by Tim Mohr
The next morning, their host trundled them onto a train and they headed for the next town, where they were again picked up and taken care of. And paid. To play another club. With a great sound system. The tour took Namenlos/Kein Talent and Wartburgs für Walter to Krakow, Warsaw, and as far east as Bialystock, a city of several hundred thousand near the Soviet border. Each night the East Berlin bands played on a bill with regional Polish punk bands, with the band Trybuna Brudu along for the entire tour. The Berliners met lots of other bands, too. One night they crashed with members of Dezerter, the Polish punk band that had played to crowds as big as 20,000 at Polish festivals.
Clearly Solidarity, glasnost, and perestroika were having major effects in Poland—A-Micha and the other Berliners could feel it. And see it. And hear it. Things were out in the open. Things were changing here. Fast.
After the final tour stop in Szczecin, it was back to the DDR, where earlier that year Communist Party central committee member Kurt Hager had dismissed Gorbachev’s reforms as a “change of wallpaper” in an interview with a West German news magazine that was reprinted in official Eastern publications. “And do you really need to change your own wallpaper just because your neighbor has?” he had asked.
It was meant as a rhetorical question, of course, but as A-Micha and Jörn and Ina and Cabi and the other musicians could tell while touring in Poland, the USSR’s other neighbors were obviously changing their wallpaper as well. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t the exception; East German dictator Erich Honecker was.
A-Micha and the rest left Poland feeling inspired. The bands wanted to plan something back home, something that reflected the boldness and scale of what they had heard and seen in Poland, something big.
55
On January 17, 1988, the East German government staged its annual parade to honor World War I–era communist martyrs Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Luxemburg in particular had always been a favorite of the Andersdenkenden—“dissenters,” or, more literally, “those who think differently.” The official parade was one that many people otherwise critical of the dictatorship were happy to join, despite the politburo heading the procession.
Following the success of the vigils after the Stasi raid on the Environmental Library, some opposition groups were feeling cocky. Some of them decided to push the envelope: they would try to join the official parade while carrying homemade banners quoting Luxemburg: “Freedom is always the freedom of the Andersdenkenden.”
The Church from Below opposed this plan for one simple reason: the loudest voices in favor were coming from groups dominated by a newly booming phenomenon, die Ausreiser—people who just wanted to flee the country. Would-be emigrants. By 1988, 110,000 DDR citizens had submitted applications to leave. Naturally these people did not share the same goals as the fighters. Many of the Ausreiser just wanted to be photographed by the Stasi while taking part in any sort of anti-government activity, in the hope that it would help their chances of being allowed to leave the country. In other words, the would-be emigrants were narrowly self-interested, reckless, and in essence apolitical. And they were starting to create headaches for those who sought to fight the dictatorship rather than run away from it.
A few groups opened up to would-be emigrants. After all, some groups argued, when people submitted an application to leave the country, they sacrificed a lot. They often encountered trouble keeping their jobs, they lost many rights, and then they languished at home waiting to be approved for emigration—which could take years. The Ausreiser landed for the most part in human rights groups, despite the fact that they desired just one right: the right to get the fuck out. If Destroy what’s destroying you was the unofficial punk motto, the motto of the would-be emigrants might as well have been: See ya, suckers.
As a practical matter, it proved difficult to absorb Ausreiser and still maintain a functional group. When word got around that people tended to be approved for departure after joining some particular group, it made that group even more attractive to other would-be emigrants. The number of such people then ballooned, and the turnover created as people left the country meant there was little familiarity or communication within the group anymore. It was a clusterfuck, and the Church from Below wanted no part of it.
They’re not like us.
So when a subgroup of the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights that had been swamped by more than two hundred would-be emigrants started pushing to disrupt the official Rosa Luxemburg parade, the Church from Below urged caution: too many Ausreiser were looking to take advantage of the situation, it was the perfect sort of outlet for their selfish notions of how to advance their cause. Their goals put them totally at odds with those—like the Church from Below—who wanted to shape their own future by changing the situation at home. By staying and fighting.
A number of groups agreed to participate in the parade anyway. Many of those groups disagreed with the Church from Below on another point: the value of Western media attention. The Church from Below shunned it; many other activist groups courted it. One of the potential upsides of participating in the parade was the chance to make the West German news—this was something both the Ausreiser and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights valued.
But the Stasi, too, had caught wind of the plan to march in the official parade with homemade, unsanctioned banners. And they were in no mood to be embarrassed again, so soon after the Zion Church debacle. On the morning of the parade, police and Stasi detained more than a hundred known activists. It was an attempt to head the problem off before it even got started.
Much of the membership of the Church from Below was at a retreat outside Berlin on the day of the parade—they were holding a national meeting of Open Work chapters. When they heard there had been arrests, they didn’t think anything of it: there were always arrests at events like that, but there were rarely serious consequences anymore.
Protests against the mass detentions sprung up in more than forty cities across the country—a repeat, on an even bigger scale, of the reaction to the raid on the Environmental Library two months prior. The protesters had seen this film before, and they knew it had a happy ending.
But then everything went haywire.
Police made a second wave of arrests after the parade, and charges were brought against many of the detainees. Perhaps the government was turning back the clock, asserting control again after the embarrassments of the previous year?
And then the unthinkable happened: faced with charges, many of the detained activists agreed to leave the country for the West—even some of the biggest stars of the older generation, like Bärbel Bohley, Werner Fischer, Vera Wollenberger, Ralf Hirsch, and Wolfgang Templin. To some outsiders, it looked as if that had been the point of the whole exercise—as if the supposed integrity of the reformist activists was nothing but bullshit, and they were really no different than Ausreiser.
The nationwide protests collapsed in shock and disbelief. Zion Church became the punch line of a bitter joke: What’s the longest church in East Germany? Zion Church: you enter in the East and exit in the West.
But it wasn’t funny.
The Church from Below cried foul, asserting that church leadership had been complicit in shipping the detainees out of the country in order to defuse the situation. Of course, it was true that an awful lot of the church hierarchy—particularly in Berlin—was in bed with the dictatorship. And the defense lawyer who represented the detainees turned out to work for the Stasi. But what about the activists themselves? Why had they agreed? Since when did anyone believe the Stasi when they threatened draconian jail sentences? After all, the Environmental Library detainees had been released within a few days. These detainees must have known there would be protests on their behalf.
Another thing was clear from the Rosa Luxemburg debacle: Western media attention was no panacea. Apparently it didn’t even confer any kind of protection. Many of the activists who had been detained and shipped out of the country were media darlings in the We
st, having actively sought coverage there. And where were they now? Gone, that’s where. Gone.
With the dispiriting reality setting in that so many people from the reformist groups were willing to leave even at a moment when things seemed to be looking so hopeful, punk attitude took on an even more important role. When A-Micha had been offered release from prison to the West, his response was in essence, Fuck you, I’m staying.
There was a logic to the punk position: if you wanted to change the world you had to start with your own turf.
We are the people, we are the power!
Plus, the punks were still around and active as other groups atrophied from the huge bloodletting or were overwhelmed by Ausreiser. From now on, it seemed to the punks, this fight was going to be theirs and theirs alone.
Punks were the most radical and confrontational group on the spectrum of DDR opposition groups—though that’s not quite the right formulation. The groups they dominated, like the Church from Below, were the most radical and confrontational. And since punks formed a significant portion of so many other groups—there were by then more than three hundred independent groups operating nationwide under the umbrella of the Lutheran church, varying in size from five to eighty members—punks were also the most radical and confrontational people within most any group. And even the older generation of punks like Pankow, Speiche, and A-Micha were young by comparison to the aging hippies in many peace and environmental groups. So punks tended to man the frontlines in the increasingly chaotic public protests that would characterize the final year and a half of Communist Party rule in East Germany, with the bulk of the bodies coming from the youngest generation, the kids who had joined the scene after the Stasi crackdown of 1983–84.
Punks were street fighters, willing to endure police batons for those who followed.
They were changing the game.
As a February 16, 1988, report from the Stasi’s Department XX explained, since the raid on Zion Church and the Rosa Luxemburg affair, “the Church from Below has strengthened its position as the leading force behind activities.” This was unlike the Environmental Library and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, both of which were “institutionally weakened” by the same series of events. That was an understatement: the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights was basically dead after the Rosa Luxemburg arrests, done. And there had been a schism inside the Environmental Library in early 1988, too, with a subgroup splitting off and causing in-fighting. The report also stated that “The Church from Below is determined to strongly distance itself from those who just want to leave the country.” In addition, the report talked of the Church from Below creating new forms of Open Work, including being able to offer touring versions of their programs, taking music and activism to other groups around the country.
The Church from Below was functioning the way A-Micha had conceived of his own actions since his release from prison—using as a model the Narodniks, the nineteenth-century socialist revolutionaries and forerunners to the Russian revolution. The Narodniks went out to the people and planted political seeds, built revolutionary cells here and there, and then moved on again, counting on the new life to sustain itself and proliferate. Hit-and-run operations designed to create a grassroots movement primed for revolution. Hit-and-run operations designed to allow ordinary people to feel the tremors in society’s foundations, the shakiness of government power. Hit-and-run operations designed to leave sparks that could slowly smolder, designed to leave society burning from the inside, with heat and intensity building toward a climactic cleansing by fire.
In early 1988 the Erlöser punks approached Dirk Moldt, who still served as treasurer of the Church from Below. They wanted to put on a massive spring festival to coincide with an annual Free German Youth festival—sort of a music-focused equivalent to the previous year’s Church Conference from Below. The event was also inspired by the boldness and scale of what A-Micha, Jörn, and the others had witnessed in Poland.
We will stay and we will fight.
Moldt and the Church from Below agreed to stump up the working capital for the event—much of it the proceeds from the Church Conference from Below.
It was on.
The Erlöser spring festival would be a public spectacle, but one not limited to grabbing attention—especially attention from Western media—the way disrupting an official parade was designed to do.
That was pantomime.
This was punk rock.
56
Herne’s alarm went off early on the Saturday morning of the Erlöser festival. His apartment was full of hungover punks from all over the East Bloc. The party had kicked off the night before.
Herne got up and looked out his window.
It was snowing.
Shit.
It was April 23, 1988.
Still, thought Herne, if this is the worst thing that happens today . . .
Drama had reigned in the run-up to the festival.
Even the date had been a problem—they had to use fake dates throughout the planning sessions to throw off the Stasi, who always seemed to have ears, even at Erlöser. Hell, getting the minister to consent to the festival at all had even been tough. They had nearly come to blows with him.
Things had only gotten more difficult from there. Herne and his brother Mecki had prepared a fanzine especially for the festival, a one-off newsletter. Originally they had planned to copy it themselves on church copiers, but with the churches more careful since the Zion Church raid, they had been barred from doing it on either of the two machines in town. Someone suggested printing it in Poland and having it transported across. A-Micha didn’t think it would be right to ask one of their Polish friends to take the risk of transporting it, though his Polish “cousin” Slipeck could arrange the printing.
“Listen,” he told the rest of the festival organizers at the Profikeller, “I have the most experience with this kind of shit.”
Namenlos wasn’t even going to play the festival, the band was still in flux.
“I’ve been to prison,” he continued. “I’ve dealt with the cops and the Stasi. And I know the guys in Poland, too. I’ll do it. I’ll go over and bring the materials back.”
His logic was sound.
A few weeks before the festival, A-Micha took a train to Poland, once again using a trusty cousin visa. A-Micha met Slipeck and picked up a thousand copies of the fanzine. His buddies in Poland suggested he sew them into a giant teddy bear, but A-Micha just shoved them into a duffel bag and got onto the train back to the border at Frankfurt Oder.
At the last stop in Poland, his train car emptied. A customs officer appeared at the front of his car. He was the train’s lone customs official, and there he was staring at the car’s lone passenger.
Shit, must have been compromised by a Stasi informant, he thought.
A-Micha didn’t have time to shove his bag under his seat, much less another seat. The officer came straight to him and searched his duffel.
Agententätigkeit!
Activity as a foreign agent.
He could get four to six years, he was told.
A-Micha knew how to handle interrogations. Whenever he was questioned, he would tell a story that was clearly false in order to bait the interrogator into revealing that he knew this or that wasn’t true because of this or that reason. It was a ploy to figure out what the Stasi or whoever really did know. So when A-Micha was taken to a customs interrogation facility in Frankfurt Oder, he made up a story of having bought the papers at a flea market because they looked interesting. The customs officer took notes. After he had typed up a report, he told A-Micha in a surprisingly friendly way, “The men from Berlin are on their way. I’ve written down what you said, but you’d better think up something better for them.”
Not all functionaries were the same. Some, like this guy, were affable. This guy chuckled along with A-Micha, and his warning wasn’t meant as a threat, more like a bit of friendly advice.
The Stasi picked A-Micha up i
n Frankfurt Oder and drove him back to Berlin. The interrogations started again from scratch.
This time, A-Micha used a story he had pieced together to best take advantage of a legal loophole he’d found out about before setting out on this expedition. If only one person in each country took part in the act, it did not constitute activity as a foreign agent.
He and his “cousin” Slipeck were the only ones involved, A-Micha explained, an East German and a Pole, nobody else. But the Stasi wouldn’t relent: they wanted info on the festival.
“You can throw me back in prison before I agree to that,” A-Micha insisted.
“Oh no, Herr Horschig, you can forget that. We’re not going to do that again. We have other ways to silence you.”
They’re going to kill me, thought A-Micha.
A-Micha was shaken.
In the end, they struck a deal: the Stasi agreed to release him and he agreed to return the following day and report back on what bands were playing—he would give them info on the festival.
But A-Micha had no plans to honor the deal.
Upon his release from detainment he went to a youth club, ABC, out in Köpenick, where he knew some friends would be hanging out. He was several days late returning, and people were surprised to see him. You made it! He had beers with them and explained the situation. A-Micha knew he had been followed by several agents but he and his friends came up with a plan for him to ditch them. All at once, about thirty people inside ABC got up, went outside, and suddenly ran in different directions. There were not enough plainclothes agents to follow them all and A-Micha slipped his tail in the confusion. Then he went to find Deacon Postler and Herne and some others to come up with a plan that could keep him out of jail.
When A-Micha went back to the Stasi office the next day, he took Deacon Postler and another punk with him. That way the Erlöser crowd could be confident A-Micha wasn’t a snitch.