In
BURNING DOWN THE HAUS: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin
Wall, renowned music journalist and award-winning German-language
translator Tim Mohr brilliantly captures this historic moment. Telling
the little-known story of a group of East German kids who rebelled and helped
set the world on fire, Mohr takes readers on a fascinating trip through
the 1980s. Rejecting the dismal, pre-ordained futures that the state tried to
impose on them, these teenagers embraced punk—the aesthetic, the music,
the liberating feeling of collective anarchy—and defied the dictatorship.
Banding together, they faced down surveillance, repression, beatings,
and even imprisonment as they fought to create and control their own,
individual futures.
Beginning
in earnest in the late 1970s, a handful of young people who had lived in the
oppressive shadow of the Berlin Wall their entire lives caught snatches
of punk music on forbidden British military radio broadcasts, and they began to
question authority, daring to dress differently and criticize the
government. Living in squats, hassled in the streets, and relentlessly pursued
by the Stasi—the legendary East German secret police—these kids would
not be deterred in their pursuit of punk. “All the antagonism drew the little
gang of punks closer together,” Mohr writes. “Like the British band Sham
69 sang: If the kids are united, they will never be divided.” The movement grew
in size and ferocity throughout the 1980s. “They raged against the
system, out loud, publicly,” writes Mohr, until the Wall finally came down in
1989. Although the future remained in limbo at that point, one thing was
certain—the punks had played an indispensable role in bringing down a postwar
empire.
Mohr,
who arrived in Berlin in 1992 and discovered a netherworld of dark and dirty
clubs in derelict buildings, learned the secret history of punk rock under the
dictatorship from those who had lived it, and he fell in love with the world
they had created.
Writing
with the keen eye for observation and the narrative grace of a novelist, he
resurrects this all-but-forgotten story with insight and cinematic urgency.
Timely and resonant, Mohr’s incredibly accomplished first book, BURNING DOWN
THE HAUS, is a testament to the essential power of youthful protest in the
face of authority.
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