Burning Down the Haus

by Tim Mohr

  Yep, Flake could do that with his new organ.

  The next day Kriening returned, this time with Aljoscha. Flake, too, was taken aback at his age and his odd look and attitude. Aljoscha giggled the whole time, and acted like Flake’s parents’ place belonged to him, tromping around and then carrying the organ out of the place and down the stairs, with Flake trailing behind.

  The organ was too heavy to carry back to Aljoscha’s place, so Aljoscha flagged down a car and convinced the driver to schlep it to Fehrbelliner Strasse. Flake followed on foot, and by the time he arrived in the strange, sprawling attic, his organ was set up alongside the other musical equipment in the living room.

  Flake could not believe his eyes. The apartment was like nothing he had ever seen. It was like some sort of music studio, except that the roof was crumbling and open to the sky here and there.

  Incredible!

  Aljoscha pulled out a bottle of apricot brandy and they began to chat. Aljoscha quickly downed a whole tumbler of brandy while Flake nursed a small splash of it—he’d never drunk hard alcohol before. Then Aljoscha made a casserole, ever the good host.

  Flake just sat there with his mouth open in amazement.

  The second time Flake went to Aljoscha’s place, Paul was there. The whole band was there: Aljoscha, Paul, Flake, and Kriening. They jammed at ear-splitting volume, with the windows open. Flake couldn’t understand any of the lyrics Aljoscha shrieked and warbled, sounding tortured, twitchy, out of breath.

  Still, it was a band. Well, sort of. For the initial few weeks it was more like a party, people coming and going and drinking and playing music and drinking and drinking.

  They dubbed the band Feeling Berlin, then quickly shortened it to Feeling B. From his years as a roadie, Aljoscha seemed to know everyone—musicians, promoters at official clubs, bar managers. One of his friends was André, the singer in a heavy blues-rock band called Freygang. André was a long-haired old warhorse who kept running afoul of authorities and having his performance license revoked and reinstated and revoked again. He invited Aljoscha to test out Feeling B during a break between Freygang sets at an official club on the rural outskirts of East Berlin the night of May 14, 1983.

  It did not go well.

  When officially licensed bands played at official clubs, they typically had to play multiple sets, filling an entire evening from seven to midnight. Feeling B was slated to fill the biggest break, the one during which Freygang would be fed dinner by the club. But by the time Feeling B got their chance, the band was wasted. Aljoscha had kept ordering rounds of beers and vodka and orange juices, and the young guys were not able to keep up. They were also nervous about playing in front of an audience for the first time. Feeling B sounded horrible when they took the stage, and almost from the first note they played, beer glasses started flying toward the stage. They managed to stick it out for about fifteen minutes. To make matters worse, Paul and Kriening got picked up by the cops on the way home on Kriening’s moped. They were taken to a rural police station and interrogated from eleven at night until three in the morning. Kriening also took punches to his gut and face.

  When Paul eventually made it home, he scrawled in his diary: what he had always dismissed as tough-guy tall-tales about the police turned out to be true.

  The next Feeling B show was during the day at an insane asylum in Berlin’s Lichtenberg neighborhood, kind of a public rehearsal in front of the inmates. Aljoscha had arranged it with a guy he knew who worked there. The bands Rosa Extra and Die Firma came along. Then Feeling B played another gig, this time with Rosa Extra and Wutanfall in a church—just before the summer crackdown on the major punk bands.

  But while the Stasi was preparing to hammer the hardcore punks during that summer of 1983, Feeling B was on vacation. Aljoscha had taken the entire band to Hiddensee, a narrow island in the Baltic Sea and his place of refuge since childhood, when he’d started going there with his parents.

  “Hiddensee is the most beautiful spot in East Germany,” Aljoscha told the boys. “The Greek isles have nothing on this place.”

  And Hiddensee was where the band really came together.

  Aljoscha convinced a friend with a car to drive the four band members to the ferry that went to Hiddensee—cars were not permitted on the island itself. At the ferry they loaded their rudimentary gear onto a wooden cart they could wheel by hand, and made their way across to the island. You needed to be able to prove you had accommodations to board the ferry, but Aljoscha was able to talk his way through nearly anything, and managed to get everyone across despite his plan to sleep open-air on the beach.

  On the island, the band pulled their cart to one of the chalky cliffs on the ocean side and unloaded. They hooked up their jerry-rigged amp to a car battery, Kriening tipped over the cart to make a bass drum, and they were ready to jam around a campfire. The beach party scene on Hiddensee was magical.

  The island had its share of bigwigs, but Aljoscha knew who was with the Stasi and who was okay. He knew the areas where noise wouldn’t carry, and where they could sleep without being spotted. The island was considered a border area, so doing illegal things carried some risk of being charged with attempted defection. But the island’s only cop—Officer Gruber, everyone knew his name—rode a loud Schwalbe moped, which you could hear from miles away since there were no other motorized vehicles. Something about the place had always attracted freaks and fun-seekers. The campsites and cafés were crawling with scenesters from the Berlin underground. Hiddensee was a giant playground for cool kids, and Feeling B staged impromptu concerts on lazy afternoons or around a campfire at night, everyone drunk and dancing while the band basically rehearsed.

  Feeling B started to go to Hiddensee every weekend, all summer, adding on whatever days Paul and Kriening could skip work. Flake had just finished school and would start his apprenticeship in the fall. Other Berlin bands, like their friends in Die Firma, came to visit. They were amazed at the scene and the fact that Feeling B staged electrified concerts in the woods or on the beach, sheltered from prying eyes and ears by chalky cliffs.

  Every weekend party, party, party, playing music together and drinking in bars and cafés. At closing time they bought bottles of wine or cases of beer to take out—a last couple rounds to fuel an all-night party in the woods and to soften the ground below them when they passed out, illegally roughing it in some hidden spot Aljoscha had found, no tent, no sleeping bags, not even a tarp.

  Still, even sleeping in bushes, all this fun cost money.

  Once again, Aljoscha had a plan: earrings.

  Huh?

  Earrings.

  Aljoscha had realized that metal hoop earrings were not readily available in East Germany but were highly sought after. Using his Swiss passport he crossed into West Berlin and bought spools of silver-plated copper wire. With pliers, the band members learned to twist the wire into hoops and create rudimentary clasps. Some of the hoops they decorated with colorful bits of fabric or beads. Soon, they could make a pair of earrings in four minutes. The material for a single pair cost next to nothing when Aljoscha bought it in bulk, and they found they could sell them for twenty East German marks. The band could simply sit at a café without a cent in their pockets, eat and drink all day, and, by selling earrings to tourists, finish the day full and fucked-up with a huge wad of cash. They took boxes of their earrings to beaches, campsites, and concerts. They sold like hotcakes.

  They pooled the money in a band slush fund that Aljoscha kept. He suggested they should try to buy a band vehicle. Sometimes if Flake said he wanted an ice cream, Aljoscha would hand him a fifty and not ask for the change. By the end of the summer, nobody was sure how much money Feeling B had saved, but they figured it must have been thousands.

  In September, Feeling B played a punk wedding party together with die Firma at a church in Johannisthal. Church officials got nervous about the racket and threatened to shut down the party several times.

  But instead of continuing down that well-t
rod path—occasional gigs in churches—Feeling B was about the take a major detour, one that would change the whole punk scene.

  41

  On October 27, 1983, Feeling B auditioned for an Einstufung, the government performance license bands—even amateur bands—needed to play in public legally.

  Another friend of Aljoscha’s had set the whole thing in motion. The guy, Arnfried Schobert, had been part of an officially licensed blues-rock combo that also toured in the 1970s as East Berlin’s Pink Floyd tribute band. Definitely not punk. But despite Feeling B’s weird polka-punk sound and the punk background of the younger members, Arnfried urged Aljoscha to audition for an amateur license—it was the only way forward, he said.

  Once again it was a case of Aljoscha knowing people in the official music world, and of the band playing by their own rules.

  Why can’t we get an Einstufung?

  The word Einstufung means evaluation—in this case, a rating given by a cultural commission. There were five ratings, from the worst—Unterstufe—through Mittelstufe, Oberstufe, Sonderstufe, and the best of all, Sonderstufe mit Konzertberechtigung. A band could also fail to qualify at all. The various levels reflected the commission’s assessment not just of the individual musicians’ talent level and the quality of their songs, but also their political maturity—the extent to which they complied with government notions of music and, especially, lyrics. All five ratings came with the government seal of approval, and the practical difference between them lay primarily in how much a band got paid. The concert business in East Germany was unique: a venue could let a band play only if the group was legally sanctioned with an Einstufung and had a corresponding tax ID number—the number was necessary for payment, and the band’s stamp of approval was needed to keep club and bar managers from getting fired or worse. Bands were paid an hourly rate for shows that generally were billed for five hours, providing music from seven to midnight. The rate did not vary based on how many people turned up, but on what level Einstufung the band had. Unterstufe? Four marks fifty an hour per musician. Sonderstufe? Seven marks fifty an hour per musician.

  Despite allowing the acts to earn a little money, the Einstufung ratings were for amateur bands only. And in order to audition for one, band members had to be able to prove they had jobs—real jobs, unrelated to the band. Luckily the members of Feeling B were covered. Paul, for instance, was working as a boiler technician at a library near his parents’ apartment. Flake was an apprentice toolmaker. Aljoscha was ostensibly a full-time student in West Berlin. Kriening presented the only problem: he was working as a janitor, but he’d been called up for army service and failed to report. The band just had to hope Kriening’s army records didn’t get cross-checked by the commission.

  The afternoon of October 27, Feeling B went to the Kulturhaus in Berlin’s Karlshorst neighborhood, feeling nervous and excited. Their confidence built as they watched other bands audition in front of the commission.

  Wait, we’re better than them.

  Feeling B took no chances, changing potentially contentious lyrics, adding extra songs, and creating a blow-out performance in the empty hall. They projected Super 8 film clips of their Hiddensee adventures behind them, and they put a block of dry ice in an old laundry machine basin and mounted it atop a ladder so the band was swathed in dry-ice fog.

  The commission sat with the band afterward and passed judgment from behind their table, consulting their notes: “First, the singer needs to learn to sing more clearly and work on his microphone technique. Second, the guitar player must not fall to his knees so often.”

  The verdict: Feeling B had passed, and would receive an Einstufung at the Sonderstufe level—the second best rating.

  With their Einstufung in hand, Feeling B became trailblazers of a new way forward—soon enough, many more bands followed them into this new gray area, officially sanctioned as amateur musicians. Their status represented a concession to punk on the part of the government. Or did it? Kids who considered themselves true punks did not see it that way. They saw it as a government attempt to defang the scene by dangling the possibility of legitimacy, to co-opt the scene, to kill the scene by hugging it to death. They saw it as a new front in the dictatorship’s war on punk. The Stasi had tried the stick; this was the carrot.

  After all, was it really possible to use the official power structure against itself—to undermine the system from within? The first generation of punks certainly hadn’t thought so. They rejected the entire system. Destroy what’s destroying you. Feeling B now seemed to have a foot in each camp. After getting their amateur license, they continued to turn down gigs at special events put on by the Free German Youth. But they never explicitly said they refused to play state-sponsored events, just that they couldn’t fit them into their schedule. And they did play in officially sanctioned concert venues all over the country.

  No more churches for Feeling B.

  They would find they weren’t welcome in the church-based scene anymore anyway. The punks who’d been targeted by the Stasi crackdown considered anyone who submitted to the government for approval a traitor, a turncoat.

  Verräter!

  But then again the members of Feeling B didn’t see themselves as very political. They didn’t have any songs like Namenlos—MfMfS . . . SS! They considered themselves more about having fun than about politics. Or maybe having fun was their politics. Polka-punk, party-punk, whatever you called their music, it certainly wasn’t politically strident. They weren’t counterrevolutionary agitators; Feeling B were more of a guerilla party troupe. They were happy to live their dreams despite the system—music and booze, partying and traveling. They were happy to live their dreams within the system. Shit, they’d received a Sonderstufe, the second best rating.

  Despite that rating, the concert payday for amateur bands wasn’t worth much. The real money, Feeling B would find, was in the inflated travel costs they were able to bill venues. Even with that money, the band continued to depend financially on selling earrings and handmade T-shirts and jackets everywhere they went. Their DIY business thrived as they began to take punk to the people, spending their weekends playing hole-in-the-wall youth clubs in every godforsaken village in the DDR.

  The boys in Feeling B approached it all with an innocent sense of fun, in part because they could—they had never encountered much trouble and now could live semi-legally as itinerant musicians, continuing to pool their money for band use.

  Without the need to show official employment again until they had to renew their Einstufung a few years down the road, they began shifting into the expanding gray areas of the economy, becoming less dependent on day jobs and less fastidious about even working day jobs at all.

  This corresponded with a general change in East German society: the overarching importance of having an official job was fading. One reason first-generation punks feared not having jobs was a spike in the prosecution of asoziales Verhalten cases starting in 1978 and peaking from 1979 to 1982. The incidence of criminal charges for not working decreased from 1983 on—by 1985 the number of prosecutions had dropped to just 40 percent of the number it was in 1980. And the drop in prosecutions of youth as asozial over the same period was even more dramatic, down in 1985 to less than 5 percent of the number in 1980. With fewer arrests being made, the fear of not having an official job diminished sharply as the decade wore on.

  The members of Feeling B compared their Einstufung to a driver’s license: you paid attention to the rule book during the test, but out on the open road you could drive as fast and as crazy as you wanted. To the band, the Einstufung represented a kind of independence, a kind of freedom. And they intended to make the most of it.

  The day after Feeling B passed their Einstufung, Aljoscha took the band’s collective pot of money and bought a used Trabant. Since people had to wait years to take delivery of a new car in the East, used cars were expensive.

  They really had sold a shitload of earrings that past summer.

  Aljoscha
began to use his contacts to put together a busy schedule of gigs, sometimes several per week.

  As far as Feeling B saw it, their new status—with wheels and a license to rock—proved that anything was possible, even in East Germany. The opportunities were there.

  We may live in a dictatorship, Paul thought, but it’s a dumb one. There are holes in it. And we can operate in those holes. We can live our whole lives in those holes. And live well.

  With his Swiss passport and the chance to see the West, Aljoscha had come to hate it. He often talked about the way money ruined people. Paul and Flake shared his distaste for the West, even if they didn’t have Aljoscha’s direct experience. In that regard they were typical DDR punks, for whom the West was never a goal or ideal.

  In the East, Aljoscha and the boys could now hop in their car and head off to one big continuous party that they were always the center of—wherever they turned up, shit got crazy. Over the next year Feeling B finished just a handful of concerts intact. Seven to midnight was just too long for them to stay sober enough to perform—or at least for Aljoscha to stay sober. He finished nearly every show falling off the stage or babbling incoherently or simply passing out on stage, forcing the others to take on vocal duties and play long, improvised passages to pad the shows.

  The young band members knew they could be better if they weren’t drunk all the time. And they knew that Aljoscha was a liability at times. But they never contemplated kicking Aljoscha out. Feeling B was meant to be a party, and Aljoscha was the life of the party. And besides, the last thing they wanted was to be like one of the inert professional bands of the official East German rock scene.

  Taking punk to the people wasn’t always easy in 1984. There were pockets of punks at most shows—but not always. One night in the cafeteria of the applied science college in Wismar, up on the Baltic Sea coast, the audience turned ugly. About a thousand students had been looking forward to an evening of dancing to conventional covers, and instead were confronted with Aljoscha’s shambolic, warbling antics, the band’s crazy rhythms, and Flake’s childlike Casio tones tinkling alongside Paul’s angular guitar riffs. Beer glasses started flying at the stage. At first the band was defiant. Paul and Flake shouted, “Come on! You can do better than that!” But the crowd got too angry, too violent. The band switched over to playing blues shuffles to protect themselves and to appease the student mob.