In Burning down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, author and translator Tim Mohr documents the origins of East German punks living behind the Iron Curtain, their cat and mouse games with the secret police (Stasi), and their effective self-organizing that ultimately helped topple the Berlin Wall. Lauded both by critics and punk bible author Legs McNeil ((Please Kill Me) ), Burning Down the Haus succeeds in placing its readers among concrete towns and cities populated by informants and the ever-present threat of interrogation and incarceration. The day-to-day Orwellian paranoia of having to conceal individuality is conspicuous in Mohr’s writing, as is the excitement generated by a radical underground movement with its very own frenetic sound.
Tim Mohr (TM) generously shares his thoughts and insights about this work below with the author, K. Krombie for Picture this Post (PTP).
PTP: So many of the individuals in Burning Down the Haus were turned onto punk by listening to Western radio. The Sex Pistols in particular had such a reactionary effect that turned disaffected teens into purposeful punks and activists, often overnight. What do you think the Pistols had that was so seductive compared with their contemporaries?
(TM ) The [Sex Pistols] sound was unlike anything these kids had heard before. They had grown up on officially sanctioned rock that mimicked Western styles of the early 1970s. And even without paying much attention to the lyrics it was obvious that the Pistols were completely different. The howling sneer of Johnny Rotten's voice could not have sounded more different from prog rock (progressive rock), for one thing, and there was the raw sound and the speed of the music. Many of the people described the sensation of first hearing the Pistols to having a switch thrown. It broadened the range of what was possible and gave people the idea that they could harness the same fury.
The Pistols were on the radio more than most other early punk bands, too. For one thing, they seem to have been something of an exception for making it onto commercial West German radio. Radio broadcasts for British troops definitely played punk, and as kids in the East got tuned into punk and started to figure out what radio shows to listen to and all that, they got into a wider range of bands. I think X-Ray Spex had a big influence in East Germany, for instance, and the more politically savvy kids were into Crass, among others.
In spite of the Soviet system that they were railing against, do you think that equality between the sexes, a component of Communist philosophy and indeed punk, played a part in the forthright attitudes of the women you interviewed?
In theory, East Germany espoused gender equality - more so than most Western countries, at least on paper. But the reality was often depressingly traditional. Major, for instance, was basically forced into an apprenticeship to become a typist, and the other apprentices were exclusively women. Kids typically stopped school and started an apprenticeship at 16. Jana had a similar experience, initially pushed to become a nursing assistant before she fled her home and job, which in the East German system subjected her to potential jail time. Mita had been interested in becoming a mechanic, but that path wasn't open to her, either. So the hypocrisy they saw elsewhere in society was also reflected in the false claims of gender equality.
With many of the punks, they were basically just trying to match the rhetoric to reality - you can see it in the interrogation transcripts, when they were arrested by the Stasi. Often the conversation would go something like, "Why would you claim that you can't speak your mind openly?" And the kid would say, "Well, I did, and here I am in detainment. What better proof could there be?"
The Open Work programs, organized by the lower ranks of the church, provided some protection in their youth club spaces where punks could group together. Can you explain how the church was able to subsidize these growing punk communities?
The relationship between punks and the church was very fraught. The Lutheran church was, like most protestant churches, not very hierarchical, and thus regional and national church leaders couldn't really enforce orthodoxy on individual ministers or congregations. What happened, basically, is that starting in the 1970s a small subset of radical ministers began to bring outsider groups into their churches, including punks. Church spaces enjoyed protection from uniformed security forces, so in theory these spaces could function as safe spaces to discuss taboo subjects and engage in activities that would be illegal outside. This allowed a handful of ministers to allow punk concerts in their facilities - often in the sanctuaries themselves. Church leaders were generally not supportive of these efforts, and the ministers found themselves in constant conflict with their bosses, as well as the secret police. Siggi Neher of Christus church in Halle, who sponsored the first national punk festival in 1983, was openly called an "enemy of the state" and he and his family were harassed by the Stasi right up until the revolution. The ostensible protections of the church were also somewhat limited. Namenlos, Jana and Mita's band, went to prison for about two years as a result of lyrics they sang at a church show: informants told the Stasi about the lyrics.
Siggi Neher identified punk as an existential scream, a desire to make contact with something that wouldn’t otherwise react. Meanwhile, the Stasi identified the punk movement as their biggest subversive problem. What were the punks able to achieve that surpassed the efforts of the hippies before them?
The level of Stasi paranoia was one of the biggest puzzles as I started to do my research. Initially I couldn't understand why the Stasi had seen a bunch of teenagers with bad haircuts as such a dire threat. As I got deeper into it, of course, I realized the Stasi had been correct. Anything that influenced people to diverge from the preordained path the dictatorship had mapped out for them was a threat. And punks very much did that, and in large numbers. By 1983, the Stasi estimated there were 1000 punks and 10,000 "sympathizers" - who, the police said, also dressed like punks. So it is difficult to see the distinction, to be honest - in a country of 15 million. There were certainly other musicians, artists and writers who voiced oppositional sentiments, but they put their work out into the world and then faded back into anonymity. Punks, because of their look, voiced opposition anytime they appeared in public. That distinguished punks - and it also was a key to their ability to continuously expand their movement despite police crackdowns. Often just seeing a punk on the street was enough to turn on a teen—as in: “Wow, you could never go to a communist youth meeting like that!” That means...they're not going to communist youth meetings! And compared to the hippies, punks were extremely confrontational. That, too, added to their appeal to rebellious teens.
The vast majority of territories that were annexed into Soviet rule slipped into a belief system that in Germany’s case, opposed every regime that had gone before. Over time, how much actual brainwashing occurred versus knuckling under?
I would say that in any society the vast majority of people just go along with the system, regardless of what the system is. It didn't take as much as you might think to enforce conformity. That was one of the biggest takeaways from researching the dictatorship. We are taught to think of dictatorships as a system of control imposed against the will of the populace, but it is not nearly as simple as that. Most people reflexively support the system - not unlike the way the majority of people here either openly defend or implicitly support, by inaction, police brutality and the murder of unarmed citizens by police.
It’s not hard to understand the tough predicament faced by the frequent informants who were positioned inside the tightest of circles. So many of them, often friends with those whom they were informing on, were blackmailed child spies. Do you have any idea how they were treated once their activities became accessible to the public via the open Stasi files?
There is a lot of forgiveness for most of them. Like you say, many of them were recruited while still minors, for one thing. Also, many of them were convinced they were doing it for the "right" reasons: saving their friends, basically. They Stasi was very good at profiling potential informants, and convincing them that in working with the Stasi they were helping their friends avoid jail, for example. And also, as you mentioned, if this method didn't work, they could always do it the other way—“…it would be shame if your parents lost their jobs, or your sibling lost her or his spot at university, etc”. The cases where there is real bitterness are usually when the informant was doing it for money or personal advantage of some kind, or if the info led directly to jail for friends, which happened as well.
You mention in your book that the Stasi files on the individuals you were writing about were mundane compared with the interviews you conducted. How much did you rely on them to fact check and did anything surprise you about their content?
The surprise is just how mundane the info is. Endless accounts of people's ordinary day to day life: left the apartment at 8:15 AM, bought two bread rolls at 8:37 AM, got on the subway at 8:46 AM, and so on. Of course, having access to interrogation transcripts was priceless. And there are some cases where the file just blows your mind. A-Micha, for example, had his file transferred from the division of the Stasi responsible for monitoring political opposition to the division for counter-terrorism. He was deemed a domestic terrorist for his punk activism, all of which was peaceful.
The East German punks split with their former allies, the skinheads, who chose Neo-Nazism and football hooliganism as their prime motive and pastime. Meanwhile, there were those that pretended to be subversive and join a cause just to get arrested and then expatriated as a way to escape. With all the splintering groups and multiple motives, did researching the book give you a better or different understanding of interpreting history?
I would say it offers a warning about accepted narratives, and how counterproductive it can be to cling to a narrative whose value is primarily to reinforce what amounts to its own sort of propaganda. A specific example is the idea that Reagan's tear-down-this-wall speech was important in the East German revolution. This is something that has become an article of faith in the US, despite there being no evidence whatsoever to support it. Eastern activists hated Reagan, and Reagan was viewed as totally impotent at the time as a result of the Iran-Contra scandal. As far as mistakes the dictatorship made in assessing the various threats, perhaps the biggest was insisting that people like the punks were being manipulated by the West. They continued to see the movement as Western-influenced and Western-guided to the end. This was the case despite the fact that their own intelligence showed this not to be so. They too, clung to a narrative that suited their ideology rather than reality.
The Tiananmen Square massacre and rumors of similar oppressive tactics being approved by Soviet leaders was incredibly instrumental in changing the attitudes of ordinary people in 1989. Would you say that it was police brutality, suffered and witnessed by a growing number in the late eighties, that accelerated the GDR’s opening of its borders?
Definitely. Most ordinary people weren't directly confronted with police brutality in their everyday life. When the demonstrations moved into the streets, it was on display for all to see. That was a key, I think - it confirmed any misgivings people may have harbored the legitimacy of the regime.
Your own ties with Berlin are interesting. What brought you there? And what made you stay for as long as you did?
I ended up there more or less by coincidence in 1992, two years after unification, and almost instantly fell in love with the city. I ended up working as a DJ in the nightlife scene that was just starting to explode, and that's where I first met former East German punks. A lot of them founded or worked in the first generation of bars and clubs. Ever since then, I'd dreamed of somehow telling this story, even though back then I didn't know I would end of being a writer.
Having befriended the GDR punks so soon after the fall of the Eastern Bloc and later documenting their interconnecting stories, did you toy with the idea of first person journalism?
It's funny - a lot of potential publishers asked the same question. I guess between "New Journalism" and the popularity of memoirs, first person is the default way to tell a story these days. But as I told publishers, there was no f**ing way I was going to include myself as a character alongside people who went to Stasi prison for their activism! I just wanted to be a conduit for their story, not try to pretend to be part of it.
Occasionally you use italics to express the first person thoughts of your main protagonists. Are they quotes from your interviews or a device to bring the reader further in?
In interviews I would often ask what people had been thinking at the time of a given incident. I’d ask – “What went through your mind when the police broke down the door?”, for example. In writing the book, I just wanted to be a conduit of sorts for the people in the scene. Originally I had in mind an oral history format, like Please Kill Me - the obvious template. But because there is so much context necessary to understand the situation on the ground in a different society, I realized that wasn't practical. In the end, I tried to write the book in a cinematic narrative style meant to evoke the speed and excitement of punk music, and I used a number of mechanisms to do that, including the one you mention.
Burning Down the Haus points out that as the East German punk scene grew, cassette tapes of Western punk were replaced by the GDR’s own punk bands, their own sound. And, contrary to Western ignorance, many of the East German dissidents wanted Socialism but without the dictatorship. They; were anti-West and anti-capitalist. After the Berlin Wall fell, how did this train of thought adapt to a unified Germany?
That will probably be one of the biggest surprises for many readers— that the activists who fought the dictatorship weren't pro-Western. We are taught that the Wall fell because of some combination of Reagan's speech and the fact that kids wanted hamburgers and Levis, as if Western-style consumption was a driving revolutionary principle. Like you said, it was almost the opposite. They were critics from the left, and the hope was to maintain an independent, idealistic East Germany. But the people who fought and sacrificed to bring down the dictatorship lost control of the political situation pretty quickly after the regime fell. They were forced instead to create islands that reflected their ideology. These were the squats and early nightlife and cultural venues. In that way, they definitely had a long-term influence on the ethos of 21st century Berlin, an influence you can still see and feel today.
Burning Down the Haus was published by Algonquin Books in 2018 and will be released in paperback on September 3rd, 2019.
Hardback price: $28.95
Visit the Workman Press website to purchase a book.
All Photos Courtesy of Tim Mohr
About the Author:
K. Krombie is a writer, reviewer and incidental performer living in Astoria, NY.
