Burning Down The Haus:

Punk Rock, Revolution And The Fall Of The Berlin Wall Tim Mohr DIALOGUE

Excellent study of the role of East German punk in the country’s downfall.

In the 1970s, krautrock sought to shun all Anglo-American influences and create a musical identity of its own, West German in origin. In East Germany, things were different. There, the imperative was to shun the blandness of state-approved bands and take inspiration from the radical West. In the late 70s, this meant punk.

Author Tim Mohr traced the very first East German punk – Britta Bergmann, aka Major, who first started wearing safety pins in 1977. In a manner that’s almost novelistic, Mohr traces the others that follow her over the coming months and years – Micha, Pankow, and the fearsome Otze, a huge young man who if refused drinks at a bar would bodily lift the bartender away and serve himself. If being a punk was no picnic in Britain in the 70s, it was an immense act of bravery in the GDR, requiring as it did for you to look conspicuous. By de-conditioning, harassment, interrogation, the raiding of the rare spaces in which punk bands could play, the authorities sought to stamp out the movement which they saw as an existential threat to the state in its nonconformism.

The more they attempted to repress the movement, the more it flourished,

however, even reaching small East German villages. Not that it was easy; churches were unlikely venues, including Pfingst, although punks ran foul of both church officials and locals for their rowdiness. It was only in 1983, long after it had been discarded in the UK, that it gained any sort of foothold. Cassettes were a vital but expensive form of exchange – one blank cassette cost 20 marks, almost half a month’s rent.

However, there was at the movement’s heart a certain idealism. Punks like Pankow did not wish to flee East Germany; they sought to make it the ideal state. When the Wall finally came down, they immediately squatted large buildings in East Berlin, hoping to form a new society based on anarchosocialist cells. Unification put paid to that, while part of East Germany’s punk legacy was a neo-Nazi element attached to the movement. However, as Mohr observes, East German punk idealism not only sowed the seeds of revolution, but also laid the foundations for the relatively free-thinking cultural haven that is modern Berlin. All was not lost, much was won. ■■■■■■■■■■