by Tim Mohr
They had tried to reach out to likeminded people in other parts of the country to create a nationwide event of some kind. But that sort of thing was tough with no reliable or secure means of communication. Scattershot word-of-mouth messages made coordinating things with any precision virtually impossible. Who could you trust? But here was something they could do locally, for now, to make a statement at the very least, to move forward, to show up the fangless church groups sitting around talking, talking, talking.
This is it.
This is action.
Public action.
Rummaging through the basements of their apartment buildings, they turned up a few used spray cans. They began making little runs that same month. Different groups of three or four of them went out in the dead of night, wearing gloves. A couple of them sprayed jagged anarchist circle-As here and there as another kept watch. There was never a plan of attack—they just wandered the mute, blackened streets. At the end of each run the sprayers dropped the empty paint cans into the sewer system, taking home no hard evidence of their activities.
The message during those first few weeks was merely implied: We are here, motherfuckers, we are here.
On Thursday, October 6, the eve of the thirty-fourth anniversary of the founding of the DDR, a national day of celebration, of parades and speeches, they set out again to festoon the facades of the city with slogans that would make the following day worth celebrating for them. These would be cries of protest, war cries—even if awkwardly scrawled and dripping.
The six of them crept through the center of town, aimed the spray cans, and left their statements for all to see in lurid orange letters, obscenely slithering, awkwardly scrawled on the walls of this little town:
strike back
be realistic, demand the impossible
defend yourself
active resistance
They also sprayed a word that had already become a sort of shorthand political slogan throughout the East Bloc:
solidarity
It was a great night, full of adventure, punk-rock action, and real rebellion instead of blah blah blah. And, truth be told, they were more than a little proud of themselves. Before they dropped the paint cans into the sewer, they added one last message:
you will never find out who it was
That turned out to be wishful thinking.
The police started hauling people in the next morning, Friday, October 7, the national holiday. The six sprayers’ recent activites were an open secret among their peers. But by Monday, over a hundred people had already been questioned and still nobody had squealed.
As the six sprayers were quietly congratulating themselves at a café on Monday afternoon, their confidence boosted that they would get away with it, everything was about to change for them. But the information that would break the case wasn’t being coerced out of some casual acquaintance of theirs. It came from Jürgen Onisseit, Thomas’s brother. And Jürgen wasn’t at the police station at all. He was in the Stasi’s local headquarters, sitting across the desk from one of their hated operatives. Jürgen was a punk, too, but this was no interrogation. The Stasi man’s face was familiar to Jürgen: he was, in fact, Jürgen’s handler. Jürgen told his Stasi handler that Ulrich and his friends were responsible for the graffiti. He didn’t mention his brother Thomas’s name, but it was obvious Thomas, too, would get caught—he was one of Ulrich’s closest buddies. Afterward Jürgen took a clutch of East German marks and left. It would be many, many years before anyone in the punk scene—or the Onisseit family—realized what Jürgen was: a paid Stasi snitch.
By Monday evening Thomas, Grit, Ulrich, and Holm had all been arrested. They spent the night being interrogated; the next morning they were marched out to an unmarked van with the same six tiny cells inside. They were unable to see each other and ordered not to speak. The van started up and drove around for—who knew how long? They lost all sense of orientation after the first few turns in the windowless van.
Finally the van lurched, made a few tight turns, and stopped.
They had arrived. Somewhere.
Uniformed guards pulled them out one by one, all handcuffed except Grit. This pissed Grit off, since she considered herself every bit as threatening as any of the boys.
The four of them found themselves inside a loading bay of some sort, with the bay doors shut behind the van so they couldn’t see outside at all. They were marched through a door that led from the loading bay into an adjoining building. They were separated.
Grit had to strip. She was given a full body search in a room full of male and female guards.
“Bend over,” they said.
“Spread your legs,” they said.
Her clothes and belongings were taken out of the room.
They presented her with a form to sign—something about wearing institutional clothing. She was still naked.
“I don’t want to sign this,” she said. “Let me have my own clothes back.”
“We’ve got time,” laughed a guard.
She feared that if she had to stand there naked much longer she might start to cry. She didn’t want them to see her cry. She signed the paper and the guards slowly handed her a tracksuit-like prison uniform and a pair of underpants that were far too big for her. She put the clothes on. They marched her to a narrow cell. The first thing she noticed was the window. It consisted of a few opaque glass bricks that let in an anemic trickle of light but didn’t allow her to see out.
Each of the three boys was also given a blue tracksuit and then thrown into an isolation cell before eventually being transferred into cells they shared with two other prisoners.
When Ulrich entered his cell, the two other prisoners asked what he was in for.
“It’s political,” he told them.
“We’re all political prisoners,” said one of his cellmates with a tone that added, you fucking idiot. “This is the Stasi joint.”
So this was Thüringen’s central Stasi prison, in Erfurt. The only contact Ulrich or any of the others would have with the outside world for the next five months would be the sound of the bells of Erfurt’s cathedral.
After five months of incarceration and interrogation during pretrial detention, a trial was held in February 1984. The entire state of Thüringen was on lockdown during their court appearance, with the train stations and city centers of Erfurt and Weimar as well as many small towns heavily patrolled by armed security forces.
It was for all the world like a terrorist trial. The four punks were marched into the building and down the halls through a gauntlet of machine-gun-toting guards. Even in the courtroom itself, guards stood posted with machine guns at the ready.
Thomas, Ulrich, Grit, and Holm were also joined in court by the other two co-conspirators, Jörn and Andreas, who, unbeknownst to the other four, had been arrested in November, a month after the first four.
They’d been told time and time again in prison that they would not get less than a year and a half. But in the end, Thomas and Grit got six months, and Ulrich and Holm were sentenced to five months. The other two defendants, Andreas and Jörn, who’d been arrested a month later and released again in January, got lesser sentences, equal to the time they had already served. They arrived back home after the trial feeling guilty and uncomfortable about their seemingly preferential treatment.
This was a common Stasi tactic—leniency gave off the stench of a dirty deal, of treachery.
Is Jörn an informant?
The suspicion was typically enough to bust up a circle of friends.
Sure enough, Jörn was ostracized from the scene immediately, a situation that did not improve when his former buddies got out of prison. Before long Jörn disappeared to Berlin, slipping off the grid and living illegally in a derelict building in Prenzlauer Berg, among the many punks who had taken up similarly tenuous, invisible lives inside the physical borders of East Germany but somehow outside the DDR.
But there was another consequence of the ordeal: the gang
of Weimar punks weren’t afraid anymore. One of the main sources of fear of the Stasi was the not knowing.
After half a year of prison, they now knew.
And they knew they could endure.
Swooping down on Grit, Thomas, Ulrich, Holm, Andreas, and Jörn in October 1983 was supposed to send a message to the opposition scene. But in the end, because of the resilience of these six punks, the Stasi inadvertently provided the opposite example.
They survived . . .
Why can’t we?
We can.
STRIKE BACK.
We will.
STRIKE BACK.
STRIKE BACK.
STRIKE BACK!
37
Despite the arrests of Namenlos, the implosions of Wutanfall and Planlos, and the other police actions in motion against punks nationwide that fall of 1983, anticipation had still been running high for the second national punk festival, scheduled for October 22 in Halle’s Christus Church. The legend of the first festival, back in April, had spread far and wide in the DDR.
City authorities were determined not to be embarrassed a second time. Siggi, the minister—and enemy of the state—had been leaned on to cancel the event. Church officials had been asked to intervene. All to no avail. Siggi wasn’t backing down, and his congregation wasn’t going to force him to.
Unbeknownst to Siggi, though, the live-in maintenance man at his church had been informing on him. As a result, the Stasi had very detailed information about the planning of this second festival. This time the secret police were determined to smash it.
The Stasi had devoted a major and six underlings to run the operation, in conjunction with the Volkspolizei and the Transport Police. A three-page Stasi memo outlined a nine-point plan to subvert the event, complete with the streets and tunnels they planned to blockade to prevent anyone reaching the church, and the plans for fake speed traps that would be set up along incoming highways to filter out punks.
As October 22 approached, Department XX’s Operation Decadence was well underway.
Once again, the geography room in the school opposite the church had been closed all week. Once again, the pupils had been warned about the enemy of the state operating behind the church walls. This time, in fact, students all over Halle were warned. Of course, for some kids, anything that bothered the authorities that much just had to be cool—whatever the hell was going to happen at Christus Church sounded adventurous and conspiratorial, and it further piqued their interest in punk. In fact, for exactly that reason, hordes of very young teens planned to make their way to the festival, and not just from Halle. They wanted in on the scene and—perhaps—out of society.
On the Thursday before the festival, all known Halle punks and their associates were issued summonses. Those who didn’t accept the invitation to come down to the police station for a chat were picked up and driven there. After they were interrogated, more than a hundred were issued orders not to attend the upcoming “criminal event” at Christus Church. They had to sign papers stating that they would comply with the orders. The major in charge had already cabled Stasi offices in nearby cities and towns like Erfurt and Eisleben and ordered them to undertake similar measures against their own punks, and to hinder any from traveling to Halle.
Otze and Schleim-Keim warranted their own telegram to Erfurt police from the Stasi.
Some concert-goers were clever enough to travel to Halle a day or two in advance, but by Saturday morning, train stations all over the country bristled with extra transport police, all on the lookout for punks. Recognizable punks who showed up in stations in Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and elsewhere were detained and questioned until their trains had departed. Groups were chased from the platforms.
Yet somehow, punks still scurried out of the trains arriving in Halle on Saturday. They had not, however, ever seen the likes of the barriers between the station and Christus Church. Transport cops at the Halle train station were rounding up punks as fast as they could, pushing them back into their train cars until the trains chugged off again. Some groups were accompanied on their trip by an officer who collected all their identification papers and wouldn’t relinquish them again until they were back in their hometowns.
It would get worse.
For out-of-towners who managed to slip the grasp of the transport cops at the train station, the Stasi and police had set up checkpoints on the streets leading from the station to the Christus Church. The side streets were choked with troop transports—the kind used to cart off large numbers of detainees. Baton-wielding cops lined some of the routes to the church; anyone who tried to get through was attacked and beaten.
For locals, the situation wasn’t much easier. Cops occupied public squares in the city and ringed tram and bus stops. In the morning hours leading up to the festival, a few kids who looked “normal” were able to reach the church. Some local punks tried wearing costumes, putting overalls and hats on to try to blend in as ordinary workers of the district. Others took taxis straight to the church gate and managed to avoid getting nabbed. But most either were sent away or faced batons or arrest.
As the festival start time of 1 p.m. approached, even the “normal” kids—not outwardly punk—who tried to get to the church had difficulty. At the tram stops near the church, groups of Stasi officers and cops surrounded any young people who hopped off—Papers, please! Without an address in the immediate area, kids had a choice: leave the area or be arrested.
Groups of punks began straggling into the church. Some were bruised or even dripping with blood. One had grabbed a police officer’s cap as a trophy when he’d braved a line of batons.
Like animals at the slaughterhouse, thought Siggi, surveying the battered teens who had made it into the church.
What amazed him was their reaction. Despite the respect they had shown at the first festival—making sure the organ didn’t get damaged, for instance—he feared they would want to break things after being attacked. But all they wanted to do was dance, to pogo and writhe around—they vented their aggression on the dance floor, while a band thrown together spontaneously from the few musicians who managed to get to the church knocked out some rough chords at breakneck speed.
Though originally Siggi had expected as many as a thousand people, in the end, only about a hundred and fifty people managed to reach the church.
A group of Berliner punks had written a short theater piece about being a punk. Not all the players had reached Halle, but Siggi went onstage and explained the situation. Volunteers came forward to read the roles so the piece could still be performed.
In the opening scene, two punks discussed their troubles with their parents. One said to the other, “But what can you do about it, eh?”
The other replied, “I left home, squatted a place of my own.”
The conversation continued with the two punks bemoaning the way all decisions were made for them. Too much future.
“You’re nothing more than a marionette,” said one.
“I want to live the way I want to live, not the way they have planned for me.”
Later in the play, in a scene set in a squatted apartment, a punk described a recent interrogation: “Same as always, they asked about people I’m supposed to know . . . some punk is supposed to have spray-painted Nazi slogans on a wall.”
Another punk, pissed off, said, “They must be crazy. First we’re not allowed to lay a wreath at the concentration camp, and then we’re supposed to be Nazis.”
In another scene, a punk was stopped by the police, asked for his papers, beaten with a baton, and told he was being taken to jail. When he complained that he hadn’t done anything and that they couldn’t just take him into custody, the cops said, “You’re about to see what all we can do.”
And outside the church that day, the punks really had seen what all the police could do.
The second national punk festival was a bloodbath. But the Stasi’s actions also had a boomerang effect. For many of the younger kids entering the scene
or thinking about it, this was the first time they’d been threatened by the police. And the first time they’d seen cops beat the shit out of other kids. It was the kind of thing that made you question your society in a fundamental way.
One young Halle resident, fourteen at the time and not yet a punk, couldn’t believe what he had witnessed. Putting that kind of effort into preventing music from being played? That’s just crazy.
But that fourteen-year-old knew one thing now: he was going to be a punk.
And he was definitely not alone.
Major, shortly after her expatriation
Private archive of Major Bergmann
Kaiser (left) and Lade (at drums) rehearsing, ca. 1981
Nikolaus Becker/Nikolaus Becker Fotografie
East Berlin punks at Plänterwald, ca. 1981
Harald Hauswald / Ostkreuz Agency
Punks on Alexanderplatz, ca. 1982
SUBstitut Archive
Rosa Extra in Prenzlauer Berg, 1982
Harald Hauswald / Ostkreuz Agency
Keule, Colonel, and Esther Friedemann, ca. 1982
Helga Paris Archive
Hand-printed poster for the first punk festival at Christus Church in Halle, 1983
SUBstitut Archive
Planlos (left to right: Kaiser, Micha Kobs, Lade, Pankow) in Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1983
SUBstitut Archive
Mita Schamal and Jana Schlosser in Leipzig, ca. 1983
Christiane Eisler / Transit Agency
Mita (middle left) and Jana (middle right) of Namenlos, ca. 1983
Christiane Eisler / Transit Agency
Police photo of A-Micha, 1983
SUBstitut Archive
A-Micha (at left) and deacon Lorenz Postler (at right, with beard), 1983
SUBstitut Archive
Mita (left) and Conny Schleime, ca 1982
