Niklas reviewed Burning down the Haus by Tim Mohr
Review of 'Burning down the Haus' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
Talk about youth against fascism!
This book is about how punk changed, both itself, its listeners, and mainly East Germany around the late 1970s up to the 1990s. It takes the reader on a journey of personal fulfillment through youth in a dictatorship, which is what East Germany was at the time. Honecker‘s Germany, along with Stasi, was merely a gentler version of super-fascist Nazi Germany, which fit the glove for precisely what punk counteracts.
From the book, which kind of sets the tone:
"The first song they put together was called “Überall wohin’s dich fährt,” or “Wherever You Go.” Lade wrote it.
Wherever you go
You’re asked for ID
If you say a false word
You know what happens next
It doesn’t matter where you look
Cameras are everywhere
Accompanying you step for step
“Security” always follows you
You speak your mind openly
And what will happen?
You can …
Talk about youth against fascism!
This book is about how punk changed, both itself, its listeners, and mainly East Germany around the late 1970s up to the 1990s. It takes the reader on a journey of personal fulfillment through youth in a dictatorship, which is what East Germany was at the time. Honecker‘s Germany, along with Stasi, was merely a gentler version of super-fascist Nazi Germany, which fit the glove for precisely what punk counteracts.
From the book, which kind of sets the tone:
"The first song they put together was called “Überall wohin’s dich fährt,” or “Wherever You Go.” Lade wrote it.
Wherever you go
You’re asked for ID
If you say a false word
You know what happens next
It doesn’t matter where you look
Cameras are everywhere
Accompanying you step for step
“Security” always follows you
You speak your mind openly
And what will happen?
You can only hope
Something has to happen
Who wants to stand around passively? Were you really born
To be subordinate to it all?
"Observations like that were the sort of thing that got people sent to jail. The members of the band knew that. But as far as Pankow was concerned, this was the logical next step. He knew the country was fucked up and wanted to do something about it."
East Germany in the 1970s was a beast of its own; self-contained, censored, and highly punished by means of brutal paranoia due to how Stasi run, and how people turned into informants.
"One of the most momentous decisions in the history of the DDR was made in a matter of minutes on February 8, 1950, during a meeting of the as yet provisional People’s Council: the founding of a Ministry of State Security, or Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. The first few letters of the two constituent parts of the final word—Staat and Sicherheit—lent the ministry the name the world would come to know and dread: the Stasi. By the mid-1950s the Stasi already had 16,000 employees, more than Hitler’s Gestapo had employed in a unified Germany with five times as many inhabitants as East Germany; by 1952 the Stasi had also recruited 30,000 informants. Both of those numbers would continue to rise steeply.
Who can’t love and recognise a scene like this?"
"At the beginning of the school year in September 1977, Britta’s sister gave her a stack of photos and pullout posters she’d amassed from the precious West German teen magazines her father brought her—images of ABBA, Boney M, Smokie, the cheesy chart toppers and heartthrobs of the day. As Britta leafed through the images, she suddenly stopped at one. It was a black-and-white shot of a band called the Sex Pistols. What the **** is this, she wondered, fascinated by their ripped clothes and sneering faces."
If you’re wondering how draconian the Stasi methods of reasoning were, check this out as just a tiny example:
"East German punks had already perfected the art of confrontation. A few had even started to play with Nazi imagery—the ultimate taboo in a country explicitly founded on anti-Nazi ideology. Faced with ever more brutal treatment by the police, some punks wore yellow star patches, making reference to the patches the Nazis forced Jews to wear. Others wore red armbands with white crosses on them and the word chaos written in black on the cross, meant to make people look twice because of its similarity to the armbands worn by Hitler’s SA and SS. Then the authorities spotted some public graffiti they found particularly disturbing: ddr=kz, meaning East Germany = a concentration camp. A punk named Spion had spray-painted the slogan. He was the singer in a garage band called Ahnungslos, or Clueless. In the course of investigating the graffiti, the police also found drafts of Spion’s song lyrics, and he was thrown into prison for a year."
One of Tim Mohr’s good things as an author is his forté where it comes to merely place things simply, and let the reader dip into everything and discover things for ourselves. His style made me curious to read on, and I dig the way he unveiled the different main characters.
"On January 27, 1982, China, a punk who had been at Major’s trial back in 1981, was arrested, subjected to multiple strip searches and body cavity searches, and placed in pretrial detention for five weeks. The charge, according to the arrest warrant: she had distributed a total of twenty hand-typed statements saying, among other things, that she lived in a “mousetrap” where “no freedom of opinion existed.” The statements, it turned out, were from her diary. She was sixteen.
This book provides a lot of atmosphere, air, good writing—and is altogether a great reminder that, yes, revolution is possible whenever and wherever."
This book provides a lot of atmosphere, air, good writing—and is altogether a great reminder that, yes, revolution is possible whenever and wherever.
