Burning Down the Haus

by Tim Mohr

  The key figure behind the mOAning Star was twenty-two-year-old Dirk Moldt, who functioned in essence as the editor in chief—at least as much as anyone did in such an anti-hierarchical context. Dirk was also the paper’s political cartoonist. He had grown up in an atheist household, and his first exposure to the church had come when he started to attend Blues Masses at Samariter Church as a teenager. He immediately loved the fact that the events were filled with freaks. But Dirk soon began to question the hippielike ethos that dominated the Blues Masses. What he initially thought he had found in the long-haired blues crowd he found in punk instead. There was something about the punks—they were funny, for one thing, and they were all about action. He started to go to punk shows as often as he heard about them, and though he didn’t affect a punk look, his affinity for punk and anarchism continued to deepen. When Namenlos and Planlos played the Blues Mass at Erlöser Church in the summer of 1983 and were initially shouted down by the blues fans, that settled things for Dirk. It was all about punk for him from then on.

  The mOAning Star very much embodied the punk spirit. For one thing, the paper reflected the grotesque humor that had drawn Dirk, among others, to the punks in the first place. Also, unlike subsequent underground publications, the mOAning Star was most definitely not intended for Western media consumption. Unlike some other activist groups, Berlin’s Open Work activists did not cultivate contacts on the Western side of the Wall. If anything, the Erlöser Church gang—both the all-punk group and the more heterogeneous Open Work—tended to look eastward, building ties to Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

  Editorially, the mOAning Star operated independently of the church, but it did benefit from an important church privilege: with the addition of an official stamp that said “for internal church use only,” the paper was shielded from government legal action. Of course, it was still dangerous to be associated with such a project. There were no bylines and no masthead. In addition to providing the protection of anonymity, the lack of attribution and leadership structure suited the Erlöser crowd’s radically democratic approach.

  Under Dirk and Kaiser, and with contributions from the Erlöser punks as well as the lay deacons Lorenz Postler and Uwe Kulisch, the mOAning Star became an important underground paper, distributed as far afield as Dresden, Halle, Jena, and Karl-Marx-Stadt, and eventually sharing production facilities—and Dirk, as political cartoonist—with the Umweltblätter, a famous underground environmental newsletter that was founded in 1987. From initial print runs of just a few dozen copies, the mOAning Star reached a thousand within a few years.

  By October 1985, A-Micha had also gathered a staff—including Jana and Kaiser—to publish another political newsletter, the first of which was called die Un/freie Gesellschaft, or the Un/free Society. At around the same time, other Profikeller punks started a fanzine called Alösa, a Berlin-accented spelling of Erlöser that allowed for anarchist As in the design. The outbuildings of Erlöser Church were now the source of three uncensored publications, all shielded from shutdown by the “for internal church use only” stamp.

  They had done it again.

  Create your own world, your own reality.

  DIY.

  Revolution from below.

  45

  When Pankow was discharged from the army in late 1985, he didn’t miss a step. He had been to the Profikeller before his conscription and was still friendly with Deacon Postler, and it felt natural to him to return. But Pankow didn’t necessarily fit in the same way he had before his military service. He no longer dressed so outlandishly or wore a punk haircut. A younger generation of punks had come along while he was in the army, and Pankow didn’t know any of them. Still, he joined A-Micha, Kaiser, and Speiche, who formed a sort of inner circle at Erlöser. And Pankow soon got to know Dirk Moldt, too.

  Other aspects of Pankow’s life were a mess.

  Pankow was still deeply in love with Nase, who had saved him from prison by agreeing to collaborate with the Stasi, then burned herself as an asset by telling everyone. Despite pressure from his band mates, Pankow had stuck by Nase just as she had stuck by him, and they were still together when he had to report for army duty. Pankow was crushed when he arrived back home and found she had moved on.

  Pankow had come home from the army with the idea of founding a new band. He settled his differences with Kaiser over the breakup of Planlos, but the breakup still haunted him. He felt oddly inhibited now. Somehow he had lost the courage to sing, to front a band. The demise of Planlos—the animosity, the distrust that the Stasi had managed to cultivate—had been so traumatic, and the shock of being chucked out by his friends was something he had never recovered from. Now the person for whom he had drawn a line in the sand—Nase—had abandoned him, too.

  Still, Pankow wanted to make music—up to then it had been his means of taking ownership of his life, the way he wrested control of his own future. He started talking to Kaiser and Dirk Moldt about forming a band. In this new outfit, Fatale, Pankow did not sing. He decided to hunker down behind the drum kit. Dirk would play guitar. Kaiser would play bass and sing, or they could find another singer. Pankow wasn’t going out front anymore.

  Although the new band provided a way to connect to other people, in some ways Pankow found himself less animated by music, less passionate about it. Limiting the scope of his activity to being in a band no longer seemed sufficient to him. He wanted to do things at a national or international level, to be part of something much bigger. So in addition to putting together Fatale, he got involved in a number of other efforts. He joined Open Work’s fight for space and he joined a punk theater group that was also operating out of Erlöser Church. He joined peace groups and groups liaising with the Polish opposition. Slowly he began to shift more and more of his energy into straight-up political activities.

  Fatale eventually found a frontman in Herne’s older brother Mecki, who was now out of jail. Mecki had briefly tried singing in a project with Imad from Wutanfall, and was friends with other Leipzig punks. The Stasi kept close tabs on him.

  With the Fatale lineup set, the band rehearsed for a few months. They sang about everyday problems and the environment, they railed against consumption and production-line work, and they delved into more pointedly political topics, too.

  The first Fatale gig would be in early 1986 at an Open Work benefit concert for an agrarian commune in a village called Hartroda, in the southern state of Thüringen. The Hartroda commune had been founded in 1978 to serve adults with disabilities. One of the cofounders, Matthias Vernaldi, was nineteen at the time but due to a physical disability he had always lived at home; he was rarely able to meet up with other people his age and yet he didn’t share the same ideas about life with his straitlaced parents. East Germany had services and facilities for school-age kids with disabilities, but most adults with disabilities felt marooned, typically forced to live either with their parents or in nursing homes intended for the elderly. Vernaldi and a group of friends—some with disabilities, some not—decided to establish an alternative. For that they immediately attracted the attention of the Stasi, who started “Operation Parasite” to monitor them. Despite the scrutiny, they eventually managed to get hold of a farm with a wreck of a farmhouse on it. They lived off of much of what they produced—vegetables, eggs, pigs—and brought in a little money selling fruit and wool.

  Pankow found the Hartroda commune magical. They were doing out in the open what many punks were trying to do furtively in Berlin and other East German cities. They had disengaged and struck out on their own, pursuing collective goals and a lifestyle that suited them. Vernaldi and his friends had created their own world, their own reality. Their fundamental philosophy was similar to the punks: as Vernaldi used to say, you had to make the best out of whatever the situation on the ground was, and not wait around until everything was just right. You could wait forever for that.

  Don’t die in the waiting room of the future.

  Maybe communities like this could
be the building blocks that could be scaled up to a societal level, the cells that could form an entire organism? Though a lot of the punks espoused some sort of socialist anarchism, they themselves often weren’t entirely confident about the chances of success for such a system on a society-wide level; it just seemed like the most attractive blueprint in the abstract. But here was a functioning, concrete model.

  Pankow and Kaiser and A-Micha, Jana, and Mita weren’t the only key players from the first generation who kept charging forward. After singer Chaos left the Leipzig band Wutanfall in the wake of his extreme harassment by the Stasi in 1983, the band fused with HAU. The new band included guitarist Imad, who had quit Wutanfall for HAU; Stracke, the HAU singer who had replaced Chaos in Wutanfall; and, upon his release from prison for spray-painting freedom for jana, mita and a-micha, bassist Ratte.

  Ratte represented the government’s worst nightmare: totally unfazed by his prison stint, he put his leather jacket back on as soon as he walked out of the prison gates and went straight back to punk, to activism, to ignoring the laws he deemed unjust, to fighting a regime he considered illegitimate.

  In the end, the only original and continuous member of Wutanfall—drummer Rotz—left the band, so they decided to change their name. They became L’Attentat, and the new band proved as incendiary as Wutanfall. In addition to playing Wutanfall songs like “Leipzig in Ruins,” and “Bürgerkrieg,” or “Civil War,” L’Attentat had strident new songs, too. “Friedensstaat,” or “Peace Nation,” was a send-up of official government rhetoric on security through militarization. “Kinderkrieg,” or “Children’s War,” was a bitter commentary on military training in schools. “Demonstration” had a couplet that translated “Freedom of thought is guaranteed, but if you try to use it you get hauled away.”

  L’Attentat sang about taboo subjects and used explicit terminology—the Wall, the Party—that even other non-licensed punk bands might have had second thoughts about using. All of this over an intense, menacing hardcore sound.

  The lyrics of another tune, “Ohne Sinn,” or “Pointless,” translated as:

  I’m old enough to go it alone

  I don’t want to see all this shit anymore

  The way you rob me of my future

  And ask me to fight for things you no longer believe in yourself

  When the members of Wutanfall and HAU joined forces to form L’Attentat, they had sat together and all agreed: we will say exactly what we think, even if that means we go to prison. Ratte, who had been to prison, knew what that meant. Stracke, too, had been detained for a month and knew the potential gravity of what they were agreeing to. But they fully backed the band’s determination to be open, not to mince words. Stracke loved the sense of liberation. If he was interrogated and asked whether he was opposed to the state he would just say, “Ja.”

  Go fuck yourself.

  L’Attentat also sought to foster a sense of community around the band, to build a sturdy network. On holidays like Mayday or Easter the band created photo collages with greetings and fun images, printed them as black-and-white photos, and sent them to hundreds of people. They mailed out invitations to their gigs and parties, again using a darkroom to copy the flyer in the form of a photo. They knew the mass mailings would attract attention from security organs. That was part of the point.

  We are here, motherfuckers.

  Leipzig now had a space comparable to the Profikeller at Berlin’s Erlöser Church: the Mockauer Keller, also a basement on the grounds of a church. Like the Profikeller, the Mockauer Keller became a buzzing hive of activity, information, and communication. In early 1985 L’Attentat played a gig there that embodied their sense of community. Namenlos came down from Berlin, Paranoia from Dresden, and it felt as if the whole punk family was represented, the whole country. Unfortunately it also proved to be the final show by that lineup of L’Attentat.

  Once again it was the singer they came for first.

  In the summer of 1985, L’Attentat vocalist Stracke was arrested—again—and held in pretrial detention—again. This time, however, Stracke went to trial after two months of detention. He was sentenced to one year and seven months for illegal Western contact and vilification of the regime. He had sent an article about Eastern punk to a West German fanzine.

  Stracke wondered why L’Attentat guitarist Imad, who had also written for Western fanzines, hadn’t been picked up. But he wouldn’t have believed the real reason why: Imad had served up Stracke to the Stasi just as he had doomed Chaos back in 1983.

  Like everyone in L’Attentat—or at least, as they had all vowed—Stracke wasn’t worried about going to jail. Punishment was not a disincentive to Stracke; he would obey the law if and only if he deemed it legitimate, just, fair. Stracke felt confident in the fact that what he did, and what he was doing with the band, was right, and that the laws under which he was guilty were wrong. He even said so in court, just as he had said he would when the band rebooted. Was he opposed to the state? Ja.

  Stracke was eventually ransomed from prison by West Germany. By the second half of the 1980s, political prisoners were becoming an ever more valuable source of Western currency for the Honecker regime, another export product, like blood supplies—which were also siphoned from prisoners.

  L’Attentat, meanwhile, reconvened with yet another singer, Perry. The band still had no clue that Imad was betraying them from within.

  This second incarnation of L’Attentat played the benefit concert for the Hartroda commune together with Fatale in early 1986. The gig was the start of two ongoing relationships—one between punks and the commune in Hartroda and another between Fatale and L’Attentat. Both bands were deeply involved in the Open Work scenes in their respective cities, and they went on to play many gigs together, helping to further unify the Berlin and Leipzig punk scenes.

  Otze had also kept Schleim-Keim going. The original bass player had been conscripted into the army in 1984, around the time Otze himself spent four weeks in Stasi detention. When Otze was released, Schleim-Keim started up with a succession of bass players, two of whom turned out to be Stasi snitches. The band shape-shifted on stage, too. Otze sometimes played guitar instead of drums, and several other people joined the band over the course of the years. In part this was because Otze was living like a nomad, with no fixed address and without so much as a change of clothes or a toothbrush.

  The band remained a sensation. With their second bass player, they started playing a new song, “Prügelknaben,” which means “Baton Boys,” as in the kids who get beaten by police batons. The song included the following lines:

  Wir wollen nicht mehr, wie ihr wollt

  Wir wollen unsere Freiheit

  Wir sind das Volk, wir sind die Macht

  Wir fordern Gerechtigkeit

  Wir sind das Volk, wir sind die Macht

  We don’t want it the way you want it anymore

  We want our freedom

  We are the people, we are the power

  We demand justice

  We are the people, we are the power

  The phrase Wir sind das Volk—“We are the people”—from Otze’s new anthem would be heard again in a few years, echoing through the streets of East German cities.

  46

  Meanwhile Feeling B were inspiring a new generation of bands, bands that were not mainstream but did not draw the same line in the sand that the more political punks did when it came to getting amateur licenses and performing in official youth clubs.

  One kid who orbited Aljoscha and Feeling B was Olaf Tost. He went by the nickname Toster and was a relative neophyte when it came to the punk scene.

  Toster had seen punks at Alexanderplatz when he was fifteen and sixteen, in 1980 and 1981, but his musical socialization had been in the blues scene—he had even played guitar in a teenage blues band.

  Still, Toster respected the punks because they were so blatant about everything. Like a lot of teens who encountered punks back then, he was shocked at the guts they had to flaun
t their disregard for societal norms like that—the safety pins and homemade jewelry made out of beer tabs, the obviously controversial slogans scrawled on their clothes, the hair. You sure as hell couldn’t go to a Free German Youth meeting looking like that. Which meant they weren’t. They weren’t going.

  Toster had encountered problems at school for much more minor fashion transgressions. A few years back he’d found an old camo jacket with a German flag patch on the shoulder. The camo wasn’t the official National Volks Army pattern and the flag didn’t have the hammer, compass, and ring of rye of East Germany. When he wore it to school he got into trouble immediately. From then on he’d been known as the kid who flew the West German flag.

  It’s so easy to fall onto the wrong side of things, he thought.

  And yet, there were the punks, strolling around like fucking aliens, getting hassled and beaten by cops and good citizens alike, and turning right back up again in public. Toster knew only one punk personally: a school friend who went by the name of Dafty, who had played in a few short-lived bands and knew everyone in the punk scene, including Paul Landers of Feeling B.

  Toster found himself casting about, feeling as if he was falling between the cracks, politically disaffected but also put off by what he saw as propagandizing by church-based peace activists he encountered. He was also dismayed at how uncool the hippielike peace activists were. Toster felt the same anxiety as any teenager of the era—it really felt as if the end of the world would come during his lifetime. Nuclear armageddon. Boom, done. He didn’t know how to deal with it.