by Tim Mohr
Acid rain, dead forest
Industry will gas us soon
Finally, after four or five songs, a hippie climbed up on stage and addressed the crowd.
“Hey, you need to listen to the lyrics they’re singing,” he shouted. “They’re saying the same things we say! Don’t be like this! Listen to them!”
The situation improved somewhat after that, and the number of stones and bottles and bockwurst zinging past the band slowed. Still, it was a tough show, and Jana had to puff herself up and push quickly through the crowd afterward, trying not to betray the fact that she felt a bit crestfallen.
But then a girl came up to her as the next band, Planlos, was getting ready to start playing.
“That was so cool how you just kept going,” she said. “That was so brave!”
“Thanks,” said Jana.
For A-Micha, because of the animosity they had faced down, it had been the band’s greatest show yet.
The gig functioned as a turning point for many in the crowd. A lot of kids were put off by the old blues fans’ negative response to the punks and never returned to a Blues Mass; a lot of kids realized they might just be punks themselves.
Jana liked to think and write in images sometimes. As she looked back on the summer of punk, she saw communism as a building inside which a few people had managed to set up nice, comfortable rooms. Those people were Stasi people. And she pictured the lyrics of the band’s songs as blows against the foundation of that building.
We’re shaking the foundation.
We’re a threat.
Jana wasn’t so far from the truth. Longtime Stasi chief Erich Mielke was seething by this point. In fact, he now personally issued orders declaring all-out war on punk. Härte gegen punk was the command, which meant something like countering punk with relentlessness, severity. Härte gegen Punk um Eskalation dieser Bewegung zu unterbinden—Fight punk relentlessly in order to suppress the escalation of this movement. Mielke outlined the goals of his war on punk: to ferret out activities that could be punished with imprisonment; to identify and take action against the lyricists and composers of punk music groups; to find the connections between punks and the church, peace activists, environmental activists, “and other garbage,” as well as any international connections the punks had. Finally, he wrote, “in the face of resistance, remove the kid gloves—we have no reason to treat these characters gently.”
Mielke may have had enough, but A-Micha wasn’t quite finished. To round out the summer of punk, A-Micha organized two more public actions. In July he took a group of punks to Oranienburg, where they had tried to lay a wreath at the nearby concentration camp in May. This time they put flowers at a memorial dedicated to anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, who was murdered at the concentration camp on July 10, 1934. The participants included other Open Work types in addition to punks—A-Micha had gotten to know more and more peace and environmental activists, in part because some of them were squatting in a building in Prenzlauer Berg near his own. Laying flowers to honor Mühsam was another moment when the different groups realized they shared goals, and older activists were forced to continue to take the punks more seriously.
Then on August 6, 1983, A-Micha rallied over 150 people to mark the thirty-eighth anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Punks for peace. Many participants wore rubber masks, plastic bags, and goggles. And at the end of the unauthorized march they presented a plaque at Sophien Church in Mitte. A lot of these punks for peace were grabbed by the cops as they left the church grounds.
Interrogation time again.
Jana, Mita, A-Micha and their dog, Wotan, made their way safely away from the church, but at ten minutes to six they were nabbed near Alexanderplatz. They were held for several hours.
“The individuals were dressed as punkers,” reported the arresting officers. “As a result of their decadent look an identity check was conducted. The individuals bore no resemblance to the photos in their identity papers.”
The cops reported that they were mouthy, describing them as acting “fresh” and “provocative.”
After so many arrests and interrogations, they were losing their fear; they knew this drill. If anything, they felt emboldened by the fact that the state seemed threatened by them.
This was getting fun.
29
On the morning of Thursday, August 11, 1983, Jana heard a knock at the door of her squatted apartment in Prenzlauer Berg.
It took a while for the sound to register. She and Mita had been out late partying the night before and had been in bed only a few hours. Mita had arranged to take the day off. Jana had simply skipped work again.
Today, Jana remembered, today they had scheduled a band meeting to discuss what to do if the Stasi came for them—or, as they had all pretty much acknowledged by now, when the Stasi came, not if.
MfS . . . SS.
“Come on in,” called Jana groggily as the dog barked at the incessant knocking.
The door was never locked. In fact, usually their friends just came in without knocking. “It’s open.”
Nothing.
More knocks.
“I said it’s open.”
She didn’t want to drag herself out of bed. She and Mita each had mattresses on the floor on either side of an old dresser they used as a sort of room divider. Mita was not stirring.
Jana just wanted to go back to sleep.
Wotan, their German shepherd, was now standing in front of the front door howling and growling and barking aggressively.
Jana finally stood up. The elastic band of her pajama bottoms was broken and she had to hoist them up as she staggered to the door. The dog ran to her and jumped around as she made her way to the door. She opened it.
Outside, two men and one woman. Obviously police of some kind, but in civilian clothes, not uniforms.
“Kriminalpolizei.”
Aha, police, criminal division.
Jana knew she didn’t have to let them in, but then Wotan escaped her grasp and she scampered after the dog to try to calm him. The cops quickly slipped in before she could assert her rights and demand a warrant.
“You’re going to have to come with us,” they ordered. “Klärung eines Sachverhaltes.”
Mita had woken up by this point. Her face was covered with paint—someone had painted colorful geometric shapes all over her face at the party the night before.
Klärung eines Sachverhaltes? Jana and Mita were both struck by something when the cops said this. Normally you got a letter in the mail with the date and time you had to report to a police station when they wanted you to clear up some facts surrounding a case.
This is weird.
Then it began to dawn on them.
This could be about the band.
Their minds kicking quickly into gear, they asked to be allowed to take Wotan someplace where a friend could take care of him. If this was just to clear something up, then, well, they weren’t being arrested, so the police shouldn’t object to their looking after the dog, at least they hoped.
The cops pointed to Mita. She could take the dog to a friend’s place.
The female officer and one of the male officers marched Jana out to an unmarked car and drove her to the detention center on Keibelstrasse, near Alexanderplatz.
They would interrogate her for the rest of the day.
Back at the apartment, the remaining officer told Mita to wash her face.
When she was finished, she and Wotan climbed into another car and the officer drove them the few blocks down to Göhrener Strasse, to the Elias Church rectory, where A-Micha worked.
Mita stood in front and called up, trying to make sure as many people as possible heard her.
“Jana and I have to go down to Keibelstrasse to clear something up! Can someone come take the dog?”
Mita knew there were scraps of paper with lyrics, tape recordings of the band playing in their rehearsal space, photos, and all sorts of other potentially incriminating bits of e
vidence stashed around their apartment. She hoped that somebody would be clever enough to walk up there and get rid of it all. Maybe even A-Micha, if he hadn’t yet been arrested.
A-Micha came down and took Wotan’s leash. The officer did not recognize him.
“Okay, bye, have fun!” he said.
Then Mita got back into the Trabant. The officer started the little car with a puff of silvery black smoke and they rattled off down Prenzlauer Allee.
Take it all in, this could be the last time you see all of this for a while.
When they arrived at the detention center on Keibelstrasse, she snapped out of her reverie as they took her mugshots—front, both sides.
Then they gave her a piece of cloth and made her reach into her pants and wipe her crotch. They took the cloth from her with tongs and sealed it in a glass jar.
“We’re taking a scent sample,” they said.
Weird.
Then fingerprints.
When she asked to go to the bathroom, she was accompanied by an officer who didn’t let her out of her sight.
Mita had never been through this before, despite being detained many times.
And then it was off to an interrogation.
Meanwhile A-Micha was still trying to figure out why exactly Jana and Mita were being taken in rather than receiving the usual letters. Namenlos bassist Frank had already been picked up, too, as had Kaiser of Planlos, whom the Stasi mistakenly thought played in Namenlos. It was two days before a major national holiday, A-Micha remembered. August 13 would mark the twenty-second anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall and another year of successfully fending off capitalist aggression. The cops often rounded up punks before big public events to keep them out of sight and to confiscate their homemade buttons with embarrassing logos and phrases.
During his lunch break A-Micha took Wotan for a walk up to his apartment in the squatted building on Schliemannstrasse, just a few blocks from the church. A couple of punks from Erfurt were crashing at his place, and he needed to get them out of harm’s way. He also didn’t want them to see his hiding spaces for fear they would be interrogated. Once they were gone, he hid a few pieces of potentially damning evidence. There wasn’t much—and he knew how to hide shit. A-Micha’s best friend from elementary school—a guy he had even stolen and burned a DDR flag with—had been forced by his parents to go to work for the Stasi. The guy worked in a division that created spy toys for international operatives, things like books with hidden compartments to hide microfilm in for transportation across borders. A-Micha still trusted him, and he had taught A-Micha some great tricks, like removing a doorframe, creating a hiding space in the wall, then replacing the doorframe. Or digging holes beneath the floor stones of a building’s basement and stashing things down there, always careful to re-smear the floor with coal dust and dirt.
After squaring things away at home, A-Micha went back to work at the church, scraping the old paint off the windowsills of the uppermost floor of the church building. A-Micha still felt there was a fifty–fifty shot that this was just the usual bullshit, a routine interrogation that would lead to nothing.
Shortly after three in the afternoon, A-Micha watched out the window as an unmarked Lada sedan pulled up. Two plainclothes officers got out and started looking around. A-Micha put down his palette knife and walked downstairs with Wotan in tow.
“Horschig, Micha?” asked one of the officers as A-Micha approached them.
“Yes.”
“You’re going to have to come with us.”
A-Micha—and the dog—were put into the back of the car.
They drove to Keibelstrasse. A-Micha was taken inside, photographed, fingerprinted. As had happened to Mita, they handed him a piece of cloth and told him to shove it down his pants and rub it around. The scent sample was new to A-Micha, too, and like the others he began to realize that this might be serious.
They started to interrogate him just before five that afternoon.
This was a Department XX operation: The breakup of the illegal punk music group Namenlos, as the operation was described in Stasi records.
The shock and awe phase of the Stasi’s war on punk was now underway.
The Summer of Punk was over.
30
A-Micha sat on a chair in the middle of the small room. The Stasi officer, a lieutenant, had his back to the window, silhouetted; it was difficult to see his face.
As part of a “procedure to investigate suspicious activity”—a particularly government-speak-sounding term, Verdachtsprüfungshandlung—“you will be subject to questioning.”
A-Micha nodded.
“It is known to the investigative organ of the Ministry of State Security that on June 24, 1983, you appeared on the grounds of the Erlöser Church in Berlin-Rummelsburg. Comment on the circumstances of your activities there.”
A-Micha was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m not prepared to make any comments on what I was doing on the grounds of the Erlöser Church.”
He paused, looking at the stone-faced Stasi agent, then continued.
“I believe that first you are obligated to tell me why I am here being interrogated. I have nothing more to say.”
The Stasi man started to show his anger, banging a fist on the desk, waving it threateningly in A-Micha’s face. It was the first of many times that evening he thought he was going to be beaten.
“Let’s try again,” shouted the lieutenant.
It went like that until eight at night. Sometime after eight, A-Micha finally said, “Yeah, I was at the church, but I can’t remember any crimes committed there.”
The Stasi lieutenant: “What songs did you play there? Think carefully!”
When the lieutenant stepped out for a moment, A-Micha opened a light green folder on the desk and saw the lyrics of some of his songs typed out neatly.
Shit.
When the lieutenant returned, the interrogation continued.
“What songs did you and your friends perform on the stage on the grounds of the Erlöser Church? Answer the investigative organ!”
The Stasi man insisted the band had played seven songs. A-Micha said two.
“The investigative organ requests once again that you make truthful statements! What other songs did you and your friends perform on the stage at the Erlöser Church?”
The interrogation went on through the night. Eventually they had discussed five songs, the last of which was the MfS song—the one comparing the Stasi to Hitler’s SS.
“You say the security organs of the DDR surveil the populace. On what basis do you make this assertion?”
Fuck it, thought A-Micha. He’d been heading for this moment since the day Major had been arrested in 1981.
“As far as I’m concerned, the populace is barred from the freedom of expression by the Stasi. Like me. I’ve been arrested even though all I did was openly speak my mind.”
The Stasi officer sneered back: “What is your understanding of ‘freedom of expression?’”
“I understand freedom of expression to mean the presentation of my own thoughts—and it doesn’t matter whether those thoughts are for or against the interests of the DDR.”
It was 4:30 a.m.
A-Micha was led to a prison cell, where he slumped onto the wooden slab that was the bed.
He was awoken about three hours later. Two officers entered his cell.
Finally, I can go home.
He knew they would need the consent of a judge to continue to hold him.
“You are being transferred,” said one of the officers, “to a pretrial detention center.”
They held up a warrant, signed by a judge early that morning: “Together with three other persons Horschig performed lyrics during a concert as a ‘punk music group’ that portrayed the societal conditions of the DDR as un-free and slandered the Ministry of State Security as a surveillance organ.”
A-Micha was admitted to the prison in Pankow at 9 a.m. on August 12, 1983. Aside from his clot
hes, his only possessions were a cloth sack, four cigarettes, six safety pins, and a homemade button that said, in German, destroy what’s destroying you.
He would spend the next six months in pretrial detention in cell 59R, subject to daily interrogation.
31
After the scent sample, photographs, and fingerprints were finished, Mita was rushed around the building on Keibelstrasse and eventually seated opposite a Stasi officer in an interrogation room.
Stasi officer: “Describe the progress of your personal development to this point.”
Mita: “I don’t understand what this has to do with clearing up any facts of a case and as a result will not answer.”
Stasi: “You are advised that for the assessment of the relevant facts of a case, under the criminal procedure regulations of the DDR, information about personal development must also be gathered.”
Mita: “Despite this order I will not answer the question.”
It’s not like I’m a freedom fighter or something, I’m a drummer.
The interrogation continued.
Stasi: “What are your musical interests?”
Mita: “I like to play drums, which I taught myself to play. I own a drum kit.”
Stasi: “In what form do you practice your drums?”
Mita: “I play alone mostly, or sometimes with other people. But I will not make any statement about other people.”
Stasi: “In what public performances have you taken part?”
Mita: “Up to now I have appeared only in church spaces, where the freedom exists to do things spontaneously.”
Mita explained that she had played at a Blues Mass.
Stasi: “What songs were performed by you and others at the Blues Mass?”
Mita: “I won’t say anything about song titles, I have no comment. I have the right to refuse to talk.”
Stasi: “Be advised that alongside the right to refuse to talk you have a civic legal duty to cooperate in the clearing up of a possible criminal offense. You are therefore asked again to answer the question!”
Mita: “I have no statement to make to the question posed.”