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    Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
    Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
    Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
    Audiobook11 hours

    Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

    Written by Tim Mohr

    Narrated by Matthew Lloyd Davies

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: In their gray surroundings, where everyone's future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy-quite literally, as it turned out.

    But as the East German punks became more numerous, more visible, and more rebellious, security forces-including the dreaded secret police, the Stasi-targeted them. They were spied on by friends and even members of their own families; they were expelled from schools and jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of backing down, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

    The story of East German punk rock is about much more than music; it is a spellbinding cultural and political history that also serves as a rallying cry against authoritarianism everywhere.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 11, 2018
    ISBN9781684414659
    Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

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    Reviews for Burning Down the Haus

    4/5

    32 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The book was pretty good but the recording kept cutting out in various parts.
    • 5/5
      This book is amazing! This is a part of history everyone needs to hear. 11 out of 10
    • 3/5
      I wish this was a more scholarly book, but I will admit I enjoyed it, learned a lot, and suspect that I will be returning to it at some point for band names and places.
    • 4/5
      I thought I knew the story of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, but this history of East German punk rock added a new dimension to my understanding of East German society in the 1980s. In some ways, the punks who emerged in East Germany were similar to those in the West - teenagers who felt as though they didn't fit into society, finding expression in a new form of music, and distinctive in their appearance. But, in East Germany being different wasn't tolerated and punks quickly became enemies of the state. This book is filled with fascinating details I hadn't encountered before - like that some people would show up to antigovernmental protests in hopes of being arrested and deported to the West - which merge with a story I know well. Overall, this is a book that changed how I view the fall of the Berlin Wall and the society which existed behind it for so many years - a society that at times felt eerily familiar. If you have an interest in Cold War history, this is definitely a good to pick up.
    • 4/5
      Talk about youth against fascism!

      This book is about how punk changed, both itself, its listeners, and mainly East Germany around the late 1970s up to the 1990s. It takes the reader on a journey of personal fulfillment through youth in a dictatorship, which is what East Germany was at the time. Honecker‘s Germany, along with Stasi, was merely a gentler version of super-fascist Nazi Germany, which fit the glove for precisely what punk counteracts.


      From the book, which kind of sets the tone:

      "The first song they put together was called “Überall wohin’s dich fährt,” or “Wherever You Go.” Lade wrote it.

      Wherever you go
      You’re asked for ID
      If you say a false word
      You know what happens next

      It doesn’t matter where you look
      Cameras are everywhere
      Accompanying you step for step
      “Security” always follows you
      You speak your mind openly
      And what will happen?
      You can only hope
      Something has to happen
      Who wants to stand around passively? Were you really born
      To be subordinate to it all?

      "Observations like that were the sort of thing that got people sent to jail. The members of the band knew that. But as far as Pankow was concerned, this was the logical next step. He knew the country was fucked up and wanted to do something about it."

      East Germany in the 1970s was a beast of its own; self-contained, censored, and highly punished by means of brutal paranoia due to how Stasi run, and how people turned into informants.

      "One of the most momentous decisions in the history of the DDR was made in a matter of minutes on February 8, 1950, during a meeting of the as yet provisional People’s Council: the founding of a Ministry of State Security, or Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. The first few letters of the two constituent parts of the final word—Staat and Sicherheit—lent the ministry the name the world would come to know and dread: the Stasi. By the mid-1950s the Stasi already had 16,000 employees, more than Hitler’s Gestapo had employed in a unified Germany with five times as many inhabitants as East Germany; by 1952 the Stasi had also recruited 30,000 informants. Both of those numbers would continue to rise steeply.
      Who can’t love and recognise a scene like this?"

      "At the beginning of the school year in September 1977, Britta’s sister gave her a stack of photos and pullout posters she’d amassed from the precious West German teen magazines her father brought her—images of ABBA, Boney M, Smokie, the cheesy chart toppers and heartthrobs of the day. As Britta leafed through the images, she suddenly stopped at one. It was a black-and-white shot of a band called the Sex Pistols. What the **** is this, she wondered, fascinated by their ripped clothes and sneering faces."

      If you’re wondering how draconian the Stasi methods of reasoning were, check this out as just a tiny example:

      "East German punks had already perfected the art of confrontation. A few had even started to play with Nazi imagery—the ultimate taboo in a country explicitly founded on anti-Nazi ideology. Faced with ever more brutal treatment by the police, some punks wore yellow star patches, making reference to the patches the Nazis forced Jews to wear. Others wore red armbands with white crosses on them and the word chaos written in black on the cross, meant to make people look twice because of its similarity to the armbands worn by Hitler’s SA and SS. Then the authorities spotted some public graffiti they found particularly disturbing: ddr=kz, meaning East Germany = a concentration camp. A punk named Spion had spray-painted the slogan. He was the singer in a garage band called Ahnungslos, or Clueless. In the course of investigating the graffiti, the police also found drafts of Spion’s song lyrics, and he was thrown into prison for a year."

      One of Tim Mohr’s good things as an author is his forté where it comes to merely place things simply, and let the reader dip into everything and discover things for ourselves. His style made me curious to read on, and I dig the way he unveiled the different main characters.

      "On January 27, 1982, China, a punk who had been at Major’s trial back in 1981, was arrested, subjected to multiple strip searches and body cavity searches, and placed in pretrial detention for five weeks. The charge, according to the arrest warrant: she had distributed a total of twenty hand-typed statements saying, among other things, that she lived in a “mousetrap” where “no freedom of opinion existed.” The statements, it turned out, were from her diary. She was sixteen.
      This book provides a lot of atmosphere, air, good writing—and is altogether a great reminder that, yes, revolution is possible whenever and wherever."

      This book provides a lot of atmosphere, air, good writing—and is altogether a great reminder that, yes, revolution is possible whenever and wherever.
    • 4/5
      Punk rock IS frightening. Not necessarily the music itself, but the message and lifestyle it represents. It's an umbrella term used by people that don't understand the idea of not caring, while at the same time holding very dear a belief system...whether that be political, religious, environmental or just a belief in the healing power of music. It can be difficult, for people that want nothing more than to not rock the boat of societal moors, to take a look at the individual with spike hair, torn jeans and a Sharpie'd Circle A drawn on a stained t-shirt and not think of them as a subversive threat. And that's where this book starts...A Berlin split by ideological differences, concrete, 70+ years of identity crises from losses in multiple wars and father governments constant assurance that "stick with me kid and it will be ok." The version of punk you subscribed to in the early to mid-80's had a lot to do with where you were growing up. British punk saw no future and had strong contempt for the monarchy. American punk saw a future, but an undesirable one of selling out, being a Stepford spouse and being part of a capitalist culture hidden by democracy. Then there is the East German punk idea that there is no future, but there is a path decided for you and that will make you the perfect citizen, employee and adherent to one political groups idea of freedom.Part history lesson and part expose, this book is an exploration of a corrupt police force (the Stasi), with almost limitless power and condoned authority, and how they dealt with the "menace" that was young people bucking the system. Different leaders, different factions, different "Open Work" churches and spaces that provided the only sanctioned area for people to congregate and discuss ideas, although even in these safe havens they had to always be vigilant of snitches and informers.I might have done a disservice by not mentioning specific players or bands or quoting passages, but I feel the book speaks for itself when you start reading it. There is a quote that I will leave you with...a motto of the early East German punks "don't die in the waiting room of the future."
    • 3/5
      The subtitle of BURNING DOWN THE HAUS, PUNK ROCK, REVOLUTION, AND THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL, may lead you to believe, as it did me, that this book makes the case for punk rockers causing the fall of the Berlin Wall. But no, not exactly. Rather, the messages in punk rock songs and the attitude of the punk rockers contributed (just partially or in large part depending on who tells the story) to the fall of the Berlin Wall.Tim Mohr’s research for this book was mostly through his contacts with punk rockers and former punk rockers. Therefore, the book was written from their perspective and sometimes even sounds like a punk rocker wrote it, swear words (particularly the F word) and all.Maybe their attitude, their messages incorporated in their songs, was the beginning. So Mohr introduces us to a few punk rockers and writes about how they suffered for those messages yet persevered. Then he shows how more and more punk rockers found each other and, so, became louder over the years.They didn’t want to leave East Germany; they wanted for fix it.Mohr takes the reader all the way to the early 1990s, to post-Berlin Wall. The punk rockers’ ideal life did not come to be, but their attitude was part of the revolution that caused the demise of Communism in their country.I won this book from the publisher through goodreads.com.
    • 4/5
      I liked this quite a lot. It hit a bunch of my sweet spots: history as viewed through a specific lens, particularly events that happened in my adult lifetime, and early punk rock. In this case, as the title would indicate, the book focuses on the fall of the Berlin wall and what part was played by the early punk movement in the DDR and eastern Europe, from 1981 through 1989. Mohr has good sources in addition to opened Stasi records, which he admits are pretty dry, and his narrative is very engaging—he's obviously making sure his voice matches up to the subject, without falling into total inarticulacy, so lots of short sharp sentences, sometimes repeated like song choruses, and plenty of profanity. As someone who was involved in the downtown NYC punk scene starting in roughly 1981, I was fascinated by the contrast. Note that I ID what I was part of as a scene, rather than a movement—it may have stemmed from adolescent (and post-adolescent) rebellion and a dislike of conformity on my end, but it didn't carry the same kind of life-and-death charter—no one I knew was going to jail for their beliefs (other than for public intoxication, maybe), or having to dodge police to make the music they wanted to make or attend concerts or marches. So even though I know my history and have read a fair amount about the end of the DDR and the Communist regime at the time, this was an interesting filter to drive home the import of what a lot of young people were dealing with there and then. It also sparked a wave of nostalgia, and I stayed up too late last night Googling photos of punks in the early 80s East Village and falling down a few where-are-they-now rabbit holes.