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Culture from the Slums

Culture from the Slums

Punk Rock in East and West Germany
JEFF HAYTON
1
3
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For my parents,
Elise de Stein and Greg Hayton

Acknowledgments
Culture from the Slums could not have been completed without the encourage-
ment and support of my colleagues, friends, and family. Researched and written
across North America and Europe, my debts are many and one of the great
pleasures in completing such a big project is the opportunity to offer formal
thanks to all those who contributed in ways big and small.
This book began as a dissertation at the University of Illinois in Urbana-
Champaign. My advisor, Peter Fritzsche, was instrumental in challenging my
ideas and pushing me toward new frames of understanding: his always insightful
comments have stayed with me for a long time, and they remain imprinted on the
text in all sorts of wonderful ways. At Illinois, I had the good fortune of sharing my
work with many scholars and students whose consideration and critiques allowed
me to transform my vague thoughts into tangible reality. Before heading off to
Illinois, I was inspired to study German history by Pamela Swett, and over the
years, she has become one of my closest friends, and a model of scholarly wisdom
and integrity. Since arriving in Wichita, my colleagues have been incredibly
supportive of my endeavors and have made Kansas a great place to teach and
learn.
This book has only been possible thanks to the generosity of friends and
colleagues who have volunteered their time and energy to ensure its success.
Tim Brown, David Imhoff, Julia Sneeringer, Pamela Swett, and Jonathan
Wipplinger, as well as four anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press, all
read parts or the whole manuscript. Their comments were critical to the final
product, and I could not have asked for better readers. Over the years, I have had
numerous conversations with many brilliant individuals, exchanges which have
shaped my thinking about popular music and the study of history more generally.
I would like to thank the following for helping me to clarify my thoughts: Celia
Applegate, Julie Ault, Jovana Babović, David Blackbourn, Timothy Brown, Mary
Fulbrook, Juliane Fürst, Neil Gregor, Joachim Häberlen, Scott Harrison, Seth
Howes, David Imhoff, Mark Keck-Szajbel, Eric McKinley, Josie McLellan, Bodo
Mrozek, Klaus Nathaus, Katherine Pence, Michael Rauhut, Martin Rempe, Eli
Rubin, Detlef Siegfried, Edith Sheffer, Julia Sneeringer, Pamela Swett, Toby
Thacker, Katharine White, and Jonathan Wipplinger. Without any of them, this
book would be a much poorer affair. If it remains so, that of course is my fault.
In Germany, I received tremendous support from many institutions and the
great people who work at them. With no “punk archive,” I have visited dozens of
archives in the faint hope of finding traces of my subjects, and it is thanks to the
viii 
professionalism and diligence of archivists at these institutions that I was able to

do so. I would like to thank staff at the following archives for their generous help:
Archiv der Jugendkulturen (especially Klaus Farin), Berlin; Archiv für alternatives
Schrifttum, Duisburg; Archiv für populäre Musik im Ruhrgebiet, Dortmund;
Archiv für Sozialer Bewegungen, Hamburg; Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich;
Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich; Bayerisches Staatsarchiv, Munich; Bibliothek
für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung, Berlin; Bundesarchiv Berlin; Bundesarchiv
Koblenz; Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehe-
maligen DDR (especially Frau Annette Müller), Berlin; Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv,
Babelsberg; Evangelisches Landeskirchliches Archiv, Berlin; Evangelisches
Zentralarchiv, Berlin; Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Hauptstaatsarchiv,
Stuttgart; Landesarchiv Berlin; Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Duisburg;
Lippmann+Rau-Musikarchiv, Eisenach; Matthias-Domaschk-Archiv in der
Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft e.V., Berlin; Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv,
Hannover; Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Hamburg; Sächsisches Staatsarchiv,
Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig; Staatsarchiv
Hamburg; Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf; Stadtarchiv Essen; Stadtarchiv Hannover;
Stadtarchiv Mainz; Stadtarchiv München; Stadtarchiv Stuttgart; Stadtarchiv
Wuppertal; Stadtarchiv Stadt Nürnberg; and the Thüringer Archiv für
Zeitgeschichte, Jena.
Over the course of my research and writing, I have also met numerous
protagonists and enthusiasts from the era under study, and their assistance has
been essential in my understanding of German punk. I would like to give special
thanks to the following for their willingness to help a foreigner understand their
culture: Christian Baumjohann, Annette Benjamin, Franz Bielmeier, Gunther
Buskies, Tobias Cremer, Ray Ebert, Dirk Eisermann, Christiane Eisler, Klaus
Fiehe, Bettina Flörchinger, Holger Friedrich, Ronald Galenza, Peter Hein, Alfred
Hilsberg, Andreas Höhn, Michael Horschig, Annette Humpe, Burkhard
Inhülsen, Axel Klopprogge, Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt, Andi Küttner, Edmund
Labonté, Michael Max, Michael Mayer, Romy Meijer, Karl Nagel, Herne
Pietzker, Maik Reichenbach, Ilse Ruppert, Sabine Schwabroh, Xao Seffcheque,
Che Seibert, Dr. Enno Stahl, Mike Stanger, Martina Weith, Piotr Wierzbicki,
and Frank Ziegert. These are their stories, and I could not have told them without
their help.
This project would not have been possible without the support of the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the German Academic
Exchange Service, the Central European History Society, the Department of
History and Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, and the Department of History and Fairmount College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at Wichita State University. I would also like to thank the staff at
the Interlibrary Loan Department of Ablah Library for their heroism in bringing
obscure German publications to Kansas. My wonderful editors at Oxford
University Press—Stephanie Ireland, Christina Wipf Perry, and Cathryn
 ix
Steele—were enthusiastic about the project from the beginning and their support
was essential for its completion. Brian North was a superb copy editor, Rosalba
Putrino a meticulous indexer, and Scott Greenway designed a fantastic cover.
Thanks especially to Bhavani Govindasamy for doing a fantastic job at getting the
manuscript to final production. I have been able to present my work at numerous
forums over the years and I would like to thank panelists, commentators, work-
shop participants, audiences, and students for all the excellent questions and
debate we have had; while only a single name stands on the cover, monographs
are truly collective endeavors.
Earlier versions of several chapters were previously published as the following
articles and chapters: parts of Chapters 1 and 2 appeared as “Punk Authenticity:
Difference across the Iron Curtain” in The Politics of Authenticity: Countercultures
and Radical Movements across the Iron Curtain, edited by Joachim Häberlen,
Mark Keck-Szajbel, and Kate Mahoney (New York: Berghahn, 2018); parts of
Chapter 3 appeared as “ ‘The Revolution is over – and we have won!’: Alfred
Hilsberg, West German Punk and the Sixties” in The Global Sixties in Sound and
Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt, edited by Timothy S. Brown and Andrew
Lison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); parts of Chapter 4 appeared as
“Crosstown Traffic: Punk Rock, Space and the Porosity of the Berlin Wall in the
1980s” in Contemporary European History 26, No. 2 (2017) and “Härte gegen
Punk: Popular Music, Western Media, and State Response in the German
Democratic Republic” in German History 31, No. 4 (2013); and parts of
Chapter 8 appeared as “Krawall in der Zionskirche: Skinhead Violence and
Political Legitimacy in the GDR” in European History Quarterly 45, No. 2
(2015) and “Ignoring Dictatorship? Punk Rock, Subculture and Political
Challenge in the GDR” in Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of
Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc, edited by Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). All translations throughout the text are my
own unless otherwise noted.
Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their (mostly) unwaver-
ing support over the years it has taken me to complete this study. To my parents,
Elise de Stein and Greg Hayton, to whom this book is dedicated, without their
interest, encouragement, and support, my studies and career would not have been
possible. To my brother and sister, Scott Hayton and Jen Hayton, and their
families, the distractions from work were necessary antidotes to getting the book
done. To the entire Duque clan in Spain, thank you for inviting me into your
homes, your culture, and your cuisine! And finally, to Silvia Duque de San Juan,
my partner since the very beginnings of this punk adventure, her love and strength
gave me the determination to complete what I had set out to do; and more
importantly, she has given my life the meaning and happiness which we are all
looking for.
Wichita, Fall 2021
Contents
List of Figures xiii

List of Abbreviations xvii
Introduction: Punk Rock on the Spree 1
1. Origins and Scenes 28
2. Beliefs and Practices 62
3. Language and Identity 98
4. Wall Jumping and Repression 130
5. Commercialization and Crisis 161
6. Religion and Resistance 193
7. Politicization and Panic 226
8. Integration and Collapse 261
Epilogue: Memory and Meaning 293
Discography 307
Bibliography 311
Index 349
List of Figures
0.1 Der Spiegel cover story on punk (January 23, 1978) 11

Source: Der Spiegel, No. 4 (1978).
0.2 Maik “Ratte” Reichenbach, bassist for the Leipzig bands H.A.U. and
L’Attentat, on a train to East Berlin (1983) 15
Source: Christiane Eisler.
1.1 Cover page and feature story on Janie Jones’ and Mary Lou Monroe’s trip
to Mont-de-Marsan, France, in The Ostrich, No. 4 (September/October 1977) 30
Source: Franz Bielmeier.
1.2 West Berlin band PVC standing at the Berlin Wall (1978) 40
Source: Harald inHülsen.
1.3 East German punks dancing at the “PW” youth club in the Plänterwald,
East Berlin (1983) 44
1.4 Jürgen “Chaos” Gutjahr, singer for the Leipzig band Wutanfall,
in their practice space (1983) 46
1.5 Crowd outside the Ratinger Hof, Düsseldorf (1981) 49
Source: ar/gee gleim.
2.1 East Berlin band Planlos in their practice space (1982) 82
Source: Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft/Nikolaus Becker/RHG_Fo_NiBe_F0021_60.
2.2 “I hate Pink Floyd.” Weimar band The Madmans (1979) 85
Source: Holger Friedrich.
2.3 East German punks pogoing during a concert in the Christusgemeinde,
Halle (1983) 92
2.4 Audience during a concert in the Ratinger Hof, Düsseldorf (1981) 96
3.1 Peter “Janie Jones” Hein (right) and Fehlfarben in the Ratinger Hof,
Düsseldorf (1980) 104
3.2 Beate Bartel, from the band Mania D. and later Liaisons Dangereuses,
on bass during the “Festival der Neuen Deutschen Welle” at the FU
Berlin Audimax (1980) 110
xiv   
3.3 Jürgen Engler, from the band Die Krupps, plays the Stahlophone at the Haus
Blumenthal, Krefeld (1981) 112
3.4 Alfred Hilsberg, Sounds journalist, ZickZack record label owner,
and concert promoter (1980) 120
Source: Sabine Schwabroh.
3.5 Male performs at the “Into the Future” festival in the Markthalle,
Hamburg (1979) 122
Source: Che Seibert.
4.1 Singer Jana Schlosser from Namenlos during a concert in the
Christusgemeinde, Halle (1983) 132
4.2 East German punks at the Kulturpark in the Plänterwald, East Berlin (1983) 147
4.3 Surveillance photograph of Schleim-Keim’s rehearsal space in Stotternheim,
Erfurt, after the arrest of singer Dieter “Otze” Ehrlich (1983) 154
Source: BStU, MfS, BV Erfurt, AU 1409/83, Bd. I, Bl. 213, Bild 0009.
4.4 East German punks arrested during the state crackdown on the
subculture (1982–5) 157
Source: BStU, MfS, HA IX Fo 1705, 4; BStU, MfS, HA IX Fo 1706, 1-4;
BStU, MfS, HA XX Fo 847, 13f; BStU, MfS, HA XX Fo 850, 3 and 12.
5.1 West Berlin band Ideal during a concert (1981) 164
Source: Getty Images, ullstein bild No. 541074771.
5.2 Annette Benjamin, singer from Hannover band Hans-A-Plast, during
a concert in Vienna (1980) 169
5.3 Neue Deutsche Welle band Nichts, Düsseldorf (1981) 173
5.4 Klaus Maeck (2nd from right) in his Rip Off record store, Hamburg (1981) 184
6.1 East Berlin punks on an excursion to Bergholz near Potsdam (1983) 201
6.2 Cover page and feature story on Namenlos in the East German fanzine
Inside (1987) 207
Source: Michael Horschig, Herne Pietzker, and Piotr Wierzbicki.
6.3 Wutanfall during a concert in the Christusgemeinde, Halle (1983) 210
6.4 Antitrott playing during the Kirchentages von Unten in East Berlin (1987) 214
Source: Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft/Siegbert Schefke/RHG_Fo_HAB_18472.
   xv
6.5 “Overview of the manifestations of ‘negative-decadent’ youths in the GDR.”

Stasi understandings of youth subcultures including punk (mid-1980s) 216
Source: BStU, MfS, BV Erfurt, KD Weimar 1362, 30.
7.1 Slime during a concert at Krawall 2000, Hamburg (1980) 230
Source: Slime.
7.2 Yankees Raus album cover by Slime (1982) 235
Source: Slime.
7.3 “Hate.” Punks facing police at the Chaos-Tage in Hannover (1983) 249
Source: Dirk Eisermann.
7.4 “Be afraid! 5000 Punks are here.” Die tageszeitung snaps a punk holding
up the tabloid Bild (1983) 251
Source: taz—die tageszeitung, No. 1062/27 (July 4, 1983), 1.
7.5 The crowd slam-dances during The Clash in the Markthalle, Hamburg (1981) 253
Source: Ilse Ruppert.
7.6 Die Toten Hosen emerged as the preeminent Fun Punk band (1981) 257
8.1 Paul Landers and Christian “Flake” Lorenz from the East Berlin band
Feeling B (1988) 277
Source: Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft/Hartmut Beil/RHG_Fo_HBeil_165.
8.2 East German punks dancing during the Weißen Beat Inn concert (1988) 290
Source: Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft/Volker Döring/RHG_Fo_VDoe_3.
E.1 Musealization of German punk. Exhibition on the subculture in the
Archiv der Jugendkulturen, Berlin (2008) 301
Source: Jeff Hayton.
List of Abbreviations
AGR Aggressive Rock Productions (Aggressive Rockproduktionen)

APPD Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany (Anarchistische Pogo-Partei Deutschland)
ARD Working Group of Public Broadcasters of the Federal Republic of Germany
(Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland)
BEK League of Protestant Churches in the GDR (Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen)
BMG Bertelsmann Music Group
CBS Columbia Broadcasting System (Columbia Records)
CCCS Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
CDU Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Christlich-Demokratische Union
Deutschlands)
CSU Christian Social Union in Bavaria (Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern)
DIY do-it-yourself
DM Deutschmark (West German currency)
EMI Electric and Music Industries (EMI Records)
FDJ Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend)
FRG Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland)
GDR German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik)
GKR Parish Council (Gemeindekirchenrat)
HdjT House of Young Talent (Haus der jungen Talente)
IM Unofficial Collaborator (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter)
JG Young Congregations (Junge Gemeinde)
KKR District Church Council (Kreisenkirchenrat)
MCA Music Corporation of America
MfS Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Stasi)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NDR Northern German Broadcasting (Norddeutscher Rundfunk)
NDW New German Wave (Neue Deutsche Welle)
NVA National People’s Army (Nationale Volksarmee)
RAF Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion)
RCA Radio Corporation of America
RIAS Radio in the American Sector (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor)
SED Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands)
SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands)
WDR West German Broadcasting (Westdeutscher Rundfunk)
WEA Warner Elektra Atlantic (Warner Music Group)
ZDF Second German Television (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen)
Introduction
Punk Rock on the Spree
Punk Histories of Divided Germany
Hey ho, let’s go! Hey ho, let’s go!

The Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”¹
The Ramones are perhaps the most famous punk band in history. Getting their
start in 1974, they were central figures in the New York punk scene around Max’s
Kansas City and CBGBs on the Lower East Side. Although never experiencing
commercial success, their sound and style has been exceedingly influential.²
Unsurprisingly, the Ramones Museum opened in 2005 to preserve the memory
of the band for those too young to have watched them play but who still think
Rocket to Russia (1977) is a great record.³ As punk’s creators increasingly exit the
stage (all four original Ramones have now passed away), the genre has progres-
sively become enshrined in houses of remembrance as a crucial component of our
modern cultural legacy.⁴
However, the Ramones Museum is not located on the Lower East Side, or
anywhere in New York for that matter. Rather, the Ramones Museum is steps
from the Spree River in Berlin, Germany. The institution was founded by Florian
Hayler who, after attending a Ramones concert in 1990, began collecting mem-
orabilia that came to fill his apartment. In the new millennium—per the flyer
recounting the genesis of the museum—Hayler was given an ultimatum by his
then girlfriend: either the souvenirs go, or she does.⁵ Today, she is long gone, but
the Ramones Museum just celebrated its fifteenth-year anniversary and has been
patronized by tens of thousands of visitors from across the globe. As Hayler has
¹ Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop,” Ramones (Sire, SASD-7520, 1976).

² Everett True, Hey Ho Let’s Go: The Story of the Ramones, updated edition (London: Omnibus
Press, 2005).
³ For example, 2016 was the fortieth anniversary of punk in Britain and to celebrate, cultural events
took place all year in London. See Christopher D. Shea, “Hey Ho, It’s Old: England Embraces Punk
Rock 40 Years Later,” New York Times (August 15, 2016), C1.
⁴ “Ramones” Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/ramones [February
13, 2021].
⁵ “Welcome to Ramones Museum Berlin: Here’s a few things you should know about this museum.”
(Berlin: Ramones Museum, n.d.), n.p.
Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West Germany. Jeff Hayton, Oxford University Press. © Jeff Hayton 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866183.003.0001
2    
explained, the museum is a dedicated lieux de mémoire for fans to celebrate their
musical tastes: “All kinds of people stop by,” he told Neues Deutschland in 2006,
“from professors to punks. Anyone who’s ever heard the Ramones and immedi-
ately fallen under their spell.”⁶ A perusal of the guestbook substantiates these
claims as fans from around the world have scrawled rejoinders like “Punk’s Not
Dead!” to emphasize punk’s historical significance as a transnational community,
impetus for alternative culture, and soundtrack for unconventional living.
At first glance, it might seem strange that the Ramones Museum is in Berlin and
not New York, but upon closer inspection, it makes sense. Nowhere has punk
burrowed deeper into the socio-cultural woodwork than in Germany. From
youths encountered on the streets to the blaring of punk music on the radio, in
clubs, or at protests, the genre has grown firmer roots in Germany than perhaps
anywhere else in the world. Nor has its influence remained confined to a marginal
subculture. German punk books have been bestsellers and German punk films
award-winners. Punk couture graces the shelves of boutiques and department
stores across Germany. Several of the country’s biggest international music stars
over the years—Einstürzende Neubauten, Nina Hagen, Nena, die Toten Hosen,
Rammstein—began their careers as punks. The alternative music scene—more or
less founded by punk—accounts for one-fifth of the German music market, the
fourth-largest globally after the United States, Japan, and Great Britain.⁷ The use
of German-language lyrics in popular music found its initial mass popularization
with German punk which in turn, has influenced hip-hop, techno, and other
genres. German punks even have a political party, the Anarchist Pogo Party of
Germany (Anarchistische Pogo-Partei Deutschland, APPD) and punks have been
delegates in municipal, state, and national legislatures.⁸ These influences even
extend abroad as German punk bands are featured at international music festivals
and non-Germans flock to cities like Berlin for its supposed nonconformity, an
association deepened by punks and other alternatives in the 1970s and 1980s. This
long list of punk influences can be extended almost indefinitely and illustrate the
genre’s remarkable impact on German politics, society, and culture. Despite first
emerging in New York and London, punk has arguably had a more long-lasting
echo in Germany than in either the United States or Great Britain.
⁶ Sebastian Krüger, “Gammeljeans hinter Glas,” Neues Deutschland (August 5/6, 2006). See also
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations, No. 26 (Spring
1989): 7–24. Cf. Peter Carrier, “Places, Politics, and the Archiving of Contemporary Memory in Pierre
Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire,” in Susannah Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg,
2000), 37–57.
⁷ International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Global Music Report 2021 (London: IFPI,
2021), 11.
⁸ Die Partei hat immer Recht! Die gesammelten Schriften der APPD (Berlin: Thomas Tilsner, 1998);
and Angela Marquardt, Was ich bin, was mir stinkt, was ich will (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch,
1999).
:      3
Culture from the Slums explains why Germans endowed punk with such
tremendous political, social, and cultural meaning, and how these investments
shaped divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. In East and West Germany,
punk facilitated individual and collective renewal as youths built alternative
communities and fashioned unconventional identities to distinguish themselves
from mainstream society. These efforts were grounded in a belief that the world
they inhabited was inauthentic, but that punk could restore meaning and purpose
to individuals and their lives. Whether through making music, creating independ-
ent institutions, or protesting mainstream convention, punk was an important
vehicle for political, social, and cultural emancipation in both German states
during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite vastly different contexts, youths on both
sides of the Berlin Wall believed punk could help them nurture more genuine
identities and more lively relations than those existing in their present societies.
These similarities illustrate the remarkable resemblances and connections which
existed between East and West at this time, convergences which challenge rigid
Cold War divisions. Although certainly inflected differently on either side of the
Iron Curtain, punks helped transform divided Germany by forcing both states and
societies to respond to their provocations. Indeed, punk disturbances generated
heated debates about German identity, society, and citizenship among the broader
public, and in so doing, pushed divided Germany toward a more heterogeneous
and pluralistic society. Punk has always been a minority taste, but its influence
upon German life has been profound.
Such depth makes punk a useful lens to explore divided Germany in the 1970s
and 1980s. These years are a significant if understudied era in postwar European
history.⁹ In the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, FRG),
the 1970s witnessed a gradual fatigue for the Social Democratic Party
(Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) coalition government under
first Willy Brandt (1969–74) and then Helmut Schmidt (1974–82). Burdened by
economic recession, domestic terrorism, leftist activism, and a renewed Cold War,
West Germany increasingly staggered along until the confident return to power of
the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands,
CDU) under Helmut Kohl in 1982/3. In the German Democratic Republic
(Deutsche Demokratische Republik, GDR), the initial political and social goodwill
greeting the ascent of Erich Honecker to the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party
(Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) in 1971 was soon dashed by the
expulsion of critical singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976 and the growing
economic difficulties which ultimately contributed to state collapse in 1989.¹⁰ The
⁹ See Andreas Wirsching, ed., “The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History?”
Journal of Modern European History 9, No. 1 (2011): 8–26.
¹⁰ On these decades generally, see Peter C. Caldwell and Karrin Hanshew, Germany since 1945:
Politics, Culture, and Society (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
4    
late 1970s and early 1980s are thus a moment across the Iron Curtain which looks
to the future but does not seem to possess its own discrete historical impression.
In narrating these years, scholars often take the present as their starting point.
For West Germany, the late 1970s and early 1980s are a period of heady challenges
and uncertainties marked by international confrontations abroad and struggles
for greater liberty at home. The difficulties of this era are contrasted with the
renewed assurance of the mid-1980s under the guidance of the CDU which
eventually led to reunification in 1990. For East Germany, these years function
as an antechamber of collapse, as the moment when the many political, social,
economic, and cultural loans which the SED had taken out over the years came
due. In these interpretations, 1989/90 operates as a “vanishing point” or “ending
myth” confirming the success of Western democratic capitalism and the failure of
Eastern state socialism.¹¹ The various theoretical frameworks which have been
developed over the years to account for the triumphs of the Berlin Republic—
Americanization, Westernization, liberalization, democratization, re-civilization,
etc.—speak to this narrative in which reconstruction, capitalism, parliamentarian-
ism, civil society, and the rule of law in West Germany were crucial in the growth
of democracy.¹² And since these developments did not take place in East
Germany, only reunification has enabled Easterners to experience democracy
and modernity, an account leaning heavily on an older historiography stressing
a repressive state, and not more recent work elucidating the “limits of dictator-
ship” and the nuanced contours of everyday life in the GDR.¹³ In these under-
standings, even before the recent rise of illiberal and populist sentiments which
¹¹ Jennifer L. Allen, “Against the 1989–1990 Ending Myth,” Central European History 52, No. 1
(2019): 125–47; and Helmut Walser Smith, “The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on
Perspective,” History & Memory 17, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 269–95.
¹² See, e.g., Sonja Levsen and Cornelius Torp, eds., Wo liegt die Bundesrepublik? Vergleichende
Perspektiven auf die westdeutsche Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016); Ulrich
Herbert, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014); Eckart
Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart
(Munich: Siedler, 2009); Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, trans. Alexander
J. Sager (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Thomas Hertfelder and Andreas Rödder, eds.,
Modell Deutschland: Erfolgsgeschichte oder Illusion? (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007);
Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von ihren
Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2006); Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler:
Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, trans. Brandon Hunziker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Manfred Görtemaker, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Von der Gründung bis zur
Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die
Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1999); and Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen. Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der
Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999).
¹³ See Andrew I. Port, “Introduction: The Banalities of East German Historiography,” in Becoming
East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 1–30; and
Thomas Lindenberger, “Die Diktatur der Grenzen,” in Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und
Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999),
13–44. For recent work, see e.g., Julia E. Ault, Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational
Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021);
Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (Seattle:
:      5
have called the future of Western-style modernity into question, Germany has
come to embody a model liberal democratic state and the Berlin Republic a
success story after decades of dictatorship, war, and genocide: not for nothing
did Time magazine christen Chancellor Angela Merkel the “leader of the free
world” in 2015.¹⁴
Yet scholars have become increasingly dissatisfied with these interpretations,
even if no clear consensus has emerged on how to best understand the history of
divided Germany. For starters, the difficulties of integrating East and West into a
single account has proven remarkably elusive. While scholars have offered
detailed comparisons of the early decades of the Cold War, the last two, by
contrast, remain more cursory and impressionistic.¹⁵ This disparity is related to
sources and archival access, but it is equally a question of narrative frame. More
problematic, however, is the emphasis on Western success and Eastern failure.
Whereas an earlier generation of scholars regarded the postwar era as a story of
successful Westernization culminating in the Berlin Republic, recent voices ques-
tion this teleology as either relying on faulty analogies or overstating the degree to
which German history can be reduced to a single, dominant narrative.¹⁶ Critics
argue these works judge postwar Germany against imaginary archetypes—and
University of Washington Press, 2020); Ned Richardson-Little, The Human Rights Dictatorship:
Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2020); Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016); Sandrine Kott, Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East
German Society, trans. Lisa Godin-Roger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Heather
Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Josie McClellan, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy
and Sexuality in the GDR (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Paul Betts, Within Walls:
Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Jan
Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945-1990
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
¹⁴ Karl Vick, “Person of the Year. Angela Merkel: Chancellor of the Free World,” Time (December
21, 2015).
¹⁵ See, e.g., Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided
Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs
and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Dagmar
Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005); Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture
in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Elizabeth D. Heineman, What
Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999); and Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two
Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For important recent exceptions, see
Katrin Schreiter, Designing One Nation: The Politics of Economic Culture and Trade in Divided
Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Marcel Thomas, Local Lives, Parallel Histories:
Villagers and Everyday Life in Divided Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Frank Bösch,
ed., A History Shared and Divided: East and West Germany since the 1970s, trans. Jennifer Walcott
Neuheiser (New York: Berghahn, 2018); and Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht, and Andrew
Plowman, eds., Divided, But Not Disconnected: German Experiences of the Cold War (New York:
Berghahn, 2010).
¹⁶ On pluralizing narratives of West German history, see Frank Bajohr et al., eds., Mehr als eine
Erzählung: Zeitgeschichtliche Perspektiven auf die Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016).
6    
thereby engage in an updated version of the Sonderweg thesis—and fail to

adequately account for either illiberal currents dogging the West, or the modernity
of the East.¹⁷ By elevating Western-style liberal democracy as the normative
scaffolding against which states and societies are adjudicated, these histories
moreover foster a condescending attitude toward the many ideas, groups, and
developments which have been lost in the homogenizing march of modernity: that
East Germany is dismissed as a “footnote of world history,” a “satrapy” of
Moscow, and “failed” state, illustrates just how inadequate “Western success”
functions as a tool for writing the history of divided Germany.¹⁸ More to the
point: not only do narratives of “Western arrival” fail to capture the diversity of
thought and behavior which has so marked German history during the postwar
era, but they overlook the ways in which peripheral currents have been an integral
part of the whole.
As these comments suggest, histories focusing on the Berlin Republic as the
destination, ignore the multitude of life experiences that encompassed the jour-
ney. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, East
and West Germans did not know their countries would be reunified and lived
their lives within the contexts of their separate yet entangled existences. For some,
this meant imagining identities and constructing collectives counter to main-
stream conceptions of self, state, and society. And for these individuals and their
communities, this historical conjucture provided unprecedented opportunities to
pursue alternative modes of existence. The late 1970s and early 1980s was a
moment of uncertainty in both East and West as assumptions and certitudes
about politics, prosperity, and progress were put into question. In these years,
unconventional lifestyles and alternative communities exploded across the Cold
War divide, developments attesting to a widespread disenchantment felt by many
Germans with their societies. Although this era is often understood as a period of
crisis—which punk’s nihilistic “No Future” ethos seems to personify beautifully—
it was also seen as an opportunity to reimagine society.¹⁹ In both East and West,
many Germans during these decades endeavored to create alternative futures,
¹⁷ Frank Biess and Astrid M. Eckert, “Introduction: Why Do We Need New Narratives for the
History of the Federal Republic?” Central European History 52, No. 1 (2019): 1–18, esp. 6–8; and
Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, “Introduction,” in Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, eds., Socialist
Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008),
1–34, esp. 6–15. On the German Sonderweg, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of
German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984).
¹⁸ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Fünfter Band: Bundesrepublik und DDR
1949–1990 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008), 361, and 424–5. See also Donna Harsch, “Footnote or
Footprint? The German Democratic Republic in History,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute
46 (Spring 2010): 9–25; and Thomas Lindenberger, “What’s in this footnote? World History!” Bulletin
of the German Historical Institute 46 (Spring 2010): 27–31.
¹⁹ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael
Joseph, 1994), 403ff. See also Niall Ferguson, “Crisis, What Crisis? The 1970s and the Shock of the
Global,” in Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the
:      7
even if they ultimately remained deferred or, in many cases, unrealized.

Nonetheless, their industry demands explanation, both because Germans at the
time invested tremendous energy in these pursuits, and because their activities
transformed East and West Germany in significant ways.
To write the history of divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s means to take
seriously the beliefs and practices of ordinary Germans, especially those who
dissented from dominant discourses or rejected prevailing conventions, even if
their strivings never amounted to much. Doing so can recuperate the many past
futures which Germans pursued and can reorient our appreciation of this period
in history. Nearly two decades ago, Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch implored
scholars to rethink German history from the margins to “decenter received
conceptions of what it meant to be German at a given time.” The point, they
cautioned, was not to add “previously silenced voices to the general chorus,” but to
communicate the “enormous diversity of life stories and group experiences” lost in
the homogenizing effacements of difference.²⁰ What histories of the present miss
is the conditional nature of the past, and how alternative visions of what Germany
might have been has shaped the historical record. Investigating roads not taken
thus restores contingency to a moment when Germany remained divided, its
achievements in question, and its future trapped in the subjunctive.
Punk is a particularly fruitful means of accessing this historical moment. While
punk never resolved its own contradictions—as we will see, they eventually tore
the subculture apart—the genre nonetheless inspired Germans in the 1970s and
1980s to challenge existing orthodoxies and create new certainties, a revolt which
upended the status quo. Indeed, the disruptions punks provoked oftentimes
helped emancipate and pluralize divided Germany. Making these claims does
not suggest triumphant progress: as will become clear, punk tumults very often
reinforced convention, and in fact, German punk can be read as a poignant tale of
unfulfilled promise. But the ideals and practices which punks pursued, and the
debates and reactions unleashed by their subcultural activities, nevertheless
shaped Germans and their societies profoundly. As we will see, the controversies
surrounding punk—over space and behavior, fashion and music, consumerism
and violence, rebellion and collusion—were disagreements about the contours of
the subculture; but they were equally contestations about German politics and
society.
As such, punk can help us better understand divided Germany in the 1970s and
1980s. As others have observed, punk was not simply a music genre but rather a
field of cultural production in which sounds, styles, and stances were diverse and
Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010), 1–21. Cf. Cyrus Shahan, “Fehlfarben
and German Punk: The Making of ‘No Future,’ ” in Uwe Schütte, ed., German Pop Music: A Companion
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 111–129, esp. 112.
²⁰ Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 59 and 83.
8    
often contradictory.²¹ Plurality encouraged youths to mobilize punk in manifold

ways, even if multiplicity led to friction and considerable division. But while punk
as a subculture and movement remained contradictory, its reverberations were
emancipatory. In both East and West, youths were attracted to punk because it
offered them the possibility of reimagining the world, even if their efforts to make
dreams become reality were often fraught with inconsistencies. And though punk
undertakings were not always explicitly articulated as such, they nonetheless
helped enlarge the contours of German politics and society by compelling the
mainstream to react to their unconventionality, a dialectical process expanding
German experiences. To say this does not reproduce the narrative of Western
success, but rather to show how punks and others helped broaden the possibilities
for expectant futures at a moment when the present seemed so unsettled.²² In this
way, Culture from the Slums explores how emancipatory sensibilities were
renewed and reimagined by alternative communities on both sides of the Iron
Curtain during the 1970s and 1980s.
In exploring how punk helped emancipate divided Germany during these
years, Culture from the Slums makes two broad claims. First, I argue that punk
was a medium for alternative living and a motor for social change. While I agree
the subculture was not merely a waypoint in a progressive narrative running
from the student movement in the 1960s to reunification in 1990, punk was
much more than an “inventory of crises.”²³ By investing the genre with eman-
cipatory potential, Germans on both sides of the Berlin Wall mobilized punk to
oppose convention and advance difference as a basis for alternative identities
and communities. In the East, music and style was used to reject “real-existing
socialism,” while in the West, the punk revolt condemned democratic capitalism
as inhibiting authentic existence. In each case, punk provided a powerful
alternative to mainstream conformity and inspired new vistas for belonging,
distinctiveness, and experimentation among Germans. Punk certainly encom-
passed significant contradictions, inconsistencies which regularly undermined
its ideals and fractured the collective as we will see. In fact, despite a large
literature extolling punk as a form of resistance, it would be wrong to ascribe
such hagiography uncritically to the subculture. Punks constantly engaged in
practices the subculture supposedly rejected, activities that were often deeply
imbricated in mainstream society whether participating in consumer practices
in the West or working with the state in the East. These examples and others
²¹ Matthew Worley et al., “Introduction: From Protest to Resistance,” in The Subcultures Network,
eds., Fight Back: Punk, Politics and Resistance (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2014), 1–2.
²² On the deep imbrications between past, present, and future temporalities, see Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1985).
²³ Cyrus Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis: Adaption and Resistance after 1977 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–22, here 1 and 16.
:      9
indicate the complexity of punk and demonstrate how either/or dichotomizing

are unhelpful for elucidating the full contours of the subculture. Yet despite
these paradoxes, for many Germans in the 1970s and 1980s, punk pursuits
enlarged their possibilities for difference, thus illustrating why the subculture
is representative of the new forms, contents, and sensibilities of cultural politics
that emerged during the 1960s.
Second, through a comparative analysis of the subculture, I argue that punk
helps explain why West Germany flourished and why East Germany collapsed. At
first glance, this claim appears to celebrate Western success. However, the oppos-
ite is in fact intended: while punk remained fundamentally indigestible to Eastern
state socialism, it proved unable to withstand Western democratic capitalism. In
West Germany, punk led to both an enriched civil society and a ghettoized
subculture. Punk sonic experimentation and singing in German led to the creation
of an indigenous popular music genre, the Neue Deutsche Welle (New German
Wave) and gave youths access to an expressive new vernacular. Except success
provoked backlash and critics questioned whether punk could retain its preten-
sions of alterity if beholden to commercial interests. Threatened by commodifi-
cation, some youths retreated into a more exclusionary, violent, and isolated
subculture, while others moved punk more readily into the mainstream: in both
cases, by the mid-1980s, punk had ceased to function as an instrument of
difference in the West.
By contrast, authorities were never able to control punk in East Germany.
Despite initially dismissing punk as nonexistent in the GDR, continuing provo-
cations convinced the SED to violently repress the subculture. Except coercion
failed as youths rebuilt their shattered scenes and became socialized into the
growing opposition groups gathering in the Protestant Churches. Having unsuc-
cessfully hindered the subculture with force, the SED reversed course and instead
tried to generate support for its tottering rule by endorsing punk at the end of the
1980s. Again, however, these efforts backfired as youths used their new privileges
to only further erode the legitimacy of the state which, in the end, collapsed. These
opposing outcomes demonstrate how democratic capitalism tamed alternative
currents that contested its power to ascribe value and meaning, and why state
socialism proved unable to absorb or constrain the challenges posed by punk and
other subcultures. Perhaps most consequentially, such divergent aftermaths imply
that alternative futures remained open for much longer in the East, than they did
in the West, opportunities that should encourage a rethinking of Western “suc-
cess” and Eastern “failure.”
Culture from the Slums thus examines the roles which punk played in German
politics, society, and culture, and how German contexts transformed punk. Put
differently: this study is about punk in Germany, and Germany in punk. As many
scholars have noted, popular culture has often nurtured pluralistic sensibilities
and, in the postwar era, has frequently been the site of contested politics and social
10    
change.²⁴ By forcing Germans to respond to its provocations, punk destabilized

the existing social order and became a nexus for complex debates about divided
Germany. Nor was this a smooth process as state and societal reactions to the
subculture—indeed, panic over punk—tells us much about how the margins help
construct the mainstream in both democracy and dictatorship. Punk, I argue, was
both an expression and a consequence of the tremendous political, socio-
economic, and cultural changes unfolding in East and West during the 1970s
and 1980s. Understanding German punk can therefore help to explain why so
many individuals devoted their lives to alternative politics and culture during this
period, and how German politics, society, and culture were transformed by these
pursuits.
Alternative Culture and Authenticity in East

and West Germany
Ugly made-up youths, wearing ripped clothes with Nazi-insignia and

dog-collars, protesting unemployment and boredom in industrial
society are on display. Their primitive ‘Punk-Rock’ is being success-
fully marketed by the record industry. Jet-setters from New York to
Munich find the ‘lumpen-fashion’ to be the latest trend. But real
punks are already critical about the big fuss: “Something crooked is
going on.”
Der Spiegel, 1978²⁵
As one of the more dramatic movements of the time, contemporary media reports
on punk illustrate the importance of authenticity and alternative culture during
these decades. My title is borrowed from an issue of Der Spiegel that sought to
educate West Germans about punk in 1978. The cover depicted London punks
sporting swastikas, Dave Vanian from The Damned dressed as Dracula, and the
American transgender singer Jayne County (Figure 0.1). Der Spiegel paired these
provocative images with a sensational headline: “Punk. Culture from the Slums:
Brutal and Ugly.” Within, the magazine detailed the dissolute nature of punk and
its fans, as well as efforts by the music and fashion industry to monetize the genre.
By stressing punk’s repulsiveness and transgression, Der Spiegel shocked
staid burghers even as it intrigued their kids.²⁶ But scandal also illuminates
²⁴ On the importance of popular culture in the study of postwar Germany, see Alexa Geisthövel and
Bodo Mrozek, “Einleitung,” in Alexa Geisthövel and Bodo Mrozek, eds., Popgeschichte. Band 1:
Konzepte und Methoden (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), 7–25.
²⁵ “Punk: Nadel im Ohr, Klinge am Hals,” Der Spiegel, No. 4 (January 23, 1978), 140.
²⁶ Ute Wieners, Zum Glück gab es Punk—Autobiografische Erzählungen (Neustadt: Verlag des
Arbeitskreises Regionalgeschichte e.V., 2012), 60–1.
:      11
Figure 0.1 Der Spiegel cover story on punk (January 23, 1978)
Source: Der Spiegel.
how punk was understood by East and West Germans, with the former following
the latter in condemning the subculture as originating from the “garbage heap.”²⁷
The word “slums” was an Anglo-American import much like punk itself and
freighted with meaning: socio-economic decay, racial segregation, and cultural
²⁷ Ingold Bossenz, “Krisenkultur von der Müllhalde,” Neues Deutschland (June 3/4, 1978), 16.
12    
inferiority.²⁸ The term’s use in divided Germany trafficked in persistent fears of

American cultural hegemony and racial threat, embodied by the anxious
responses to earlier music genres like jazz or rock ‘n’ roll; and by the 1970s,
“slums” were used to describe ethnic enclaves in German cities inhabited by
Turkish Muslims.²⁹ By associating punk with slums, Der Spiegel implied the
subculture was both foreign and a menace.
Yet Der Spiegel’s allusion was not strictly one-sided. Punks too embraced slums
because they believed these sites and their connotations conferred authenticity:
slums were threatening, but also promised possibilities. Punks gravitated to slums
both literal and metaphorical because they implied danger, liminality which
strengthened their rejection of the status quo and aided in efforts at walling
themselves off from what they perceived to be mainstream corruption. Slums—
political, economic, racial, cultural—have often been pursued as a source of
genuineness in postwar German history whether by Western student radicals in
the 1960s or Eastern hip-hop enthusiasts in the 1980s.³⁰ And by positioning
themselves as marginal to the mainstream—more invented than real, as we will
see—punks sought to negotiate cultural politics in both German states from a
location considered to be more authentic. For these reasons, Der Spiegel’s primer
on punk sounded alarms, not only with the public but amongst youths too. After
describing the genesis and contours of the British scene and its recent arrival in
West Germany, the magazine questioned punk’s future legitimacy as music
producers and fashion gurus tried to capitalize on the genre. By underscoring
punk’s growing commodification, Der Spiegel signaled how the authenticity which
alternative culture purported to bestow upon its members—“subcultural capital”
in Sarah Thornton’s classic terminology—was vulnerable to corrosion and
decay.³¹
As the disquiet by “real punks” that “something crooked is going on” in Der
Spiegel suggests, authenticity was central to punk, a concept at the heart of
alternative culture. With connotations of “real” and “truth,” authenticity is used
to designate laws and spaces, artifacts and events, practices and behaviors that are
²⁸ On the American context, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid:
Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
²⁹ Maria Stehle, Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture: Textscapes, Filmscapes,
Soundscapes (Rochester: Camden House, 2012), 11–17. See also Jonathan O. Wipplinger, The Jazz
Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2017); Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and
America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels.
³⁰ Leonard Schmieding, “Das ist unsere Party”: HipHop in der DDR (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2014);
Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2012); and Detlef Siegfried, “White Negroes: The Fascination of the Authentic in
the West German Counterculture of the 1960s,” in Belinda Davis, Wilfried Mausbach, Martin Klimke,
and Carla MacDougall, eds., Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective
Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 191–213.
³¹ Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 1995).
:      13
valued for their genuineness. We seek out authentic food, travel to authentic
locales, and pursue authentic experiences: although difficult to define, authenticity
structures daily life.³² Evolving in the early modern era through political and
socio-economic modernization, as Lionel Trilling classically argued, authenticity
was concerned with the development of one’s inner self and its presentation to and
recognition by others outwardly.³³ Influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
nineteenth-century Romantics felt that modern society, driven by industrial
capitalism and bourgeois norms, with its stress on conformity, convention, and
tradition, was inhibiting authenticity.³⁴ Nevertheless, despite such fetters, the
authentic self could still be realized, especially by resisting homogenization and
expressing one’s individuality regardless of social expectations or typical beliefs.
As these remarks indicate, by the twentieth century, authenticity was intimately
linked with the relationship between individuals and society, and the pursuit of
individuality had become the means to discover, experience, and express inner
genuineness.
Efforts at differentiating themselves from a mainstream society believed to be
inauthentic have guided alternatives throughout the twentieth century. From fin-
de-siècle bohemians to the interwar era avant-garde, nonconformists in the first
half of the century provoked controversy with their rejection of middle-class
customs and adventurous tastes.³⁵ Even the division of the world into Eastern
and Western blocs after 1945 saw efforts at overcoming synthetic existences on
either side of the Iron Curtain. Labeling their endeavors “genuine” or “real,”
radicals in the West sought to restore meaning to lives they argued were bound
by consumer culture, political stultification, and social conformity before, during,
and after the sixties.³⁶ In the East, pursuing authenticity meant refusing
the demands of dictatorship, or “living in truth” in Vaclav Havel’s famous
³² For recent works on authenticity, see Maiken Umbach and Mathew Humphrey, Authenticity: The
Cultural History of a Political Concept (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Martin Sabrow and
Achim Saupe, eds., Historische Authentizität (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016); and Charles Lindholm,
Culture and Authenticity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). For authenticity and popular music, see Hugh
Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).
³³ Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
³⁴ Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of
Modern Society, new edition (New York: Verso, 2009). See also Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self:
Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
³⁵ Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930
(New York: Viking, 1986).
³⁶ For an introduction to this vast literature, see Timothy Scott Brown, Sixties Europe (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Chen Jian et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global
Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building (London: Routledge, 2018); and Martin Klimke and
Joachim Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
14    
formulation.³⁷ While authenticity has been conditioned by its historical contexts,

in the postwar era, the objective remained remarkably similar: to nurture individ-
ual genuineness and reject societal conformity. Punks continued these efforts even
though they departed from their predecessors in significant ways. For punks, in
both East and West, authenticity was a regime of truth, a means of bestowing
legitimacy to a range of practices and ideals that dissented from mainstream
society. In this sense, punk is representative of a diverse collective—hippies,
peaceniks, environmentalists, squatters, and others—who made up the alternative
milieu in the 1970s and 1980s, groups who strove to reorient daily life in ways they
felt were more authentic, even if such a regime always remained contested and
unstable.³⁸ To German punks, authenticity was an incessantly negotiated entity
whose politics and practices sought to distinguish youths from the mainstream by
locating legitimacy on the margins.
As these comments suggest, slums and authenticity are deeply concerned with
“margins” and “alternatives,” and these terms are used throughout this study to
denote individuals, groups, thoughts, and practices that were positioned—
consciously or not—in contrast to the mainstream. Yet thinking about the mar-
gins and mainstream as dichotomous is not especially helpful. For these individ-
uals and collectives, the margins or alternatives were relational and interactive, a
stance or site from which to comment or act upon the center; while protagonists
often spoke in terms of opposition, it is more useful to consider them dialectic-
ally.³⁹ On both sides of the Berlin Wall, marginal figures and their doings became
central points of departure for the whole since they regularly forced the main-
stream to respond to their antics. As nonconformists, punks were well-placed to
question existing assumptions about life in East and West, and to compel the core
to react to their rhythms on the periphery (Figure 0.2). As we will see, punks
deliberately sought confrontations with the mainstream, not only to trouble the
status quo but perhaps as importantly, to validate their marginality and thus
authenticity. And by contesting dominant notions about what it meant to be
German, punk praxis pluralized divided Germany, demonstrating how marginal-
ity is essential for understanding divided Germany during these decades.
Especially since the 1960s, alternative culture has been a crucial site of social
change. Remarkable opportunities to pursue alternative endeavors existed in the
1970s and 1980s, a consequence of the dramatic socio-economic changes taking
³⁷ Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism:
A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 168–74.
³⁸ Sven Reichardt, Authentizität und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den siebziger und
frühen achtziger Jahren (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014); and Sven Reichardt and Detlef Siegfried, eds., Das
Alternative Milieu: Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und
Europa 1968–1983 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).
³⁹ On the margins in German history, see Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman,
“Introduction,” in Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman, eds., German History from the
Margins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1–26, esp. 1–7.
:      15
Figure 0.2 Maik “Ratte” Reichenbach, bassist for the Leipzig bands H.A.U. and
L’Attentat, on a train to East Berlin (1983)
place in Europe which ended the postwar period of prosperity in the West, and the
building of socialism in the East.⁴⁰ In the West, drug centers, independent presses,
housing co-opts, holistic homeopath clinics, experimental day-care facilities,
autonomous youth centers, avant-garde music clubs—all offered Germans
means to participate in unconventional collectives which revitalized daily life in
the Federal Republic.⁴¹ While dwarfed numerically by the scene in the West,
alternative culture also sprang up in the cracks of socialist life in the East—
tentative political associations, unofficial artistic performances, subversive reading
circles, underground media networks—which gave participants some measure of
autonomy outside state control, endeavors, ideas, and communities that would, in
⁴⁰ Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die
Zeitgeschichte seit 1970, 3rd revised edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). See also
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Lutz Raphael, and Thomas Schlemmer, eds., Vorgeschichte der
Gegenwart: Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem Boom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2016); and Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008).
⁴¹ David Templin, Freizeit ohne Kontrollen: Die Jugendzentrumsbewegung in der Bundesrepublik der
1970er Jahre (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015); Reichardt, Authentizität und Gemeinschaft; Timothy Scott
Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Reichardt and Siegfried, eds., Das Alternative Milieu; Robert
P. Stephens, Germans on Drugs: The Complications of Modernization in Hamburg (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2007); and Sabine von Dirke, “All Power to the Imagination!” The
West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997).
16    
the end, help to bring down the Berlin Wall.⁴² In both East and West, these
decades saw young Germans question existing realities and imagine new worlds of
political and social engagement which revolutionized daily life. While not every
alternative project succeeded, nor did every alternative ideal or practice find
purchase, nonetheless, the collective influence of alternative culture on East and
West during these years has been substantial.
Positioned on the margins from which to challenge the status quo, hippies,
squatters, punks, and others strove to reorient their daily lives in ways they felt to
be more real, endeavors which often put them into conflict with authorities and
society. These encounters tell us much about the political, social, and cultural stakes
during these decades, and how relations between the mainstream and margins
worked to construct identity and belonging for the whole. Although attuned to
the peculiarities of historical context, German punk was nonetheless part of a global
subculture that straddled the Iron Curtain. Comparing punk in East and West
points to substantial differences but also surprising similarities which must revise
our understandings of Cold War division.⁴³ Governed by notions of authenticity
and belonging to a global network, punk provides a window into efforts by Germans
to reimagine their world at a time when the existing state of affairs seemed ripe for
questioning. Emancipation certainly looked different whether pursued under the
conditions of capitalism or socialism—and youths rarely referred to their endeavors
in these terms either. Nevertheless, punk provided the ideas, organizations, and
practices toward a radical re-envisioning of what divided Germany could be.
Popular Music and Punk in Postwar Germany
Chaos in the suburbs

But not in Bilk and Derendorf
The situation is calm
On the inner-city front
Mittagspause, “Innen Stadt Front”⁴⁴
⁴² Juliane Fürst, Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2021); Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan, eds., Dropping out of Socialism: The Creation
of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017); Cathleen M. Giustino,
Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari, eds., Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and
Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (New York: Berghahn, 2013); Jonathan Bolton, Worlds
of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It
Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Padraic
Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe in 1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
⁴³ Even works ostensibly studying alternative culture in East and West, rarely depart from a national
framework and instead examine alternative movements in either East or West. See Joachim C. Häberlen,
Mark Keck-Szajbel, and Kate Mahoney, eds., The Politics of Authenticity: Counterculture and Radical
Movements across the Iron Curtain, 1968–1989 (New York: Berghahn, 2019); and Martin Klimke, Jacco
Pekelder, and Joachim Scharloth, eds., Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in
Europe, 1960–1980 (New York: Berghahn, 2011).
⁴⁴ “Chaos am Stadtrand / doch nicht in Bilk und Derendorf / die Lage ist ruhig / an der
Innenstadtfront.” Mittagspause, “Innen Stadt Front,” Mittagspause (Pure Freude CK 1, 1979).
:      17
One reason why punk is helpful for tracking change in divided Germany is
because music has often been central in defining German identity and community
throughout history. Whether in Felix Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s St. Matthew
Passion, Richard Wagner’s attempts to define Germanness musically, or
Commandant Rudolf Höss’ insistence that Jewish prisoners give concerts on
Sunday afternoons in Auschwitz, music has played a critical role in transforming
German politics, society, and culture for centuries.⁴⁵ For this reason, Celia
Applegate and Pamela Potter have persuasively argued that “German” and
“music” merge so seamlessly that their connection is “hardly ever questioned.”⁴⁶
This was certainly the case in the postwar era as popular music was endowed with
meaning and deployed by Germans to rebuild their nations, communities, and
identities after National Socialism.⁴⁷ Such adoptions helped them create what
William Sewell has called the “thin coherence” of cultural meaning necessary
for individuals to make sense of their lives.⁴⁸ Throughout German history, popular
music has been both a means of organizing individuals and society, and an
instrument of empowerment, making it an important intersection of power and
agency from which social reality is constructed and contested.
We can see these processes by briefly examining the development of popular
music in Germany in the decades prior to punk. In the years before 1945, popular
music became a key component of German society and culture. While classical
music—what Germans call “serious music” (Ernstmusik, or E-Musik)—was focal,
technological inventions, increased leisure time, and new consumer habits all led
to the development of popular “entertainment music” (Unterhaltungsmusik, or
U-Musik) in the last decades of the nineteenth century.⁴⁹ Featuring lighter sounds,
vernacular vocals, and foot-tapping rhythms, the pre-World War I era witnessed a
flourishing culture of popular music-oriented practices.⁵⁰ Although the war inter-
rupted these developments, they were picked up again at the conclusion of
hostilities and the 1920s saw the climax of this first wave of German popular
music culture. The infusion of African American sounds helped fashion the
legendary music culture of Weimar: jazz bands, dance halls, radio, and cabaret
⁴⁵ See Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St.
Matthew Passion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust:
Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); and Hannu Salmi,
Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National Utopia (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).
⁴⁶ Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity,”
in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002), 1.
⁴⁷ For an overview of the field, see Michael Ahlers and Christoph Jacke, eds., Perspectives on German
Popular Music (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
⁴⁸ William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds.,
Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 49–50.
⁴⁹ On “E-Musik” and “U-Musik,” see Annette Blühdorn, Pop and Poetry—Pleasure and Protest: Udo
Lindenberg, Konstantin Wecker and the Tradition of German Cabaret (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 39–47.
⁵⁰ Martin Rempe, Kunst, Spiel, Arbeit: Musikerleben in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1960 (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019); and Barbara Eichner, History in Mighty Sounds: Musical
Constructions of German National Identity, 1848–1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012).
18    
were all hallmarks of this profoundly musical era.⁵¹ Nor did these trends halt
under the Nazis. Despite their vocal disdain for “cultural degeneracy,” they
nonetheless mobilized popular music in the consolidation of the racial state,
especially once the war began to turn sour.⁵² By the end of the Third Reich,
popular music had functioned as a vehicle of national and cultural politics, and a
forum for identity and community, for nearly a century.
These trends continued in the postwar era with popular music playing an
important role in the reconstruction of German society on both sides of the
Iron Curtain. In the first decade, Western authorities encouraged popular music
like jazz as a means of integrating residents into the new trans-Atlantic commu-
nity, while in the East, the SED used it to transform the public into proper socialist
citizens.⁵³ During these decades, Schlager (hits), a genus featuring easy rhythms
and catchy melodies, with German-language lyrics about mountains, sunny lakes,
and the joys of simple life and love was the dominant popular genre.⁵⁴ The mid-
1950s, however, witnessed the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll and the subsequent explosion
of Beat music following the success of the Beatles in the early 1960s.⁵⁵ Across the
Iron Curtain, stimulated by the socio-economic changes attending the
Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) in the West, and the building of socialism
in the East, German youths eagerly embraced these new sounds and styles, a
development causing considerable consternation. In the West, authorities and the
public worried that rock ‘n’ roll was disrupting gender norms and encouraging
youth delinquency.⁵⁶ In the East, despite cautiously supporting Beat initially, after
riots consumed Leipzig in 1965, rock ‘n’ roll was condemned by the SED as a
decadent form of Western imperialism sent eastward to corrupt socialist youths.⁵⁷
⁵¹ Wipplinger, The Jazz Republic; Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996); and Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi
Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
⁵² Brian Currid, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller, eds.,
Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945 (Laaber: Laaber, 2003); and Alan E. Steinweis, Art,
Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
⁵³ Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels.
⁵⁴ On Schlager, see Julio Mendivil, Ein musikalisches Stück Heimat: Ethnologisches Beobachtungen
zum deutschen Schlager (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008).
⁵⁵ Julia Sneeringer, A Social History of Early Rock’n’Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to the
Beatles, 1956–69 (London: Bloomsburg Academic, 2018).
⁵⁶ Bodo Mrozek, Jugend, Pop, Kultur: Ein transnationale Geschichte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019);
Sneeringer, A Social History of Early Rock’n’Roll; Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels; and Hermann
Haring, Rock aus Deutschland West. Von den Rattles bis Nena: Zwei Jahrzehnte Heimatklang
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984).
⁵⁷ Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock “n” Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany (New
York: Berghahn, 2009); Dorothee Wierling, “Youth as Internal Enemy: Conflicts in the Education
Dictatorship of the 1960s,” in Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, eds., Socialist Modern: East German
Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 157–82; and Michael
Rauhut, Beat in der Grauzone. DDR-Rock, 1964 bis 1972: Politik und Alltag (Berlin: BasicDruck, 1993).
:      19
While authorities remained anxious, youths embraced popular music which

became deeply embedded in leisure cultures during the long sixties on both sides
of the Iron Curtain. During this decade, English-language rock ‘n’ roll became
both the lingua franca of the global youth revolt and, paradoxically, imbricated in
capitalist consumerism.⁵⁸ Except the Vietnam War soured young Germans on
America and by the late 1960s, Anglo-American popular music was criticized as
well. The political rupture with America encouraged sonic experimentation and
young Germans began exploring new sounds, lyrics, and languages.⁵⁹ Although
these efforts never attained mass commercial or popular success in the 1970s,
whether in the Krautrock of Can, the proto-electronica of Kraftwerk, or the political
rock of Ton Steine Scherben, music was increasingly regarded as a platform for
nonconformist identities and communities.⁶⁰ In the East, fearful of subversion,
SED authorities began promoting politically reliable rock bands, a genre which
became known as Ostrock.⁶¹ However, the SED was never able to fully control
musical production and pockets of artistic autonomy remained, such as within the
rebellious blues scene or in the critical lyrics of outspoken singer-songwriter Wolf
Biermann, whose expulsion from the GDR in 1976 triggered a wave of protest.⁶²
As this brief summary illustrates, well before punk burst onto the scene in the
⁵⁸ Detlef Siegfried, Time Is on My Side: Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der
60er Jahre (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006). On English-language German popular music, see Richard
Langston, “Roll Over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s Rock, the Myth of Progress, and the
Burden of National Identity in West Germany,” in Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick, eds., Sound
Matters: Essays in the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 183–96;
Edward Larkey, “Just for Fun? Language Choice in German Popular Music,” in Harris M. Berger and
Michael Thomas Carroll, eds., Global Pop, Local Language (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
2003), 131–51; Osman Durrani, “Popular Music in the German-Speaking World,” in Alison Phipps,
ed., Contemporary German Cultural Studies (London: Arnold, 2002), 197–218; and Edward Larkey,
“Postwar German Popular Music: Americanization, the Cold War, and the Post-Nazi-Heimat,” in Celia
Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 234–50.
⁵⁹ See Rüdiger Esch, Electri_City: Elektronische_Musik_Aus_Düsseldrof, 1970–1986 (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2014), 10.
⁶⁰ Melanie Schiller, Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity (London:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); David Stubbs, Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern
Germany (London: Faber & Faber, 2014); Christoph Wagner, Der Klang der Revolte: Die magischen
Jahre des westdeutschen Musik-Underground (Mainz: Schott, 2013); Sean Albiez and David Pattie, eds.,
Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop (New York: Continuum, 2011); and Timothy Scott Brown, “Music as a
Weapon? Ton Steine Scherben and the Politics of Rock in Cold War Berlin,” German Studies Review 32,
No. 1 (February 2009): 1–22.
⁶¹ Puhdys, Abenteuer Puhdys (Berlin: Neues Leben, 2009); Gerd Dehnel and Christian Hentschel,
eds., Es brennt der Wald . . . Die Rockszene im Ostblock (Berlin: Neues Leben, 2008); Christian Hentschel
and Peter Matzke, Als ich fortging . . . Das große DDR-Rock-Buch (Berlin: Neues Leben, 2007); Michael
Rauhut, Rock in der DDR, 1964 bis 1989 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2002); and
Jürgen Balitzki, electra. LIFT. Stern Combo Meißen: Geschichten vom Sachsendreier (Berlin:
Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2001).
⁶² On the Biermann affair, see Fritz Pleitgen, ed., Die Ausbürgerung: Anfang vom Ende der DDR
(Berlin: Ullstein, 2001); and Roland Berbig et al., eds., In Sachen Biermann: Protokolle, Berichte und
Briefe zu den Folgen einer Ausbürgerung (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1994).
20    
1970s, popular music had long been a site of emancipation and contestation
throughout German history.
The history of punk has often been told and can be quickly summarized. Punk
did not begin with a single song or specific band, but as a series of cultural
antecedents in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to mainstream
Western society and rock ‘n’ roll culture. Dissatisfied with the self-absorption of
rock acts and the more commercially oriented pop sounds, some youths sought
rock ‘n’ roll that would reconnect performers with their audiences and return
music to the amateur.⁶³ Instrumentation was simple: electric guitars and bass,
drums, and vocals. Songs were short and fast, driven by simple, repetitive chords
and played with little in the way of musical expertise. Lyrics emphasized the
banalities of daily life and often dealt with controversial subject matter—drugs,
sex, crime, boredom, etc.—to expose the hypocrisies of contemporary society.⁶⁴
The rejection of technical proficiency was typical of punk, integral to the democ-
ratizing impulse behind the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos that urged action over
words: the famous sketch in an early punk fanzine—“This is a chord, this is
another, this is a third, now form a band”—well captured this imbrication of
dilettantism and daring. Creating independent media and production
enterprises—labels, shops, fanzines, clothes—was equally essential as punks
worked to reclaim agency from the music industry.⁶⁵ In the final analysis, punk
aspired to break the conventions of popular music: to rescue it from what it had
become; to make rock ‘n’ roll dangerous again.
First used in the early 1970s by writers and musicians to describe these new
sounds and endeavors, the term “punk” etymologically stretched back to
Shakespeare and has been variously used to mean “prostitute,” “queer,” “garbage,”
and “scum.”⁶⁶ Early punk pioneers adopted the term to signify their abjectness
and to distance themselves from mainstream society. Over the 1970s, punk scenes
arose across America before arriving in Great Britain. In London, masterminded
by Malcolm McLaren—designer, entrepreneur, impresario—and his creation, the
Sex Pistols, punk quickly swept the British Isles. McLaren and his partner
Vivienne Westwood owned a clothing store on King’s Road where they made
and sold controversial fashions, and they assembled the Sex Pistols to promote
their wares. Featuring Johnny Rotten on vocals, the band debuted in 1975 and
⁶³ The literature on punk is enormous but for an introduction, see Clinton Heylin, Babylon’s
Burning: From Punk to Grunge (London: Viking, 2007); Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill
Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, reprint edition (New York: Grove Press, 2006); and Jon
Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, revised edition (New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002).
⁶⁴ The best analysis of punk music remains Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in
Punk Rock, revised edition (Oakland: PM Press, 2015 [1985]).
⁶⁵ Stacy Thompson, Punk Productions: Unfinished Business (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2004).
⁶⁶ See “A Punk Etymology,” in Johan Kugelberg, ed., Punk: An Aesthetic (New York: Rizzou
International Publications, 2012), 348–51.
:      21
within a year, aided by a scandalized media that broadcast every insult, youths
across Britain began forming bands, making music, and performing live. By 1977,
outrage ensured that punk had become a new genre ripe for appropriation—
which Germans eagerly did.
As these histories of popular music suggest, punk was neither native to divided
Germany nor wholly foreign. Imported from abroad and translated into local
contexts, punk globality is a critical element explaining its development in divided
Germany. As a music genre, punk originated in the United States and Great
Britain, before moving first to West Germany and then jumping the Berlin Wall
to East Germany. Such transnational exchanges and influences help explain why
punk evolved in East and West as it did, and how the genre and subculture was
understood and developed once it emerged in both German contexts. Arriving in
diverse locales, punk ideals and practices were grafted onto indigenous scenes, a
process creating a new hybrid culture: German punk.⁶⁷ Such flows were certainly
not unique to Germany as the histories of punk, popular music, and alternative
culture more generally suggest.⁶⁸ Nor was punk evolution after its arrival strictly a
national affair as influences and interactions from abroad and between East and
West continued to shape the subculture in divided Germany. These adaptations
demonstrate the importance of the media in diffusing culture regardless of
national borders or ideological blocs and reinforce the degree to which distinct
sonic elaborations are affected by global processes. Punk globality must therefore
always be kept at the forefront of any analysis of the genre, and such mindfulness
invites a reconsideration of national music subcultures, and how music functions
as a transnational inspiration and stimulus.
The historiography of punk is extensive if incomplete. Both American and
British cases have been minutely documented with scenes and bands figuring
prominently. But as is common in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, punk has been the
preserve of journalists and former protagonists whose writings are typically
episodic and sensational as they jump from band to band without placing these
artists in their larger contexts or analyzing how they speak to larger historical
developments. Yet almost from the beginning, scholars also trained their gaze on
punk. The earliest interpretations of punk were developed by scholars working at
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) who argued
that youth subcultures like punk were symbolic rejections of dominant social
formations; that is, that young people’s music, style, and leisure activities were
efforts at reconstructing a working-class community in opposition to bourgeois
⁶⁷ On the importance of hybridization for German popular music, see Ulrich Adelt, Krautrock:
German Music in the Seventies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 1–6.
⁶⁸ Raymond A. Patton, Punk Crisis: The Global Punk Rock Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018); and Kevin Dunn, Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
22    
society.⁶⁹ Writing amidst the socio-economic downturn affecting Britain in the

1970s and 1980s, CCCS authors’ understandings of punk were rooted in an effort
to locate a new revolutionary subject following the “failure” of the 1960s student
unrest.⁷⁰ Yet for the CCCS, as evident in their use of the term “magical” to describe
efforts by punks to solve “real” socio-economic changes, youth subcultures always
remained symbolic rather than a transformative form of societal change.⁷¹
Since these pioneering works in the 1970s and 1980s, the CCCS subcultural
model has come in for substantial critique. Almost immediately, commentators
criticized their emphasis on public and male youth subcultures, a privileging
which denied women or more private groups the same levels of agency.⁷² Nor
did ethnographic research into specific youth subcultures support many of their
claims, such as whether these were working-class communities, or if they were
resisting hegemonic society. Indeed, further research has only tended to show how
the binaries hypothesized by the CCCS (bourgeois vs. working class, resistance vs.
conformity) have not corresponded particularly well to historical reality.⁷³
Scholars working on youth subcultures today—often under the umbrella of
“post-subcultures”—argue they are sites of complex conversation, conflict, and
expression, rather than claiming these communities are coherent or oppos-
itional.⁷⁴ Yet as Raymond Patton has pointed out, despite the merited critique
of the CCCS, the usefulness of “post-subcultural studies” remains limited: when
forced to address the broader social significance of youth subcultures, they too
tend to fall back on the same language of resistance and incorporation as the
CCCS did.⁷⁵ With these limitations in mind, the term subculture is used through-
out this study in a descriptive rather than analytic manner.
Despite these theoretical inadequacies, recent literature has begun reinterpret-
ing punk as more than simply a manifestation of youth subculture and has instead
sought to embed it within larger historical trajectories. Although earlier works
⁶⁹ Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); and Stuart Hall and
Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London:
Hutchinson, 1976).
⁷⁰ On the Birmingham School, see Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History,
the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
⁷¹ Phil Cohen, “Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community,” in Stuart Hall et al., eds.,
Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979 (London: Hutchinson,
1980), 78–87.
⁷² Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2000
[1991]).
⁷³ Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (York: Methuen, 1988).
⁷⁴ Paul Hodkinson and Wolfgang Deicke, eds., Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes (New
York: Routledge, 2007); Rupa Huq, Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth, and Identity in a Postcolonial
World (London: Routledge, 2006); and David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning
of Style (Oxford: Berg, 2000). More generally, see David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, eds., The
Post-Subcultures Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
⁷⁵ Patton, Punk Crisis, 6–7.
:      23
often examined punk from a predominantly aesthetic standpoint, recent studies

are more attentive to elucidating how the subculture has been understood, appro-
priated, and enacted—and how these perceptions, adoptions, and undertakings
differ depending on time and place.⁷⁶ While popular accounts of punk concentrate
on the bands and music, scholars have begun offering more nuanced analyses of
punk cultural productions and political endeavors. Even more helpful, the earlier
coherence which marked the CCCS has been jettisoned as scholars now stress that
punk was contested, unstable, its politics and practices diverse and messy:
although punk has always sought to challenge the status quo, these impulses
have never been consistent or uniform.⁷⁷ And whereas early works on punk
focused exclusively on the Anglo-American phenomenon, now scholars are
examining punk’s spread throughout the world and arguing that the subculture
can only be understood as a global movement.⁷⁸ Scholarly literature on punk in
divided Germany has just begun, although the subculture’s political, social, and
cultural background remains untold as researchers have mostly concentrated on
the genre’s aesthetics and texts.⁷⁹ Thus, as the first history of punk in East and
West Germany, Culture from the Slums seeks to embed the subculture within its
larger historical context, and to account for its tremendous cultural and political
resonance in divided Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.
Methodology, Sources, and Outline
We don’t want what you want anymore

We want our freedom
Schleim-Keim, “Prügelknaben”⁸⁰
⁷⁶ For examples of older interpretations, see Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009); and Neil Nehring, Flowers in the
Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy and Postwar England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
⁷⁷ For an exemplary recent account, see Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British
Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
⁷⁸ Patton, Punk Crisis; Dunn, Global Punk; Marta Marciniak, Transnational Punk Communities in
Poland: From Nihilism to Nothing Outside Punk (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015); Ivan Gololobov,
Hilary Pilkington, and Yngvar B. Steinholt, Punk in Russia: Cultural Mutation from the “Useless” to the
“Moronic” (London: Routledge, 2014); Emma Baulch, Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk and Death Metal in
1990s Bali (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Anna Szemere, Up from the Underground: The
Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2001).
⁷⁹ See Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan, eds., Beyond No Future: Cultures of
German Punk (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis.
Unfortunately, Florian Lipp’s important new study of punk and New Wave in the GDR arrived too late
to be integrated into this study. See Florian Lipp, Punk und New Wave im letzten Jahrzehnt der DDR:
Akteure – Konfliktfelder – musikalische Praxis (Münster: Waxmann, 2021).
⁸⁰ “Wir wollen nicht mehr, wie ihr wollt / Wir wollen unsere Freiheit.” Schleim-Keim,
“Prügelknaben,” Abfallprodukte der Gesellschaft (Nasty Vinyl/Höhnie Records, N.V.06/HÖ04, 1992).
24    
Culture from the Slums is a cultural history tracking the advent and growth of
punk in divided Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, and the social and political
responses to the subculture. Punk’s archival traces encourage such a methodology.
What makes these decades so exciting was the explosion of grass-roots collectives,
local organizations, and the proliferation of mainstream and alternative presses.
The alternative milieu engendered a democratization not only of politics and
culture but also of archival materials. These alternative records have provided a
substantial corpus of sources for this study. In the West, fanzines, records, posters,
newspapers, fashions, and films document in minute detail the many activities of
German punks. Moreover, the past two decades have witnessed a bevy of memory
work—exhibitions, interviews, memoirs—to accompany contemporaneous
materials. With its emphasis on materiality and collecting, pop music culture
assists scholars in reconstructing the ebb and flow of West German punk from the
ground up. And these materials are complemented by sources located in federal,
state, and municipal archives where available and the mainstream press to help
flesh out the views and actions of those responding to punk.
For East Germany, by contrast, the situation is radically different. Tightly
controlled by the state, Eastern punks were rarely able to produce the subcultural
materials which youths did in the West, and even less has survived. Yet the
collapse of state socialism has produced a peculiar situation: the state files of the
dictatorship are much more accessible than those of the democracy. Since Eastern
punk was politicized by the state, materials recording the genre are preserved in a
dozen state archives. Thus, while state records play a smaller role in the history of
West German punk, they are indispensable for investigating East German punk.
However, this situation also means that Eastern punk was mostly spoken about by
others rather than by youths themselves as was the case in the West, one of the
substantial differences contrasting the subculture in divided Germany. And inter-
estingly, although an alternative public sphere was comparatively non-existent in
the East, interviews, pictures, recordings, and print materials about Eastern punk
appeared in the West, part of youths’ efforts at subverting the information
dictatorship. These sources provide an important corrective to state narratives
of the subculture, but such an imbalance of sources between East and West also
makes for a challenging comparative study.⁸¹ And because Culture from the Slums
is not a work of oral history—it asks different questions—formal interviews were
not conducted (although I talked with many participants informally). Since
substantial material used in this study already contained verbal responses, inter-
views would have only added to the cacophony rather than reworked the argu-
ment; I leave it to another to write an oral history of German punk.
⁸¹ See the comments on East and West sources by Thomas Lindenberger, “Everyday History: New
Approaches to the History of the Post-War Germanies,” in Christoph Kleßmann, ed., The Divided Past:
Rewriting Post-War German History (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 58–9.
:      25
Culture from the Slums begins with punk’s origins in divided Germany.
Chapters 1 and 2 explore the contours of the subculture and consider the
similarities and differences between punk in East and West. Chapter 1 examines
the circumstances surrounding the arrival of punk and its institutionalization in
East and West Germany, before analyzing the sociological dimensions of the
subculture. Youths learned of punk from the mainstream media on both sides of
the Berlin Wall and, inspired by what they saw and heard, worked to recreate the
subculture back home. Setting up spaces, institutions, and networks, punks
spread the subculture across both countries. Youths felt punk could help them
overcome what they perceived as a period of intense boredom (an Eternal
Seventies) by fashioning a marginal if authentic subculture in contrast to what
was considered a phony mainstream. Chapter 2 is concerned with the ideo-
logical imperatives guiding youths and how these beliefs manifested themselves
in punk praxis. In the West, youths used punk to pursue individuality—what
they called Anderssein (difference)—to reject convention and reclaim “alterna-
tiveness” from prior generations. In the East, punk was primarily understood as
an anti-state endeavor whose practices were directed toward resisting the uni-
formity of state socialism. These beliefs were articulated in numerous concrete
forms, above all in punk fashion and music. Thus, on both sides of the Iron
Curtain, youths mobilized punk to pursue independence and individuality in the
face of custom and conformity, impulses helping to emancipate their respective
societies.
Chapters 3 through 8 examine how the subculture developed in East and West
Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These chapters focus on the separate
national stories of punk, even if there were constant citations across the Berlin
Wall. Chapter 3 considers efforts by Western youths to produce German punk.
Though at first imitating the Anglo-American genre, Western punks soon began
singing in German as a way of articulating a more expressive music culture and
experimenting with new instruments and sounds in pursuit of a distinctly German
genre. Through these innovations, youths elaborated a critique of everyday life
which they believed to be more honest and genuine. Inspired by these labors,
Sounds journalist Alfred Hilsberg began popularizing punk in the media, arguing
that it was the first truly national popular music genre in postwar German history.
But many were not happy with these developments and debate over the future of
punk split the subculture between those favoring the more experimental and
German-language music, the Kunstpunks (Art-Punks), and partisans of more
traditional rock ‘n’ roll sounds, the Hardcores. Across the Berlin Wall,
Chapter 4 investigates the decision by the East German state to repress punk
after initially turning a blind eye. Alarmed by reports about and recordings by
Eastern youths that were appearing in the West, when punk bands started to
appear on stages condemning the state, the SED moved to suppress the subcul-
ture. Arresting youths, drafting them for military service, or expelling them
26    
abroad, the SED sought to break punk with coercion. But although the regime did
enormous damage to the subculture, punk managed to survive.
In the West, despite the schism, the growth of German punk led to its
nationalization and subsequent transformation. Chapter 5 examines how the
musical innovations pioneered above all by Kunstpunks led to an increase in
popularity of punk by the early 1980s. Impressed with the success of German-
language punk, the music industry began supporting the more conventional
sounding bands and saturated the media market with their recordings, branding
its creation the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW). Except the popularity of the NDW
led to a crisis of authenticity as punks were condemned for abandoning the
margins for mainstream success. Heated debates over commercialization tore
the scene asunder and illustrate how the politics of authenticity excludes and
divides as much as they integrate and comfort. In the East, a different type of crisis
was also dividing the subculture. Attacked by the state, Chapter 6 explores the
consequences of repression: namely, the integration of punk into the political
opposition. Hounded by state authorities, punks found shelter in the Protestant
Churches and once inside, were socialized into the small dissident groups that had
begun gathering there. Radicalized by their experience, punks threw their energies
into political opposition and especially used their concerts to challenge the state
publicly. Faced with this dangerous escalation, the secret police tried to shift gears
by moving from public coercion to silent subversion. Wholly penetrating the
scene with informants, the security apparatus sought to use punks to sabotage
the subculture and infiltrate the dissident groups. But punks were never effective
spies, and the state’s new strategy failed to produce any meaningful results. In fact,
punks used collaboration to promote their own interests and those of the subcul-
ture, activities which only undermined state socialism even further.
The experience of commodification was jarring to punk. In response, Chapter 7
explores how Western youths sought to defend punk against threats to its
authenticity by transforming the subculture into a community marked by uni-
formity and radical politics. This transition, however, increasingly pushed the
subculture into conflict with authorities and society. Moral panic led to violent
confrontations between youths and the state as punks resisted what they perceived
to be an authoritarian regime. These actions trapped the subculture in a cycle of
homogeneity and violence which alienated many youths. Disaffected by margin-
ality, youths fled to the mainstream and developed a more commercially success-
ful subgenre, Fun Punk, which equally arrested punk’s initial promise of
difference. Thus, in both cases, by the mid-1980s, punk had ceased being a vehicle
for alterity and emancipation, caught between ghettoized conformity and main-
stream success. In the East, recognizing the failure of its repressive strategies,
authorities contemplated the unthinkable and in the last years of its existence, the
SED reversed its previous stance and instead tried to integrate punk into the
GDR. Appearing in the media, clubs, studios, and films, as Chapter 8 analyzes, the
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Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in

East and West Germany Jeff Hayton

Culture from the Slums

Culture from the Slums

Elise de Stein and Greg Hayton

professionalism and diligence of archivists at these institutions that I was able to

List of Figures xiii

0.1 Der Spiegel cover story on punk (January 23, 1978) 11

xiv   

6.5 “Overview of the manifestations of ‘negative-decadent’ youths in the GDR.”

AGR Aggressive Rock Productions (Aggressive Rockproduktionen)

Punk Histories of Divided Germany

Hey ho, let’s go! Hey ho, let’s go!

¹ Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop,” Ramones (Sire, SASD-7520, 1976).

2    

:      3

4    

:      5

6    

thereby engage in an updated version of the Sonderweg thesis—and fail to

:      7

even if they ultimately remained deferred or, in many cases, unrealized.

8    

often contradictory.²¹ Plurality encouraged youths to mobilize punk in manifold

:      9

indicate the complexity of punk and demonstrate how either/or dichotomizing

10    

change.²⁴ By forcing Germans to respond to its provocations, punk destabilized

Alternative Culture and Authenticity in East

Ugly made-up youths, wearing ripped clothes with Nazi-insignia and

:      11

12    

inferiority.²⁸ The term’s use in divided Germany trafﬁcked in persistent fears of

:      13

14    

formulation.³⁷ While authenticity has been conditioned by its historical contexts,

:      15

16    

Popular Music and Punk in Postwar Germany

Chaos in the suburbs

:      17

18    

:      19

While authorities remained anxious, youths embraced popular music which

20    

:      21

22    

society.⁶⁹ Writing amidst the socio-economic downturn affecting Britain in the

:      23

often examined punk from a predominantly aesthetic standpoint, recent studies

Methodology, Sources, and Outline

We don’t want what you want anymore

24    

:      25

26    

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