Bloc party
Before Pussy Riot there was Slimy Germs: how punk took down the Berlin Wall. By
THE MORNING after the Berlin Wall came down, a 26-year-old musician arrived home from the party of the century to be told by his brother that officers of the East German state security service – the Stasi – were looking for him. Dieter ‘Otze’ Ehrlich was the drummer/ singer of a provincial anarcho-punk band, Schleim-Keim (‘Slimy Germs’). That the Stasi were bothering with the likes of Otze even as their world crumbled is just one of the myriad contradictions laid bare by Tim Mohr in this deeply researched study of the bottom-up revolution against Europe’s most rigorous police state, and of the role punks like Otze played in its demise. During the autumn of 1989, street demonstrations in East Berlin and Leipzig grew so large that the government no longer had the authority to intervene. The crowds chanted “Wir sind das Volk!” – “We are the people!” It’s unlikely many of the hundreds of thousands knew these words came from a song called Prügelknaben (‘Baton Boys’) which Otze wrote in 1984 upon release from four weeks in Stasi detention, but such is the momentum of a grass roots uprising. Mohr persuasively suggests the end of the DDR was directly attributable to the emergence of punk as a visible symbol of opposition to the regime; charismatic figures like Jana Schlosser, singer with Namenlos (key song: Nazis Back In East Berlin). He even cites the first East Berlin punk as Britta Bergmann, AKA ‘Major’, who in 1977, aged 15, cut her hair and dyed it blue after seeing the Sex Pistols in an illicit West German magazine and hearing Pretty Vacant on Radio Luxembourg. For the next five years she was harassed, interrogated, abused, imprisoned and eventually expatriated by the state. An American who arrived in the former East Berlin in 1992 and became part of the city’s underground club scene, Mohr’s narrative is astutely balanced between the sometimes inchoate voices of its protagonists and analysing the peculiar absurdities of the East German totalitarian system. For UK punks in 1977, “No future” was an existential condition; profound, but not intrinsically life-threatening. In East Germany, where state-sponsored conformity was so deeply embedded that parents reported their own children’s behaviour to the police, the situation was far graver: in the words of Planlos’s Micha Kobs, “Too much future… your whole life was planned out for you almost from birth.” Few of Mohr’s characters subsequently achieved any musical renown: two members of Feelings B formed metal band Rammstein; Ronald Lippok of Rosa Extra played with post-rockers Tarwater and To Rococo Rot. Most of the DDR punk bands were broken by Stasi infiltration, yet still the sounds of freedom prevailed. This is an enthralling account of true heroism. As the punk graffiti on an East Berlin church wall had it: “Don’t Die In The Waiting Room Of The Future.”