by Tim Mohr
This was the bleak reality of life while Reagan held the nuclear launch codes.
On June 11, 1987, despite rain, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of West Berlin. Demonstrators torched cars and smashed store windows. Police fought back with tear gas and batons.
“Reagan is a murderer and a fascist!” the demonstrators chanted.
Feelings for Reagan were no warmer in the East.
Kids in the East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would, in fact. For some, this fueled nihilistic feelings—one reason Toster from die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit. Forget changing the world, let’s have a party. To Toster, the posturing, especially from Reagan, was like a pissing contest—but one that affected the whole world. And while Gorbachev had raised hopes a little, the future still looked dim with the tough-talking Reagan in power in the U.S.
On June 12, the day following the protests in West Berlin, Reagan delivered his speech at the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall as a backdrop. Police sealed off the entire Western district of Kreuzberg in order to contain protesters they feared would overwhelm the modest audience assembled at the site of the speech.
In front of the Brandenburg Gate itself, a hand-picked crowd provided a made-for-American-TV audience for the lame-duck, Iran-Contra-scandal-ridden president. Estimates of the crowd size varied, but even the highest estimates were under 50,000. (Kennedy had drawn half a million.) Many of those present had been bused in; many had connections to the Allied military communities. Gorbachev’s star had long since eclipsed Reagan’s in both Germanies, and there was little interest in, or West German media coverage of, the speech.
The previous week, at nearly the same location as Reagan’s speech, David Bowie, the Eurythmics, and Genesis had headlined open-air shows on three successive nights as part of anniversary celebrations. Each night a couple thousand East Germans had tried to approach the Brandenburg Gate from the east in order to hear the music; for Reagan, they didn’t bother.
“Mr. Gorbachev,” Reagan intoned, “tear down this wall,”
And nobody on either side of the Berlin Wall gave a fuck.
51
Two days later, organizers of the Church Conference from Below met in Halle for the last major planning session prior to the event. The group still had no reason to think the church would provide space. The Berliners had determined they would squat Pfingst Church, the old punk hangout in Friedrichshain. It seemed perfect, with an enclosed yard and several useful indoor spaces.
The following week, just days before the official church conference was to kick off, Open Work held one last round of negotiations with church leaders in Berlin. Somehow, in a moment of indiscretion, the name “Pfingst” slipped out of the mouth of one of the Open Work organizers. If anything, though, church leaders seemed relieved—at least they knew that the target wasn’t one of the churches they themselves planned to use as part of the official conference. They decided to take temporary formal control of Pfingst and hand it over to Open Work peaceably to avoid the embarrassment of having it squatted.
Starting on the morning of June 26, 1987, organizers of the Church Conference from Below readied Pfingst, setting up stands and PA systems, loading in supplies for the café and bar. The Church Conference from Below opened its doors at four. Right away, almost a thousand people entered the grounds. The official opening took place two hours later, with a greeting to “friends and foes” and a speech from a young woman who attacked church, state, and party leadership and told participants that the two-day event would demonstrate the need to tackle things from the bottom up, from below.
The number of attendees continued to grow. Friday night, organizers held a general meeting, which was mobbed. Because of the unexpectedly large crowds, the church ended up giving Open Work a second church facility in order to avoid any potential unpleasantness—Galiläa Church, a few blocks away, would absorb overflow and host additional events on Saturday.
On Saturday, the day of the main event, as many as four thousand people were on the grounds of Pfingst Church at any given time. There was dancing and partying and punk rock, but the political impact was real: thousands of people had participated in the various workshops and discussions, with some individual events drawing huge crowds—Saturday night’s general meeting attracted one thousand four hundred participants, for instance.
A government report offered a sneering description of the meetings as “completely chaotic, almost anarchic.” There was no leadership, everyone lobbed criticism, and the working principle was described as “democratic.” This last word reads in the report like an epithet, a curse. Democracy, the lowest of the low.
In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, June 28, 1987, Dirk Moldt’s work was finally done as the Saturday night revelry wound down. Millionaire Moldt stashed a denim sack filled with over 15,000 marks in notes and coins earned from concessions, and then went to savor a few drinks and bask in the sense of accomplishment as volunteers on the cleaning crew began to tidy up.
Overall attendance at the anticonference had surpassed six thousand, tripling expectations.
Six thousand!
It had been a smashing success.
Organizers who had been in a state of despair over Open Work’s prospects prior to the conference suddenly had a euphoric sense of purpose and solidarity, even a feeling of power. The momentum was not fleeting, either, as the Church Conference from Below led immediately to the founding of a permanent Church from Below, replacing Open Work in Berlin and becoming an umbrella that fostered collaboration among disparate groups—from punks to peaceniks, from the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights to the Environmental Library, from teenage miscreants to aging freaks.
The Church from Below saw the causes of the various groups as interrelated: when you talked about peace you couldn’t ignore human rights or environmental issues, or the structure of society for that matter. It wasn’t about one or the other, it was about all of it at the same time. It wasn’t about reform, it was about wholesale change. Destroy what’s destroying you. The Church from Below reflected the aggressiveness and unconventional style of a punk-inflected organization—in fact, A-Micha and Kaiser advised the Church from Below on how to organize itself, based on their experience in Erlöser.
From then on the Church from Below held general meetings every two to three months, enabling them to maintain active contacts nationwide. The Church from Below created a deep and extensive root structure for whatever was going to grow out of the underground. And as the Stasi began to pay more and more attention to the new network, they made the same mistake they had when trying to break up the punk scene a few years before: they sought to identify leaders and focus on undermining them. The Stasi assumed every organization had a top-down structure like the Stasi, like the Party, like the dictatorship. But the Church from Below did in fact run democratically, even radically democratically.
Under the banner of the Church from Below, Dirk Moldt and the rest of the punks and anarcho-freaks of Open Work felt confident they would now get a building in Berlin. And they were right: a few months later, they signed a contract to take over part of a freestanding parish hall on the grounds of St. Elisabeth Church, a half-destroyed neoclassical gem on Invalidenstrasse in Mitte, originally built in 1835 by the famous Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. It took more than a year for all the details to be worked out, but the Church from Below now knew they would have a home base.
Everything had turned out better than in their wildest dreams.
Stasi observers later wrote about the hundreds of punks at the Church Conference from Below—about the way the atmosphere had taken on a particularly “provocative” tone during the hours of “aggressive” punk music. Antitrott, L’Attentat, Kein Talent, Namenlos, and the other bands had people making “wild rhythmic movements.” The observers also tried to dismiss
the punks as “primitive” and nothing more than a source of irritation at the conference. Reports mentioned their hard drinking and drunkenness, their sneaking of liquor into the event to supplement the beer on hand, and a few of them passing out in the yard. It’s true, many punks liked nothing more than to get wasted. But the punks were not a homogenous group, and many among them had played key roles throughout; they were an integral part of the event’s success. Government observers also commented on the way punks yelled at Western journalists who tried to take photos of them or interview them. This did not fit with the party dogma that problematic youth cultures like punk were Western-oriented.
What the government observers failed to realize was that the entire joint had been an iteration of punk; punk wasn’t music or clothing or novelty haircuts, it was revolution from below, it was creating your own reality, it was action, DIY, it was wresting control of a building and throwing a radically anti-government circus in the middle of the celebration of the city’s 750th anniversary, during a carefully choreographed national church conference, in the capital of a dictatorship.
That was punk.
Don’t die in the waiting room of the future.
52
One common question during the Church Conference from Below had been: What next?
The short answer: a hell of a lot.
The next two years would be a flat-out sprint to the finish, with a new structure to help direct punk energy back onto the streets and ultimately down into the foundations of DDR society, shaking it deeply enough to be felt by ordinary citizens, betraying the inherent unsteadiness masked by the outward appearance of stability and strength and power.
But first, there was a reckoning to be had inside the punk scene.
The year 1987 marked the final, definitive break between punks and skinheads. The most dramatic manifestation of that break came on October 17, 1987, during a concert at Zion Church.
Stasi files had discussed skinheads and neo-Nazism in East Berlin as early as 1983, and the authorities had tried to smear DDR punks as harboring fascist tendencies. But once the smear tactics against punks proved ineffective, they seemed to have tried to convince themselves that neo-Nazism was a Western problem. A book published in 1985 by a government-approved journalist, for example, highlighted neo-Nazism’s association with Western pop culture: the book described David Bowie calling Adolf Hitler “the first superstar” and reported on Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart’s support for xenophobic British politician Enoch Powell, as well as Clapton’s racist on-stage tirades against “coons” and “wogs.” It was a logical approach. After all, according to official dogma, Nazism was a symptom of capitalism, a product of capitalist society, and as a result could not exist in the communist DDR.
It’s true that shaved heads had been part of the punk scene almost from the start. Some committed anarchists also shaved their heads—Stracke, the singer of L’Attentat, had been a skinhead, for instance. In the early years, a shaved head was mostly a mark of someone who liked to fight rather than an expression of a political identity. They were thrill-seekers and button-pushers, but not Nazis. That would change.
Within the Erlöser gang, too, there had always been skinheads, including a group called the Ostkreuz crew, who hung out at a bar near Erlöser Church. As far as the other punks were concerned, some of them were okay. But others had begun to drift to the right, politically—they were, for instance, the only group calling for unification of the two Germanies before the fall of the Wall. The politically attuned punks found these attitudes totally unacceptable.
Several of the leaders of the Ostkreuz skinheads, including Jens Uwe Vogt and Sven Ebert, had grown up with Pankow and were friendly with many other first-generation punks—they had been punks themselves. In fact, almost all of the first-generation skinheads started out in the punk scene. As trouble began to brew, A-Micha was charged with shadowing Sven Ebert and Ebert’s brother, Pogo-Bear, whenever the Ostkreuz crew showed up at Erlöser. A-Micha didn’t consider either of them racists, it was more that Ebert had a kind of sickness—he just needed to fight—and Pogo-Bear always had his back.
One night a young skinhead turned up at the Profikeller in a T-shirt that said fuck white power. Unfortunately, the word fuck was hard to read.
A-Micha took a quick glance at the shirt, walked right up to the guy and leveled him with a knockout punch. When the skin woke up, he was pissed off—the shirt said fuck white power!
“Write it more clearly next time,” growled A-Micha.
Skinheads continued to create more and more trouble at Profikeller events. They would profile out-of-town punks, waiting for them to leave the church grounds before viciously attacking them en masse. After one violence-plagued night, the Profikeller punks gathered to decide how to deal with the problem—they wanted to make sure people felt safe coming to concerts, discussion groups, and other events. They decided to make a statement at the next concert. They arranged for the drummer of a band playing the show to give a sign, at which point A-Micha, Herne, and others jumped the skinheads they deemed the most problematic, jumped them the same way the skinheads had been jumping isolated out-of-towners.
We will do what we have to do.
The fight at the Profikeller did not take care of the problem for long. Neo-Nazism was spreading and the punks wanted to fight back. Speiche had gone so far as to start an Antifa group at Zion Church. Disagreements over tactics—there was a lot of resistance to violence, whereas Speiche had been fighting on an almost daily basis for years—led to the quick demise of the group. But an Antifa group did take off under the auspices of the new Church from Below. Soon Speiche had a sort of paramilitary troupe—armed only with their fists—that went out hunting for Nazi skinheads to beat the shit out of them.
Still the problem persisted.
In an Interior Ministry memo, the East German government seemed to think the turning point had been in 1986, when skinheads and soccer hooligans had started to openly show fascist tendencies. A report from late 1987 estimated the national skinhead contingent at 800, which represented massive growth in the space of just one year: Berlin alone now had 350 skins, versus 80 the year before and 50 in 1985. An additional 120 skinheads resided in nearby Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin.
A-Micha, Pankow, and Speiche began to discuss the neo-Nazi problem with Deacon Lorenz Postler, who was still in essence the sponsor of the punks at Erlöser Church. Postler didn’t want to exclude the skinheads—he took the idea of Open Work quite literally and had no desire to narrow the scope of operations at the church. A-Micha, Pankow, and Speiche vehemently disagreed. And after another series of violent disturbances at the Profikeller, they decided to take things into their own hands in the fall of 1987.
This had to be settled.
Pankow and A-Micha decided to go into the belly of the beast—to go to Hackepeter bar, the homebase of the Ostkreuz skinheads, and try to hash out some kind of understanding with the leaders. After all, these guys were old friends of theirs from the early punk days. But once they sat down and started to talk, Pankow and A-Micha quickly realized the futility of their mission. For one thing, the older skins were surrounded by much younger skinheads—and this new generation of skins had no history with punks. Or rather, no history beyond hatred, beyond seeing them as political enemies, as no better than the disheveled, smelly, useless hippies they also hated. There was no longer any sense of mutual respect, however grudging, and the conversation quickly soured, with the older skinheads making sarcastic comments toward the punks, trying to save face with the younger skins in the room. Sitting face to face with a couple of old punks was now an embarrassment. Punks were the enemy—or at least one of the enemies. In the end, Pankow and A-Micha counted themselves lucky to be able to leave unharmed.
Not long afterward, word came: the Ostkreuz skins had had it, no more talk and no more bullshit. We are going to beat your ass.
The Erlöser gang sent back their own message: Bring it.
They s
et a date for a straight-up rumble: Saturday, October 17, 1987.
On the assigned day, the core of the old Erlöser punks assembled ready for battle, waiting at the Profikeller with weapons, including bats and chains, and expecting an all-out war.
But on that same night, Zion Church hosted a huge concert in the main sanctuary. Dirk Moldt and Silvio Meier of the Church from Below had managed to get a popular new wave band from West Berlin, Element of Crime, to headline a show. The pair also grudgingly arranged for the DDR band die Firma to open the show—the band was not well-liked in punk circles, but die Firma had good-quality gear that both bands could use, so Element of Crime could cross the border as normal tourists, with no equipment. The Stasi found out about the show beforehand—both vocalists in die Firma were Stasi snitches—but they did not stop it.
Two thousand people had gathered by seven thirty in the evening, when die Firma started their set. Paul Landers of Feeling B was now playing guitar in die Firma as well; he was a restless musical soul and in addition to Feeling B and die Firma he also played in several side projects—one was an improvisational gypsy-punk kind of thing called Tacheles, and he and Flake had another called Magdalene Keibel Combo, a pun on the addresses of the Stasi headquarters at Magdelenenstrasse and the Keibelstrasse detention center near Alexanderplatz where punks were often taken.
About a mile away, on Greifswalder Strasse, skinheads from all over town—including a few from West Berlin—had gathered at a bar called Sputnik to celebrate the birthday of one of their members. They had spent the afternoon drinking, interrupted briefly for a skirmish with some soccer fans from Leipzig. That’s really what most of the skinheads were: soccer hooligans, followers of East Berlin’s BFC Dynamo, which was, ironically, the factory team of the Stasi. Despite official denials of the existence of neo-Nazis in the DDR, many high-ranking Stasi apparatchiks—including Stasi chief Erich Mielke himself—had in recent years been directly confronted at BFC matches with skinheads, their fascist and antisemitic chants, and even Nazi salutes.
