by Tim Mohr
For Aljoscha, part of the point of any performance was to do something unusual, something jarring even, but always with the aim of instigating fun, of pushing the party along. One night they played naked. Some nights the band distributed balloons filled with jello and told the crowd to throw the balloons at them if they didn’t play well enough. And they never played well enough. They knew it themselves, but they didn’t care. It was all about partying.
The band would spend another summer together on Hiddensee in 1984, again roughing it, selling earrings, and, of course, partying like it was the only thing that mattered in life. And for them, it was. They had succeeded in making it so.
For the next five years Feeling B became the soundtrack to the longest-running party in the DDR.
42
Since the closure of Pfingst Church and the Stasi crackdown in 1983, both the punk community and Berlin’s Open Work had been without a home base.
Thanks to an original punk named Herne, the punks had found a new meeting place at the very end of 1983: Erlöser Church, in Rummelsburg, the spot where Namenlos had played their last gig prior to their arrest.
The space wasn’t in the church itself but down in the basement of a side building at the back of the church grounds, up against the raised S-Bahn tracks, a building that had once housed a small church hospital. And you couldn’t really call it a building. The only thing left of the structure above ground was a brick stoop and the top of the foundation. Everything else had been destroyed during the war. But the cellar, or Keller in German, was still mostly intact. Punks called their damp, musty new subterranean home alternatively the Leichenkeller, which means corpse cellar, or the Profikeller, after the building that had been above it, which was named after a doctor—a Professor Fischer—who had once practiced there. A number of other original punks, including Kaiser from Planlos, whose medical waiver had saved him from being conscripted into the army, began to hang out at the Profikeller.
Herne had been thirteen when he was first drawn to punk, in 1977. He and his brother Mecki, a year and a half older, saw a punk at the school they attended in Köpenick—she was a few years older, with crazy blue hair. They didn’t really get to know her, but they were impressed. Really impressed. She was just so fucking cool.
Her name: Major.
Herne’s first year at the Profikeller, 1984, was a lonely one. His brother was in jail and many of his closest friends were gone. Herne kept the place going with an eye on the eventual return of his friends. He figured the original gang of Berlin punks would be returning en masse by the middle of 1985 after serving in the army or in prison.
While he waited, Herne took to writing letters to any address he could get his hands on that had to do with punk. He sent letters to punk-rock labels in West Germany and Dischord records in Washington, D.C. In many cases, their replies managed to slip through state surveillance of international post and reach Herne.
By far the most important contacts Herne made were to punks in Poland. Again it started by an almost random mailing campaign to punk bands in Warsaw, several of whom wrote back. Because of the Solidarity uprising, it was still illegal for ordinary citizens to travel between the DDR and Poland, but Herne quickly figured a way around the regulations. He registered one of the Warsaw punks as his cousin—there was virtually no way to check the veracity of a claim like that back then—and, as relatives, they were granted visas to visit each other. Soon he had other Erlöser punks also registered as cousins of various Polish counterparts. Polish punks were several steps ahead of the East Germans: the Polish punk band Dezerter, for example, played in front of 20,000 people at the open-air Jarocin festival in Warsaw in 1984, only a year after martial law had been suspended; Karcer would play the main stage at the same festival the following year. The audacity of the Polish punks—and all they were able to get away with—began to exert a major influence on their new friends in East Berlin.
As more of the original punks returned, Herne started to set up shows at the Profikeller on Saturdays. It was a lot of work. Once he had lined up a band, he had to visit band rehearsal spaces around East Berlin in order to collect the instruments and amps he would need. All of this using public transport. And then, of course, he had to get boatloads of beer. But word spread—first in Berlin, then slowly throughout the country—and the concerts eventually became the beacon that had been missing since the closure of Pfingst Church.
One thing he and everyone agreed on at the Profikeller: there would be no bands with Einstufungen. For some Erlöser punks, it was a practical issue: those bands, like Feeling B, had plenty of opportunities to play in other venues, including official youth clubs. For others, it was ideological: no fucking way. Those bands had been co-opted by the same regime that sent A-Micha and Jana and Mita to prison for their lyrics, the same regime that jailed Herne’s brother.
No fucking way.
The moment you permit your thoughts to be censored, you’ve made a compromise—a compromise that is not necessary.
Another original punk who kept the fire burning while the first generation was largely banished from Berlin was Speiche, the willowy kid who had helped spray-paint the phrase overthrow the police state in Grünau back in the day. Speiche was now seemingly everywhere all the time. He was active in Erlöser and in Open Work, and he worked at Zion Church, up on the roof mostly, one of several punks hired as laborers by Carlo Jordan, the environmental activist who lived in the same squat as Aljoscha and who, as a certified engineer, was supervising renovation and upkeep of the church.
Speiche was hyper-social, a hub connecting many people and groups. For that reason, some suspected he might be a Stasi snitch. But this suspicion was also partly a result of the Stasi’s own strategy for dealing with Speiche: unable to turn him, the Stasi tried to burn him. During interrogations of other punks, they planted the idea that Speiche worked for them; they also had snitches spread rumors about him.
Speiche eventually had keys to seven different empty apartments, most deserted by people who had left the country. He held classes in these places, training all sorts of people in self-defense—punks, women’s groups, gay groups, activists and outcasts of all stripes. And as neo-Nazi skinhead violence gradually became more of a problem in coming years, he became a key figure in the organization of Antifa, or Anti-Fascist groups.
Speiche had always had the feeling that he would be willing to give his life for freedom. And even though his dream had been of a peaceful world, a world of brotherhood, where everyone could live their life as they wished and love one another, Speiche—unlike many of the people in the environmental movement, for example, who tended to be older or more hippie-influenced—had no qualms about fighting violence with violence. Especially skinhead violence.
But in 1984 that battle was still mostly in the future.
43
On one of the first days of September, 1984, several months before Namenlos guitarist A-Micha’s prison term was set to end, officials took him out of his cell and drove him to Karl-Marx-Stadt.
He was taken to an office and set in front of a Party official.
“Horschig, Michael.”
“Yes.”
“So, let me see here . . . you wish to leave for the West?”
“What?” said A-Micha.
This must be some kind of trick.
He had never filed an application to vacate his citizenship, to leave.
“No,” he said. “I do not wish to go to the West.”
“What is there for you here?” the official asked A-Micha. “Why don’t you just go to the West?”
A-Micha refused.
On September 4, 1984, he was released from Naumburg Prison.
He was five years into his ten-year countdown to the end of the DDR and he was free again.
Jana, Namenlos’s singer, remained in the women’s prison in Hoheneck. But now that her fiancé was free, A-Micha became her designated visitor. He came to see her and subtly explained what had happened to him.
Two months before her own term was over, they drove her to the same transport point and asked her if she wouldn’t really rather emigrate. Jana vowed to become a good citizen, and said she wanted to marry and have children with A-Micha.
The truth was, they wanted to change their country, not leave it.
I will not let them defeat me.
Upon her release, A-Micha and Jana moved into a squat on Schliemannstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. Mita was living nearby in a place she had squatted on Gleimstrasse.
The punk council—originally formed at Pfingst Church, now based at Erlöser—and Open Work had started to facilitate the squatting of apartments, particularly in the crumbling nineteenth-century buildings of Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain. There were nearly-entire buildings squatted on Lychenerstrasse, Schliemannstrasse, and Dunckerstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, and on Simon-Dach-Strasse in Friedrichshain. The punk network maintained a catalogue of empty apartments various people had spotted, serving as a clearinghouse for would-be squatters and helping them get into the places.
With the loss of monopoly control over housing, and the increase in gray-market economic activity, the dictatorship was slowly losing its ability to define the future.
Almost as soon as Jana was released and reunited with A-Micha, the two of them wanted to put the band back together. They didn’t have any problem with the fact that their original bass player, Frank Masch, had confirmed some song lyrics late in the pretrial detention process—at the end of the day, they all stood behind their songs and their right to sing them. But Frank had applied to emigrate in the meantime, so A-Micha and Jana felt his goals were different from theirs now, and they worried he could end up compromising the band.
Perhaps, they thought, Kaiser from Planlos, whose bandmates were still off at the army, would want to work with Namenlos? Kaiser had spent a lot of 1984 with Mita, the lone member of Namenlos spared a long jail sentence. A-Micha and Jana met up with Kaiser and Mita and asked them. They agreed. They wanted to keep going, to keep making music, to keep fighting.
The building where Jana and A-Micha had squatted housed just one last “normal” person among the punks and freaks: an eighty-two-year-old woman who, mercifully, was hard of hearing. The new band lineup started using an empty apartment in the same building as a rehearsal studio. They checked in with the old woman to make sure it wasn’t going to be a problem.
“Do you hear the music? Does it bother you?”
“Ach nein, all I hear is a bit of a vibration,” she said. “Actually, it’s nice to be able to tell there are other people around.”
Namenlos was back.
Kaiser recognized something in A-Micha when he came out of prison: A-Micha was interested in music and playing in the band and all, but at the end of the day it almost didn’t matter to him any more what he was doing as long as it was fighting the system. A-Micha could just as well have organized an army. In fact that might have been more to his liking. For A-Micha, this was a war. And he would never stop fighting. Never.
He would also never contemplate playing footsie with the government the way Feeling B was and others soon would be. As he saw it, the government had tried to kill the scene with repression and infiltration; when that tactic appeared destined to fail, the government added another strategy—integration, co-opting the scene by creating wiggle room within the amateur band license system. There wasn’t enough wiggle room in the whole of the DDR to incorporate A-Micha’s rage.
A-Micha started hanging out at Erlöser Church, too. Alarmed Stasi reports, which included information provided by several snitches planted in punk circles, document the activities “Anarchie-Micha” undertook in the Profikeller: he organized an anarchist circle, an environmental discussion group, a group to study history. He held lectures on the Makhno Movement, an anarchist insurrection of farmers and laborers in the Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno that, during the Russian Revolution, amassed a militia of 100,000 infantry and cavalry and established an independent anarchist society before being violently suppressed by the Red Army.
The tenor of things at Erlöser Church changed with A-Micha’s return. What had been a loosely organized bunch of punks mostly getting drunk and hanging out in a basement became highly organized and highly active. The government also regarded it as highly threatening: A-Micha’s Stasi file, titled Schwarz or black, was administered by the specialized counterterrorism branch of Abteilung XX, the AG XXII. A-Micha was seen by the dictatorship as a terrorist, just as he had predicted in his song “Der Exzess.”
Namenlos made a triumphant return to Halle’s Christus Church in December 1984, playing to hundreds alongside Otze and Schleim-Keim, Paranoia from Dresden, and the Berlin band Betonromantik, at a two-day oppositional workshop. Jana was a little fearful of singing the lyrics that had sent them to prison—she was on probation for two years after her release and could have been tossed back into the slammer at the drop of a hat. Fortunately everybody knew their songs and the entire crowd sang the lyrics, a rough-hewn chorus growling and howling about Nazis in East Berlin. This led to one of the first brawls between punks and skinheads, who made up a small portion of the audience. Most DDR skinheads had started out as punks and still had connections to the scene; they were drawn to the shaved-head look because in some ways it was even more provocative than a Mohawk. As the decade wore on, the skinhead scene began to evolve from a bunch of thrill-seeking brawlers into actual neo-Nazis. At that December 1984 concert in Halle, for instance, some skinheads wore white power patches. The fistfights in Halle hinted at the future—to an eventual break between the punks and skins, a break fraught with violence and at least one murder.
Namenlos began to play regularly at events set up by any and all of the oppositional political groups, whose ranks were now heavily stocked with young punks. The band got people dancing wildly, pogoing, every jump and stomp and lurch a blow to the regime and its increasingly futile attempts to control every facet of life.
44
By the mid-1980s, Open Work in Berlin had become an autonomous, self-governing operation. It was welcoming to people who didn’t necessarily consider themselves punk when it came to fashion or music, though most of the participants subscribed to a similar anarcho-punk philosophy, whether or not they wore Mohawks.
The problem in Berlin was that while punks now had a place to hang out—the Profikeller—Open Work still had no permanent home in the city. Pfingst had wanted to get rid of the punks, but condemning the bell tower apartment had ended Open Work altogether.
With the new level of organization and activity that came with the return of A-Micha and others, Erlöser-based activists built bridges to other groups throughout the city and the rest of the country—peace groups, environmental groups, and rights groups, as well as Open Work communities in other cities—and pushed for a new, permanent home for Open Work in Berlin.
What the Berlin chapter of Open Work wanted: a church building with an intact roof where they could pursue their mission of serving the city’s outsider community and fighting the society that created outsiders. They wanted a building that would be open every day, with room enough for concerts, workshops, and parties.
What the Berlin chapter of Open Work had: an infrequent café night featuring readings, discussions, and exhibitions in the punks’ cellar on the grounds of Erlöser church, and very infrequent larger-scale events on the side—like a two-day political workshop and punk music festival in October 1984.
Then, in September 1985, Open Work convened a general meeting in a rented church space. At that meeting, attended by nearly two hundred people, the idea of squatting a church first started to percolate. Squatting was by now such a normal part of how the underground operated that it seemed only natural to solve another space issue by simply grabbing it, carving it out, making it theirs.
Action.
Still, it initially looked as if squatting might not be necessary. For one thing, there were a lot of empty church buildings i
n Berlin. For another, the large number of people who turned up for the general meeting seemed to give Open Work leverage. So representatives of the Open Work community began to negotiate with church leadership for a home base.
In the rush of enthusiasm that followed, the Erlöser gang was eager to keep people updated on those negotiations. This led in the fall of 1985 to the publication of an underground newspaper—the first such publication in East Germany. Called the mOAning Star, its initial core staff included Kaiser and other first-generation punks. The title combined a reference to a British labor union paper—the Morning Star—with the letters OA, which were the initials of Open Work in German: Offene Arbeit.
Open Work eventually took the strategy of declaring itself a congregation, albeit one made up almost entirely of nonbelievers and governed strictly by direct democracy, with no hierarchy whatsoever. Despite initial optimism that the church would provide a home for the new “congregation,” by the end of 1985 Open Work would be denied space at fourteen different church buildings where it requested access. It galled the activists that Zwingli Church, near Warschauer Strasse S-Bahn station, had recently been ceded to the state library system as an auxiliary storage facility under a ninety-nine-year lease while Open Work couldn’t get space despite their roots within the church.
But the Erlöser crowd didn’t give up easily.
For one thing, they now had their own publication.
When it was first conceived in 1985, the mOAning Star was supposed to function as an in-house info sheet on negotiations for space, and also—since it initially looked like space would be quickly forthcoming—a way to inform readers about the event schedule at the new venue. But as the hunt for space dragged on, the mOAning Star instead became a satirical political newsletter that took pride—punk pride—in being provocative, undiplomatic, and downright disrespectful in its coverage.
