Burning Down the Haus

by Tim Mohr

  Neither side is going to get me. Not the church people, not the pseudo-communists. I’m just going to do my thing, and party.

  Dafty volunteered to show Toster around the punk world.

  Once Dafty had introduced Toster to some punks, Toster realized one of them might be able to help him with something. He had been trying to get hold of an effects pedal for his guitar—he’d painstakingly saved up the 150 Western marks he would need, but the pedal wasn’t available in the East. When he met Paul Landers and heard about Aljoscha—with his Swiss passport and freedom of movement—a bell went off in Toster’s head. This Aljoscha guy could get the pedal for him.

  Toster eventually went over to the squat at Fehrbelliner 7 to ask Aljoscha personally. He could not believe the scene—it was more bohemian than anything he had ever seen. Aljoscha agreed to get the pedal and Toster forked over the cash—an absolute fortune at the time. But Aljoscha dragged his feet. Toster stopped by a couple times a week to gently remind him. After a while the ritual of hanging out at Fehrbelliner 7, drinking wine, meeting more and more people, and becoming part of the scene became more important than the original mission. By the time Aljoscha finally procured the pedal, Toster was travelling with Feeling B to their shows.

  Dafty, like so many first-wave punks, had been shipped off to an army unit in 1984 for reeducation. By then, though, Toster had entered the world of Feeling B. And Feeling B was doing exactly what Toster wanted to do. Toster came to see the band’s amateur performance license—the Einstufung that allowed the band to play openly, in official venues—as a strength. The church punks, Toster reasoned, were preaching to the converted. But when Feeling B went into some backwater town and brought the noise in an official youth club, they were playing to kids who had no idea this kind of thing existed. Besides, the youth clubs had real stages and real sound systems. Toster didn’t want to be a dissident and he didn’t want to leave; he did want to play music. And the Feeling B model allowed you to make a living playing music.

  Soon Toster started a band of his own.

  Toster’s band, die Anderen, or the Others, would lend their name to a whole new genre of music in East Germany—their name became synonymous with the gray-area bands that auditioned for amateur band licenses and yet thought of themselves as operating outside the realm of official music. These bands soon came to be lumped together and called die anderen bands, or the other bands; that is, the outsiders.

  47

  In the 1980s, rent on an official apartment in Prenzlauer Berg cost about fifty East marks a month. You could get twenty freshly baked bread rolls for one mark. But one blank cassette cost twenty marks.

  Still, cassettes had several advantages. First and foremost, although expensive, they were at least available. And cassettes could be easily duplicated. In Russia, many big factories or institutions had devices to cut vinyl records—the idea was to allow for the distribution of patriotic songs and speeches on special occasions. In such a big country, it was perhaps more efficient to allow local production of such stirring recordings than to distribute them from a central manufacturing plant. The upshot was that in the Soviet Union, with so many devices sitting around, adventurous musicians could make and distribute flexi-discs on materials considered waste—the USSR was awash in illegal records cut on things like X-ray photographs. The DDR did not hand out machines capable of copying vinyl. Shit, copying paper was virtually impossible in the DDR, hence the use of home darkrooms to copy flyers as black-and-white photos.

  Cassettes were also a “fast” media. A band could record direct to cassette and have a finished product—playable in almost any household in the country—as soon as the last note subsided. Then it was just a matter of copying it from one tape to another. Sure, this had to be done in real time, but it was at least possible.

  Flake from Feeling B had a cousin in West Germany who sent him a nice tape deck as a gift. For a time, nearly all the recordings in Prenzlauer Berg were made on that deck. But while lots of bands and musicians recorded on Flake’s tape deck, Flake’s own band Feeling B was one of the few bands that didn’t bother with recordings.

  Feeling B were in a unique situation, one made more complicated by their Einstufung. On the one hand, they were the most widely known and most frequently performing punk band in the country. But on the other hand, they actually didn’t want to advance their “career.” It wasn’t just that they objected to making music for the sake of selling it—after all, they could have given it away. Because of their Einstufung, they had to be careful not to become too successful. They didn’t want to end up in the horrible wasteland of professional Eastern bands. Nobody in the scene—even those with aspirations of living as musicians—wanted that sort of Eastern success.

  The most adamant opposition to the idea of Feeling B making recordings came from Aljoscha. To him, a Feeling B concert was a unique event, a happening, and anything that detracted from that would be a mistake. Feeling B, to Aljoscha, was all about the fun of being there, together; he wanted the active participation of an audience, not the passive ears of mere listeners.

  But for the rest of the scene, cassettes were a lifeblood. In a society where the state maintained an iron-fisted grip and official monopoly on mass communication, tapes represented an alternative grassroots form of media, a shadow system free from government oversight and censorship.

  There was no distribution system for unsanctioned cassettes. People simply passed them around, traded them, re-taped them. Once it had been the Pistols and Crass and X-Ray Spex; now it was also Eastern bands, or even some unknown DDR musician’s basement tapes. No official media acknowledged the existence of these homemade recordings, much less reviewed them.

  As the scene grew, bands began to put artistic covers in the cassette boxes, copy their tapes in larger quantities, and even encourage people to order tapes through the mail. Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok of the first-generation punk band Rosa Extra started a cassette-only record label called Assorted Nuts, which was based in a squatted apartment in Friedrichshain. As musicians, both Jestram and Lippok had already moved into the gray areas that opened in the wake of Feeling B in the mid-1980s, Bernd with the band Aufruhr zur Liebe and Lippok with Ornament & Verbrechen. When the two of them had trouble getting hold of enough tapes for their label, they scrounged up officially issued cassettes by artists like Mireille Mathieu—the French crooner whose music was licensed for sale by Amiga, the state-run record label—and recorded over them.

  Jestram was expatriated in 1986 and ended up in West Berlin. But illegal labels soon sprang up all over East Germany: Klangfarbe in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Zieh-dich-warm-an in Dresden, Trash Tape Records in Rostock, Hartmut in Leipzig, and in Eisleben a label called Christus—named for the church in Halle that had hosted that first-ever punk festival in 1983. In Jena, a label called Hinterhof Productions released twenty-two cassette albums by fifteen different bands during the late 1980s. There were also countless homemade tapes recorded and handed out by bands themselves.

  Not all of the bands producing cassettes had been coopted by the Einstufung process. On the contrary. Christus was basically the house label of the unlicensed original punk band Müllstation. Hinterhof Productions issued tapes by Sperma-Combo, die Fanatischen Frisöre, and hardcore rejectionists Antitrott, among other decidedly “negative-decadent” bands. Trash Tape Records released tapes only by bands without an Einstufung. Sample of lyrics from one of their bands, Virus X:

  Wir brauchen eure Normen nicht,

  Ihr wisst ja nicht mal selbst was richtig ist.

  Wir werden euch niemals vertrauen,

  Wir wollen uns unser Leben selbst aufbauen

  We don’t need your standards,

  You don’t know yourselves what’s right.

  We will never trust you,

  We want to make our own lives.

  Or take a 1985 tape by the band Re-Aktion, out of Potsdam, which contained material that was downright Namenlos-like, including incendiary screeds against the p
olice. A typically explicit Re-Aktion couplet:

  Say good-bye to the Party,

  Shout opposition!

  This shadow media system changed the game. Suddenly underground music that bypassed the state-run media could find a larger audience than ever before. The scale of underground tape distribution grew to be staggering—by 1988 three quarters of all music released in the DDR originated outside the state-controlled media system.

  Things were changing in a broader sense as well. Glasnost. Since the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the signals coming from the East had changed. Right from the start, Gorbachev broke taboos when he admitted to economic problems in the USSR. And he just kept going, deploying the word glasnost to describe his reform goals—a word that up to then was most familiar as the term dissidents used to describe their demand for openness in court proceedings.

  1986 proved a landmark year: Gorbachev made concrete policy changes based on glasnost in March; in November he told Soviet satellite states that they had a sovereign right to self-determination, indicating his unwillingness to continue to meddle in their domestic affairs; and in between those two developments, the biggest nuclear disaster in history occurred at the Soviet power plant in Chernobyl. For East Germans, Chernobyl provided a concrete example of the hypocritical, dishonest leadership of their country. DDR news outlets trivialized the potential consequences of the massive radiation leak; it was only from Western outlets that East Germans were able to learn the scale of the disaster.

  In the wake of Chernobyl, A-Micha of Namenlos collected signatures for a petition on nuclear policy reform. He intended to forward the petition to the East German parliament. Two other punk bands, Vitamin A, from Magdeburg, and Müllstation, from Eisleben, specifically addressed the Chernobyl disaster—Vitamin A organized a rally during a local workers’ festival, and Müllstation collected signatures for an anti-nukes petition that was similar to A-Micha’s.

  Two members of Vitamin A were jailed.

  On March 27, 1986, just weeks after Gorbachev formally introduced his policies of glasnost and perestroika at the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the official youth radio station of the DDR, DT64, launched a new show called Parocktikum. The show was initially broadcast for one hour on one Thursday a month, but soon extended to two hours every Saturday. The host, Lutz Schramm, began to play songs from gray-area bands whose tapes he collected. Suddenly listeners across the entire country heard bands that operated outside the official record label system, even if the only bands DT64 dared to broadcast did have amateur-band licenses.

  As a later Stasi report would lament, looking back at these developments, “Amateur licenses are easily procured . . . which has fostered an independent scene in Berlin . . . a scene also propagated on youth radio . . . as a result, the number of punk sympathizers has risen.”

  Many bands that had operated entirely outside the system came in from the cold at this point and auditioned for an Einstufung. The old-school Dresden punk act Paranoia evolved into the amateur-licensed band Kaltfront; former Planlos members Lade and Kobs formed the Goth-influenced Cadavre Exquis; die Zucht, from Leipzig, became die Art. When Toster’s buddy Dafty returned from the army, he, too, secured a license for his new band, die Drei von der Tankstelle—the Three From the Gas Station. More and more bands began to make tapes and send them to Schramm at DT64.

  Even so, this new development did nothing to bridge the divide within the scene: while some bands submitted cassettes to the host of Parocktikum, others refused on principle to enter the state-run media world in any form, even through the side door of the radio show. To them—the rejectionists—this was just another example of the state trying to coopt the scene. If anything, DT64’s tacit approval of gray-area bands only intensified the philosophical battle within the scene.

  For people who thought like Toster, frontman of die Anderen—people who wanted to make a living as a musician and find an audience for their music—access to the national airwaves spurred them on. Groups in the anderen bands scene could make a name for themselves on government radio and pack official venues, but that also allowed them to unleash their own sometimes politically unsavory sentiments on live audiences. Even if the lyrics weren’t as explicit as straight-up rejectionist bands like Namenlos and Re-Aktion, it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines of a song like “Scheissegal” by Kaltfront:

  Was ihr sagt ist mir egal

  Was ihr denkt ist mir egal

  Was ihr wollt ist mir egal

  Scheissegal

  Es hat keinen Sinn zu warten

  Ich passe nicht in das Klischee

  Ich habe keine Illusionen

  Ich glaube nur, was ich sehe

  I don’t care what you say

  I don’t care what you think

  I don’t care what you want

  I don’t give a shit

  There’s no point in waiting

  I don’t fit into the cliché

  I have no illusions

  I believe only what I see

  48

  For the hardcore punks, the political punks, the ones who refused to seek amateur licenses or work with the government in any way, 1986 became the most active year since 1983. Things were really taking off.

  On the third weekend of June, thousands of youths—the Stasi’s conservative estimate claimed 700, including 280 punks—descended on a small town in Thüringen called Rudolstadt for a three-day church-sponsored festival billed as Jugend 86, or Youth 86. Pankow’s band Fatale played, creating a major draw for Berlin punks, alongside Schleim-Keim, L’Attentat, and other bands. Local authorities proved unable to control the situation, and punks had complete run of the little town of 30,000.

  A Stasi follow-up report mentioned not only the unlicensed bands and the distribution of unauthorized publications, but also the fact that groups of punks left the church grounds and created commotions in town.

  After the festival, one concerned citizen complained in a letter to city officials that he and his wife had gone to the market on Friday evening and noticed other townspeople walking home with looks of confusion and disgust on their faces. The man and his wife soon realized why: in front of a grocery store they saw “so-called punkers,” whose “appearance cried out revulsion and rebellion,” the citizen reported, “and instilled terror.” That same good citizen had also overheard a conversation in town in which another older citizen claimed that the police “were afraid to intervene.”

  Afraid.

  Of the punk hordes.

  And maybe, just maybe, they were afraid—punks certainly hadn’t faced the obstacles in Rudolstadt that they had in Halle back in 1983.

  The Stasi noted with alarm the extensive network of contacts and communications between punks in cities like Halle, Magdeburg, Dessau, Erfurt, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Leipzig, and Berlin, but where were the lines of baton-wielding cops? Where were the orders to keep punks from boarding trains to Rudolstadt? Where were the rows of police trucks to haul away detainees? Sure, the Stasi accumulated information about Jugend 86 and the tenor and content of discussions during the festival, but was that going to help tamp down the rising tide of open revolt?

  One of the bands that had played Jugend 86 was a newly reformed Internationale Müllabfuhr, or IM—called IM 86 for the Rudolstadt show. IM’s guitar player, Bernd Hennig—now eighteen, going by the nom-de-punk of Boris Becker, and a regular in the Profikeller—put together the new version around a female vocalist named Cabi. After Jugend 86 the group quickly renamed themselves Kein Talent, or No Talent.

  Boris Becker, it turned out, had been manipulated into informing for the Stasi—into becoming an actual IM. During conversations with the Stasi that had begun when he was significantly underage, Boris had declared himself opposed to any form of violence in the exercise of power—he believed that people’s support for any system should be won over, they should be convinced, not cowed. His handlers considered him idealistic and saw that he was extreme
ly loyal to his friends. They used it all against him. Boris was led to believe that he could help his friends. If he just gave the Stasi information about this or that, they wouldn’t have to haul other people in for unpleasant interrogations. He could even prevent things that might get people sent to jail, they told him. And so, as Kein Talent became a regular draw at the Profikeller and Boris attended all sorts of other meetings and concerts there, he relayed some details to his handlers.

  A punk named Reimo played drums in Kein Talent. Reimo also played in another combo, called Antitrott.

  Antitrott represented a new trend—the arrival in East Berlin of scads of kids from elsewhere in East Germany. Antitrott had been founded in Frankfurt Oder, a small industrial river city on the Polish border, northeast of Berlin. Like East Berlin, Frankfurt Oder had some nice old buildings and cobblestone streets; like East Berlin, many of those buildings and streets were in grim condition, and there were lots of ugly new apartment blocks, smokestacks, and wide open fields of mud where other buildings had been razed or destroyed. The population of Frankfurt Oder was under 100,000, so the city’s few punks really stood out.

  Reimo had started Antitrott with singer and guitarist Thomas Kremer and bassist Jörn Schulz upon their return from mandatory army duty in 1984. The boys had been conscripted during early attempts to break up the punk scene. They returned from the army angrier and more determined than before. Initially authorities had sought to coopt them into the new gray areas opened up by Feeling B, offering a musical mentor and trying to get them to rehearse in the basement of an official youth club. Instead, Antitrott found an isolated storage shack and worked there—until the place burned down. Then they broke into an empty building on the outskirts of town where the electricity was still on and practiced there. Until they got caught. After that they practiced in a waterlogged basement.

  Antitrott’s music was ferocious. When they played their first live show at a church in Leipzig on New Year’s Eve, 1984, the crowd went fucking crazy.