Kommi-punks; punk rock behind the iron curtain in East Germany

Whole Earth Review, May, 1985 by Tom Starr, Norbert Haase, Harald Hauswald

It's just a short walk to the Wall. You near the checkpoint's tiny walkway and massive concrete barriers. Passport and visa get a preliminary checking.

Your passport disappears. A stoneface border Polizei in a wishiy-washy gray/green uniform has shoved it through a slot to another room.

"Did you enjoy your stay here with us?" the guard asks.

Wishing you could just fall asleep in your shoes, you open your bags. This time you don't have to empty the contents of your pockets out onto that table.

Your passport returns for a third, final, close look-in-the-face. As the guard hands you passport back, a curt "danke schon" means you're free to leave.

Reentering the subway at West Berlin's Kochstrasse Station, red-and-white Marlboro posters welcome you to a more familiar world. Just an hour earlier, it had been a night of heavy east-west talk/talk with the German Democratic Republic's subculture at the far end of the (divided) subway line, and on foot through the bars and blustery winter streets of East Berlin.

Our friend Christoph spends every other afternoon tearing tickets in an East Berlin movie theater. For this he gets the East German minimum monthly wage -- 250 Marks, less than one hundred bucks.

Martina earns even a bit more than Christoph, working part-time as a kindergarten teacher at a semi-private day-care center in what once was a vegetable shop.

They live in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg -- the Prenzlau Hill District. Christoph and Martina's place is just one of x-thousand similar flats, built to house Berlin's turn-of-the-century proletarian masses.

It's definitely no frills, with a small coal stove in one room and a gallon-and-a-half calcium-caked electric water heater in the kitchen. The stairwell may have been painted sometime before the First World War. Out the door and down and half-flight of stairs will get you to the toilet, shared with the occupants of two similar nests.

"I know it's not much," commented Christoph, "but neither is the rent -- 15 Marks a month!"

Fifteen East German Marks is either $1.80 or $5.40 U.S., depending on where and how you change your money. Some of the area's residents pay nothing at all, squatting in flats somehow forgotten by the Central Housing Authority.

These Prenzlauer Berg tenements have become the property of the very young -- and those too old to move out. The East German middle class has left for the pre-fab "Neubauten" -- new buildings -- in neighboring districts.

Their flat has neither a TV nor a phone. Two bicycles parked in the courtyard are their primary means of transportation. "We don't tend to travel very far," explained Martina. "Most of our friends live nearby."

Our introduction to the virtues of voluntary simplicty in the socialist state was interrupted by a knock. Harry and Heino had arrived.

Heino is not the type of person you'd expect to meet behind the Iron Curtain. He wears a lopsided grin, a small golden earring in his pierced left ear, and his short blond hair brushed up. Heino is a twenty-year-old punk.

Heino gets by doing odd jobs, pulling weeds in the cemetery or carrying coal. He's begun investing his spare change in black-market Levis.

Friends say Heino ought to watch his step. He could get classified "asozial" -- anti-social -- and land in jail. In East Germany, the state guarantees you a job -- and not working is a crime.

"Asozial Elemente" may be banished to the provinces, forbidden even to visit Berlin. You can get a "PM-12," a kind of second-class I.D. card restricting travel to the territorial limits of the German Democratic Republic. If convinced of "blatant disrespect for state order," you may go to jail. Many have.

East Germans, it seems, are in love with West German broadcasting. It's no crime to tune in and everybody does. Prenzlauer Berg residents have access to three West German, two East German, American, French, British, and Russian television programs. The latest sounds from London or L.A. are available on stereo FM. The East German stations do their socialist best to keep the pace, but run a poor second. Just 30-odd miles from the Polish border, the East German subculture looks and listens West, a fact even communist party boss Eric Honnecker can't escape:

"Deep in your heart, Eric, dear I know that you, too, are a rocker. You don your leather jacket Lock the door to the 'Klo' and tune in West Radio!"

--German rock star Ido Lindenberg

The six of us hopped streetcar #4 as it rolled down dimitrovstrasse. Harry warned us that our destination might be full of "Spiesser" -- average middle-class citizens. We swung off the trolley and pushed into a backstreet dive near Prennzlauer Allee. It was a cacophonous din, a middle-European low-life rereun of the barroom in Star Wars.

Dressed in nondescript zip-front turtlenecks and beige polyester slacks complemented by those ubiquitous Eastern Bloc brown shoes, the native Berliner boys-at-the-bar appeared to be more in need of a shave than another beer. Slicked-back, thin greasy hair seemed to be high fashion here -- parted low on the side, then combed up-and-over to cover the bald spots.