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