by Tim Mohr
I just want to be allowed to be an individual, to be who I am, to make my own choices.
In the summer of 1977, one of Britta’s friends had a visit from a cousin from West Germany. The cousin told the girls about someone who had escaped to West Berlin by crossing one of the lakes that formed the border down in the southwest corner of the city, near Potsdam. Fifteen-year-old Britta felt inspired: she wanted to escape, too.
The future laid out for me in the DDR is NOT acceptable.
It’s time for me to get out of here.
She and her friend secretly discussed the idea and soon both of them began to make plans—Britta even wanted to go scout out the lakeshore. In the end, though, the escape attempt did not go beyond teenage daydreams.
At the beginning of the school year in September 1977, Britta’s sister gave her a stack of photos and pullout posters she’d amassed from the precious West German teen magazines her father brought her—images of ABBA, Boney M, Smokie, the cheesy chart toppers and heartthrobs of the day. As Britta leafed through the images, she suddenly stopped at one. It was a black-and-white shot of a band called the Sex Pistols.
What the fuck is this, she wondered, fascinated by their ripped clothes and sneering faces.
At school she asked around in class to try to figure out if anyone had heard of this mysterious band with the crazy name, the Sex Pistols. One kid in school knew everything about music, and sure enough he knew the Pistols: they were “punk,” he told her. Punk? But wait, she thought, she’d heard that AC/DC was supposed to be punk, and she couldn’t stand AC/DC. She hated hard rock. Not long afterward, though, Britta was listening to a Western radio station, Radio Luxembourg, and heard something that immediately caught her attention. The song started with a ragged, chiming guitar line and then the drums kicked in and then it got seriously loud, chugging along like some kind of overheated locomotive, a runaway train, and then the singer started—well, it wasn’t exactly singing, the guy couldn’t carry a tune, he was sort of howling in a tortured monotone, sneering and shrieking and growling . . . There’s no point in asking, you’ll get no reply . . . the song was like a punch in the gut and the singer sounded committed in a way she’d never heard before, almost possessed . . . I don’t pretend ’cause I DON’T CARE . . . stuff your cheap comment ’cause we know what we feel!
It was as if the band was speaking directly to her. She felt like a switch had been thrown inside her, as if the song had activated something that had been buried inside her, something she hadn’t known was there until this moment.
Holy shit!
She waited for the DJ to identify the band.
“That was the Sex Pistols, with ‘Pretty Vacant,’” said the DJ.
The Sex Pistols!
Now that was what she had expected from the picture of the band, with their fucked-up hair and fucked-up skin and fucked-up clothing.
She hacked off her hair the next day, affecting the look she knew from the black-and-white photo of the Pistols. Then she started rummaging through her sister’s stack of West German magazines for more shots of the band. Once she had a few, she began to modify her clothes to mimic the Pistols’ look as best she could. She ripped holes in a shirt and then sewed the holes closed again with big, ugly stitches that were clearly visible. She cut out a swatch of white cloth and wrote destroy on it with a black pen, then sewed it onto the chest pocket of her jacket. Then she nicked the chain from a spare toilet plunger and attached it to the same jacket, stringing it from the chest pocket to one of the buttons. In one of the pictures Britta found, Johnny Rotten—the Sex Pistols’ singer—had safety pins on the shoulders of his jacket. Britta could do that, too. She put a row of safety pins on the top of each shoulder of her own jacket—punk-rock epaulets.
You could hear the gasps at school when she showed up with short hair and her clothes ripped and stuck with pins.
One kid came up to her and greeted her based on her shiny metal epaulets: “Hello, Major!”
From that moment on, that was her name.
School authorities did not take her stunt so lightly. Any deviation from the officially ordained path was seen as threatening to the social cohesion the dictatorship nurtured with its system of youth organizations and propaganda, all designed to feed properly indoctrinated workers into the planned economy. The school quickly sprang into action, and the principal and Major’s teachers—in consultation with the local youth services office—secretly deliberated on how to deal with her. As Major learned years later when she gained access to her Stasi file, the teachers felt they were incapable of molding an acceptable socialist identity out of Major, and they debated whether to have her committed to an institution where she could be treated for her “difficulties.”
Major had problems in the classroom, too. Her grades fell as teachers began to look dimly on her work; they also gave her additional assignments, projects like preparing a poster about the good relations East Germany enjoyed with the Soviet army and writing a speech on the advantages of a planned economy. This was how the teachers hoped to reintegrate her into socialist society. Teachers also sent her home a lot, telling her she shouldn’t return to class until she changed her clothes. She never changed her clothes. In fact, she continued to assemble more and more outfits, modifying more shirts and pants with paint and pins and pen markings, and adding homemade buttons with band names and phrases like i’m an enemy of the state.
She had found the perfect vent. Punk sounded and looked and felt like liberation. Major had never doubted she lived in an illegitimate system, but she hadn’t wanted to throw rocks or build bombs or murder anyone. She just wanted to be herself, and doing, saying, reading, and writing the things that would have made her feel like herself were all verboten. Becoming a punk imbued Major with a sense of power on two levels. First, the music seemed to give voice to the rage she felt inside and gave her the strength to survive in a system she hated. Second, the look provided an explicit way for her to show her opposition every time she stepped out in public.
Meanwhile Major’s friend—the one she had talked about escaping with—had been corresponding with her cousin in West Berlin, and the two of them had naïvely mentioned the previous summer’s teenage dream of swimming across the lake to the West; Major was mentioned by name. The girl’s father came across one of the letters and he ratted out his own daughter, as well as Major, to the police.
On May 16, 1978, Major was ordered to report to a police station for questioning.
Led by a Lieutenant Müller of the Volkspolizei, the cops interrogated the sixteen-year-old all day and straight through the night. They also executed a search of her family’s apartment while she was in police custody.
During the interrogation Major made a strategic error: she answered some of Lieutenant Müller’s questions about punk, questions brought on by her outlandish look and then by things they’d found when they searched her apartment—song lyrics she’d jotted down while listening to the radio, poems she’d written that were deemed “politically negative.” Major had discovered a bunch of bands she liked from Western radio: X-Ray Spex, Sham 69, Slaughter and the Dogs, Chelsea, the Clash, Cock Sparrer, the Buzzcocks, the Vibrators, the Stranglers, Stiff Little Fingers, Wire . . . She could rattle off a lot of names of bands she considered favorites by now. Unfortunately, most anything she knew about punk had to have come from Western media. This compounded the suspicions about Major stemming from her being mentioned in her friend’s letter alongside chatter about something considered a very serious crime: Republikflucht. In essence, defection.
Major was finally released the next day, but the authorities anticipated more trouble from her. Anyone who self-identified with a youth culture that wasn’t officially sanctioned was problematic enough. But in Major’s case, not only was she a punk—or “pank,” as the authorities sometimes wrote in reports—she had also written antisocial poems and broached the topic of defection with others. Any instance of attempted Republikflucht also triggered an automatic
process: the Stasi had to be informed.
The Stasi started an official file on Major on August 27, 1978.
She was now on the radar of one of the world’s most feared domestic spy agencies.
From that point on, Major was under constant surveillance. She was followed constantly and any mail she received was opened and read. The police never stopped tailing her, either. Lieutenant Müller was convinced he had ferreted out a dangerous enemy of the state in sixteen-year-old Major. And maybe he was right.
2
Tenth grade was the end of formal education for most East German students. At that point they began to be integrated into the planned economy through an apprenticeship in a specific field of work. Or rather, they were integrated more thoroughly—since even as students they worked several hours per week in factories as part of a school subject called Produktionsarbeit.
At the end of the school year in 1978, Major received the official assessment she would need to apply for any future apprenticeship or job. “She has great difficulty grasping the tenets of socialism,” it stated, “but in Produktionsarbeit she was obedient.” Major was convinced the assessment was meant to ensure she’d be steered into factory work rather than being allowed to enter a job field she might be more enthusiastic about. Once again her future was being preordained without her input.
Major applied for a number of apprenticeships and training school programs. She was shut out of them all. Doing nothing was not an option: working was not just a social obligation in East Germany; it was illegal not to work—and punishable by imprisonment.
The importance of work in the DDR was backed by law and enforced with the teeth of the state. People who didn’t work weren’t just lazy, they were criminally antisocial, guilty of asoziales Verhalten. As a policy, condemning lack of work as criminally antisocial was actually inherited from Nazi Germany. Work in an Arbeitskollektiv, or work collective, was also seen as a key means of integration, a way the individual formed a direct connection to socialist society.
The notion of asozial played a prominent role in developmental and pedagogic approaches in East Germany, too. The rehabilitation of wayward kids often involved shipping them off to work camps, where they could learn the value of honest work, social responsibility, and discipline. Unfortunately the work camps often translated to child factory labor—sometimes by kids still in single digits—in conditions that bordered on prisonlike.
In the end, Major’s mother managed to secure her a spot in a program for typists. Officially, East Germany embraced gender equality, but the reality was often depressingly traditional; Major joined a training program that consisted exclusively of other girls. Not surprisingly, Major was the only punk. In fact, she had yet to see another punk anywhere, boy or girl. Her teachers and the director of the program constantly threatened her with expulsion because of her appearance.
Major quickly realized that as part of their surveillance efforts the Stasi had coopted people around her to work as informants. Of course, most of the people around Major were young like her—teenage typists. For a time in its history, the Stasi had debated internally about recruiting minors, but since 1968 the agency had actively sought to convert kids as young as seventh graders into informants, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter in the Stasi’s own terminology, or IMs for short, meaning something like “adjunct employees.” The general population, not privy to the Stasi’s internal jargon, called a Stasi informant a Spitzel, or “snitch.” In a system where the state micromanaged the future, it was easy to get leverage over kids—it would be a shame if you weren’t able to get one of the few available spots in the job field you want . . . it would be a shame if your parents had to go to jail because you wouldn’t cooperate and you ended up in an orphanage. Of the hundreds of thousands of IMs the Stasi ran over the years, close to 10 percent were considered “youths,” though not all of those were minors.
For the first year of her job training, Major lived as if she were on the run. She rarely slept in one place for more than a few nights in a row, switching between her grandmother’s apartment—where she’d grown up—and friends’ places, as well as the apartment of her ninety-year-old great-grandmother, who also lived in the Köpenick district. Moving around kept the informants and spies guessing; often she managed to ditch her tails by living so erratically. After about a year, the Stasi gave up chase—though Lieutenant Müller of the Volkspolizei did not give up his patriotic crusade to rid his district of her “negative-decadent” influence.
It was difficult to get an apartment at the time, so in 1979 Major registered herself at her great-grandmother’s place, making it her official residence in the hope that she might be able to stay there when her great-grandmother eventually died.
Late that summer, while wandering through an annual local summer fair, Major saw something she had never seen before outside of her own mirror, a few Western magazines, and record covers: punks.
There are others!
Major had been a punk for nearly two years—totally alone, as far as she knew.
She made straight for them and they all chatted excitedly for a while. But there was no way to stay in touch—virtually nobody had a phone in the East, Major was moving from place to place all the time, making even mail difficult, and since she was still under surveillance, or so she suspected, letters would be intercepted anyway.
Major managed to hang in and finish the job training program, which landed her a minimum-wage job as a typist. She would have to work Monday to Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., using a typewriter from 1933.
In September of 1980, around the time she started her full-time job, Major ran into a few of the punks she’d met the summer before.
They told her about a meet-up planned for a few days later at a youth club in a nearby neighborhood. She went to the club—of course she went to the club! But only one other punk showed up, a guy she’d never seen before. They became friends. They arranged to meet again, and within a few weeks a handful of punks from the southern parts of the city—Köpenick, Schöneweide, Wendenschloss—began to congregate regularly at a youth club in a park called Plänterwald, which the punks called PW for short. In addition to the youth club, the adjacent amusement park, with its huge ferris wheel nestled in the woods, also became a punk landmark. At first there were just a few punks showing up at PW, then a dozen. As word of their Wednesday and Saturday gatherings got around during the autumn of 1980, the numbers began to rise.
One day a punk approached Major at PW, a guy she’d never seen before. He was tall and strikingly handsome, and dimples appeared on his cheeks when he smiled.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Major,” she said.
“In that case I’m Colonel,” he said, placing himself a rank above her.
His real name was Mario Schulz, but now he, too, had his nom-de-punk.
The gang of punks would sit at the side of the dance floor of the youth club waiting for something they could dance to, punk or ska, they didn’t care. They took homemade cassettes of the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers, Sham 69, and all their other favorite UK bands—all taped off the radio—and offered them to the DJ. The DJs in official youth clubs were fully integrated into the system. They had to take a course and pass an exam in order to get a license to spin. But the use of homemade cassettes was common even among the officially-sanctioned DJs, since the cheapest and easiest way to get Western music was to tape it off West Berlin radio. And anyway, the DJs wanted to be hip and cool, too. So they’d usually play a punk song or two a night. The general crowd would run for the hills as the punks stormed onto the dance floor and threw themselves around wildly and pogoed. At first other kids thought the punks were cool, but it didn’t take long before they started to take issue with them. Many nights ended in fistfights. For some of the punks, that became part of the thrill—waiting for the moment all hell broke loose.
Sometimes the punks would hit other youth clubs in the area—KWO in Schöneweide, FAS in Lichtenberg�
�but the pattern was always the same: wait all night for a Pistols song; hope to get out alive before the mainstream kids got up enough liquid courage to try to beat the shit out of the greatly outnumbered punks.
Major’s great-grandmother had also died in the summer of 1980, leaving Major to occupy the apartment all by herself. Since Major had lived on the run, lived with the paranoia of being followed, she was happy to open her new place as a crash pad for other punks, whether they wanted to hang out and listen to music, sleep there to take a break from oppressive conditions in their family homes, or try to throw off police tails. Major’s apartment soon became the hub of a burgeoning scene, a place where punks knew they could find each other even on nights when there wasn’t a meet-up somewhere else.
It’s a cliché to describe the East Bloc as gray, but there was truth behind the cliché. Many of the old buildings that had managed to survive Allied air raids during World War II were dilapidated or even derelict, with shrapnel damage on their facades from street fighting at the end of the war. The old buildings had a brownish-gray hue darkened by soot from the coal stoves still used to heat many apartments. Large sections of the city had been flattened by Allied bombing and never rebuilt; other sections had been rebuilt with cheerless sprayed-concrete facades and low-ceilinged apartments; on the outskirts of town the government had thrown up huge colonies of unadorned, monotonous high-rises. There were hardly any streetlights and virtually none of the posters, billboards, or signs splashed with advertisements that gave a lot of the color to Western streets—in a planned economy there was no need for advertising and branding. A leaden sky hung above the city for much of the year and the air was choked with the ruddy smoke belched out by all the stoves burning brown coal ripped from massive strip mines in central East Germany. In these surroundings, punks—splattered with paint and pins and homemade buttons and patches, wearing garish makeup, their hair dyed unnatural colors—might as well have dropped from outer space.