by Tim Mohr
Leo saw the squatted building complex as a logical extension of the band. He wanted to bring to life—to concrete reality—the spontaneity and creativity of the band, the ever-expanding sense of solidarity nurtured by the interchangeable lineup, and, just as important, the chaos. And it worked. Partly because of the scale of it, Leo’s complex on Oranienburger Strasse—more than any other place established in the rush to stake out physical and philosophical space for a new society—came the closest to being a fully fledged alternative world. It was a magical realm where anything seemed possible—where everything seemed possible. And it quickly became the hub for the entire scene that sprang up in East Berlin after the fall of the Wall.
Early on, someone hung a banner on the pockmarked facade of the new squat, the grand, five-story former department store, bombed-out, soot-caked, grotesquely disfigured, now with music and the clink of beer bottles echoing through the damp, cavernous space.
It read: Die Ideale sind ruiniert, retten wir die Ruine.
Translation: The ideals are ruined, we’re saving the ruins.
They named these ruins Tacheles.
Ruins like Tacheles—places where time had stood still since the end of World War II—became the means of transport into the future: you opened the door to these crumbling monuments of the past and entered a new world, a colorful vision of a new way of life created amidst the grim rubble of history.
In coming years, Tacheles came to encompass bars, theaters, a cinema, a printmaking studio, video editing facilities, and a sprawling sculpture garden that doubled as a biergarten—all in addition to the art studios and living quarters.
The main bar, Café Zapata, on the ground floor, became a popular destination. And a subterranean space beneath the bar became the first new club in East Berlin—a club representative of a different world, the world Tacheles residents wished to make real, a physical manifestation of their collective ideals. Radical democracy reigned inside the club, just the way they wanted it to outside the club. There was no door policy. The restrooms were not divided by gender. Photographs were forbidden—a policy continued in many other Berlin clubs through the years—adding to the atmosphere of spontaneity, participation, and total lack of self-consciousness. A mix of sweat and dirt dripped from the low ceiling as unnamed DJs—there were no stars in this environment—dropped tunes and a wild mix of people danced. It was a free space, where everyone took part, everyone played a role, and thus everyone experienced the collective euphoria of the party.
Tacheles also became a sort of musical petri dish—the place where a musical mutation first took place, where punk philosophy extricated itself from the stifling constrictions of traditional rock instrumentation. Otze of Schleim-Keim, who lived under a staircase in Tacheles for a year or so, began to experiment with electronic production while there. It all made sense to an old punk like Otze: producing on a computer demanded even less technical know-how than playing punk-rock guitar, it had even more of a leveling effect, it broke down the barriers between listener and musician even further. And DJs did not demand attention like a band. DJs empowered people to have fun on their own terms. DJs stood at ground level—at least at a place like Tacheles—and partied along with everyone else. Techno was punk as fuck.
Eastern bands died off quickly after the fall of the Wall. It wasn’t just that people now could hear music from all over the world, it was also that previously existing forms of music seemed mired in the past, the soundtrack to a bygone era. For Eastern punks, the original enemy had been vanquished. And even if Western colonization and the sudden rise in neo-Nazi violence presented new challenges, the music—and the message—needed to change.
After all, the occupants of Eimer and Tacheles and other squats were trying to build now rather than destroy.
For that, they needed a form of music as new as the idealized society they were inventing, a sound forged in the present and pointing to the future.
68
Bohemianism is typically formed in opposition to some status quo, set in relief against an existing society. But East Berlin in 1990 was a totally blank slate: the system of government, the material culture, even the names of the streets in many cases—everything was gone. Everything. An entire society had been wiped from the earth, and here were the physical remains, waiting to be redeveloped into something else, something new, something formed not in reaction to a status quo but conjured out of thin air, built from scratch by those willing to create a new world, a new reality, DIY.
What was suddenly happening in East Berlin wasn’t bohemianism, it was pure magic: the imposition of something completely new on this blank slate of a city, a collective imagination being brought to life. And for that reason alone, the crumbling wasteland of central East Berlin became the most beautiful place on earth just then, an entire city of limitless possibility.
East Berlin was basically a complete nineteenth-century city standing empty. But instead of being in the middle of nowhere, abandoned like some ghost mining town, it was fused to a bustling, modern city—West Berlin—and was served by an enviable and still functional infrastructure: subways and trains and buses and trams, a great water supply flowing from every tap, reliable electricity. Everything was in place beneath this half-empty paradise of elegant ruins, this dilapidated gray metropolis just waiting to be imbued with the color and life of a brand new society.
The call to action issued by Schreinerstrasse 47 had not fallen on deaf ears. An informational pamphlet produced by the squatters council in the spring of 1990 showcased eighteen buildings, plus two blocks of buildings: Kreutzigerstrasse 18-23, and Mainzer Strasse 2-11, both in Friedrichshain.
The dream of scaling up a society based on socialist anarchist cells seemed to be working. East Berlin had become an autonomous zone on par with the Paris Commune of 1871, and unlike nineteenth-century Paris, Berlin had no central government to fight, no national troops threatening to invade—there was in essence no central authority at all in the aftermath of the collapse of the communist regime.
“Our growing movement,” read the introduction to the pamphlet, “is composed for the most part of young people who wish to put into practice their own ideas about collective living,” to build a “self-determined neighborhood culture,” and to keep usable buildings from sitting empty and further deteriorating.
Over the years, punk activism helped save hundreds if not thousands of historic buildings throughout the DDR. For an indication of the scale of East German “redevelopment” plans, 10,900 residential buildings in the city of Dresden were planned for demolition by 1990 as part of a program that would have ripped down 30,000 by the year 2000; for comparison, during World War II, when Dresden was repeatedly firebombed, 25,000 residential buildings were destroyed, with an additional 18,000 heavily damaged. There were similar plans for mass demolition in Berlin’s historic districts. One would have razed two-thirds of the buildings in some sections of Prenzlauer Berg. In Friedrichshain, all six of the buildings squatted on Kreuzigerstrasse were slated for demolition in early 1990. If not for the rethinking caused by the takeover of spaces like Tacheles, many of the planned demolitions throughout East Berlin might have still taken place before unification, gutting the city of much of its historic housing stock.
A squat was not first and foremost about living rent-free on an urban island of egalitarian hedonism. If you wanted to create a new society, your goals couldn’t end at the front door. Many of the buildings built playgrounds or opened day cares. The squatted blocks on Mainzer and Kreutziger offered communal meals for elderly neighborhood residents. This new way of life had to work from birth to retirement. There were food cooperatives, bicycle repair facilities, carpentry workshops. And nearly every building housed a bar or “info-café.” Bars and cafés in the squats brought in money, of course, though not much, and the profits were set aside to pay for meals and supplies. More important, the bars and cafés were places to socialize and party together with the wider community.
A squat
drew the rest of the world in through its bar or café. And the rest of the world just might take away the seed of an idea from that interaction; if that seed took root elsewhere, it just might grow into another outpost working toward the formation of a new society. If all these outposts continued to expand and stayed at least loosely tied together, they might actually form the basis of a new way of life. It was in any event the only hope for a new society once the election of March 18, 1990, determined that the territory of the DDR would be split into its constituent states and absorbed by West Germany; from the point of view of those who had fought and marched and chanted “We’re staying here,” the speedy annexation of East Germany represented straight-up colonization.
The pamphlet’s introduction ended with another call to action: “Don’t isolate yourselves. Build your own projects in your neighborhood!”
By the time that pamphlet was published, Grit Ferber, the Weimar punk, had squatted in one of buildings in Kreutzigerstrasse, too. The building had been listed in a log of empty spaces maintained by the squatters council. Others who had already moved into the street were anxious to get more of the empty buildings around them filled because they kept getting attacked by gangs of skinheads. One obvious solution to the problem seemed to be strength in numbers.
The buildings on Kreutzigerstrasse were in terrible shape. The building Grit ended up in had windows in the front, but the back was open to the weather, and many of the floors had collapsed. The coal ovens were not in working order. The first two things Grit and her friends did were secure the ground floor with heavy doors and install a communal kitchen in one of the intact floors at the top of the building.
Grit and her compatriots scoured other empty buildings for supplies, salvaging water pipes, wiring, fixtures, lamps, anything. One afternoon as they were loading her VW with supplies rummaged from an empty structure on Mainzer Strasse, two East German cops approached them and said, “You can’t take that stuff, you’re going to have to take it all back into the building.”
What can they do? thought Grit.
She had West German license plates on her Beetle, and she had never been one to cower in fear of authority—if you could even call the Volkspolizei an authority now, after the election.
“Go home,” Grit said to the cops. “You can’t tell us what to do anymore.”
The cops did not respond.
Grit finished loading her VW and then drove back to Kreutzigerstrasse.
The move back to the East had cost Grit her band. But she ended up meeting two other women on her first day in Kreutzigerstrasse and together they formed a new band and quickly started playing the bars and clubs in other squats all over the central parts of the East, including Eimer. When she wasn’t playing with her band or working on the building, she took her turn working at the bar, dubbed Pilatus, where everyone in the house had a shift.
Even with more houses in the area squatted, the attacks from skinheads did not subside. If anything, they were increasing: neo-Nazis had realized they, too, could take advantage of the political vacuum.
Tacheles was attacked with Molotov cocktails one night, and one of the squatters defending the place went screaming through the café with his clothes on fire.
The squatters council eventually appealed for help, reaching out to personal contacts and leftist organizations in West Berlin and urging them to come occupy more buildings in the East. By August 1990 there were a hundred and twenty buildings squatted in East Berlin.
These increasingly numerous outposts, bursting with color and energy, were beginning to set the tone. Even if, after the March elections, everyone knew these cells would not be part of the political structure of a new country, they were beginning to define the culture of a new city.
69
The political limbo—the de facto anarchy—during which the initial burst of creativity in East Berlin took place, ended in a legal sense with the official annexation of the East by West Germany, on Oct 3, 1990. After unification, the West German regime quickly asserted its authority.
And the West Germans did not fuck around.
In November 1990, police were tasked with emptying a city block in Friedrichshain that was almost completely squatted. Thus began the battle of Mainzer Strasse, in essence a small-scale civil war. Residents of the squatted block erected barricades, lit cars on fire, and threw Molotov cocktails at the police, who eventually rolled in with armored vehicles and violently removed the squatters.
It would be easy to say everything changed after that first year, after unification, after Mainzer Strasse was cleared in a military-style operation, but that wouldn’t be accurate. The sense of anarchy, the feeling of limitless possibilities, lasted for years. Some squatted buildings, like Eimer, held on in nearly the same form for another twenty years; others, like Schreinerstrasse 47, managed to legalize their status while retaining their soul. Grit Ferber still lives on Kreutzigerstrasse in a building with a communal kitchen. Herne, who had set up the concerts at Erlöser Church in the 1980s, still books shows at Köpenicker Strasse 137.
Tacheles, the grandest and most audacious of all the squats, was fatally weakened by an internal rift, but the death spiral lasted two decades. Not long after it was squatted in 1990, the original occupants of Tacheles had invited a group of West Germans to move in—they’d been kicked out of an abandoned hotel near Anhalter Bahnhof, in West Berlin, where they had set up an artist collective. At first, the Westerners seemed to share the same goals as the Eastern artists already living in Tacheles, and things worked well. The newcomers brought fresh energy and skills, and a lot got done. But slowly the relationship soured. Spearheaded by Ludwig Eben, the Westerners wrested control of the money-generating parts of Tacheles and milked them for personal gain—creating profits at the bar became the overriding priority, and creating culture took a back seat to this new priority among the group from West Berlin. Ludwig Eben became a millionaire while Leo Kondeyne, the original mastermind of Tacheles, was eventually forced out of the building altogether.
It was a terrible blow to the fundamental vision behind the project, which had been built as a collective dream rather than a personal one: the bars were supposed to provide modest funding for art, music, and culture.
Gone was the anarchist ideal of democratic control of the workplace.
After years of wrangling, the bank that by then held the deed to the property insisted on emptying Tacheles in September 2012.
“This is the theft of a work of art, supported by the police,” said a Tacheles spokesman as the building was finally cleared.
But by then, there were over a hundred lawsuits pending between various parties within Tacheles, most related to the ongoing battle between two factions—on one side, the artists; on the other, the group that ran the bars and clubs. Any semblance of solidarity within Tacheles had evaporated. Not only did the battle for the building complex not rise to the level of Mainzer Strasse, the police encountered no resistance at all.
The world inside had long since capitulated to the world outside.
It’s tempting to grumble about the death of the grand experiment of the post-Wall years, tempting to look back at the early 1990s with a nostalgia that suggests the city is no longer that way, to say that the creative anarchy of the year with basically no government was just a freakish anomaly, a moment in time, unsustainable and unrealistic, a product of a once-in-a-lifetime circumstance, magical but inevitably short-lived. And it’s true that the city isn’t the same as it was then, and that the transient nightlife scene of the 1990s has largely been replaced by a more formalized scene, with leases, fire exits, and professionalization.
And yet, artists and musicians still flock to Berlin, activists and whistleblowers seek haven here, and tens of thousands of people come to the city every weekend to party.
What draws people to Berlin today is not nostalgia for some bygone era. What draws people to Berlin today is the fact that it is still unique. And while the continued existence of Köpenicker
137 and Schreiner 47 and old squatted cultural centers like Acud, Zosch, and Schokoladen is heartwarming, what makes Berlin unique today isn’t the few lingering bastions of the 1990s. What’s important isn’t the locations that survived but the spirit that survived, a spirit that has continued to evolve in its particulars and to breathe life into new institutions, a hyper-political spirit that continues to imbue the city with the ethos of East Berlin punk.
These days, club life is not only Berlin’s most famous attraction; it is also a window on the city’s soul. The contemporary club About Blank offers a glimpse of that soul. It sits unmarked on a street lined with scrub trees and corrugated metal fences, an apparent wasteland sandwiched between rail yards, construction sites, car lots, and a cut-rate grocery store. All that’s visible from the outside are two graffiti-covered doors in a concrete block. Inside, you pay a modest cover and walk down a bare entrance hall. There is no velvet rope, no VIP area, no dress code, no branding, no bullshit. Here, cool is not for sale. A few feet beyond the hall, you are totally immersed in another world—the darkness and smoke are so thick and disorienting that you feel as if you’re suspended in air, and any sense of time or space fades. There is just the austere boom-tick-boom-tick of the city’s signature sound, minimal techno, and the thump of the bass compressing your chest, practically lifting you off your feet. Sexual politics are a non-issue in here, and people—gay, straight, bi, women, men, transgendered—writhe as one, slip-sliding up against each other awash in sweat, smoke, and jubilation.
The club was founded by a twelve-person collective, almost all of whom have connections to squats in the former East, particularly to Köpenickerstrasse 137. The About Blank collective, consisting mostly of feminist punk women, set out a political framework for the project even before they discovered a location. The complex where they ended up had originally been a kindergarten for the children of East German railway employees, and then had sat empty for about fifteen years. By 2009 the property belonged to the city, which agreed to rent it out until it is eventually razed to make way for a highway. There was nothing left in the building—no heat, no plumbing, no electricity, no windows. But rather than take out bank loans to improve the place, the members of the collective set to work themselves, calling in friends to perform tasks they couldn’t manage alone; any extra money they needed they borrowed from leftist groups connected to various squats.
