Afro-punk pioneers The Indestructible Beat and myself are back to pay our last respects to the old GDR. For the first time we travel to East Berlin the easy way, through West Berlin: past the bright lights of the Kurfurstendamm, a couple of sharp corners and then the familiar crumbling buildings and dimly lit streets. The Wall has gone!
East Berlin is in turmoil. The old Stasi headquarters has been occupied by hunger strikers demanding that the files within be kept there and made available to East German citizens: the new masters want to keep them under lock and key and then transport them en masse to West Germany. Since the majority of the people who were in opposition under the Stasi were Leftist activists equally opposed to the rule of the Deutschmark it’s not difficult to follow the Kohl government’s line of thinking: messages of support for the hunger strikers flood in from all over East Germany and during our visit a big rally and concert takes place. As with the abortion issue, much easier in the old GDR, housing, social security and the rest, the West makes the rules.
At the main East Berlin radio station, another hunger strike. The massively popular GDR radio station Jugendradio DT64, which for several years has featured really good music and intelligent, left-orientated discussion programmes and played a major part in East Germany’s peaceful revolution, has been deprived of most of its frequencies so it can’t be heard outside Berlin and replaced by a West Berlin commercial pap monstrosity called RIAS. DT64 DJs and supporters are occupying the entrance to the station. One and a half million listeners take to the streets in cities all over East Germany to show their support, and within four days DT64 is back on the air. A small victory, but maybe only temporary. RIAS has offered a huge sum of money for those frequencies, and these days money makes the rules.
Yes, everything is up for grabs, a knockdown sale. In the old days the arts were heavily subsidised in an attempt to make culture readily accessible to all – now the subsidies have gone, and the vultures are moving in. Radio and TV stations, theatres, clubs, rock venues, cinemas, rock bands, orchestras, actors’ ensembles – everything must now operate according to the law of the market place, and in an environment where the masses want nothing more than an overdose of discos, sex shops, Coke and Western consumer goods, that means the end for many. Posters all over East Berlin: ‘Save the Berlin radio choir’. Major alternative rock venues like the Auensee in Leipzig have been bought by Western entrepreneurs and turned into tacky discos – no beer, and vodka and tonic £4 a throw. The historic and beautiful town hall in Cottbus, a primary theatre and music venue for the area, will soon become a car showroom. A Western car is an absolute must for this nation of former Trabant drivers, and the whole country has become a second-hand car salesman’s paradise.
Eastern bands like Die Skeptiker and Herbst in Peking play in West Germany for peanuts: the few promoters left want Western bands and even they come a real cropper. Just 250 people in Cottbus to see Billy Bragg – a real hero over here, he sold 30,000 albums just two years ago. Myself and The Indestructible Beat have a wonderful time at a university club in Magdeburg playing to maybe 150 people: down the road, six times as many throw themselves around to Stock Aitken and Waterman. Disco, that’s where the money is. In theory, all the managers of music venues have the right to buy them outright at a reduced price: in practice, none of them have the money, and of course the West German entrepreneurs certainly do…
On the other hand, a promising alternative scene is developing: truly autonomous, grouping together many of the people who actually took to the streets and made the revolution possible last year and whose aims and aspirations have been crushed by the drive towards reunification and monetary union. Forty years of haphazard renovation and building policy has left thousands of houses derelict, unsafe, uninhabitable: in the last few months a massive and highly political squatters’ movement has developed, taking over countless derelict state-owned buildings and renovating them, often with the active support of the authorities who don’t have the money to do it themselves. We visited several of these places: the not long opened Tacheles in East Berlin, where we did a gig in Spartan but invigorating circumstances, and above all the incredibly impressive Connewitzer Alternative in Leipzig, a huge complex being refurbished with the help of a local architects’ collective – packed gig, wonderful hospitality, the highlight of the tour. Such occupied houses with their East German flags flying as symbols of resistance are, sadly, the focus for terrifying attacks by gangs of neo-Nazi skinheads. At Connewitz they’re well prepared and any sieg heiling morons who come their way get well and truly sorted out.
Places like this are the backbone of the new scene; in a couple of years’ time, when all the renovation work is done, the likes of the Connewitzer Alternative will carry the hopes of the cultural Left throughout East Germany. In a country where many people don’t know if they’ll still be in work, still have their club, perhaps even still have their house in three months’ time, there is but one answer. Take over your own lives!
And many people tried to do just that – against massive odds.
There were some classic tragic-comedy moments during that couple of weeks touring a society falling apart. ‘Squatting’s alright, but not in someone else’s place!’ said our driver Johnny Mortimer as he surveyed the vibrant scene in Connewitz. ‘The Stasi have a new profession now’ said George, gesturing at a queue of second hand Western cars touting for trade. ‘They’re all taxi drivers. Just tell them your name and they’ll take you home.’ Best of all though was a twist on the famous Kennedy quote: it wasn’t all just starry eyed East Germans making trips to the West, there were plenty coming the other way. Lost in Potsdam, we asked a passer-by for directions to our gig.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. I am a Hamburger…’
‘Yes’, said Simon. ‘And I’m a sausage roll.’
For the people I had got to know well over the years those were bittersweet days, full of hope and genuine feelings of freedom on the one hand and of fear for the future on the other. But for that large part of the population who lapped up tabloid headlines from the likes of Bild-Zeitung (the West German equivalent of the Sun, now ubiquitous in the East) with gusto, there were no doubts: everyone was going to have plenty of money, a brand new car, loads of foreign holidays, designer clothes and all the trappings of the West. With a bunch of bananas thrown in…
Then came the privatising Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency) which destroyed most East German industry on the grounds that it was ‘uncompetitive’: out of 4 million people who worked in the Volkseigene Betriebe (People’s Own Enterprises) 2.5 million were laid off in the early 1990s. Many of the workplaces destroyed weren’t ‘uncompetitive’ at all, as in the case of the Oranienburg steel plant which was sold by the Treuhand to the West German conglomerate – and former Nazi slave labour exploiter – Krupp, and then closed down a few weeks later in an act of wanton vandalism. In any case, the Treuhand’s purely economic calculation of whether or not an enterprise deserved to survive ignored the devastating social consequences involved in throwing millions on the scrapheap at a stroke.
And many people lost not just their jobs, but their homes: GDR real estate nationalisations were declared illegal, old certificates were unearthed, the sacred Western concept of ‘property rights’ invoked and countless East German families evicted from places many had lived in for two generations at the behest of the descendents of a name on a title deed. People who in most cases already had a comfortable home in the West. It happened to farmers too: land ‘reclaimed’ at a stroke from those who had been working it in common for years. And to many of the activists who had turned run down buildings into venues and cultural centres: months, maybe years, of hard work destroyed by a ‘property-owning’ ghost from the past waving a piece of paper. Of course, even if you kept your home, it wasn’t long before rents and utility costs soared as the old subsidies were ripped away.
One ideology ruled the roost - everything from the West good, everything from the East bad. In all areas of
life: science, education, culture, you name it. Street names celebrating noted socialist leaders were changed, and in one case a whole city, as Karl Marx Stadt became Chemnitz again. As unemployment rose in the early Nineties, so did the anger, the disillusionment and in many cases a conviction that East Germans had been better off as they were. As a worker on hunger strike at the soon to be closed potash mine in Bischofferode said: ‘At school in the old days we were taught how evil capitalism was. Now everything I was taught is coming true…’
Sure, there was freedom of speech: you could say what you like, but it didn’t change anything. There was freedom of travel too, except that many people couldn’t afford to go anywhere. It was as though everything that East Germans had believed in had officially been declared worthless by the West German state, and what they were offered instead was a media-fostered golden dream which turned out to be a pack of lies. Like so many people there, I shared the happiness at the fall of the Wall in 1989, and I share the nostalgia for the GDR which many people feel today. Because, as the years have passed, those old beliefs - of community, solidarity, the simple life, an aversion to the rat-race – have reasserted themselves, and to some degree passed on to a new generation too. A complete re-evaluation of that period in history is taking place, and ‘Ostalgie’ is here to stay, much to the anger of the West Germans who think they paid for reunification and their Eastern brothers should be grateful. ‘Wessis’ will be even more angry now, because in December 2014 Bodo Ramelow of ‘Die Linke’, the successor party to the old SED, became the governor of the state of Thuringia as the head of a left wing coalition. It’s not surprising. Many people in East Germany have been betrayed.
As Brandenburg state premier Matthais Platzeck said, what happened was not unification but Anschluss – annexation – where one side made the rules and told the other what to do. It didn’t work then, and for many it isn’t working now. Most East Germans still feel different, and although I’m English, I spent enough time there to understand how they feel, probably better than any West German – or other Western - commentator observing from afar could ever do. You’ve probably realised by now that I could write a whole book about my experiences in, and thoughts about, what used to be the GDR: maybe some of you are already thinking that a whole chapter on it is too much. But this is the story of my life, and for me, my time there was incredibly important, inspirational and formative. I make no apologies.
After I returned from my last visit before reunification in 1990, the one described in the Guardian article above, I wrote new words to my song ‘Airstrip One’ about what I had seen. I called it ‘Market Sector One’, asked George and Ilona to translate it once again, and included the German version on a compilation album I did for the radical label Verlag Plane in 1992. I consider it an honour, and a vindication of my stance, that it struck a chord to such a degree that two East German bands have covered it.
I dedicate it to everyone at my favourite venue in Germany, the Schokoladen in East Berlin, an old chocolate factory renovated and turned into a cultural centre and communal living space and one of many places where the spirit of the old East, of the activists who took matters into their own hands in 1990, burns bright and strong. They squatted it when it was crumbling away, fought for years to save it from post-unification speculators - and succeeded. As it says in the old GDR national anthem: ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen, und der Zukunft zugewandt’ (Arisen from ruins and looking to the future).
I’ve lost count of how many gigs I have done there, and when I played there with my band Barnstormer on October 8th 2014 – the night before the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall - as part of our 20th Anniversary tour, a whole mass of East Berliners sang along with gusto.
MARKET SEKTOR ONE
Another new year and too much beer and goodbye to the Wall
But now there’s only disappointment, nothing left at all
The dreams we marched and fought for have faded and turned sour
The cabbage is a king now, it’s Helmut’s finest hour
And on the streets the people want it ‘as seen on TV’
And a big bunch of bananas is a sign that you are ‘free’
It’s just begun – Market Sektor One
As in the East we talked about a future bold and new
A thousand Western businessmen were celebrating too
The vultures were all circling, there was money to be made
A multinational carve up, a bank to be obeyed
And now the old, rich foreigners make claims on every hand -
‘You’re living in my house, mein Herr, you’re farming on my land’
It’s time to run – Market Sektor One
Is that all that we were fighting for?
Bananas and sex shops, nothing more?
Welcome to the Western dream
Welcome to the cheap labour scheme
The whole of Europe’s changing – Big Brother’s on the run
It could just be a whole new age of freedom has begun
But freedom doesn’t bow its head to some financier’s will
And Europe is our common home, not some gigantic till
So send the money grabbers riding off into the sun
And send with them the culture of the dollar and the gun
Then we’ll have fun
And justice will be done…
I really hope it is, one day.
Auf Wiedersehen, DDR!
SEVEN
NORTH KOREA (NEARLY), ALBANIA, CANADA, ST. PAULI, SLOUGH – AND THE POLL TAX
There’s one final twist to the East German story. In February 1989, at East Berlin’s final Political Song Festival before the Wall came down and my fourth visit to the GDR, I was approached after a performance by a group of Asian-looking blokes in matching dark suits with red lapel badges. I’d seen them at several events at the festival, always together, always suited up, always far more reserved and formal than the other guests and participants. Even before they spoke to me, I knew where they were from.
‘Good evening, comrade. We have come to ask you if you would be interested in performing at the World Festival of Youth and Students, which will be held later this year in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. About 20,000 people from 177 countries will be attending. We would be very pleased to invite you.’
I punched the air. The next month, along with a bunch of fellow readers of the football fanzine When Saturday Comes, I was already looking forward to going to Albania, ostensibly to see England play a World Cup qualifier, actually because that was the only way the Albanians would let us in. You’ll be reading about that below. But for sheer hardline Stalinism, North Korea put even Albania in the shade. It truly was the big one.
‘Too bloody right, comrades. Thanks very much! When is it?’
‘It takes place in the first week in July.’
My heart sank. At a previous Political Song Festival I had been approached by Gary Cristall, director of the Vancouver Folk Festival, and invited to play there - and on the back of it I had booked my first tour of Canada, 20 dates from mid-June to mid-July. There was no way I could cancel it, and no way I wanted to - but I was still absolutely gutted.
‘I’m sorry, I’m doing a Canadian tour then. You couldn’t possibly put it back a couple of weeks, could you?’
They didn’t understand that I was joking, which in itself was very funny! But I did manage to get them to give my old friend Steve Drewett from the Neurotics the gig instead. He went to Pyongyang on a Soviet troop carrier, played unplugged versions of his songs to huge crowds of frenziedly applauding Koreans, saw ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations against US imperialism organised through loudspeakers attached to lamp posts and had a thoroughly surreal and very good time.
The lucky, lucky bastard.
Even though I didn’t make it to North Korea, Albania made a pretty good booby prize. England had been drawn against Albania in the qualifying stages of the 1990 World Cup, the football fa
nzine When Saturday Comes had organised a trip, and given my lifelong interesting in that enigmatically Stalinist country I was going with bells on. Before we went, I made one of my sporadic appearances on BBC TV, being interviewed about the trip for the lunchtime news, and I was featured in the Guardian too, holding a bust of Enver Hohxa (‘Albania beckons for Attila the Stockbroker’). Steve Drewett and my Brighton friend Mike Williams were up for it as well, and we joined around 50 other fans on a rickety coach journey from London to Tirana - through the Balkan mountains.
The coach broke down in Kent, on the way to Dover. It was repaired. It broke down again in Senj, now in Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia: after a long delay it was declared demised and gone to meet its maker, and after we had forked out for a replacement an even more clapped-out looking Yugoslav one appeared and an insane lunatic then drove this ancient contraption into the mountains and around tiny bendy roads at breakneck speed. The back of the coach hung way over the edge on each bend, allowing those unfortunate enough to be sitting in that part, including us, an ideal view of the burnt out and crushed wrecks in the ravine below. It was absolutely terrifying. I just had to take the approach I do when flying: the driver/pilot doesn’t want to die either, so he must know what he’s doing…
Eventually, to our enormous relief, we arrived at the Albanian border crossing of Hani I Hotit. Prior to the trip, all beards and long hair had been shaved off – although Enver Hoxha had died in 1985, Albania was still the world’s only officially atheist state and since a hirsuite appearance could indicate an affinity with Islam, it was banned. A few Yugoslav ‘revisionist’ travel guides were confiscated and then we were on the way to Tirana and the Hotel Tirana, our designated hotel, mostly wearing the T shirts which When Saturday Comes had made specially for the trip. On the front, the WSC logo and an Albanian flag. On the back, in Albanian: ‘Friendly English football fans salute our Albanian comrades on the historic occasion of the first meeting between our two countries’. For indeed it was.
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