All of this in the actual sanctuary, with the bands up on the altar. One thing impressed Siggi amidst the wild dancing: he had asked them to be sure not to damage the church’s pipe organ or grand piano, and sure enough they made sure the church and its contents stayed intact. By the end of the night there wasn’t a scratch on the piano or the organ.
To the uninitiated, the music sounded primitive, abrasive, even inept. “Ein, zwei, drei, vier . . .” and off the bands went, two minutes of breakneck chords and some word fragments screamed over the top. Of course, thought Siggi: when people find themselves in distress, in an emergency, they don’t form perfect sentences, they just scream.
A line in one of Wutanfall’s songs went:
Jauchegruben wie Elster und Pleisse
Wasserlos und stinkend nach Dreck und Scheisse
Cesspools like the Elster and Pleisse rivers
Waterless and stinking of filth and shit
Siggi and a number of other local clergymen he had assembled realized that while that could be dismissed as simplistic, it also represented a sweeping criticism of society, one they supported. Sure, by the standards of environmental activism it was almost banal, but it was also an aesthetic and cultural critique—an attack on the fundamentals of life in the East, a bloodcurdling cry that everything was wrong.
And then, of course, there was Jana screaming, MfMfS . . . SS!
No wonder the complaints poured in after the event. The local neighborhood association started a letter-writing campaign. Worse, the city councilman for the district surrounding the church dropped by to see Siggi, enraged by reports he’d heard about the concert.
“If you think you can come into my district and piss off the working people, you’ve got another thing coming,” he told Siggi. “And that’s no empty threat!”
It wasn’t, either. Siggi and his family started to experience both discreet and open intimidation. After the festival, every night a police car idled in front of the rectory where Siggi lived, and the two-stroke engines of the Wartburgs did not purr quietly, they choked and coughed like a cheap lawnmower. Siggi’s eight-year-old son was so scarred by all the threats and intimidation that he would need psychiatric help.
The regional church leadership also caught hell. And they didn’t know what to do. Nothing of this scale had ever happened before. It was true that the punks were not church people; their music had nothing at all to do with religion and most of them considered themselves atheists. On the other hand, these kids represented a group in distress, they’d been beaten and oppressed, they were the castoffs of this socialist kingdom of heaven; dogs had compassed them, the assembly of the wicked had enclosed them; if anyone needed ministering, it was these kids.
Siggi found himself at the center of the same sort of battle that had engulfed the deacons who took in the punks in Berlin. The church was split between those, like Siggi, who wanted to make it work for outsiders, activists, and the downtrodden, and those who favored a more accommodating relationship with the government—which in its least insidious iteration meant hewing to a narrowly religious interpretation of the church’s mission. As one government-friendly church functionary put it, “The church is there for everyone, but not for everything.”
The problem was that, like most protestant churches, German Lutheran churches were quite democratic institutions. The Reformation itself had fundamentally democratic implications. First and foremost in a cosmological sense: the hierarchical system of mediation between parishioner and god had been abolished. But protestant churches were also democratic in a structural sense: taking the cosmological implications to their logical conclusions led to sects like Congreg
ationalism, where any three people constituted a church, anyone could preach, and each congregation was fully autonomous. Even within the more rigid structures of the establishmentarian German Lutheran church, there was little the leadership—which routinely insisted the church was not oppositional and that churches were not places of opposition—could do to impose orthodoxy on its member churches or its clergy members.
Still, the pressure mounted on Siggi. The Stasi even tried to smear him by planting rumors that he was an alcoholic, in order to weaken his position within the church. In the end, however, church leaders found a kind of middle ground. Siggi was told that the church didn’t want to hear any more complaints about alcohol abuse and noise pollution in conjunction with his work. Siggi was okay with one of those suggestions. He agreed to stop providing beer at punk meet-ups and at future concerts. It was BYOB at Christus Church from there on out.
As for the noise pollution, Siggi soon began to plot the next big concert at Christus Church, scheduled for Saturday, October 22, 1983. Little did he know that the bands who had played that first show would be shattered by then. And the Stasi would not take things so lightly next time. The festival in Halle in April 1983 had made the scene national, and that was perhaps even more alarming to the Stasi than the release of Schleim-Keim’s music in the West. Otze and Schleim-Keim caused embarrassment; by contrast, a national network of punks with ties to the most troublesome churches represented a genuine threat, especially to a government as paranoid as Honecker’s East Germany.
As spring turned to summer in 1983, the hysteria over punk reached the highest levels of government.
Chaos of Wutanfall in the band’s Leipzig rehearsal space, 1982
Christiane Eisler / Transit Agency
III
Combat Rock
24
They came for Wutanfall first.
The Stasi’s Department XX had been tracking singer Chaos intensively. A July 1982 report described a trip to Leipzig by a group of Berlin punks—including Colonel, Keule, Special, and Herne—to meet Chaos and other Leipzig punks. Reports in November 1982 detailed a trip Chaos took to Berlin with Wutanfall bassist Zappa, during which time he told Colonel and other Berliner punks about an upcoming gig in Jena, in the southern state of Thüringen. The reports also listed two other shows the band had played in Leipzig in the third week of November, and alerted authorities to the fact that Wutanfall had made cassette recordings of their rehearsals, which were then copied and handed around, facilitating the dissemination of their music throughout the country.
Another set of Stasi reports in early 1983 placed Chaos in Berlin for three days in February along with Wutanfall drummer Rotz and Ratte, who played bass in HAU, the other band Wutanfall guitarist Imad had started. In Berlin, the Stasi learned, the Leipzig punks had been setting up a Wutanfall gig for May 1983—not the sort of thing you could do over the phone in the DDR. They had also gone to Planlos’s rehearsal space on Metzer Strasse, though the Stasi had been unable to establish what was discussed there.
Pressure had been steadily ramping up on Chaos. According to internal Stasi memos from late 1982, they considered Wutanfall the “favorite and best known” punk group: “Punks travel to their shows from across the entire country.” As the band’s singer, Chaos was viewed by authorities as public enemy number one—even though he never saw himself as the leader of the band, and music and lyrics were written by the whole band. Authorities paid attention to Chaos over and above other members of Wutanfall for another reason, too. But at the time Chaos would not have dreamed that anyone in his gang would be informing on him.
Still, he was often surprised at the details the Stasi interrogators revealed when he was hauled in. There would often be moments when he thought, How could they possibly know that? But then again, he reasoned, they probably had every place bugged.
Since finishing school in 1981, Chaos had been doing an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and his bosses there were also informing on him. Stasi officers regularly picked him up during work and hauled him down to the station zur Klärung eines Sachverhaltes, that is, to clear up some facts surrounding a case.
With Chaos, the initial approach involved physical violence and intimidation. But that just made him even more sure of his convictions—what kind of government wielded state-sanctioned violence against a kid who just wanted to dress weird and talk shit over loud music? An illegitimate one.
As time had gone on, the security forces had started to mess with his head in addition to the corporal punishment. They sought to demoralize him, to make him slip up and give them some piece of evidence they could use to throw him jail. Sometimes they would take him to the window during an interrogation and point out at another window across the way, in the pretrial detention center, and say, “Hey, look over there, that cell is reserved for you!”
By early 1983, he was receiving two summonses a week to report to police stations for questioning. If he didn’t turn up for an appointment, they came for him. Usually at work.
During another trip to Berlin, he’d been picked up on Alexanderplatz, thrown in a car and driven all the way back to Leipzig, then thrown into detention. They interrogated him for seventeen hours straight that time, without breaks and without meals. Then they brought in a twenty-page summary of the talks and told him to sign each page to attest that it was accurate. He didn’t care, he just signed them—it was all bullshit anyway.
After he’d signed, they picked up the stack of papers and ripped them up in front of his face.
“Let’s start again from the beginning.”
And they did.
After the second marathon interrogation, he couldn’t even sign his name. He was trembling too much from fatigue and lack of food, water, and sleep.
They confiscated his ID papers and replaced them with a PM 12, a second-class ID that barred the bearer from traveling beyond his or her hometown. And while a PM 12 holder might be able to slip the police inside the country, it was impossible to cross any border. This was a serious blow for Chaos, who had already established connections to punks in Hungary. He’d found a lot of inspiration in his visits to Budapest, where the punks were further along than in East Germany—Hungarian punks were tolerated on the streets and even had clubs where their bands could play openly. Budapest was a place of refuge for Chaos, a place where he could get out from under the pressure of East German security forces.
Chaos was at the end of his rope. He finally snapped one afternoon in the back of an unmarked police car, lashing out as the officers in the front seat continued blathering at him.
“Shut your trap, you fucking pig,” snarled Chaos from the backseat.
The atmosphere in the car suddenly changed.
They put a bag over Chaos’s head and drove around for a while before dragging him out of the car and marching him into some woods—Chaos could hear the leaves and twigs crackling underfoot, and feel the soft forest floor.
Then, still hooded, Chaos was savagely beaten and kicked. He’d been hit and punched at police stations before, but nothing like this. When it was over, he was covered in hematomas, splattered with blood.
They took him, trembling and battered, into the Stasi stationhouse and made him sign a statement attesting that he had been well treated during his detainment. They had to move his hand for him as he signed.
The next day, Chaos turned up for work in a shocking state, scabs and swelling and deep bruises all over his body. Everyone could connect the dots: he’d been taken away by security forces, practically paraded through the workshop; he returned a bloody mess. There was no mystery as to what had happened.
After that particularly harsh beating, Chaos’s parents became a bit more accepting of him and his side of the story—it seemed to them that maybe he wasn’t the problem after all, maybe he wasn’t some kind of hooligan. Still, they continued to think Chaos wouldn’t have all these problems if he would just cut the crap—drop this silly punk thing.
“I’m not doing anyth
ing!” he told them, “I just play music and spike my hair up with shaving cream, OK? I just want to have my own brand of fun, that’s all. That’s no reason for them to beat me half to death!”
Other non-punks noticed, too. Chaos didn’t have to say anything; the marks on his body said it all. For some people, that was the first time they’d come face to face with the ugly reality of what could happen if you strayed from the official path. With many punks, the brutality they encountered had served to harden their resolve and radicalize their thinking—now that same brutality made others wince, people at Chaos’s workplace, for instance. It was impossible to ignore. Though most did their best. They’re not coming for me. Chaos was struck by the silence at work. Not my problem. Ah, but not everyone looked away. The government’s violence always had a boomerang effect.
None of that mattered for Chaos, though. Chaos was beaten down. Physically. Beaten down. Mentally. Beaten down. By the end it was an all-out terror campaign. They would kick in his door at three in the morning three or four nights a week, screaming at him as they stormed in. If anyone was crashing at his place, he’d be accused of harboring criminals. Grounds to take Chaos in for a night of interrogation.
And they started to come for him before every gig Wutanfall had lined up. They always knew. Sometimes HAU singer Stracke stepped in for him—Stracke had been practically a member of the band anyway, ever since the first rehearsals.
Things no longer felt the same to Chaos.
