by Tim Mohr
58
In an East German government report on the “preliminary findings of youth analysis” dated January 12, 1989, punk was identified by authorities as the top problem. Punks had developed a scene independent of DDR officialdom, including, as the report pointed out, the creation of a gray-market economy as well as communications nodes and a national network to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas. “The Church from Below—with its anarchist mode of operation—has become a catchment basin for these punks,” and the skinhead attack at Zion Church had strengthened ties between punks in various activist groups, increasing the potential scale of activities going forward.
The report said about a hundred of the core members of the “old classic punks from the years 1983/4” who had been expatriated had ended up involved in anarchist and leftist extremist circles in the West, helping punks still in the East cultivate links to those groups in West Berlin and more broadly in West Germany. In the eyes of the East German government, that was a primary source of trouble: the West.
In some ways the authorities’ obsession with the West wasn’t surprising. After all, Siegbert Schefke—Media Siggi, with his recording equipment secretly stashed around town—had been smuggling out audio of oppositional musicians and political activities for broadcast on Radio Glasnost and eventually also video footage for mainstream West German news operations; L’Attentat had released an album in the West, and a compilation of Eastern punk bands had also appeared in the West under the title Live in Paradise DDR, further embarrassing the dictatorship; Stracke and Imad of L’Attentat had written for West German fanzines, bringing more attention; West Berlin bands were sneaking into the East to join concert bills at activist churches and even private parties; printing supplies for the illegal publication of the mOAning Star and Umweltblätter and Grenzfall were seeping in from the West; and the West German media was having a field day covering the ongoing existence of East German neo-Nazis.
The dictatorship was so paranoid about former Eastern punks in West Berlin that the Stasi had continued to secretly monitor the group of Weimar punks who’d been jailed in 1983 for spray-painting graffiti—solidarity, strike back, active resistance—even after they were expatriated following their release from prison; this had led to one of the more bizarre incidents in the history of the Berlin Wall. Thomas Onisseit and his older brother, Jürgen—who, unbeknownst to Thomas and his friends, had gotten them sent to the slammer back in 1983 by snitching to the Stasi—along with a small group of former Weimar punks, had decided at the end of 1986 to paint a white stripe along the entire length of the West side of the Berlin Wall. It could take weeks to complete, but they felt compelled to do it. The Weimar punks hated the way the barrier had become a canvas for self-promotion. Celebrity artist Keith Haring, for example, had recently painted a stretch of the Wall. So on November 3, 1986, five former Weimar punks had put on creepy white masks and begun rolling a simple white line at shoulder height along the west side of the Wall, starting in Kreuzberg. On the second day, a little-known aspect of the Wall had come into play. Not only was the entire Wall itself within the sovereign territory of East Germany, the sovereign territory also extended about ten feet west of the Wall—this allowed for maintenance, for instance. Few West Berliners realized that if they stood at the base of the Wall, they were actually standing in the DDR, despite being on the west side of the divide. On the second day of the white stripe project, as the painters worked their way through Tiergarten, East German border guards had suddenly popped out of a hatch and, standing in what anyone else would have regarded as West Berlin, had pointed machine guns at the painters and shouted, “Hands up or we’ll shoot!” Four of them had fled into the bushes of Tiergarten, but one, Wolfram Hasch, froze. He was dragged back through the hatch, put on trial, and sentenced to more than two years in prison. He missed the birth of his son while sitting in a Stasi cell.
But the East German government was missing the real problem. Outside forces weren’t fomenting dissent. The DDR was burning from the inside.
Not only were Eastern punks not being steered by the West, they were still largely anti-Western. The Church from Below had chastised Samariter Church minister and Blues Mass organizer Rainer Eppelmann for meeting with West German politicians and grandstanding for personal gain. The Church from Below was still stridently opposed to using Western media to advance its goals. Part of the objection was explicitly anti-capitalist: the punks knew Western news organizations leveraged interest in their articles to sell advertisements, and the punks didn’t want their story to become a commodity. But part of it was something else: what they were doing was for themselves, not for international consumption via Western media connections. They also feared—correctly, it turned out—that their motives would be misinterpreted in the West, that they might be seen as anti-communists who wanted German unification, when in fact the only Easterners interested in unification were the neo-Nazis that punks spent a good deal of time and energy combating.
An article in the mOAning Star looking back at the Church from Below’s 1987 alternative Church Conference from Below dripped with sarcasm when addressing the notion that its organizers were Western puppets. “We have to wake up to the fact that we were perhaps being steered by the West—after all, what Easterners took part in the planning? It’s obvious that [West German newspapers] pushed everything along and came up with the flyers . . . It’s still completely unclear whether the Church from Below was set up by the USA or by the western media and its shadowy behind-the-scenes figures or by the USSR and Gorbachev-friendly forces.”
On the surface, the basic situation in the country seemed unchanged. A few days after the January 12 youth analysis report was issued, Erich Honecker made his famous pronouncement affirming that the Berlin Wall would still be standing in fifty or even a hundred years if the reasons for its existence had not yet been vanquished. And on February 5, 1989, a twenty-year-old East German named Chris Gueffroy was shot in the heart while trying to escape over the Wall in Treptow.
Despite those events, and despite a burst of police activity in February when authorities tried to empty several squatted buildings in Friedrichshain, the Church from Below had its collective gaze fixed on the national elections scheduled for May 7, 1989. The Church from Below had finally gotten its safe haven on the grounds of St. Elisabeth Church, but the pace and scale of protests was actually picking up primarily because protesters were abandoning the protective walls of the church and instead taking to the streets. The government might have misplaced the blame but they hadn’t missed all the actions, public actions.
And even as Honecker’s border guards were gunning down Chris Gueffroy—who turned out to be their last victim—the Church from Below was organizing the most audacious and damning public action yet.
59
It’s tempting to think of a dictatorship in simple terms: a government imposed on a populace, one whose rule runs counter to the will of the people. But it’s rarely so simple. The communist party of East Germany always touted its landslide electoral victories—Party garners 99 percent of the vote, again! While such results may have elicited a collective roll of the eyes in the West, what percentage of the vote did the party really receive?
In May 1989, the political opposition in Berlin decided to find out.
Voting in East Germany was not an actual legal obligation but was considered virtually compulsory because of the consequences for not voting—like losing your job. So voter turnout was usually high, helped along by friendly reminders from security organs for those disinclined to vote. The ballots listed the Communist Party alongside a series of nominally different parties that were in fact sister parties affiliated with the Communist Party in a coalition called the National Front. No opposition parties appeared on the ballot.
There were really just two ways to express disaffection with the ruling coalition: one was not to vote. The punks at Erlöser held parties on every election day—revelers were admitted only with an unused vo
ter card, and the parties ended in a bonfire of those cards. The other way to express disaffection was to fill out the ballot in a way that wasn’t an affirmation of the listed parties—like crossing them out. In theory, this could create a gap between the number of voters and the number of votes in favor of the Communist Party and its National Front coalition partners. And still, after every election the Party announced another victory with 99 percent of the vote.
Not surprisingly, elections in East Germany were assumed to be fraudulent above and beyond the system designed to create high voter turnout while offering no choice. But citizens had the right—at least on paper—to monitor the election officials who counted the votes. Activists from a peace group in Samariter Church had made a small-scale attempt to monitor the vote a few years prior. They had stationed their people at eight voting locations near the church and had witnessed in those few locations as many ballots intended as “no” votes as were officially acknowledged in the entire precinct, which included dozens more voting locations. The stories from that limited sample were legendary. One ballot had a big, fat anarchist A scrawled on it. “It could stand for all,” offered a vote counter. Chalk one up for the Party. On another ballot, someone had written, “You’re more idiotic than the Nationalelf,” or the National Eleven—the country’s notoriously unsuccessful national soccer team. “Well, at the very least that’s not a no,” said a vote counter. Chalk up another vote for the Party.
Now, in 1989, the Church from Below and other groups planned not only to monitor the vote-counting at a large number of polling stations but also to educate voters on how to properly cast a no vote with none of the ambiguity of an anarchist A. Already in the lead-up to the election, the Stasi had catalogued more than one hundred incidents of criticism of the vote, mostly attempts to distribute flyers or hang posters. In the run-up to the May elections, the Church from Below held meetings every Wednesday night to clarify how to cast a no vote and explain the legal basis for monitoring the vote and how exactly to exercise it. Loads of young people turned up, many of whom had heard about the effort at concerts either at St. Elisabeth Church or Erlöser.
More and more people seemed interested in doing things, taking action.
Don’t die in the waiting room of the future.
On the day of the election, Sunday, May 7, 1989, hundreds of volunteers headed to the schools, gyms, and municipal buildings that made up the polling locations. Teams of monitors blanketed the stations in three East Berlin districts: Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, and Weissensee, and more limited monitoring took place in Leipzig, Dresden, Erfurt, Rostock, Potsdam, Halle, Magdeburg, Weimar, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Jena, and other cities. In Berlin’s Weissensee, monitors attended 66 of 67 polling stations; in Friedrichshain, 82 of 89; in Prenzlauer Berg, 41 stations, which represented a third of the total.
Once polling stations closed at six on that sunny spring evening, election officials dumped the ballots out on big tables, organized them, examined them, and counted them. There was no attempt to shut out the monitors—in every location, monitors managed to sit by and watch as the votes were counted.
By nine that night, nearly all the monitors in Berlin had taken their results to the Church from Below at St. Elisabeth Church, where hundreds gathered for an election party. According to numbers tallied by the monitors, the Communist Party and its affiliated sister parties had received 85 to 90 percent of the vote at various stations. Of course, the Party and its election commissioner, Egon Krenz—Honecker’s number two and long assumed to be next in line to take over the dictatorship—announced another landslide victory: 98.85 percent of voters had cast their ballots in favor of the ruling party slate. Even if it was only a 10 to 15 percent discrepancy versus the official numbers, the Church from Below now had hard evidence of election fraud.
The repercussions began immediately.
On the night of the elections, the Church from Below’s party evolved into a minor demonstration. Some West German reporters had caught wind of the monitoring effort and attended the party at St. Elisabeth Church; the fraudulent results quickly made their way across town to West German news organizations and made the late news, where it was heard by East Germans tuned to Western stations. Between that and the more limited monitoring in other cities across the DDR, similar demonstrations sprung up all over the country. In Leipzig, a thousand people took to the street. A hundred were arrested and detained overnight.
As West German media reported, East German security forces made “free use of their batons” against protesters in Berlin and other cities, including Leipzig.
The following day, May 8, was the weekly Monday peace prayer at Nikolai Church in Leipzig. Since the dispute over control of the prayer sessions, activists had started gathering outside the church. The shift mirrored Berlin and the Church from Below: the formerly church-based groups had in essence seceded from the church and taken to the streets. Once again Party pressure had backfired, as a prayer session previously cloistered away in the church became a public spectacle, even if it was still small in scale.
On May 8, police ringed demonstrators in front of Nikolai Church in Leipzig, just as they had surrounded about a hundred protesters the week before as they tried to stage an alternative Mayday march on the important labor holiday.
On May 10, the details of the election commission’s counts were published in official Eastern media. Obviously the specific numbers didn’t jibe with the monitors’ figures any more than the initial numbers had. In Prenzlauer Berg, for instance, monitors in just one third of the total polling stations counted 2,659 votes against the ruling party slate; the official tally for the entire district acknowledged just 1,998 against. Fraud. In Friedrichshain, monitors had counted more than three times the number of no votes as officially acknowledged. Fraud. And voter participation numbers appeared cooked, too: in Weissensee, where monitors attended all but one polling station, the government claimed 15,000 more total voters than the 27,680 ballots counted by monitors. Fraud.
Was a dictatorship simply a government imposed on a populace, one whose rule ran counter to the will of the people? Not exactly. Most people actually went along. The vast majority of people, in fact. But the dictatorship had falsified the vote anyway.
The opposition now held proof that elections were a sham.
The regime was going to pay.
60
On May 26, 1989, die Anderen and Feeling B played a concert in West Berlin’s Ecstasy club, in the Schöneberg district. It’s difficult to know for sure why authorities green-lit the gig. Perhaps they hoped the bands wouldn’t come back, that sending them over for a concert was even easier than expatriating them. Perhaps the ministry of culture thought Eastern bands might be able to develop a following in the West and create another source of hard currency for the DDR. Whatever the reason, the ministry had approved one-day visas for the members of Feeling B and die Anderen.
On the day of the show, the bands had traveled together in an official bus, together with a minder from the ministry of culture.
The bus pulled to a stop at the checkpoint at Invalidenstrasse—it was still morning and the bands would have all day in West Berlin.
Toster, the frontman of die Anderen, had never been through a border checkpoint before. He was practically pissing himself with anticipation.
An East German soldier climbed into the bus.
“You got anyone hidden in here?” he asked.
“No, no,” everyone assured the guard. They had all the right paperwork and even a ride-along minder.
The bus continued on, across the death strip and toward the second wall, the one facing the West. With the exception of Aljoscha, none of the members of Feeling B or die Anderen had ever witnessed the scale of the security curtain the East had erected—normally you weren’t permitted to get close to the checkpoints.
Toster experienced an otherworldly feeling—how strange it was to be crossing the border on a bus chartered by the cultural authorities of the DDR rather than
fleeing, as so many others had tried to do.
I can’t believe how easy this is, he thought.
A few yards past the second wall Toster felt overwhelmed.
This was only a few yards from where he had spent his life, and yet here he was in the middle of a totally different world. He thought of all his friends who had left the country in various waves over the past years.
After pulling beyond the checkpoint, the bus drove past the Reichstag—the former capital building next to the Brandenburg Gate. The members of Feeling B and die Anderen stared in amazement at the field in front of the building. A pair of ultra-light aircraft were sitting there, parked on the lawn, surrounded by Allied military police vehicles. It turned out the miniplanes had landed there at 4:30 that morning, just as the early summer sky was beginning to lighten, after two Western brothers had flown into East Berlin’s Treptower Park to extract a third sibling still living behind the Wall. The three brothers—two in one aircraft, one in the other—had then flown back over the floodlit death strip at an altitude of only about five hundred feet and aimed for a landmark where they would be sure they were touching down on the correct side of the serpentine Wall. Reunited and ready to celebrate, they abandoned the planes right in front of the Reichstag.
The bus drove on to the venue and the bands did a quick sound check. Most of the guys were meeting friends they knew in West Berlin.
Feeling B guitarist Paul and keyboardist Flake had decided in advance not to get stressed out by trying to see everything on this, their first trip to the West. They went for a late breakfast at the apartment of Christian Jäger, a friend of theirs who had played in the band Happy Straps before his departure from the DDR.
Before they headed back to Ecstasy, they stopped for their first-ever döner kebabs. When they went to sit down and eat them, the owner of the kebab stand shooed them away.
