September 24, 2020 • 49 mins
East Berlin, 1983. A teenage punk rocker finds himself in a Stasi interrogation cell. The choice is simple: inform on his friends, or go to prison. Hari travels to Berlin to meet the punks and spies whose cat and mouse game in the last years of the GDR predicted the privacy wars of today.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The place is East Berlin, the year nineteen eighty three.
We're in an interrogation room in the offices of the
(00:35):
Ministry of State Security known as the Stasi. There's a
filing cabinet, a dirty neck curtain at the window, a
view outside of gray concrete blocks. In the middle of
the room. There's a cheap wood veneered desk. On it
as a phone, an intercombox with an array of cool buttons,
(00:57):
and a big old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder.
Behind the desk is the interrogator. He wears a uniform,
a gray military jacket, a shirt and tar a peak
cat placed carefully on the desk beside him. He's a
committed communist who's sworn an oath to defend the German
(01:17):
Democratic Republic the GDR, commonly known to the rest of
the world as East Germany. The interrogator has the authority
to do more or less whatever he wants, and he
doesn't have to worry about privacy. He can have people followed,
listen to their phone calls, break into their apartments, arrest them.
Usually his interested in dissidence. Political types who meet to
(01:41):
talk about democracy or the environment will make plans to
escape to the West, but today he has a different
kind of problem on his hands. Sitting at the end
of the desk in front of the microphone is a
(02:01):
skinny teenage boy. He has bleached spiky hair, a dog
collar and an old suit jacket with an A for
anarchy spray painted on the back. The kid is something
completely new, something never before seen in the GDR. He's
a pump. Everyone calls him Pancau after the North Berlin
(02:25):
neighborhood where he comes from. And he's the lead singer
of a band, East Germany's very first punk band. They're
called plan Loos, which you could translate as aimless, having
no plan. By most standards, they're barely a band at all,
but to the Starzi they're a threat to the very
(02:46):
foundations of the state. This is Into the Zone, a
podcast about opposites and how borders are never as clear
(03:09):
as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru. This episode is about
government power and individual liberty. It's about how you look
in public and what you think in private, and what
it was like to live in a country that wanted
to abolish privacy altogether. And it's about one of the
(03:31):
most powerful binary oppositions in modern history, the Cold War
in Flabbentro, in ostarch Land, Belan Gibson, Punk and plant
(03:54):
Fu and the Bent. That's what Pankou sounds like. Now.
His real name is Michael, but everyone still calls him
by his old nickname, and he still lives in the
neighborhood of Pankau. He's telling me about the Stasi, how
they thought in a very top down way. The word
he uses as patriarchal the stars. He reasoned like this,
(04:14):
Berlin is the center of East Germany. In Berlin there's
one punk band, plan Loss. Therefore, they are the leading
band and the singer as its head. If we can
get him, then we can neutralize the threat of punks.
In that interrogation room in nineteen eighty three, the Stasi
officer has one goal. He wants to turn Pancao into
(04:37):
an informer for the state. The officer thinks if he
can get this one kid to work for him, then
he'll be able to control the whole punk movement. The
officer will be a hero. They'll probably give him a medal.
I grew up during the Cold War. If he went
around at that time, it's hard to imagine the degree
(04:58):
to which the Cold War organized everything, the whole world
into one big us versus them. You knew you were
on one side. On the other, there was a sort
of mirror world, totally different, and of course the two
worlds had nuclear weapons pointed at each other. It was madness.
(05:23):
One summer when I was fifteen, I went on an
exchange program, staying with the family in West Germany. One
day we went to the border somewhere out in the
country to look at the barbed wire fence and the watchtowers.
It was a weird feeling. We'd read George Orwell's nineteen
eighty four in school, and I imagined on the other
(05:44):
side of the wire as a gray world where everyone
had to be exactly alike but all the same. I
was curious. If I'd been a bit older, I would
have wanted to cross over to see for myself, because
it truly was a different world for the unlucky inhabitants
of the eastern half of Germany. The horrors of the
(06:06):
Nazi period were followed by the Soviet patient, then the
regime of the GDR. The GDR was governed ontotalitarian lines.
The Communist Party controlled everything including where you worked or
went to school, how you spent your leisure time. Berlin
was central to the identity of both East and West Germany.
(06:29):
Though the city lay deep in East German territory, it
had been divided just after the war. The city was
split in two. West Berlin was connected to Western Europe
only by a long walled off highway. West Berlin was
an outpost, like a probe stuck into the side of
the Eastern bloc. In nineteen sixty one, the East German
(06:54):
government built what it called the anti Fascistictis Schutzva, the
Anti Fascist Protection Wall, to separate West and East Berlin.
The government said the war was to keep its citizens
safe from the fascists in the West, but everyone knew
really to keep them from leaving. The East. German communist
leaders had lived almost unimaginably hard and terrifying lives. They'd
(07:17):
lived through stylinist purges, the Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps.
Their reality was paranoid and violent, and they were determined
that their enemies would never get the jump on them,
so they set up a sprawling domestic intelligence service dedicated
to watching the citizens for the slightest sign of descent
(07:38):
the stars. He had informers everywhere. An informer could be
your colleague at work, one of your roommates, even someone
in your family. Add to the informers another two point
two million party members who had a duty to report
whether other citizens were following orders, and you had one
of the most pervasive spying machines ever to exist on
planet Earth. But right in the middle of the GDR
(08:03):
was an island, a place the spying machine couldn't control,
a hotbed of dissident culture and radical ideas. West Berlin.
My name is Mark Reader. I'm a music producer and
over the record label Cole masterminded for success known as MFS,
(08:25):
and now I've lived in Berlin for false and Wild.
In nineteen seventy eight, Mark Reader was living in the
North of England in Manchester, dreaming of making it in
the music business. He worked in a record store and
he'd fallen in love with the sound of West German
(08:45):
bands who were experimenting with futuristic new sounds, bands like
Can the Cosmic, Joker's Noise, craft Work and Tangerine Dream.
Mark was so obsessed with this music that he decided
to visit the place where it came from. When he
came to Berlin. What was he able to describe it?
(09:06):
Just what it looked, what it looked like. It was
different from from the city that you knew, the fact
that it was bullet riddled and gray, and rows of
houses where obviously bombs had fallen and kind of destroyed
the houses, and so he had a lot of gaps
in the buildings and stuff. It was like Manchester was
a bit kind of like a bit decrepit, falling apart,
(09:28):
but Berlin was the same, but bullet riddled. But first,
let's put the picture straight. This film tells the time
when we had all the discovers, girls still had their
pubic hair, and boys wore perms and makeup. Mark loved
Berlin so much that he never went home. He's lived
(09:48):
there for more than forty years now. A few years
ago he made a documentary about the city's music scene
in the eighties. It's called b movie Lust and Sound
in Berlin. If you want to feel jealous of someone
else's misspent youth, it's well worth watching. It was a
time when you could smoke him pubs and on TV.
(10:09):
One had a record player and the wartman. There were
Scottied Houses, no Hood Band, the Red Armorfraction, packed telephone boxes,
Polar rode nod Dishwashers, Super eight film, anti gay laws,
the Deutsch Mark, the German Democratic Republic, the Wall and
(10:31):
West Berlin. Mark knew everybody. He hung out with the
pioneers of industrial music, the band Einstead Send any Bouton.
Mark shared a squat with Nick Cave, the young Gothic
eminence behind the Birthday Party. He stayed up late, made movies,
(10:52):
played music and became part of the Berlin underground. But
you became a sort of connection between the Manchester scene
and Berlin. And from what I understand, you bought joy
Division univered to Berlin. Yea a convinced to come to
Berlin before transit of Annan came from from Manchester and
drove all the way down to put all the way
(11:15):
down to Berlin. Really, you know, you know, Berlin had
a different attitude to what we had in Manchester. You know,
Manchester we are you're in a punk band or you're
in a band any for any reason. It was just
just to get away. You know, if you if you
made it, you'd be able to escape miserable Manchester. Berlin
was very different. Everyone had already escaped here. It was
(11:36):
like the place where if you were a male of
a certain age, you would obliged to go to the military.
But if you lived in Berlin, you didn't have to
go to military. So if you were a pacifist, or
you were gay, transvestile, or ever anything weird, you know, artist,
or you'll just didn't want to go the army. You know,
you came to Berlin, you could live here and escape
(11:58):
going to the army. Because of all the countercultural refugees,
the West Berlin punk scene was one of the most
vibrant in the world. But Mark wasn't satisfied with knowing
just the western half of his new city. Like me,
he'd grown up wondering what lay on the other side
of the Iron curtain. Now he had a chance to
(12:21):
find out. It was a completely different world on the
other side of the building wall. Can you describe the
experience of crossing over, Yeah, it was scary, you know,
it was. It was scary. It was it was like
because you didn't know what to expect on the other side.
It was a completely different kind of regime and everything,
you know, like everything that we'd taken for granted here
(12:42):
in the West didn't exist in the East. Incense, you know.
It was like I didn't know what was letting myself
in full to be honest, you know, I just started
just go and see what it was like and where
did you find there? I thought it was it was
like stepping back in time. It was like a time machine.
On his first trip, Mark just walked around, but he
(13:03):
kept going back. For most of his West Berlin friends,
it was an administrative hassle to get a visa across
the border. They had to apply days or weeks in advance.
But strangely enough, with Mark's British passport, he could come
and go as he pleased. The fascination of that this place,
you know, it's like it was like like no other
(13:24):
place I've been to. It's like I felt there was
a an ambient stare that was like desperate in a sense,
and I got quite addicted to that and this feeling
of like big brothers watching you kind of thing. Despite that,
Mark got talking to other young people and soon he
(13:44):
had friends in East Berlin. He began to smuggle in
cassettes of the music his friends were listening to and
making in the West I'd record all the records that
I bought and record all every you know, every omni
record collection as much as possible. Even later on, you know,
I didn't want them just to listen to punk rock,
ordered them to listen to all the kinds of music
(14:05):
as well. So I'd record, like, you know, underground disco music.
And it wasn't just about punk rock, It's about everything.
And how much did young people in East Berlin know
about what was going on on your side of the wall. Well,
the only information they really got was from TV or radio,
most of them not unless they had relatives who came
(14:27):
to visit them. Then his dead relatives that they get
a bit more information. Book. You know, if your anti
Betty comes to visity, you know you're not going to
talk about the punk rock scene Berlin because you won't
know anything about that, you know. For Mark, going to
East Berlin was an adventure like being in a movie.
For his young friends, those tapes were a thread that
(14:47):
connected them to another world. In West Berlin, you could
go and see Joy Division or the birthday party. In
East Berlin, youth culture was a little different. Recently, I
(15:24):
was in Berlin and I met up with my old
friend Anya, a German artist and filmmaker. I first met
her a while back when she lived in London. I
helped out on a film she made called Trail of
the Spider, a spaghetti western about gentrification, with people from
our eastern neighborhood dressed up like lawman and bandits. Anya
(15:47):
also played in a band with some other artist friends.
It was more art rock than punk, but Anya is
not unpunk right now. She's even got kind of a
mohawk haircut. I wanted Anya to come with me to
a place that houses some of the most painful memories
of the GDR, an office building just off Alexander Platz,
the old center of Communist East Berlin. Alex As Berliners
(16:12):
call it as a big open square dominated by the
fans tourm the TV Tower, still the tallest structure in Germany.
It's a space age needle with a shiny ball skewered
through it. It looks like a giant version of a
lamp put for sale in a mid century modern furniture store,
A massive symbol of the communist state's futuristic ambitions. And
(16:33):
we're coming up to the officers of STARSI Archive, and
I have a thin in that there'll be a little
nervous if we record on the way. But I don't know.
Maybe you never the woman after the wall fell the stars.
You did its best to destroy evidence of its crimes
(16:54):
and human rights violations, but it couldn't get rid of everything.
There were millions of documents, tape recordings, piles of shredded paper.
The new reunified German government set up the Starzi Records
Archive to administrate what was left behind. Mind people could
apply to see the files that were kept on them
and in some cases find out who had been spying
(17:15):
on them. We come to see Doug Mahovstadt, who's the
press spokesperson for the archive and knows more than almost
anyone about the Stasie. I wanted to understand more about
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what life in the GDR was like for young punks
like Punkau, what was expected of them. Why would the
government care what music they liked or how they dressed.
There is this idea that socialism leads to a better society,
but socialism requires everybody to believe in this idea in
the way that it was organized, and in this case
(18:00):
we're talking about Eastern European communist states. Very much modeled
after the Soviet idea, the Soviets Revolution of ninety in seventeen.
Who was always afraid that somebody will take away this
path to the better society. So there was from the
very beginning an enemy that would squash the revolution, that
(18:21):
would persecute the idea of a socialist society. And so
you had to be aware all the time of the
enemies who are against you. And it very much is
summed up in this idea that the dissenter is the enemy.
Then yeah, thoughts as must if Yune and again not
(18:44):
on an and deadish land, to Laban, on to Campern.
That's Eric Honecker, the East German leader, addressing a massive
rally of the Free German Youth, the official East German
youth organization. If you wanted to get ahead in East Germany,
(19:06):
it was a good idea to be a member of
the Free German Youth and wear their distinctive blue shirt
with the sunrise emblem on the arm. Conker is saying
that only socialism can give young people a goal and
the future. So these were state organized youth organizations, and
to refuse to become part of them already made you
very suspicious. And you were not part of the mainstream anymore,
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and that would continue. If you wanted to study, certain
wanted to study at all, as a young man, you
would have to sign up for military service. That was
mandatory military service. And as a young woman, if you
wanted to study, for instance, journalism, it was mandatory that
you would eventually join the party, so you would become
a candidate for the party in order to join the
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party in order to study journalism. That's what was on offer.
To be a good East German young person, you would
join the FDJ, go camping and hiking and sing jolly
songs with verses in English and Russian. To show that
you were a true internationalist. You wore the blue uniform
shirt and clapped along because if you didn't, you weren't
going to be able to have a good life. In
(20:10):
East Germany, you had to have a job. It was
illegal not to have one. But if you didn't play
the game, you would just be cleaning toilets or unloading trucks.
There was a real risk to being a rebel. As
for music, East Germany had one record company owned and
operated by the government. To be in a band and
(20:31):
play live, you needed a license. That's right. You couldn't
just go out and play a gig in a local bar.
The cops would break it up and you'd get arrested.
To get a license, you needed two things. You had
to have done your military service, and you had to
pass an audition in front of a panel of judges
from the Musicians Union. And in the middle of this,
(20:56):
imagine your Panco, an angry fifteen year old who pissed
off with your violent dad and needs something, anything, to happen,
otherwise you're going to go mad. Then one day you
hear the Stranglers on a bootleg cassette tape, perhaps copied
from a copy brought over by an English guy called Mark.
(21:19):
You see a picture of the band and you want
to look like them, so you tear some holes in
your t shirt and walk out of your front door
with your hair spiked up with soap. You go to
Alexander Platz, where you find some other kids like you
if you're not doing anything, just hanging around. But the
cops come and you get arrested. They ask some questions
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and tell you to clean yourself up. The next day
you go there again and the same thing happens. The
cops are nervous because this is a tourist spot right
next to the famous TV tower. The government likes foreigners
to see the architectural and technological achievements of socialism. It
doesn't like foreigners to see that East Germany has punks.
(22:02):
So you end up in an interrogation room facing a
guy in a uniform who wants to know if you're
an enemy of the state. This was Pancou's reality as
a teenager. He ran up against the full might of
(22:23):
the GDR. I want to go and talk to him,
but he doesn't speak English and my German isn't good
enough to do an interview. So I asked my artist
friend Anya if she'll come along with me. Clearly still
a little bit impaired, thanks for coming along on this
(22:48):
small adventure. So we're on a tram traveling out of
the center of Berlin Northwoods. We're in a district of
Punka to see somebody who's called Punko. The neighborhood of
Punko is a little way out of the center, and
it turns out neither Ana nor Oliver the producer, have
(23:08):
ever been there before. To me, it looks like a
lot of places on the East side of the city.
We get there early and it's starting to rain, so
we hang around under a bus shelter like board teenage
punks and yeah, and Oliver smoked cigarettes. People like to
smoke in Berlin. Smoking is part of the culture, like
nude sunbathing and techno music. So yeah, this looks like
(23:33):
not the new Berlin. It's an old, old building cover
and graffiti him with a sort of messed up wooden
door and no bell. So I'm going to see if
actually opens. So it does, comment, I'm hurry. Punko turns
out to be a wiry guy in his fifties. He's
(23:55):
dressed in jeans and a hoodie and looks more like
a rock climber than a rock musician. Has the punk
one angist piece Dima n front and then tut as
fast ring Us Normal heros sexpisodevmenton Bollocks on the door,
Plata fun Damdaman, do you have a little They were
(24:21):
in names of the records, and they were passed around,
and he got them from a friend, and then he
copied them to cassette, and he made a hundred eighty
copies of and and and passed them on again to
all his other maids. Punko had never really ventured out
of his neighborhood, but somehow he found his way to
(24:43):
the south of the city to a youth club where
some other punks hung out. I asked him how many
punks there were in East Berlin at this time, about twenty.
He says, for which funny flag John Rotten as the
cutters and polls stuff on his expisode on Johnny Rotten.
Soon enough, Punkou's idol was Johnny Rotten. He had a
poster of him, and he had the tape of never
(25:05):
Mind the Bollocks that he copied from his friend. So
the first time he went to a youth club at
that time, He's son who was really punk already, but
he was a huge fan of Udo Lindenberg. And actually
he dressed like Udo Lindberg at that point and also
had this hair club on this Panic belt. So Udo
Lindenburg is a West German rock star who circa nineteen
(25:27):
eighty had long hair and wore a big metal belt
buckle that's spelled out Panic. On YouTube, you can find
him doing a satirical cover of All Things Chattanooga Chu
Chu called Special Train to Punkau, where he's singing for
whatever reason to a dwarf dressed as an East German
(25:47):
railway conductor about how he wants to go to East
Berlin to sing if only Eric Honeker and the Communist
Party would let him. The whole Udo Lindenburg thing is
kind of weird and very specifically German. For our purposes.
(26:09):
Really need to know is that sixteen year old Punkau
thought he was cool, but he really wasn't. Panco dyed
his hair blonde, which wasn't easy to do in East Berlin,
but he'd met a hairdresser at a gay bar in
Prince Lauerberg who helped him. Punko and his friends used
to hang out at this gay bar because it was
(26:30):
one of the few places where they wouldn't get kicked out.
Some of Punkou's experiences sound pretty typical for teen rebels
anywhere in the world. The neighbors stared at him, his
dad was angry. He got chased by football hooligans who
wanted to beat him up. Since most people in East
Berlin had never seen a punk, people would ask him
(26:51):
questions on the tram, sometimes hostile, sometimes just curious. Then
he did something genuinely dangerous. He joined a band. He
joined a band at best already existed that they didn't
have a singer, and they were called if like the Wall.
(27:17):
But at the time they got together, that name in
itself already seemed too provocative, and so they've found a
new name, and they called the Plan Laws. As I mentioned,
plan Laws means aimless, with no direction. Life in the
GDR was preprogrammed. You studied, got a job, you retired.
(27:41):
There's a famous English punk slogan spat out by Johnny
Rotten on the song God Save the Queen. There's no future,
he snarls in England's Dreaming no future. For East German punks,
it was the opposite. They had too much future. Everything
was planned for them. Punkous bandmates, friends from the little
(28:10):
gang of punks that hung around in Alexander. Platz Kaiser
played bass, Cobbs, the guitarist, was a pretty good musician,
but the drummer Ladder couldn't really keep time and wanted
to be the front man. It didn't really matter. It
wasn't about getting famous or even being good musicians. Punko
(28:32):
and his friends wanted the unexpected. They wanted to get
to a place where they knew nothing when nothing was
fixed they wanted, as he puts it, alf Nuligan to
start again from zero plus. Rehearsed in a coal cellar
with mattresses against the walls for soundproofing. They didn't even
(28:55):
have proper equipment. They had to plug everything into one amplifier,
so the drums drowned out everything else. Of course, punk
I was banned. Didn't have a license to perform. Even
rehearsing was risky. The varatrich Pezzi Amacrimino Buddish or not,
(29:17):
it was criminal, he says bluntly. Without a license, you
could be put in prison. Writing lyrics was particularly dangerous.
Keeping anything on paper meant the possibility that it could
be read by the Stasi as it cut. He was
afraid from the beginning, I mean even to the point
of being paranoid. And he used to um like, write
(29:40):
the songs, then immediately memorize them, and then he would
burn the paper that you've written them on. And actually
you would even be to paranoid to just hear it aptly.
He literally burned it so it would be gone. The
bandmates had to trust each other. Despite the risks. Plan
Lows did perform live. Their gigs were usually very small,
(30:03):
twenty to thirty people in sellers or abandoned buildings. They
managed to get hold of a tape recorder and recorded
their songs at one of their rehearsals. But Punk says
he's heard other recordings, live recordings that they themselves didn't make.
He doesn't know who would have been able to record
(30:24):
a plant low skig. He thinks it was most likely
the stars. I'm waiting in line at the Curry Worst
(30:44):
stand sings Punk lyrics written by the guitarist Cobbs. Curry
Worst is one of the iconic snack foods of Berlin,
slices of sausage slathered in a very mild spicy ketchup.
Calling it curry is Klein of overstating the case. But whatever,
Punker's in line for a snack, I don't turn around,
(31:05):
he sings, I've already seen you, you and my shadow
wherever I go, a dark spot on the sun. He's singing,
(31:33):
of course, about his starsy tail. Sometimes they'd follow him
without doing anything. Sometimes they just shove him in the
(31:55):
back of a car and take him in for interrogation.
And so here we are with the teenage Punk and
the secret policeman, staring at each other across the table.
Punko's interrogator belongs to a unit called Abtailongs Spansish Department twenty,
(32:17):
whose special remit is political dissent. Punko has begun to
realize the Stasi are desperate for information. They've been completely
blindsided by punk. For more than ten years. In East Germany,
there have been what they call blusers, long haired kids
who listen to rock music and go hitchhiking, hitchhiking being
one of the many things that is illegal in this country.
(32:40):
But punk is different. They're not just hippies. They seem
to be rejecting every kind of authority. Who or what
is behind them? Could it be Western intelligence agencies? Are
Plan Loos and the twenty East Berlin punks all working
for the CIA. Other punks wouldn't necessarily talk, or they
would have no interest to have a conversation with the
(33:02):
guy from the Stasi. But the person from the Stasi
that was always having the conversations with him or the interrogassion,
he would literally tell his superiors here is someone that
actually really wants to engage and also I think ultimately
we can win him over to work for us as
an informal midda bser. The phrase is actually in a
(33:26):
fitzil mita bitter unofficial co worker. This is the Starsi's
name for informers on the street, they're called spitzland or snitches.
When they wanted you to work with them, what did
they suggest? Did they offer you money or is it
did they threaten you? How did they try and persuade
you to become an em with stuntn urban vige married
(33:50):
to target. He would be arrested every two days probably,
But for him as nobody and then later on as
a singer of or yeah it's a singer of plans
was first of all he felt sort of somehow affirmed
by it. They were taking him serious, they felt threatened
(34:13):
by him, and for him, the conversations that he had
with them were also a kind of um, they were
schooling him in some way and do as uh becauz.
That's so, that's just that's only had this priligios. This
is where it gets really strange. The police would just
(34:33):
come and break heads. They just wanted the punks off
the street and they didn't care how it happened. But
the Stasi were more like Sun, you're going down the
wrong path. And inadvertently they were giving this scrappy kid
a political education. Intervu mandufound Spider tired as okay, so
(35:02):
like at first he just he felt more like an
agitator in that situation. I mean, he knew he had
to be careful um what to say, because you knew
that he could go to prison if he said anything
against the States. So it was Ko that that was
the fine line. But at the same time he found
that he was sort of somehow also in the process
of convincing this Stazzi guy. He may have been fun
(35:24):
for a while, but the stakes were getting higher. Finally
they asked him outright whether he was willing to become
an informer. He refused. After that it was clear that
the Stasi were going to find a way to get
him sooner or later, and they did. It all happened
because of a T shirt. Punko's girlfriend, he went by
(35:47):
the nickname Nasa or Knows, made him a shirt with
a political quote on it, when injustice becomes law resistance
as a duty. That's essentially a massive subtweet of the
East German government. And in case it wasn't provocative enough,
the T shirt also had the logo of the terrorist
group the Red Army Faction. Not only did Punkout go
(36:08):
out wearing this shirt, he wore it to a big
meeting where foreign journalists were present, and he got up
on a chair and gave a speech. He was immediately
pulled down and arrested. He faced almost three years in prison.
That was when the Stars He turned up the heat.
(36:32):
I've done Rutlan done Clars. They got his girlfriend to
come in and they said, your boyfriend's going into prison
for three years if you don't work with us. So
then she agreed to work with them. Um and it
was quite clear to her that she would not give
them any information, but that she was trying to save
(36:56):
him from going to prison for three years. This was
a dangerous game, but it worked. Thinking they'd recruited NASA
the Stars he let Pancar go. Clark and his girlfriend
didn't want to give the STARSI any real information. As
soon as they got back to their friends, they told
them about the deal they'd made. Punkou trusted his girlfriend,
(37:21):
but the other members of Plan Los weren't so sure
she'd agreed to work for the Starzi. The members of
Plan Los had good reason to be paranoid. The Stasi
weren't just watching people and raiding apartments. They were also
trying to undermine the punks psychologically, trying to get into
(37:43):
their heads. Information gathering on them is just not enough.
You want to destroy what they start forming. So the Stasi,
especially in the seventies and eighties, came up with the
methodology they called tazetun demolition of personality. This is Doug
Mahoverstadt again at the STARSI Archives. So all the information
(38:07):
you gather on a very individual, sometimes intimate level, about
a person, you would use to debase their sense of
self and their security and of themselves. And so this
says that song strategy meant that you would start spreading
rumors about a person coincidentally, or rather not coincidentally. One
(38:28):
of a more effective rumor was to say that that
person was an informant for the Stasi. In more extreme cases,
the Starzi used to raid the apartments of a person
and they did little psychological things. They would change around
the towel that you were certain to have put to
the right side of the think, and when you came
(38:49):
home it was on the left side of the sink,
and you would just think, what happened here? And you would.
You know, it's so minimal, it's just banal little thing,
but they start messing with your sense of self, your
sense of security, who you are the Stasi. We're using
a zette song strategy on the punk scene and it worked.
Everyone was paranoid. Thebers of Planlow stopped trusting each other. Finally,
(39:12):
Punko's friends gave him an ultimatum, drop his girlfriend or
leave the band. Punkar told them to go fuck themselves.
Though the stars he never managed to turn punkal, they
got their way. In the end, the first these Berlin
punk band was dead. I got interested in the Starzi
(39:51):
in twenty sixteen when I took my family to live
in Berlin for six months. I've been offered a fellowship
at the American Academy, an institution out in the far
western suburb of Vanze. I was going to spend my
time researching and writing the book that eventually became read Pill.
There are all sorts of practical issues when you moved
(40:12):
to another country. My wife, Katie is also a writer.
Our son was two. When she was pregnant with our daughter,
we needed to find a preschool somewhere close to where
we'd be living. I went online to look, hopeful that
i'd find something in walking distance. I found a couple
of possible places, and I went on street View to
look at them. To my surprise, they were blurred out.
(40:37):
German law requires Google to blur out street view images
if people request it. Germany has some of the strongest
privacy laws in the world. Germans don't like sharing their
personal information. They don't like being tracked online. Doug Mahoverstad
of the Stasi Archives says this is the legacy both
of Communism and the Nazis the idea that a citizen
(41:00):
is sort of corrupted through the state, and that the
balance between the individual and the state between who I
am as a citizen and what the state does, my
government does to me and how we interact is much
more fraught from the history, and so there's a larger
sensitivity of how we balance ideas of security and privacy
(41:21):
of the individual and the state, and how we come
to a compromise between our respective spheres. We tend to
think if privacy is the right not to be watched
or overheard, and also the ability to keep control of
our personal information. But it's more than that. Privacy is
the space where we can experiment the space where we
(41:42):
work out how to be ourselves before we have to
step out into the social world. Emily Dickinson called it
a finite infinity, and it's true. There's something sublime about it,
something that makes it very disturbing to us when it's violated.
Sooner or later. In any conversation about privacy, someone will say,
why do you care? If you've got nothing to hide,
(42:04):
why should we care. The philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton,
who thought about privacy very deeply, wrote this, In actual fact,
society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude
of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be
made up not of numbers or mechanical units, but of persons.
(42:28):
To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both
these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity,
a sense of one's own reality, and of one's ability
to give himself to society or to refuse that gift.
He's saying that without privacy, without the ability to make
(42:52):
basic decisions for yourself, society couldn't exist unless you have
freedom to act and can take responsibility for your actions.
You're not human in society. You're just a function, a
cog in a totalitarian machine. Perhaps that's why so many
(43:12):
Germans ask for their homes to be blurred out on
Google street View. Right now, with eavesdropping home devices and
a tracker in every phone, privacy is under threat like
never before. We have an unfocused paranoia about corporations and
the government, but we're never sure who exactly is listening
to us, whether they're really paying attention, or what their
(43:35):
agenda might be. That wasn't true during the Cold War.
The citizens of East Germany knew who was watching the
Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. But I also think
that once you grew up in a system like that
and you befriend yourself with the father, the state that
I live in shoots me if I travel west, and
(43:57):
if I speak my mind completely, I might run into trouble. Okay,
so I better. I just better give them what they want,
and so I can be left in peace, and I
just do my thing, and I have a normal life
and celebrate my birthday and my Christmases and my little career.
Everything's fine, But you have voluntarily limited the space you're
(44:18):
entitled to. And I think that's a long lasting effect.
After the Stars he broke up Plan Loos. Pankou didn't
join another band. Reluctantly, he went off to do his
military service. When he returned to Berlin eighteen months later,
(44:39):
his friends had scattered, Some were in prison or the army,
some had gone to the West. He felt out of
place again. The East German government said tonight they were
going to make more openings in the wall, at least
a dozen more put bulldozers right through the wall so
that more people could cross to the west. When the
(45:00):
wall came down in nineteen eighty nine, Pankoo had mixed feelings.
He was excited to see the East German regime falling,
but he was also worried about the prospect of joining
the capitalist West. I wanted to know if he was
still worried, if he was concerned about all the ways
which we can now be or feel watched. I thought,
(45:24):
all predominoscence, why perspective another extremely shreatened. I mean, I
think he says he thinks it's frightening, but at the
same time it's something that he knows very well. So
in that sense, he never had a moment where he
had any kind of illusions about that it would be different.
Can someone who spent his youth being watched by the
(45:46):
most paranoid secret police force in history tell me what
to do about today's pervasive surveillance. I'm expecting Punkau to
condemn it, to say that we need to fight governments
and tech companies instead, he says to me. Sure, you
can spend a lot of time focusing on the idea
that you're being surveiled, figuring out exactly how much, but
(46:11):
that always puts you into a sort of negative frame
of mind. You feel hopeless. He lived for years knowing
he was being watched night and day. Now, he says,
it's important to make a clear choice. Do you stay
inside your fear or do you push through? Do you
put fear in its place and start making decisions for yourself?
(46:41):
And this is the thing I go away with as
I ride the tram back to the center of Berlin,
that you don't wait to act until you feel you're
free to do so. It's the action that you take
in spite of your fear that counts. That's what it
means to be punk. Turns out, Johnny Rotten was wrong
(47:11):
for punk musicians like Pancau and surveillors like the STARSI
there would be a future, specifically in Hanover, where another
German is about to engineer how the future our present
will sound. And as a listener, you also recognize the
conscient between these two things. You recognize that if it
(47:33):
that it's the patterns that you sounds that make it beautiful,
and it's also the fact that the patterns do not
repeat themselves perfectly that make it exquisitely beautiful. Finding the
needle of a signal in a haystack of noise that's
next week on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is
(47:58):
produced by Rider Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is
Julia Barton. Mire La Belle is our executive producer. Martin
Gonzalez is engineer. Music for this episode composed by Izzyokampo,
also known as Student. Our theme song is composed by
Sarah k Peedinatti also known as lip Talk. Thanks to
(48:23):
Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori,
Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick and Maggie Taylor. Special thanks to
our Berlin producers Oliver Martin and Johannes Nikola. And the
very special thanks to Annie Kirschner for all her help
(48:44):
for this episode. To hear what Mark Reader is up
to now, go to www mfs Berlin dot com. An
archive of Punkau's material can be found at substitute dot net.
Into the Zone is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The
(49:07):
best way to do this is by rate tist on
Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review for more
East German punk head to our Into the Zone playlist
on Spotify, and you can find me on Twitter at
Harry Quin's room. See you next time. Pressure. That was
(49:38):
wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was
wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was
wrong with that?
Pushkin. The place is East Berlin, the year nineteen eighty three.
We're in an interrogation room in the offices of the
(00:35):
Ministry of State Security known as the Stasi. There's a
filing cabinet, a dirty neck curtain at the window, a
view outside of gray concrete blocks. In the middle of
the room. There's a cheap wood veneered desk. On it
as a phone, an intercombox with an array of cool buttons,
(00:57):
and a big old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder.
Behind the desk is the interrogator. He wears a uniform,
a gray military jacket, a shirt and tar a peak
cat placed carefully on the desk beside him. He's a
committed communist who's sworn an oath to defend the German
(01:17):
Democratic Republic the GDR, commonly known to the rest of
the world as East Germany. The interrogator has the authority
to do more or less whatever he wants, and he
doesn't have to worry about privacy. He can have people followed,
listen to their phone calls, break into their apartments, arrest them.
Usually his interested in dissidence. Political types who meet to
(01:41):
talk about democracy or the environment will make plans to
escape to the West, but today he has a different
kind of problem on his hands. Sitting at the end
of the desk in front of the microphone is a
(02:01):
skinny teenage boy. He has bleached spiky hair, a dog
collar and an old suit jacket with an A for
anarchy spray painted on the back. The kid is something
completely new, something never before seen in the GDR. He's
a pump. Everyone calls him Pancau after the North Berlin
(02:25):
neighborhood where he comes from. And he's the lead singer
of a band, East Germany's very first punk band. They're
called plan Loos, which you could translate as aimless, having
no plan. By most standards, they're barely a band at all,
but to the Starzi they're a threat to the very
(02:46):
foundations of the state. This is Into the Zone, a
podcast about opposites and how borders are never as clear
(03:09):
as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru. This episode is about
government power and individual liberty. It's about how you look
in public and what you think in private, and what
it was like to live in a country that wanted
to abolish privacy altogether. And it's about one of the
(03:31):
most powerful binary oppositions in modern history, the Cold War
in Flabbentro, in ostarch Land, Belan Gibson, Punk and plant
(03:54):
Fu and the Bent. That's what Pankou sounds like. Now.
His real name is Michael, but everyone still calls him
by his old nickname, and he still lives in the
neighborhood of Pankau. He's telling me about the Stasi, how
they thought in a very top down way. The word
he uses as patriarchal the stars. He reasoned like this,
(04:14):
Berlin is the center of East Germany. In Berlin there's
one punk band, plan Loss. Therefore, they are the leading
band and the singer as its head. If we can
get him, then we can neutralize the threat of punks.
In that interrogation room in nineteen eighty three, the Stasi
officer has one goal. He wants to turn Pancao into
(04:37):
an informer for the state. The officer thinks if he
can get this one kid to work for him, then
he'll be able to control the whole punk movement. The
officer will be a hero. They'll probably give him a medal.
I grew up during the Cold War. If he went
around at that time, it's hard to imagine the degree
(04:58):
to which the Cold War organized everything, the whole world
into one big us versus them. You knew you were
on one side. On the other, there was a sort
of mirror world, totally different, and of course the two
worlds had nuclear weapons pointed at each other. It was madness.
(05:23):
One summer when I was fifteen, I went on an
exchange program, staying with the family in West Germany. One
day we went to the border somewhere out in the
country to look at the barbed wire fence and the watchtowers.
It was a weird feeling. We'd read George Orwell's nineteen
eighty four in school, and I imagined on the other
(05:44):
side of the wire as a gray world where everyone
had to be exactly alike but all the same. I
was curious. If I'd been a bit older, I would
have wanted to cross over to see for myself, because
it truly was a different world for the unlucky inhabitants
of the eastern half of Germany. The horrors of the
(06:06):
Nazi period were followed by the Soviet patient, then the
regime of the GDR. The GDR was governed ontotalitarian lines.
The Communist Party controlled everything including where you worked or
went to school, how you spent your leisure time. Berlin
was central to the identity of both East and West Germany.
(06:29):
Though the city lay deep in East German territory, it
had been divided just after the war. The city was
split in two. West Berlin was connected to Western Europe
only by a long walled off highway. West Berlin was
an outpost, like a probe stuck into the side of
the Eastern bloc. In nineteen sixty one, the East German
(06:54):
government built what it called the anti Fascistictis Schutzva, the
Anti Fascist Protection Wall, to separate West and East Berlin.
The government said the war was to keep its citizens
safe from the fascists in the West, but everyone knew
really to keep them from leaving. The East. German communist
leaders had lived almost unimaginably hard and terrifying lives. They'd
(07:17):
lived through stylinist purges, the Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps.
Their reality was paranoid and violent, and they were determined
that their enemies would never get the jump on them,
so they set up a sprawling domestic intelligence service dedicated
to watching the citizens for the slightest sign of descent
(07:38):
the stars. He had informers everywhere. An informer could be
your colleague at work, one of your roommates, even someone
in your family. Add to the informers another two point
two million party members who had a duty to report
whether other citizens were following orders, and you had one
of the most pervasive spying machines ever to exist on
planet Earth. But right in the middle of the GDR
(08:03):
was an island, a place the spying machine couldn't control,
a hotbed of dissident culture and radical ideas. West Berlin.
My name is Mark Reader. I'm a music producer and
over the record label Cole masterminded for success known as MFS,
(08:25):
and now I've lived in Berlin for false and Wild.
In nineteen seventy eight, Mark Reader was living in the
North of England in Manchester, dreaming of making it in
the music business. He worked in a record store and
he'd fallen in love with the sound of West German
(08:45):
bands who were experimenting with futuristic new sounds, bands like
Can the Cosmic, Joker's Noise, craft Work and Tangerine Dream.
Mark was so obsessed with this music that he decided
to visit the place where it came from. When he
came to Berlin. What was he able to describe it?
(09:06):
Just what it looked, what it looked like. It was
different from from the city that you knew, the fact
that it was bullet riddled and gray, and rows of
houses where obviously bombs had fallen and kind of destroyed
the houses, and so he had a lot of gaps
in the buildings and stuff. It was like Manchester was
a bit kind of like a bit decrepit, falling apart,
(09:28):
but Berlin was the same, but bullet riddled. But first,
let's put the picture straight. This film tells the time
when we had all the discovers, girls still had their
pubic hair, and boys wore perms and makeup. Mark loved
Berlin so much that he never went home. He's lived
(09:48):
there for more than forty years now. A few years
ago he made a documentary about the city's music scene
in the eighties. It's called b movie Lust and Sound
in Berlin. If you want to feel jealous of someone
else's misspent youth, it's well worth watching. It was a
time when you could smoke him pubs and on TV.
(10:09):
One had a record player and the wartman. There were
Scottied Houses, no Hood Band, the Red Armorfraction, packed telephone boxes,
Polar rode nod Dishwashers, Super eight film, anti gay laws,
the Deutsch Mark, the German Democratic Republic, the Wall and
(10:31):
West Berlin. Mark knew everybody. He hung out with the
pioneers of industrial music, the band Einstead Send any Bouton.
Mark shared a squat with Nick Cave, the young Gothic
eminence behind the Birthday Party. He stayed up late, made movies,
(10:52):
played music and became part of the Berlin underground. But
you became a sort of connection between the Manchester scene
and Berlin. And from what I understand, you bought joy
Division univered to Berlin. Yea a convinced to come to
Berlin before transit of Annan came from from Manchester and
drove all the way down to put all the way
(11:15):
down to Berlin. Really, you know, you know, Berlin had
a different attitude to what we had in Manchester. You know,
Manchester we are you're in a punk band or you're
in a band any for any reason. It was just
just to get away. You know, if you if you
made it, you'd be able to escape miserable Manchester. Berlin
was very different. Everyone had already escaped here. It was
(11:36):
like the place where if you were a male of
a certain age, you would obliged to go to the military.
But if you lived in Berlin, you didn't have to
go to military. So if you were a pacifist, or
you were gay, transvestile, or ever anything weird, you know, artist,
or you'll just didn't want to go the army. You know,
you came to Berlin, you could live here and escape
(11:58):
going to the army. Because of all the countercultural refugees,
the West Berlin punk scene was one of the most
vibrant in the world. But Mark wasn't satisfied with knowing
just the western half of his new city. Like me,
he'd grown up wondering what lay on the other side
of the Iron curtain. Now he had a chance to
(12:21):
find out. It was a completely different world on the
other side of the building wall. Can you describe the
experience of crossing over, Yeah, it was scary, you know,
it was. It was scary. It was it was like
because you didn't know what to expect on the other side.
It was a completely different kind of regime and everything,
you know, like everything that we'd taken for granted here
(12:42):
in the West didn't exist in the East. Incense, you know.
It was like I didn't know what was letting myself
in full to be honest, you know, I just started
just go and see what it was like and where
did you find there? I thought it was it was
like stepping back in time. It was like a time machine.
On his first trip, Mark just walked around, but he
(13:03):
kept going back. For most of his West Berlin friends,
it was an administrative hassle to get a visa across
the border. They had to apply days or weeks in advance.
But strangely enough, with Mark's British passport, he could come
and go as he pleased. The fascination of that this place,
you know, it's like it was like like no other
(13:24):
place I've been to. It's like I felt there was
a an ambient stare that was like desperate in a sense,
and I got quite addicted to that and this feeling
of like big brothers watching you kind of thing. Despite that,
Mark got talking to other young people and soon he
(13:44):
had friends in East Berlin. He began to smuggle in
cassettes of the music his friends were listening to and
making in the West I'd record all the records that
I bought and record all every you know, every omni
record collection as much as possible. Even later on, you know,
I didn't want them just to listen to punk rock,
ordered them to listen to all the kinds of music
(14:05):
as well. So I'd record, like, you know, underground disco music.
And it wasn't just about punk rock, It's about everything.
And how much did young people in East Berlin know
about what was going on on your side of the wall. Well,
the only information they really got was from TV or radio,
most of them not unless they had relatives who came
(14:27):
to visit them. Then his dead relatives that they get
a bit more information. Book. You know, if your anti
Betty comes to visity, you know you're not going to
talk about the punk rock scene Berlin because you won't
know anything about that, you know. For Mark, going to
East Berlin was an adventure like being in a movie.
For his young friends, those tapes were a thread that
(14:47):
connected them to another world. In West Berlin, you could
go and see Joy Division or the birthday party. In
East Berlin, youth culture was a little different. Recently, I
(15:24):
was in Berlin and I met up with my old
friend Anya, a German artist and filmmaker. I first met
her a while back when she lived in London. I
helped out on a film she made called Trail of
the Spider, a spaghetti western about gentrification, with people from
our eastern neighborhood dressed up like lawman and bandits. Anya
(15:47):
also played in a band with some other artist friends.
It was more art rock than punk, but Anya is
not unpunk right now. She's even got kind of a
mohawk haircut. I wanted Anya to come with me to
a place that houses some of the most painful memories
of the GDR, an office building just off Alexander Platz,
the old center of Communist East Berlin. Alex As Berliners
(16:12):
call it as a big open square dominated by the
fans tourm the TV Tower, still the tallest structure in Germany.
It's a space age needle with a shiny ball skewered
through it. It looks like a giant version of a
lamp put for sale in a mid century modern furniture store,
A massive symbol of the communist state's futuristic ambitions. And
(16:33):
we're coming up to the officers of STARSI Archive, and
I have a thin in that there'll be a little
nervous if we record on the way. But I don't know.
Maybe you never the woman after the wall fell the stars.
You did its best to destroy evidence of its crimes
(16:54):
and human rights violations, but it couldn't get rid of everything.
There were millions of documents, tape recordings, piles of shredded paper.
The new reunified German government set up the Starzi Records
Archive to administrate what was left behind. Mind people could
apply to see the files that were kept on them
and in some cases find out who had been spying
(17:15):
on them. We come to see Doug Mahovstadt, who's the
press spokesperson for the archive and knows more than almost
anyone about the Stasie. I wanted to understand more about
(17:36):
what life in the GDR was like for young punks
like Punkau, what was expected of them. Why would the
government care what music they liked or how they dressed.
There is this idea that socialism leads to a better society,
but socialism requires everybody to believe in this idea in
the way that it was organized, and in this case
(18:00):
we're talking about Eastern European communist states. Very much modeled
after the Soviet idea, the Soviets Revolution of ninety in seventeen.
Who was always afraid that somebody will take away this
path to the better society. So there was from the
very beginning an enemy that would squash the revolution, that
(18:21):
would persecute the idea of a socialist society. And so
you had to be aware all the time of the
enemies who are against you. And it very much is
summed up in this idea that the dissenter is the enemy.
Then yeah, thoughts as must if Yune and again not
(18:44):
on an and deadish land, to Laban, on to Campern.
That's Eric Honecker, the East German leader, addressing a massive
rally of the Free German Youth, the official East German
youth organization. If you wanted to get ahead in East Germany,
(19:06):
it was a good idea to be a member of
the Free German Youth and wear their distinctive blue shirt
with the sunrise emblem on the arm. Conker is saying
that only socialism can give young people a goal and
the future. So these were state organized youth organizations, and
to refuse to become part of them already made you
very suspicious. And you were not part of the mainstream anymore,
(19:28):
and that would continue. If you wanted to study, certain
wanted to study at all, as a young man, you
would have to sign up for military service. That was
mandatory military service. And as a young woman, if you
wanted to study, for instance, journalism, it was mandatory that
you would eventually join the party, so you would become
a candidate for the party in order to join the
(19:49):
party in order to study journalism. That's what was on offer.
To be a good East German young person, you would
join the FDJ, go camping and hiking and sing jolly
songs with verses in English and Russian. To show that
you were a true internationalist. You wore the blue uniform
shirt and clapped along because if you didn't, you weren't
going to be able to have a good life. In
(20:10):
East Germany, you had to have a job. It was
illegal not to have one. But if you didn't play
the game, you would just be cleaning toilets or unloading trucks.
There was a real risk to being a rebel. As
for music, East Germany had one record company owned and
operated by the government. To be in a band and
(20:31):
play live, you needed a license. That's right. You couldn't
just go out and play a gig in a local bar.
The cops would break it up and you'd get arrested.
To get a license, you needed two things. You had
to have done your military service, and you had to
pass an audition in front of a panel of judges
from the Musicians Union. And in the middle of this,
(20:56):
imagine your Panco, an angry fifteen year old who pissed
off with your violent dad and needs something, anything, to happen,
otherwise you're going to go mad. Then one day you
hear the Stranglers on a bootleg cassette tape, perhaps copied
from a copy brought over by an English guy called Mark.
(21:19):
You see a picture of the band and you want
to look like them, so you tear some holes in
your t shirt and walk out of your front door
with your hair spiked up with soap. You go to
Alexander Platz, where you find some other kids like you
if you're not doing anything, just hanging around. But the
cops come and you get arrested. They ask some questions
(21:40):
and tell you to clean yourself up. The next day
you go there again and the same thing happens. The
cops are nervous because this is a tourist spot right
next to the famous TV tower. The government likes foreigners
to see the architectural and technological achievements of socialism. It
doesn't like foreigners to see that East Germany has punks.
(22:02):
So you end up in an interrogation room facing a
guy in a uniform who wants to know if you're
an enemy of the state. This was Pancou's reality as
a teenager. He ran up against the full might of
(22:23):
the GDR. I want to go and talk to him,
but he doesn't speak English and my German isn't good
enough to do an interview. So I asked my artist
friend Anya if she'll come along with me. Clearly still
a little bit impaired, thanks for coming along on this
(22:48):
small adventure. So we're on a tram traveling out of
the center of Berlin Northwoods. We're in a district of
Punka to see somebody who's called Punko. The neighborhood of
Punko is a little way out of the center, and
it turns out neither Ana nor Oliver the producer, have
(23:08):
ever been there before. To me, it looks like a
lot of places on the East side of the city.
We get there early and it's starting to rain, so
we hang around under a bus shelter like board teenage
punks and yeah, and Oliver smoked cigarettes. People like to
smoke in Berlin. Smoking is part of the culture, like
nude sunbathing and techno music. So yeah, this looks like
(23:33):
not the new Berlin. It's an old, old building cover
and graffiti him with a sort of messed up wooden
door and no bell. So I'm going to see if
actually opens. So it does, comment, I'm hurry. Punko turns
out to be a wiry guy in his fifties. He's
(23:55):
dressed in jeans and a hoodie and looks more like
a rock climber than a rock musician. Has the punk
one angist piece Dima n front and then tut as
fast ring Us Normal heros sexpisodevmenton Bollocks on the door,
Plata fun Damdaman, do you have a little They were
(24:21):
in names of the records, and they were passed around,
and he got them from a friend, and then he
copied them to cassette, and he made a hundred eighty
copies of and and and passed them on again to
all his other maids. Punko had never really ventured out
of his neighborhood, but somehow he found his way to
(24:43):
the south of the city to a youth club where
some other punks hung out. I asked him how many
punks there were in East Berlin at this time, about twenty.
He says, for which funny flag John Rotten as the
cutters and polls stuff on his expisode on Johnny Rotten.
Soon enough, Punkou's idol was Johnny Rotten. He had a
poster of him, and he had the tape of never
(25:05):
Mind the Bollocks that he copied from his friend. So
the first time he went to a youth club at
that time, He's son who was really punk already, but
he was a huge fan of Udo Lindenberg. And actually
he dressed like Udo Lindberg at that point and also
had this hair club on this Panic belt. So Udo
Lindenburg is a West German rock star who circa nineteen
(25:27):
eighty had long hair and wore a big metal belt
buckle that's spelled out Panic. On YouTube, you can find
him doing a satirical cover of All Things Chattanooga Chu
Chu called Special Train to Punkau, where he's singing for
whatever reason to a dwarf dressed as an East German
(25:47):
railway conductor about how he wants to go to East
Berlin to sing if only Eric Honeker and the Communist
Party would let him. The whole Udo Lindenburg thing is
kind of weird and very specifically German. For our purposes.
(26:09):
Really need to know is that sixteen year old Punkau
thought he was cool, but he really wasn't. Panco dyed
his hair blonde, which wasn't easy to do in East Berlin,
but he'd met a hairdresser at a gay bar in
Prince Lauerberg who helped him. Punko and his friends used
to hang out at this gay bar because it was
(26:30):
one of the few places where they wouldn't get kicked out.
Some of Punkou's experiences sound pretty typical for teen rebels
anywhere in the world. The neighbors stared at him, his
dad was angry. He got chased by football hooligans who
wanted to beat him up. Since most people in East
Berlin had never seen a punk, people would ask him
(26:51):
questions on the tram, sometimes hostile, sometimes just curious. Then
he did something genuinely dangerous. He joined a band. He
joined a band at best already existed that they didn't
have a singer, and they were called if like the Wall.
(27:17):
But at the time they got together, that name in
itself already seemed too provocative, and so they've found a
new name, and they called the Plan Laws. As I mentioned,
plan Laws means aimless, with no direction. Life in the
GDR was preprogrammed. You studied, got a job, you retired.
(27:41):
There's a famous English punk slogan spat out by Johnny
Rotten on the song God Save the Queen. There's no future,
he snarls in England's Dreaming no future. For East German punks,
it was the opposite. They had too much future. Everything
was planned for them. Punkous bandmates, friends from the little
(28:10):
gang of punks that hung around in Alexander. Platz Kaiser
played bass, Cobbs, the guitarist, was a pretty good musician,
but the drummer Ladder couldn't really keep time and wanted
to be the front man. It didn't really matter. It
wasn't about getting famous or even being good musicians. Punko
(28:32):
and his friends wanted the unexpected. They wanted to get
to a place where they knew nothing when nothing was
fixed they wanted, as he puts it, alf Nuligan to
start again from zero plus. Rehearsed in a coal cellar
with mattresses against the walls for soundproofing. They didn't even
(28:55):
have proper equipment. They had to plug everything into one amplifier,
so the drums drowned out everything else. Of course, punk
I was banned. Didn't have a license to perform. Even
rehearsing was risky. The varatrich Pezzi Amacrimino Buddish or not,
(29:17):
it was criminal, he says bluntly. Without a license, you
could be put in prison. Writing lyrics was particularly dangerous.
Keeping anything on paper meant the possibility that it could
be read by the Stasi as it cut. He was
afraid from the beginning, I mean even to the point
of being paranoid. And he used to um like, write
(29:40):
the songs, then immediately memorize them, and then he would
burn the paper that you've written them on. And actually
you would even be to paranoid to just hear it aptly.
He literally burned it so it would be gone. The
bandmates had to trust each other. Despite the risks. Plan
Lows did perform live. Their gigs were usually very small,
(30:03):
twenty to thirty people in sellers or abandoned buildings. They
managed to get hold of a tape recorder and recorded
their songs at one of their rehearsals. But Punk says
he's heard other recordings, live recordings that they themselves didn't make.
He doesn't know who would have been able to record
(30:24):
a plant low skig. He thinks it was most likely
the stars. I'm waiting in line at the Curry Worst
(30:44):
stand sings Punk lyrics written by the guitarist Cobbs. Curry
Worst is one of the iconic snack foods of Berlin,
slices of sausage slathered in a very mild spicy ketchup.
Calling it curry is Klein of overstating the case. But whatever,
Punker's in line for a snack, I don't turn around,
(31:05):
he sings, I've already seen you, you and my shadow
wherever I go, a dark spot on the sun. He's singing,
(31:33):
of course, about his starsy tail. Sometimes they'd follow him
without doing anything. Sometimes they just shove him in the
(31:55):
back of a car and take him in for interrogation.
And so here we are with the teenage Punk and
the secret policeman, staring at each other across the table.
Punko's interrogator belongs to a unit called Abtailongs Spansish Department twenty,
(32:17):
whose special remit is political dissent. Punko has begun to
realize the Stasi are desperate for information. They've been completely
blindsided by punk. For more than ten years. In East Germany,
there have been what they call blusers, long haired kids
who listen to rock music and go hitchhiking, hitchhiking being
one of the many things that is illegal in this country.
(32:40):
But punk is different. They're not just hippies. They seem
to be rejecting every kind of authority. Who or what
is behind them? Could it be Western intelligence agencies? Are
Plan Loos and the twenty East Berlin punks all working
for the CIA. Other punks wouldn't necessarily talk, or they
would have no interest to have a conversation with the
(33:02):
guy from the Stasi. But the person from the Stasi
that was always having the conversations with him or the interrogassion,
he would literally tell his superiors here is someone that
actually really wants to engage and also I think ultimately
we can win him over to work for us as
an informal midda bser. The phrase is actually in a
(33:26):
fitzil mita bitter unofficial co worker. This is the Starsi's
name for informers on the street, they're called spitzland or snitches.
When they wanted you to work with them, what did
they suggest? Did they offer you money or is it
did they threaten you? How did they try and persuade
you to become an em with stuntn urban vige married
(33:50):
to target. He would be arrested every two days probably,
But for him as nobody and then later on as
a singer of or yeah it's a singer of plans
was first of all he felt sort of somehow affirmed
by it. They were taking him serious, they felt threatened
(34:13):
by him, and for him, the conversations that he had
with them were also a kind of um, they were
schooling him in some way and do as uh becauz.
That's so, that's just that's only had this priligios. This
is where it gets really strange. The police would just
(34:33):
come and break heads. They just wanted the punks off
the street and they didn't care how it happened. But
the Stasi were more like Sun, you're going down the
wrong path. And inadvertently they were giving this scrappy kid
a political education. Intervu mandufound Spider tired as okay, so
(35:02):
like at first he just he felt more like an
agitator in that situation. I mean, he knew he had
to be careful um what to say, because you knew
that he could go to prison if he said anything
against the States. So it was Ko that that was
the fine line. But at the same time he found
that he was sort of somehow also in the process
of convincing this Stazzi guy. He may have been fun
(35:24):
for a while, but the stakes were getting higher. Finally
they asked him outright whether he was willing to become
an informer. He refused. After that it was clear that
the Stasi were going to find a way to get
him sooner or later, and they did. It all happened
because of a T shirt. Punko's girlfriend, he went by
(35:47):
the nickname Nasa or Knows, made him a shirt with
a political quote on it, when injustice becomes law resistance
as a duty. That's essentially a massive subtweet of the
East German government. And in case it wasn't provocative enough,
the T shirt also had the logo of the terrorist
group the Red Army Faction. Not only did Punkout go
(36:08):
out wearing this shirt, he wore it to a big
meeting where foreign journalists were present, and he got up
on a chair and gave a speech. He was immediately
pulled down and arrested. He faced almost three years in prison.
That was when the Stars He turned up the heat.
(36:32):
I've done Rutlan done Clars. They got his girlfriend to
come in and they said, your boyfriend's going into prison
for three years if you don't work with us. So
then she agreed to work with them. Um and it
was quite clear to her that she would not give
them any information, but that she was trying to save
(36:56):
him from going to prison for three years. This was
a dangerous game, but it worked. Thinking they'd recruited NASA
the Stars he let Pancar go. Clark and his girlfriend
didn't want to give the STARSI any real information. As
soon as they got back to their friends, they told
them about the deal they'd made. Punkou trusted his girlfriend,
(37:21):
but the other members of Plan Los weren't so sure
she'd agreed to work for the Starzi. The members of
Plan Los had good reason to be paranoid. The Stasi
weren't just watching people and raiding apartments. They were also
trying to undermine the punks psychologically, trying to get into
(37:43):
their heads. Information gathering on them is just not enough.
You want to destroy what they start forming. So the Stasi,
especially in the seventies and eighties, came up with the
methodology they called tazetun demolition of personality. This is Doug
Mahoverstadt again at the STARSI Archives. So all the information
(38:07):
you gather on a very individual, sometimes intimate level, about
a person, you would use to debase their sense of
self and their security and of themselves. And so this
says that song strategy meant that you would start spreading
rumors about a person coincidentally, or rather not coincidentally. One
(38:28):
of a more effective rumor was to say that that
person was an informant for the Stasi. In more extreme cases,
the Starzi used to raid the apartments of a person
and they did little psychological things. They would change around
the towel that you were certain to have put to
the right side of the think, and when you came
(38:49):
home it was on the left side of the sink,
and you would just think, what happened here? And you would.
You know, it's so minimal, it's just banal little thing,
but they start messing with your sense of self, your
sense of security, who you are the Stasi. We're using
a zette song strategy on the punk scene and it worked.
Everyone was paranoid. Thebers of Planlow stopped trusting each other. Finally,
(39:12):
Punko's friends gave him an ultimatum, drop his girlfriend or
leave the band. Punkar told them to go fuck themselves.
Though the stars he never managed to turn punkal, they
got their way. In the end, the first these Berlin
punk band was dead. I got interested in the Starzi
(39:51):
in twenty sixteen when I took my family to live
in Berlin for six months. I've been offered a fellowship
at the American Academy, an institution out in the far
western suburb of Vanze. I was going to spend my
time researching and writing the book that eventually became read Pill.
There are all sorts of practical issues when you moved
(40:12):
to another country. My wife, Katie is also a writer.
Our son was two. When she was pregnant with our daughter,
we needed to find a preschool somewhere close to where
we'd be living. I went online to look, hopeful that
i'd find something in walking distance. I found a couple
of possible places, and I went on street View to
look at them. To my surprise, they were blurred out.
(40:37):
German law requires Google to blur out street view images
if people request it. Germany has some of the strongest
privacy laws in the world. Germans don't like sharing their
personal information. They don't like being tracked online. Doug Mahoverstad
of the Stasi Archives says this is the legacy both
of Communism and the Nazis the idea that a citizen
(41:00):
is sort of corrupted through the state, and that the
balance between the individual and the state between who I
am as a citizen and what the state does, my
government does to me and how we interact is much
more fraught from the history, and so there's a larger
sensitivity of how we balance ideas of security and privacy
(41:21):
of the individual and the state, and how we come
to a compromise between our respective spheres. We tend to
think if privacy is the right not to be watched
or overheard, and also the ability to keep control of
our personal information. But it's more than that. Privacy is
the space where we can experiment the space where we
(41:42):
work out how to be ourselves before we have to
step out into the social world. Emily Dickinson called it
a finite infinity, and it's true. There's something sublime about it,
something that makes it very disturbing to us when it's violated.
Sooner or later. In any conversation about privacy, someone will say,
why do you care? If you've got nothing to hide,
(42:04):
why should we care. The philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton,
who thought about privacy very deeply, wrote this, In actual fact,
society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude
of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be
made up not of numbers or mechanical units, but of persons.
(42:28):
To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both
these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity,
a sense of one's own reality, and of one's ability
to give himself to society or to refuse that gift.
He's saying that without privacy, without the ability to make
(42:52):
basic decisions for yourself, society couldn't exist unless you have
freedom to act and can take responsibility for your actions.
You're not human in society. You're just a function, a
cog in a totalitarian machine. Perhaps that's why so many
(43:12):
Germans ask for their homes to be blurred out on
Google street View. Right now, with eavesdropping home devices and
a tracker in every phone, privacy is under threat like
never before. We have an unfocused paranoia about corporations and
the government, but we're never sure who exactly is listening
to us, whether they're really paying attention, or what their
(43:35):
agenda might be. That wasn't true during the Cold War.
The citizens of East Germany knew who was watching the
Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. But I also think
that once you grew up in a system like that
and you befriend yourself with the father, the state that
I live in shoots me if I travel west, and
(43:57):
if I speak my mind completely, I might run into trouble. Okay,
so I better. I just better give them what they want,
and so I can be left in peace, and I
just do my thing, and I have a normal life
and celebrate my birthday and my Christmases and my little career.
Everything's fine, But you have voluntarily limited the space you're
(44:18):
entitled to. And I think that's a long lasting effect.
After the Stars he broke up Plan Loos. Pankou didn't
join another band. Reluctantly, he went off to do his
military service. When he returned to Berlin eighteen months later,
(44:39):
his friends had scattered, Some were in prison or the army,
some had gone to the West. He felt out of
place again. The East German government said tonight they were
going to make more openings in the wall, at least
a dozen more put bulldozers right through the wall so
that more people could cross to the west. When the
(45:00):
wall came down in nineteen eighty nine, Pankoo had mixed feelings.
He was excited to see the East German regime falling,
but he was also worried about the prospect of joining
the capitalist West. I wanted to know if he was
still worried, if he was concerned about all the ways
which we can now be or feel watched. I thought,
(45:24):
all predominoscence, why perspective another extremely shreatened. I mean, I
think he says he thinks it's frightening, but at the
same time it's something that he knows very well. So
in that sense, he never had a moment where he
had any kind of illusions about that it would be different.
Can someone who spent his youth being watched by the
(45:46):
most paranoid secret police force in history tell me what
to do about today's pervasive surveillance. I'm expecting Punkau to
condemn it, to say that we need to fight governments
and tech companies instead, he says to me. Sure, you
can spend a lot of time focusing on the idea
that you're being surveiled, figuring out exactly how much, but
(46:11):
that always puts you into a sort of negative frame
of mind. You feel hopeless. He lived for years knowing
he was being watched night and day. Now, he says,
it's important to make a clear choice. Do you stay
inside your fear or do you push through? Do you
put fear in its place and start making decisions for yourself?
(46:41):
And this is the thing I go away with as
I ride the tram back to the center of Berlin,
that you don't wait to act until you feel you're
free to do so. It's the action that you take
in spite of your fear that counts. That's what it
means to be punk. Turns out, Johnny Rotten was wrong
(47:11):
for punk musicians like Pancau and surveillors like the STARSI
there would be a future, specifically in Hanover, where another
German is about to engineer how the future our present
will sound. And as a listener, you also recognize the
conscient between these two things. You recognize that if it
(47:33):
that it's the patterns that you sounds that make it beautiful,
and it's also the fact that the patterns do not
repeat themselves perfectly that make it exquisitely beautiful. Finding the
needle of a signal in a haystack of noise that's
next week on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is
(47:58):
produced by Rider Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is
Julia Barton. Mire La Belle is our executive producer. Martin
Gonzalez is engineer. Music for this episode composed by Izzyokampo,
also known as Student. Our theme song is composed by
Sarah k Peedinatti also known as lip Talk. Thanks to
(48:23):
Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori,
Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick and Maggie Taylor. Special thanks to
our Berlin producers Oliver Martin and Johannes Nikola. And the
very special thanks to Annie Kirschner for all her help
(48:44):
for this episode. To hear what Mark Reader is up
to now, go to www mfs Berlin dot com. An
archive of Punkau's material can be found at substitute dot net.
Into the Zone is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The
(49:07):
best way to do this is by rate tist on
Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review for more
East German punk head to our Into the Zone playlist
on Spotify, and you can find me on Twitter at
Harry Quin's room. See you next time. Pressure. That was
(49:38):
wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was
wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was
wrong with that?
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