0:15

Pushkin. The

0:27

place is East Berlin, the

0:30

year nineteen eighty three. We're

0:32

in an interrogation room in the offices

0:35

of the Ministry of State Security

0:37

known as the Stasi.

0:42

There's a filing cabinet, a dirty

0:44

neck curtain at the window, a view

0:46

outside of gray concrete blocks.

0:50

In the middle of the room. There's a cheap wood veneered

0:52

desk. On it as a phone,

0:54

an intercombox with an array of cool buttons,

0:57

and a big old fashioned reel to reel

0:59

tape recorder. Behind

1:02

the desk is the interrogator. He

1:04

wears a uniform, a gray military

1:07

jacket, a shirt and tar a

1:09

peak cat placed carefully on the

1:11

desk beside him.

1:14

He's a committed communist who's sworn an

1:16

oath to defend the German Democratic

1:18

Republic the GDR,

1:20

commonly known to the rest of the world as East

1:23

Germany. The

1:25

interrogator has the authority to do more

1:27

or less whatever he wants, and he doesn't have to

1:29

worry about privacy. He can

1:31

have people followed, listen to their phone

1:33

calls, break into their apartments, arrest

1:36

them. Usually his interested

1:38

in dissidence. Political types

1:40

who meet to talk about democracy or the environment

1:43

will make plans to escape to the West,

1:46

but today he has a different

1:48

kind of problem on his hands. Sitting

1:58

at the end of the desk in front of the microphone

2:01

is a skinny teenage boy. He

2:04

has bleached spiky hair, a dog collar

2:07

and an old suit jacket with an A for anarchy

2:09

spray painted on the back. The

2:12

kid is something completely new, something

2:15

never before seen in the GDR. He's

2:18

a pump. Everyone

2:21

calls him Pancau after

2:24

the North Berlin neighborhood where he comes from.

2:27

And he's the lead singer of a band, East

2:29

Germany's very first punk band.

2:32

They're called plan Loos, which

2:35

you could translate as aimless, having

2:37

no plan. By most standards,

2:39

they're barely a band at all, but

2:42

to the Starzi they're a threat

2:45

to the very foundations of the state.

3:01

This is Into the Zone, a

3:05

podcast about opposites and how

3:07

borders are never as clear as we think.

3:11

I'm Harry Kunzru. This

3:13

episode is about government power and

3:16

individual liberty. It's

3:18

about how you look in public and what

3:20

you think in private, and

3:22

what it was like to live in a country that

3:25

wanted to abolish privacy altogether.

3:29

And it's about one of the most powerful

3:31

binary oppositions in modern history,

3:34

the Cold War in

3:44

Flabbentro,

3:50

in ostarch Land, Belan

3:52

Gibson, Punk and plant Fu

3:54

and the Bent. That's what Pankou

3:56

sounds like. Now. His real name is Michael,

3:59

but everyone still calls him by his old nickname,

4:01

and he still lives in the neighborhood of Pankau.

4:04

He's telling me about the Stasi, how they thought

4:07

in a very top down way. The

4:09

word he uses as patriarchal

4:12

the stars. He reasoned like this, Berlin

4:15

is the center of East Germany. In

4:17

Berlin there's one punk band, plan

4:19

Loss. Therefore, they are the leading

4:22

band and the singer as its head. If

4:24

we can get him, then we can neutralize

4:26

the threat of punks. In

4:29

that interrogation room in nineteen eighty

4:31

three, the Stasi officer

4:34

has one goal. He

4:36

wants to turn Pancao into an informer

4:38

for the state. The officer

4:40

thinks if he can get this one kid

4:42

to work for him, then he'll be able

4:44

to control the whole punk movement.

4:48

The officer will be a hero. They'll

4:50

probably give him a medal. I

4:52

grew up during the Cold War. If

4:55

he went around at that time, it's

4:57

hard to imagine the degree to which the

4:59

Cold War organized everything,

5:01

the whole world into one

5:04

big us versus them. You

5:07

knew you were on one side.

5:09

On the other, there was a sort of

5:11

mirror world, totally different,

5:14

and of course the two worlds had nuclear

5:16

weapons pointed at each other. It

5:19

was madness. One

5:23

summer when I was fifteen, I

5:26

went on an exchange program,

5:28

staying with the family in West Germany. One

5:31

day we went to the border somewhere out in

5:33

the country to look at the barbed wire fence

5:35

and the watchtowers. It

5:37

was a weird feeling. We'd

5:39

read George Orwell's nineteen eighty four

5:41

in school, and I imagined

5:43

on the other side of the wire as a gray

5:46

world where everyone had to be exactly

5:48

alike but all the same.

5:50

I was curious. If I'd been a bit older,

5:52

I would have wanted to cross over to see for

5:54

myself, because it truly

5:57

was a different world for

6:02

the unlucky inhabitants of the eastern half

6:04

of Germany. The horrors of the Nazi

6:07

period were followed by the Soviet patient,

6:10

then the regime of the GDR. The

6:13

GDR was governed ontotalitarian

6:15

lines. The Communist Party controlled

6:17

everything including where you worked or

6:19

went to school, how you spent your leisure

6:22

time. Berlin

6:24

was central to the identity of both East

6:27

and West Germany. Though

6:29

the city lay deep in East German territory,

6:32

it had been divided just after the war. The

6:35

city was split in two. West

6:37

Berlin was connected to Western Europe only

6:40

by a long walled off highway. West

6:42

Berlin was an outpost, like a

6:45

probe stuck into the side of the Eastern

6:47

bloc. In

6:53

nineteen sixty one, the East German government

6:55

built what it called the anti Fascistictis Schutzva,

6:58

the Anti Fascist Protection Wall, to

7:01

separate West and East Berlin. The

7:03

government said the war was to keep its citizens safe

7:06

from the fascists in the West, but everyone

7:08

knew really to keep them from leaving.

7:12

The East. German communist leaders had lived

7:14

almost unimaginably hard and terrifying

7:16

lives. They'd lived through stylinist purges,

7:19

the Gulag, the Nazi concentration

7:21

camps. Their reality was

7:23

paranoid and violent, and they were determined

7:26

that their enemies would never get the jump on

7:28

them, so they set up a

7:30

sprawling domestic intelligence service

7:33

dedicated to watching the citizens for

7:35

the slightest sign of descent the

7:38

stars. He had informers everywhere. An

7:40

informer could be your colleague at work, one

7:43

of your roommates, even someone in your

7:45

family. Add to the informers

7:48

another two point two million party members

7:50

who had a duty to report whether other citizens

7:52

were following orders, and you

7:54

had one of the most pervasive spying machines

7:57

ever to exist on planet Earth. But

8:01

right in the middle of the GDR was

8:03

an island, a place the spying

8:06

machine couldn't control, a

8:08

hotbed of dissident culture

8:10

and radical ideas. West

8:13

Berlin. My

8:15

name is Mark Reader. I'm

8:18

a music producer and over

8:20

the record label Cole masterminded for success

8:23

known as MFS, and

8:26

now I've lived in Berlin for false

8:28

and Wild. In

8:32

nineteen seventy eight, Mark Reader

8:34

was living in the North of England in Manchester,

8:38

dreaming of making it in the music business.

8:41

He worked in a record store and he'd

8:43

fallen in love with the sound of West German

8:45

bands who were experimenting with futuristic

8:48

new sounds, bands

8:50

like Can the Cosmic, Joker's

8:53

Noise, craft Work and Tangerine

8:55

Dream. Mark was

8:58

so obsessed with this music that he

9:00

decided to visit the place where it came from.

9:03

When he came to Berlin. What was

9:05

he able to describe it? Just what it looked,

9:07

what it looked like. It was different from

9:10

from the city that you knew, the fact

9:12

that it was bullet riddled and gray, and rows

9:14

of houses where obviously

9:16

bombs had fallen and kind of destroyed the houses,

9:19

and so he had a lot of gaps in the buildings

9:21

and stuff. It was like Manchester

9:24

was a bit kind of like a bit decrepit, falling

9:27

apart, but Berlin was the same,

9:29

but bullet riddled. But first,

9:32

let's put the picture straight. This

9:36

film tells the time when we had all

9:38

the discovers, girls still

9:40

had their pubic hair, and boys wore

9:42

perms and makeup. Mark loved

9:45

Berlin so much that he never went home.

9:48

He's lived there for more than forty years now.

9:51

A few years ago he made a documentary about

9:53

the city's music scene in the eighties. It's

9:55

called b movie Lust and Sound

9:57

in Berlin. If you want to feel

10:00

jealous of someone else's misspent youth,

10:02

it's well worth watching. It

10:04

was a time when you could smoke him pubs

10:07

and on TV. One

10:09

had a record player and the wartman. There

10:12

were Scottied Houses, no

10:15

Hood Band, the Red Armorfraction,

10:18

packed telephone boxes, Polar

10:21

rode nod Dishwashers,

10:23

Super eight film, anti gay

10:25

laws, the Deutsch Mark, the German

10:28

Democratic Republic, the Wall

10:31

and West Berlin. Mark

10:38

knew everybody. He hung

10:40

out with the pioneers of industrial music,

10:42

the band Einstead Send any Bouton. Mark

10:45

shared a squat with Nick Cave, the young

10:47

Gothic eminence behind the Birthday Party.

10:50

He stayed up late, made movies, played

10:53

music and became part of the Berlin

10:55

underground. But you became a sort

10:57

of connection between the Manchester scene and

11:00

Berlin. And from what I understand, you

11:02

bought joy Division univered to Berlin. Yea

11:05

a convinced to

11:08

come to Berlin before transit of Annan

11:10

came from from Manchester and

11:12

drove all the way down to put

11:14

all the way down to Berlin. Really, you know, you

11:17

know, Berlin had a different attitude

11:19

to what we had in Manchester. You know,

11:21

Manchester we are you're

11:23

in a punk band or you're in a band any for any reason.

11:26

It was just just to get away. You know, if you if

11:28

you made it, you'd be able to escape miserable

11:30

Manchester. Berlin was very different.

11:32

Everyone had already escaped here.

11:35

It was like the place where if

11:37

you were a male of a

11:40

certain age, you would obliged to go to

11:42

the military. But if you lived

11:44

in Berlin, you didn't have to go to military.

11:47

So if you were a pacifist, or you were gay,

11:50

transvestile, or ever anything weird,

11:52

you know, artist, or you'll just didn't want to go the

11:54

army. You know, you came to Berlin,

11:56

you could live here and escape going

11:58

to the army. Because of all

12:00

the countercultural refugees, the

12:03

West Berlin punk scene was one of the

12:05

most vibrant in the world. But

12:08

Mark wasn't satisfied with knowing just

12:10

the western half of his new city.

12:13

Like me, he'd grown up wondering

12:15

what lay on the other side of the Iron

12:17

curtain. Now he had

12:20

a chance to find out. It

12:22

was a completely different world on the other side of

12:24

the building wall. Can you describe the experience

12:27

of crossing over, Yeah,

12:30

it was scary, you know, it

12:32

was. It was scary. It was it was like because

12:35

you didn't know what to expect on the other side. It was a completely

12:37

different kind of regime and everything, you know,

12:39

like everything that we'd taken

12:42

for granted here in the West didn't exist

12:44

in the East. Incense, you know. It was like I

12:47

didn't know what was letting myself in full to

12:49

be honest, you know, I just started just go and see what it

12:51

was like and where did you find there? I

12:54

thought it was it was like stepping back in time.

12:57

It was like a time machine. On

13:00

his first trip, Mark just walked around,

13:03

but he kept going back. For

13:06

most of his West Berlin friends, it was

13:08

an administrative hassle to get a visa

13:10

across the border. They had to apply days

13:13

or weeks in advance. But

13:15

strangely enough, with Mark's British

13:17

passport, he could come and go as

13:19

he pleased. The fascination of that this

13:22

place, you know, it's like it was like like no

13:24

other place I've been to. It's

13:26

like I felt there was a

13:28

an ambient stare that was like desperate

13:32

in a sense, and I got quite addicted

13:34

to that and this feeling of like big

13:37

brothers watching you kind of thing. Despite

13:40

that, Mark got talking to

13:42

other young people and soon he

13:44

had friends in East Berlin. He

13:47

began to smuggle in cassettes of the

13:49

music his friends were listening to and

13:52

making in the West I'd

13:54

record all the records that I bought and record all

13:56

every you know, every omni record collection as

13:59

much as possible. Even later on,

14:01

you know, I didn't want them just to listen to punk rock,

14:04

ordered them to listen to all the kinds of music as well. So I'd

14:06

record, like, you know, underground disco music.

14:08

And it

14:10

wasn't just about punk rock, It's about everything.

14:13

And how much did young people in East

14:16

Berlin know about what was going on on your

14:18

side of the wall. Well, the only information

14:20

they really got was from TV or

14:23

radio, most

14:25

of them not unless they had relatives

14:27

who came to visit them. Then his

14:29

dead relatives that they get a bit more information.

14:31

Book. You know, if your anti Betty comes

14:34

to visity, you know you're not going to talk about the punk

14:36

rock scene Berlin because you won't know anything

14:39

about that, you know. For Mark, going

14:41

to East Berlin was an adventure like being

14:43

in a movie. For his young

14:45

friends, those tapes were a thread that connected

14:48

them to another world. In

14:50

West Berlin, you could go and see Joy Division

14:52

or the birthday party. In

14:55

East Berlin, youth culture

14:57

was a little different. Recently,

15:24

I was in Berlin and

15:26

I met up with my old friend Anya, a

15:28

German artist and filmmaker. I

15:31

first met her a while back when she lived in London.

15:34

I helped out on a film she made called

15:36

Trail of the Spider, a spaghetti

15:39

western about gentrification, with

15:41

people from our eastern neighborhood dressed up

15:43

like lawman and bandits. Anya

15:47

also played in a band with some other artist

15:49

friends. It was more art rock

15:51

than punk, but Anya is not unpunk

15:54

right now. She's even got kind of a mohawk haircut.

15:58

I wanted Anya to come with me to a place

16:00

that houses some of the most painful memories

16:02

of the GDR, an office

16:04

building just off Alexander Platz, the

16:07

old center of Communist East Berlin.

16:11

Alex As Berliners call it as a big

16:13

open square dominated by the fans

16:16

tourm the TV Tower, still

16:18

the tallest structure in Germany. It's

16:20

a space age needle with a shiny ball skewered

16:23

through it. It looks like a giant version

16:25

of a lamp put for sale in a mid century

16:27

modern furniture store, A massive

16:29

symbol of the communist state's futuristic

16:32

ambitions. And we're coming

16:35

up to the officers

16:38

of STARSI Archive,

16:42

and I have a thin in that there'll be a little

16:45

nervous if we record on the way. But I don't

16:47

know. Maybe you never the woman after

16:49

the wall fell the stars. You did

16:51

its best to destroy evidence of its crimes

16:54

and human rights violations, but

16:56

it couldn't get rid of everything. There

16:58

were millions of documents, tape recordings,

17:01

piles of shredded paper. The

17:03

new reunified German government set up

17:05

the Starzi Records Archive to administrate

17:08

what was left behind. Mind people

17:10

could apply to see the files that were kept on

17:12

them and in some cases find out

17:14

who had been spying on them.

17:17

We come to see Doug Mahovstadt, who's

17:19

the press spokesperson for the archive and

17:22

knows more than almost anyone about the Stasie.

17:35

I wanted to understand more about what life

17:37

in the GDR was like for young punks

17:39

like Punkau, what was expected

17:41

of them. Why would the government care

17:43

what music they liked or how they dressed.

17:46

There is this idea that socialism

17:49

leads to a better society, but socialism

17:51

requires everybody to believe in

17:54

this idea in the way that

17:56

it was organized,

17:59

and in this case we're talking about Eastern

18:01

European communist states. Very much

18:04

modeled after the Soviet idea,

18:06

the Soviets Revolution

18:08

of ninety in seventeen. Who

18:10

was always afraid that somebody will take

18:13

away this path

18:15

to the better society.

18:17

So there was from the very beginning an

18:19

enemy that would squash the revolution, that

18:21

would persecute the idea

18:24

of a socialist society. And so you

18:27

had to be aware all the time of the enemies

18:30

who are against you. And

18:33

it very much is summed up in this

18:35

idea that the dissenter is the enemy.

18:38

Then yeah, thoughts

18:40

as must if Yune

18:42

and again not on an

18:46

and deadish land, to Laban,

18:49

on to Campern. That's

18:54

Eric Honecker, the East German leader, addressing

18:57

a massive rally of the Free German Youth,

19:01

the official East German youth organization.

19:04

If you wanted to get ahead in East Germany, it was a

19:06

good idea to be a member of the Free German Youth

19:09

and wear their distinctive blue shirt with the

19:11

sunrise emblem on the arm. Conker

19:14

is saying that only socialism can

19:16

give young people a goal and the future.

19:18

So these were state organized youth organizations,

19:21

and to refuse to become part of

19:23

them already made you very

19:25

suspicious. And you were not part of

19:27

the mainstream anymore, and that would continue. If

19:29

you wanted to study, certain wanted

19:31

to study at all, as a young man, you

19:33

would have to sign

19:36

up for military service. That was mandatory military

19:38

service. And as a young woman, if you

19:40

wanted to study, for instance, journalism,

19:42

it was mandatory that you would eventually

19:45

join the party, so you would become a candidate

19:47

for the party in order to join the party in order

19:49

to study journalism. That's

19:51

what was on offer. To be a good East German

19:54

young person, you would join the FDJ,

19:56

go camping and hiking and sing

19:58

jolly songs with verses in English and Russian.

20:01

To show that you were a true internationalist.

20:03

You wore the blue uniform shirt and clapped

20:05

along because if you didn't, you

20:07

weren't going to be able to have a good life. In

20:10

East Germany, you had to have a job.

20:13

It was illegal not to have one. But

20:15

if you didn't play the game, you would

20:17

just be cleaning toilets or unloading trucks.

20:20

There was a real risk to being a rebel. As

20:24

for music, East Germany had one

20:26

record company owned and operated

20:28

by the government. To be in

20:30

a band and play live, you needed

20:32

a license. That's right. You couldn't

20:35

just go out and play a gig in a local

20:37

bar. The cops would break it up and you'd

20:39

get arrested. To get a license,

20:42

you needed two things. You had to

20:44

have done your military service, and you had

20:46

to pass an audition in front of a panel

20:48

of judges from the Musicians Union. And

20:55

in the middle of this, imagine

20:57

your Panco, an angry fifteen

20:59

year old who pissed off with your violent dad

21:02

and needs something, anything,

21:04

to happen, otherwise you're going to

21:07

go mad. Then

21:10

one day you hear the Stranglers

21:12

on a bootleg cassette tape, perhaps

21:15

copied from a copy brought over by an English

21:17

guy called Mark. You see

21:19

a picture of the band and you want to

21:21

look like them, so you tear some holes in

21:24

your t shirt and walk out of your front door

21:26

with your hair spiked up with soap. You

21:29

go to Alexander Platz, where

21:31

you find some other kids like you if

21:33

you're not doing anything, just hanging around.

21:35

But the cops come and you get arrested.

21:38

They ask some questions and tell you to

21:40

clean yourself up. The next

21:43

day you go there again and the same thing happens.

21:46

The cops are nervous because this is a tourist

21:48

spot right next to the famous TV tower.

21:52

The government likes foreigners to see the architectural

21:54

and technological achievements of socialism.

21:57

It doesn't like foreigners to see that East

22:00

Germany has punks. So

22:02

you end up in an interrogation

22:04

room facing a guy in a uniform

22:07

who wants to know if you're an enemy

22:09

of the state. This

22:17

was Pancou's reality as

22:20

a teenager. He ran up against the full

22:22

might of the GDR.

22:32

I want to go and talk to him, but he doesn't

22:34

speak English and my German isn't good

22:36

enough to do an interview. So I asked

22:39

my artist friend Anya if she'll come along with me.

22:41

Clearly still a little bit impaired, thanks

22:46

for coming along on this small

22:48

adventure. So we're

22:51

on a tram traveling out

22:53

of the center of Berlin Northwoods.

22:56

We're in a district of

22:58

Punka to see somebody who's called Punko.

23:01

The neighborhood of Punko is a little way

23:03

out of the center, and it turns out neither

23:06

Ana nor Oliver the producer, have ever

23:08

been there before. To me,

23:10

it looks like a lot of places on the East side of

23:12

the city. We

23:14

get there early and it's starting to rain,

23:17

so we hang around under a bus shelter like

23:19

board teenage punks and

23:21

yeah, and Oliver smoked cigarettes. People

23:24

like to smoke in Berlin. Smoking is part

23:26

of the culture, like nude sunbathing

23:28

and techno music. So yeah,

23:30

this looks like not

23:33

the new Berlin. It's an

23:35

old, old building

23:37

cover and graffiti him with a sort of messed

23:41

up wooden door and no bell. So I'm going to see

23:43

if actually opens. So it does, comment,

23:49

I'm hurry. Punko

23:52

turns out to be a wiry guy in his fifties.

23:55

He's dressed in jeans and a hoodie and

23:57

looks more like a rock climber than a rock musician.

24:00

Has the punk one angist piece

24:03

Dima n front and then tut

24:06

as fast ring Us Normal heros sexpisodevmenton

24:11

Bollocks on the door, Plata

24:13

fun Damdaman, do

24:17

you have a little They

24:21

were in names of the records, and they were

24:23

passed around, and he got them

24:25

from a friend, and then he copied

24:27

them to cassette, and he made a hundred

24:30

eighty copies of and

24:34

and and passed them on again

24:36

to all his other maids. Punko

24:39

had never really ventured out of his neighborhood,

24:41

but somehow he found his way to the

24:44

south of the city to a youth club

24:46

where some other punks hung out. I

24:48

asked him how many punks there were in East Berlin at

24:50

this time, about twenty. He

24:53

says, for which funny flag John Rotten

24:55

as the cutters and polls stuff on his expisode on

24:58

Johnny Rotten. Soon enough, Punkou's

25:01

idol was Johnny Rotten. He had

25:03

a poster of him, and he had the tape of never

25:05

Mind the Bollocks that he copied from his friend. So

25:07

the first time he went to a youth club at

25:10

that time, He's son who was really punk

25:12

already, but he was a huge

25:14

fan of Udo Lindenberg. And actually

25:16

he dressed like Udo Lindberg at that

25:19

point and also had this hair club on this Panic

25:21

belt. So Udo Lindenburg

25:24

is a West German rock star who circa

25:27

nineteen eighty had long hair and

25:29

wore a big metal belt buckle that's

25:31

spelled out Panic. On

25:34

YouTube, you can find him doing a

25:36

satirical cover of All

25:38

Things Chattanooga Chu Chu called

25:40

Special Train to Punkau, where

25:44

he's singing for whatever reason to a dwarf

25:46

dressed as an East German railway conductor

25:56

about how he wants to go to East Berlin to sing

25:59

if only Eric Honeker and the Communist

26:01

Party would let him. The whole Udo

26:03

Lindenburg thing is kind of weird and

26:06

very specifically German. For our

26:08

purposes. Really need to know is that

26:10

sixteen year old Punkau thought he was

26:12

cool, but he really wasn't.

26:18

Panco dyed his hair blonde, which wasn't

26:20

easy to do in East Berlin, but

26:22

he'd met a hairdresser at a gay bar in Prince

26:25

Lauerberg who helped him. Punko

26:27

and his friends used to hang out at this gay bar because

26:29

it was one of the few places where they wouldn't get

26:31

kicked out. Some

26:34

of Punkou's experiences sound pretty

26:36

typical for teen rebels anywhere in the world.

26:39

The neighbors stared at him, his dad

26:41

was angry. He got chased by football

26:44

hooligans who wanted to beat him up. Since

26:47

most people in East Berlin had never seen a

26:49

punk, people would ask him questions

26:51

on the tram, sometimes hostile,

26:54

sometimes just curious. Then

26:57

he did something genuinely dangerous.

27:00

He joined a band. He

27:07

joined a band at best already existed

27:09

that they didn't have a singer, and they were called if

27:14

like the Wall. But

27:17

at the time they got together, that

27:20

name in itself already seemed too provocative,

27:22

and so they've found a new name, and they

27:24

called the Plan Laws. As

27:29

I mentioned, plan Laws means

27:31

aimless, with no direction. Life

27:34

in the GDR was preprogrammed. You

27:37

studied, got a job, you retired.

27:41

There's a famous English punk slogan

27:43

spat out by Johnny Rotten on the song God

27:46

Save the Queen. There's

27:48

no future, he snarls in England's

27:50

Dreaming no future.

27:53

For East German punks, it was the opposite.

27:56

They had too much future. Everything

28:00

was planned for them.

28:07

Punkous bandmates, friends from the little

28:10

gang of punks that hung around in Alexander. Platz

28:13

Kaiser played bass, Cobbs,

28:15

the guitarist, was a pretty good musician, but

28:17

the drummer Ladder couldn't really keep time

28:20

and wanted to be the front man. It

28:22

didn't really matter. It wasn't about

28:24

getting famous or even being good

28:27

musicians. Punko

28:32

and his friends wanted the unexpected.

28:35

They wanted to get to a place where they knew

28:37

nothing when nothing was fixed they

28:39

wanted, as he puts it, alf

28:41

Nuligan to start again from

28:44

zero plus.

28:50

Rehearsed in a coal cellar with mattresses

28:52

against the walls for soundproofing. They

28:54

didn't even have proper equipment. They

28:57

had to plug everything into one amplifier,

28:59

so the drums drowned out everything else.

29:02

Of course, punk I was banned. Didn't have a license

29:04

to perform. Even rehearsing

29:06

was risky. The varatrich

29:08

Pezzi Amacrimino Buddish

29:14

or not, it

29:17

was criminal, he says bluntly. Without

29:20

a license, you could be put in prison. Writing

29:23

lyrics was particularly dangerous. Keeping

29:25

anything on paper meant the possibility that

29:27

it could be read by the Stasi as

29:30

it cut. He

29:34

was afraid from the beginning, I mean even to the point

29:36

of being paranoid. And he used to um

29:39

like, write the songs, then immediately

29:41

memorize them, and then he would

29:43

burn the paper

29:46

that you've written them on. And actually

29:48

you would even be to paranoid to just

29:51

hear it aptly. He literally burned it so

29:53

it would be gone. The

29:55

bandmates had to trust each other. Despite

29:58

the risks. Plan Lows did perform live.

30:01

Their gigs were usually very small, twenty

30:04

to thirty people in sellers or abandoned

30:06

buildings. They

30:09

managed to get hold of a tape recorder and recorded

30:11

their songs at one of their rehearsals. But

30:15

Punk says he's heard other recordings,

30:18

live recordings that they themselves didn't

30:20

make. He doesn't know who

30:22

would have been able to record a plant low skig.

30:25

He thinks it was most likely the stars.

30:43

I'm waiting in line at the Curry Worst stand

30:45

sings Punk lyrics written by the

30:47

guitarist Cobbs. Curry

30:50

Worst is one of the iconic snack foods of Berlin,

30:52

slices of sausage slathered in a very

30:55

mild spicy ketchup. Calling

30:57

it curry is Klein of overstating

31:00

the case. But whatever, Punker's

31:02

in line for a snack, I don't turn around,

31:05

he sings, I've already seen you, you

31:07

and my shadow wherever I go, a dark

31:10

spot on the sun. He's

31:33

singing, of course, about his starsy

31:35

tail. Sometimes

31:50

they'd follow him without doing

31:52

anything. Sometimes they just

31:54

shove him in the back of a car and take

31:57

him in for interrogation. And

32:00

so here we are with

32:02

the teenage Punk and the secret

32:05

policeman, staring at each

32:07

other across the table. Punko's

32:12

interrogator belongs to a unit called Abtailongs

32:14

Spansish Department twenty, whose

32:17

special remit is political dissent. Punko

32:21

has begun to realize the Stasi are

32:23

desperate for information. They've

32:25

been completely blindsided by punk.

32:28

For more than ten years. In East Germany, there have

32:30

been what they call blusers, long

32:32

haired kids who listen to rock music and go hitchhiking,

32:35

hitchhiking being one of the many things that is

32:38

illegal in this country. But

32:40

punk is different. They're not just

32:42

hippies. They seem to be rejecting

32:45

every kind of authority. Who

32:47

or what is behind them? Could

32:50

it be Western intelligence agencies?

32:52

Are Plan Loos and the twenty East Berlin

32:55

punks all working for the CIA.

32:58

Other punks wouldn't necessarily talk, or they

33:00

would have no interest to have a conversation with

33:02

the guy from the Stasi. But the person

33:04

from the Stasi that was always having the

33:07

conversations with him or the interrogassion, he

33:09

would literally tell his superiors

33:12

here is someone that actually really wants

33:15

to engage and also I think

33:17

ultimately we can win him over to

33:20

work for us as an informal

33:23

midda bser. The phrase is

33:25

actually in a fitzil mita bitter

33:28

unofficial co worker. This is

33:30

the Starsi's name for informers on

33:33

the street, they're called spitzland or

33:35

snitches. When they wanted

33:37

you to work with them, what did

33:40

they suggest? Did they offer you money

33:42

or is it did they threaten you? How did

33:44

they try and persuade you to become an em

33:47

with stuntn urban

33:49

vige married to target. He would be arrested

33:52

every two days probably,

33:55

But for him as nobody

33:57

and then later on as a singer of or

34:03

yeah it's a singer of plans was

34:06

first of all he felt sort of somehow

34:09

affirmed by it. They were taking him serious,

34:11

they felt threatened by him, and for

34:14

him, the conversations that he had with them

34:16

were also a kind of um,

34:19

they were schooling him in some way and do

34:22

as uh becauz. That's so, that's

34:24

just that's only had this priligios.

34:28

This is where it gets really strange.

34:32

The police would just come and break heads.

34:34

They just wanted the punks off the street and they

34:36

didn't care how it happened. But

34:39

the Stasi were more like Sun,

34:41

you're going down the wrong path. And

34:44

inadvertently they were

34:46

giving this scrappy kid a political

34:49

education. Intervu

34:52

mandufound Spider tired

34:55

as okay,

35:01

so like at first he just he

35:04

felt more like an agitator in that situation.

35:06

I mean, he knew he had to be careful um

35:09

what to say, because you knew that he could

35:11

go to prison if he said anything against the States.

35:13

So it was Ko that that was the fine line.

35:16

But at the same time he found that

35:18

he was sort of somehow also in the process of

35:21

convincing this Stazzi guy. He may

35:23

have been fun for a while, but the

35:25

stakes were getting higher. Finally

35:28

they asked him outright whether he was willing to become

35:30

an informer. He refused.

35:33

After that it was clear that the Stasi were

35:36

going to find a way to get him sooner or later,

35:39

and they did. It

35:41

all happened because of a T shirt. Punko's

35:46

girlfriend, he went by the nickname Nasa

35:48

or Knows, made him a shirt with a

35:50

political quote on it, when

35:52

injustice becomes law resistance

35:55

as a duty. That's essentially

35:57

a massive subtweet of the East German government.

36:00

And in case it wasn't provocative enough, the T shirt

36:03

also had the logo of the terrorist group

36:05

the Red Army Faction. Not

36:07

only did Punkout go out wearing this shirt,

36:10

he wore it to a big meeting where foreign journalists

36:13

were present, and he got up on a chair

36:15

and gave a speech. He was

36:17

immediately pulled down and arrested. He

36:20

faced almost three years in prison. That

36:24

was when the Stars He turned up the heat. I've

36:33

done Rutlan done

36:36

Clars. They got his

36:38

girlfriend to come in and they said, your

36:41

boyfriend's going into prison for three years if

36:43

you don't work with us. So then

36:46

she agreed to work with them.

36:50

Um and it was quite clear to her that she would

36:52

not give them any information, but that

36:54

she was trying to save him

36:56

from going to prison for three years. This was

36:58

a dangerous game, but it worked. Thinking

37:01

they'd recruited NASA the Stars he let

37:04

Pancar go. Clark

37:09

and his girlfriend didn't want to give the STARSI

37:11

any real information. As

37:13

soon as they got back to their friends, they

37:16

told them about the deal they'd made. Punkou

37:19

trusted his girlfriend, but the

37:22

other members of Plan Los weren't so sure

37:25

she'd agreed to work for the

37:27

Starzi. The

37:30

members of Plan Los had good reason to be

37:33

paranoid. The Stasi weren't

37:35

just watching people and raiding apartments.

37:38

They were also trying to undermine the punks

37:40

psychologically, trying to

37:42

get into their heads. Information

37:48

gathering on them is just not enough. You

37:51

want to destroy what they start

37:53

forming. So the Stasi, especially

37:55

in the seventies and eighties, came up with the methodology

37:58

they called tazetun demolition

38:00

of personality. This is

38:02

Doug Mahoverstadt again at the STARSI

38:05

Archives. So all the information

38:07

you gather on a very individual, sometimes

38:09

intimate level, about a person, you

38:11

would use to debase

38:14

their sense of self and their

38:16

security and of themselves. And

38:18

so this says that song strategy

38:22

meant that you would start spreading rumors

38:24

about a person coincidentally, or

38:26

rather not coincidentally. One of a

38:29

more effective rumor was to say

38:31

that that person was an informant for the

38:33

Stasi. In more extreme

38:35

cases, the Starzi used

38:37

to raid the apartments of a

38:39

person and they did little psychological

38:42

things. They would change around

38:45

the towel that you were certain

38:47

to have put to the right side of the think, and when

38:49

you came home it was on the left side of the sink, and you would

38:51

just think, what happened here? And you would.

38:53

You know, it's so minimal, it's just banal little

38:56

thing, but they start messing with your

38:58

sense of self, your sense of security, who you

39:00

are the Stasi. We're using a

39:02

zette song strategy on the punk scene and

39:05

it worked. Everyone was paranoid.

39:08

Thebers of Planlow stopped trusting each

39:10

other. Finally, Punko's

39:13

friends gave him an ultimatum, drop

39:15

his girlfriend or leave the band.

39:19

Punkar told them to go fuck themselves.

39:22

Though the stars he never managed to turn punkal,

39:25

they got their way. In the end, the

39:27

first these Berlin punk band was

39:30

dead. I

39:49

got interested in the Starzi in twenty

39:52

sixteen when I took my family

39:54

to live in Berlin for six months. I've

39:57

been offered a fellowship at the American Academy,

40:00

an institution out in the far western

40:02

suburb of Vanze. I

40:05

was going to spend my time researching and writing

40:07

the book that eventually became read Pill.

40:10

There are all sorts of practical issues when you moved

40:12

to another country. My wife, Katie

40:14

is also a writer. Our son was two.

40:16

When she was pregnant with our daughter, we

40:19

needed to find a preschool somewhere close

40:21

to where we'd be living. I went

40:23

online to look, hopeful that i'd find something

40:25

in walking distance. I

40:28

found a couple of possible places, and

40:30

I went on street View to look at them. To

40:33

my surprise, they were blurred

40:35

out. German law

40:37

requires Google to blur out street view

40:40

images if people request it. Germany

40:43

has some of the strongest privacy laws in the

40:45

world. Germans don't like sharing

40:47

their personal information. They

40:50

don't like being tracked online. Doug

40:53

Mahoverstad of the Stasi Archives says

40:55

this is the legacy both of Communism and

40:57

the Nazis the idea that a

40:59

citizen is sort of corrupted

41:02

through the state, and that the balance

41:04

between the individual and the state between

41:06

who I am as a citizen and what the state

41:08

does, my government does to me and how we interact

41:12

is much more fraught from the history, and so

41:14

there's a larger sensitivity of how

41:16

we balance ideas of security

41:20

and privacy of the individual

41:22

and the state, and how we come

41:24

to a compromise between our respective

41:27

spheres. We tend to think if privacy

41:29

is the right not to be watched or overheard,

41:32

and also the ability to keep control

41:34

of our personal information. But

41:36

it's more than that. Privacy

41:38

is the space where we can experiment the

41:41

space where we work out how to be ourselves

41:44

before we have to step out into the social world.

41:47

Emily Dickinson called it a finite

41:49

infinity, and it's true. There's something

41:51

sublime about it, something that makes

41:53

it very disturbing to us when it's violated.

41:57

Sooner or later. In any conversation about

41:59

privacy, someone will say, why

42:01

do you care? If you've got nothing to hide, why

42:04

should we care. The philosopher

42:07

and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who

42:09

thought about privacy very deeply, wrote

42:11

this, In actual fact,

42:14

society depends for its existence on

42:17

the inviolable personal solitude of its

42:19

members. Society,

42:21

to merit its name, must

42:23

be made up not of numbers or mechanical

42:26

units, but of persons. To

42:29

be a person implies responsibility

42:31

and freedom, and both these

42:33

imply a certain interior solitude,

42:37

a sense of personal integrity,

42:39

a sense of one's own reality, and

42:41

of one's ability to give himself

42:44

to society or to refuse

42:46

that gift. He's

42:49

saying that without privacy, without the

42:51

ability to make basic decisions for yourself,

42:53

society couldn't exist unless

42:56

you have freedom to act and can take

42:58

responsibility for your actions. You're

43:01

not human in society. You're just

43:03

a function, a cog in a totalitarian

43:06

machine. Perhaps

43:11

that's why so many Germans ask for their homes

43:13

to be blurred out on Google street View. Right

43:17

now, with eavesdropping home devices

43:19

and a tracker in every phone, privacy

43:21

is under threat like never before. We

43:24

have an unfocused paranoia about corporations

43:28

and the government, but we're never

43:30

sure who exactly is listening to us,

43:32

whether they're really paying attention, or

43:35

what their agenda might be. That

43:37

wasn't true during the Cold War. The

43:40

citizens of East Germany knew who was watching

43:43

the Ministry for State Security, the

43:45

Stasi. But

43:48

I also think that once you grew up

43:50

in a system like that and you befriend

43:52

yourself with the father, the state that I live in

43:54

shoots me if I travel west, and

43:57

if I speak my mind completely, I

43:59

might run into trouble. Okay, so I better. I

44:02

just better give them what they want, and so I can

44:04

be left in peace, and I just do my thing, and I have

44:06

a normal life and celebrate my birthday

44:09

and my Christmases and my little

44:11

career. Everything's fine, But

44:14

you have voluntarily limited

44:17

the space you're entitled to. And

44:19

I think that's a long lasting effect. After

44:27

the Stars he broke up Plan Loos. Pankou

44:30

didn't join another band. Reluctantly,

44:33

he went off to do his military service. When

44:36

he returned to Berlin eighteen months later, his

44:39

friends had scattered, Some were

44:41

in prison or the army, some

44:43

had gone to the West. He felt

44:45

out of place again. The East

44:48

German government said tonight they were going to make more

44:50

openings in the wall, at least a dozen more put

44:52

bulldozers right through the wall so

44:54

that more people could cross to the west.

45:00

When the wall came down in nineteen eighty

45:02

nine, Pankoo had mixed

45:04

feelings. He was excited

45:07

to see the East German regime falling, but

45:09

he was also worried about the prospect

45:12

of joining the capitalist West. I

45:15

wanted to know if he was still worried, if

45:18

he was concerned about all the ways which we can

45:20

now be or feel watched.

45:23

I thought, all predominoscence,

45:25

why perspective another extremely

45:28

shreatened. I mean, I think he says

45:30

he thinks it's frightening, but at the

45:32

same time it's something that he knows very well.

45:35

So in that sense, he never had

45:37

a moment where he had any kind of illusions

45:40

about that it would be different.

45:44

Can someone who spent his youth being watched

45:46

by the most paranoid secret police force

45:48

in history tell me what to do about

45:51

today's pervasive surveillance. I'm

45:54

expecting Punkau to condemn it, to

45:56

say that we need to fight governments and tech

45:58

companies instead,

46:00

he says to me. Sure, you can spend a lot

46:02

of time focusing on the idea that you're being

46:05

surveiled, figuring

46:07

out exactly how much, but

46:11

that always puts you into a sort of negative

46:13

frame of mind. You feel hopeless.

46:16

He lived for years knowing he was being watched

46:19

night and day. Now, he says,

46:21

it's important to make a clear choice. Do

46:24

you stay inside your fear or

46:26

do you push through? Do you put fear

46:29

in its place and start making

46:31

decisions for yourself? And

46:42

this is the thing I go away with as

46:44

I ride the tram back to the center of Berlin,

46:48

that you don't wait to act until you feel

46:50

you're free to do so. It's

46:52

the action that you take in spite of your

46:54

fear that counts. That's

46:57

what it means to be punk. Turns

47:08

out, Johnny Rotten was wrong for

47:11

punk musicians like Pancau and

47:13

surveillors like the STARSI there would

47:15

be a future, specifically

47:18

in Hanover, where another

47:20

German is about to engineer how

47:22

the future our present will

47:25

sound. And as a listener, you

47:28

also recognize the conscient between

47:30

these two things. You recognize that

47:32

if it that it's the patterns

47:34

that you sounds that make it beautiful,

47:37

and it's also the fact that the patterns

47:40

do not repeat themselves perfectly that

47:43

make it exquisitely beautiful. Finding

47:46

the needle of a signal in a

47:48

haystack of noise that's

47:50

next week on Into the Zone.

47:57

Into the Zone is produced by

47:59

Rider Also and Hunter Braithwaite.

48:02

Our editor is Julia Barton. Mire

48:04

La Belle is our executive producer.

48:07

Martin Gonzalez is engineer.

48:10

Music for this episode composed by Izzyokampo,

48:14

also known as Student. Our

48:16

theme song is composed by Sarah k Peedinatti

48:19

also known as lip Talk. Thanks

48:22

to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine,

48:25

John Schnaz, Maya Kanig,

48:28

Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler,

48:31

Emily Rostick and Maggie Taylor.

48:34

Special thanks to our Berlin producers

48:36

Oliver Martin and Johannes Nikola.

48:39

And the very special thanks to Annie

48:42

Kirschner for all her help for

48:44

this episode. To hear what

48:46

Mark Reader is up to now, go

48:48

to www mfs

48:51

Berlin dot com. An

48:53

archive of Punkau's material can

48:55

be found at substitute dot net. Into

48:59

the Zone is a production of Pushkin

49:01

Industries. If you enjoyed

49:03

this episode, please consider letting others

49:06

know. The best way to do this

49:08

is by rate tist on Apple Podcasts.

49:11

You could even write a review for

49:14

more East German punk head to our

49:16

Into the Zone playlist on Spotify,

49:19

and you can find me on Twitter at

49:22

Harry Quin's room. See you

49:24

next time. Pressure.

49:37

That was wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was wrong with that?

49:40

What was wrong with that? What was wrong with that?