"SILENCE" "A movement-film has to be made where there's motion, and when you make a film later to pin down a movement, the describing kills it off for good." "We even fought with the police in the station one night." "They had brought us to Friedensstraße in Friedrichshain." "I was there, too." "In '82." " We were standing there." "Against the wall like this." "Sven, Jörg and Pogobär that is, were lined up..." "My thing was resting on..." "Can you hold it?" "One hour, 2, 3, 4 hours..." "All the cops were out on calls." "Only two were in the station." "The one out front and another." "I started to unpack my thing..." "And he ran up and hit me in the neck." "I banged into the wall..." "it didn't hurt so bad..." "Pogobear, Jörg that is, grabbed the cop pulled him down into a headlock and everyone started hitting him." "We really smacked him one and he called for reinforcements." "Then we were sent to Wedekindstrasse for questioning." "When I got the invitation I thought about what I'd like to show in Munich and thought..." "I should choose stuff so there'll be something in it for me." "So I'll take some solid stuff, it is a solid crowd there." "Exhibition opening:" "Desire of the Flesh." "My thing is to create some tension." "An artist is never satisfied with reality." "You are constantly yearning and trying to put yourself at a distance from reality." "Because reality isn't very satisfying." "You could complain, but it's nicer to make something to stand up to it." "This job... is extreme." "And I love extreme." "I am technical director of the house." "I am responsible for the opera house and playhouse." "The problem is I constantly have to suck in my gut." "I might just turn blue and collapse some day." "In my business you have to go where the work is." "A bit of a mercenary mentality." "Michael!" "Run 44 again, please." "I think I already had, "behavioral problems" at school." "As the teachers would put it." "They tried to force me from left-handed to right-handed." "And when I was 6, my speech system became extremely disturbed." "It's okay now." "I still stutter, but..." "If I take the time to speak slowly and clearly like they taught me in the special kindergarten, it would be alright." "But you always want to talk fast." "I have so much to say." "So, and I didn't have a problem," "I was lucky." "I always asked if I could sing to tell poems, because, it's been proven, no idea why, but people with speech impediments can sing easier than speak." "I always liked hard and fast music." "Ramones..." "Addicts..." "Atwords..." "UK Subs..." "I have to say, naked flesh isn't so erotic anymore, it's too exhibitionist." "Erotic is when you want to reach in and free the flesh from its shell." "Hold on." "Sit." "Sit!" "Okay, shake." "Good boy." "At the time I was... 14." "That was around '79." "One night my brother came home with a girlfriend, also from Köpenick." "Up until then, my brother always looked normal, like any guy at the time." "Jeans, hair a bit long..." "and there he was in the doorway, pants torn at the knee and an old, green sweater, in shreds, holes cut in it, and his hair standing up and holes everywhere, and a safety pin in his cheek." "I opened the door for him." "It was a shock, sure, it wasn't pretty. "What is up with you?" "What are you wearing?"" "I'll never forget, my brother standing there, 'cause he didn't know what it was either and said, "This is punk."" "You reinvent yourself as a punk." "At the beginning you try just what I was saying, distance yourself from the present, fight against it and change yourself." "Punk was new." "It was always interesting." "Thank God we had Western TV in Leipzig and when you saw what they were doing and how..." "I dunno." "Johnny Rotten always impressed me, how he stood there." "He was twisted and his rigid stare, it was totally... so insolent." "I really hated the hippy culture." "Smoking joints, too, I never did that in my life." "Just the thought of everybody smoking and passing it on, that's Socialism all over again." "Everyone takes a hit and everyone gets their stupid, little bliss." "No, it was..." "We wanted to be individuals." "Sometime when I was young..." "I was at a concert." "It was the first time I had seen a band playing punk rock in East Germany." "Dunno if I though so at the time, but I mean..." "It was the first time I had kinda seen people" "ART AND CULTURE ENRICH OUR LIVES" "I apply for Party membership" "Kindergarten, school, basic training in the Folks' Army, then you do an apprenticeship." "Folks' Army, have kids and then carry out the work plan till the end of your life, working in some company for 400 marks, that was absolutely predetermined." "There was a nice legal paragraph, §249 or something like that." ""Anti-social behavior."" "When you didn't work, you weren't a burden to anyone, no social office, labor office, those didn't exist anyway..." "Well, in that case, you went to jail." "Socialist Realism." "Paint the brigadiers and the workers." "I was 22." "It wasn't fertile territory for a young person, painting stupid brigadiers." "I broke out of it and was forbidden to exhibit." "So that started my tendency towards music." "You want to be seen, and when my pictures were forbidden, I picked up the microphone." "I was a rehearsal room fan and knew all the songs and always hung out with the people from "Fit of Rage."" "I found it really cool, it was all so different there." "The walls were covered in posters from the bands" "I only knew from TV and I thought, "This is it!"" "I was already fascinated by drums and rhythm at school and I bought myself a drum set." "And I always practiced on boxes and stuff and on the school bus." "I was already interested in making music." "It's a punk philosophy:" "If you can, then do it." "If you can't, do it anyway." "Because my voice is miserable, I always had problems at rehearsals." "I couldn't hit a single note." "I was supposed to sing melody." "I cried at a lot of rehearsals." "But in concert I was great." "No one else was there." "I was the first at the rehearsal." "And I was extroverted enough to go to the mike." "It was enough for drums, you had to sing anyway." "I was always coarse." "The drums were totally abnormal." "Unbearable." "At my school in Oberschöneweide," "I had two friends who were also into it." "I noticed it was the same thing, hair sticking up..." "We talked and I asked if we should do something." "We met a couple of times in his father's garage, but the horrible noise was too much for his parents" "so we looked for a rehearsal room and got to work." "The first band we founded in 1980 had the legendary name, "Band Salad."" "Wutanfall," ""Fit of Rage."" ""No idea."" ""Pink Extra." - "Slime Germ," "Attack."" "We didn't have a name." "We were nameless." "Nameless." " Nameless somehow." " Nameless was something." "Nameless." ""Slime Germ." - "Pig Bastard." - "Fit of Rage" is a punk name." ""Jack Frustration." - "Canned Rebel."" ""Attack" is a bit anarchist." ""Chirp Machine." - "5 Weeks in a Balloon."" ""Megalomania." - "Concrete Romance." - "Paranoia."" "Everyone knows "Chirp Machine," but we changed names a lot." "We were called "Ambulant Musicians on the Way to the Hospital."" "The name "Fit if Rage" got us in a lot of trouble." "It was the moment that counted, the moment in the rehearsal room, so every band always had its rehearsal room fans who were there." "The concert, that was decisive." "You had to go to a concert to experience it." "That was it." "I was a pretty lively kid, always doing things with friends, with cliques and we hung out all over the place." "I wasn't easy to handle when I was young." "I had a lot of fun, let's say... stirring up shit." "We were even criminal sometimes." "We wouldn't subordinate." "We always had something to say." "I think we were hyperactive." "Climbing fences, breaking in, stealing stuff from the store." "The worst time, we broke into a chemical warehouse in Leipzig and took chemicals to make our own fireworks." "I wasn't good at science in school my only A's were in art." "And that was my world." "I always lived in a..." "Because I don't have siblings or parents either..." "I spent a lot of time in my own head as a child." "I come from a very musical family." "At family gatherings, uncles, aunts, my father, whoever..." "All the men..." "There was no canned music at parties." "There was guitar, banjo, harmonica, whatever." "Everyone sung at home." "And they all played their instruments very well." "PALACE OF THE REPUBLIC" "Then my daughter was born." "This creature really, massively changed my life." "In what way?" "Well, I'm alone, her father isn't here and I have no other partner." "And that's pretty hefty." "Sometimes you think it really sucks." "I can never go wild orjust let go." "You can't do that anymore." "My daughter is learning violin, so I am, too." "It's really fun." "I had to play as a child, but didn't want to." "I have to change my life, then my pictures change, too." "You can tell that these pictures..." "What can I say?" "They have another dynamic." "As opposed to the static portraits." "What interested me... was the magic of a look." "What interests me here is..." "It's like an awakening." "In Dresden, there was the legendary Door Exhibition." "They showed my drawings of caged women with their hair hanging down." "The officials said East German women don't look depressed like that." "But the thing was that I was pregnant and had my son, but I kept studying." "The models came to me at home." "These nude models had already been sitting 8 hours at the academy and were tired out, and their heads hung in exhaustion." "They interpreted it as depression, but the models were just tired." "The nice female portraits stopped working for me." "Digging in the earth, and suddenly these mob pictures started." "First, I worked in portrait format, here it's like a panorama." "You see it from up there on my rooftop terrace and I thought," ""Yes!" "Landscape format!"" "Whether you paint a lemon, an apple or a sausage, it's always a self-portrait." "Get off my leg!" "Clothes weren't the most important thing to me." "I wore things I liked." "I had gotten them." "Coloring our hair in the tram with water colors and then you look like a clown if you're caught in the rain." "It was a problem when it rained and the soap ran down, 'cause you looked like a drowned rat." "We really made sure our hair was sticking up just right, and that our leatherjackets were messed up right, etc., but we made it all ourselves, we didn't buy it." "You wanted to go out and shock people, so you wanted to be really shocking." "In my late 20s I decided I didn't want a fat gut and so on and I started to exercise." "Firstjogging, condition, and a little punching bag." "But I'm not very ambitious, vain, but not ambitious." "My first tattoo?" "What?" "Am I tattooed?" "We worked so hard to look punk that we were almost trendy." "We made a big effort over our outfits." "But we were ironic about it, too." "We were ironic about it, but we really made an effort to look good, us guys." "We spent a lot of time in front of the mirror." "To me erotic is something true to itself." "When a man is really himself, not posing in the mirror, not trying too hard." "Jackboots cost 100 marks, the exchange rate 1 to 6 or 7." "You can imagine what we spent on shoes." "We were snobs really." "I don't think anyone spent as much on shoes as we did." "If you had jackboots or Doc Martens, you were..." "My God, they were sacred." "Grandma had to get them when she went to the West." ""Grandma." "Y'know, the LP, the LP is called this." "You go to Cortex,"" "that was in Adalbertstrasse, in Kreuzberg..." ""You go there, give them the note if you can't pronounce it..."" "The guards didn't know what to do with a grandma with a B-52s record." ""No idea what this is, but if she has it, it must be okay."" ""The band is called 'Exploited' and I want the record," "'Punk's not Dead."'" "She didn't know what it was." "All the punks there looking at this old lady with her East German glasses buying punk LPs for her grandson." "When you got an LP, in that moment, you were obliged to make 400 copies on tape or whatever." "Later, I was in Hungary with Kaiser but I didn't buy any punk records," "I bought Rolling Stones or something like that." "In '82, I came back from Erfurt, from a concert weekend with "Slime Germ" and..." "My mother was upset." ""The police were here." "Where were you?"" "We were supposed to report to them on Monday." "I was home Sunday." "And then we went straight to them because we thought it was just "routine questioning" as they always called it, but they arrested me on the spot and sent me to a juvenile detention center without warning or court appearance and wanted to send me to" "East Germany's kind of children's prison." "I was in the detention center for over three months." "The first couple of weeks, I had to struggle with myself." "I had a Mohawk back then and they wanted to cut it off." "I fought them off like crazy, punching and kicking till they locked me down." "They put me in a concrete cell in the basement with darkened windows." "There was only a concrete block and a cot." "You only got a blanket at night." "They locked me in there and I stayed for a week." "They tried to cut my hair again." "I said, "I won't let you, but I'll do it myself." After that I tried to fit in to the group, because there was just no point." "The State really wanted to do away with me," "But all they had was three days of cutting school and being a punk." "It was surrounded by searchlights." "There was a rooftop garden, fenced in, where they let us out." "I could see out over the lake to Rummelsburger Prison." "All summer I said to myself, "I'm never going in there."" "The next winter I was sitting on the other side." "You weren't allowed to belong if you weren't allowed to belong." "Tough luck for you." "Punks everywhere!" "Sounds weird, but notjust anyone could be a punk." "People were chosen or not." "There was a term, the "Plastics."" "To them, we were practically punk nobility. "Plastics" in Berlin." "When a weekend-punk came along, hair up in a kind of..." "Beckham-Mohawk, you can call it that now, it's been fashionable lately, which I find awful, anyway..." "his hair would be cut off or he'd be "plucked," his cloths taken from him." "It was dangerous sometimes." "As a punk from out of town, when you went to the Plänter Forest, you came home in your undershirt." "There was a lot of "plucking" in Berlin." ""Plucking" is what we called, like, when a "Plastic" came along with a cool leatherjacket, but it didn't suit him at all, maybe it suited me or my best friend much better," "then we managed to make sure it belonged to us afterward." "That was "plucking."" "I was lucky to be together with Colonel in a way." "We got along well and maybe we were a little bit in love." "But I was lucky because Colonel was a leader." "A friend had a jacket with "Fit of Rage" written on it and "Trade Fair City" over that." "Foolish way to dress in Berlin." "We went up to Berlin and we really found some trouble." "The Berliners always thought they were the greatest... maybe they were, too..." "I was messed up by Dresden, the Saxons with punk haircuts, but, "No, we have to go there, and maybe we'll go there..." But it didn't fit together." "We were more like hippies than the Berliners." "Berlin's scene was harder." "Leipzig was a lot like Berlin, funnily enough." "They were radical, too." "They were enormously radical." "Maybe because of the trade fair, they had a lot more people coming through their city." "If you hung out with the Berliners and experienced it... little us from Leipzig, following in their wake, using their rep, but in the end, we never managed to be like them." "Music is definitely a way to express every kind of aggression." "Frustration, whatever." "There was nothing to do." "That's not an excuse, but there was incredible violence just under the surface." "First the train conductor who smacks you one while you're still sleeping." "There was always trouble in local discos." "If you weren't in groups of five... even then sometimes." "I remember running for my life..." "With the neighbors, plumbers, with our parents' generation we came to... came to blows more often." "...Slowly now!" "In the beginning we got beat up a lot, 'cause we were inexperienced, but that changed later." "We messed some people up." "When some jerk looked at us on the street and said," ""You should all be gassed!" Then we let him have it, he deserved it." "Alone was bad." "Being alone was pretty dangerous." "We were always together somehow." "We always grouped together." "Either on Alexander Place or some church center, or at someone's house." "It's dangerous when you realize there are 4 or 5 people, like a fist..." ""Wherever you go, always stick together when there's trouble."" "Later, that turned into, "We go there and attack as soon as something happens."" "And later still, "We go, we clean out the place."" "The provocation was deliberate." "I never thought we were corrupting the system through subterfuge." "It was simply deliberate, intentional, provocation." "I remember a concert in the Palace," "I had a fat lip..." "some guy had hit me..." "Here's the scar." "And I had this fat lip and we were pogoing and there was this funny singer-songwriter..." "Billy Bragg." "Pankow was there and some of the other guys, and he made sure that nobody hit me, he kept me in the clear." "Everybody pogo now!" "Let's go!" "Just about everything there got me down, we couldn't travel, we couldn't read what we wanted." "Everything was censored..." "I really felt..." "That's my ball!" "As a punk, I played on a really special rugby team called, "Gastronom Leipzig."" "The punks here are Chaos, the singer from "Fit of Rage" and me." "We were the mascots." "There were some pop kids, too." "A real mix of sub-cultures." "Driving around as a team, playing exerienced teams like Falkensee it took subculture to another level." "Every dickhead played soccer." "Who cared?" "Rugby was special." "I'd like to form a team." "I know lots of people who are interested." "I'd like to build it up a bit with international exchanges." "Today, I am... a conformist supporter of democracy." "I am." "But..." "I'm not revolutionary anymore and I have no motivation to be, 'cause I think things are okay as they are." "I have more of a problem with groups who are against freedom and democracy." "I fight the extremists." "I tell myself, "Not like that."" "The encounter center is part of the "Open Your Eyes" initiative and was founded in 2000." "I am kind of the center of it." "LÖBAU CITY COUNCIL It takes a while to build an initiative and find partners and have an identity so that people perceive you and come to you." "I do political work now." "It doesn't come down to punk, it comes down to the time when you just open your mouth and damn the consequences." "To stop being afraid." ""Is that politically correct?" "Will I still have enough voters?"" ""Will I be reelected?" I have to stop caring about that." "Itjust goes to show that life changes and that every young person in trouble today could be on the city council later." "As a subcontractor, you don't have much chance, you don't make your schedule, your employer does." "But when you're sick of it, you can always say," ""Screw you!"" "Who cares." "I don't work because it's nice." "Home or the band room, that's nice." "You have to get the people excited." "Thank you for coming but I am tired." "No one out there cares." "It really takes a lot of energy to do this." "It's been 3 months." "We'll see how it goes." "We're about to go on." "Construction workers hated us, waiters, too." "That's one reason why we were so restless, going from one pub to another, one club to another, in a group that they'd never let in anyway." "Sometimes you'd go the whole night without having a beer or cola." "There weren't any discos, clubs or pubs where you were allowed." "The only real hang-outs were Alexander Place and then on summer weekends, from spring till fall, in the Plänter Forest, at the fair there." "We were always there." "Sundays in the Plänter Forest starting at seven." "It's dark and I'm standing there." "This local cop comes up to me with his walkie-talkie, gun, brown shoulder bag, hat on, and marches right into our group and asks what's going on and if we're a mob and stuff." "Then he asks for our IDs." "It was dark, we think, "What is this?" "What does he want?"" "He starts to get firm and asks if we'd understood that he wanted our IDs." "We didn't say anything, but we all understood, and wham, his hat was off." "Someone knocked it off from behind." "That was already attacking the state." "He got nervous and tried to pull his gun." "I don't know how many hands were pulling on him, his walkie-talkie was taken, his gun was out of its holster and the shoulder boards were gone from his uniform and he got beaten to a pulp." "We knew we couldn't show our faces in the next weeks, there were so many cops there, you couldn't believe it." "In a studio or apartment the police cleared out this party." "It wasn'tjust punks, there were artists, painters, theater people." "The scene was very mixed in the late 80s, early 90s." "There were punk concerts in artists' studios until they moved to the churches later." "The church was a safe haven." "We were observed from outside, but the cops never came in." "There were church youth programs in the Protestant church and they let 'outsiders' use their rooms so they could "express themselves."" "They didn't know what they were in for in the beginning." "So the bands now had the chance to play for larger audiences." "Berlin, Church of the Savior, the Blues-Mass..." "Word got around that we could play there." "Punks are going to play there so we're going to, too." "We went, everything was set up." "I dunno if they brought their guitars, but the drums were set up there..." "I perfectly remember rocking behind these drums and then rocks started to fly, hitting the drums." "I thought, great!" "Just like the Sex Pistols!" "Bottles were thrown, too." "So many people were pogoing." "There were lots of punks there, pushing people back against the wall, out into the bushes, dancing around..." "These drunk hippies were there throwing their bottles." "You feel really great to see people pogoing to your music." "For me, our very first concert was somehow the greatest." "It could have finished right there." "It was everything we'd done... crystallized into... a single moment." "In Leipzig we played in the church sometimes, but also in student clubs." "Sometimes we played at artists' openings." "Every tour was a highlight because we traveled with this mob of people and somehow made do in every city we came to." "There was something new every day." "Every day a new band, a new outfit..." "Always changing and developing." "It was all in constant motion." "Horrendously long tours from Karl-Marx-Stadt to Berlin and back in dirty old trains." "Halle was very important, the Friedenskirche in Halle." "Gigs in the Friedenskirche were a really big deal." "Everyone from Leipzig, Berlin and Dresden all met up there." "The STASI would turn back whole trains if they saw punks on them." "After 45 minutes, we'd done all our songs." "They kept on clapping, so we had to do it again." "It was so great with "Slime Germ"" "especially with the differences." "I thought they were great." "It was so different." "They were younger and wanted something else." "He played drums like he was slaughtering a pig." "It was a different energy." "They weren't artists, they worked at the slaughterhouse." "They brought something new to punk, different than us academy students." "The cops never asked, "Is Corneila Schleime there?"" "Or "Anybody with a Mohawk?" They just moved us all out." "I had this top on once and my left breast came out." ""I'm not going to put it back in!" "I'll just leave it!"" "They all thought it was on purpose." "I was so ashamed, Catholic and romantic before..." "And there I was on the stage and I didn't care if my breast was showing or not." "It changed a lot inside of me." "At that time, it was the best way for me to confront the state," "living it out in my subculture." "It's more fun than fighting with the kid next door." "Punk is communication, I didn't write lines for myself," "What do I get from saying it all to myself?" "No, it has to be yelled into an audience." "So it was a form of communication." "It was very direct." "I was in the now, not in an artificial bubble, in the now." "There's a change right there." "Earlier, I had been in a bubble, in the past." "I wanted to paint like Paula Modersohn-Becker or something." "We read a lot." "We occupied ourselves with the past." "There was no present in East Germany, it was all too pathetic, we made do with the past." "There was no future, either." "So punk was the only chance to live in the present." "Just the fact of our existence was already a rebellion." "There was no way we could see that at the time." "We wanted to change the world and maybe we did, just a little." "A little, tiny bit." "I had a couple of illegal exhibitions in the East." "People reacted differently." "They said," ""Wow, Connie, you're developing so well!" "When I think what you were doing 2 years ago and now you're doing this!"" "In the West, they only count the 'sold' stickers." "No one is interested how an artist developed." "There's a gap..." "I hate that..." "You live alone out there with your inner monologue, paint pictures." "Then all these people saying, "That is so great!" "So many red stickers, red stickers, red stickers..."" "I almost had a breakdown." "I should have been happy to have sold everything, instead..." "I took off at 12 o'clock." "All the collectors in the restaurant and I disappeared at 12." "I'm still the same as always." "Whether a punk or not, I am still Connie Schleimer." "And not very compatible." "I always make a spectacle of myself, I was born that way." "No idea, it's just how I am." "I can't even separate what is show and what is really me." "It's all just part of me." "Does the backup usually sing that?" "No, they go..." "One more time." "I did that shorter last time, right?" "Okay, you can do two more anyway." "Fine." "We'll look at it at 4 o'clock." "If it's necessary... for whatever reason, even if it's only for your self-esteem, then you have to be prepared to give everything for that." "Sorry..." "It's a real sore point in my life, that you have to be ready to give everything for what you believe in." "I have had to sacrifice a lot for those things, in my case, especially for my career, I've had to pay." "I've had to fight with all of my shortcomings." "My relationships never really work," "I feel a regret for that." "I am very happy." "My wife and I have a daughter." "She turned 17 two days ago." "In the early 90s, I met a couple of guys from the Rocker Club and we got pretty close and so I said, "Okay"... 'cause I'm a bit of a family guy..." ""This is my place in life."" "I decided to do it and became a member." "You had to have a Harley." "That decision affects everything." "You have to live with that and know yourself very well." "But it doesn't always work." "At least not in my case." "The charge was blackmail and armed kidnapping." "It was 60 million marks." "We were arrested at the hand-over and were all sent to different prisons to await trial." "I went to Stammheim prison, where the RAF terrorists had been." "Riding a Harley is like listening to punk, or vice versa." "Shooting toward the horizon with a thundering roar." "That and a bit of happiness, that's a Harley to me." "It's just a toy to me." "I like riding motorcycles, but I don't need to boast about riding 3000 km through the snow, that's not my thing." ""What's a little rain and snow?" "We all love the Soviet Union!"" "My favorite time is always June or early July, when the Linden trees blossom and you drive through Berlin at night with that sweet smell." "That's okay." "That's living!" "Baby, I am on set!" "Yes..." "No, it's fine." "What is it?" "Doesn't matter." "I was out on my bike and we're almost finished." "Bye." "We can continue now." "The first song I ever wrote," ""Ugly," was about a guy my age who is ugly, who doesn't look like he wants to." "He is alone, he's lonesome and nobody cares." "The chorus was, "Everyone walks past him, he's the latest thing."" ""When women mix with men, there are no heroes anymore." "Our fathers lie sweating in the night, cold winter, I fell off."" "Good God, with emphasis?" " "War, death, get up again."" ""You stand in line, you don't turn around, you recognized him."" ""Close your windows, you won't hear our screams, then you'll have peace."" ""I'm gonna kill you, drop-out."" ""Close your ass and your hands, faded like a crocodile's flippers and your noses blew up in your faces."" ""Everywhere you may go, they'll check your pass and you know what'll happen if you say the wrong thing."" ""War, death, get up again."" "At 14 you're afraid, sure." "Afraid that the cops will show up at your door and... make something of your lyrics." ""And your legs, pointy and thin, they carry a jellyfish body that trembles in fear at night because everything's gone wrong."" ""Close your windows, you won't hear our screams, then you'll have peace..."" "Free from my parents' inhibitions, out of the inhibitions of my mother's life, finally free and finally..." "You're still young and it's perfectly clear that first you're gonna have fun." "We moved into an apartment, it was our first squat." "We'd really made ourselves at home." "Punks visited, too, and we really lived." "For a while, I had such a great feeling, but it was still summer." "It went well until August 11th." "I was 17 and a half." "I'd been awake all night." "There was a knock at the door." "Then Jana said..." "It was Jana," ""It's open!"" "That was strange." "Why a knock?" "That wasn't normal." "It was always open, come and go." "We investigated and ascertained who had been on stage and then they were simply... very early in the morning, they were paid a visit." "It had never happened to me that someone had come so early and taken me for "routine questioning" without warning." "I knew this was it." "The goal was to undermine the music groups and thereby the whole scene." "This had never been done before with such a large group of undesirables." "I felt strong." "I felt really strong because I knew it was time." "It was time to find out if I was truly strong and I knew I was." "But I didn't know what it was all about, the scale of it." "But in any case, you can see it in my files, that I didn't say anything." "There was a lot of pressure, not physical, but psychological, to talk." "I only said, "I refuse to make a statement."" "The 24 hours you had for questioning were, naturally, intensively used..." "The interrogations were aggressive." "The guy pulled my hair and kicked my chair." "You knew you were helpless." "It is psychological warfare." "The State Security Ministry [STASl]" "Ensures the inviolability of the security of the German Democratic Republic in every situation." "The classic example was the Blues-Mass in 1983." "At such a BLUES-MESSE event, the punk group "Nameless"" "was invited to perform." "This lyric was among their songs..." "Here, "Terrorist," this is it." ""Is it worth marching for the one who doesn't love you?" "Is it worth marching..." "Is it worth marching for the one who locks you up?"" "Clearly counter-revolutionary." ""Speak it, say it, cry it out, the truth is so distant!" "Speak it, say it, cry it out, what will it all come to?" "Speak it, say it, cry it out, the papers are red." "Speak it, say it, cry it out, the citizens look dead." "Speak it, say it, cry it out, listen to us, informant." "If we go to prison for this, you can be sure that we're coming out one day and we're gonna..."" "The next morning the imprisonment orders were signed." "Then I was in a cell." "The cell was wonderfully calm." "Finally some peace and quiet." "It had all been so much." "This isn't some game." "No parents or friends to help you..." "You were in the lion's den." "From there, you were transported to whatever prison you were going to." "In East Germany, they always took you to another city, in a prisoner transport train." "I was sent to Naumburg, to the regular prison." "We had to work, it was prison, and I'd been there 2 or 3 months and I was doing fine, I was coping with the situation." "I knew some people, it wasn't my first time..." "The first time, I was in STASI custody and then out again." "The second time I was imprisoned for real." "The door opened and in came the newcomers, the latest batch." "I came into the room, 16 guys, with my cup and my blanket under my arm..." "I thought, "Here we go." "What happens now?"" "You go in, find a bed, there was only one free..." "I asked if it was okay..." "And there was Stracke." "He hadn't seen me." "He had his bowl, his blue and white sheets and... he was looking around, kind of intimidated." "I'd recognized him, but hadn't said anything..." "There was Colonel in the corner!" "I hadn't recognized him at first." "He looks at me, I look at him and I thought, "Thank God!" "I'm gonna be alright."" "I'm sure he knew the old stories, fucked in the ass or whatever..." "Eastern prisons were pretty harsh." "The Colonel had experience with all this and I knew that Colonel is someone you can rely on." "A girl came to my cell sometime and I learned from her what all the knocking was." "I learned how to talk with the others by knocking." "You were in a cell and never addressed by name." "You were either "left" or "right," depending where your bed was." "Either you were alone or you were called "one" and "two."" "I was in custody 7 weeks." "Almost exactly." "Firstly, I was under-aged and secondly, somehow conspicuous." "Whatever." "I don't know why they decided..." "Maybe because my father was Venezuelan and had some diplomatic ties here..." "I was psychologically examined." "Six weeks later, I was pulled out, "Left, step forward!"" "I was taken downstairs to an empty cell." "My regular clothes were there." "I knew I was getting out." "I had to go to some court building where my parents and Connie and some others were waiting for me." "Then an officer picked me up a couple of minutes later, we went down a couple of hallways and came to another section." "There was wallpaper and carpeting and there were lots of single rooms." "The door opened, I stood there, my Marlies was sitting there, my fucking interrogator and a guard." "I was happy, but didn't know what to say." "We'd hadn't seen each other, didn't know what had happened." "You weren't allowed to touch or say hello or anything." "You had to sit there, totally agitated, but you couldn't kiss, or hug or anything." "Then I got out and it was horrifying." "I had been bad, too, and wanted..." "So you're suddenly out and all your friends are still inside" "and you can't handle your freedom..." "What good is it?" "The punk scene was basically destroyed." "I had really strong paranoia." "I drank a lot of alcohol and took pills, hoping to die." "I walked the streets, drunk and crying." "People tried to help me." "There was this one woman..." "I was crying underneath a streetlamp and this woman comes up to me and asks if she can help." "What made it worse was knowing she couldn't help me at all." "All my friends are in jail and itjust wasn't possible." "The situation was so bad." "Where was I?" "If I know what the digger is for, I can't use the image anymore." "That's why I started to paint these martial images." "This wheel, pulling mud out of the lake had something erotic to me." "It is like..." "Although it's mechanical, it was still very erotic, that digger, going in and pulling out the mud." "Itjust worked." "I never question the images." "It's all gut-feeling." "I think I wanted images that showed the feeling of imprisonment." "East Germany was a prison, you couldn't be who you wanted to be and I think the bandages were that to me, the pressure of them." "That you can't see or breathe." "I did it with wire, too." "It was a kind of mutilation." "You wanted to be shocking, too." "I walked through Berlin wearing a gas mask." "I did things I couldn't believe." "I was so unhappy." "I waited for years to emigrate and they wouldn't let me." "I hoped the STASI would see the films and finally want to get rid of me." "I wanted some pigeons and stupidly thought to catch them." "Then I called the agriculture ministry, saying I was making a film." "They thought it was for the TV and not some little super-8 thing." "The guy from the ministry told me the pigeons in Berlin were sick." ""How unfortunate," I said." "He gave me the number of the pigeon fanciers' club." "The guy there said, "Come on over, I'll give you 15 or 20 from my coop." "They were all prizewinners that he'd caught and boxed up for me." ""How do I get them back to you?" "Open the window." "They're homing pigeons, they'll just fly back."" "You could get away with a lot in East Germany." "The film set was chaos." "I'd brought a duvet, shook all the feathers out." "There I was with pigeons and feathers." "But the feathers also flew down onto the street and of all people, his wife saw it and called him and told him I was massacring his prizewinners!" "Life in the punk era was more communicative and dynamic." "I couldn't capture that dynamism in my paintings, because they follow other principles." "Like I said before, "Time passes slowly," etc." "There." "So I needed an adequate artistic medium to express this feeling and that was film." "I wanted something to occupy me and keep me busy since making punk music was out of the question." "Not because I was afraid of going to prison again but because it was over for me." "I had to develop something else." "I had always painted and drawn and stuff..." "I didn't really feel better until I'd fallen in love in my first real..." "in my first lover." "And the sex thing started happening and I had work out a lot of stuff and I always tried to use the painting to help with that." "I painted a lot of porn, for example." "Back then, the small group of punk women were faced with a huge group of punk men eager to get together." "That's why you had to find other chicks." "I turned 18 in March and the big defloration happened in April." "I always found the Berlin girls totally hot." "Honestly." "I was impressed that they were always there with their big mouths, just like the other Berliners." "They had to assert themselves." "Whenever I see Colonel at 17, he drives me completely wild." "I was so in love with Colonel that I can still feel it." "Well, you know, maybe I am..." "I am a nice guy." "We lay together, our hands gently, tenderly touching for so long." "It was so great..." "I was tingling for weeks." "With Mita?" "That was one of my most important relationships." "Kaiser?" "At the time I regretted that it didn't last." "With time, I fooled around with a lot of them." "Confessions of unfaithfulness..." "Yeah, we'd already broken up by that time." "I walked out and in my rage, I kicked over an ash bucket without thinking of the consequences." "The ash flew everywhere, of course." "The only comment was, "You know where the vacuum cleaner is."" "But I wouldn't necessarily want to change what happened." "It's part of life, right?" "Kicked it over..." "In the second you kick it, you already see it coming down," "Going everywhere, ashes, ashes..." "As black as a chimney-sweep." "Fine." "I have to answer this one." "My sweet wife." "Hey, sweetie." "Missed her twice in a row!" "Never make a woman wait." "There's a mike in my face, keep it clean!" "I love you, Annika." "A..." "It's A." "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8..." "Just remember the E. Play E twice in a row." "Keep going." "You join in, my friend and sound me out," "you report the lies that you need." "A hyena is threatened by a mouse." "The mouse goes behind bars, the hyena gets let out." "It was shocking to find out that two guys in our band, in the bands, were STASI informants." "I never expected that from either of them." "I read my STASI files of course, they were very long." "Our best friend spied on us." "The worst part was that I didn't have any private photos of myself." "Then in the 90s, in '91, when I was allowed to read my STASI files, there were private photos of me." "That bothered me the most, being confronted with myself." "Oh well..." "It really sucked." "Only much later, after I'd read my file, did I realize what kind of shit he'd done." "The STASI system stripped me completely bare and I still got through personally without any damage." "I should do something with that." "I am also very open about how I do things." "Basically, nothing embarrasses me." "They figured out they couldn't control the punk scene and tried to infiltrate it with other bands in the late 80s." "When you infiltrate something, you kill it." "I think knowing that you've been let out, but that you're not free was the worst part of being out ofjail." "That's what landed me in the loony bin at 17... attempted suicide." "Pretty banal." "I drank the mercury from a thermometer, hoping to poison myself for good." "I write about my psychiatric experiences, hoping that working them out that way would make it unnecessary to go through it all again." "It is very stressful and yet boring at the same time." "You get put away, you get pills, get depressed, go back in again..." "No one bothers to help you really." "So I did it for myself." "I won't take any pills at all." "I think that's totally crazy, the pills just dumb down all your senses." "Talking with my doctor, he told me to figure out what situations in life give me joy, 'cause I sort of lost that." "After that evening I can say, "I really feltjoy on stage singing and drumming."" "A lot of the guys who went to jail when I did left for the West after that." "I didn't want to go." "I wanted to stay like Jana and Mita after they were arrested." "I wanted to do something at home." "'84." "That's what made it happen." "I never actually wanted to go." "I always wanted to stay." ""You'll never beat me down!"" "But we went to the fucking Baltic coast once, to Bansin, and the cops picked us up, kept us off the camping place and we were all arrested and our stuff was taken away." "We had to go home and report to the local police station within 24 hours." "If we didn't, we'd all be locked up and shit." "At some point you say to yourself, "How long can this go on?"" "Locked up, out again..." "The army would have been the next big problem." "That would have been bad." "I didn't want to serve for that country, or any other country." "I wouldn't go to the army in West Germany either, no way, no how." "No one tells me to join the army." "I didn't have a breakdown, but I came to realize that nothing would change here." "It wasn't a life in which I could be happy anymore." "I was close to despair." "You couldn't leave and they messed with you..." "I felt really paranoid, I had this paranoia and I thought I was being followed." "Which wasn't without reason if you go and read my files." ""Is it not a great state, one in which everyone is free?"" "So I slept on it over the weekend and thought," ""I'm going to go on a hunger strike in the church to the bitter end."" "But first I had to come to the decision and to do that" "I had called my friend, Ralf Kehrbach." "He wanted to tell the RIAS radio so that the West would know but the STASI had heard the call and told me to leave within 24 hours." "That was a time, looking at it from my perspective now, where we made these grave decisions in a totally carefree and uninhibited manner from one day to the next." "A duvet in my right and 10 pictures rolled up... under my arm." "That's all I have from that time." "You leave one system and arrive in another." "It was astounding to check in at Schönefeld and get off in Milan." "When we drove over in the bus, the other prisoners and I," "I sat there thinking of my friends and what I left behind, and they were all glued to the windows in the West," ""Look, a Mercedes!" "Oh, a Porsche!" and stuff..." "I didn't give a shit." "I went through and was trembling to get that stamp..." "When I had it, it was..." "A weight was lifted from me." "The first two or three years after I got there..." "I wasn't very political." "I still went to punk concerts in all the places, all the bands I'd always wanted to see." "I went to concerts every week." "I went to concerts, traveled, I felt really good, but somehow it wasn't..." "I wasn't a fighter any more, y'know?" "It was like you were..." "like a retired soldier." ""Now you can settle down."" "Getting into college without a high school diploma was impossible." "Then someone told me you can do that in Amsterdam, at the Ritfeld Art Academy, they take people anyway, if they're good." "I'm good." "I applied." "I went there and was accepted." "Stupidly enough." "Then I suffered through six months there, absolute torture, studying art, Western-style." "It was terrible." "They knew nothing about hard work." "They only wanted you to act like an "artist."" "I could never do that." "Pity." "Not much on this one." "By the way, the nasturtiums there make great salad." "While I had the professorship, my nerves couldn't take any more." "I ate a lot of young nettles to get my strength back." "This works!" "I was named professor for life." "It was so touching, so great, but I didn't have the time..." "I couldn't take commuting between Berlin, Ketzin and Münster," "I quit a month later." "A German record, I think." "To quit a lifetime professorship one month later..." "The is the Palace of the Republic, or what's left of it." "We were never allowed in here as little punk rockers." "What is this!" "I can't work like this!" "I was banned from the Palace and now I am burying it." "They aren't called bouncers anymore, now they are servants of property." "But I'm not an attacker, now I'm a defender." "As we learned in the East back then, "Peace requires arms."" "Empty." "Now I feel good." "I got it all out." "It's a nice feeling." "All I want now is a quick shower and to disappear." "Maybe drink some tea or something." "A CONCERT 25 YEARS LATER" "East German punk grew up alone and died a lonesome death." "It died like it came." "It couldn't mutate into something new." "The fact that we had been totally isolated only became clear when the door opened." "In Leipzig, in a crowd of a hundred thousand, an individual can hide." "But we never hid." "We showed our faces, we stood for it all with our names and our music and we paid the price." "Then they put up a sign, "Leipzig, City of Heroes."" ""City of Heroes?" Pretty bad when you think about it." "Fucking hell, where were you all 10 years earlier?" "Subtitles Jeffrey A. McGuire" "Film und Video Untertitelung Gerhard Lehmann AG"