RECOMMENDED: Off the Beaten Track: Cold War Berlin – The Church, the Wall and the underground punks / 2021 🇩🇪

Off the Beaten Track: Cold War Berlin – The Church, the Wall and the underground punks by Tom Taylor

Fri 22 October 2021 19:00, UK


Remarkably, aside from the stories of two lairy musical mavericks absconding from the glare of the gaudy mainstream to a city of beady-eyed spies and a debauched ever-growing demimonde, the overarching finale would take years to come to fruition. Whilst the final curve of the narrative would be the toppling of the Berlin Wall soundtracked by the insurmountable wave of euphoria that is ‘Heroes’ and the sanguine future that it represented for a united Germany and beyond, for a long while nothing happened at all. Or at the very least on the surface nothing happened. (...) Reeder adds regarding the renegade East: “Punk was a musical force that had a fearless political attitude and the potential to cause disruption and it was an attitude they didn’t like the look of. Being a Punk in East Berlin meant you were taunting their political system. The underground meant the political underground.” Continuing: “Still, the thrill of breaking the rules and flaunting your appreciation of Punk music in front of authority was very Punk in its attitude. These Eastie kids religiously taped John Peel’s radio shows on their rare and coveted Cassette recorders and, in turn, they would share the tracks for others to copy. You could be arrested for being a Punk on the streets of East Berlin, just for wearing spiky hair and a dog collar, you could be thrown into prison, or forced to inform on your friends for the STASI. That is why I believe that the real Punks were actually in East Germany.” - faroutmagazine.co.uk

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Illustration: explorethearchive.com