by Tim Mohr
Bullshit, thought Pankow. I’ve been arrested a million times.
Bullshit.
At the detention center they took his T-shirt and then interrogated him all day and into the night. During that time they broke into Pankow’s apartment and searched it, and broke into the band’s basement rehearsal space and searched that. Though the band was careful with lyrics—Pankow burned everything—there was one scrap of paper in the rehearsal space. It was the words to a song by Kobs that translated as “Smog and Soot.” Luckily, a friend of theirs had been in the space at the time and heard the footsteps on the stairs. He shoved the scrap of paper into his pants just in time.
They threw Pankow in a cell overnight.
Pankow figured he’d be released the next day. After all, they couldn’t keep him for too long without a formal arrest warrant. Though East German laws criminalized things that in the West couldn’t be criminalized, the system was still a very legalistic one, and generally the security forces stuck to the letter of the law. For the most part, you couldn’t just throw people in jail and hold them indefinitely.
But when the guards came for him in the morning, they didn’t release him. They marched him out to a car, handcuffed. They drove Pankow to the back door of a hospital, removed him from the car, shirtless and handcuffed, marched him over to the building, and ordered him to stand against the wall.
A doctor emerged from the hospital door. He walked over to Pankow, made a fist, and bounced the fist off the top of Pankow’s head. It was like something out of a cartoon. You could almost hear the sound effect: Boing!
Pankow nearly laughed.
“Fit for detainment,” the doctor announced.
What the fuck? That was an examination?
The doctor signed a form and then Pankow was bundled back into the car.
Fit for detainment.
Maybe this isn’t a joke.
At first, Pankow remained cocky back at the detention center, talking shit and acting the way he thought a renegade should act. But the longer it went on, the more he began to worry. Some of Pankow’s closest friends, including Colonel, had already been imprisoned.
This could be serious.
Next they showed Pankow an arrest warrant: public disturbance, disorderly conduct, obstructing an investigation . . . and at the end was the proposed sentence: three years and eight months.
I’m going to prison.
“By the way, we’ll make sure you serve your sentence up in Brandenburg, with the lifers.”
Pankow, now twenty, knew he wouldn’t last long among murderers.
The Stasi were not fucking around.
“Okay, this is your last chance: either you agree to work with us, or you’re going to get three years and eight months.”
I will never work with you, never.
He cried in his cell that night.
But he did not change his mind.
I’m going to prison.
And then, the next morning, they took him from his cell and released him.
Were they bluffing all along?
That wasn’t actually the reason he’d been released, but it would be a while before Pankow would learn the real reason.
Pankow walked out of the detention center in just his ripped-up, splatter-painted pants and no shirt. He walked away from Alexanderplatz, the TV tower peering down at his pale, skinny, bare-chested body. He walked up Prenzlauer Allee toward the apartment on Marienburger Strasse that he was sharing with Nase. He was free.
When he reached his place, total chaos. They had rifled through everything and turned the place over. They had taken the photos he had of his friends, and they had taken the old pictures and posters he’d collected from illicit Western music magazines. But—he exhaled—they hadn’t confiscated his records and cassettes. They were still there, and still intact.
But that was not the end of it.
27
A few days later, Pankow heard a knock at the door of his apartment.
Nase answered.
Stasi.
“We’d like to speak to Herr Boehlke,” said one of the officers.
“He’s not here,” lied Nase.
They didn’t have a warrant to enter the apartment, so they couldn’t prove her wrong. But what if they had changed their minds and wanted to get him off the streets—maybe they had found out about the band’s gig the next week? Pankow knew he was in a particularly dangerous spot: he had recently lost another job and hadn’t been working—which made him asozial. They could jail him for that alone. He was at risk of going to prison under a pretext that had nothing to do with the band.
Fortunately, he’d finally been offered a new job—he just had to make it to the following Monday, then he’d be legally employed again. He was going to be operating the garbage press at Charité hospital, pretty much the worst job he could imagine. But better than jail.
As he furtively looked out the apartment windows, he saw suspiciously casual people standing around the courtyard, smoking cigarettes, not going anywhere.
Stasi, he thought.
He looked again a while later and the same people were still there.
Fuck.
More of them must have been waiting out in front of the building.
They are waiting for me to come out.
I’m surrounded.
Pankow decided to hunker down. Nase answered the door anytime there were knocks. She always said the same thing—no, haven’t seen Herr Boehlke, no he’s not here, no don’t know where he is, no you can’t come in.
But then his mother turned up at the door, red-faced and puffy-eyed.
“What is it?” Pankow asked after Nase let her into the apartment, “What’s wrong?”
“Father’s killed himself,” she sobbed to Pankow.
She begged Pankow to go to the funeral, which would take place a few days later, over the weekend.
Since Pankow had left home in the fall of 1980, he had seen his father just twice. The first time, Pankow had been walking along the street in his full punk gear, buttons and anarchist As on his clothes, hair up to the sky, and he spotted his father on a passing trolley. The orange carriage rattled past and Pankow ran alongside banging on the window, his rage welling up. “Come out, you bastard!” he shouted, daring his father to fight him. Everyone on the trolley stared at Pankow as he ran and shouted and punched the glass—everyone except his father, who looked casually away and pretended not to recognize his son.
The next time—which proved to be the last—was near the subway station at Spittelmarkt. Pankow was walking with Kaiser, and said to him, “Hey look, that’s my old man.”
Kaiser didn’t believe him.
“It’s really him,” said Pankow.
Pankow and his father did not acknowledge each other as they passed.
Now his mother was standing in front of him, crying, begging him to come to the funeral.
But the Stasi also no doubt knew that this father had killed himself, and they would be banking on Pankow leaving the building to attend the funeral. All they had to do now was wait.
After his mother left, Pankow and Nase sat glumly, trying to figure a way out. In the end, the plan they cooked up was surprisingly simple—almost comically simple. Nase went to see a friend who worked at a theater and got hold of a wig and some women’s clothes.
On Sunday morning, the day of the funeral, Pankow put on a dress, high heels, a wig, and lipstick. He went down into the basement of their apartment building, which was connected to the next one down, and then emerged in the next-door entryway. Meanwhile Nase went out onto the street with a pack of cigarettes and sized up the situation. Pankow peeked out of the keyhole and waited for a signal from Nase, who was now standing across the street. If the coast was clear—or at least as clear as it was going to get—Nase would scratch her nose. If she lit a cigarette without scratching her nose, that meant Pankow should go back into the basement and hide. He waited. Then she scratched her nose. Pankow walked out in his dress an
d made his way to a nearby S-Bahn station. From there he rode to the family apartment in Pankow.
As he approached the building where he had grown up, he could see Stasi agents posted nearby. But either they didn’t recognize him or they recognized him too late, and he managed to slip inside and up to his mother’s apartment. Inside, all hell broke loose: this was his mother’s worst nightmare, that Pankow would make a mockery of the funeral of his estranged father. Obviously he’d been unable to tell his mother of his plan in advance. His mother was already crying, his entire extended family was there, and here was Pankow, in drag.
“Oh, God! How could you! Have you lost your mind?”
Pankow quickly explained the situation and changed into normal clothes he had brought along—normal meaning his punk gear, which was hardly less provocative in the eyes of many of the rest of the family.
When they all walked out of the building, Stasi agents immediately surrounded him, grabbed his arms, and told him he was under arrest.
Pankow’s mother fell to the ground, crying and screaming, begging them to let him attend the funeral first.
For some reason they relented, and said Pankow could go to the gravesite. They would take him into custody afterward.
At the end of the ceremony, as the rest of the crowd ambled toward their cars parked at the cemetery entrance, Pankow ran off through the gravestones. Out of sight of the Stasi watchers, he hopped the cemetery walls and slipped into the surrounding woods of the Schönower Heide, an extensive forest on the north edge of Berlin. If he could elude authorities until the next morning, he could go straight to the new job at Charité hospital and—perhaps—avoid arrest.
On Monday morning, at eight o’clock sharp, Pankow slipped into the beautiful old brick hospital complex in the central borough of Mitte to start work. The garbage press was in a small room; in front of it were bags of trash and medical waste. Pankow had to load the reeking stuff into the press and then compact it all. Whenever the press filled up, Pankow opened the bay of a loading dock and a freight truck would come and cart off the dense block of garbage. Then he’d start loading the press again.
The first day it took him about half an hour to wrestle what garbage was there into the press; his shift went until four in the afternoon. So Pankow just sat there in the stinking room waiting for more garbage to arrive.
Then the phone on the wall rang.
“Hello?” said Pankow.
“It’s Herr Breuer,” a man said. It was the boss, head of personnel.
“Come upstairs to my office.”
Shit.
Pankow went up to the personnel office.
“Do you know who was just here?” asked Breuer.
“No,” said Pankow.
“The Stasi,” said the boss.
“Aha,” said Pankow.
“Any idea what they wanted?” asked the boss.
“No idea,” said Pankow.
“Well, apparently you’re political—but I guess that’s obvious from the way you look, isn’t it?”
“Listen, I don’t necessarily agree with what they think of me, but fine, I guess that’s it,” said Pankow.
“You know what?” interrupted the boss. “I don’t agree with them either. I told them to get lost.”
Pankow’s new boss pushed a finalized employment contract across his desk toward Pankow. With that piece of paper, Pankow was legal again, employed, no longer subject to arrest for not working.
28
About a week later, on June 24, Planlos and Namenlos were scheduled to play a hometown show at the Bluesmesse in Berlin’s Erlöser Church. Three months after getting thrown out of Pfingst Church, the Berlin punks were back in business, at least for one show.
The Bluesmesse—or “Blues Mass”—was a Berlin church tradition going back to 1979, when it started in nearby Samariter Church. A musician named Günter Holwas had approached the minister there, Rainer Eppelmann, whose obsession was peace and the demilitarization of youth culture and schools, about holding a concert in the church. Holwas had pledged to bring in a lot of disaffected youths, people who would not otherwise have been exposed to church activities. Eppelmann liked the idea; East Bloc blues rock had been the soundtrack to the DDR peace movement for years and a Blueser, or blues fan, was practically a synonym for a peacenik. For strategic reasons, Eppelmann decided to incorporate the music into a vaguely liturgical framework.
The Blues Masses quickly became a thing—several hundred people attended the first one on June 1, 1979, and by 1980 several thousand showed up whenever a Blues Mass took place, with a significant portion of the concert-goers traveling to Berlin from other cities. Authorities tried to shut down the Blues Masses based on public safety codes—the events were too crowded, they said—so Eppelmann arranged to move them from Samariter Church to Erlöser Church, a larger facility in a desolate corner of Lichtenberg that had extensive grounds to hold spillover crowds and information booths on various causes and discussion groups. The first Blues Mass held there, in November 1980, had attracted five thousand people.
By the time the punk bands were brought into the Blues Mass that summer of 1983, Rainer Eppelmann had become a focus of the state security apparatus. In 1982 he had issued a formal appeal for disarmament and for the elimination of military instruction in schools, and had managed to publicize the appeal in the West German media. He had also been a key figure in the campaign aimed at getting fellow pacifists to wear patches with the Biblical citation swords into plowshares, a campaign that infuriated the government in general and attracted the personal ire of Erich Honecker. The Stasi had stepped up their spying on Eppelmann, bugging his apartment, placing more informants around him, and infiltrating the events he organized, including the Blues Masses. They had even contemplated murdering him, though his connections to the West made them hesitate, as killing him might set off a potentially embarrassing uproar and threaten the precious international legitimization Honecker seemed to crave above all else. As with other rogue clergymen, the government had also tried to get the national and regional church leadership to discipline Eppelmann—to no avail.
Eppelmann had been chastened by the threats, but he had never been a rock-solid ally of the various outside groups inside the church anyway—his primary focus seemed to be self-promotion, particularly in the West. He was already notorious for showing up to demonstrations when the pictures were being taken and then buggering off before things got ugly with the cops; kids, including many punks, who got into hot water for signing his various petitions, also resented the fact that he himself seemed to be protected by his connections to the West while they took it on the chin. And now he seemed more craven. He had yanked the microphone away from musicians who tried to make provocative statements during Blues Masses. He had caved to pressure not to mention Poland and the Solidarity movement at his events. And the frequency of the Blues Masses had dwindled to just two per year.
The teeth had gone out of the events.
Which is exactly why Deacon Lorenz Postler thought it would be a great idea to integrate the punks and their music into the Blues Mass. He saw it as a chance to redefine the event, a changing of the guard. Enough with hippie passivity, punks were loud and aggressive, and far more radical. Eppelmann was very much opposed. But Postler—who, because of the Stasi’s disapproval of his involvement with the punks, was still stuck in a studio apartment even though he had a wife and three children—won the day.
The scene at Erlöser Church that June of 1983 could hardly have been more different from the first big punk show in Halle. That had been a punk show pure and simple. It had also been inside the church. Here at the Blues Mass were what looked to be several thousand freaks and hippies, and the stage was outside in the churchyard, open-air. Jana watched as the hippies shook their long hair to a blues band playing before Namenlos. It sure as hell wasn’t her thing, but then again Jana was too excited to pay much attention.
When Jana and Namenlos took the stage and ripped into their fi
rst song—Mf . . . Mf . . . MfS . . . SS!—the punks in the crowd surged forward and started to pogo. Many of the band’s close friends were there and they sang along.
There were a lot of punks, but there were far more hippies, and unrest quickly spread through the crowd. Things started flying toward the stage—rocks and bottles and other projectiles.
A-Micha kept getting splashed with some sort of messy liquid—at first he thought the crowd was throwing tomatoes at the band. But no, it was bockwurst, which were exploding in greasy, watery bursts as they struck the stage and the band members.
“What is this shit?” people yelled from the crowd.
Most of the punks were bunched up toward the right side of the stage, a swirl of colorful hair, pogoing and shoving and loving the show. Toward the left of the stage were the older blues fans, most in the green parkas that were their uniform. In the middle, people started to skirmish. Fists started to fly.
Jana shrieked:
Minenfeld und Stacheldraht, damit sich niemand rüberwagt
Mauern und Elektrozaun, die tun uns hier die Freiheit klauen
Selbstschuss und ein Minenfeld, damit es uns hier gut gefällt
In unserem schönen Staat, in unserem schönen Staat
Minefields and barbed wire so nobody risks going over
Walls and electric fences, they’re snatching away our freedom
Automatic firing devices and minefields so we like it here
In our beautiful country, in our beautiful country
More objects rained on stage. More shouts rang out. More fights erupted in the crowd.
Mita was loving it, reveling in the chaos. Her drums kept moving around, lurching away from her. She played on. Jana kept screaming lyrics and the band chugged on. A punk came out of the crowd and up on stage and danced alongside the band to offer support—and to block the projectiles whizzing through the air toward the band.
Namenlos played “Umweltlied,” or “Environment Song.” It went, in part:
Saurer Regen, toter Wald
Die Industrie vergast uns bald
