by Tim Mohr
The Berlin Wall had fallen.
As news spread inside the club, the bar passed out free beer.
Unbeknownst to the people at the concert in Pike Club, East German government spokesman and Politburo member Günter Schabowski had announced an immediate end to travel restrictions at a press conference earlier that evening. Though Schabowski had told the mayor of West Berlin ten days prior that travel restrictions would be liberalized, and West Berlin had prepared its public transport system for that eventuality, it seemed as if East Berlin had not prepared for the policy change. After the press conference ran live on Eastern TV and the news was broadcast and re-broadcast on West Berlin TV and radio, East Berliners had gathered at some checkpoints, demanding to be let through. Guards at the checkpoints had received no specific orders, however, and struggled to reach superiors at night; as the crowds began to build, the guards just had to wing it and decide on an individual basis how best to deal with the situation. A little-known checkpoint between Waltersdorfer Chausee in the East and Rudow in the West opened first, at around 8:30 p.m. Then, faced with a huge crowd of perhaps tens of thousands, having themselves seen the news conference, and unwilling to open fire to maintain control, the guards at Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint opened their gates at around 11:30 p.m. Word spread, and other checkpoints, including Checkpoint Charlie, soon followed suit.
A carload of the bands’ friends had driven through the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint in their old Volga and then found their way to Kreuzberg and Pike Club, where they knew Feeling B and die Anderen were playing.
Despite the excitement, the members of Feeling B just wanted to go home. But the scene at the checkpoints was so crazy, they couldn’t get back across. In the end one of their friends bought a bottle of whisky and they, too, joined the party.
The members of die Anderen walked over to the checkpoint at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse and stood there watching their countrymen flood through. They rapped on the tops of Trabants, Easterners greeting other Easterners as they entered the West.
People chanted and sang. It was a huge street festival in the middle of the night.
The Berlin Wall had fallen.
Toster and Dafty and the rest of the band wandered the streets of West Berlin all night with friends, smoking dope and drinking what seemed like a hundred beers.
The band also made a decision right there and then: die Anderen broke up.
The Wall was done and so was the band.
For the punks of East Berlin it was simple: mission accomplished.
Or was it?
The battle of Mainzer Strasse, 1990
Harald Hauswald / Ostkreuz Agency
VII
Lust for Life
66
It’s easy to look at the images of Easterners and Westerners dancing arm in arm atop the Wall and think that was it; everything changed in an instant.
But it didn’t.
When Otze of Schleim-Keim went home on November 10 after a night of partying, his brother met him at the door.
“The Stasi were just here,” he told Otze. “They’re looking for you.”
The day after the fall of the Wall, Stasi officers went to work. The police went to work. Border guards still stood at attention with machine guns at their sides. The East German Communist Party’s annual three-day conference even continued with little mention of the opening of the border.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Wall, it wasn’t clear how much had changed, and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen. Groups like the Church from Below and the Erlöser punks had never spent much time thinking about what might come after the fall of the Wall.
In hindsight, it’s seen as inevitable that the two Germanys would reunite. But none of the people who had laid the groundwork for the fall—those who had started the tremors and endured the security forces’ brutality—envisioned a unified Germany. Those people had sacrificed their places in society for the chance to form a new one, something different and distinct, an independent East Germany built from scratch. They hadn’t looked to the West for inspiration before, and none of them looked to the West for salvation now that the border was open.
The political situation quickly spiraled out of control—specifically, out of the control of all of those people who had fought so hard to bring down the dictatorship. Not even the new political organizations that had mushroomed during the final days before the fall of the Wall—some of which, like Neues Forum, or New Forum, ostensibly had tens of thousands of members—seemed to have any influence. As demonstrations continued after the opening of the border, the chants on the street transformed with frightening speed from “We are the people” to “We are one people.”
That was the sort of nationalist sentiment that sent shivers down the spines of anti-Nazi Antifa groups. A unified Germany was just about the worst outcome they could imagine. But their nightmares were about to be realized—in more than one way. Skinheads joined the continuing demonstrations, skinheads attacked those voicing anti-unification sentiments, skinheads operated openly in the streets.
Antifa groups began to mobilize.
Among those moved to action was Grit Ferber, the woman who’d been among the teenagers imprisoned for spray-painting anarchist graffiti in Weimar in 1983. She was living in West Berlin in 1989, having left East Germany not long after her release from prison.
In December 1989 Grit went back to her home town, alarmed at what was happening on the streets of East Germany. Grit and a group of friends joined a big Antifa demonstration in Weimar. Afterward they secured speakers to the top of Grit’s VW Beetle to serve as a makeshift PA, and drove around the streets shouting things like “Deutschland muss sterben,” or “Germany must die.”
After her release from prison back in 1984, Grit had become increasingly paranoid about the Stasi—about being surveilled and about them trying to set her up in order to throw her back in prison. She and her friends had refused to go straight to the West from prison, but once on the outside she changed her mind. She had landed in Kassel, a mid-sized city in the middle of West Germany. After about six months there, she had moved to West Berlin and started a band with two other exiled women from Weimar and two women from Kassel. And now she was driving around her old haunts shouting into a microphone that Germany must die.
One day in early 1990, Grit and the drummer in her band ran into some friends.
“We squatted a building in the East,” they said.
“Squatted a building?” said Grit. “I want to do that!”
She had two small children now and had always dreamed of bringing them up in a communal setting. The squats in West Berlin never suited her—the people all wore black and shat on the idea of being in a relationship or having kids.
She began to talk to her bandmates about the idea of squatting a place in East Berlin together. One of the women originally from Weimar immediately rejected the idea. She had been together with Wolfram Hasch when Hasch had been arrested at gunpoint in 1986 while painting the white line on the West Berlin side of the Wall; she had given birth to their child while he was stuck in Stasi prison; she said she would never, ever set foot in the East again.
Grit decided to explore the idea anyway. She heard about a squatters council that had been set up and went to one of their weekly meetings in January 1990. The more she listened, the more interested she became.
By early 1990 about fifteen buildings had been squatted in Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, and Lichtenberg, including Köpenicker Strasse 137 and Kastanienallee 85/86, which still exist in largely the same form today, as residential collectives. On the facade of Köpenicker Strasse 137, residents painted a slogan: Die Grenze verläuft nicht zwischen der Völkern, sondern zwischen oben und unten. Loosely translated: Borders don’t run between nations but between those at the top and those at the bottom. Emancipation—true freedom—was predicated on an equitable economic system, and unification would not bring that.
Aljoscha, the singer of Feelin
g B, put down roots in Schönhauser Allee 5. Because of the travel privileges he’d enjoyed with his Swiss passport, Aljoscha knew he didn’t like the West. He also knew that if they were going to make anything out of the East, they would have to get an independent infrastructure up and running—and fast, since he expected Western investors to swoop in and take advantage of the situation. The only way to block Western real estate speculators was to scoop up the real estate before them.
With more than thirty apartments in its original configuration and a courtyard in the middle, Schönhauser Allee 5 was ideal: Aljoscha wanted to establish something big. Schönhauser 5 offered plenty of space to create the arts center he envisioned, with concert venues, band rehearsal spaces, music and art studios, video editing facilities—within months he would even erect broadcasting facilities for a pirate FM radio station, called Radio P.
But first things first: the pub, with a bar made of stacked beer crates, opened almost immediately.
67
Squatted in the gathering dusk of December 29, 1989, Schreinerstrasse 47, in Friedrichshain, was arguably the first of all the buildings squatted after the fall of the Wall.
Core members of the Church from Below, including Dirk Moldt and Silvio Meier, squatted this imposing nineteenth-century apartment building; A-Micha joined them a short time afterward. For them, it was a logical extension of how they had always done things: if the political process was going off the rails, they would create their own world, their own reality. DIY. Punk.
What they felt they needed were building blocks that could be scaled up to a societal level, cells that could form a whole organism. They had carved space out within the dictatorship—negative space, outside society; now there was nothing but negative space, a political vacuum, and they would create islands—positive space, a living model for a new society. The possibilities seemed endless: on top of all the derelict old buildings, many of which were still scheduled for demolition, there were tens of thousands of apartments left empty by those who decamped for the West once the border opened.
Dirk and Silvio withdrew from the Church from Below and devoted themselves to the new project full-time. In addition to making the space livable, they had to fortify the building to fend off potential police attempts to oust them as well as to protect against increasingly bold and frequent attacks by skinheads.
A statement they issued upon squatting the building began by talking about how the overthrown rulers of the DDR had betrayed the country, warning that international capital now had free rein to plunder the country. It continued:
We hereby declare that we have squatted Schreinerstrasse 47 in Berlin Friedrichshain in order to give our hope for socialism, understanding, and solidarity at least a tiny chance of survival . . .
We didn’t stay in the noncapitalist world through the long, bitter years of the dictatorship just to sit by passively and watch the breaking up and selling off of our country. Our moral values—solidarity, nonviolence, education, participation, our shameless lust for life, and rage—allowed us to survive the era of Stalinism. And we will make a stand against the far worse dictatorship of global capitalism by using the exact same means . . .
We urge everyone to follow this example and to take buildings, workshops, educational institutions, bars, cafés, etc., under your own control. It’s the only way we see to deny the inhumane “free market” a base in the DDR . . .
In a spirit of hopeful desperation, we cry: don’t let us waste this last chance for free self-determination!
The plan for Schreinerstrasse 47 included a meeting space where communal issues could be addressed and projects—like creating a playground on an adjacent empty lot—could be managed. Drawing on past experience that had taught them the importance of independent media sources, they also installed a printing press, allowing them to produce informational flyers as well as a newsletter devoted to the squatting movement they hoped to catalyze. The renovations also included a café, because, of course—it was right there in their manifesto, after all—lust for life.
Another one of the very first buildings squatted after the fall of the Wall went one better: at Rosenthaler Strasse 68, in Mitte, living space was totally secondary to the goal of creating a revolutionary party venue. Or as the squatters themselves described it, an “independent art, culture, and communications center.”
The gang who squatted it on January 17, 1990—mostly people loosely associated with the bands Ich-Funktion, Freygang, and die Firma, including Paul Landers of Feeling B—dubbed the building Eimer, which meant bucket. The name came from the hundreds of buckets of rubble the squatters had to remove from the damp, dark, derelict building when they took it over. The ground floor of the old building was already collapsing, so the squatters ripped it down and created a cavernous basement concert space. Upstairs was soon to be another bar, with a smaller stage and dance floor.
Even as they worked on the building, the Eimer crew immediately began to put on concerts, performances, and parties, open to all. They assembled the best sound system ever heard in the East, built a recording studio and rehearsal spaces, and installed guest quarters where musicians and artists could crash after events. The Eimer squatters also stuck to their ideological guns, establishing a simple, equal distribution of pay: whatever income was left after costs was split evenly between all who worked and lived there, no exceptions.
Speiche joined Eimer about two weeks after it was squatted and became a key figure within the collective. He booked bands and DJs, and helped get the word out for events. He also handled security—which would prove quite a job, as the leftist squats quickly came under attack from right-wing skinheads. At times, Speiche also served as Eimer’s punk conscience. When, a few years down the road, someone tried to install a cigarette machine and coin-operated slot machines, he knew how to take care of the problem: he threw that shit right out the window.
Not commerce.
Culture.
Eimer functioned not only as the home of the first burst of experimental post-Wall culture, but also as the jumping-off point for the most important squat in the evolution of the city. Eimer eventually became crowded enough that a group split off and started to look for another building. Eimer had appealed to its occupants in part because it was scheduled for demolition as part of government plans—plans still being executed despite the opening of the border; in essence, Rosenthaler 68, which became Eimer, no longer existed in official records. Many places in the old streets around Hackescher Markt were designated for demolition, including a sprawling complex on Oranienburger Strasse that the breakaway group from Eimer was eyeing.
The complex dated from 1909 and had been built as an elegant shopping center. The structure was among the first in Berlin to employ steel, so even though it had been damaged during World War II, and even though Eastern authorities had started years before to demolish the rear walls of the building, it was still surprisingly sound—especially given how skeletal it looked, particularly in the back, where the exterior walls had been blasted off and the space was completely open to the weather. The building took up about half a block and the view from the open rooms at the back looked out over a vast vacant lot—altogether, the property covered almost six acres.
On February 13, 1990, the team from Eimer—led by a musician named Leo Kondeyne—struck.
Borrowing a surplus fire truck owned by Tatjana of die Firma, a group of fewer than ten people climbed into a second floor window of the five-story complex, went downstairs, opened the boarded-up ground floor, and then got to work securing the place—like the other squats, it had to be heavily fortified.
This building is hereby squatted.
It was a huge job.
Leo’s gang had to secure the structures and the yard, get water and electricity running, clear the chimneys to allow them to heat. Demolition of the complex had been so imminent that the group had to pull explosives out of holes demolition experts had already drilled. And then they started to craft the place to fit their
goal: to provide more space for people who had the urge to create art and music, to create culture—a new culture that could form the basis of a new society, one being created from scratch, one they hoped to conjure up as a living model. Depending on how the political situation shook out, it might serve only as a basis of an antisociety, but they were used to playing that role; and even if their vision didn’t become a living model for something larger, they themselves would still be living in a world of their own creation, by their own ideals.
Speiche took a sleeping bag and did not leave the complex for five days straight as the group worked around the clock. They had brought a generator and got music and lights on by day two; over the next few days they tapped into electrical lines they located in the building.
Leo Kondeyne, the ringleader of the group, wasn’t a traditional punk. He was a bit older, slight and soft-spoken, really more in tune with the hippie generation; he had worked as a soundman for the Eastern heavy blues outfit Freygang. But in the mid 1980s he had met Alexander Kriening, the drummer in the initial lineup of Feeling B. Kriening did Leo a great favor in urging him just to make music—winning him over to the punk DIY ethos. It didn’t matter what you played or how well, just start making a racket. And when Leo and Kriening started doing just that, Leo loved the results.
Soon an ever-shifting array of guest musicians from the punk scene came and went within Leo’s anarchic group, a strictly improvisational affair without a set lineup or repertoire. The shapeshifting combo was dubbed Tacheles, taken from a German idiom derived from Yiddish: Tacheles reden, which means to speak frankly. Feeling B guitarist Paul Landers was a frequent member, but because of the nature of the project, Paul played clarinet in Leo’s band. Of course. Clarinet. Paul—as well as his Feeling B compatriot Flake—went on to become technicians in the newly squatted complex, helping to build the first sound system out of old parts, fashioning stages in various bars and performance spaces inside, working behind the scenes on theater productions, even pulling out the asbestos lining in part of the building.