by Tim Mohr
Huh?
They had cans of Coke they’d bought somewhere else.
“You can’t sit here with those drinks! Get out!”
Toster of die Anderen had something specific he wanted to do on his first trip to West Berlin. He wanted to ride one of the subway trains that passed beneath East Berlin territory, rolling through stations that had been sealed off by the DDR. Toster had felt those trains pass beneath him, trains from another world, another country, just beneath his feet in the East. It was like something out of science fiction, he always thought, and he wanted to ride on one of those ghostly trains just once.
Unfortunately, the friend he planned to meet and ride the trains with was late. So the manager of Ecstasy—who had himself never been to East Berlin—asked Toster if there was something he might want to do. The club manager had an old Italian sports car, so Toster suggested they go see the highway that entered West Berlin from the southwest.
“I want to see the part beyond the sign I always see—last exit in the DDR.”
He and the club manager trundled into the Lancia and drove down to the checkpoint between Wannsee and Potsdam, then came back.
That afternoon Toster spent his share of the band’s earnings. First he bought guitar picks—up to then he’d always played with homemade picks he cut out of the tops of jelly jars. Then he invested the rest of the money in cans of Becks beer. It had to be cans. Neither he nor any of his friends had ever had beer out of a can before, and he wanted to take them back for all the friends he knew would be waiting at their local hangout in East Berlin upon their return.
Back at Ecstasy, the guys couldn’t believe all the things they experienced for the first time. There was a billiard table in the bar—just like in the movies!—and Flake tried to play pool. He and Paul ordered Campari and orange juice with their free-drink tickets but found themselves struggling to pronounce the exotic name of the bitter Italian liqueur. And there was a backstage area at Ecstasy. In the East they sat at the bar with the audience before a show.
A lot of people they’d known in the East turned up for the show, people who had fled or applied to leave only to find themselves unemployed in West Berlin, struggling to get by. Despite their presence, the concert wasn’t very well attended. But it didn’t matter. The bands were so excited that they sped through their songs.
When they all boarded the bus after the show, the minder from the cultural ministry addressed them.
“If you don’t want to go back, just get off here,” the minder said. “I don’t care.”
The band members stayed put.
The minder shrugged his shoulders and off they went. The bus pulled through the checkpoint and returned to a different country—a country without bright streetlights and kebab stands and sunset-colored glasses of Campari and orange juice.
Toster didn’t care.
He was looking forward to passing out cans of beer to his friends.
61
The first of what became monthly protests over the election fraud was called for June 7, 1989, one month after the vote.
Everything about the protest plan was bold.
First of all, activists distributed hundreds of flyers announcing a demonstration, depositing them by hand in mailboxes around town. Then there was the plan for the demonstration itself, which involved burying a crematorium urn marked “Here lies democracy.”
They planned to meet in front of a centrally located church administration building and from there go to Alexanderplatz. Police caught wind of the plan, though, and mustered a massive presence all around the area. Fewer than a hundred people managed to reach the planned location.
It was a bust.
But there was a backup plan: activists met at Sophien Church that same evening at seven. Sophien was a pretty eighteenth-century baroque church nestled among the tight little streets of an old quarter near Hackescher Markt. This time, about five hundred people made it. Herne, who still booked bands at Erlöser, was pissed off at the turnout. Since 1983 he had held a day job at a concrete factory and as a result he knew a lot of normal working people; he knew that they, too, had started to grumble openly about the bullshit they saw, and about the sham elections specifically. Herne could tell the mood was changing—some of the workers he knew had decided not to vote at all, or to cross out the candidates on their ballots—and yet those people, normal people, weren’t here at the protest, at least not in big numbers. Where were they? Were they still afraid to protest, even in the face of actual fraud? There must have been thousands of ordinary citizens, maybe tens of thousands, who knew they’d had their votes stolen. And here were just five hundred souls.
The plan at Sophien Church remained the same: to bury the urn to mark the death of democratic elections and to march through the streets. At least, that’s what people like A-Micha and Dirk Moldt thought. After some speeches and discussions, those two guys and a handful of others got up and headed to the doors of the church with the urn in hand.
The church doors opened onto a fenced yard. Beyond the church grounds: swarms of police and rows of military-style troop transporters in which to carry off detainees.
As he walked out, A-Micha turned to look back at the church doors, expecting to see hundreds of people streaming out behind him.
Nobody was following.
The church pews were full.
A-Micha and Dirk and the rest went back inside. A-Micha went to the front of the church and began to speak at the top of his lungs. He thought he could get the more timid people to their feet, get them out of the church, get them to face the police, to stand with him and Dirk, to stand together for all those whose votes had been disappeared, for all those whose futures had been usurped.
“You can’t let a handful of people go out there on their own and get taken away by the Stasi,” he yelled. “If we all go out, nobody will go to prison.”
Again he went to the doors with Dirk and the urn, and again he started across the churchyard. Again he turned to look behind him.
Again they were alone.
God damn it!
Again he went in and exhorted the crowd.
“Together is the only way!”
A-Micha stalked out a third time.
This time, a few people got up. This time, a few people followed him. And then a few more, and a few more. Soon hundreds of people flowed out into the yard toward the street.
By the time the majority of the group had exited the churchyard and spilled onto Grosse Hamburger Strasse, the assembled police and Stasi came running at them with batons.
“Everyone sit down,” yelled A-Micha.
He figured the security forces hoped the crowd would try to push through their lines. That would justify any violence—which was just what the government forces wanted. The police started to beat protesters, knock them with batons, and drag them away by their hair.
“Do not fight back,” A-Micha implored.
Most people did as he urged. They sat down. And they were hauled away one by one and transported to the central Stasi facility at Magdalenenstrasse.
As he waited to be processed, A-Micha watched others have their information recorded by Stasi officers. A chill went down his spine, an icy dagger of fear, something he rarely felt, even in situations like this: he recognized some of the Stasi officers’ faces. The team processing the demonstrators included some of the very same officers who had processed him when he’d been arrested with the rest of Namenlos back in 1983, the day they rounded up the whole band, the day they executed Jana’s dog, Wotan.
This is not good, he thought.
But the officers did not seem to recognize A-Micha, and he never let on that he recognized them.
After a few hours, everyone was released.
They had done it again. They had taken their rage into the open, aired it in public, off church grounds. They had made it onto the streets, if only briefly, and they were back out and ready to fight. Battered, yes, some bloodied, yes, but all ready to fight on.
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A-Micha, who had been counting down since 1979, sure the battle would take just ten years, was beginning to believe.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one . . .
62
Even the gray-area acts with Einstufungen, the government-sanctioned amateur licenses, were getting salty by 1989.
Die Art, a Leipzig band with an Einstufung, scored a major underground hit with the song “Wide Wide World.” The band was already selling hundreds of its homemade tapes, and their 1989 cassette, Dry, set what is thought to be a DDR record for private tape album sales with nearly two thousand copies—which doesn’t come close to accounting for all the copies of copies that circulated. “Wide Wide World” could never have been recorded through official channels because of the lyrics:
Gray in gray is our city,
I want to see the colors of the world
But with their amateur license die Art could still play the song at official events, such as the Free German Youth’s spring festival, where they sang it for 15,000 people from a big open-air stage. The Erlöser and Church from Below crowd may have hated this kind of footsie-playing, but those yearning lyrics were easy to decipher.
Criticism hardened in the wake of the official East German reaction to China’s violent suppression of student protesters on Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989—which also happened to be the same day Solidarity managed to capture every parliamentary seat it was permitted to contest in the first semifree elections in Poland. Chinese students had occupied Tiananmen Square for weeks—public action against the dictatorship. China had criticized the protests as “counterrevolutionary” and then declared martial law. Finally, Chinese troops supported by tanks and armored vehicles cleared the square, leaving hundreds or perhaps thousands dead.
News of the violence led to demonstrations in front of the Chinese embassy in East Berlin on June 6, followed on June 7 by the protests on the one-month anniversary of the East German election. On June 8, the East German People’s Congress passed a resolution supporting China’s use of force against the demonstrators on Tiananmen Square, and Egon Krenz—Honecker’s anointed successor—reiterated the government’s support in comments to Western media; Krenz would later hint at the implementation of a “Chinese solution” to the increasing unrest in the DDR.
It was all too much. At least for some musicians.
The night of June 10, 1989, the Berlin band Herbst in Peking took the stage at another Free German Youth open-air festival, in Brandenburg, north of Berlin.
The singer, Rex Joswig, had moved to Berlin a few years before, working as a roadie for licensed jazz musicians and getting to know Aljoscha, Paul, and Flake from Feeling B, as well as Toster from die Anderen and many others. With his long blond hair and his enthusiasm for classic rock, he wasn’t a traditional punk, but the Sex Pistols had been transformative for him, too, and the Pistols’ kiss-my-ass attitude he’d adopted had gotten him kicked out of school in the dipshit town well north of Berlin where he’d grown up. He’d put Herbst in Peking—the name taken from a book, Autumn in Peking, by French poet Boris Vian—together in 1987 after a few false starts, and despite his fundamental desire to be confrontational, he had decided to do that within the context of the amateur licensing system—like most of his friends. After getting their Einstufung, the band developed a good following, and played eight to ten gigs a month.
That June night, as the last streaks of high summer light seeped from the sky, Rex addressed the crowd of several thousand: “We’d like to start with a moment of silence for the victims of the massacre at Tiananmen Square,” he said.
Some boos echoed out in the crowd.
What the fuck, thought Rex. People get run over by tanks and these assholes don’t have a problem with it?
A voice spoke to him through his vocal monitor, a voice from the sound booth.
“Don’t say shit like that on our sound system.”
The guys running the sound were afraid the omnipresent Stasi agents would think they were in on Rex’s tirade. They were shitting themselves.
But Rex felt a visceral hatred for the DDR authorities in the wake of their reaction to the massacre, outraged by their support for China’s murderous actions and the veiled threat the East German government’s support represented to DDR citizens. We will roll right over you, too, they seemed to say.
Later in the show, Rex was at it again.
“This next song is for our bassist, who on Wednesday spent twenty-four hours in detainment because he didn’t agree with the vote on May 7, because he wants secret ballots and doubts the accuracy of the vote count.”
Whoa.
At the end of the band’s set, a few people made a point of telling Rex how cool they thought it was for him to bring up Tiananmen Square, but the festival organizers just wanted to get the band the hell out of there. The other bands at the festival wanted them gone, too—speaking out made the other bands look like cowards for not saying anything. The local police seemed more intent on washing their hands of the problem than anything else. They immediately escorted the band’s vehicle away from the festival grounds and out of their jurisdiction.
As the band drove off, the keyboard player said to Rex, “Today is the end of the road, today we break up the band.”
I don’t think so, thought Rex.
Two days after the performance, Rex and the band received a summons to the culture ministry in Berlin. Rex knew there was going to be trouble. And he had a statement in mind.
Fuck it, he thought as he stopped by a seafood shop on Stargarder Strasse to get the right prop for his statement.
“You have anything that’s gone off?” Rex asked the fishmonger.
The guy retrieved a stinking, spoiled carp and wrapped it in a newspaper for Rex.
When Rex and the other members of the band sat down in front of the commission at the culture ministry, the officials started to rattle off all the evidence. They had Stasi reports with every word Rex had said. At the end of the presentation they announced the verdict: the band’s amateur performance license had been yanked indefinitely. They could no longer legally play gigs. Venues across the country would be notified of the revocation of Herbst in Peking’s Einstufung. They were poison.
“Do you have anything to say,” the band was asked.
Rex did.
“Yes, I’d like to say something. First, we brought you something, a gift from the band,” he said, putting his parcel on the table in front of the commission. “It’s a fish that stinks from the head. If you know anything about the history of the Italian mafia, you know what that means. And one more thing: time is on our side.”
Rather than break up, Rex rallied the band to record a song that would become the hit of the fall of 1989, played in heavy rotation on West Berlin radio after a friend of Rex’s smuggled the master tape out. The song was called “Bakschischrepublik,” and the chorus, bristling with Rex’s rage, went:
Schwarz-Rot-Gold ist das System
morgen wird es untergehen
Black-red-gold is the system
Tomorrow it will fall
63
Another demonstration against election fraud was planned for Alexanderplatz on July 7. Only about sixty people made it there, but it took a thousand security personnel to thwart the demonstration. Government forces closed nearby subway stations and shut down access roads. They also beat and arrested innocent bystanders—collateral damage. It was another mistake, as ordinary people were rarely confronted with ugly state-sanctioned violence. Not my problem, they’re not coming for me . . . except now some ordinary citizens had bruises and bloody noses, and many other ordinary citizens had seen bruises inflicted and noses bloodied.
The Erlöser punks and Church from Below had already taken advantage of the collective repulsion that many ordinary citizens—even committed party members—felt at the East German government’s reaction to Tiananmen Square. At the end of June they had organized a week of twenty-four hour drumming as
a protest. Church leadership at St. Elisabeth Church, which housed the Church from Below, complained that the round-the-clock drumming was a disturbance of the peace. Of course, that was the point, and despite threats the Church from Below did not get evicted.
In September, the monthly electoral fraud demonstration once again tried to take Alexanderplatz, with protesters blowing whistles and lining up in T-shirts that spelled out election fraud and then splitting up again. Police dragged protesters away by their hands and feet to police vans, battered and beaten, one with a broken arm. Nearly a hundred were arrested and held overnight. Three days later in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, Antifa activists attempted to join an officially sanctioned rally in remembrance of the victims of fascism. The kids carried signs that translated “Warning! Neo-Nazis in the DDR!” and “Against Nazis” and “War never again—fight it from the start.” Police brutally beat them.
Meanwhile the crisis over would-be emigrants had taken on a dynamic all its own. Thousands of Ausreiser had fled to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and especially Hungary, where the government led by Miklos Nemeth had taken perestroika and glasnost so far as to dismantle the wire fence dividing Hungary from Austria—the first break in the Iron Curtain—with the cryptic blessing of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who told Nemeth that border security was Nemeth’s own problem, not his. On August 19, 1989, Hungarian activists had staged a “Pan-European Picnic” near Sopron, directly on the Austrian border, during which hundreds of East Germans were allowed to push through a border gate and enter Austria. So began a flood of humanity. By September 10, Hungary had officially opened its border to the West and refused to stop East Germans from exiting, despite bitter complaints from the Honecker regime. People left East Germany in droves—tens of thousands fled during the next few weeks of September. Immediately after the border opened, the tenor of demonstrations back in East Germany changed—especially in Leipzig.
Ever since the attempt by church leaders to hijack the Monday meetings at Nikolai Church, people had taken to gathering outside the church on Monday evenings. This continued even after the church had relented and allowed activists once again to lead the Monday peace prayer themselves. By summer of 1989 the outdoor public gatherings had built from a few dozen to a few hundred strong, packed with members of the punk scene in Leipzig and nearby Halle. One of them was Connie, now twenty-three, who had been jailed at age seventeen for spray-painting freedom for jana, mita and a-micha after the arrest of the members of the band Namenlos in 1983. Connie and others from the Mockauer Keller gang went to the Monday gatherings week in and week out, though they couldn’t stand the Ausreiser, who, they felt, selfishly pursued their short-sighted personal goals at the expense of those fighting for change at home. When the would-be emigrants chanted “Wir wollen raus,” or “We want out,” Connie and other Leipzig punks even mockingly chanted back: “Wir bleiben hier,” sneered the punks, “We’re staying here.”