Der Klang der Familie E-Book

Felix Denk

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 562

Beschreibung

After the fall of the Wall, Berlin is full of disused spaces and abandoned buildings, just waiting to be filled with new life. It is unclear who owns any of this, which allows the techno scene to take over these new empty spaces in both halves of the city. Clubs, galleries, ateliers and studios spring up – only to disappear again a few weeks later. Soon Berlin has become the epicentre of a new culture, attracting enthusiastic followers from all over the world to clubs like the Tresor and the E-Werk. Wearing gasmasks and welding goggles they dance the night away to the jackhammer sound of previously obscure Detroit DJs. Among them are writers, artists, photographers, designers, DJs, club-owners, music producers, bouncers and scenesters, people from the centre of the movement and from its peripheries – in Der Klang der Familie they all get to have their say and paint a vibrant picture of a time when it felt like everything was possible.

Leseprobe

After the fall of the Wall, Berlin is full of disused spaces and abandoned buildings, just waiting to be filled with new life. It is unclear who owns any of this, which allows the techno scene to take over these new empty spaces in both halves of the city. Clubs, galleries, ateliers and studios spring up – only to disappear again a few weeks later. Soon Berlin has become the epicentre of a new culture, attracting enthusiastic followers from all over the world to clubs like the Tresor and the E-Werk. Wearing gasmasks and welding goggles they dance the night away to the jackhammer sound of previously obscure Detroit DJs. Among them are writers, artists, photographers, designers, DJs, club-owners, music producers, bouncers and scenesters, people from the centre of the movement and from its peripheries – in Der Klang der Familie they all get to have their say and paint a vibrant picture of a time when it felt like everything was possible.

For Silke, Henry and Oskar

For Lili

CONTENT

Preface

PART ONE:

The ’80s

The soundtrack of feeling misunderstood

Anal riot

One-way ticket to space

Radio escape

Probably the most important night in history

PART TWO:

1990-1991

The freaks among the zonies

Temporary autonomous zone

The hunt for records

The East is listening

Party at the end of the world

The great escapist masterpiece

The Summer of Love

Transmission from Detroit

The biggest rave ever

PART THREE:

1992-1996

The music of the future

The most beautiful hell in the world

Don’t get caught

Der Klang der Familie

The Detroit-Berlin connection

The scorned ones

All for the advertisers

The High Mass of techno

Beyond the rainbow

Amusement total sans regret

Epilogue

APPENDIX

People

Places

DJ charts

Picture credits

PREFACE

It was basically pure coincidence. This new, raw, stark machine music appeared – and then the Wall came down. In East Berlin, the administration collapsed; the former GDR capital became a “temporary autonomous zone.” Suddenly, there were all these spaces to discover: a panzer chamber in the dusty no man’s land of the former death strip, a World War II bunker, a decommissioned soap factory on the Spree, a transformer station opposite the erstwhile Reich Ministry of Aviation. And suddenly, people were dancing at all these sites rejected by recent history, to a music virtually reinvented from week to week.

Put simply, techno originated in Detroit in the mid ’80s. But the new electronic sounds didn’t find a home in the crisis-ridden Motor City. No club scene developed around the music, which became an export by necessity. Detroit musicians found their largest following in Berlin, of all places, and a symbiotic relationship developed between the two desolate cities. Aside from the efforts and enthusiasm of a few music freaks, this, too, was for the most part a matter of chance.

At the time, Berlin couldn’t look back on a long history of electronic music – unlike, say, Frankfurt, where a professional network of clubs, producers and labels had been operating since the ’80s. Even the word “techno” was already being used there. West Berlin, by contrast, was a rock city, albeit an experimental one. Bands like the Einstürzende Neubauten and movements like the Geniale Dilletanten1 meant there was a fairly broad understanding of what the word music could mean. And in clubs like Metropol, a small DJ culture was already emerging, born from the days of disco.

In East Berlin, of course, everything was different. Youth culture was something clandestine, even dangerous. The first generation of punks was vigorously persecuted. Young people were accustomed to seeking out niches. One of them was breakdancing, which began to shape GDR subculture far earlier than in West Germany, a fact which explains the East’s special enthusiasm for electronic sounds.

Techno became the soundtrack of reunification-era Berlin for three main reasons: the pure kinetic energy of the new sounds, the magic of the places it was played and the promise of freedom it contained. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone could program his own world: DJ, produce, start magazines, print t-shirts. Techno was a music that called for participation, a sound of flat hierarchies. Not for nothing was it referred to in the early days as a music with no need for stars. There didn’t seem to be any room for them. The human disappeared in the tracks; the artist subject dissolved in the circuitry of the drum machine, the binary codes of the sampler and the ever-changing project names of the producers. At the beginning, even the DJ was part of the party, not its focus or star. The star was the party itself and with it, all the abandoned, decaying venues transformed into dance floors, sometimes for a night, sometimes long enough that people from around the world could come dance on them.

Few music genres have brought together such a disparate mix of people with a shared feeling of joy. At the early techno parties, breakdancers from Alexanderplatz, football2 hooligans, former East German punks and radio junkies encountered a West Berlin conglomerate of Schöneberg gays, Kreuzberg squatters, students, artists, English soldiers on furlough and American expats in Berlin for the cheap rents. For a while, it seemed as though differences no longer mattered, nor where you came from or what you were wearing. So long as you participated. Everything was focused on the music and the new togetherness on and alongside the dance floor. The exuberant, contradictory community that converged there every weekend really saw itself as a family – in the early years, at least.

This book tells the story of that impromptu family, from its subcultural beginnings to the moment techno stormed the charts and the very rules and market mechanisms that seemed not to apply at the beginning found their way into the scene. Of course, chart hits like Marusha’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” weren’t the swansong of techno. Quite to the contrary, the music has continued even today, in ever new forms, to conquer the last corners of pop culture and shape like no other the image of Berlin. But they did herald the end of the anarchic beginning. From a subculture grew a culture.

We weren’t there back then. Der Klang der Familie3 consists of about 150 interviews conducted mostly in 2011.4 We would like to thank all the interviewees for meeting us with so much trust and taking so much time to share their memories. We hope we can give something back with this book.

Thanks also to those interviewees who unfortunately didn’t find their due place in the book, particularly Moritz von Oswald, Kay Itting, Sandra Molzahn and Frank Schütte. We would especially like to thank Carola Stoiber, Arne Grahm, Stefan Schvanke, Mijk van Dijk, Jürgen Laarmann and Dimitri Hegemann for their organizational help and DJs Tanith, Rok, Clé, Jonzon, Terrible, Zappa and Dr. Motte for their playlists. Jürgen Teipel’s Verschwende Deine Jugend served as an important inspiration, and we thank him for lending his counsel and advice. Jan Rikus Hillmann designed so many fabulous covers, we could have turned the book into a series. Thanks finally to Sebastian Leber from the Tagesspiegel, without whom we would never have met our agent Marko Jacob from Landwehr & Cie, who, in turn, introduced us to our editor Thomas Halupczok, who always kept an eye on the essentials when we had long since lost sight of them.

We’d like to thank Jenna Krumminga, who spent the hot Berlin summer of 2014 translating this book from the German, and Viktoria Pelles, who edited the translation. We’d also like to thank Alexander Seeberg-Elverfeldt, who’s responsible for the look and layout of this volume.

Felix Denk Sven von Thülen

Berlin, October 2014

1 The “ingenious amateurs” or “dilettante geniuses” was a broad underground movement encompassing various musical genres, united primarily by an eagerness to experiment and a contempt for the professionalization of music production. Though the misspelling of “dilettantes” originated in a mistake, it was kept as a nod to the ethos that amateurs, unlike professionals, embrace their mistakes and consciously incorporate them into their work.

2 The sport known in America as “soccer” will be referred to as “football” throughout this book in deference to the explicitly European context and the specific cultural resonance of the word within that context, particularly when combined with “hooligan.”

3 In English, “The Sound of the Family,” title of a 1992 track by 3Phase and Dr. Motte.

4 The interviews with Mike Banks and Ron Murphy were conducted for De:Bug magazine back in 2007, and the interview with Blake Baxter was part of a 2011 feature on Detroit for Groove magazine.

PART ONE

The ’80s

The soundtrack of feeling misunderstood

KATI SCHWIND When I first moved to West Berlin in 1981, I only lived in squats. That was totally normal in Kreuzberg. Back then, entire housing blocks were being occupied.

CLÉ When you got off the subway back then, it was really spooky. You were standing in the middle of sooty, deserted urban canyons. The smell of coal stoves was everywhere.

DER WÜRFLER You had the feeling the war wasn’t over yet.

KATI SCHWIND Everything in West Berlin was subsidized from top to bottom. Until the late ’70s, there was even some “welcome money” for anyone who moved there because the city had so many old people. This all-around care clearly rubbed off on the residents. The cost of living was low, and worry about how to scrape together next month’s rent was minimal. As a result, you had quite a lot of time to creatively live out your quirks and eccentricities.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN Back then, I was studying music at the Free University [of Berlin], heading out for field research at night. There wasn’t much. Risiko was a special place; I met Nick Cave and Birthday Party there. I wasn’t at Dschungel so often, they usually didn’t let me in. In 1982, I organized a festival at SO36. It was called Atonal. We wanted to break entrenched listening habits and show something new in image and sound. A ton of bands with great names played: Malaria!, Sprung aus den Wolken, Die tödliche Doris and the Einstürzende Neubauten. When the Neubauten took the stage, they immediately started to drill through the back wall. Sparks flew, and the guy who ran SO36 and was selling beer cans up front started running around like mad. I was sitting backstage and suddenly, a drill came through the wall right next to me. One year later, we had Psychic TV there. Genesis P-Orridge was already sporting a bald head with a braid and arrived like a cult leader with eight people in tow who looked like Hare Krishnas. During the performance, they showed a movie where an anaconda eats a rabbit.

MARK REEDER The Berlin punk scene was refreshingly different, not as commercialized as the one I knew from England, which by 1978, was already rock. I’d worked at a record store in Manchester and was friends with people like Tony Wilson, Daniel Miller and Ian Curtis. Then in Berlin, I was the Factory Records representative. I organized a few gigs for Joy Division and got to know bands like the Neubauten, who played with garbage, and P1/E, an electronic band with Alexander Hacke. Later on, the early house and techno stuff was similarly radical for me.

3PHASE Through punk, you got the idea that making noise yourself is a great thing. Bands like Throbbing Gristle seemed to be using everything from a toaster to a blender to make music. It didn’t matter whether or not you could play an instrument. The important thing was that it sounded interesting and was your own thing.

MARK REEDER The Geniale Dilletanten Festival, for example, was very humorous and creative. You could simply join in. Nobody could play properly, bands were formed for just one night, and people heard something they’d never heard before.

COSMIC BABY I started to listen to the rougher stuff at around 16: Throbbing Gristle, Der Plan, Pyrolator. I experimented a lot, recording radio static, then playing it alongside records or recording it back and forth with two tape recorders. I had a Roland 606 drum machine that I let run for hours, playing sequences on the piano to it. Everyone thought it was boring, of course – it’s always the same, there are no vocals, there are no other instruments – but I was happy. I loved the repetition. It always had something euphoric for me.

JONZON I was the drummer in a band. We were called Zatopek and played punk-funk and somehow also a little NDW [New German Wave]. We all wore winklepickers and loden jackets and even had a record deal with Polydor. I can still remember exactly how we were on tour and someone slipped me a tape recording of Frankie Crocker’s radio program, a DJ from New York. I listened to the tape exhaustively on my Walkman. It had things like D Train and Peech Boys. It was proto-house. The straight machine beat I was hearing fascinated me. I realized you could program things with a drum machine that as a drummer, you can’t even play. The tape was really well mixed, and I tried to analyze it. How many records are playing right now? Where does one track end and the next begin? Which elements belong to which record? When is something added? When is something removed? I had no idea about everything you could do with two turntables.

STEFAN SCHVANKE For me, everything always revolved around music. My first techno moment was “Los Ninos Del Parque” by Liaisons Dangereuses. Sequences that proceed along a four-four beat. This restlessness that I felt in myself, I also had to feel in the music.

DR. MOTTE Back then, I was addicted to anything new. Barry Graves had a radio program on RIAS2 where he always played mixes from New York. One DJ he played was called Paco. Graves always announced him in a very particular way: “And now another Pacooooooosssssssuper mix.” He always played his own edits. He re-edited and extended tracks like “Walking on Sunshine,” so then I tried to tinker together different versions with my two cassette decks. At one point, I could edit with pinpoint accuracy. I made “Radio Gag” from “Radio Gaga,” cutting away the “a” with the stop button. Then I did the rounds of the Kreuzberg bars selling the cassettes.

JONZON Motte was my neighbor on Lübbener Straße in Kreuzberg. Back then, we both made tapes with stupid names like “The Gilded Mr. Tape.” There was a competition between us – whose tape got more people dancing. I pieced together my tapes using modest means: a record player and a tape recorder. You could use the pause button to cut tracks together; it was almost like edits. You could even create staccato effects like with a sampler.

DR. MOTTE For a while, I lived by selling tapes. I always had some with me. Musically, it was soul, funk, post-punk. I didn’t do anything else on the side. That worked. My apartment cost 120 Deutsche Mark. The Job Center tried to get me a job, but I always refused, using all sorts of strategies.

THOMAS FEHLMANN I was in New York twice in the early ’80s with Palais Schaumburg, and I witnessed the burgeoning electro scene there. Seeing Afrika Bambaataa DJing at the Roxy was a formative experience. I was very interested in club music or disco, as it was called back then. Especially when the experimental and danceable met. I found the contingence between punk and hip-hop exciting. For me and the others in Schaumburg, disco wasn’t a dirty word. We loved Chic and Michael Jackson without qualification.

DER WÜRFLER Through disco, gay nightlife shifted a bit into the mainstream focus for the first time. It was totally unusual, after all, for homos and heteros to party together. I was a dancer in the late ’70s, the heyday of disco. I even performed with Liza Minelli, Diana Ross and Gloria Gaynor at Studio 54. It was around that time I started DJing at clubs like Dschungel, Metropol and Cha. Metropol was supposed to be the Studio 54 of Berlin – there were giant disco balls, something like two meters [80 inches] in diameter, and these balls were beamed with lasers. Back then, it all looked like Star Wars, as though fluorescent tubes were flying through the air. A UFO hung over the dance floor in front, emitting bubbles and glitter.

WESTBAM Metropol was known as a gay spot, but there weren’t only gays there. You can compare it to Early Christianity. There was the Jewish temple in the center, and the Greeks who wanted to be part of it were allowed to walk around outside. At Metropol, the gays were in the corners – really hardcore with leather and chains. The trippy kids from the Berlin suburbs were at the front. Maybe they weren’t sure yet if they were gay. Or maybe they just thought it was all wonderful, like I did the first time I got in at 17, standing there in a Hawaiian shirt among all these men in chains. It smelled of poppers, the new beat dropped, and everyone shouted out loud. The energy, the subculture, the hardcore thing, the menace – it was wicked.

DER WÜRFLER By 1984, the disco era at Metropol was basically over. Instead, there was Hi-NRG, a music that appealed especially to gay

men. It was also the time of New Wave and New Romantic. The club was mixed when it came to sexual orientation. You could wear whatever you wanted, even make-up if you felt like it.

STEFAN SCHVANKE I started going to Metropol at age 14, 15 – it was my surrogate family. At home, there was a lot of fighting; I lived in a youth institution for a bit. Early on, I took care to spend as little time at home as possible. By day, I sat around the Gedächtniskirche5. There were always young punks and New Wavers hanging around. At night, I snuck out the window. In West Berlin, nobody ever asked how old I was. At the underground spots, nobody cared.

DISKO Metropol was famous for its fan-fags. They danced swanlike choreographies with dayglo fans and were armed to the eyebrows with poppers. It had a little something of voguing and rave about it.

STEFAN SCHVANKE They wore light blue jeans, tight cut-off tops with their navels sometimes exposed and short hairstyles – these gelled-forward fag horns. They stood in rows of four. Hans, Leo, Tamazs and Lutz were the most prominent. The first three died of AIDS. The leather gays were in the corner, and on the other side of the dance floor, the New Wave kids. That’s where I was standing WESTBAM It was already totally clear to me back then where it was all heading, musically speaking. I wrote it down in Der Neger, an avant-garde journal based in Frankfurt. The text was called “What is Record Art?” and it was intended as a manifesto. I wrote that the new electronic music would be created by the DJs.

JONZON I was at Dschungel a lot; Juri DJed there. He was already mixing, though the mixes were really short, and individual passages were extended using two copies of the same record.

WESTBAM Back then, there weren’t any records with one perpetual beat, so you took the same record twice and extended the short part with the beat by cutting the spot back and forth. In hip-hop, they did it so they could rap over it. But I did it to create a new minimalist dance style. It was the thing back then that came closest to the later techno culture. An endless repetition of a specific line with an up-tempo beat. Of course, it didn’t run the whole night. These were facets. “I Feel Love” would play, and then there’d be another one of these mix numbers with the same record twice. It wasn’t techno yet, of course, but the rudiments were there. There were moments where you could already hear this idea – all I really need is a beat, a strobe and screaming people.

THOMAS FEHLMANN Westbam played good records, sure. But sometimes, Modern Talking was also played at Metropol.

STEFAN SCHVANKE After the Hi-NRG era, I liked EBM musically, but it was more like concert music. People just did this three-steps-to-thefront, three-steps-to-the-back dance. In the dance context, EBM was totally occupied by this scene. Unlike in Hi-NRG, there was no freaking out on the dance floor, no excess. Still, I often hitchhiked to concerts in West Germany.

MARK REEDER Berlin began to stagnate in 1985. There was no longer anything fiery. The freshness was gone, the spontaneity. I was frustrated. More and more people slipped into a kind of drug swamp. The booze flowed in torrents. Clubs like Ex ‘n’ Pop and Cri du Chat played mostly stuff like Birthday Party, Sisters Of Mercy and The Cult. Dark rock. My musical taste was different. When I said I liked disco in Ex ‘n’ Pop, people looked at me funny. That was a dirty word, after all. The music playing there sounded to me like synthesizer hatred.

KATI SCHWIND In the mid ’80s, I spent a year and a half in the States. I had the shock of my life when I came back to Berlin, totally excited about hip-hop, which was everywhere in the States. All I could think was: what happened? Sisters Of Mercy was the only thing playing in the erstwhile Neubauten orbit. Everything was bleak and depressing.

3PHASE Risiko and Ex ‘n’ Pop were underground spots for leather-jacket punks and avant-garde artists. The whole scene was basically on speed back then. It was rumored that the yellow crystals were smuggled from the GDR to get the Kreuzberg anarchists going. You can almost see Halber Mensch, the Neubauten album that came out at the time, as documentary. There’s one drinking song, and the rest is about the side effects of permanent speed consumption and sleep deprivation.

TANITH When I arrived in Berlin in 1986, the feeling was “it’s all over.” Punk was long since a pointless hanging-around, a single booze brigade. And the industrial people were whacked out on heroine, listening to Johnny Cash.

STEFAN SCHVANKE The only thing that mattered to them anymore was who had what and how they’d get through the week.

TANITH Everyone was an artist – often never recognized because far too genius. For them, music was less something for dancing and more something for suffering, a soundtrack of feeling misunderstood.

COSMIC BABY At the time, electronic music didn’t seem to be exactly what the city had been waiting for. The zeitgeist was Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld; they were heroes and idols. Unfortunately, I didn’t look like that, nor did they reflect my attitude towards life. I was too thin, not addicted to heroin and didn’t have black hair. In general, I felt too small, too soft, too odd and too uncool for Berlin when I moved there from Nuremberg in 1986.

TANITH Clubs like Dschungel, once at the forefront, became totally arbitrary. They played chart trash meant ironically. The position they’d had in the early ’80s was gone. A strange anti attitude prevailed: actually, I think it sucks, but because you think it sucks too, I think it’s cool.

KATI SCHWIND It got more and more ridiculous. They played terrible funk and bad soul-pop. There was no trace left of the avant-garde. There was a GI disco at Adenauerplatz. I liked to go there because the music was extremely good, and I always loved to dance. It was a little journey to another world.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN There were a lot of suicides in the scene in which I circulated. I was in a serious crisis. We were taking a break from the Atonal festival, and I had no apartment, no nothing. Then a friend got me a room on Lübbener Straße, on the fifth floor. It was freezing, and I always had to haul coal up from the basement. One morning, I saw a storefront with fogged-up windows on Wrangelstraße behind which a woman sat at a heating stove repairing shoes. I went in, and we got to talking. At some point, she told me she was leaving. I could have the store – for 200 Deutsche Mark. I built a lectern with a friend and opened the Fischbüro [Fish Office]. It was a kind of Dada club. On Saturdays, an eccentric intelligentsia met there to discuss crazy things.

KATI SCHWIND The Fischbüro started on Wrangelstraße, then moved to Köpenicker. In the Wrangelstraße days, Dimitri was so completely broke, he slept there on a cot.

DIMITRI HEGEMANN Everything was under the name Mrs. Fisch – phone, mail, rooms, electricity. But Mrs. Fisch was always out of reach. She didn’t exist, of course. In principle, it was supposed to be a reeducation camp: from consumer to producer. I moderated and motivated people to participate. It was fantastic. They took the stage, usually very shy at first, and everyone clapped. Käthe Be, a performance artist, read from his address book. One woman reported on her wardrobe – where the individual pieces came from, how expensive they were and so on. One time, we weighed the Fischbüro. Between the individual speakers, there was always some music, then the applause started up again and so on and so forth until eleven pm. At that point, “Continuing Education” was over – that’s what we called the event. For us, it was essentially about speaking with one another again, not waiting in line somewhere, paying ten marks to see a blood performance you didn’t understand, then going back home alone. In the Fischbüro, by contrast, we were like kids. Everything was self-made. We were inquisitive, playful and very peaceful, like in an ashram. At some point, we started throwing acid house parties in the basement.

5 Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a famous landmark in West Berlin located on the Breitscheidplatz, a major public square.

Anal riot

WOLLE XDP I met Johnnie around 1983. He always wanted to punch me out because I was a popper, with a quiff and everything.

JOHNNIE STIELER I didn’t really feel like I belonged to this movement. I was punk. We met because of Alexanderplatz. It was so big, there was space for everyone without offending territorial claims. The people who hung around there had no connection to other scenes. They came alone or in pairs. At night, we went to the same clubs. Inevitably, you become closer.

WOLLE XDP I still remember how we were standing at Alex, and I played “Buffalo Gals” by Malcom McLaren on my boombox, and Johnnie said, “How is it that you popper swine are listening to music like that now?” At some point, we became friends.

ARNE GRAHM I met Wolle at Alex-Treff. We were both into Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa.

WOLLE XDP The more electronic the music, the better I liked it. I liked rap too, but electro funk much more. Dance beats with the sounds of Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream. For a breaker, that was the best.

ZAPPA Johnnie and I really became friends at the Free German Youth6 training camp at Plau am See. I was the camp disco guy, and he gave a sort of breakdance course.

WOLLE XDP Breakdance was a little revolution in the East. It arrived at nearly the same time as it did in the West. Apparently, there were a few people who lobbied Honecker to allow Harry Belafonte’s Beat Street to run in theaters. The movie played a very decisive role. Breakdance was sold as a revolutionary anti-imperialistic culture. The first unofficial GDR breakdance championship was held in the spring of 1984. I placed third.

DJ JAUCHEBeat Street played everywhere in the East. The first time I saw it, I knew immediately that I wanted to be a DJ. I was also a breaker, but never part of a crew. I just danced with a few friends. We would clear away the carpet in the living room at home and bust some moves. I knew Wolle by sight; pretty much all the breakers hung out at Alexanderplatz. You had to show what you were capable of. Compared to the punks, the breakers were usually left alone. We looked like poppers, after all.

WOLLE XDP Breakdance was a way to find your niche in the GDR. We danced at the disco and in the streets. It was a bit of a subculture. It was accompanied by the music I liked. I liked this space-age aesthetic. It was a space-age-futuristic-sci-fi world. For me, the starting point was a report I saw about the airport disco in Frankfurt. How these poppers – the guys with stand-up collars, the girls with popper hair – did a robot dance to Kraftwerk. It looked so great. I started practicing it in front of the mirror. When electro funk came on in the disco, I lead the way, red as a lobster and pretty jittery.

THOMAS ELIAS I was in the Automatic Crew. Wolle was basically our breakdance nemesis. We battled a few times at Alexanderplatz. Wolle was good. He could move so damn strangely – but only his top half because he’s so lanky. I was better on the ground. That, Wolle couldn’t do at all.

DIETA BERLINER When the carpets at home were yet again worn through by moonwalk practice, my mom would tell me off. But we had to practice. Every day. Once, we even had a gig at a National People’s Army gala in the middle of nowhere. We were announced and everything: “And now the Automatic Crew from Berlin.” Then it got going.

ARNE GRAHM I didn’t really dance. I just imitated and tried to impress girls standing nearby with the suggestion of movement. I was more responsible for ensuring that all the money coming in from breakdancing really got to Wolle and, respectively, to us. We walked around with nunchuks made of broomsticks and were chronically underestimated because of our baby faces.

THOMAS ELIAS You weren’t really allowed to break at Alex. It was not welcome. The police could turn a blind eye, but usually they said something. If you had bad luck, they took your tape recorder. You’d have to pick it up the next day on Keipelstraße, begging and pleading.

ARNE GRAHM When we danced at Alexanderplatz, 100 people would gather in no time at all. We played with the fact that the whole thing was being watched. You could always recognize the Stasi informants and undercover cops by their hairstyles and wrist bags as they stood there totally inconspicuous. It got funny when we simulated violence. We would stage fights with diplomat kids, and the undercovers would come out of their holes like rats and chase after us. When they caught us, our friends would show their red diplomatic IDs and threaten the civil servants with a future regulating traffic. Their bewilderment – expressed in officialese, usually with a strong Saxon accent – sounded something like this: “We have a problem here. There are unfortunately no aggrieved parties.”

DJ JAUCHE People in the GDR who did breakdance and listened to hiphop weren’t Ost-Pocken.7 They weren’t about staying especially loyal to the system. You could dance, and the people around you didn’t know how to react. The police, for example. They didn’t like it, and they monitored it. But what could they do? We were only dancing. Even if they sensed that with our dancing, we were expressing a desire for something different than what was available in the GDR. The diplomat kids provided fresh music. Sometimes they even brought a boombox.

THOMAS ELIAS We were often engaged in Friedrichshain at the SEZ8 on Dimitroffstraße, as it was called back then. We got 40 ostmarks9 per appearance. One time, we received a tidy 120 marks – the monthly salary of an apprentice – for five minutes of dancing. We even had a manager and travelled throughout the GDR.

DIETA BERLINER Once, we even appeared in an issue of Deine Gesundheit [Your Health]. It was something like “Fit for Fun.” With a picture. We were wearing these sort of BMX caps, which were airbrushed out.

WOLLE XDP Usually, the performances were booked via the diskotheker.10 The one I travelled with was named Peter Niedziella, a radio presenter often booked for office parties. People knew him because of his job at Stimme der DDR [Voice of the GDR]. His program, Die Musikalische Luftfracht [Musical Airfreight], was one of the few that played music from the West. Also, he always played songs through to the end so that other DJs could record them. He took us with him a lot. No idea how he dealt with the payment. According to the regulations for artists, we were allowed to get 2.50. We had no classification, after all, no official license to perform. But he just did it somehow. Even at the SEZ, which was a government establishment, I got 40 marks.

ARNE GRAHM Punk always went hand in hand with this popper and breakdance thing. The subcultural scenes were not so separated in the GDR.

SPEZIAL I was punk from the very start. That was more real in the East than the West. It was a normal development to go from punk to skinhead. In the East, a lot of punks were sent to prison or the army. That’s how they tried to break the scene’s core. They came for me at 18. When I got back, a lot of my buddies were already skinheads. It wasn’t a political thing. That didn’t even come into play. It was just a question of: are you a skinhead or a punk?

ARNE GRAHM Back then, I wore fine rib mesh shirts with a gold belt hanging diagonally and winklepickers. Sometimes frilled shirts as well and a kind of New Romantic crow’s nest on my head to top it all off. My parents thought I was gay.

WOLLE XDP We made our own clothes. We wanted to look like Wessis,11 of course. That was extremely important for every Ossi.12

ARNE GRAHM I wore my outfit both for breaking and for going to punk shows or BFC13 games as a hooligan. In fact, we looked like gay poppers. I had red Italian leather shoes; I think they were even women’s shoes, but you couldn’t be sure. Those, and then pink pleated pants, striped shirts and an enormous popper hairdo. We often brought banners along as well, with slogans like “Saxons, show your dicks!” We swung these in the stadium, pulling super-camp dance moves. People freaked out. And after the game, they got beat up by us to boot. But in those cases, it was almostalways consensual violence.

SPEZIAL As hooligans, we primarily provoked. And what better way to provoke than with the opposite of what’s currently popular? Of course, that was also construed for us politically. By outsiders.

JOHNNIE STIELER Punk, breakdance, BFC – it all ran parallel. The good thing about football was that we could move freely. The Stasi people weren’t so athletic. We could assert ourselves there. We looked like proper little boys with polo shirts and snazzy jeans, and the police, after all, were expecting rakish thugs.

WOLLE XDP Personally, I wasn’t interested in soccer at all. Still, I sometimes went with Johnnie and Arne. We went to Dresden for the game and got dressed up nice – white clothes and leather ties – then stood in the sea of black-and-yellow-clad idiots with their flags, scarves and hats. The BFC fans hated their team. But they liked that they always won.

JOHNNIE STIELER The BFC didn’t have many fans. There were the Stasi people conscripted to cheer, dance and keep up spirits. And there were the bad boys – usually, the children of those sitting in the stands on the other side.

ARNE GRAHM We called ourselves the Anal Boys. “The Anal Boys salute the BFC” was one of our sayings. Anal riot. We were 17, and it was about breaking taboos. We wanted to discredit this masculine sport, football, with this homoerotic flirtation. I’m not really sure anymore what exactly our motivation was. We were, in any case, always very sarcastic and really enjoyed provoking.

SPEZIAL The Anal Boys was a relatively large crew. I knew Johnnie and Arne, but we didn’t have much to do with each other. They came from different circumstances. They were teachers’ kids; I come from a working class family.

WOLLE XDP Of course, the BFC also had a few normal fans. The Anal Boys were a distinct section. I wasn’t really a part of it. We knew a lot of them from the disco. Some were really disturbed. You couldn’t go anywhere with them; right away, there was always trouble. They couldn’t help it. But we had similar taste in music. And everything that was a bit out of line inevitably crossed paths. A bit like in a small town. The common enemy was the straighty 180 and the square.

JOHNNIE STIELER In the ’80s, everyone in the East got in fights. It was a really brutal society. A punch in the head was run of the mill. Family men would beat up teenagers for having weird hairstyles. You had to defend yourself against that. You started refusing to take any shit from the police, maybe even thrashing someone from the Stasi. Football games were where things really exploded. Everyone came together there: drunks, police, Stasi, frustrated teenagers. The country was a rat cage…with 16 million rats.

SPEZIAL In 1986 at an away match in Leipzig, I broke my kneecap in three places. I slammed down a flight of stairs at the train station and landed directly on my knee. It wasn’t pretty, acoustically or optically. I wore a cast for half a year. In the East, they were heavy as tables. Afterwards, I restrained myself a bit and slowly pulled back, though the BFC always remained my team.

WOLLE XDP I studied karate with Arne. You couldn’t do it regularly; it was quasi illegal. At most, the people from the security agencies were allowed to do it. It gave us a combative advantage, even though we couldn’t do much. If you were capable of doing a kick, you were immediately considered invincible.

JOHNNIE STIELER You had to assert yourself, have a physical presence. The police weren’t all masochists; there were those that simply wanted to go home, not get in fights with the teenagers at Alexanderplatz. We didn’t do anything really criminal. We were just present. But when some cooperative farm boy from the country felt he had to make a name for himself, it hurt.

WOLLE XDP We never went to the disco with the intention of making trouble. But we didn’t get out of trouble’s way when someone got smart with us. Actually, though, all this violence was annoying. Even when you win a fight, you still get your share, even if it’s just the other guy’s blood ruining your clothes.

ZAPPA A stupid look was enough to incite a fight back then. It could happen so quickly. Fortunately, I belonged to a crew that was relatively respected. Johnnie and Arne already had a reputation. They were BFC hooligans. They always protected me. I was the only Union14 fan in our group, but that didn’t bother anyone. The music welded us together.

WOLLE XDP I’m a Saxon, so I was beat up all the time. Every time I opened my mouth, I was no longer Wolle, but a Saxon. No matter where I went. At some point, I got sick of it. Through breakdancing, I met an extraordinary number of people and got respect for the first time. It was fantastic to put one over on all those guys that had bullied me so much a few years earlier. They were dumb, uneducated, listened to trash music and looked like shit in their jean jackets with cut-off sleeves and “Peter Maffay” or “Kiss” scrawled on the back. I listened to African-American music. Electronic music. And I dressed well. I was a motherfucking popper.

DJ JAUCHE A friend of my brother’s worked at the Prater and somehow managed to get me a traineeship as a waiter. In the East, that was the job where you could earn the most money. That’s how I fell onto the disco track. After work, my buddies and I went straight to the clubs. I was usually the youngest. When you worked in gastronomy, you tended to know the bouncer, and you never had to wait in line or pay.

SPEZIAL I got along really well in the East. I made good money. I had a beer stand downstairs at Alex-Treff where all the breakers hung out. Gastronomy in the East was like printing money. A good doctor had something like 2,000 marks a month. We had more.

FRANK BLÜMEL Operncafé, Café Nord, Turmcafé, Alex-Treff – those were the places to be in East Berlin. I experienced the last two. It was hard to get into the others. They were extremely hip, really. Alex-Treff was full of foreigners and odd birds. No one kept to the 60:40 rule – technically, only 40 percent of the music was allowed to come from the West. But there, they only played western music. I listened to The Cure and some gothic stuff, but also a lot of electronic music. I had a bird’s nest hairstyle. It was difficult to walk through a city of 30,000 people like Weißwasser as the only teenager with hair like that. That’s why I always went to Cottbus on Fridays and Berlin on Saturdays.

WOLLE XDP Clubs in the East were always on the move. They were like a kind of sound system. They brought everything themselves – equipment, lighting. Two were especially good, Tute and Velox. They were mostly in the Operncafé. A strange place. The first thing the bouncer did every night was hang up a sign that read, “Youth Dance Sold Out.” You had to know someone who would take you. Then you had to hope that the bouncer remembered you. That’s how it was at all the better places. Nothing happened without bribes. The diplomat kids went there. A few actors, pushers and then the people who made sure things got going. I was one of the latter. I could dance well, always had pretty girls with me and got along with the diplomat kids.

JOHNNIE STIELER The Operncafé was firmly in the hands of the Stasi. Syrian agents coupled off with Stasi prostitutes. A whole lot of scum cavorted there. True, we were there all the time – but more due to lack of alternatives. They made real money there. To get in, you had to bribe the bouncer. They really cleaned up at every position – at the bar, at the door, at the toilets.

WOLLE XDP It was totally unrepresentative of GDR nightlife. The rest was a nightmare; normal clubs were awful.

JOHNNIE STIELER Musically, it was almost all trash. And the announcements between songs drove you crazy.

DJ JAUCHE I always had a tape with me when I went out so that the diskothekers would play my music, even if it was just one track. I had everything cued up to the right spot. My aunt in Bayreuth15 sent me hip-hop records – Eric B. & Rakim, Grandmaster Flash, Man Parrish, transitioning smoothly to hip house by Fast Eddie and Tyree, early DJ International records. I bugged the diskothekers until they let me play. At some point, I started bringing my turntable. When I was finally allowed to get going, I could watch as the dance floor got emptier and emptier.

PAUL VAN DYK I was often at Kalinka in Lichtenberg [in East Berlin]. They had a lot of events, relatively speaking. By day, school children from the neighborhood were looked after there. At night, the chairs were moved aside and the diskothekers came. They brought their own equipment. When I was 14, I soldered cables and helped set up for one. They were called Tarantel.

FRANK BLÜMEL In 1987, I completed a DJ training program. It was offered by the Station for Young Engineers and Natural Scientists, a kind of special interest club for recreational activities. How to moderate, how to choose music, what’s the 60:40 rule and so on. The course ran two months. The certificate bore the emblem of the GDR and said, “Frank Blümel is authorized to organize discos in schools.” In order to play in clubs, I would have had to keep going. I would have had to become a state-certified disk jockey. There were classifications – A, B, C. They determined the salaries. The higher your classification, the more you earned.

ZAPPA Owning a lot of records was a total status symbol in the East. You nourished and cultivated it. I bought everything I could get my hands on, especially hip-hop. Back then, it was still called rap. If you knew about music, you were definitely cool. And if you made an effort, you could get a lot of stuff.

FRANK BLÜMEL There was the Polish and Hungarian Cultural and Information Center at Alex. They licensed records from the West and released them as records from the East. You could get them for cheap, around 23 ostmarks. The run was huge of course.

WOLLE XDP I started at the SEZ in the winter of 1987. My mom worked on the management floor there. I knew a few people in the Department of Culture through my breakdancing past. I was tired of the waitering jobs I’d done before – working with all those criminals. At the SEZ, I thought it was cool that I could contribute to different event concepts. At the beginning, I earned miserably. It was a real back-breaking job. I even cried sometimes because it was so exhausting. But it was worth it. What’s money when you can work somewhere you truly enjoy, where you can achieve goals? I wanted to organize parties.

DJ JAUCHE There was no DJ culture in the East. I only knew it from Westbam. We had the diskothekers, and that was a completely different principle of entertainment. Had the Wall not come down, I would have tried to run away to become a DJ. It may sound silly now, but that’s how it was.

THOMAS ELIAS My life consisted entirely of making escape plans. Every day, we came up with new ways of getting out. I lived on Leipziger Straße, right up against the West. From the roof, you could see the cars, the Springer publishing house. Sometimes it smelled of chocolate – when the wind blew favorably, it blew the smells of the sweets factory in Britz over to us.

WOLLE XDP On Leipziger Straße, we had an apartment with a telephone. You could also go up to the roof. There, you could see the border strip and over into the West. Whenever we had visitors, we went up there. For me, it was always like looking at the moon. When the weather’s good, you see a few hills. But you can’t get there. What should I think about it? It got hard the first time I asked myself, “Will I maybe get there some day after all? And why is the system forcing me not to ask that question?”

JOHNNIE STIELER I was in the Young Pioneers, the FDJ.16 I was always socially engaged because I always had a sense of mission. But when I wanted to join the Party, it was reluctant to take me. Not every asshole could be in the Party, after all. They wanted it a bit more elite. Which first of all means totally streamlined. But thanks to my parents, I was aware that not every socialist comes into the world without a spine. I grew up in a relatively intellectual household. There were always discussions; they really went at it in the living room. A continuing political dialogue.

WOLLE XDP There’s obviously a reason I stayed in the East. I thought socialism could be reformed. I didn’t feel like I was in a dictatorship. We knew there was the Stasi. But I didn’t suffer because of it. There were a lot of things I considered stupid, but I thought that like a doctor, you could fiddle around a bit, and it will work out.

THOMAS ELIAS I was with a friend on holiday in Bulgaria, and we spontaneously ripped out the notice in our passports, burned our plane tickets and showed up at the West German embassy in Sofia. We told them we were from West Berlin and had lost everything. We had to fill out forms – where we worked and so on. I wrote, “Driver at the KaDeWe.”17 But I didn’t know how to write KaDeWe, so I wrote “KDW.” Nor can the zip code have been right. They said, “Go home, apply for an exit visa, we’ll help you.” At home, we had to spend a day in jail. The Stasi people picked us up at the Mokka-Milch-Eisbar. The western authorities got me a lawyer. Vogel – he was the man for exit matters. He told us not to cause trouble, not to talk to anyone, it wouldn’t be long now. On August 13th, I got out of jail. On December 13th, 1986, I was allowed to leave.

JOHNNIE STIELER There was a multifaceted culture of mistrust. It got worse at the end of the ’80s. When I, an ordinary citizen of socialist conviction, set out for my advanced secondary school in the morning to work towards my final exams, people were waiting at the door. There were operational procedures. Because I was somehow involved with youth culture, carefully circumscribed, and with people who were problematic, but who I liked a lot. It was clear they had it in for me.

ARNE GRAHM There was some ambiguous clause in the GDR that allowed the state to put you in jail for antisocial behavior. You were already antisocial if you couldn’t prove how you subsisted. But since you had a rent that could be covered with around 25 marks, could eat a full month off 50 marks and could live at subsistence level off 250 marks, you didn’t need much. If you could prove you lived off your savings, that was OK, but no one my age could do that. So I needed a job. Especially because at 18, or barely 19, I’d applied for an exit visa. That’s why I worked as a window cleaner. At the end of 1987, I was able to leave with my girlfriend. Before leaving, I organized a few punk shows at Zionskirche and other locations. Three bands played at my goodbye party in Schöneiche. Two were from West Berlin. Everything illegal, of course. One of the West Berlin bands was called IAO. It was Achim Kohlberger’s band; later, he cofounded Ufo and Tresor. Die Vision was also there. They were state authorized. The singer, Uwe Geyer, was an icon of the GDR underground – and a Stasi informant, as it later turned out. A village cop put his neck on the line and approved the concert, but there were Stasi sitting in the anteroom. All three bands had to wear the same blue baseball cap that Geyer always wore so it looked like the same band was playing the whole time. I had registered it as a Christmas party for the BSG Landbau Schöneiche,18 as an athletes’ ball. The Westerners almost shat their pants because they had to cross the Berlin city limits to get to the concert, and their day visa wasn’t valid there.

WOLLE XDP Of course it sucked that everyone left. But it wasn’t like someone dying. More the feeling that now you had one more friend in the West. I kept in touch with Arne. We were lucky enough to have a phone. Otherwise, you simply accepted the separation. It was an intense time. There were no finalities, just ongoing change.

6 The official socialist youth movement of the GDR and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

7 Derogatory slang for East Germans deemed insufficiently critical of the system.

8 A large, government-run Sports and Recreation Center.

9 Common term for the East German mark.

10 An East German DJ with official state training and an official license to play music for a live audience.

11 Slang for former citizens of West Germany.

12 Slang for former citizens of East Germany.

13 Berliner FC Dynamo, a Stasi-sponsored East Berlin football team.

14 FC Union Berlin, an East Berlin soccer team known for its heated rivalry with Berliner FC Dynamo. While the latter was affiliated with the Stasi, Union was supported by the Free German Trade Union Federation.

15 A small city located in Bavaria, i.e. West Germany.

16 Free German Youth, the official socialist youth movement of the GDR and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

17 The Kaufhaus des Westens is a large department store near the center of West Berlin.

18 An East German association football club.

One-way ticket to space

THOMAS ELIAS At the beginning, it was boring in the West. I was one of the first from the East to come. I knew no one and missed my crew. I started off at a refugee center at Stuttgarter Platz, then a highrise in the Märkisches Viertel19, which wasn’t a good fit at all – in that case, I could have just stayed in the East. My first job was as a floor assistant in a casino. You clean ashtrays, look for which table needs money. Sometimes also card check or baccarat service. Then I was a waiter. I got 2,400 marks for six hours of work. That was a lot. I could buy everything. Rent was only 480 marks, after all. At the casino, they always said, “As someone from the East, it must be totally crazy for you, people playing with thousands of marks. It’s the decadence of capitalism in its purest form. How can you stand it?” I was only excited about it for one day. I always saw them lose everything, after all. Go out with hanging heads.

ARNE GRAHM I’ve always been a night owl. In the West, I hit the streets and tried virtually everything – from the washed-up nightclubs on Kudamm to the moldiest punk spots. I was at a UK Subs concert at Madhouse and watched the whole show on a movie screen, sitting in a theater seat one level up, thinking the whole time how shitty it was. You could tell from the crowd that punk in the West had been dead at least five years.

JONZON The first place I DJed was Grex on Eisenbahnstraße in Kreuzberg. The DJ booth was glassed-in and looked like an 800-liter aquarium. The mixer was a 60-mark thing with no crossfader, and the two turntables were Technics, massive things with powerful motors, but you couldn’t adjust the speed. Nor were there any slipmats. Mixing meant hard cuts. I was always excited as hell and once, in my excitement, I stopped the record entirely. Every now and then, I could wheedle 50 marks out of the boss to buy records at WOM. I bought whatever imports they had. In the afternoon, I had to play the new records for him in the club. He stood on the dance floor and tried to dance to them. “Jon, you bought shit music again!” he often complained. One time, he came raging into the DJ aquarium, and we had punch-up.

TERRIBLE When I came to Berlin, the old West Berlin was coming to an end. Gone the days where you couldn’t get into SO36. At Metropol, at Dschungel, at Loft – nothing going on. And the story that Blixa Bargeld stood around Café Swing getting smashed with pockets full of pills turned out to be a fairy tale. Still, I got a DJ job within seconds, even before I started university. The one cancelled the other out anyway.

ELSA FOR TOYS I grew up in the country. After high school, I more or less studied art in Amsterdam – and had my first club experiences. The Roxy was super hip. I’d never seen anything like it. There were masses of decked-out, half-naked queens who rubbed themselves in oil, writhed on the floor and danced to police sirens. One year later, I went to Berlin. The city seemed gray and faceless. At first, I worked the cash register at WOM. Often, I woke up at five am and went to Trash on Oranienstraße. They always played a half hour of punk, then a half hour of hip-hop. The old head bangers took the dance floor for the one; the somewhat cooler people for the other. What I knew from Amsterdam didn’t yet exist here. In Berlin, there was only this collective “anti” power. Everyone cool, leaning against the wall with a beer. I was always chatted up for speed. People thought I was a dealer because I was fit.

CLÉ Grex was the first place I realized something was happening. Jens Mahlstedt was DJing. First soul, then house. Things like “Move your body” by Marshall Jefferson. He played long passages that were really well-mixed. A raw music, a little unfinished, clumsy, but also soulful and a direct invitation to dance. It really ignited me. When I left in the morning, I stopped at a Turkish place for tripe soup. I was all riled up by the experience.

DR. MOTTE For a while, I DJed in a club on Hasenheide on Wednesdays. The local residents eventually put an end to that. Too loud. Then a few DJ friends and I decided to make our own club. We quickly found a spot in Schöneberg, a former drugstore. Using a brewery loan, we installed a floating floor and built fill walls and noise barriers.

DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO Turbine was the first club I went to. It was very hip. I came to Berlin in the fall of ’87. My roommates took me with them. It was a very small club with a tiny dance floor. Motte was cleaning and said, “Look what I can do,” then pulled out his tooth. I was totally flabbergasted. Shortly thereafter, he asked if I wanted to work at Turbine. It was a huge accolade, of course.

ELSA FOR TOYS I first worked there as a stopper – that’s the person who stops people from going in without paying. Later, I was at the door. You had to maintain a strict door there, but I’d never been a bouncer, so I had to practice during my first shift. For two hours, I didn’t let anyone in, always using questionable explanations. “What kind of shoes are those?” “Groups of over two and half are out.” “No thick down jackets.” Always new rules. Inside, they wondered why no one was coming.

DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO At first, Motte played more hip-hop. The people who worked there were a cross-section of all music genres. It was unusual for a club to be so eclectic. It was because of Motte. Berlin was basically a rock town, after all.

DR. MOTTE We threw the first acid house party in Germany at Turbine.

JONZON Even before Westbam.

DR. MOTTE It was on September 21st