The seeds to the story of my time in the GDR were sown in the mid Eighties debates within the ruling SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and their youth section the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, Free German Youth) about what constituted ‘progressive youth culture’. At the start of the rock ‘n’ roll explosion in the Fifties, the old Party men right across Eastern Europe had decreed that all that kind of stuff was ‘bourgeois and decadent’. As the Fifties turned to the Sixties and the folk protest movement began, this changed to ‘long haired hippy folky protest stuff may be OK as long as we can’t actually see any drugs and all the criticism is aimed at Western governments rather than us, but bands with electric guitars in are definitely by definition nefarious tools of Western imperialism and probably contain actual members of the CIA.’
Attitudes were evolving slowly, however. By the turn of the next decade the GDR had embraced its own carefully choreographed version of electro-folky protest and in 1970 started an annual Political Song Festival, which took place every February: things started slowly, as evinced by the fact that the 1971 event did actually contain a performance by The Schonebeck Tractor Factory Singing Group. However, by the 1980s, invitations were being extended to the likes of fiery West German theatrical rockers Floh de Cologne and the acerbic Franz-Josef Degenhardt, fine Scottish/Australian songwriter Eric Bogle and Canada’s Bruce Cockburn - which proved that a certain amount of modernising was taking place.
Then came the big debate in the party, albeit ten years too late: what about punk? Definitely a tool of imperialism, said the hardliners. Rubbish, said the new breed: listen to this bloke with the big nose, singing about unemployment, the lies of the capitalist press, opposition to the arms race, the chain falling off his bicycle - all the stuff our youth should be hearing, comrades! The new breed won, and Billy Bragg was invited to the February 1986 Political Song Festival in East Berlin. He went down a storm and was invited back that summer for the party youth section’s Summer Song Festival Tour. Bronski Beat were supposed to be going with him apparently, but they couldn’t – so Billy invited the Neurotics.
Whether he invited me as well is a moot point, but we were pretty much a unit back then and I did much of the Neurotics’ organising, especially when speaking German was involved (at that time just adequately, but it soon got a lot better). After five minutes on the phone to Uschi at the Artists’ Agency of the German Democratic Republic, I was definitely on the bill too, if I hadn’t been already, and preparations began in earnest.
A van and driver presented no problem whatsoever. Steve’s great friend and sometime recording engineer John Mortimer (later to be nicknamed ‘Overspeed’ by our companion and translator George because of the way he incurred repeated fines by driving faster than the officially sanctioned 100kmh on GDR motorways: this wasn’t something that was going to bother us, as you’ll hear) was recruited along with his trusty Transit van. He’d already driven us all round England and through France and we knew that both he and his vehicle were very reliable: we didn’t want to break down over there.
So what the hell were we letting ourselves in for? The Neurotics would be the first Western punk band ever to play there, I’d be the second punk poet (after Bragg) and although we knew that we would be disciplined and responsible when necessary, there would nevertheless be strident opinions in evidence, lots of beer would be drunk in and out of the van, we wouldn’t always be exactly sober - and though we were all committed socialists, none of us had ever toed a party line in our lives…
I gathered together all the received Western propaganda wisdoms. We were going to EAST GERMANY, on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL, BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN, a place where there was NO DEMOCRACY and lots of SECRET POLICE called STASI. It was DULL, everybody wore GREY, ate nothing but POTATOES and SAUERKRAUT and was permanently MISERABLE because they were OPPRESSED, DENIED FREEDOM OF SPEECH and COULDN’T ESCAPE. According to regular garish headlines in every single UK visual, aural and print media outlet apart from the Morning Star.
I was really looking forward to seeing the place for myself, trying out my rusty ‘A’ Level German and making up my own mind, that’s for sure: we’d been invited, we were coming, bring it on!
First we needed visas. Uschi at the GDR Artists’ Agency assured me that there would be no problem with them, but I was nevertheless uncharacteristically reserved as I queued briefly with our passports at the East German Embassy in a basement flat just off London’s Belgrave Square. I thought I wouldn’t bother with my German, because we were after all in London.
‘Good morning. Myself and my friends The Neurotics have been invited by the Free German Youth to perform at the Summer Song Festival in Berlin, Capital of the GDR’. (NB: You didn’t call it ‘East Berlin’. Only Western reactionaries called it that.) ‘And our friend Womble – sorry, David Trent - wants to come too, although I haven’t got his passport. Here is the letter from the Artists’ Agency and our passports.’
‘Ah’ said the clerk with a smile. We were obviously expected! Everything was processed in a very short space of time, and I was told that Womble was welcome as well but he’d have to bring his passport to the office to get it stamped. I phoned him to give him the good news, went home, got on with my life and more gigs for a few weeks… and then, after organising an expensive ‘carnet’ for our musical equipment from Harlow Customs & Excise (ironically to satisfy the demands of the Western European borders we crossed in those pre ‘single market’ days: the East Germans weren’t bothered in the slightest) we set off to catch the night ferry to Zeebrugge on a Monday night, 11 August 1986. Destination: Dresden, for the first of seven gigs in a different world.
It’s incredible to think now, after about 500 appearances in Germany solo and with my band, but I played nearly 40 gigs in East Germany before doing any in the West and got my initial ones in the West from organisers who saw me first in the East. One thing is for sure though: the memory of that first tour, and the first border crossing, will stay with me as long as I live.
Dramatis personae: Steve Drewett, Neurotics’ singer/guitarist, Colin ‘Dredd’ Masters, bass (Mac ‘Cut’ McDonald would replace him on later tours), Simon Lomond, drums: John Mortimer, driver: Dave Trent, aka Womble, punk dentist and editor of the seminal ‘Wake Up’ fanzine, and myself. We’d done loads of gigs together, were great friends and were used to the usual tour stuff, but we’d never been this far, in any sense of the word. Not knowing how long the border crossing would take, and to make sure we had plenty of time to get to our destination - way across in the East near what was then Czechoslovakia - I’d decided to give us two days to get to Dresden. Beer on ferry, early Tuesday morning arrival in Zeebrugge, several hours’ drive, breakfast/beer, more driving, beer in van, stop for lunch, beer, more driving, arrive at evening destination of Hannover, cheap hotel, beer, bit of minor toothpaste and water pistol related horseplay, lots of beer, bed. Next morning, up bright(ish) and early for the 60 mile journey to the border - and our date with destiny.
I don’t normally do nervous, but I was on that day.
Helmstedt border crossing: in 1986, three years before the Wall came down, one of the major intersection points between East and West. Start of the ‘corridor’ which took West Berliners to and from their island of capitalism deep in the East, and their cars constituted most of the traffic. Scruffy English Transit van approached bearing cargo of punk rockers, equipment and beer bottles both full and empty. First the West German side: police casually brandishing machine-guns at every vehicle passing through as passports were inspected. ‘Westberlin?’ we were asked, in a bored tone of voice which assumed an affirmative answer. Beer-sodden English punks in Transit van, gig in West Berlin, obviously!
‘Nein. Festival-Tour in Ostdeutschland.’ No point in lying. The stamps were in the passports: we were sleeping with the enemy tonight. As organiser and translator, I was beckoned from the van and shown into an office, where our passports were handed to a serious looking official. He kept me standing there for a few minutes, then spoke in English. ‘You are playing in East Germany?’ he said, looking sternly at me.
I’d half imagined this scenario, but on the Eastern side of the border – not here.
‘Yes, we are the very first punk musicians to be invited – shows things are changing’ I said in reasonable German. He glowered at the passports for a couple of minutes, showed them to someone else, shrugged his shoulders, showed them to someone else, came back and handed them to me: I got back in the van, we were waved through. And that was supposed to be the easy bit…
A few hundred yards up the road stood the huge, formidable East German checkpoint (actually a long series of different checkpoints) guarded by more stern, machine-gun toting police, and in front of it was a long line of expensive-looking West German cars obviously on the way to West Berlin. Those in the front of each row were being thoroughly searched: dogs, mirrors, some having panels dismantled, you name it. We got closer and closer. I was somehow distracted and didn’t see, but the next thing I knew, our driver John Mortimer had taken a photo of the border installation!
Oh, John, you IDIOT…
Angry Grenztruppen (GDR border police) appeared brandishing guns. ‘You have taken a photo of the border. This is forbidden. Give me the camera and park over there!’ John parted with the camera and it was returned with film exposed: we parked as directed and stern faces approached. Time to play my ace card.
I’d been practising my German in readiness for this precise moment. It had better bloody work, I thought to myself.
‘I apologise for my friend’s photo. It is our first time at the GDR border and we didn’t know it was illegal.’ (LIE. I did, John obviously didn’t.) ‘We have been invited by the Free German Youth to play at the Summer Song Festival in Berlin and take part in the Summer Song Festival Tour in seven GDR cities. Here is the letter from the Artists’ Agency of the GDR and here are the multiple-entry stamps in our passports.’
The stony face cracked a hint of a smile. A bit of a puzzled smile, as if to say ‘I’m surprised the comrades from the Party youth section have decided to let scruffy drunken punk rabble like you lot in’, but a smile nevertheless. A brief consultation. The nasty Grenztruppen then went away: a friendly one inspected and stamped our passports: then, without so much as a ‘Please open the back doors of the van, sir’ we were directed past a long line of harassed-looking West Berliners in big cars and, with a celebratory drum-rolling of empty beer bottles around the floor of the vehicle, we were in the German Democratic Republic. The border crossing had taken an hour and a half, but we’d done it. A cheer went up, I got a round of applause for my efforts and celebratory beers were opened!
And then, almost immediately, we got lost.
Somehow we came off the motorway. I’ve no idea how, except that motorways in the GDR weren’t like Western ones: they were often made of cobblestones, sometimes made mainly of potholes, and occasionally had small streams running across them because they hadn’t been repaired for so long. Nevertheless, we should have managed to follow the signs to Dresden, but we didn’t: we took a wrong turning, ended up in the small town of Quedlinburg, saw a hostelry and stopped for something to eat. (I bet the owners were pleased – we had no GDR money and paid in Westmarks, gold dust to them…) As we emerged we were greeted by a local family, the Topperweins, who had seen the British numberplates and the unfamiliar vehicle – basically anything which wasn’t a Trabant, a tiny little local made car which looked as though it was made of papier mache, or a Wartburg, a bigger version of same, was totally unfamiliar at that time – and who were intrigued as to how we had ended up at their local pub. They invited us home for coffee and schnapps.
Things were starting very well indeed, given the received media wisdoms about the GDR I’d detailed above. We’d actually had slightly less hassle from the GDR border guards than from their Western counterparts - and the first people we’d met on the other side of the Iron Curtain had invited us into their home. In 1980s East Germany everyone learned Russian as their second language rather than English, for obvious geopolitical reasons, so my German got another good outing: then, armed with the necessary directions, some bottles of the Topperweins’ home made wine and a promise that they’d see us in Halle later in the tour, it was off to Dresden. And, at a prearranged point on the motorway before we got there, we met George.
George was our designated translator: he became travelling companion, friend, problem-solver and, for me, the essential helper I needed in my determined quest to find out for myself what everyday life was really like for an ordinary citizen of the German Democratic Republic (or ‘German Problematic Republic’ as he so brilliantly dubbed his homeland!) While the tour was in the planning stage I had asked the East German cultural authorities if someone could help me translate my anti-Falklands War song ‘Sawdust and Empire’ and anti-Cruise Missile song ‘Airstrip One’ into German, and they’d suggested George, whose superb command of English was complemented by the fact that his then partner Ilona was a singer/songwriter herself, able to aid in the process by fitting his translation round the chords and melody of the songs. They had done an absolutely magnificent job, and I had learned the two songs off by heart. That bit of attention to detail was going to stand me in very good stead during the gigs to come.
George spoke English with a strange Irish-German sounding hybrid accent. He’d been in the East German Navy and had travelled to all kinds of places: both his English and his reputation had reached a level where he’d received the award of Activist of Socialist Labour, one of the GDR’s highest honours, and been offered the job of personal translator to GDR leader Erich Honecker. He’d turned it down: like many people I was to meet over there, although a convinced socialist, he refused to join the Party, essential for such a high profile position. He’d preferred to stay independent and work for people like the Artists’ Agency, giving him the chance to meet and translate for musicians from all over the world. He was a real character: friendly, open, honest, a lovely bloke with a great sense of humour, a Castro beard and a dreadful nicotine habit.
It took ages to get to Dresden on those bumpy GDR roads, and we finally arrived at the Hotel Dresden about 4am on the Thursday of our first gig: a very swish hotel it was too, with Springsteen’s ‘Born In The USA’ playing in the foyer as we got there. (The Boss was massively popular in East Germany, as you’ll discover later.) Exhausted, we crawled into bed, surfacing for breakfast around noon. Once we were all gathered together, George gave us a shock. A nice shock, and one that takes some explaining…
When I had talked to the Artists’ Agency about the tour, I had obviously asked about the money side of things: as was the case with all Warsaw Pact countries, East German marks were not exchangeable or worth anything in the West at all, and I was concerned to at least recoup our expenses. Uschi at the agency had explained that West German marks were very difficult to come by for a tour such as ours. ‘Hard currency’ was something the GDR state was desperate to obtain, for all kinds of political and economic reasons: all visitors from Western countries (apart from us with our special performers’ visas) were obliged to change a certain amount of money at the border, and there were hard currency ‘tourist shops’ in every major city and airport. By the same token, it was loath to dish it out to visiting musicians. Uschi said that we would have to fund much of the travel expenses to the GDR ourselves, but once there we would have plenty of spending money: it was such a wonderful opportunity that I readily agreed on all our behalves. Little did any of us know what the GDR cultural comrades’ idea of ‘plenty of spending money’ would be…
‘Now folks’ said George, ‘I’m not hanging on to this lot any longer, I’m giving it to you.’ He handed me a thin envelope containing, if I remember rightly, about 300 DM – maybe a third of what it would be costing us to get there and back. My initial disappointment was blown away by what happened next.
He produced a small suitcase-like object and opened it: inside were bundles of brand new 50 GDR mark notes, fresh from the bank. Lots of bundles. It was like something out of a gangster film. The Neurotics and I gaped in amazement. Soon we would gape more. ‘Here you are’ he said. You’ll be given the other half at the artists’ agency tomorrow.’
He then went off to pick Billy Bragg up from the airport, leaving us to pick our jaws up off the floor. When we’d done so, we divvied out the money: we’d each got the equivalent of well over a grand. And that was just half of it! It was a surreal feeling. Here we were in a self-proclaimed socialist country for the first time, and, for one week only, we were richer than any of us had ever been, and far, far richer than most East Germans. Rich in a currency we couldn’t spend anywhere else – and, as we were soon to find out, one we were going to find very difficult to spend where we were. But it was a lovely summer afternoon on our first full day in the German Democratic Republic, and it was time to have a look round.
Dresden had of course been destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt in a very modern style, but it certainly wasn’t ‘grey’ or ‘soulless’: it was a lively, bustling place, with a shopping precinct as appealing, or horrible, as any you could find in the West, depending on whether you liked shopping or not. There was a big difference, though. Most items were GDR ‘own brand’ which meant that there was hardly any choice, just one or two kinds of everything – but then that’s all you need. Everyday stuff (bread, vegetables, beer, potatoes, fruit, sausages, schnaps, cigarettes, toys, clothes, toothpaste and so on, along with other basic needs like heating, lighting and rent) were unbelievably cheap, an infinitesimal percentage of the weekly wage. It’s difficult to make a modern day prices-to-wages UK comparison but I’d say a bottle of beer, for instance, would have worked out at about 10p at 2014 prices, a loaf of bread about 5p. On the other hand, consumer goods were incredibly expensive: a very 1970s looking colour TV sold for the equivalent of several weeks’ wages. (There again, because everything else was so cheap, it was easier to save than it would be in the West.) Needless to say, the people weren’t dressed in grey and miserable-looking: they looked, sounded and behaved just like, well, people everywhere. Amusing aside: the GDR ‘own brand’ cola was called Prick Cola. ‘Prick’ means ‘fizzy’ in German. A bottle was brought home with us and adorned the bar at the Square in Harlow for years…
Then to the gig, in an outdoor ampitheatre not far from the hotel. First there was a cheery meeting with Billy Bragg, who had flown in separately with his roadie/guitarist Wiggy and manager Peter Jenner, then the sound checks, and then I was on, to be followed by the Neurotics, then Billy. I remember a lovely, sunny summer evening and a friendly, attentive audience maybe a couple of thousand strong: I’d got the set worked out well in advance, together with my introductions in my soon-to-improve German. No poems of course, because of the language barrier, but a selection of my best songs including the very topical ‘Libyan Students from Hell’ and ‘World War Three’ and finishing with the two songs George and Ilona had translated for me – the first time I had ever sung in German in public.
At all the gigs in the GDR the introductions were very important. The Neurotics and I had been welcomed there because of the political nature of much of our material, and because everyone was singing in English, it was George’s job to summarise the themes being sung about before each song, except in my case, where George helped me a couple of times at first, and from then on I was fine on my own. My gig went well: everyone appreciated my efforts with the language in my introductions, and my songs in German, ‘Startbahn One’ (Airstrip One) and ‘Glanzendes Empire’ (literally, ‘Shining Empire’) went down an absolute storm.
The Neurotics rocked their arses off, aided by possibly the best PA system I’d ever heard them play through – another preconception about the GDR gone by the board, no primitive sound systems powered by old tractor parts or whatever – and it was plain that the crowd had never seen a live band like that before: they loved it. Billy finished things off in fine style, an electric solo singer/guitarist in every sense of the word, and we joined him for a spontaneous, unrehearsed and chaotically rousing version of The Clash’s ‘Garageland’. Our first ever gig in the GDR had been a roaring success, but things were about to get even better: backstage we were given an invitation to the following February’s Political Song Festival – the event Billy had played earlier that year - which would mean a whole week in Berlin and another national tour. We celebrated with a lake of VEB (literally ‘People’s Own’) Berliner Pilsner beer. No, it wasn’t real ale, and for once I didn’t care.
The next gig was in East Berlin, the capital city, showcase of the whole tour, filmed and recorded for national radio and TV. So the next morning it was back on the cracked and cobbly roads, past a succession of broken down and occasionally burnt-out, abandoned Trabants and Wartburgs, and into ‘Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR’. The East Germans had about fifty per cent of the divided city, but for them their half WAS the city: the rest was simply ‘Westberlin’. George drove me to the artists’ agency, where I finally got the chance to put a face to the Uschi I’d been talking to on the phone from England. I picked up another huge wedge of cash, doled it out to a bunch of disbelieving Neurotics, and we made our way to the gig.
We were playing in a huge square, packed with around 6,000 people: on previous nights acts like The Dubliners and Dick Gaughan had done their stuff, along with other acts from all over the world, and now it was our turn. I started events off once again, and after a few of my own songs decided to test out their Clash knowledge with my version of ‘Spanish Bombs’. Some punks down the front started pogoing – and the gig just took off from there. I was very well received, but the Neurotics went down like heroes: that gig remains for me the best one they have ever done (I’ve seen a few!) and there is an iconic picture of Steve with his guitar at the end of the set, receiving the acclamation of six thousand people, his biggest audience ever. Billy played another stunning set in a thunderstorm, and then it was back to the hotel and a very interesting encounter indeed.
So far everyone we’d met had been very much part of the official set up: nobody was forced to help with the organisation or attend the gigs, and we seemed to be surrounded by enthusiastic volunteers, music lovers involved to a greater or lesser degree in the national communist youth organisation. The gigs were much like gigs anywhere else, to be honest, the only difference being that there weren’t many punks (and LOADS of mullet haircuts!) and the ideology of the state which was promoting the tour coincided, theoretically at least, with my own. I was really keen to get into some serious discussions with the activists around me about the pros and cons of life in the GDR, but at that point everything had been such a dash that I really hadn’t had the chance. And so it was that the very first proper discussion I took part in was with someone who absolutely loathed the place and was desperate to leave.
Back at the hotel (where The Ramones and ‘Dallas’ were on TV – West German stations were freely available everywhere in the GDR apart from Dresden, and many GDR citizens were thoroughly familiar with both the best and the worst of Western culture) Billy introduced us to Mario, whom he had met the previous February. Mario had been trying to set up gigs and had tried to go through the official channels, but his application had been rejected and now he was involved in the underground punk scene and was getting a load of hassle. He told us that there were a number of illegal gigs happening, mainly in churches, but there was always trouble with the police: he’d had enough, he said, and he wanted to emigrate to the West, where people could travel where they liked, organise the gigs they wanted, buy fashionable clothes and not be like the grey sheep he lived and worked with, happy to fit in with the system…
So what about the people who had set up this tour, I asked him. Were they all grey sheep? What about people like George, outspoken, humourous and full of life, who refused to join the party, but who loved his country, appreciated the good aspects and wanted to fight to make socialism better? Did Mario know about the reality of life in the West, where the simple guarantee of the basics necessary for life didn’t exist, where there was homelessness, poverty, unemployment? Yes, he did, he said, but he didn’t care. It was what he wanted, and that was all that mattered. I guess that was the point for Mario and those like him, before and after the fall of the Wall: they thought that they’d be OK ‘cos they were clever and confident: as for the fate of those who weren’t, it wasn’t their problem. The classic individualistic ‘Western’ worldview in a nutshell.
But the overriding point that struck me about that encounter was that if a young bloke already known to the authorities as a dissident could spend half the night with a bunch of Westerners in a hotel room complaining about the system he was living under and not get thrown in nick, then the GDR couldn’t quite be the evil, repressive hell hole the Western media made it out to be. He left us a tape of some of the bands he’d been trying to organise gigs for: as Womble said, they made Crass sound like the London Symphony Orchestra. No reason to ban them, of course, but every reason not to listen to the tape more than once…
We talked to Mario until well into the early hours, then, after he’d gone, discussed what he’d said amongst ourselves for a while longer – all washed down with copious amounts of beer. By the time we got to bed the sun was coming up, and not long after that George was back, telling us it was time to get up and on the road for the next gig in George’s home town of Halle Neustadt. Halle Newtown, I thought to myself. The Neurotics should be in their element there…
Bleary-eyed, back on the road, past more broken down Trabants and occasional packs of wild boar, cousins to the ones on the menu last night. Halle was indeed a new town, home to massive chemical plants which spewed ghastly pollution everywhere, and most specifically into the river Saale, which was a dead zone, stinking and yellow. I was shocked. East Berlin had taken my nose back into childhood with the smell of the Trabants’ two-stroke engines and the brown coal (lignite) used in industrial production – but Halle was in a different league. Trees spindly and dying, grass stunted, and the effect on the lungs of the local population (especially in a country where 90% were chain smokers) could only be guessed at. What had this got to do with socialism?
I asked George.
‘It all dates back to a declaration by former SED party chief Walter Ulbricht, comrade’ he said, sarcastically. ‘Ulbricht said that the industrial development of the GDR and the increase in the living standards of its people was more important than environmental considerations.’
‘But that’s a complete fucking pile of bollocks!’ I said. If the very air the people breathe stinks, the rivers are dead and the environment a danger to human health it is a betrayal of everything socialism is supposed to stand for…’
George agreed. As did absolutely everyone I met at my gigs in the GDR, whatever their point of view on other issues. For me the pollution question – beyond belief in the Halle/Bitterfeld area but bad everywhere, especially in winter when domestic chimneys spewing lignite smoke added to the industrial fog – was by far the worst aspect of life there: many people inside and outside the ruling party were involved in campaigns against it, and at the time of our first visit some of them were suffering considerable harassment as a result. Environmental activists would play a huge part in the left wing (yes, left wing: the Western commentators want us to forget this, but it was) movement which eventually led to the collapse of the Wall and the forming of ‘Neues Forum’ and ‘Bundnis 90’, the East German Green activist party which still exists to this day.
We drove through Halle to our venue for the afternoon’s gig – not in a new town at all but the exact opposite, Schloss Moritzburg, an atmospheric, 500 year old castle. Another open air event, sunny weather, beer in abundance, a large, receptive crowd… and a lone, clueless bonehead in a ‘Britain Is Great’ T shirt who ‘sieg heiled’ during Bragg’s set and was thoroughly put in his place by the big-nosed balladeer from Barking. Another surprise: firstly, that there would be anyone cretinous enough to do that in the GDR, of all places, and secondly, that he wasn’t immediately dragged away by the authorities. As would happen here, fellow gig goers had a go at him, there was a brief scuffle, he disappeared and that was that. All as it should be really. But, unbelievably, there really was a problem with neo-Nazi boneheads in the GDR, especially at the football: a problem that would only get worse after the Wall came down…
The gig finished with a thunderous collective version of the Neurotics’ ‘Living With Unemployment’, then loads more beer and another chance to quiz the local population. Rent? About £20 a month in modern terms. Water free: heating, electricity a tiny, nominal sum. Nobody needed to worry about the necessities of life, that’s for sure. Accommodation just about adequate, though the outside of the older buildings had been left to go to pot (often bullet holes from wartime battles were still clearly visible) and the modern flats had mostly been built in that drab utilitarian style common to many Eastern European countries. Despite the basic provision by the state, a few daring people, mainly from the alternative scene, squatted in unoccupied buildings to give themselves more space and to keep out of the way of the authorities.
I learned about the Trabant cars: you put your name on a waiting list and eight to ten years later you got one. Spare parts were often hard to come by and there was an unofficial ‘swap shop’ in every town. They were very flimsy, often broke down and the bodywork fell to bits at the slightest encouragement: the state of the roads was encouragement enough for older models, hence the relics at the side of the motorways. Nevertheless, people took pride in them, decorated them in all kinds of esoteric ways – and, of course, it was a big deal when your number came up at the factory and you took charge of one for the first time. To compensate for what would be seen by many in the West (not by me, I was a non-driver then and remained so until the year 2000) as a grave infringement of personal freedom, public transport was plentiful and incredibly cheap.
We talked about history, some of which I knew from previous study. After the War all East German military-related industry and everything owned by the Nazi state and by war criminals, large private firms (some of which had profited from Nazi atrocities in a big way) and large landowners had been confiscated and nationalised. Successive Five and Seven Year Plans increased nationalisation, though small scale private enterprise, both rural and urban, was still possible, in contrast to the Stalinist forced collectivisations in the Soviet Union. From the Seventies onwards, as well as catering for the basic necessities of life, special consideration had been made to improving the availability and quality of consumer goods, to the point where the GDR was generally considered to be the best-equipped of all the socialist countries in that regard.
But yes, everyone agreed, the pollution was terrible. Far worse, I said, than anything I had seen in the West. So why, I asked, was capitalism, where the incentive is purely to make money, better at dealing with pollution than socialism, where the incentive is supposed to be a better life for all? A local party ideologue gave me the official line. While the Marshall Plan was ploughing economic aid into West Germany, the GDR was paying reparations to the Soviet Union, meaning that modernisation of industry in the West was far more advanced and the GDR was still reliant on older style manufacturing methods. The GDR had fewer natural resources than West Germany, and its coal, brown coal or lignite, was of inferior quality and therefore far more pollutative.
It all sounded plausible… but we socialists claim to be custodians of the planet, and it wasn’t acceptable, was it, comrade? Stinking rivers, smoggy skies, withered trees? And still less acceptable was the persecution of fellow socialists who complained about it!
He looked a bit flustered. If the East German authorities thought they had imported a bunch of line-toeing punk ideologues, they had another think coming.
I quickly worked out that the real, committed socialists were the questioning activists, and the dogmatic timeservers trotting out the official line mostly didn’t believe a word of what they were saying and just wanted to feather their own nests and have a quiet life. The best way to question dubious aspects of the GDR when talking to this kind of Party hack was to couch my arguments in classic, idealistic Marxist terms and let them confront their own contradictions. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of them confronted them head on by confirming that they’d never believed a word of what they were saying and joining the right wing CDU: one of those, of course, was current German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a one time FDJ Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda. Says it all really.
I was knackered: not much sleep the night before, an afternoon gig, lots of beer and hours talking to friendly people on a warm, sunny day. Off to bed and, the next day, off to Suhl, a particularly good gig for yours truly at another open air event in the town square (I went on after perhaps the worst pop band in East Germany, mullets and all, which may have partly explained the reception). On the way, we got stopped - for speeding. GDR motorway speed limits were rigorously enforced, maybe a good idea given the nature of the vehicles and the roads, and we found ourselves with a 200 mark fine, which was paid with smothered guffaws. We really did have too much money…
Back to the hotel for a good rest: the following day was supposed to be a day off. It was there that I met Anne McElvoy, a young English journalist – at the time, I believe, correspondent for The Times, later an author of several books about the GDR and now a well-known writer and broadcaster. She’d turned up to see Billy, and we ended up having long arguments about the system: I remember her as being quite right wing, but witty and charming. She gave me her phone number – for strictly professional reasons, I might add – and asked me to get in touch when we got back to England. I never did.
We’d had an offer to do an unofficial gig at the student club at Berlin Humbolt University on our day off, so back we went, and a great time was had by all: no PA, café tables for a stage, a lovely punk rock atmosphere – and this was an unsanctioned gig with no FDJ officialdom present whatsoever. We danced on the tables, did loads of silly covers, talked to students about their lives, met a militant from the South African ANC called Pinky, in East Berlin for education and military training, and a few of his mates, spent hours drinking and talking with them and finally crashed in some empty rooms in the student accommodation block. ‘Crashed’ being the operative word. We were having an absolutely fantastic time. The next day George told us that the authorities were none too happy that we’d left Suhl a day early and done an unofficial gig, but he’d had a word and it was all sorted out. Well done George. Once again, this didn’t appear to be quite the monolithic, authoritarian state the Daily Mail had warned us about…
Now we really did have a day off, and I had plans for the large sum of GDR marks in my wallet. I made my way to the main state musical instrument store in the centre of East Berlin and spent several thoroughly enjoyable hours trying out violins. I narrowed it down to two: a beautiful modern one made by a local luthier, and a splendidly battered mid-19th century Bohemian folk fiddle with the most fantastic tone I had ever coaxed out of an instrument in my life. I could afford either: thanks to our hosts’ generosity I could afford anything in the shop. Sound before beauty, I decided, and I bought myself a piece of Czech musical history. Years later I had it properly valued and identified, and even in its battered state it is worth a fair sum: far more importantly, armed with a Barcus Berry pick up, it has been a vital part of my armoury ever since I founded my band Barnstormer in 1994. Very often, when I take it out of its case, my mind goes back to those days in the GDR.
Later in the day it was back in the van and off to Leipzig, where we would be playing the following day: after a good night’s sleep there was plenty of time to explore the town, a hotch potch of ancient, cobbled streets and modern open squares in the Soviet style. The gig was in an old Zeppelin hanger: a huge crowd and another storming night, ending with the by now traditional ‘Garageland’ and ‘Living With Unemployment’ belted out by all concerned. The local English language students had asked me to do a poetry performance too, which was most enjoyable, and then it was back to the hotel and another attempt to spend all that money. I recall Colin from the Neurotics ordering a huge bottle of cognac. By this time I was feeling really uneasy about the whole money thing: paradoxically, since it was I who had the least left, thanks to the violin. ‘Find something good to spend it on!’ I urged the others. I think Steve bought a camera. But Colin and Simon? Cognac, taxi rides, and rounds of beers for anyone that wanted them. And there was still loads left over. We ended up giving some away.
Then back to Berlin via another speeding fine, and the final gig – again at the university student club, but an official one this time. Once more we ended up doing a bunch of covers: Billy joined me on Eric Bogle’s ‘Green Fields of France’, then he did a great version of Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ and we all bashed out ‘Garageland’. Amid much mutual congratulation and audience acclaim, our first tour of the GDR, the first ever by a bunk of UK punk rockers, was over. Apart, of course, from loads more conversations and loads more beer…
The next morning we said thanks and goodbye to Billy, Wiggy and Peter Jenner, and a more poignant goodbye to George, whom we dropped off on the motorway so he could hitch a ride home. We were all very much aware that we could visit him but he couldn’t come and see us, and he had become a really good friend: things were made easier by the fact that we knew were coming back the following February. Then it was home. Or as Simon put it: ‘Back to the land of poverty and unemployment. And the rat race.’ I knew I wouldn’t miss the awful roads and the pollution, or the toilet paper, which resembled fine sandpaper: as George put it, they made it like that to ensure that every last arsehole in the GDR was red. But there was lots I would miss: the lack of advertising, the laid-back, non-competitive lifestyle, the absence of poverty and unemployment, the sense that everyone was on the same side and working slowly towards a common goal. I was sad to leave, and very pleased to know that myself and the Neurotics would be coming back just six months later. Without further ado, I’ll continue the story.
Our second tour was very different, being the annual Political Song Festival I mentioned at the start of this chapter, a huge event with many different performers from all over the world. The format was the same every year: the first week was spent doing gigs in East Berlin, then in the second week a selection of the acts went on tour to six different cities. Given that it was held in February the weather was as different as it could be as well: the sun-kissed memories of our first visit were replaced with sub-zero temperatures, treacherous pavements and even more defunct Trabants at the sides of the roads. This time the border crossing was a piece of cake - with our multi-entry visas and our invitation to the Festival we were almost welcomed by the Grenztruppen, and the West Germans didn’t seem as bothered as last time either.
But there had been an interesting prelude to the tour. The GDR Artists’ Agency had contacted the Sokolov Festival, a political song festival held in the Czech (at that time of course Czechoslovak) town of that name immediately before the start of their one in Berlin, asking them to put myself and the Neurotics on there. There were strong links between the two, and many performers were booked for both. I got a phone call a few weeks after our return to England asking me if we were interested, and we were booked: then, a couple of weeks later, the invitation was cancelled. On arrival in East Berlin the second time I found out why. The Czechoslovak communist youth organisation thought they’d won the argument with their elders about punk, but it turned out that they hadn’t. Punk rock was still officially decadent and reactionary over there: the Sokolov Festival went ahead with the usual acoustic stuff, and we went straight to Berlin. Bunch of hippies.
And there, of course, was George to meet and translate for us once again: this time we got to meet his then partner, the talented singer Ilona Vildebrand who had helped him translate my songs, and stepdaughter Fanny as well. Apart from some fantastic gigs, for me the most memorable aspect of the February festival week in Berlin – events took place in different venues all over the city centre - were the hours of discussions long into the night in Berlin’s Haus der jungen Talente (literally, House of Young Talents) opposite the Ministry building. This was the post event ‘party zone’ where festival organisers and musicians, party activists and, yes, some cynics and dissidents all gathered to drink copiously and share ideas and experiences. In seven days of intense conversation my desire to learn as much as I could about what was going on in the GDR forced my German into previously uncharted areas: in purely linguistic terms, I’ve never looked back. When I tell my German audiences that I learned their language in East Germany, it’s that week that truly sticks in my mind.
An awful lot was talked about how the changes which were beginning to happen in the Soviet Union would affect life in the GDR – at the time, we naively thought, these changes could only benefit socialism, making it more flexible and democratic. At the Central Committee Plenum of the SU just a month earlier the groundbreaking Soviet reforming leader Mikhail Gorbachev had reinforced his modernising message, and this was resonating with young East German activists, often to the dismay of older comrades and certainly that of the leadership, led by Erich Honecker. The old SED Party slogan ‘Von der UdSSR lernen ist siegen lernen’ (Learning from the USSR is learning to win), which had been trotted out for years by the old guard as a symbol of the GDR’s subservience to the Soviet line, had gained a new significance: for the first time the Soviet Union was ahead of the GDR in the modernisation stakes, and the new generation had turned that slogan on its head. But of course we didn’t just talk about politics: we discussed everything under the sun, very much contrary to the received Western wisdom that there was no freedom of expression in the GDR and that people were scared to voice their opinions. I’d stagger back to the Hotel Stadt Berlin every night in the small hours with a head full of ideas and a belly full of beer: sometimes the Neurotics would be with me, sometimes, I’m sure, they were lying under a table somewhere! An absolutely inspirational time, and one I’ll never forget.
As for the gigs themselves, each one grouped together a number of performers and bands from all over the world in a single event. The Neurotics and I were always together – we came as a package – and fellow performers at our gigs included radical Sandinista-supporting singer Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy and his band, the brilliant West German satirist Dietrich Kittner (father of the late Konrad from seminal Hannover punks Absturzende Brieftauben) the Kalahari Surfers from South Africa, Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa and radical singer/songwriter Heber Bartolome from the Philippines. Heber and I bonded over the chessboard one night, and in the second part of the tour, which took us by bus all over the GDR, we played endlessly on the journeys. He was (still is, I’m sure) a lovely bloke, and a very good chess player indeed…
Some of the venues were more formal than on our first tour: audiences older, more Party functionaries present, fewer young music fans. Without doubt the most impressive concert venue we performed at in Berlin was at the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), seat of the East German parliament and symbol of German socialism. It has now been demolished, despite the fact that a majority of East Germans wanted to keep it: as I say, winners write history. We also played at the Volksbuhne (People’s Theatre), the Congress Hall, the Sports Hall and at Humboldt University Audimax Theatre, and it was at the last of these that I met Robert Richter, a lifelong friend to this day.
Robert, then a teenage officer cadet in the East German army, the NVA (National People’s Army) had seen Billy Bragg at the previous year’s festival, then at his summer gigs with us: having enjoyed our sets, he turned up early to see us at the Political Song Festival and after our soundcheck came up and said hello. The fact that he did so showed his independence of spirit, because members of the armed forces weren’t supposed to have unsupervised contact with people from the West, even supposedly ideologically sound ones like us. We got chatting and, among other things, he told me that part of his training was learning to drive a tank for 24 hours non stop! (Years later, when he drove my band Barnstormer and me around Germany and I’d marvel at his ability to stay awake, I’d remind myself of that.) Robert joined us at the evening discussion/drinking session after the gig that night and came to some of the other Berlin shows we did, including a much less formal affair on an island in the river Spree called the Insel der Jugend (Island of Youth). His intelligence and willingness to be absolutely open about all aspects of life in the GDR, the good and the bad, and our shared love of football (he supports the Berlin workers’ team Union Berlin, in the 1980s sworn enemies of the Stasi-sponsored permanent GDR league champions Dynamo) meant that his conversations were an absolute ‘window’ to me. We got on like a house on fire.
Before we left, I swapped books with him; I gave him a copy of my first poetry collection ‘Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters’ and he gave me ‘Vom Militarischen Beruf’(About the Military Profession’) the handbook given to all young NVA cadets. Weirdly interesting it was too. Robert took my book into his barracks - you weren’t supposed to have books from the West either - and, when told by the officers that he wasn’t allowed to keep it, informed them that he had been given it as a present at the Political Song Festival by his friend Attila, an invited performer from England! They didn’t argue with that. What they’d have said if they’d known that he’d given me their handbook, I can only guess: it must have been classified. Even at an early age he was made of stern stuff, was Robert.
We did one other gig in Berlin – at lunchtime, in a transformer factory. Part of the ethos of the festival, and indeed of the GDR, was to make culture available to all: one of the things which struck me on my travels round the country was the amount of arts centres and performance spaces there were, and work-related cultural activities were very much part of the norm. Moreover, there can be no doubt that the workers whose lunchtime we invaded that day were genuinely interested in the performance and the ideas I was sharing: I could tell by the questions they asked about songs they had obviously never heard before. It wasn’t a showcase put-up job. This was a country where you walked down the street without being confronted with advertising for stuff you didn’t need, where education was valued and available to all, especially to clever people from a working class background, where ‘celebrity culture’ didn’t exist…it was a completely different way of living, of doing things. There were always nagging doubts, mainly about just how much of the bad stuff I simply wasn’t encountering, despite my best efforts, because of the circles I was moving in, but in many ways I felt very much at home, for the first time in my life in a country where so many of the fripperies of Western life just didn’t exist and the values of the State seemed to match my own.
Then came perhaps the most memorable day of the whole trip: our visit to the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp memorial, 35 kilometres north of Berlin. It wasn’t simply its location so close to the capital which made it an important site in the GDR: it was one of the main camps for political prisoners, including the Communist leader and GDR icon Ernst Thalmann, and therefore had a particular significance. It was a specialist SS training camp where up and coming Nazi thugs learned the brutal methods they would take with them to camps elsewhere - torture, medical experimentation, execution, a ghastly place indeed. But rather than simply document the awful abuses that had happened there, the whole memorial was presented in the context of the victory over fascism – so that you walked out feeling at once humbled by the sacrifices made, and angered and inspired to carry on the anti-fascist struggle in the modern era. Learning from history.
For the second week of the Political Song Festival we set off on tour to six GDR towns and cities: Potsdam near Berlin, Dresden, Freiburg, Mittweida, Leipzig and Halle. We’d already visited three of these six months earlier, of course, and found a fair few fans waiting for us, which was great: once again the gigs on this part of the tour were in much more formal locations than on our first one, although since many of the former had been open air gigs in high summer and the temperature was now about ten degrees below freezing, this was hardly unexpected. I saw the occasional pained expression on the faces of some of the more elderly attendees when the Neurotics were in full flow, but once again we were very well received, and for me the political discussions continued apace. I heard talk of a new beginning for the GDR music scene, a vibrant new ‘youth radio’ station and loads of new bands, although we didn’t meet any at that point.
One of the most interesting gigs I did in that second week was at the ‘Ernst Schneller’ SED party school in Mittweida near Karl-Marx-Stadt (now of course reverted to its pre-war name, Chemitz). I did an acoustic performance of my songs to a middle-aged to elderly audience and then had a fascinating discussion with all and sundry about punk rock, culture under socialism, the history of the GDR, the Wall and its implications, and the much neglected history of the internal anti-fascist struggle in Germany during the Second World War. It was my first serious discussion with members of the older generation in the GDR and once again stretched my German to its limits and beyond, but it was incredibly worthwhile. I met people committed to the system, not though timeserving or the search for a quiet life, but because of personal and political experience and sacrifice. The Western (especially West German) commentators who dismiss the GDR and its history out of hand should have heard that discussion: it might have given their black and white mindset a bit of a jolt.
We travelled by bus through a frozen landscape, and on more than one occasion the bus broke down or got stuck in the snow, but we took it all in good heart and I had the aforementioned chess lessons from Heber Bartolome as a bonus. I also had a musical surprise from way outside the word of punk rock which warmed the cockles of my heart. In George’s home town of Halle we did a gig with his friends Horch, the first band I had encountered who mixed medieval music and rock since Focus and Crucible in the Seventies. As mentioned earlier, I have always loved early music, and Horch were brilliant, another of the inspirations for the medieval punk band Barnstormer I formed a few years later. We became good mates, and egged on by George I started to hatch a plan to get them over to England. As it turned out, that would eventually be a whole lot easier than I expected…
At the end of the tour the most difficult aspect of the GDR hit us full in the face: the fact that the freedom to travel we took for granted was denied to its citizens. Tearful farewells at the border this time: we had made some proper friends now, and we knew that although we could visit them, they couldn’t come and see us. But we all knew the short term solution to this, and later in 1987 came yet another invitation, this time for the Rocksommer Festival in Summer 1988. We kept in touch, of course. Letters. Remember those old things?
When we came back for the third time, about sixteen months later, things had moved forward apace both politically and musically. Gorbachev’s reforms were in full effect in the Soviet Union and all kinds of impassioned discussions about how (and whether or not) to implement them in the GDR were taking place in the SED and FDJ. The GDR youth radio station DT 64, which had started as a programme on the state network and had become a station in its own right in 1986, was playing the kind of stuff that would have seemed unthinkable a few years before. Broadcaster and DJ Lutz Schramm, best described as the John Peel of the GDR, was using his programme called ‘Parocktikum’ to give airtime to the a swathe of new bands I’d first heard about the previous year, collectively known as ‘Die Anderen Bands’ (The Other Bands). At a Rocksommer gig at the Insel der Jugend in Berlin on the 20th of July, the Neurotics and I got to meet and perform with two of the leading ones: Die Skeptiker from Berlin and Die Art from Leipzig, all recorded for transmission by Radio DT64. As befitted the new and changing times, this recording ended up as a bootleg cassette…
Die Art and Die Skeptiker were a completely different kettle of fish from the frankly insipid pop (or Mario’s awful tuneless shouty ‘punk’ noise!) which constituted the homegrown stuff we’d encountered previously. Die Art were measured and, well, arty, definitely influenced by Joy Division: not my personal cup of tea but polished and professional. Die Skeptiker, on the other hand, were quite simply the GDR’s very own Dead Kennedys, right down to singer Eugen Balanskat’s Jello Biafra-like vocal inflections and theatrics, and we loved them. When Eugen asked me if I knew the words to ‘Holiday In Cambodia’ I wasn’t surprised at all, and I took the mic with gusto! Both bands were developing a large and enthusiastic following, their new-found opportunities a reflection of the changing times.
But however much things were changing, it still remained the case that in order to do official gigs and not risk hassle from the authorities, bands had to seek approval and a licence from the FDJ. Some people had never been prepared to do that, and from the early 80s onwards there had been an underground anarchist punk scene completely at odds with the authorities and harassed by the Stasi, as Mario had described. Many of those people regarded anyone who worked with the system in any way as a traitor: in Leipzig on this tour I was to meet one such person. And thereby hangs a tale…
I remember the encounter for lots of reasons: his name was Imad, he was a dark skinned punk in a country where there were very few people of colour (and not that many punks) he was a member of a legendary Leipzig anarchist punk band called L’Attentat and he was very loudly critical of the system and even more so of me. I met him after our gig. ‘What are you doing playing in this shit state (Scheissstaat?) Call yourself a punk rocker? You’re just playing for a bunch of state hacks, and you’re probably only here anyway because no-one likes you in the UK.’
I shot straight back. ‘Well, mate, I’ve earned my living in England as a poet and musician for seven years, done sessions for John Peel and been on the front of Melody Maker, I’m here because I want to be, I say what I want, and there are many aspects of life in this country that I prefer to life back home, actually…’
Cue raging argument. Loads of people stood around listening, some joined in on either side. I didn’t agree with his seemingly cartoon-punk and nihilistic dismissal of everything in the GDR as ‘shit’ (I don’t have any time for a similar ‘anarchist’ attitude over here either) but I did respect his spirited and confrontational approach, very different to anyone I had met there at that time. I remembered the encounter, and the band name, and back in Leipzig some years later I asked what had happened to him. Turns out he was a Stasi agent provocateur. I immediately thought: what did the GDR authorities gain from that? Punk had and has a progressive world view which certainly isn’t at odds with the basic ideals of socialism: what was the point of employing someone to drive people attracted by the punk ethos into, literally, crass oppositional nihilism? Ridiculous.
I must have a Stasi file after the amount of gigs and discussions I had there: I know for a fact that one of our local entourage back then was an IM, or Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (Unofficial Co-Worker). I’d love to see that file: maybe I will one day. Whenever the GDR is mentioned in the Western media these days, the word ‘Stasi’ is normally not far behind, in the world of Rupert Murdoch and his minions a monster so unspeakable that any worthwhile aspects of the society associated with it are rendered meaningless. Countless thousands of IMs quietly reporting on their fellow citizens, mostly about things which weren’t remotely a threat to the state, for reasons varying from a desire for social advancement to personal vindictiveness to, in most cases I’d say, a genuine although misguided belief that by doing so they were somehow protecting socialism. As has often been pointed out, an early, very primitive, far less effective version of the North American Security Agency’s Prism surveillance system.
Since the Wall came down I have the feeling that the Western media get much more worked up about the ‘Stasi question’ than the majority of the people in East Germany did or do – an impression that my ex GDR friends share. Because of their fixation on this aspect of GDR life, the West can’t understand the current ‘Ostalgie’ – literally East nostalgia - and why opinion polls suggest that an absolute majority of former citizens old enough to remember say they were happier then that they are now. ‘Nostalgia for a Dictatorship’ go the headlines. Having been over there more or less every year from 1986 to date, and seen what has happened to a lot of people – mass unemployment, impoverishment, devastation, alienation, the loss of the feeling of social solidarity, of their whole identity as citizens of a communitarian state - I do understand, maybe better than the majority of West Germans who have never been there. Economic deprivation and a doctrine of enforced individualism against the will and inclination of millions is at least as much in breach of human rights as denial of freedom of speech and the right to travel: the dream of the activists who brought down the Wall was to end the latter without allowing the former to flourish. Sadly, of course, this was not to be.
And it really is not true that there was no discussion or freedom of speech in the GDR. Of course, advocating the restoration of capitalism was outlawed, and fundamental criticisms of the Party’s direction (as with the ecological movement) or personal insults hurled at the leadership got people into serious trouble. But when it came to the way people ran their local communities, it seemed to me to be very much a grass roots society, and constructive collective discussion of problems was absolutely encouraged and acted upon. Some anarchists will probably hate this, but much of what I saw on a day to day level in the GDR reminded me of the left wing autonomous centres where myself and my band play the majority of our gigs in Germany today, West as well as East, or of the communities which stood together during the miners’ strike. People working together in a common cause, driven not by a desire to make money but by concern for each other and for their community. Simple stuff - which mainstream Western society rejects absolutely, but which still strikes a chord with many ordinary East Germans. That’s why so many people in the East are so disillusioned today.
The final memory I shall share of that 1988 tour was of a legendary Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin, a marvellous event in front of 300,000 people, which coincidentally took place the day before our aforementioned gig at the Insel der Jugend. The Boss had had a huge following there for years, and his blue-collar roots and progressive - by US standards! - political stance meant that he was an ideal guest for the wannabe modernisers of the FDJ. The Neurotics and I were backstage at that gig, and quite apart from hugely enjoying Springsteen (I am quite a fan, especially of the early stuff) it was wonderful to see the new hope on the faces of so many in the audience, a belief that the reforms emanating from the Soviet Union would mean a new, different, more liberal socialism. New and different it would be soon enough, that’s for sure, but not in the way millions hoped…
More sad goodbyes to Robert, George and our other friends at the end of another tour, but not long afterwards I was invited back for the 1989 Political Song Festival, this time on my own: after nine inspirational years the Neurotics had finally called it a day at an emotional night at the Fulham Greyhound on October 29th 1988. The fact that I could make my contributions in German and now had a pretty good understanding of everyday life in the GDR was definitely a factor in these repeated invitations. So back I came again the following February, and this time there was a real feeling of revolution in the air – revolution from the Left. Banners at the events saying ‘Mehr Sozialismus, bitte!’ (more socialism, please) prominent ecological campaigners at the late night discussions in the Haus der jungen Talente, Gorbachev now a hero to all but the most died in the wool party hacks, a genuine feeling in the circles I was moving in that a new society was possible comprising the best of the economic and social achievements of the GDR with real political democracy. It was the Left – and, as far as I could see, only the Left – who were leading the opposition to the current regime and trying to move things forward, and the feeling of solidarity at the festival was incredible.
But the bad things – the pollution, the leaden hand of bureaucracy - were of course still there: the old guard was still in control and everyone was being careful. As well as my festival gigs, the discussions, the beer, the sheer excitement of the times, I had a mission on this visit: as mentioned earlier I was determined to organise a UK tour for Horch, George’s medieval rock mates from Halle, and to go through whatever bureaucratic hoops were necessary to make it happen. If I thought that the changes in the air would make the unbelievably complicated procedure associated with getting UK tour exit visas for a bunch of GDR musicians (plus George as translator) any easier, I had another think coming! But the fact that I was by now an established visitor and the band were held in high esteem in the GDR meant that after a couple of meetings at the Artists’ Agency I was given a guarded yes, subject to various checks which would mean more phone calls and faxes (those old things) when I got home. Once again I said my goodbyes, this time hoping very much that at least a few of the friends I had made in my years of visits would finally be able to make it through the Wall and the wire and come and see us. Back home I talked some more with the Artists’ Agency and, to our collective delight, finally got the go ahead - but history was about to render all my efforts unnecessary.
Despite Party General Secretary Honecker’s disgusting endorsement of the Chinese Tianamen Square massacre in early June 1989, leading to concerns that the same thing could happen in the GDR, the opposition movements across the country and in Eastern Europe as a whole grew in confidence throughout the summer, in the wake of Gorbachev’s assertion that the Soviet Union would not interfere in the internal affairs of other socialist countries. In August 1989 Hungary opened its border and thousands of people began leaving the GDR via Czechoslovakia (which had always been open to GDR citizens) and thence to Hungary, heading for Austria or West Germany. The broad Left group Neues Forum (New Forum), founded in September, became the first independent political movement in the GDR to be recognised by the SED. In the same month the Leipzig Monday night demonstrations began, led by the church and the environmentalist Left: these increased in size and confidence and spread to the rest of the country.
The Party hierarchy celebrated the 40th anniversary of its founding with a massive parade in Berlin on 7 October 1989 as though nothing untoward was happening. But the reformers’ hero Mikhail Gorbachev was in attendance: his presence overshadowed everything. FDJ members on the parades could be heard shouting ‘Gorbi! Gorbi!’and ‘Gorbi, help us, Gorbi save us!’and the oft-photographed embrace between him and Eric Honecker was followed by Gorbachev’s famous statement ‘Life punishes those who come too late’ implicitly supporting the demands for change in the GDR. The end was near. Powerless to stop the mass exodus of citizens except through the use of brutal force, Erich Honecker and much of his cabinet resigned on 18 October: Honecker was replaced by his top lieutenant Egon Krenz. By 7 November the entire government had gone. Monday nights became protest night all over East Germany: on 4 November half a million people thronged the streets of East Berlin chanting the slogan of what became known as the Peaceful Revolution: ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (We are the people’). On 9 November the Politburo of the SED bowed to the inevitable and voted to allow GDR citizens to go directly to West Germany: Gunther Schabowski, East Berlin party boss, gave the order for the Wall to be opened. I was doing a gig at the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford that night, watching the joyous scenes on TV, drinking a toast to absent friends celebrating in Berlin and wondering what the future would bring.
In the very short term, the future brought me Horch – Andreas, Witsch, Rainer and Klaus – and George, spluttering happily into England in a battered old Wartburg van in early December. An ironic twist: they got out of East Germany fine, of course, but I had to provide proof of income and gigs before the border authorities would let them into the UK! All was sorted, however, and I’d organised a 12 date tour: as far as the UK media were concerned Horch’s visit just after the Wall had fallen was big news, an excellent example of being in the right place at the right time. There were TV appearances, radio interviews and I was invited to write pieces in the Independent and Guardian newspapers. The UK media warmed to George, with his superb command of English and his intelligent and insightful analysis of what was happening in his country: he ended up doing about thirty interviews and gatecrashing the NUS Conference. The gig plan was simple: each evening George would do a talk about the recent momentous political events and the GDR Left’s dreams of an independent, democratic socialist country, I’d so some poems and songs and then Horch would whip out the crumhorns, shawms, flutes and lutes and rock the night away.
Everything started smoothly with packed shows at Bretton Hall College in Wakefield, the aforementioned 1 in 12 in Bradford (followed by a trip to a curry house: the mildest korma in the world was an ocean of fire to the East German palate and they had to leave the lot!) Axminster in Somerset and Manchester. Horch were superb and George’s talks were brilliant: he’d brought some newly-hewn bits of Berlin Wall with him and he raffled them in aid of ambulance workers who were on strike at the time. It was fascinating seeing Horch’s reactions to everyday life here; the sight of a beggar in a prosperous city centre shopping mall had a powerful impact because they’d never seen one before, and walking round Northern cities they soon realised that life for a substantial minority in this country was far more difficult than for anyone back home. On the other hand, UK hi-fi and music shops were a constant source of wonderment: technology beyond their wildest dreams.
And good old GDR technology was about to let us down, big time. For the first few days the stuttering, exhaust-fume-belching two-stroke Wartburg van we were travelling in had stood up to the test: it had been given a new engine specially for the occasion and my misgivings were starting to recede. And then, somewhere between Manchester and Wolverhampton on the M6, it suddenly decided to go to the great big garage in the sky. No bangs, no histrionics: one moment the bloody thing was working, the next it was time for another new engine. Yes, another one! The breakdown man who removed it from the motorway had it about right: ten times worse than a Skoda, he said.
Fortunately Horch had breakdown cover (it must have been from a company with very poor business sense) and so we continued on our way in a hired van while the original one was schlepped back to London. Wartburg engines were, unsurprisingly, not commercially available in the UK, but I had a piece to write for the Independent newspaper and used the opportunity to make a national appeal. Sure enough, there was a Wartburg enthusiast out there who saved the day and enabled everyone to get home at the end of the tour. I did insist that we did the rest of it in the hired van, however…
And so on we went, taking in the whole gamut of the London music scene. The scruffy punk splendour of London’s legendary George Robey pub: the equally renowned Mean Fiddler, where, fittingly, Billy Bragg put in an appearance: the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall. Then to my old stamping ground at the Square in Harlow, Essex University, Whitstable Oyster Hall and a grand finale in the magnificent surroundings of the Hackney Empire. A brilliant, memorable tour. During my visit to Halle on tour the following year, Horch presented me with a beautiful mandocello, made by a local luthier friend of theirs, as a gesture of thanks. I cherish it to this day.
Three months after the fall of the Wall, from February 11-18 1990, I was back in the GDR, invited to perform at the 20th Political Song Festival. Things were very different; the euphoria of November 9 had given way to a state of flux where the right-wing West German CDU, led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and strongly backed by the media, was building a strong base. (There had always been a left-wing East German CDU, representing Christians, as part of the Socialist Unity Party dominated government: this party, previously dismissed by enemies of the system as a ‘puppet’, had now been taken over by people whose views coincided with those of the right wing version operating in the West.) Thousands of people who had taken no part in the previous campaigns and demonstrations had poured onto the streets, many of them shouting for the Leftist reformers - whose pressure had forced open the Wall - to leave the processions. They carried banners with a new slogan, calling for reunification: ‘Deutschland Einig Vaterland’ (Germany United Fatherland). This was, ironically, a direct quote from the National Anthem of the GDR which called for Germany to be united under socialism: these people were demanding unity under capitalism…
Hans Modrow, the reforming Party boss from Dresden, had become Prime Minister and asked by the East German parliament to form a new government. On 1 December the GDR parliament rescinded the clause in the country’s constitution enshrining the SED’s guaranteed right to rule. On 3 December, under pressure from the party rank and file, the politburo and central committee of the SED resigned and a round table of new representatives encompassing many shades of political opinion convened to make proposals to solve the crisis: on 6 December Honecker’s chosen successor Egon Krenz resigned as head of the Council of State, leaving Modrow as the de facto leader of the GDR. On 19 December Helmut Kohl made his first visit there, to be met with massive crowds chanting ‘Helmut, Helmut’: the humble banana, virtually unobtainable in the GDR, became a symbol of the new reality as stories emerged of West Germans handing them out to wide-eyed Easterners crossing the border for the first time. Sarcastic leftists had a new banner: ‘Bananenrepublik Deutschland’! The pressure for reunification (on Western terms of course) grew steadily: on 1 February Modrow put forward a draft for German unity, and on the 7th the West German government decided to offer East Germany immediate talks on currency union.
The 20th Festival of Political Song thus took place in a white-hot atmosphere : excitement, determination and dread in equal measure. In many ways it felt like the last stand of the GDR. Many of those present were still determined to push for an independent East Germany against all odds and were campaigning for the Party of Democratic Socialism - successor party to the SED, now led by the charismatic reformer Gregor Gysi and purged of hardliners like Honecker - in the first East German multi party elections planned for March 18. A minority supported Bundnis 90 (Union 1990) a Left-Green coalition based around the ecological movement, and an even smaller minority campaigned for the United Left, a coalition of Trotskyists, Christian socialists and independents. It was absolutely clear to all the Left activists that monetary and political union on the West’s terms would be a disaster for all who wanted economic and social justice in the East, but wandering round Berlin and hearing reports from other East German cities it was obvious that the bedazzled majority thought they were on the verge of a golden future. The gigs at the festival were as well attended as ever, the late night discussions fascinating, and the fact that I could now extend invitations to my GDR friends to visit me in England absolutely fantastic! But I left with mixed feelings. Pandora’s Box was well and truly open.
And for one group of Berlin residents the fall of the Wall was incontestably an unmitigated disaster.
A vivid memory of the city in GDR days was of the rabbits which gambolled happily in the deadly strip of no-man’s land between East and West. It was supremely ironic that one of the most dangerous places on the planet had provided absolute security for a huge colony of them to do what they do best - reproduce. When the Wall came down and people started walking across their territory, they were of course completely freaked out and fled into the busy city streets. For a time little corpses could be regularly seen until most had been exterminated and a few survivors had established new colonies in new areas of waste ground. During my time in Berlin in February 1990, stray rabbits were everywhere. Someone has actually made a film about it all.
And then came the March election. Sure enough, the right wing alliance (CDU and Demokratischer Aufbruch - Democratic Awakening, for whom Angela Merkel was spokeswoman at the time) won on a programme of swift reunification, with the reformed Communists of the PDS getting 16% of the vote and the Social Democrats around 20%. On 5 April the Parliament elected a CDU president, and monetary union came on 1 July: on 23 August the East German Parliament approved political union: on 3 October 1990 the five East German states were officially incorporated into the Federal Republic and, just after its 40th birthday, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist.
Just before the end, I returned one last time: I’d be back loads more of course, but it would be to a different country.
After the demise of the Neurotics in 1988 my friend Steve had formed a new ‘afro-punk’ band, The Indestructible Beat, and we toured together in mid-September 1990, just a couple of weeks before the official death of the GDR. The tour was organised by George, our friend and translator, who was using his contacts to start operations as an independent promoter under the (for him) fitting banner of Maverick Productions. By this time I had a column in the Guardian about my travels, called, fittingly, On The Road, and I used it to describe what I saw on that tour. Here it is, reproduced more or less word for word.
ON YOUR MARKS.
It is cash that counts in the dying days of the GDR. Attila the Stockbroker joined the wake…
Past the Braunschweig autobahn exit in the autumn dusk, heading for Helmstedt and the erstwhile border between the two Germanies. Memories of previous crossings come flooding back: dogs, barbed wire, searchlights, mirrors, observation towers, 2000 yards of grim, bureaucratic misery. All this until only 11 months ago! Suddenly the road widens and we’re there – the point where once two worlds collided, now entirely deserted. Barracks empty, guards’ huts locked, ‘no entry’ signs lying discarded at the wayside and permanently raised barriers which express better than any words the great changes in Europe in the past year. A deserted East German checkpoint at dusk is a ghostly place indeed.
Afro-punk pioneers The Indestructible Beat and myself are back to pay our last respects to the old GDR. For the first time we travel to East Berlin the easy way, through West Berlin: past the bright lights of the Kurfurstendamm, a couple of sharp corners and then the familiar crumbling buildings and dimly lit streets. The Wall has gone!
East Berlin is in turmoil. The old Stasi headquarters has been occupied by hunger strikers demanding that the files within be kept there and made available to East German citizens: the new masters want to keep them under lock and key and then transport them en masse to West Germany. Since the majority of the people who were in opposition under the Stasi were Leftist activists equally opposed to the rule of the Deutschmark it’s not difficult to follow the Kohl government’s line of thinking: messages of support for the hunger strikers flood in from all over East Germany and during our visit a big rally and concert takes place. As with the abortion issue, much easier in the old GDR, housing, social security and the rest, the West makes the rules.
At the main East Berlin radio station, another hunger strike. The massively popular GDR radio station Jugendradio DT64, which for several years has featured really good music and intelligent, left-orientated discussion programmes and played a major part in East Germany’s peaceful revolution, has been deprived of most of its frequencies so it can’t be heard outside Berlin and replaced by a West Berlin commercial pap monstrosity called RIAS. DT64 DJs and supporters are occupying the entrance to the station. One and a half million listeners take to the streets in cities all over East Germany to show their support, and within four days DT64 is back on the air. A small victory, but maybe only temporary. RIAS has offered a huge sum of money for those frequencies, and these days money makes the rules.
Yes, everything is up for grabs, a knockdown sale. In the old days the arts were heavily subsidised in an attempt to make culture readily accessible to all – now the subsidies have gone, and the vultures are moving in. Radio and TV stations, theatres, clubs, rock venues, cinemas, rock bands, orchestras, actors’ ensembles – everything must now operate according to the law of the market place, and in an environment where the masses want nothing more than an overdose of discos, sex shops, Coke and Western consumer goods, that means the end for many. Posters all over East Berlin: ‘Save the Berlin radio choir’. Major alternative rock venues like the Auensee in Leipzig have been bought by Western entrepreneurs and turned into tacky discos – no beer, and vodka and tonic £4 a throw. The historic and beautiful town hall in Cottbus, a primary theatre and music venue for the area, will soon become a car showroom. A Western car is an absolute must for this nation of former Trabant drivers, and the whole country has become a second-hand car salesman’s paradise.
Eastern bands like Die Skeptiker and Herbst in Peking play in West Germany for peanuts: the few promoters left want Western bands and even they come a real cropper. Just 250 people in Cottbus to see Billy Bragg – a real hero over here, he sold 30,000 albums just two years ago. Myself and The Indestructible Beat have a wonderful time at a university club in Magdeburg playing to maybe 150 people: down the road, six times as many throw themselves around to Stock Aitken and Waterman. Disco, that’s where the money is. In theory, all the managers of music venues have the right to buy them outright at a reduced price: in practice, none of them have the money, and of course the West German entrepreneurs certainly do…
On the other hand, a promising alternative scene is developing: truly autonomous, grouping together many of the people who actually took to the streets and made the revolution possible last year and whose aims and aspirations have been crushed by the drive towards reunification and monetary union. Forty years of haphazard renovation and building policy has left thousands of houses derelict, unsafe, uninhabitable: in the last few months a massive and highly political squatters’ movement has developed, taking over countless derelict state-owned buildings and renovating them, often with the active support of the authorities who don’t have the money to do it themselves. We visited several of these places: the not long opened Tacheles in East Berlin, where we did a gig in Spartan but invigorating circumstances, and above all the incredibly impressive Connewitzer Alternative in Leipzig, a huge complex being refurbished with the help of a local architects’ collective – packed gig, wonderful hospitality, the highlight of the tour. Such occupied houses with their East German flags flying as symbols of resistance are, sadly, the focus for terrifying attacks by gangs of neo-Nazi skinheads. At Connewitz they’re well prepared and any sieg heiling morons who come their way get well and truly sorted out.
Places like this are the backbone of the new scene; in a couple of years’ time, when all the renovation work is done, the likes of the Connewitzer Alternative will carry the hopes of the cultural Left throughout East Germany. In a country where many people don’t know if they’ll still be in work, still have their club, perhaps even still have their house in three months’ time, there is but one answer. Take over your own lives!
And many people tried to do just that – against massive odds.
There were some classic tragic-comedy moments during that couple of weeks touring a society falling apart. ‘Squatting’s alright, but not in someone else’s place!’ said our driver Johnny Mortimer as he surveyed the vibrant scene in Connewitz. ‘The Stasi have a new profession now’ said George, gesturing at a queue of second hand Western cars touting for trade. ‘They’re all taxi drivers. Just tell them your name and they’ll take you home.’ Best of all though was a twist on the famous Kennedy quote: it wasn’t all just starry eyed East Germans making trips to the West, there were plenty coming the other way. Lost in Potsdam, we asked a passer-by for directions to our gig.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. I am a Hamburger…’
‘Yes’, said Simon. ‘And I’m a sausage roll.’
For the people I had got to know well over the years those were bittersweet days, full of hope and genuine feelings of freedom on the one hand and of fear for the future on the other. But for that large part of the population who lapped up tabloid headlines from the likes of Bild-Zeitung (the West German equivalent of the Sun, now ubiquitous in the East) with gusto, there were no doubts: everyone was going to have plenty of money, a brand new car, loads of foreign holidays, designer clothes and all the trappings of the West. With a bunch of bananas thrown in…
Then came the privatising Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency) which destroyed most East German industry on the grounds that it was ‘uncompetitive’: out of 4 million people who worked in the Volkseigene Betriebe (People’s Own Enterprises) 2.5 million were laid off in the early 1990s. Many of the workplaces destroyed weren’t ‘uncompetitive’ at all, as in the case of the Oranienburg steel plant which was sold by the Treuhand to the West German conglomerate – and former Nazi slave labour exploiter – Krupp, and then closed down a few weeks later in an act of wanton vandalism. In any case, the Treuhand’s purely economic calculation of whether or not an enterprise deserved to survive ignored the devastating social consequences involved in throwing millions on the scrapheap at a stroke.
And many people lost not just their jobs, but their homes: GDR real estate nationalisations were declared illegal, old certificates were unearthed, the sacred Western concept of ‘property rights’ invoked and countless East German families evicted from places many had lived in for two generations at the behest of the descendents of a name on a title deed. People who in most cases already had a comfortable home in the West. It happened to farmers too: land ‘reclaimed’ at a stroke from those who had been working it in common for years. And to many of the activists who had turned run down buildings into venues and cultural centres: months, maybe years, of hard work destroyed by a ‘property-owning’ ghost from the past waving a piece of paper. Of course, even if you kept your home, it wasn’t long before rents and utility costs soared as the old subsidies were ripped away.
One ideology ruled the roost - everything from the West good, everything from the East bad. In all areas of life: science, education, culture, you name it. Street names celebrating noted socialist leaders were changed, and in one case a whole city, as Karl Marx Stadt became Chemnitz again. As unemployment rose in the early Nineties, so did the anger, the disillusionment and in many cases a conviction that East Germans had been better off as they were. As a worker on hunger strike at the soon to be closed potash mine in Bischofferode said: ‘At school in the old days we were taught how evil capitalism was. Now everything I was taught is coming true…’
Sure, there was freedom of speech: you could say what you like, but it didn’t change anything. There was freedom of travel too, except that many people couldn’t afford to go anywhere. It was as though everything that East Germans had believed in had officially been declared worthless by the West German state, and what they were offered instead was a media-fostered golden dream which turned out to be a pack of lies. Like so many people there, I shared the happiness at the fall of the Wall in 1989, and I share the nostalgia for the GDR which many people feel today. Because, as the years have passed, those old beliefs - of community, solidarity, the simple life, an aversion to the rat-race – have reasserted themselves, and to some degree passed on to a new generation too. A complete re-evaluation of that period in history is taking place, and ‘Ostalgie’ is here to stay, much to the anger of the West Germans who think they paid for reunification and their Eastern brothers should be grateful. ‘Wessis’ will be even more angry now, because in December 2014 Bodo Ramelow of ‘Die Linke’, the successor party to the old SED, became the governor of the state of Thuringia as the head of a left wing coalition. It’s not surprising. Many people in East Germany have been betrayed.
As Brandenburg state premier Matthais Platzeck said, what happened was not unification but Anschluss – annexation – where one side made the rules and told the other what to do. It didn’t work then, and for many it isn’t working now. Most East Germans still feel different, and although I’m English, I spent enough time there to understand how they feel, probably better than any West German – or other Western - commentator observing from afar could ever do. You’ve probably realised by now that I could write a whole book about my experiences in, and thoughts about, what used to be the GDR: maybe some of you are already thinking that a whole chapter on it is too much. But this is the story of my life, and for me, my time there was incredibly important, inspirational and formative. I make no apologies.
After I returned from my last visit before reunification in 1990, the one described in the Guardian article above, I wrote new words to my song ‘Airstrip One’ about what I had seen. I called it ‘Market Sector One’, asked George and Ilona to translate it once again, and included the German version on a compilation album I did for the radical label Verlag Plane in 1992. I consider it an honour, and a vindication of my stance, that it struck a chord to such a degree that two East German bands have covered it.
I dedicate it to everyone at my favourite venue in Germany, the Schokoladen in East Berlin, an old chocolate factory renovated and turned into a cultural centre and communal living space and one of many places where the spirit of the old East, of the activists who took matters into their own hands in 1990, burns bright and strong. They squatted it when it was crumbling away, fought for years to save it from post-unification speculators - and succeeded. As it says in the old GDR national anthem: ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen, und der Zukunft zugewandt’ (Arisen from ruins and looking to the future).
I’ve lost count of how many gigs I have done there, and when I played there with my band Barnstormer on October 8th 2014 – the night before the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall - as part of our 20th Anniversary tour, a whole mass of East Berliners sang along with gusto.
MARKET SEKTOR ONE
Another new year and too much beer and goodbye to the Wall
But now there’s only disappointment, nothing left at all
The dreams we marched and fought for have faded and turned sour
The cabbage is a king now, it’s Helmut’s finest hour
And on the streets the people want it ‘as seen on TV’
And a big bunch of bananas is a sign that you are ‘free’
It’s just begun – Market Sektor One
As in the East we talked about a future bold and new
A thousand Western businessmen were celebrating too
The vultures were all circling, there was money to be made
A multinational carve up, a bank to be obeyed
And now the old, rich foreigners make claims on every hand -
‘You’re living in my house, mein Herr, you’re farming on my land’
It’s time to run – Market Sektor One
Is that all that we were fighting for?
Bananas and sex shops, nothing more?
Welcome to the Western dream
Welcome to the cheap labour scheme
The whole of Europe’s changing – Big Brother’s on the run
It could just be a whole new age of freedom has begun
But freedom doesn’t bow its head to some financier’s will
And Europe is our common home, not some gigantic till
So send the money grabbers riding off into the sun
And send with them the culture of the dollar and the gun
Then we’ll have fun
And justice will be done…
I really hope it is, one day.
Auf Wiedersehen, DDR!