by Tim Mohr
The trial lasted just one day.
The defense lawyer limited his argument to protestations about Jana, A-Micha, and Frank’s youth, impulsiveness and political immaturity. They didn’t know any better. This wouldn’t have been A-Micha’s argument at all. He did know better—he just believed they should be allowed to say these things.
We are the people, thought A-Micha. That’s what this is all about.
Jana tried to stand up and assert her right to defend herself, but she wasn’t able to get a word in. After a while she sat back down. In the jumble of meaningless words she heard blathered, one stood out, one she heard often throughout that day: “decadent.”
In the end, the three band members could do nothing more than snicker grimly among themselves—clearly the trial was a joke. Eventually A-Micha started openly laughing at the proceedings.
The trial adjourned in the afternoon. Jana, A-Micha, and Frank were split up again and taken back to prison. The next morning they returned and the judge asked them to stand as he read the decision. They laughed. Their lawyer poked A-Micha in the back and whispered, “Stop laughing! Now! Stop it!”
The verdict: Guilty.
Then came the prison sentences.
The accused Masch, Frank: one year.
The judge elaborated: even though Frank had asserted in court that he stood behind the band’s lyrics, it was important to the judge that he hadn’t sung or written them and had just played bass on the “so-called songs.”
The accused Schlosser, Jana: a year and a half.
A-Micha, aka the accused Horschig, Micha: a year and a half.
By comparison, peace activists Reinhard Schult, prosecuted in 1979, and Hans-Jörg Weigel, prosecuted in 1980, received, respectively, an eight-month sentence and eighteen months of probation. Bärbel Bohley and Ulrike Poppe, the founders of Women for Peace who had been arrested on December 12, 1983, were released after only six weeks, on January 25, 1984—by then Jana, A-Micha, and Frank had already been in detention for five months and their trial hadn’t even begun.
Such a long time, thought Jana, I’ll never make it.
And that was before she saw the prison—the notorious women’s prison at Hoheneck, a facility for political prisoners built partially out of a sixteenth-century hunting lodge in Saxony, several hours south of Berlin.
Pretrial detention was one thing; Hoheneck was another. She knew that much. And she was afraid. Will it be worse?
It was worse.
Cash-strapped East Germany used prison labor to earn Western currency, forcing inmates—whether political prisoners like Jana, or common criminals—to work for international firms like Ikea, as well as a range of major West German companies. At first Jana welcomed the chance to get out of her cell. But she eventually drew a night shift, working eight hours through the night until 6:30 a.m., at which point she was sometimes forced to stay awake another hour for an official count of the inmates at 7:30 a.m. One morning, a guard got upset in the cafeteria during breakfast, which was served at the end of the night shift.
“Kommando 1, it is too noisy in here!”
The prisoners were marched back to their cells and told to stand and wait to be counted at roll call.
Fuck this.
Jana lay down on her bed. A couple of others did the same.
Let them come into the cell and count me.
When the guards announced roll call, the other prisoners went out dutifully. Jana and her cellmates did not. The guards locked the rest of the prisoners in a giant shower chamber and then used rubber truncheons to forcibly get Jana and the others out of bed. They accused Jana of inciting mutiny, but the other women insisted they had laid down of their own volition.
Still, Jana spent twenty-one days in isolation.
Hoheneck was worse than she had ever imagined.
35
Planlos, one of the last major bands standing, was collapsing in on itself.
The band felt surrounded, paranoid, pressure seemed to be mounting all around; friends kept disappearing into prison, kept being deposited in West Germany, kept being drafted into the army. Everyone in the scene was convinced another guy, Schmitti, had actually been murdered by the Stasi—he had been run down in the street by a Wartburg sedan on his eighteenth birthday. He had told friends that his parents, both of whom worked for the Stasi, had warned him that he wouldn’t live to see eighteen if he kept at the punk thing. The driver of the car was never apprehended.
During a recent detainment, Kobs had first heard about Stasi plans to liquidate the punk scene. Härte gegen punk, straight from the top.
After the Stasi raid on their basement rehearsal space on Metzer Strasse over the last summer, the band considered the space burned. No way could they continue to work on songs there with the kinds of lyrics they wrote—they figured the place was probably bugged now, and they knew the Stasi would redouble their efforts to get hard evidence against the band.
Some of their gear drifted a few blocks down the road to a squat on Fehrbelliner Strasse, just across Senefelder Platz from Metzer. The building was full of church activists. Planlos’s gear would end up in the apartment of a guy named Aljoscha, who had both East German and Swiss passports and was a fixture in the social scene of bohemian Prenzlauer Berg. His place was a party hub frequented by a lot of musicians, including punks.
Interpersonal tensions created an even bigger problem for Planlos than the loss of their rehearsal space. At some stage after Pankow’s release from detention back in June, his girlfriend Nase had told him that she had agreed to work with the Stasi in order to save his skin. She had been hauled in during his detention, interrogated, and, after being told Pankow would otherwise go to jail for three years, signed a written pledge to become an IM.
That’s what saved me from jail!
It suddenly made sense to Pankow.
He was grateful. Beyond grateful. And of course, Nase wasn’t really going to inform on her boyfriend or other punks. She wasn’t like Pankow’s meddling neighbors and never would be. Nase had agreed to be a Stasi source for only one reason: to spare Pankow prison. She figured that if she just told everyone in the scene that she had agreed to be an IM, nobody would discuss potentially sensitive information around her. That way, even if she came under pressure during meetings with her handler, she wouldn’t know anything damaging. It was a smart way out. Basically, you burned yourself.
The problem was, you had to trust someone absolutely to believe that he or she would be able to function as a burned asset given the ferocity of the Stasi’s efforts to crush punk. And while Pankow trusted Nase with his life at that point—after all, she had saved it—the rest of the band members didn’t necessarily share his absolute trust. They understood she wasn’t a willing aid to the Stasi, but there was too much risk.
They asked Pankow to split up with her.
Pankow refused: “She fucking saved me from prison!”
Tension rose.
The friction brought other issues to the surface as well. Pankow had always suspected that Lade still wanted to be the singer. Now, everyone on edge, paranoia overwhelming them all, Pankow began to worry that Lade was manipulating the other members to get rid of him so he could front the band again.
As the cloud of paranoia and mutual distrust continued to darken, Pankow remembered something else. Maybe for Lade, it wasn’t just about being the singer? Back when Pankow and Lade had shared a squatted apartment, they’d had a late-night conversation about the future of the band. At that point, they’d had only one old mattress in the empty apartment, and they sometimes lay next to each other talking in the pitch-black room. They could talk seriously in that setting, but they also tried to crack each other up. And one night, Pankow remembered, Lade had suggested the band try to get an Einstufung—the government-mandated license that legalized amateur music groups and allowed them, among other things, to play in officially sanctioned venues.
Pankow assumed at the time that Lade was joking. He joked back a
bout the idea of collaborating with the enemy: “Yeah, great idea! Cool, let’s audition for an Einstufung!”
“Pankow, I’m serious,” said Lade.
“Ha, ha,” said Pankow, “Hilarious. But that’s enough of that shit.”
Lade began to talk about subverting the system from within, about infiltrating the state structures and using the system against itself.
“Are you crazy?” Pankow said, starting to get angry. “I’m not doing a fucking Einstufung. Never!”
Pankow never forgot Lade’s final sentence at the end of the fight.
“Pankow, you’re going to wind up in the gutter.”
Pankow thought he knew what was behind Lade’s attitude. Lade’s home situation had been perhaps even worse than his own. Lade wanted to get out and make something of himself. In the fall of 1983, that conversation kept coming back to Pankow and, in his paranoia, he wondered whether Lade wanted to get him out of the band so he could convince the others to become licensed musicians. These were Pankow’s best friends, and he was now questioning the foundations of their friendship.
The Stasi had already succeeded.
Finally, with the band at a standstill that fall, mutual animosity simmering and tempers flaring, Lade called a band meeting at Café Mosaik on Prenzlauer Allee—one of the Prenzlauer Berg cafés frequented by bohemian types. Lade was the only band member to speak. He gave Pankow one more chance: leave Nase because she’s with the Stasi, or you’re out of the band.
Fuck you guys.
Pankow got up and stormed out. It would be a long time before he spoke to any of the other guys again.
Planlos was dead.
By hook or by crook. The Stasi’s plans tended to work, one way or another. Sometimes sowing suspicion and paranoia was enough. Sometimes it was more effective than having an IM. Sometimes you didn’t even need an IM, or a committed IM. Sometimes suspicion and paranoia could be conjured out of thin air, using rumors or false clues, using threats real or imagined, real or intimated, real or fabricated.
The breakup hardly mattered anyway. Lade and Kobs were drafted into the army in November 1983. Pankow’s draft orders followed a few months later. Kaiser had a medical deferment.
Lade told his mother he wasn’t going to report for duty. He was going to go AWOL. His mother sobbed and begged.
You’ll ruin the whole family.
Lade finally relented, and agreed to report.
Kobs, too, reported, to a National People’s Army barrack north of Berlin.
At the gate to the base, a smiling major greeted Kobs: “How nice that you’re with us now, Herr Kobs.”
He knows my name?
This was the on-site Stasi agent.
Kobs soon learned that he had been assigned to a battalion for rehabilitating politically wayward citizens—about half the battalion had been busted trying to escape the country. There were also a few other punks.
Kobs’s army experiences confirmed everything he’d always thought about the hypocrisy in the DDR. His unit was shipped up to the Baltic Sea coast at one point. They were officially tasked with helping build a new military port project. But the officers also wanted dachas built for themselves. So a portion of all the building materials and the heavy machinery was used each weekend to erect vacation homes for the bigwigs.
One day, Kobs received a letter from Lade.
In addition to telling stories of how awful it had been at his base, Lade wanted Kobs to promise one thing: that after the army they would pick up right where they’d left off.
Kobs wrote back. He promised.
But it was not to be.
36
The minor city of Weimar lies 140 miles south of Berlin. It is in Thüringen, one of Germany’s least populous states. Even in Thüringen, there are half a dozen cities larger than Weimar; it has only around 60,000 inhabitants. In the early 1980s, it was a sleepy East German hamlet, soot-covered and gray.
Weimar may have been a provincial backwater, but it, too, had seen punk infest the local youth scene. There was something about the rush of rebellion—it was fun to provoke. Still, being a punk in a place like Weimar was seriously tough. In small towns, the police often knew kids’ parents, and for kids who stuck out, there just wasn’t enough space to be able to disappear the way you could in Berlin or Leipzig.
That didn’t stop a group of six Weimar teens from carrying out a daring protest in the fall of 1983.
One of them was Grit Ferber, who had bright dyed-red hair and black fingernails. Grit was waifish and breezily social, quick to laugh and just as quick to make a smart-ass comment. Grit’s problems with authority had started when she was thirteen, when she had dared to question her mandatory membership in a German–Soviet Friendship Society. Up to then she’d been a good little girl, and was in fact the officially recognized “spokesman” of her middle school class. Her grades were good, too: out of ninety kids in her middle school class, only the top three were chosen to enter a university-track high school—and Grit was one of them. But there she had continued to ask questions. She’d been brought up by her parents—a nurse and an engineer—to speak her mind, to say what she thought, but now that Grit had different thoughts, nobody wanted her to open her mouth.
Grit had fallen in with a group of black-clad punk friends: Holm, Andreas, Ulrich, Jörn, and Thomas Onisseit, whose older brother, Jürgen, played in a local punk band. Though none of them was religious, they’d met at church gatherings—gatherings that included music, cigarettes, and enough rotgut wine to get a buzz on.
In December 1981, most of the kids from the church group had attended the first real punk concert in the state of Thüringen, a performance by three bands in the crumbling Johannes-Lang-Haus, a church hall in Erfurt. One of the bands was Schleim-Keim, who blew the roof off the place. Almost literally. The local minister sweated and pleaded with the crowd to stop pogoing because he feared the ceiling might collapse. The Weimar teens had never seen or heard anything like Schleim-Keim’s Otze: wearing his eat shit T-shirt, Otze played drums, spat, and barked insanely hostile lyrics about spies and cops with an incandescent rage that ignited the church hall.
The group of friends began to experience the usual punk problems—aside from constant harassment from the local citizenry, all five of the boys were expelled from school. Grit was allowed to continue, but was ordered to attend a meeting with a school administrator only to walk in and find Stasi men there instead.
“If you continue to do this—” they began. Grit waited for them to say she’d get kicked out of school. But they didn’t. What they said was “—you’ll end up in jail.”
Grit had been slated to graduate in spring of 1983, hoping to go off to university afterward. Instead, she was damned as “politically immature” at her graduation ceremony, called to the podium last, shamed, and then denied entry to university. In the fall of 1983 she began a training program to become a gardener in the city’s cemeteries—it was the only option open to her.
Grit lived a little outside the central part of town, and by 1983, whenever she walked into town she’d be stopped along the way.
“Ah, Frau Ferber, show us your papers, please.”
“Why?” she asked the police officers. “You obviously know who I am.”
Eventually they revoked her national identification card and replaced it with a PM 12. Up to then, neither Grit nor the rest of her friends considered themselves very political. But they started to develop a feeling in their guts that certain things were very wrong with their society, and this feeling slowly morphed into something like political sentiment—the kind of political sentiment most people were afraid to speak aloud.
And so, as the cold of autumn settled on Weimar in 1983, the black-clad gang—Thomas and Ulrich, eighteen years old, Grit, also eighteen, and Jörn, Holm, and Andreas, all still seventeen—began to think about taking action.
All we do at the church meetings is sit around talking. We want to do more than just sit there, talking.
&n
bsp; They all felt that the church groups were doing too little.
Let’s do something concrete, something public.
It’s not like they were trying to destroy the country singlehandedly, but they wanted to push things along, they wanted something to happen. It drove them nuts that everyone complained but never openly. That hypocrisy made Grit and Thomas and the gang sick.
Let’s do something concrete, something public.
Risk assessment fell to Grit. As they sat together and brainstormed things they could do, she would figure out the penalties they might incur if caught.
Hmm, if we do that, we could get five years. We should think it over. Maybe it’s not the best idea.
Then in September 1983, Thomas had brought a new book to share with the group. He’d bought it in a local bookstore. The book, Zürich, Anfang September, was by a Swiss author named Reto Hänny and had originally been published in the West in 1981. The edition Thomas bought had been republished by a DDR press called Volk und Welt. The book told the story of the protests, riots, and police violence that followed the Zurich city government flip-flopping on a pledge to convert a former opera house into a youth center.
Apparently, Thomas had realized, the East German censorship agency saw the story as illustrating the evils of the West. DDR officials had obviously seen it as a chance to show how Western youth were suppressed.
They’re too blind to see any parallels to their own situation.
The rest of the group found the book equally fascinating, and they kept going back to pages about the slogans protesters had spray-painted on walls around Zurich. Then suddenly they realized, We could do the same thing here!
