by Tim Mohr
There’s also a lot more to About Blank than techno parties: one building on the property holds workshops for artisans and rehearsal spaces and studios for musicians. Another building holds a gender and queer studies center that puts on concerts, readings, and other events. About Blank also hosts benefits for feminist, anti-racist, and anti-fascist groups, and is part of a network that helps rally people for political demonstrations. Another point insisted on by the collective from the beginning: anyone who works here—not just the original twelve, but over a hundred people at this point—makes the same wage per hour, whether they are booking DJs, slinging beers, or cleaning the toilets.
Nowhere inside the club does it say this is a radical leftist venue, but it is one, and the hope is that the atmosphere—how people work together and treat each other, the sense of mutual respect and inclusion, the experimentalism, the unfettered freedom—rubs off on partyers. There can be a political element to partying, after all. At its best, partying can make people question normality—the normality they encounter beyond the doors of a place like About Blank, perhaps the normality they know in another city or another country altogether.
70
By far the most famous club in Berlin today is Berghain.
Opinions of the place vary—to some, it’s been irrevocably sullied by coverage in American media outlets, or it’s lost its edge because of all the tourists who flock there to party. But Berghain was the largest and most easily identifiable institution at the moment when the world decided Berlin was the coolest city on earth, and it is still the gravitational center of the scene, allowing lots of other places to operate in the relative anonymity of its outer orbits.
The building that now houses Berghain was originally part of the physical plant for a grand Stalinist residential development that runs east from Alexanderplatz out to Frankfurter Tor. The centerpiece of the 1950s development was a series of impressive apartment buildings lining Stalinallee, now Karl-Marx-Allee—still the most impressive avenue in town. What’s most striking about Karl-Marx-Allee is its scale: at ninety meters wide and two kilometers long, the avenue is comparable to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Tucked out of sight in what at the time was open land near the main East Berlin rail yards, the building that became Berghain originally provided steam to heat these showpiece housing blocks.
The steam plant was abandoned in the 1980s.
When Berghain opened, in December 2004, the space was left largely as the club owners found it, in keeping with Berlin’s makeshift style. The main dance floor is in the old turbine room, where concrete columns support a sixty-foot-high ceiling. The rest of the venue remains mostly undecorated, a disorienting industrial maze that provides secret spaces where anything goes, a dark tangle of social, sexual, and musical pleasures.
In a club where photography is strictly forbidden and the staff consciously avoid the media, the most familiar aspect of Berghain isn’t the dark, industrial interior or even the Socialist-Bauhaus exterior of the old power plant; it is the bulldog-like glower of Sven Marquardt. Sven is Berghain’s Türsteher, which could be translated as “bouncer,” but in a scene where there is virtually no violence it really means something else. Sven is the public face of the club—a bearded face with tattoos of barbed wire and thorns snaking around his left eye and steel rings bristling from his lips and nose.
Sven Marquardt is also an old East German punk, a man who represents the past, the present, and the future of the city: a physical connection between East Berlin punk and twenty-first-century Berlin.
Yes, all the bands died. Yes, the idea of an independent, idealistic country died. Yes, Tacheles died.
But the spirit of East Berlin punk rock lives.
Silvio Meier, a member of the Church from Below’s inner circle who helped squat Schreinerstrasse 47, died—murdered by neo-Nazi skinheads in a subway station in 1992. Aljoscha of Feeling B died—gasping for breath during an asthma attack in 2000, seven years after bandmates Paul Landers and Flake left to form a band called Rammstein. Otze of Schleim-Keim, whose song “Prügelknabe” included the line We are the people, died—while in a high-security mental institution in 2005 after splitting open his father’s head with an axe.
But the spirit of East Berlin punk rock lives.
The ethos of East Berlin punk infused the city with a radical egalitarianism and a DIY approach to maintaining independence—to conjuring up the world you want to live in regardless of the situation or surroundings. Berliners today still fight for the right of self-determination with a seriousness not seen in other Western cities.
A straight line connects Major and Esther to the anti-gentrification movement that has left smoke billowing from the charred remains of hundreds of luxury cars in Berlin in recent years.
Say it, speak it, shout it out loud.
A straight line connects Planlos and Namenlos to Eimer and Tacheles, to Berghain and About Blank, and on to all the other clubs that will inevitably follow.
Were you really born to be subordinate to it all?
A straight line connects the Church from Below and the Schreinerstrasse squatters’ manifesto to the unique sense of freedom that defines Berlin to this day.
We are the people, we are the power.
And sometimes, if you stand at the edge of the dark river as rosy-fingered dawn clutches at the Eastern horizon and the music thumps behind you in Kater Blau, Salon zur Wilden Renate, or Griessmühle, you can almost hear the city whispering: Don’t die in the waiting room of the future.
Create your own world, your own reality.
DIY.
Revolution.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank first of all Micha Kobs, who first exposed me to the East German punk scene twenty-five years ago. If there was one person in particular who set this book in motion, it was Kobs. I met him early in my Berlin years and figured out he had played guitar in one of the earliest punk bands in East Berlin—though it wasn’t until many years later that I realized just how significant his band, Planlos, had been. He worked at the bar in one of the venues where I deejayed, and I always looked forward to our end-of-the-night chats over a closing-time whisky or two. Eventually Kobs showed me scrapbooks of materials from the early 1980s that he had carefully hidden during the years of the dictatorship, and looking through those photos and papers in his apartment, something clicked inside me. Years later, when I eventually started working on a book that would tell this story, Kobs introduced me to his former bandmate Michael “Pankow” Boehlke, who proved the single most important person in making the book a reality. Pankow generously put me in contact with dozens of his punk compatriots, opened the archive he had assembled for a museum show and book and DVD of his own on DDR punk, and patiently helped me for years as I went about researching the book. In short, this book would never have been conceived without Kobs, and would never have been completed without Pankow.
When I began my research, I assumed Stasi files would provide the most significant information. But as I went through files, I was surprised at the mundane nature of what the famed spy agency collected. The Stasi rarely had detailed, reliable information that might form the basis for cinematic storytelling. Instead, the interviews I conducted became the key to writing the story. Many of the people I interviewed spent several hours with me, sometimes over the course of multiple days; many allowed me to follow up in order to straighten things out as I learned more over the course of my years of research.
Among my interview partners I would particularly like to thank: Grit Angermann, Jan Bayer, Major Bergmann, Tatjana Besson, Abouto Blanko, Michael Boehlke, Chaos, Belinda Cooper, Alec Empire, Esther Friedemann, Gilbert Furian, Henryk Gericke, Arne Grahm, Torsten Hahnel, Herne, Michael Horschig, Norbert Jackschenties, Rex Joswig, Daniel Kaiser, Micha Kobs, Leo Kondeyne, Olaf Kretschmar, Paul Landers, Ronald Lippok, Frank Masch, Irina Meyer, Dirk Moldt, Siegfried Neher, Thomas Onisseit, Key Pankonin, Karsten “Dafty” Richter, Mita Schamal, Siegbert Schefke, Jana Schlosser
, Stefan Schüler, Jörn Schulz, Sven Schwiegelshohn, Speiche, Curt Stauss, Johnny Temple, Olaf Tost, Frank “Trötsch” Tröger, and Mirko Whitfield.
Many others contributed to the insights and the richness of detail in this book, and I thank them as well. I’d like to add a special thanks to the many individuals who gave me access to their personal Stasi files and to those who shared with me their diaries or other writings from the time. And a note about the transcripts of Stasi interrogations used in the book: the Stasi would summarize the contents of hours of conversations into relatively short documents written in an oddly formal, bureaucratic style of German, which is why the responses don’t sound like the typical language you would expect of a teenage punk.
I realized early on that accurately transcribing these lengthy interviews was going to be a challenge for a nonnative speaker, and for help I turned to three close friends: Klaus Stimeder, Steve Winkler, and Julia Wilton. All three provided not only terrific transcriptions but also encouragement, help, and ideas, and, in the case of Stimeder, a valuable first read of the draft manuscript, as well—thank you.
Two important figures in this book had already died before I started my research, so for material on Dieter “Otze” Ehrlich, I am particularly indebted to the book Satan, kannst du mir noch mal verzeihen, by Anne Hahn and Frank Willmann, and for material on Aljoscha Rompe to Ronald Galenza and Heinz Havemeister for their extensive oral history Feeling B—mix mir einen Drink. There were also a number of existing books featuring interviews with, and first-person accounts by, Eastern punks, which proved invaluable resources, and from which I cribbed liberally throughout my own book. Among them are Too Much Future, Wir wollen alle artig sein, Auch im Osten trägt man Westen, Macht aus dem Staat Gurkensalat, Haare auf Krawall, and Zonen Punk Provinz—see bibliography for complete details on these terrific books.
Despite my reliance on interviews to bring this story to life, I was also able to gain important information through archival work. Thanks once again to Michael Boehlke for allowing me total access to the Substitut Archiv; to Sylvia Griwan, Günter Nepp, and Dr. Ulrich Mählert at the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur; to Christoph Ochs, Frank Ebert and Tom Sello at the Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft; and to the Lichtenberger Museum and the New York Public Library.
I also wish to acknowledge those who went before me in writing about this period, and who were willing to offer support as well as expertise, especially Dirk Moldt, Henryk Gericke, Frank Willmann, Anne Hahn, Gilbert Furian, Alexander Pehlemann, Ronald Galenza, and Heinz Havemeister.
Thanks to Maik “Ratte” Reichenbach for letting me spend a day at his apartment going through his photo archives; thanks to Karoline Bofinger, Micha Kobs, Paul Landers, Stefan Mai, Lutz Schramm, Jörn Schulz, and Dirk Teschner for opening up their personal photo collections.
Thanks also to: Holly Austin, Joseph Braude, Jason Buhrmester, Jamie Byng, Joao Manuel Bouza Da Costa, Community Bookstore (Brooklyn), Cookie, Frank Dabrock, Katy Derbyshire, Erin Edmison, Birgit Fordyce, Danny Francis, Harriet Fricke, Leopold Froehlich, Steffen Fuchs, David Gedge, Pia Goetz, Brezel Göring, Brittany Hazelwood, Heike Highlife, Thomas Hoeffgen, Markus Hoffman, Andrej Hüsener, Hilary Kavanagh, Trip Khalaf, Wieland Krämer, Birgitta Kröll, Alexander Kühne, Frank Kuenster, Seth Kugel, Andreas Kump, Kevin Lane, Jacob Levenson, Markus Linnenbrink, Bob Love, Ian MacKaye, Dan Mandel, Steve Martin at Nasty Little Man, Edna McCown, Duff McKagan, Andrew Miller, Stephanie Mohr, Tom Mohr, Jason Murtagh, Markus Nägele and the team at Heyne Verlag, Joel Najar, Christopher Napolitano, Johnny Perez, Martin Petersdorf, Natalie Reed, Brian Reyes, Michael Reynolds, Germo Robra, Daniel Ryser, Katie Salisbury, Ben Schafer, Mathias Schwarz, Damion Searls, Paul Stanley, Ken Steen, Riky Stock, Gerhard Stöger, Falko Teichmann, Spencer Theile, Jürgen Teipel, Anita Thompson, Virginie Varlet, and Lucas Wittmann. Special thanks also to Steffi de Velasco, whose writing inspired me to push against stylistic limitations in order to make the storytelling worthy of the story, and to Anna Stein, whose unbridled enthusiasm renewed my confidence in the manuscript.
I am also very grateful to Betsy Gleick and the team at Algonquin for taking a chance on me and believing in the power, importance, and timeliness of this story.
And finally a heartfelt thank you to Erin, Greta, and August for your collective love, patience, and understanding during the long years of research and writing, and to my parents, Elizabeth and James, who instilled in me the curiosity and openness that allowed me to learn so much during the Berlin years and beyond.
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Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of authors, including Alina Bronsky, Wolfgang Herrndorf, and Charlotte Roche. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Gil Scott-Heron, Duff McKagan of Guns n’ Roses, and Paul Stanley of KISS. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and Inked, among other publications, and he spent several years as a staff editor at Playboy magazine, where he edited Hunter S. Thompson, John Dean, and Harvey Pekar, among others. Prior to starting his writing career he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin.
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