by Tim Mohr
It had always been so fun—the little gang of punks against the idiot overlords. All the difficulties had just brought them closer together. But now he felt overwhelmed. Beaten down. The Stasi’s strategy of degradation had worked.
As Chaos started to unravel, he felt he needed peace and quiet. His apartment had become a beacon for punks from all over the country, with people showing up and crashing there all the time; his apartment had begun to feel like an almost daily target of middle-of-the-night raids, his apartment . . . he needed peace and quiet. It was all too much.
He created a bulletin board for his front door, listing the apartment’s hours of operation. He limited the opening hours and built in days off. Wednesday, for instance, was a day off. He didn’t let anyone in.
“Sorry, but I’m off today.”
The first time the cops turned up after that, he told them, “Sorry, but as you can see today is a day off.” They just got more pissed off, more brutal.
He was done.
Chaos was done.
The best frontman in East Germany was done.
25
By late spring of 1983, Namenlos’s Jana and Mita had squatted an apartment in East Berlin’s Lichtenberg district. The place had no bathroom and they had to shit in a bucket. They often arrived home to find things missing or rearranged—they suspected it was the Stasi surveilling them and confiscating things because of the band, but they weren’t entirely sure.
Officially, Jana had a job cleaning church facilities, but she was not going to work. She was supposed to start at seven in the morning, but since she and her friends tended to stay up all night, hanging out at each other’s places, she constantly ditched. This was dangerous, because if the government could gather evidence that she wasn’t working enough, she could be thrown in the slammer. Fortunately, by then she and A-Micha had become a couple and they had a plan. If they got married, Jana would no longer be legally obligated to work—in the eyes of the law, A-Micha would then be the breadwinner and Jana wouldn’t leave herself open to getting arrested for not working. Jana and A-Micha got engaged and set a date for the fall.
Soon Jana and Mita squatted another apartment, on Stargarder Strasse, back in Prenzlauer Berg, not far from Mita’s aunt’s atelier. This apartment had been abandoned by somebody they knew—he’d been arrested and slapped with Berlin-Verbot, banished from his own hometown. There was no electricity in their new place, and the toilet was out in the staircase. The door had no lock and was almost always open. But the place was basically empty and the warm weather had arrived, so what was the difference. And besides, they had adopted a dog—a German shepherd they named Wotan—who could serve as sentry.
The summer of 1983 turned out to be the Summer of Punk—and a summer of resistance in general. After the closure of Pfingst Church to punks in March, the punk council had managed to organize several large-scale outings—the security organs’ hope that rusticating them from Pfingst Church would be enough to break up the movement was proving illusory. Two hikes on the outskirts of Berlin drew nearly a hundred people each. Participants were later called in zur Klärung eines Sachverhaltes. The interrogators kept pressing them about one thing in particular—they seemed to think the outings included paramilitary training in how to attack the police.
On May 21, during a Free German Youth festival in Berlin, about thirty punks—including most of the members of Planlos and Namenlos—headed to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen to lay a wreath. They had inscribed the bow on the wreath Fascism never again–Berlin punks. They asked Deacon Lorenz Postler to accompany them to Sachsenhausen, which was just north of Berlin and reachable by S-Bahn train.
The wreath-laying was a reaction to a new Stasi tactic: as authorities upped the fight against “negative-decadent” punks, one thing they tried was to portray punks as right-wingers. After all, Namenlos sang about Nazis, and authorities could use research about Western punk—in particular, the neo-Nazi skinhead movement—to support their assertion. A few skinheads were also starting to pop up in the East Berlin punk scene, too.
But the wreath-laying was also the kind of large-scale public action that freaked the government the fuck out. The fact that it was overtly political made it even worse.
When the group of punks arrived with their wreath at the Oranienburg S-Bahn station, they were met by a massive police presence and barred from leaving the station—the plan had obviously been leaked or overheard. It was a crazy scene: a group of youth battling riot troops in an effort to be allowed to criticize Nazism, which was the explicit philosophical enemy of the government whose riot troops were beating the kids. A-Micha ended up grabbing a cop by the throat in the melee. It was always a question of justice for him, and if the police were going to pick a street fight in order to hold the line for injustice, he would not hesitate to fight back.
The police eventually forced the punks back onto the platform, where they hopped on a train in the direction of the center of Berlin.
The punks thought they could outsmart the cops. They hopped off just one S-Bahn station away and tried to make their way back to the concentration camp on foot. Again, no dice—the police arrived as the punks were setting off through the fields. They gathered them up and once again forced them back onto a train.
Sitting in the S-Bahn, the punks came up with one last idea. They could try to lay the wreath at the eternal flame to the victims of fascism on Unter den Linden, the main drag that ran from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburg Gate, past the national museums and the opera and Humboldt University. That boulevard was a showpiece of East Berlin, a stretch where tourists strolled. Would the authorities dare to arrest a group trying to lay a wreath to victims of fascism in front of tourists—potentially Western tourists? The answer was no. But first they had to get there.
The punks went in small groups, creeping from building entryway to building entryway, working their way from Marx-Engels-Platz S-Bahn station (now Hackescher Markt) until they had managed to get behind the memorial with the eternal flame. Finally, they all ran their fingers through their hair to make sure they were as outlandish looking as possible, with everything spiked up to the sky, and they ran to the front of the memorial. Two newlyweds were making their way out of the building, having just laid flowers of their own at the eternal flame. The groom was a security officer of some kind, wearing his dress uniform for their wedding day. He stared in disbelief as the disheveled punks rolled up, all Mohawks and ripped clothing. Nearby police stood helplessly by as the punks laid their wreath in full view of passersby and stood for a moment of silence in front of the eternal flame. When the punks emerged, they were immediately surrounded by dozens of plainclothes officers, and they were arrested when they moved away from the memorial. Still, news of their action spread fast, borne by punks and church-based activists across the country.
People both inside and outside the church also continued to secure space for punks. Minister Gerhard Cyrus let a band play at Galiläa Church one Sunday, announcing to the congregation, “When I am troubled, I sit in church and lament quietly. These young people here lament loudly.” People started to leave as soon as the band had struck a few chords. Auferstehung Church hosted a two-day workshop on May 27–28, 1983, to which dozens of punks went. Local officials complained that “The disbanding of the punk scene in the Pfingst Church was a jumping-off point for resolving this phenomenon—the Auferstehung Church was not intended to become a replacement for that sort of riotous assembly!”
On June 5, Lothar Rochau, the deacon in Halle, staged a large protest against environmental degradation. Nearly two hundred people biked through town with posters, some wearing gas masks or scarves over their faces, and gathered outside the gates of one of the massive petrochemical complexes on the outskirts of town, where police attacked them with water cannons. Forty people were arrested and spent a night in jail. Rochau himself was arrested soon after, and the church hierarchy did not protest as he was tried and sentenced to three years for anti-state agita
tion, illegal contacts, and vilification of state organs. As sometimes happened with political prisoners, he was eventually bought out of captivity by West Germany.
Still, environmental activists did their thing with their signs and masks for a few hours and then it was over. Like visual artists and writers, political activists could melt back into anonymity after a demonstration. While politically focused activists might appear at first glance to have represented a more serious threat to the dictatorship, their protests were discrete events separate from everyday life. Punks, by contrast, because of the way they looked, represented active constant opposition any time they appeared in public. You couldn’t spray hoses on punks and throw them in the slammer overnight to stop their particular form of protest. Because the next day they would just walk down the street again, embodying constant active protest, an all-encompassing protest tied to their very person and being. From the perspective of the Stasi, punk was a menacing outsider cult causing more and more kids to opt out of the preordained future the government had in mind for them.
On June 11, 1983, St. Michaelis Church in Karl-Marx-Stadt held another punk festival, inviting Namenlos and Planlos from Berlin to play, along with Leipzig’s Wutanfall, with Stracke replacing Chaos on vocals. It was the first time a church in the city—about a hundred miles south of Berlin—had hosted a punk show. Otze and Schleim-Keim played, too, and they arrived just as Planlos were setting up their gear. Otze had a huge entourage with him, tough Erfurt punks, already drunk, and they stampeded into the place like wild boar. Planlos watched them come. They had played with Schleim-Keim a few times already and Otze was a regular in Berlin punk circles; the Planlos band members had begun to realize that a storm cloud of potential violence followed Otze and the Erfurt punks everywhere they went, threatening to rain blows at any moment. There was a spot on the grounds where everyone had been throwing their beer bottles. One of the Erfurt punks went over to the pile of glass shards.
“Hey, you’re going to get hurt,” people warned him.
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said.
He laid down on the jagged glass. When he eventually got up again, his clothes were ripped and blood dripped from the back of his pants. He danced, blood-spattered, when the band started to play.
Pankow took the stage wearing a T-shirt his girlfriend, Nase, had decorated for him with the words wenn unrecht zu recht wird, wird widerstand zur pflicht: When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes a Duty. It was a quote from Rosa Luxemburg, a martyred communist activist, murdered in Berlin at the hands of a right-wing death squad in 1919. And even though Luxemburg’s death was marked each year with official East German government commemorations, the rest of the band warned Pankow: You could get thrown in jail for that. He didn’t care.
Karl-Marx-Stadt, which before the division of Germany was known as Chemnitz, had a population of about a quarter million but not a single punk band, though that wouldn’t be true for long after the show.
For the rest of the summer, as the waves from these events rippled out, regional punk shows took place in churches all over the country. In two-bit towns like Eisleben, the excitement around a local band, Müllstation, was able to draw people from surrounding towns to a concert on June 18 in Petri Church. When a punk in the town of Naumburg—a Stasi report put the number of local punks at eight souls in 1983—threw a birthday party, three dozen punks from ten different East German cities showed up. A whole new age cohort—a few years younger than the original punks—was being exposed to the music and philosophy. In many cases, these younger kids found something in punk that would stay with them through the end of the dictatorship—or perhaps more accurately, that would lead to the end of the dictatorship.
Were you really born
To be subordinate to it all?
It wasn’t just a case of punks shouting that the world was fucked. There was something constructive happening, too, with all the events, the squatted spaces, the network of contacts—the punks were finding free space and beginning to create an alternative reality, their own reality, their own world. The world is fucked. Yes, they all agreed on that. The world was fucked. But there was something else, something far more powerful about what was happening. It was like the graffiti in East Berlin had said: don’t die in the waiting room of the future. It was a call to action. The world is fucked . . . and what are we going to do about it?
That was the key.
What are we going to do about it?
Too much future was becoming more than a headache for the government; it was fast becoming an existential menace.
26
Planlos singer Pankow had been detained a lot more frequently lately.
At first he hadn’t realized it was the Stasi—he’d thought the interrogators were normal cops. But he figured it out soon enough. They had taken Pankow for the type of personality they liked to recruit—open, talkative—and started a file to track attempts to convert him into an informant. They were right about him to a certain extent—he was open. The problem for them was that he was open about his aspirations for change. Pankow thought he could convert them rather than the other way around.
“It’s a great country,” he told them, “but we need to improve some things.”
Pankow had never been interested in the West. Once he’d become a punk, he wasn’t even interested in what was happening in Western punk scenes. Pankow was an East German punk through and through, and he saw his mission quite clearly: We could do things differently here.
The Stasi kept Pankow under constant scrutiny. Several of his neighbors on Marienburger Strasse had been enlisted to snoop on him. And they did so with gusto. On several occasions Pankow caught the baker’s wife, who lived downstairs from him, listening at his door, notepad in hand. She filed reports with her Stasi handler listing things like visits from Leipzig and Dresden punks, plans she’d overheard about trips to meet up with the musicians in Wutanfall, and her personality assessments of Pankow: “Boehlke does seem to be one of the most sensible out of all of them.”
The Stasi knew him so well that at one point, while he was messing around with his girlfriend, Nase, in some bushes one evening near Alexanderplatz, Pankow had heard a command: “Herr Boehlke, please come out of the bushes!”
They had recognized him by his shoes. Off to another interrogation.
By the time they finally asked him explicitly to become an informant, in the spring of 1983, he’d been getting detained and interrogated regularly for two full years. Pankow was taken by surprise at what he perceived as a change of tack.
“Work with you, what does that mean?”
The officer tried to cast it in the best light. There were criminal elements in the scene, and when a crime occurred, Pankow would just contact them, that’s all.
“Rat somebody out? No way, I won’t do that.”
Never.
He felt that deep in his blood.
NEVER.
From that point on—once they realized he wouldn’t become an asset—the Stasi set about taking care of him some other way. They regarded him as important. As with Chaos, the Stasi assumed that, as the singer, Pankow was the boss. They figured he was the frontman and thus the mastermind of the band, and since the band was the most prominent one in East Berlin, Pankow was basically a mastermind of the entire poisonous movement. But it didn’t work like that. Not in the band—Kobs and Lade wrote most of the songs—and not in the DDR punk scene in general, which was stubbornly egalitarian, not hierarchical. The punks were nearly all at least fledgling anarchists, and they sought collective organization in everything they did. It was always about bottom-up politics, whether that meant how a band was run or how they wanted the country run.
In the end, Pankow made it easy for the Stasi.
During the summer, government-sanctioned publications held annual “press festivals” in various towns around the country. The day that Planlos, Namenlos, and Wutanfall had played in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Neues Deutschland—the flagship daily paper
of the dictatorship—had opened its annual festival in the People’s Park in Berlin’s Friedrichshain district, just up the road from the punks’ old hangout at Pfingst Church. The festival was more like a county fair than a professional convention, offering several days of exhibitions and entertainment open to the public. The year before, Dean Reed, a middle-aged American émigré popular throughout the East Bloc, had been a featured musical act at the festival; often called the Red Elvis, Reed had moved to East Germany in 1973 and alongside his music and film career had also established a personal relationship with dictator Erich Honecker. In addition to such state-sanctioned musical acts, there were often demonstrations of things like school children driving baby tanks, showing off the results of the military training that had been mandated in Eastern schools since the late 1970s.
The day he returned from Karl-Marx-Stadt, Pankow decided to go to the press festival—wearing his T-shirt with the Rosa Luxemburg quote: when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty.
You never knew who might be at one of these press festivals, and he had a vague plan to try to get on a soapbox and preach the punk gospel. It was not to be.
As he was walking toward the park, a police car pulled up beside him and a huge bull of a man stepped out—Pankow recognized him immediately. He was unforgettable because of his size, and Pankow had already encountered him many times on Alexanderplatz. The cop approached Pankow, picked him right off the ground, and threw him bodily into the back of the police car.
“So, Herr Boehlke!”
As they drove toward the detention center on Keibelstrasse, down near Alexanderplatz, the monster cop slowed down and pointed to a guy walking along the sidewalk.
“Check it out,” he said. “I had that guy thrown in prison. He must be out again. And now it’s your turn!”
“What?” said Pankow.
“Yeah, for that T-shirt? Three years.”
