by Tim Mohr
As the party raged on, Ostkreuz skin leader Sven Ebert wanted to head for Erlöser to settle the score with the punks, as originally planned. But others, including Jens Uwe Vogt and another leader, Ronny Busse, persuaded a group to take a tram to Zion Church, which was nearer anyway, where they could make trouble at the concert instead. So as Pankow and Herne and others waited in the Profikeller for the showdown that never came, a horde of about thirty skinheads headed towards Zion Church. They had no idea of the scale of the concert—they figured if there were two hundred people there, the thirty of them would be plenty to do some damage and keep one another protected.
Element of Crime played their final song around ten. People started to stream out of the church into the dark night. The band’s music—melancholic, mid-tempo, almost chanson-like—wasn’t the sort of thing that left an audience jacked up. Some groups lingered inside the church, some gathered to chat in front of the church, and others left the church and wandered toward the nearby tram stop.
The skinheads came out of the tram just as the first concert guests reached the stop. A small group of them attacked concertgoers on the street, pouncing on them from the steps of the tram. Most of the skins ran straight for the church. Some engaged people outside while others continued into the sanctuary, where they started punching the first people they encountered while shouting things like “Sieg Heil,” “Heil Hitler,” and “Judenschweine,” which translates as “Jewish pigs.”
At first, absolute shock paralyzed the concert crowd.
Screaming, running.
Panic.
But there were still hundreds of concertgoers in the church, including some punks, who started to fight back. Eventually the concertgoers surrounded the skinheads and started chanting “Nazis raus,” or “Get out, Nazis,” and—led by fist-flinging punks, including members of Antitrott—converged on the skinheads. Eventually the skins were able to retreat back outside, into the dark, where other skinheads were still involved in brawls with other concertgoers.
People outside screamed for help from police. There was no need to call them—a concert like this, with Stasi foreknowledge, attracted a huge police presence. Squad cars were parked all around the church. Uniformed and plainclothes officers stood around, along with conspicuously inconspicuous Stasi operatives. There was even an ambulance nearby, at the ready.
At 10:22 p.m., an emergency call went out to headquarters from police stationed around the church.
The response from headquarters: No intervention necessary. Reinforcements on the way.
None of the police did a thing. None of them reacted. The law enforcement officers of this officially anti-fascist state stood by as skinheads shouted Nazi slogans and pummeled people on the street.
Several truckloads of reinforcements arrived. They, too, did nothing.
Eventually the skinheads made off in a tram.
The East German media reported on the incident but insisted the attack had been engineered by forces from the West. East Berlin skinheads read the articles, met in a bar, and decided to blame the entire thing on a phantom West Berlin skinhead they called “Bomber.” In the case of interrogations, everyone agreed to say it was his idea, he had led the charge. Even if he did not exist and the idea was all their own. For its part, the government was happy for Zion Church to come under attack—it turned out, in fact, that at the time of the skinhead attack the Stasi was already planning a tactical operation to bust up the Environmental Library. The government would be all too glad to shift the blame across the Wall and sweep the whole thing under the rug.
But Zion Church activists had other plans. Using connections to Western media—which, unlike the Church from Below, the Environmental Library cultivated—they were able to ensure that West Berlin radio reported on the skinheads and their use of Nazi slogans and on police indifference. A few weeks later, Media Siggi was even able to get video footage of East Berlin skinheads talking about their views—making sure to show Trabants and other signs of the East in the background but never showing the skins’ faces—and then smuggle it across for broadcast on a national news show on West German TV.
That there were Nazi-sympathizing skinheads in the DDR was not news to Eastern authorities. They had interrogated skinheads in the wake of the attack on the church. Take this November 20, 1987, interrogation for example:
Stasi officer: What do you know about skinheads?
Skin: I can address that by saying that I myself am a skinhead. I consider myself part of the group known as ‘neo-Nazis’ . . . The group that I’m part of glorifies fascism the way it reigned during the Third Reich, under Adolf Hitler. I’m against foreigners . . . they should go back to where they came from . . . I’m also for concentration camps. Because I think then we wouldn’t have problems like AIDS. I’m also against punks and the skinheads who are in favor of anarchy.
Now, though, the idea that the West had become aware of neo-Nazis in the DDR—complete with video footage—sent shockwaves through the dictatorship. Shame proved an effective motivator. In late November, Ronny Busse, Sven Ebert, and two other skinheads deemed the ringleaders of the attack on Zion were put on trial. Although witnesses used words like neo-Nazis and Faschos, the political component of the attack was cast aside for the purposes of the court. Sentences ranged from one to two years for simple hooliganism. After protests on both sides of the Wall, as well as the personal involvement of dictator Erich Honecker, Ronny’s sentence was doubled to four years.
Still, something was very wrong with this picture. First, representatives of the officially anti-Nazi state had stood by as Nazis drew blood in a church while shouting things like “Heil Hitler.” Then they had dragged their feet on charging anyone. Then the political aspects of the case were papered over.
Had the whole thing been a setup? Were the skins working for the Stasi?
The punks’ suspicions that the whole thing had been orchestrated by the state were finally confirmed, at least in their eyes, in the early hours of November 25—that’s when the Stasi entered Zion Church and raided the Environmental Library.
So that was it, the thinking went, it had been a dress rehearsal, a test run.
The war games were over.
Now came the war.
53
By late 1987 the basement of Zion Church held the printing press used for three separate officially unsanctioned publications: the Environmental Library’s Umweltblätter, the mOAning Star—at least sometimes—and, as of only recently, Grenzfall, put out by the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights. Both the mOANing Star and Umweltblätter were technically legal due to the fig leaf provided by the stamp that designated the newsletters “for internal church use only.” Grenzfall, however, was illegal: the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights insisted on asserting the right to freedom of expression that was enshrined—at least on paper—in the laws of the DDR.
The dictatorship did not exactly follow the letter of the law when it came to freedom of expression.
In the fall of 1987, the Stasi began to plan “Aktion Falle,” an operation aimed at crushing Grenzfall and, they hoped, criminalizing the Environmental Library in the process. In order to accomplish these dual goals, the Stasi needed to catch activists red-handed printing the illegal Grenzfall in Zion Church. The Stasi had made it obvious to the Grenzfall editorial staff that they were being followed and surveilled—which made them nervous about where to print the paper going forward. Then, at the behest of his handlers, a Stasi IM on the Grenzfall editorial staff suggested they print the paper at the Environmental Library in Zion Church—that seemed like a safe place, after all, inaccessible to the Stasi and police. The rest of the staff agreed this was a good idea. After the Environmental Library also agreed, Grenzfall set up in a storage room in the basement of Zion.
Now the Stasi had everything lined up for their sting.
Through the same snitch, the Stasi was informed that the latest edition of Grenzfall would be printed by Environmental Library activists during
the night of November 24, 1987.
Perfect.
At precisely midnight—0:00 on November 25—a ten-man commando team stormed Zion Church together with a state’s attorney ready to write up charges.
“Hands up!” they shouted.
They ordered the seven activists to line up against the wall and searched them for weapons.
It was the first time uniformed security personnel had forcibly entered a church since the Stalinist era.
At first the Stasi commandos thought they had found what they were looking for: the activists were indeed printing a paper. But it was the wrong paper. They were printing the Umweltblätter. It turned out that the duplication of Grenzfall had been pushed back a few hours and wouldn’t have started until the morning.
Chaos ensued.
The Stasi commando rousted the minister of the church, Hans Simon, from bed. He and his wife had to dress in front of Stasi officers. Upon his arrival at the church, Simon was handed an asset seizure warrant and watched as officers confiscated the copies of the Umweltblätter and all of the printing equipment. They also arrested the seven activists, including one who was just fourteen.
By the next morning, the Environmental Library had sprung into action, which as usual included notifying contacts in the West. Meanwhile the Church from Below rallied support for a demonstration, quickly getting its young membership out in force. The first protesters gathered in front of Zion Church at three in the afternoon on November 25. Several were arrested. The crowd, by now several hundred strong, moved inside the church, which was at this point surrounded by police and Stasi officers. The protesters resolved to hold a vigil until three demands were met: the release of the detainees, the return of all the equipment and restoration of the capabilities of the Environmental Library, and an end to state repression of critical voices.
By nine that night, five of the seven detainees had been released—though not before their apartments had been searched. Two remained in custody, having been transported to the main Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen.
The protests continued.
At 10:30 p.m., police pulled up in military-style transports and carted off the first people who tried once again to take the vigil outside the church. The remaining protesters moved back inside. More people showed up over the course of the night and the next day.
Late in the afternoon on November 26, the people arrested at the vigil the previous night were released. The two original detainees remained in prison.
By then, many known enemies of the state all around the country had been rounded up for detention and interrogation in order to try to hinder sympathy protests outside Berlin. Protests sprang up anyway in cities and towns all over the DDR.
Back in Berlin on the morning of November 27, punks scaled the bell tower at Zion Church and hung a massive banner for all to see. They had smuggled it into the church—through the police lines—the day before. One of them had wrapped it around his body underneath his clothes. Hand-painted across the twelve-foot-wide cloth, it said, in German: We protest the arrests and confiscations in the Environmental Library. Western media teams rolled their cameras as a fire truck pulled up to the church and extended a long ladder toward the tower. A man climbed the ladder and carefully made his way across a ledge to pull down the banner.
Official East German media coverage of the incident purposefully conflated Grenzfall and the Umweltblätter, referring simply to the printing of “hostile” publications. Official media also tried to lump together the environmental activists and the skinheads who had been arrested after attacking the same church the month before—bad apples one and all, enemies of the state. The Church from Below in particular took this as a grave insult, since they had Antifa groups out hunting down Nazis on the street. The bruises on Speiche’s knuckles disproved any attempts at equivocation on that front.
But in the end it didn’t matter what the East German press said. The final two detainees were released on the morning of November 28, and protests continued for several more days until it appeared the library’s equipment would also be returned.
The Stasi had committed a colossal error in judgment. The uproar over the raid and the apparent success of the vigils fanned the flames of the resistance. Seventeen environmental and peace libraries soon opened in churches across the country—seventeen!—in big cities like Dresden, Jena, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and Leipzig, as well as smaller towns in the hinterlands.
Not only had the Stasi failed to eliminate Grenzfall and criminalize the Environmental Library, they had actually created a victory for the opposition. They had backtracked in the face of public pressure. That was a dangerous lesson to teach a bunch of aggressive young people whose confidence seemed to be growing every day.
We are the people, we are the power!
54
By late 1987, A-Micha’s band Namenlos was in complete disarray.
Jana, the singer, had given birth to their son in 1986 and gradually withdrawn from the band. Kaiser had been chatted up on Alexanderplatz by an Italian woman and ended up falling in love and emigrating. Mita had shifted gears, concentrating more on visual art and other sorts of music; she quit the band.
But A-Micha did not stop, would not stop. Namenlos chugged forward.
Pankow, who had taken up the drums in Fatale, sat in for Mita for some Namenlos gigs in 1987. Fatale had lost steam, too, and Pankow now spent most of his time working with groups outside Erlöser rather than in punk music circles. He still went to shows at Profikeller, but he also worked with Bärbel Bohley and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights; he worked with Media Siggi and Carlo Jordan at the Environmental Library; he worked with several other groups devoted to causes such as peace activism, liaising with Poland, and objecting to military service and paramilitary training. He could barely contain his contempt for the endless blathering that went on within many of these groups—he and Speiche often sat at meetings and joked bitterly about their all-talk, no-action approach. Yet he still worked with them, still participated in protests, and still gave lectures on topics like how to reject army service.
By that point Pankow was able to get by making and selling clothes. Along with people like Esther Friedemann, he was part of a sort of underground fashion clique. Pankow had even toured with Feeling B: selling clothes at their shows proved good business even if most Erlöser punks considered bands with amateur licenses turncoats. On paper Pankow worked for a writer named Elke Erb, who, as an independent worker, was allowed to hire an assistant. Erb was a member of an official writers union but had frequent conflicts with the government due to her ties to the older generation of peace activists. She had very little money; in fact, in exchange for receiving a legal job slot, Pankow actually helped support her.
Pankow didn’t last long in Namenlos—he seemed to be losing his urge to make music. He had never really considered himself a musician anyway; the music had been primarily a way to amplify his rage. Eventually Markus Mathyl from the band Virus X took over on drums and, for a time at least, a woman who went by the nom-de-punk Nina became Namenlos’s bassist.
The biggest hole to fill was on vocals. A-Micha had always sung on some songs, but without Jana the band wasn’t the same. Jana had been an absolute terror on stage.
In November 1987, Herne and A-Micha’s Polish contacts hatched an idea to deepen ties between the two communties: a joint tour of Polish and East German punk bands barnstorming across Poland. Starting earlier that same year, environmental groups in Poland had been permitted to operate openly, and Solidarity was making impressive headway; the Polish dictatorship would back down and make concessions to Solidarity’s demands less than a year later, in late 1988. Polish punks were feeling it.
A-Micha combined forces with another band whose lineup was in flux: Kein Talent. Their guitarist had recently left the country, leaving bassist Boris and vocalist Cabi looking for a new opportunity. Together, A-Micha, Cabi, Boris, and drummer Markus hit the road as Namenlos/Kein Talent. They also took
along Boris’s other band, Wartburgs für Walter, a new entity formed from the ashes of Antitrott—whose biggest gig, at the Church Conference from Below, had also been their last. Antitrott bassist Jörn Schulz formed Wartburgs für Walter with vocalist Ina Pallas—the couple had been living together in various squats since Jörn moved to Berlin—along with Boris, playing his original instrument, guitar.
The bands crossed the border at Görlitz, armed with visas arranged by Herne and A-Micha—the fake Polish cousins system—and were picked up in Zgorzelec, on the Polish side of the border, where Herne had close friends. Everything went as arranged—Polish punks had a tight network. In part this was because the Polish government did not have the option of expatriating their headaches. Whereas the underground was constantly thinned by expatriation in East Germany, in Poland everyone had to stay in the country. Jörn was struck by one solution the Poles had found that was different from the punk squats in the DDR: communes. Everywhere, little communes.
The first night the bands were fed at the home of a Zgorzelec punk, where they also crashed. The next day they went to a club. A proper concert venue. The bands even got a soundcheck. Polish university students also maintained an extremely well organized network, and they could put on punk shows in their clubs with none of the strictures enforced in East German youth clubs. For A-Micha and the others, who had all played only in unlicensed bands, this was truly amazing.
Wow.
Polish audiences rarely saw female vocalists, and Cabi—with Namenlos/Kein Talent—and Ina—with Wartburgs für Walter—blew the crowds away. Then at the end of the night, the club manager gave the bands money. It was the first time any of them had been paid to play music. And to top it off, they partied long into the night after the show.
