Burning Down the Haus
Page 19
SUBstitut Archive
Pankow, singer of the band Planlos, ca. 1982
SUBstitut Archive
Otze of Schleim-Keim, 1983
SUBstitut Archive
L’Attentat, ca. 1984
Christiane Eisler / Transit Agency
Poster for the Church from Below, ca. 1988
SUBstitut Archive
Stasi surveillance photos of Speiche, undated
SUBstitut Archive
SUBstitut Archive
Feeling B, ca. 1984: Paul Landers (left), Aljoscha Rompe (middle), Flake Lorenz (right)
Private archive of Paul Landers
Die Anderen (in the second row at left is Toster)
Karoline Bofinger
Wartburgs für Walter (left to right: Jörn Schulz, Ina Pallas, Bernd Hennig) in Poland, November 1987
Private archive of Jörn Schulz
Illegal album by Re-Aktion taped over an official release on the state-owned record label, Amiga
Mathias Schwarz
Punk festival at Erlöser Church, April 1988
SUBstitut Archive
Paul Landers of Feeling B (head of table, at right) and Tatjana Besson of Die Firma (standing behind Landers) at a planning session at the squat Eimer, 1990
Maurice Weiss / Ostkreuz Agency
Buildings being razed in Prenzlauer Berg in the late 1980s
Harald Hauswald / Ostkreuz Agency
Ratte, bassist of HAU and L’Attentat, on a train to Berlin, 1983
Christiane Eisler / Transit Agency
IV
Rise Above
38
On the last night of 1983, Elias Church in Prenzlauer Berg hosted a punk gathering and somewhat subdued New Year’s party. The event had originally been planned for September, but no church had agreed to let the punks congregate within its walls at the height of the Stasi crackdown. Now, on New Year’s Eve, a sandbox was erected in front of the Elias altar and punks lit candles for all of their friends who couldn’t be there—all those in prison, in the army, or sent away.
The original punk scene in East Berlin lay in rubble, still smoldering from the attack by Stasi chief Erich Mielke. Major was gone. Three members of Namenlos were in pretrial detention being interrogated, desperately hoping their case would proceed to court. Planlos were being rehabilitated in special army units reserved for the politically suspect.
In Leipzig, four punks—including Ratte of the band HAU and Connie, a seventeen-year-old punk who had always looked up to Jana and Mita of Namenlos—had been busted for spray-painting freedom for jana, mita and a-micha! on city walls. They’d been held in pre-trial detention for three months and then sentenced in November to seven to ten months jail time. During the trial, Connie’s father wore ripped jeans and an old vest in court, trying as best as he could to look like a punk—his silent way of supporting his daughter. Stracke, the singer in HAU and, for now, Wutanfall, had participated in a candlelight vigil in protest over his friends’ arrest and himself been detained, along with forty others; he was released at Christmastime after more than a month in detention. Chaos had dropped out of Wutanfall after being savaged by the authorities. In Thüringen, six punk teens were sitting in prison for spray-painting anarchist graffiti; Otze of Schleim-Keim would also soon spend four more months in Stasi prison in 1984.
Circles of big-city punks had been broken up by other means, too. They’d been sent to work in distant villages. They’d been banned from travel to other cities—Berliners couldn’t go to Leipzig, and vice versa; known Dresden punks couldn’t go to either of those cities. Some punks were simply banned from the central boroughs of their own cities. Still others were expatriated to West Germany—in Halle, for instance, the number of people shown the door in 1984 more than quadrupled the number booted in 1982. The concerted action against punk in 1983 and 1984 far exceeded that undertaken against any other opposition group since the installation of dictator Erich Honecker in 1971.
But it was too late.
Punk had taken hold even in the smallest villages of the country.
The number of punks was already growing again; more sympathizers had been drawn in by the huge events throughout 1983. By the time Namenlos, Planlos, and Wutanfall had been neutralized, the tremors they’d caused had already rippled out. Countless other kids had already felt the reverberations and knew something was happening, knew the government was scared, knew they didn’t want to die in the waiting room of the future. For every band the Stasi smashed, it seemed as if ten more cropped up.
Even in Berlin, in the midst of the crackdown, a second generation of punk bands had already formed. And outside Berlin, in the hinterlands, the scene boomed with the aftereffects of the Summer of Punk. The Stasi could congratulate itself on having silenced the loudest and most dangerous voices of the punk scene. But they underestimated the reverberations those voices would have. Kids—especially younger kids, who had only been on the fringes of the scene and witnessed the excitement but not the consequences—were still captivated by the public fuck you that punk represented.
Marcus Hugk was fourteen in 1983, living with his parents in Adlershof, a neighborhood just beyond Plänterwald, where Marcus had first seen punks the year before. Being around punks gave Marcus a whole new mental framework, and he was determined to contribute something concrete to the scene. Which is how he hit upon the idea of starting a band. He wanted to play songs that disregarded the structures an official music evaluation committee would approve of. He wanted to sing lyrics that defied state ideology.
Fuck the pigs!
Fuck the FDJ!
Too much future!
Marcus, his friend Bernd Hennig, and a few other punk teens began with a children’s guitar and a homemade amp they cobbled together, and used whatever else they could scrounge up until Marcus was able to grab a few drums from his father’s workplace—his dad was an official musician employed by the Interior Ministry.
The new combo recorded some songs on a hand-held cassette player and wanted to pass the tape around to their friends. Now they needed a band name.
And it had to be a good one.
Well, they thought, punk was often translated as Abfall in East Germany—garbage, in essence, which in German could also be called Müll . . .
They also wanted their friends to know how cool they were.
What would make us sound like bigshots?
International!
And of course, international was also a pun on the communist anthem that every East German child learned as a Young Pioneer.
Aha! What about Internationale Müllabfuhr?
International Garbage Removal.
Perfect.
Next came a graffiti campaign to get the word out about their band.
The first time they sprayed the band name on neighborhood walls, it took an awful long time. Not to mention the amount of space—and spray paint—they needed to write Internationale Müllabfuhr.
Let’s just use the initials: IM.
Several times over the course of two weeks the band members went out and sprayed IM on walls in areas where punks hung out. They also tagged their own school.
That was a mistake.
Those two letters had already set off alarms in state security circles. IM was the abbreviation the Stasi used to describe a snitch in internal documents—short for Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. IM was a secret designation. The general public used the slang term Spitzel to describe Stasi snitches. Was an insider spray-painting the neighborhood walls of Treptow and Adlershof? That seemed crazy. But it stoked the surveillance state’s paranoia.
Officers from the Criminal Division turned up at Marcus’s school and began to pull students out of class. Kids who looked like trouble. Kids who looked like agitators. There were a few kids whose look put them under immediate suspicion: punks. Their outward appearance alone told school administrators and police—and everyone else—that they refused to be slotted into officially sanctioned society.
Hau
l them in.
The police escorted Marcus, Bernd, and the other members of the band to interrogations where they were joined by some “colleagues” from the Stasi.
The police had photos. They had the recordings of band’s songs. They even had some scraps of paper with lyrics handwritten by the band.
Bernd explained during questioning: “Our lyrics are just nonsense and jokes. We were just having fun. We didn’t think anything of it. And we didn’t know it was illegal to get together and make music without an amateur band license.”
The interrogation kept circling back to one central question: Whose idea was it to spray the abbreviation IM?
“Was it the CIA?” they shouted. “Was it the West Germans?”
Eventually the interrogators realized that the band’s use of IM had nothing to do with the Stasi’s own internal use of the same term. They confiscated Marcus’s cassettes. One of the band members was sent to juvenile work camp.
Even though the rest of the boys weren’t sent away, the hours spent in dingy holding cells being told they might not be released weighed heavily on them. Marcus and his buddies were just kids, after all. The Stasi officers had demanded the boys renounce the punk community. The boys weren’t about to do that. But they did give up the band.
Marcus and his school friends were just one of dozens of groups that formed in 1983 and 1984. Some, like IM, were short-lived; others became driving forces in the underground, thorns in the side of the dictatorship as it struggled to deal with what must have been absolutely incomprehensible: the reconstitution of the punk scene in the wake of the Stasi-led crackdown. Bands like Feeling B, Aufruhr zur Liebe, der Demokratische Konsum, die Firma, Happy Straps, Klick & Aus, Betonromantik, and Ornament & Verbrechen all started in Berlin in 1983. They would be among the underground’s heavy hitters for years. Many more were to come.
Within a year of the crackdown, even the Stasi would have to concede that the movement had not only reconstituted but expanded. And then what could they do?
39
Aljoscha Rompe was already in his mid-thirties in 1983. He had a degree in physics. One of the few ways to be cleared for university was to prove your ideological maturity with an additional stint in the National Volks Army, and Aljoscha had served extra time in the NVA prior to his studies. It was during his time in the army that Aljoscha first ran afoul of the Stasi. In early 1972 a snitch told the Stasi about comments Aljoscha made at a party in the barracks—comments about how to democratize the DDR. He got in trouble again later that year for setting up an illegal club in Berlin, where he held not only discos but political discussions.
In 1978 Aljoscha spent three months in police custody while being investigated for “subversive agitation” as a result of his role in the production of a satirical calendar put together by a group of underground artists. During his incarceration, he was interrogated eighteen times; his lawyer also had to file a complaint after a police dog was let loose in Aljoscha’s cell in the middle of the night.
Also while in custody in 1978 Aljoscha received notification that his biological father, whom he had never known, had died. The news came with a surprise: his father had been a Swiss national. His mother, a committed communist who left her husband and moved to East Berlin when Aljoscha was just one year old, had never told him; her second husband, Robert Rompe, was an Eastern academic, functionary, and member of the communist party’s Central Committee from 1958 until the collapse of the DDR.
Aljoscha was still in detention when he applied for a Swiss passport, without telling his mother or stepfather since he knew they would disapprove. He got the passport in 1980, which allowed him to go back and forth to the West whenever he pleased. Aljoscha took advantage of his new status by applying to study at the Free University in West Berlin—not because he wanted to get another degree but because he wanted to get financial aid. Soon he was living off a West German educational stipend while still based in the East.
By the early 1980s, Aljoscha was a well-known figure in bohemian circles—and bars—of East Berlin. He was raucous and hyper-social. He had a lust for life that infected those around him. And he had a sort of existential restlessness that constantly got him into interesting places.
The Stasi cultivated informants around Aljoscha and surveilled him and those around him until the day the agency closed its doors in 1990. Aljoscha’s own stepfather became an IM.
Aljoscha worked for VEB Studiotechnik—the People’s studio engineering enterprise—and spent several years driving officially sanctioned bands around the country to play at state-sponsored festivals and youth clubs. But he was getting fed up.
Then he discovered punk.
Aljoscha got to know Planlos when the band was still rehearsing at their basement space in Metzer Strasse 14—that is, before the Stasi searched the place. Aljoscha had also had an apartment in Metzer 14 for a while. By the time Department XX moved in on Planlos in the summer of 1983, Aljoscha had squatted an apartment on nearby Fehrbelliner Strasse. He offered to let Planlos use his new place, a huge attic space. It was in pretty rough shape, but he had already “soundproofed” it for the legendary parties he threw: he had lined the parts of the walls and roof that were intact with old mattresses. As for the parts that were bombed out, there was nothing to be done. Electricity came from a cord Aljoscha had strung from his roof to the roof of the building across the street, where he had tapped into a live wire. For his parties, Aljoscha cooked up huge vats of spaghetti, punk bands played, and everyone got blasted. His building also housed a number of other likeminded people, including Günther Spalda from Rosa Extra and Carlo Jordan, who would later play a key role in underground environmental activism.
The more Aljoscha listened to the punk bands that practiced at his place and played at his parties—in addition to Planlos, a band called die Firma had begun working at his apartment and others soon followed—the more convinced he became that he could do the same thing. He had already sung in a hard blues band, even if it had never developed into anything serious.
All he needed was a band.
40
Aljoscha’s band arrived in the form of two teenagers: Paul, an eighteen-year-old bleached-blond guitarist, and Flake, a gangly sixteen-year-old keyboard player, both brought in by Alexander Kriening, a drummer who had already been playing with Aljoscha for a while. Kriening had been in the punk scene for years: he used to jam with Planlos bassist Kaiser back in 1980, before Planlos existed.
Paul Landers knew Kriening from hanging out with him at the punk meeting spot in Plänterwald. Paul had grown up in a neighborhood so close to the Berlin Wall that police patrolled the area day and night, often with dogs, and even children needed special permits to visit friends in some of the buildings closest to the border.
For Paul, the Wall wasn’t something he bristled at, it was just his daily reality: If I lived in the desert I’d see sand, if I lived in the Arctic I’d see snow, I live here and I see the Wall. Paul’s father was a professor of Slavic languages and his mother, a Russian teacher; both were heartfelt believers in socialism but also somewhat disillusioned about how things worked in practice in the DDR. Still, Paul and his family knew life could be far worse than in East Germany—they had spent a year in Russia and had seen food shortages there. After taking a strict approach bringing up Paul’s older sister and not liking the results, they had left Paul in peace when he started to dress funny and to attend Blues Masses and punk shows at Berlin churches. That spring of 1983, Paul was living in a squat on Invalidenstrasse and finishing up an apprenticeship in communications engineering. He was handy with electronics—he’d converted a radio into his first guitar amp and built his own guitar effects.
Kriening asked Paul to come meet Aljoscha on the afternoon of Thursday, March 31, 1983. Paul waited for Kriening and Aljoscha at Senefelder Platz in Prenzlauer Berg. Paul was shocked when Kriening showed up with a balding old man in jeans, a T-shirt, and a leather vest.
Who the hell is this?
&n
bsp; Together they went to a bar. To call the old man—Aljoscha—an enthusiastic drinker would be an understatement. Aljoscha went to order drinks for everyone, but Paul, who hadn’t been to a bar before, was nervous and claimed he wasn’t feeling well.
“In that case,” Aljoscha said, “you need an herbal liqueur.”
He had Paul drink a shot of an East German version of Jägermeister to settle his stomach. After two hours in the bar, happily buzzed, the three of them wandered over to Aljoscha’s apartment. The longer they hung out, the more Paul began to see past Aljoscha’s age. Aljoscha was a font of ideas, and they had even begun to write a song when Aljoscha started riffing on a lyrical idea Paul had thrown out.
The next day Paul wrote in his diary:
Yesterday I was in the underworld, together with Kriening. We went to a musician’s place, the guy was bald in front, had curly hair in back, wore a purple scarf, disgusting, pointless yammering, laughing, totally wasted, but he has an amazing apartment. A punk band rehearses there.
The second time Paul went to Aljoscha’s place, a few days later, Lade from Planlos was playing drums in the attic apartment. Paul could hear the racket from the bottom of the staircase. He was hooked, he was in.
Kriening had brought in Christian “Flake” Lorenz, too. Flake was sixteen and looked even younger. They’d known each other for several years, had met at a concert at the school Kriening attended with Flake’s older brother. Kriening knew something important about Flake: he had just gotten an electric organ. Kriening knocked at Flake’s parents’ apartment one afternoon and asked him to join the band.
“What am I going to play?”
“Well, actually, bass. We don’t have a bass player and you can play the bass tones with your left hand.”