West Berlin 1987, near Anhalter Bahnhof (© PD)
For the members of the ‘’Dritte Degeneration Ost (Third Degeneration East)‘’, dealing with Schleimkeim, their frontman Dieter ‘’Otze‘’ Ehrlich and, more generally, with the punk movement of the 1980s is a dive into the realm of distant events. For me, who moved to West Berlin during this time, it is an immersion in memories that are not well organised.
On the façade of the house in the north of Wedding where I first lived, there were still shell impacts from the 1940s. ‘Never again war!’ was the motto in Germany later on, but SPD Chancellor Schmidt had recently pushed through the deployment of medium-range missiles aimed at the East as part of the so-called “Nato Double-Track Decision”. Together with my generation, I also lived in the conviction that the world could blow up in our faces at any moment, and this time for good.
People of the same age had similar thoughts on the other side of the Mauser. But while the churches there were forging swords into ploughshares, we younger West Berliners had already come to terms with the future. We were full children of the economic miracle. But you could read ‘No Future’ on every other corner. This strange end-time feeling was insurmountable. And just like in the 1920s: Berlin, even if this time only its western part, was dancing on a volcano. It wasn’t worth wasting thoughts on the future. We wanted to get as much as possible out of the here and now.
Techno was emerging in this West Berlin of the mid-1980s. Punk, I think, no longer played a really important role as a music genre. It was outdated and commercially appropriated by Neue Deutsche Welle. It had moved on and become something else in the noise excesses of Neubauten.
And yet punk was not dead. Whichever of the individual scenes with their respective dress codes you belonged to in West Berlin: if you didn’t wear black, you could be sure of being turned away by the doorman of any reasonably hip club. The Schöneberg Goths and New Romantics were a kind of post-punks who styled their punky skulls at trendy hairdressers and bought their gold-plated safety pins in expensive fashion shops. They were mainly ‘Wessis’, as they were called in Berlin at the time, who had moved here from West Germany to escape the boredom and hypocritical idyll of West Germany. And there were still the real and proper punks, born in Kreuzberg, Neukölln or Siemensstadt, albeit in a different neighbourhood. They were rarely much older than twenty. You’d inevitably get hit on by them (‘Hey mate, have you got a mark?’) when you got off the underground at Nollendorfplatz or Kottbusser Tor.
Even back then, there were a huge number of homeless people in West Berlin. I had made it a rule to give something to at least every third person who opened their hand. But no punk ever received a single penny from me. Wasn’t there a mum at home who would have been happy to give them a sandwich? To me, they were snotty truants. If I had told them that I was financing my studies by working night shifts on the assembly line at the Reinickendorf pizza factory, wouldn’t they have thought I was a laughable idiot?
I found out in an embarrassing way that punks didn’t exist in the East either when I met three female punks near the border crossing after a visit to the East Berlin opera. I thought they were tourists from West Berlin and tried to make fun of them: ‘Just hurry back over: it’s all grey here, who can stand it!’ I unintentionally showed myself to be the arrogant Wessi type, who – after this word changed its meaning – later incurred the increasing anger of the East Germans.
East punks and West punks, I still find it difficult to connect the two movements. The one rebelled against capitalism, the other against (actually existing) socialism. ‘Break what breaks you!’ sang Ton Steine Scherben back in the 1970s. But what if both were broken then? The anarchists’ “A” adorned the jackets of many punks, at least in West Berlin. What was meant was: ‘Let everyone do what they like!’. Even back then, this struck me as a childishly simplified understanding of the political idea of anarchism, which does not strive for ‘no power for anyone’, but equal power for all and leads to a social system of shared responsibility that is light years away from the punk attitude to life. ‘Why don’t you destroy yourself!’ sang Otze Ehrlich, somewhat logically, five years after German-German reunification. Without ‘No Future’, punk couldn’t be punk and so that was the only consequence that remained.
