by Tim Mohr
Finally, on Thursday, April 21, Herne and company could finally get started on the nuts and bolts—they built the outdoor stage, set up the sound system, set up the portable toilets, assembled the stands for food, beer, and info. Then Friday afternoon, the festival went live with locals Reasors Exzess followed by Aurora, from Hungary, and three bands from Czechoslovakia: O.P.M., Sanov 1, and Do Rady.
Now, Saturday, April 23, the main event, ten straight hours of punk rock. And then the early morning snow that wasn’t letting up.
Luckily the sun came out and brought the temperature slightly above freezing by the time the first band started playing, at 12:30 in the afternoon. The snow let up, the stage stayed dry, and when Polish punks Karcer took the stage, things really started to cook. Pogoing and wild dancing started immediately, as S-Bahn trains passed lazily behind the stage, which was draped in a tarp. The crowd kept swelling as the day wore on, and eventually several thousand people watched bands from West Berlin and Italy, as well as plenty of DDR bands.
Re-Aktion, from Potsdam, kicked things off on Saturday afternoon and then closed the night down with their frighteningly aggressive hardcore political punk:
Say goodbye to the Party,
Shout opposition!
All told, eighteen bands from six countries had rocked Erlöser. Once again East German punks had managed to spread their message to huge numbers of people, in an event open to the public. Anyone there could feel the tremors shaking society’s foundation—and it wasn’t just the machine-gun bursts of the double-time drums. Aggression and improvisation; rage and creativity—the spring festival showed once again the power of punk and the shakiness of the regime.
The Stasi had sat by; observing, yes, but not intervening. There were no road blocks or checkpoints around the church grounds, no train stations had been blockaded the way they had been at times in the early 1980s, and the incendiary vocals had boomed out into the open air, not some dank basement.
We will stay and we will fight.
The punks were winning the war.
Members of Polish band Karcer crashed at Pankow’s place for the festival weekend. Soon Pankow, too, got into the same sort of trouble that A-Micha had. Pankow and a girl named Sue volunteered to take some printed materials from the DDR across the Polish border for a clandestine meeting with Solidarity. But they were busted by DDR authorities at the border crossing at Frankfurt Oder.
Pankow and Sue were taken off the train and thrown into a detainment facility. The materials themselves never turned up. Pankow had managed to unscrew part of the ceiling in a train car—not the same car they rode in—and hidden the stuff up there for the border crossing. For several days they were interrogated, asked where the stacks of paper were. Pankow was badly beaten in custody. But he held his tongue.
Upon his release and return to Berlin, he felt angry enough to try something quite rash: he decided to sue the Stasi for assault. He went to a doctor, who gave him an exam, documented his various injuries, and photographed his contusions. Then he started looking for a lawyer, but nobody would touch the case. No way. Finally he made an appointment with Gregor Gysi, a prominent pro-Gorbachev member of the East German Communist Party—Gysi’s own father was a party hardliner and high-ranking official, but Gregor had defended several dissidents over the course of his career. Gysi agreed to take Pankow’s case.
The first obstacle Pankow and Gysi ran up against: it proved impossible to sue the intelligence agency directly. Pankow had to bring a more general complaint for bodily harm at the hands of the state.
Soon after he had started to explore the idea of bringing a suit, Pankow came home one day and happened upon a plainclothes spook trying to break into his apartment. Pankow snapped. He pushed the agent inside the apartment and beat the living shit out of him.
The agent ran out, but no reinforcements came to arrest Pankow. Not that day. Not the next day. Nothing.
Things were really changing.
Pankow’s suit—the first of its type—went forward. And he won. But he was never given a written judgment, just an oral affirmation that he had won. He was handed 300 East German marks—about thirty bucks—as compensation.
And that was that.
After Pankow won his suit, Pankow and A-Micha—both of whom were forbidden to travel to Poland after their run-ins at the border—constantly wrote letters petitioning for permission to travel to Poland, just to piss people off. Sometimes they wrote twenty letters a week if they had nothing else going on. Pankow also turned up at the office hours of government commissions and made a public nuisance of himself.
Finally he received a summons to a meeting at the Interior Ministry.
A guy in a drab suit told Pankow in an affectless tone that he would never, ever be allowed to leave the country.
57
There was great disparity in the way local authorities addressed problems in East Germany. The provinces were tough. Weimar, for instance, where the punk kids had been sent to Stasi prison in 1983 for spray-painting anarchist slogans on walls around town, was considered a sort of Stasi laboratory—a place where the local Stasi office could try out anything and get draconian on people’s asses. The sleepy town was too small and too isolated for any consequences to hamper Stasi brutality there. And they knew it. East Berlin was generally the most relaxed, in part because of the Western media spotlight there. Berliners on both sides of the Wall were the best informed people in all of Germany because of the confluence of media outlets broadcasting views emanating from Washington, D.C. to Moscow and everywhere in between.
Dresden was different. It was tough in Dresden.
Even though it was a large city by East German standards, Dresden sat in the Valley of the Clueless, or Tal der Ahnungslosen, limiting the city’s exposure to the world at large.
Punks had it tough there, too.
The regional church leadership had managed to deny space to any Open Work or Church from Below type organizations, which also forced the Dresden punks to operate on the mean streets all the time, suffering attacks from citizens and security forces alike. And in 1988 things took a turn for the worse. Punks were totally banned from the central parts of the city. Security forces started to raid known punk apartments. And when a kid named Lars Konrad tried to bring a suit like Pankow’s against the police—for bodily harm and an illegal search of his apartment—he was thrown in prison for eighteen months.
In Leipzig, the aborted protests over the arrests of activists before and after the Rosa Luxemburg parade had led to a regular Monday evening peace prayer in Nikolai Church, right in the middle of the historic old town. By May, authorities had started to apply pressure on the church to end the events. One means mirrored a tactic used in Berlin in years past: the church leadership in Leipzig was angling to hold a national conference in 1989, and the state insisted that the church meet its terms, otherwise they could forget convening their pet project. One of those terms was to end the Monday peace prayers, just as in Berlin they had insisted church leadership cancel the Blues Masses.
Up to that point the peace prayers had been organized and run by more or less independent groups working under the roof of the church. The church’s initial solution to the Monday peace prayers was to insist on having an actual minister involved in the events. During a summer break in the prayer sessions, the church went one step further: Nikolai Church itself took control of the Monday meetings, wresting control from the semi-autonomous groups. At the first peace prayer after the changeover, on Monday, August 29, 1988, activists initiated a discussion of the organizational changes but were quickly drowned out by the church organist, who started playing at a signal from the minister.
The Leipzig band L’Attentat revised the lyrics of the Wutanfall song “Leipzig in Trümmern,” or “Leipzig in Ruins,” to reflect the new situation in 1988, post-Rosa Luxemburg debacle:
Das junge Blut hält die Fahne in’n Wind
Die alten Leute im Westen sind
Für Ideale geht keine
r in’n Knast . . .
Zum Risiko ist keiner bereit.
The new blood holds the flag in the wind
The old people are in the West
Nobody goes to prison for ideals . . .
Nobody is prepared to take risks
Things were going the opposite direction in Berlin. No thanks to the church, of course, which in Berlin toed the party line even more doggedly than in Leipzig.
On September 29, 1988, about fifty people gathered in front of the Pergamon Museum, the crown jewel of the museums East Berlin had inherited, a museum that housed world-renowned antiquities including the Gates of Babylon and the Pergamon Altar. The crowd milling around outside, organized by the Church from Below, awaited a delegation from the International Monetary Fund—the ultimate imperialist Western institution, the ultimate ideological enemy to a communist government. The problem was the communist government had actually welcomed IMF delegates with open arms: some were staying in a hotel in the East during a conference the IMF was holding in West Berlin—anything for hard currency, apparently—and a delegation was also supposed to visit the museum.
Other church-based groups, like the peace group based in Friedrichsfelde, had planned a week of activities to coincide with the IMF conference, the most ambitious of which was a march between three churches with a stop for a church service in each. But after the government pressured Berlin church leaders, nearly all of those activities had been quashed.
So it was left to the Church from Below to take action.
Church from Below stalwarts like Speiche and Dirk Moldt had already spent the previous night, September 28, calling the hotel to tie up the archaic phone lines. Now, on September 29, it was time for part two of their plan to highlight the hypocrisy of the DDR regime. The well-heeled IMF delegates were easy to pick out as they approached the museum in their fancy Western suits. When they appeared, the demonstrators showered them with small change. It was a punk-style move, bold and funny, Church from Below through and through. Police did not intervene.
Afterward the crowd of protesters started to march toward the U.S. embassy but was stopped; many demonstrators were detained at that point and taken in for questioning. The protesters had one more trick up their sleeves. They had cloves of garlic in their pockets, and while being transported to detention in the back of military-style trucks they ate the raw garlic. By the time they were all herded into holding cells, the entire horde reeked. The garlic wafted across the tables as protesters were interrogated. It filled the detention center.
All were expeditiously released.
They had gotten away with a public demonstration. A very public demonstration, in front of a prime tourist destination. No church, no problem. It was all about the streets now. They had seceded from society and found refuge in churches. Then they had seceded from the church. And now they would take the streets, the streets.
We are the people, we are the power!
There had been one casualty: one of Media Siggi’s three precious video cameras was confiscated when he was taken into custody as he walked with protesters toward the U.S. embassy. Luckily the other two were still safely stashed elsewhere.
Especially now that he no longer had a day job, Siggi tried to shoot footage whenever and wherever he could—despite the experience of the Rosa Luxemburg parade and the way the Western media darlings had been shipped out of the country, he still thought it important to give the opposition a voice on Western media. And for whatever reason, the Stasi gave him a long enough leash to do so. They maintained a file on Siggi—code name “Satan”—but it was the same old story: they couldn’t conceive of the possibility that Siggi was working independently. It’s true that Siggi often worked with a partner in crime, Aram Radomski, but that was the full extent of the operation. Siggi shot footage, handed the tapes to a West German journalist from the news magazine Der Spiegel, who as a journalist could pass through the Wall without being searched, and that was that. The Stasi figured TV-quality video production necessitated a huge team. They left Siggi out there so that he might lead them up the chain, to the mastermind of—again—what they assumed was a hierarchical organization. This despite the fact that one of Siggi’s closest friends was informing on him and even went so far as to complain to a Stasi handler, “I’ve collected so much information for you on Schefke—when are you going to throw him in jail?”
Siggi and Aram consistently filmed the physical degradation of the country, whether that was the crumbling city centers where Party planners continued to raze old buildings to make room for more high-rise complexes, or the severe pollution affecting many areas of the country. The urgency of environmental issues became more and more clear even to ordinary citizens as the years wore on. Over the course of 1986 and 1987, for instance, many of the trees that lined East Berlin’s streets suddenly died. The likely cause was the leaky hundred-year-old gas pipes still in use throughout the East, but the upshot was that the landscape was withering away right in front of people’s eyes. A recent Environmental Library study had concluded that a third of the country’s lakes were no longer safe to swim in—they were too toxic. And in late 1988, when East Germany expanded deals it had in place with West Germany to import toxic waste and dispose of it in the DDR—in exchange for hard currency, naturally—groups saw the need for another public action.
On November 11, 1988, protesters headed out to Schöneiche, on the outskirts of East Berlin—the site of a waste incinerator where the poisonous Western materials would be spewed out into the air with no public oversight, in fact with no regard for the public at all. A group from the Environmental Library went by bicycle; a Church from Below group took a train and then walked along an access road used primarily by the trucks that delivered waste to the facility. While walking along carrying banners for the demonstration, the punks and freaks noticed quite a lot of cars coming up the road. This could only be bad. So they stashed first the banners and then themselves in the bushes.
But they got caught.
They were transported to a police station for questioning. They denied any knowledge of a planned demonstration. And again the protesters walked away free, this time with a fine of 300 marks. Okay, that was a small fortune at the time to them, but they could raise the money with a benefit concert or whatever. The important thing was: no extended detention, no trial, no jail time. Following the arrests at the Environmental Library the year before, and surrounding the Rosa Luxemburg parade earlier that year, this was evidence that the possibility of a return to a more hardline approach from the government seemed to have passed. Between the spring punk music festival, the IMF protest, and this attempted demonstration, nobody had gone to jail.
A dangerous signal to give to a bunch of punks and miscreants. With no consequences for their actions, they were bound to get more audacious.
Then, in late 1988, the Polish communist party agreed to enter talks with Solidarity, and head of state General Wojciech Jaruzelski—who had declared martial law back in 1981 in an attempt to clamp down on the union—agreed to resign pending the outcome of those talks. Another dangerous signal. As far as the East German government was concerned, it was glasnost taken too far. The DDR dictatorship seemed genuinely worried about the renewed threat represented by their ostensible allies in the East Bloc, and at the end of 1988 the dictatorship banned the German-language Russian newspaper Sputnik.
Once again, people like Speiche could feel the ground shaking beneath the government.
The Honecker government was scared.
And in January 1989 the Church from Below finally moved into their permanent home on the grounds of St. Elisabeth Church, just a few hundred yards from Zion Church and the Environmental Library. Bathrooms and a bar had been added to the interior, and a congregation of anarchist non-believers now had virtually an entire building to themselves to use as a cross between a nightclub and an intellectual salon, putting on concerts, readings, lectures, discussion groups, benefits, informational sessions, and, of course, par
ties—and all of it beyond the reach of the police. Thanks to Speiche and Silvio Meier, it also housed a huge Antifa group that soon created its own newsletter.
We will stay and we will fight.
Speiche volunteered to keep a Friday night bar open on his own, and it quickly became the go-to spot for all-night drinking sessions where opponents of the state could carouse together for hours after regular bars closed. Parties could bring people together and foster new ideas. Parties fueled their own sort of productivity, creativity, and solidarity. And sex. Parties created those connections as well, and in a country where homosexuality was still persecuted, the Church from Below, like the punk scene, offered a safe haven for outcasts of all kind, a place where anything went, where freedom was freedom and all issues were seen as interconnected, and where anyone could end up intertwined with anyone on any given night.
With an actual place to go to get the latest info, open to all, even to those who wore their Mohawks on the inside and felt uncomfortable at Erlöser, the Church from Below now functioned more than ever as an independent national communications hub.
To celebrate the opening of the facility, they put on a concert featuring Leipzig’s L’Attentat and Potsdam’s Re-Aktion, two stridently political bands:
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
Say good-bye to the Party,
Shout opposition!
VI
Disintegration
Punks at the officially licensed Beat Inn, in Berlin-Weissensee, 1988
Volker Döring / Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft