Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall

By Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen

After the fall of the Wall, Berlin is full of disused spaces and abandoned buildings, just waiting to be filled with new life. It is unclear who owns any of this, which allows the techno scene to take over these new empty spaces in both halves of the city. Clubs, galleries, ateliers and studios spring up – only to disappear again a few weeks later. Soon Berlin has become the epicentre of a new culture, attracting enthusiastic followers from all over the world to clubs like the Tresor and the E-Werk. Wearing gasmasks and welding goggles they dance the night away to the jackhammer sound of previously obscure Detroit DJs. Among them are writers, artists, photographers, designers, DJs, club-owners, music producers, bouncers and scenesters, people from the centre of the movement and from its peripheries – in Der Klang der Familie they all get to have their say and paint a vibrant picture of a time when it felt like everything was possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Nov 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9783738663273

Felix Denk

Born in Munich in 1975, Felix Denk set off for Berlin in the mid '90s, lured by the promise of hidden clubs and secret parties. Since completing his studies at Humboldt University and the University of the Arts, he's been working as a journalist and author.

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PREFACE

It was basically pure coincidence. This new, raw, stark machine music appeared – and then the Wall came down. In East Berlin, the administration collapsed; the former GDR capital became a temporary autonomous zone. Suddenly, there were all these spaces to discover: a panzer chamber in the dusty no man’s land of the former death strip, a World War II bunker, a decommissioned soap factory on the Spree, a transformer station opposite the erstwhile Reich Ministry of Aviation. And suddenly, people were dancing at all these sites rejected by recent history, to a music virtually reinvented from week to week.

Put simply, techno originated in Detroit in the mid ’80s. But the new electronic sounds didn’t find a home in the crisis-ridden Motor City. No club scene developed around the music, which became an export by necessity. Detroit musicians found their largest following in Berlin, of all places, and a symbiotic relationship developed between the two desolate cities. Aside from the efforts and enthusiasm of a few music freaks, this, too, was for the most part a matter of chance.

At the time, Berlin couldn’t look back on a long history of electronic music – unlike, say, Frankfurt, where a professional network of clubs, producers and labels had been operating since the ’80s. Even the word techno was already being used there. West Berlin, by contrast, was a rock city, albeit an experimental one. Bands like the Einstürzende Neubauten and movements like the Geniale Dilletanten¹ meant there was a fairly broad understanding of what the word music could mean. And in clubs like Metropol, a small DJ culture was already emerging, born from the days of disco.

In East Berlin, of course, everything was different. Youth culture was something clandestine, even dangerous. The first generation of punks was vigorously persecuted. Young people were accustomed to seeking out niches. One of them was breakdancing, which began to shape GDR subculture far earlier than in West Germany, a fact which explains the East’s special enthusiasm for electronic sounds.

Techno became the soundtrack of reunification-era Berlin for three main reasons: the pure kinetic energy of the new sounds, the magic of the places it was played and the promise of freedom it contained. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone could program his own world: DJ, produce, start magazines, print t-shirts. Techno was a music that called for participation, a sound of flat hierarchies. Not for nothing was it referred to in the early days as a music with no need for stars. There didn’t seem to be any room for them. The human disappeared in the tracks; the artist subject dissolved in the circuitry of the drum machine, the binary codes of the sampler and the ever-changing project names of the producers. At the beginning, even the DJ was part of the party, not its focus or star. The star was the party itself and with it, all the abandoned, decaying venues transformed into dance floors, sometimes for a night, sometimes long enough that people from around the world could come dance on them.

Few music genres have brought together such a disparate mix of people with a shared feeling of joy. At the early techno parties, breakdancers from Alexanderplatz, football² hooligans, former East German punks and radio junkies encountered a West Berlin conglomerate of Schöneberg gays, Kreuzberg squatters, students, artists, English soldiers on furlough and American expats in Berlin for the cheap rents. For a while, it seemed as though differences no longer mattered, nor where you came from or what you were wearing. So long as you participated. Everything was focused on the music and the new togetherness on and alongside the dance floor. The exuberant, contradictory community that converged there every weekend really saw itself as a family – in the early years, at least.

This book tells the story of that impromptu family, from its subcultural beginnings to the moment techno stormed the charts and the very rules and market mechanisms that seemed not to apply at the beginning found their way into the scene. Of course, chart hits like Marusha’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow weren’t the swansong of techno. Quite to the contrary, the music has continued even today, in ever new forms, to conquer the last corners of pop culture and shape like no other the image of Berlin. But they did herald the end of the anarchic beginning. From a subculture grew a culture.

We weren’t there back then. Der Klang der Familie³ consists of about 150 interviews conducted mostly in 2011.⁴ We would like to thank all the interviewees for meeting us with so much trust and taking so much time to share their memories. We hope we can give something back with this book.

Thanks also to those interviewees who unfortunately didn’t find their due place in the book, particularly Moritz von Oswald, Kay Itting, Sandra Molzahn and Frank Schütte. We would especially like to thank Carola Stoiber, Arne Grahm, Stefan Schvanke, Mijk van Dijk, Jürgen Laarmann and Dimitri Hegemann for their organizational help and DJs Tanith, Rok, Clé, Jonzon, Terrible, Zappa and Dr. Motte for their playlists. Jürgen Teipel’s Verschwende Deine Jugend served as an important inspiration, and we thank him for lending his counsel and advice. Jan Rikus Hillmann designed so many fabulous covers, we could have turned the book into a series. Thanks finally to Sebastian Leber from the Tagesspiegel, without whom we would never have met our agent Marko Jacob from Landwehr & Cie, who, in turn, introduced us to our editor Thomas Halupczok, who always kept an eye on the essentials when we had long since lost sight of them.

We’d like to thank Jenna Krumminga, who spent the hot Berlin summer of 2014 translating this book from the German, and Viktoria Pelles, who edited the translation. We’d also like to thank Alexander Seeberg-Elverfeldt, who’s responsible for the look and layout of this volume.

Felix Denk Sven von Thülen

Berlin, October 2014

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¹ The ingenious amateurs or dilettante geniuses was a broad underground movement encompassing various musical genres, united primarily by an eagerness to experiment and a contempt for the professionalization of music production. Though the misspelling of dilettantes originated in a mistake, it was kept as a nod to the ethos that amateurs, unlike professionals, embrace their mistakes and consciously incorporate them into their work.

² The sport known in America as soccer will be referred to as football throughout this book in deference to the explicitly European context and the specific cultural resonance of the word within that context, particularly when combined with hooligan.

³ In English, The Sound of the Family, title of a 1992 track by 3Phase and Dr. Motte.

⁴ The interviews with Mike Banks and Ron Murphy were conducted for De:Bug magazine back in 2007, and the interview with Blake Baxter was part of a 2011 feature on Detroit for Groove magazine.

PART ONE

The ’80s

The soundtrack of feeling misunderstood

KATI SCHWIND When I first moved to West Berlin in 1981, I only lived in squats. That was totally normal in Kreuzberg. Back then, entire housing blocks were being occupied.

CLÉ When you got off the subway back then, it was really spooky. You were standing in the middle of sooty, deserted urban canyons. The smell of coal stoves was everywhere.

DER WÜRFLER You had the feeling the war wasn’t over yet.

KATI SCHWIND Everything in West Berlin was subsidized from top to bottom. Until the late ’70s, there was even some welcome money for anyone who moved there because the city had so many old people. This all-around care clearly rubbed off on the residents. The cost of living was low, and worry about how to scrape together next month’s rent was minimal. As a result, you had quite a lot of time to creatively live out your quirks and eccentricities.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN Back then, I was studying music at the Free University [of Berlin], heading out for field research at night. There wasn’t much. Risiko was a special place; I met Nick Cave and Birthday Party there. I wasn’t at Dschungel so often, they usually didn’t let me in. In 1982, I organized a festival at SO36. It was called Atonal. We wanted to break entrenched listening habits and show something new in image and sound. A ton of bands with great names played: Malaria!, Sprung aus den Wolken, Die tödliche Doris and the Einstürzende Neubauten. When the Neubauten took the stage, they immediately started to drill through the back wall. Sparks flew, and the guy who ran SO36 and was selling beer cans up front started running around like mad. I was sitting backstage and suddenly, a drill came through the wall right next to me. One year later, we had Psychic TV there. Genesis P-Orridge was already sporting a bald head with a braid and arrived like a cult leader with eight people in tow who looked like Hare Krishnas. During the performance, they showed a movie where an anaconda eats a rabbit.

MARK REEDER The Berlin punk scene was refreshingly different, not as commercialized as the one I knew from England, which by 1978, was already rock. I’d worked at a record store in Manchester and was friends with people like Tony Wilson, Daniel Miller and Ian Curtis. Then in Berlin, I was the Factory Records representative. I organized a few gigs for Joy Division and got to know bands like the Neubauten, who played with garbage, and P1/E, an electronic band with Alexander Hacke. Later on, the early house and techno stuff was similarly radical for me.

3PHASE Through punk, you got the idea that making noise yourself is a great thing. Bands like Throbbing Gristle seemed to be using everything from a toaster to a blender to make music. It didn’t matter whether or not you could play an instrument. The important thing was that it sounded interesting and was your own thing.

MARK REEDER The Geniale Dilletanten Festival, for example, was very humorous and creative. You could simply join in. Nobody could play properly, bands were formed for just one night, and people heard something they’d never heard before.

COSMIC BABY I started to listen to the rougher stuff at around 16: Throbbing Gristle, Der Plan, Pyrolator. I experimented a lot, recording radio static, then playing it alongside records or recording it back and forth with two tape recorders. I had a Roland 606 drum machine that I let run for hours, playing sequences on the piano to it. Everyone thought it was boring, of course – it’s always the same, there are no vocals, there are no other instruments – but I was happy. I loved the repetition. It always had something euphoric for me.

JONZON I was the drummer in a band. We were called Zatopek and played punk-funk and somehow also a little NDW [New German Wave]. We all wore winklepickers and loden jackets and even had a record deal with Polydor. I can still remember exactly how we were on tour and someone slipped me a tape recording of Frankie Crocker’s radio program, a DJ from New York. I listened to the tape exhaustively on my Walkman. It had things like D Train and Peech Boys. It was proto-house. The straight machine beat I was hearing fascinated me. I realized you could program things with a drum machine that as a drummer, you can’t even play. The tape was really well mixed, and I tried to analyze it. How many records are playing right now? Where does one track end and the next begin? Which elements belong to which record? When is something added? When is something removed? I had no idea about everything you could do with two turntables.

STEFAN SCHVANKE For me, everything always revolved around music. My first techno moment was Los Ninos Del Parque by Liaisons Dangereuses. Sequences that proceed along a four-four beat. This restlessness that I felt in myself, I also had to feel in the music.

DR. MOTTE Back then, I was addicted to anything new. Barry Graves had a radio program on RIAS2 where he always played mixes from New York. One DJ he played was called Paco. Graves always announced him in a very particular way: And now another Pacooooooosssssssuper mix. He always played his own edits. He re-edited and extended tracks like Walking on Sunshine, so then I tried to tinker together different versions with my two cassette decks. At one point, I could edit with pinpoint accuracy. I made Radio Gag from Radio Gaga, cutting away the a with the stop button. Then I did the rounds of the Kreuzberg bars selling the cassettes.

JONZON Motte was my neighbor on Lübbener Straße in Kreuzberg. Back then, we both made tapes with stupid names like The Gilded Mr. Tape. There was a competition between us – whose tape got more people dancing. I pieced together my tapes using modest means: a record player and a tape recorder. You could use the pause button to cut tracks together; it was almost like edits. You could even create staccato effects like with a sampler.

DR. MOTTE For a while, I lived by selling tapes. I always had some with me. Musically, it was soul, funk, post-punk. I didn’t do anything else on the side. That worked. My apartment cost 120 Deutsche Mark. The Job Center tried to get me a job, but I always refused, using all sorts of strategies.

THOMAS FEHLMANN I was in New York twice in the early ’80s with Palais Schaumburg, and I witnessed the burgeoning electro scene there. Seeing Afrika Bambaataa DJing at the Roxy was a formative experience. I was very interested in club music or disco, as it was called back then. Especially when the experimental and danceable met. I found the contingence between punk and hip-hop exciting. For me and the others in Schaumburg, disco wasn’t a dirty word. We loved Chic and Michael Jackson without qualification.

DER WÜRFLER Through disco, gay nightlife shifted a bit into the mainstream focus for the first time. It was totally unusual, after all, for homos and heteros to party together. I was a dancer in the late ’70s, the heyday of disco. I even performed with Liza Minelli, Diana Ross and Gloria Gaynor at Studio 54. It was around that time I started DJing at clubs like Dschungel, Metropol and Cha. Metropol was supposed to be the Studio 54 of Berlin – there were giant disco balls, something like two meters [80 inches] in diameter, and these balls were beamed with lasers. Back then, it all looked like Star Wars, as though fluorescent tubes were flying through the air. A UFO hung over the dance floor in front, emitting bubbles and glitter.

WESTBAM Metropol was known as a gay spot, but there weren’t only gays there. You can compare it to Early Christianity. There was the Jewish temple in the center, and the Greeks who wanted to be part of it were allowed to walk around outside. At Metropol, the gays were in the corners – really hardcore with leather and chains. The trippy kids from the Berlin suburbs were at the front. Maybe they weren’t sure yet if they were gay. Or maybe they just thought it was all wonderful, like I did the first time I got in at 17, standing there in a Hawaiian shirt among all these men in chains. It smelled of poppers, the new beat dropped, and everyone shouted out loud. The energy, the subculture, the hardcore thing, the menace – it was wicked.

DER WÜRFLER By 1984, the disco era at Metropol was basically over. Instead, there was Hi-NRG, a music that appealed especially to gay

men. It was also the time of New Wave and New Romantic. The club was mixed when it came to sexual orientation. You could wear whatever you wanted, even make-up if you felt like it.

STEFAN SCHVANKE I started going to Metropol at age 14, 15 – it was my surrogate family. At home, there was a lot of fighting; I lived in a youth institution for a bit. Early on, I took care to spend as little time at home as possible. By day, I sat around the Gedächtniskirche⁵. There were always young punks and New Wavers hanging around. At night, I snuck out the window. In West Berlin, nobody ever asked how old I was. At the underground spots, nobody cared.

DISKO Metropol was famous for its fan-fags. They danced swanlike choreographies with dayglo fans and were armed to the eyebrows with poppers. It had a little something of voguing and rave about it.

STEFAN SCHVANKE They wore light blue jeans, tight cut-off tops with their navels sometimes exposed and short hairstyles – these gelled-forward fag horns. They stood in rows of four. Hans, Leo, Tamazs and Lutz were the most prominent. The first three died of AIDS. The leather gays were in the corner, and on the other side of the dance floor, the New Wave kids. That’s where I was standing WESTBAM It was already totally clear to me back then where it was all heading, musically speaking. I wrote it down in Der Neger, an avant-garde journal based in Frankfurt. The text was called What is Record Art? and it was intended as a manifesto. I wrote that the new electronic music would be created by the DJs.

JONZON I was at Dschungel a lot; Juri DJed there. He was already mixing, though the mixes were really short, and individual passages were extended using two copies of the same record.

WESTBAM Back then, there weren’t any records with one perpetual beat, so you took the same record twice and extended the short part with the beat by cutting the spot back and forth. In hip-hop, they did it so they could rap over it. But I did it to create a new minimalist dance style. It was the thing back then that came closest to the later techno culture. An endless repetition of a specific line with an up-tempo beat. Of course, it didn’t run the whole night. These were facets. I Feel Love would play, and then there’d be another one of these mix numbers with the same record twice. It wasn’t techno yet, of course, but the rudiments were there. There were moments where you could already hear this idea – all I really need is a beat, a strobe and screaming people.

THOMAS FEHLMANN Westbam played good records, sure. But sometimes, Modern Talking was also played at Metropol.

STEFAN SCHVANKE After the Hi-NRG era, I liked EBM musically, but it was more like concert music. People just did this three-steps-to-thefront, three-steps-to-the-back dance. In the dance context, EBM was totally occupied by this scene. Unlike in Hi-NRG, there was no freaking out on the dance floor, no excess. Still, I often hitchhiked to concerts in West Germany.

MARK REEDER Berlin began to stagnate in 1985. There was no longer anything fiery. The freshness was gone, the spontaneity. I was frustrated. More and more people slipped into a kind of drug swamp. The booze flowed in torrents. Clubs like Ex ‘n’ Pop and Cri du Chat played mostly stuff like Birthday Party, Sisters Of Mercy and The Cult. Dark rock. My musical taste was different. When I said I liked disco in Ex ‘n’ Pop, people looked at me funny. That was a dirty word, after all. The music playing there sounded to me like synthesizer hatred.

KATI SCHWIND In the mid ’80s, I spent a year and a half in the States. I had the shock of my life when I came back to Berlin, totally excited about hip-hop, which was everywhere in the States. All I could think was: what happened? Sisters Of Mercy was the only thing playing in the erstwhile Neubauten orbit. Everything was bleak and depressing.

3PHASE Risiko and Ex ‘n’ Pop were underground spots for leather-jacket punks and avant-garde artists. The whole scene was basically on speed back then. It was rumored that the yellow crystals were smuggled from the GDR to get the Kreuzberg anarchists going. You can almost see Halber Mensch, the Neubauten album that came out at the time, as documentary. There’s one drinking song, and the rest is about the side effects of permanent speed consumption and sleep deprivation.

TANITH When I arrived in Berlin in 1986, the feeling was it’s all over. Punk was long since a pointless hanging-around, a single booze brigade. And the industrial people were whacked out on heroine, listening to Johnny Cash.

STEFAN SCHVANKE The only thing that mattered to them anymore was who had what and how they’d get through the week.

TANITH Everyone was an artist – often never recognized because far too genius. For them, music was less something for dancing and more something for suffering, a soundtrack of feeling misunderstood.

COSMIC BABY At the time, electronic music didn’t seem to be exactly what the city had been waiting for. The zeitgeist was Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld; they were heroes and idols. Unfortunately, I didn’t look like that, nor did they reflect my attitude towards life. I was too thin, not addicted to heroin and didn’t have black hair. In general, I felt too small, too soft, too odd and too uncool for Berlin when I moved there from Nuremberg in 1986.

TANITH Clubs like Dschungel, once at the forefront, became totally arbitrary. They played chart trash meant ironically. The position they’d had in the early ’80s was gone. A strange anti attitude prevailed: actually, I think it sucks, but because you think it sucks too, I think it’s cool.

KATI SCHWIND It got more and more ridiculous. They played terrible funk and bad soul-pop. There was no trace left of the avant-garde. There was a GI disco at Adenauerplatz. I liked to go there because the music was extremely good, and I always loved to dance. It was a little journey to another world.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN There were a lot of suicides in the scene in which I circulated. I was in a serious crisis. We were taking a break from the Atonal festival, and I had no apartment, no nothing. Then a friend got me a room on Lübbener Straße, on the fifth floor. It was freezing, and I always had to haul coal up from the basement. One morning, I saw a storefront with fogged-up windows on Wrangelstraße behind which a woman sat at a heating stove repairing shoes. I went in, and we got to talking. At some point, she told me she was leaving. I could have the store – for 200 Deutsche Mark. I built a lectern with a friend and opened the Fischbüro [Fish Office]. It was a kind of Dada club. On Saturdays, an eccentric intelligentsia met there to discuss crazy things.

KATI SCHWIND The Fischbüro started on Wrangelstraße, then moved to Köpenicker. In the Wrangelstraße days, Dimitri was so completely broke, he slept there on a cot.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN Everything was under the name Mrs. Fisch – phone, mail, rooms, electricity. But Mrs. Fisch was always out of reach. She didn’t exist, of course. In principle, it was supposed to be a reeducation camp: from consumer to producer. I moderated and motivated people to participate. It was fantastic. They took the stage, usually very shy at first, and everyone clapped. Käthe Be, a performance artist, read from his address book. One woman reported on her wardrobe – where the individual pieces came from, how expensive they were and so on. One time, we weighed the Fischbüro. Between the individual speakers, there was always some music, then the applause started up again and so on and so forth until eleven pm. At that point, Continuing Education was over – that’s what we called the event. For us, it was essentially about speaking with one another again, not waiting in line somewhere, paying ten marks to see a blood performance you didn’t understand, then going back home alone. In the Fischbüro, by contrast, we were like kids. Everything was self-made. We were inquisitive, playful and very peaceful, like in an ashram. At some point, we started throwing acid house parties in the basement.

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⁵ Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a famous landmark in West Berlin located on the Breitscheidplatz, a major public square.

Anal riot

WOLLE XDP I met Johnnie around 1983. He always wanted to punch me out because I was a popper, with a quiff and everything.

JOHNNIE STIELER I didn’t really feel like I belonged to this movement. I was punk. We met because of Alexanderplatz. It was so big, there was space for everyone without offending territorial claims. The people who hung around there had no connection to other scenes. They came alone or in pairs. At night, we went to the same clubs. Inevitably, you become closer.

WOLLE XDP I still remember how we were standing at Alex, and I played Buffalo Gals by Malcom McLaren on my boombox, and Johnnie said, How is it that you popper swine are listening to music like that now? At some point, we became friends.

ARNE GRAHM I met Wolle at Alex-Treff. We were both into Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa.

WOLLE XDP The more electronic the music, the better I liked it. I liked rap too, but electro funk much more. Dance beats with the sounds of Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream. For a breaker, that was the best.

ZAPPA Johnnie and I really became friends at the Free German Youth⁶ training camp at Plau am See. I was the camp disco guy, and he gave a sort of breakdance course.

WOLLE XDP Breakdance was a little revolution in the East. It arrived at nearly the same time as it did in the West. Apparently, there were a few people who lobbied Honecker to allow Harry Belafonte’s Beat Street to run in theaters. The movie played a very decisive role. Breakdance was sold as a revolutionary anti-imperialistic culture. The first unofficial GDR breakdance championship was held in the spring of 1984. I placed third.

DJ JAUCHE Beat Street played everywhere in the East. The first time I saw it, I knew immediately that I wanted to be a DJ. I was also a breaker, but never part of a crew. I just danced with a few friends. We would clear away the carpet in the living room at home and bust some moves. I knew Wolle by sight; pretty much all the breakers hung out at Alexanderplatz. You had to show what you were capable of. Compared to the punks, the breakers were usually left alone. We looked like poppers, after all.

WOLLE XDP Breakdance was a way to find your niche in the GDR. We danced at the disco and in the streets. It was a bit of a subculture. It was accompanied by the music I liked. I liked this space-age aesthetic. It was a space-age-futuristic-sci-fi world. For me, the starting point was a report I saw about the airport disco in Frankfurt. How these poppers – the guys with stand-up collars, the girls with popper hair – did a robot dance to Kraftwerk. It looked so great. I started practicing it in front of the mirror. When electro funk came on in the disco, I lead the way, red as a lobster and pretty jittery.

THOMAS ELIAS I was in the Automatic Crew. Wolle was basically our breakdance nemesis. We battled a few times at Alexanderplatz. Wolle was good. He could move so damn strangely – but only his top half because he’s so lanky. I was better on the ground. That, Wolle couldn’t do at all.

DIETA BERLINER When the carpets at home were yet again worn through by moonwalk practice, my mom would tell me off. But we had to practice. Every day. Once, we even had a gig at a National People’s Army gala in the middle of nowhere. We were announced and everything: And now the Automatic Crew from Berlin. Then it got going.

ARNE GRAHM I didn’t really dance. I just imitated and tried to impress girls standing nearby with the suggestion of movement. I was more responsible for ensuring that all the money coming in from breakdancing really got to Wolle and, respectively, to us. We walked around with nunchuks made of broomsticks and were chronically underestimated because of our baby faces.

THOMAS ELIAS You weren’t really allowed to break at Alex. It was not welcome. The police could turn a blind eye, but usually they said something. If you had bad luck, they took your tape recorder. You’d have to pick it up the next day on Keipelstraße, begging and pleading.

ARNE GRAHM When we danced at Alexanderplatz, 100 people would gather in no time at all. We played with the fact that the whole thing was being watched. You could always recognize the Stasi informants and undercover cops by their hairstyles and wrist bags as they stood there totally inconspicuous. It got funny when we simulated violence. We would stage fights with diplomat kids, and the undercovers would come out of their holes like rats and chase after us. When they caught us, our friends would show their red diplomatic IDs and threaten the civil servants with a future regulating traffic. Their bewilderment – expressed in officialese, usually with a strong Saxon accent – sounded something like this: We have a problem here. There are unfortunately no aggrieved parties.

DJ JAUCHE People in the GDR who did breakdance and listened to hiphop weren’t Ost-Pocken.⁷ They weren’t about staying especially loyal to the system. You could dance, and the people around you didn’t know how to react. The police, for example. They didn’t like it, and they monitored it. But what could they do? We were only dancing. Even if they sensed that with our dancing, we were expressing a desire for something different than what was available in the GDR. The diplomat kids provided fresh music. Sometimes they even brought a boombox.

THOMAS ELIAS We were often engaged in Friedrichshain at the SEZ⁸ on Dimitroffstraße, as it was called back then. We got 40 ostmarks⁹ per appearance. One time, we received a tidy 120 marks – the monthly salary of an apprentice – for five minutes of dancing. We even had a manager and travelled throughout the GDR.

DIETA BERLINER Once, we even appeared in an issue of Deine Gesundheit [Your Health]. It was something like Fit for Fun. With a picture. We were wearing these sort of BMX caps, which were airbrushed out.

WOLLE XDP Usually, the performances were booked via the diskotheker.¹⁰ The one I travelled with was named Peter Niedziella, a radio presenter often booked for office parties. People knew him because of his job at Stimme der DDR [Voice of the GDR]. His program, Die Musikalische Luftfracht [Musical Airfreight], was one of the few that played music from the West. Also, he always played songs through to the end so that other DJs could record them. He took us with him a lot. No idea how he dealt with the payment. According to the regulations for artists, we were allowed to get 2.50. We had no classification, after all, no official license to perform. But he just did it somehow. Even at the SEZ, which was a government establishment, I got 40 marks.

ARNE GRAHM Punk always went hand in hand with this popper and breakdance thing. The subcultural scenes were not so separated in the GDR.

SPEZIAL I was punk from the very start. That was more real in the East than the West. It was a normal development to go from punk to skinhead. In the East, a lot of punks were sent to prison or the army. That’s how they tried to break the scene’s core. They came for me at 18. When I got back, a lot of my buddies were already skinheads. It wasn’t a political thing. That didn’t even come into play. It was just a question of: are you a skinhead or a punk?

ARNE GRAHM Back then, I wore fine rib mesh shirts with a gold belt hanging diagonally and winklepickers. Sometimes frilled shirts as well and a kind of New Romantic crow’s nest on my head to top it all off. My parents thought I was gay.

WOLLE XDP We made our own clothes. We wanted to look like Wessis,¹¹ of course. That was extremely important for every Ossi.¹²

ARNE GRAHM I wore my outfit both for breaking and for going to punk shows or BFC¹³ games as a hooligan. In fact, we looked like gay poppers. I had red Italian leather shoes; I think they were even women’s shoes, but you couldn’t be sure. Those, and then pink pleated pants, striped shirts and an enormous popper hairdo. We often brought banners along as well, with slogans like Saxons, show your dicks! We swung these in the stadium, pulling super-camp dance moves. People freaked out. And after the game, they got beat up by us to boot. But in those cases, it was almostalways consensual violence.

SPEZIAL As hooligans, we primarily provoked. And what better way to provoke than with the opposite of what’s currently popular? Of course, that was also construed for us politically. By outsiders.

JOHNNIE STIELER Punk, breakdance, BFC – it all ran parallel. The good thing about football was that we could move freely. The Stasi people weren’t so athletic. We could assert ourselves there. We looked like proper little boys with polo shirts and snazzy jeans, and the police, after all, were expecting rakish thugs.

WOLLE XDP Personally, I wasn’t interested in soccer at all. Still, I sometimes