Punk Avant-Gardes: Disengagement and the End of East Germany

Punk Avant-Gardes: Disengagement and the End of East Germany by William Seth Howes A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Germanic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Julia C. Hell, Co-Chair Professor Johannes von Moltke, Co-Chair Professor George P. Steinmetz Associate Professor Vanessa H. Agnew Associate Professor Colin Gunckel For my father, William Craig Howes. ii Acknowledgements In order to write this dissertation, I availed myself of the support and patience of a great number of people. Foremost among these were the members of my extraordinary dissertation committee, whose bracing ambition for my work was outdone only by their saintly willingness to read multiple drafts of everything that made it into the dissertation. George Steinmetz and Colin Gunckel provided outstanding guidance as the dissertation reached its final stages, encouraging me to pursue new lines of inquiry just as the old ones started to frustrate me. Vanessa Agnew’s keen readerly insights and stimulating conversation continually opened new doors for the dissertation; it was at her encouragement that I began to learn how to really, really listen. As co-chairs, Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke provided inspiration and humor in equal good measure. Due to their expertise and wit, I felt none of whatever torture is supposed to attend the dissertation-writing process. This project, which is as much a product of their wisdom as of my effort, was in incredibly good hands all along. At the Archiv der Jugendkulturen, Fr. Antje Pfeffer was of great help; at the archives of the BStU in Berlin, Fr. Annette Müller did incredible work on my behalf over the course of four years. At every turn, each of these two inspiring colleagues reminded me how much I’ve yet to learn about scholarship, about archives, and about my topic. Being surrounded by the brilliant graduate students of the University of Michigan department of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian was invaluable. If Ela Gezen, Jeff iii Luppes, Solveig Heinz, and Sara Jackson hadn’t been here, the dissertation wouldn’t be here either. Outside the academy, Linda turned a patient ear—and looked askance—whenever I needed it. Finally, my two families in Honolulu and in Halle have been there from the very beginning. They gave me the emotional, linguistic, and analytic resources I’d need to write this dissertation, and certainly set me on the path toward writing it. Finally, I can’t forget to acknowledge Athena and Calli, who always gave me opportunities to get away from the dissertation when it was most necessary. By doing so, of course, they also gave me the energy to get back to it. Of course, the aforementioned people are responsible only for what’s good about the dissertation. All mistakes, obscurantisms, pedantries, evasions, or flat jokes, as the saying goes, are my own. iv Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures vi Introduction: Punk Avant-Gardes 1 Chapter 1: The New Punk Man and Cold War Cultures of Disengagement 34 Chapter 2: Satellit Sascha 72 Chapter 3: It’s Punk Time! Futurity, Pessimism, and GDR Punk 116 Chapter 4: DDR von Unten 154 Conclusion: Post-Punk, Post-Soviet Spaces 203 Works Cited 219 v List of Figures Figure 1. Punk apartment, from Furian’s pamphlet 157 Figure 2. Punk apartment, foyer, from Furian’s pamphlet 160 Figure 3. Am Händel 164 Figure 4. Punks in front of Berlin’s Palast der Republik 168 Figure 5. Tanz auf dem Boulevard 169 Figure 6. Deutsche Volkspolizei (DVP) arrest photographs of punks 181 Figure 7. Arrest photographs emphasizing punk inscriptions 194 Figure 8. Micha Brendel of the Autoperforationsartisten 195 Figure 9. A L’Attentat flyer 195 vi Introduction: Punk Avant-Gardes The Ostpunk Avant-Garde: a Cold War Culture In 2005, an exhibition opened in the Prenzlauer Berg. Called Ostpunk! too much future, it occupied three stories of an abandoned factory, and papered bare-brick walls and utilitarian corridors with photographs, dioramas, and display cases. The exhibit’s topic was East German punk, and its curators offered an argument for East German punk’s idiosyncrasy in their exhibition catalog: Punk in West-Europa war ein popkulturelles Phänomen mit politischen Ursachen. Punk in der DDR dagegen war ein politisches Phänomen mit popkulturellem Hintergrund.1 The distinction depends upon the classification of Western European punk forms as primarily cultural, rather than political. Playing a zero-sum theoretical game, Boehlke and Gericke reconstrue Westpunk and Ostpunk as mirroring one another: similar, and replete with analogous structures, but with the relationships of influence between their corresponding parts (their political and their cultural tendencies) reversed. One punk was concerned with “material shortfalls” and “elementary freedoms,” while the other’s marginal “artistic reaction” targeted a “satiated consumer society.” And for all that it mobilizes pop-cultural elements, punk’s East German iteration remains an essentially “political phenomenon.” For Boehlke and Gericke, the art/life boundary reasserts itself through a comparison of Punk forms which hierarchizes as it divides. Though they hesitate to deny Western punk all traces of its politicality—it does have “politische[] 1 Ursachen,” just as East German punk has a “pop-cultural background”—a clear differentiation is made between the essentially political and the ephemerally pop-cultural. Case closed: Eastern punk differs from its Western forebear because its essence, not just its appearance, is political. Where Boehlke and Gericke describe clear-cut differences between the political and the pop-cultural, between Western and Eastern punk forms, this dissertation instead identifies ambiguities. Unsatisfied with the conclusion that punk constituted a political problem for its various East German audiences—since staggering arrest records, intensive surveillance efforts, and ten years of Stasi punk theory confirm that it did—this project instead aims to investigate how this came to be. At stake in such an investigation are two simple questions: how was punk culture transferred across the most heavily policed border in the world, and why was it held to pose such a threat to the civic and symbolic order of East Germany? Pragmatically speaking, such questions are easily answered. The avenues of punk’s transfer across borders were manifold, but certainly finite. Radio broadcasts of syndicated BBC programming by RIAS, and radio content originating in West Germany, entered East German households in the same way that other content on so-called Westradio and Westfernsehen did: over the air waves. Circulating tape recordings, press clippings, and self-published fanzines amongst themselves, hundreds of East German youths struck by their initial encounters with Western (and West German) punk music and fashion constituted ad hoc circles of those in the know. These individuals frequently adopted the requisite style of dress, Anglicisms, and musical sensibilities to go along with their pursuit of new recorded, sewn, or written punk materials.2 Beyond this, they 2 organized concerts under the aegis of the Evangelical churches’ open youth work, or offene Jugendarbeit, whose foundational tenets provided performance or meeting spaces and other resources to young East Germans who couldn’t access them through the usual channels of school clubs, mass organizations, or workplace associations.3 This dissertation holds that the two questions have one answer. Punk’s transferability to cultural contexts on both sides of the Iron Curtain and its outsized impact on aesthetics and culture policy in both East and West Germany resulted from punk’s inheritance and reauthorization of a central cultural problem: the unresolved legacy of the avant-garde. As a culture of the Cold War, punk revivified debates about art, life, politics, and the avant-garde by serving as the center of a transnational debate about punk’s meaning as a youth culture. At the same time, by drawing upon some avant- garde practices and rejecting others, punks refused to entirely inherit, or entirely reject, the avant-garde tradition through which punk’s critics frequently sought to understand it. This dissertation shows that examining the punk phenomenon raises pressing questions about the political meaning of aesthetics, and in particular of the avant-garde, in Cold War Europe. Furthermore, such an examination prompts us to rethink our long-held notions about the impermeability of the Cold War’s constitutive boundary, the German- German border, and to re-consider the geopolitical division of Germany as it was transgressed and reimagined by punk’s socially marginal, but symbolically powerful protagonists. Punk Avant-Gardes 3 As early as 1978, punk’s first scholarly interlocutor, Dick Hebdige, linked punk’s cut-up aesthetic and “profane and terminal” representational rationale to the techniques of the classical avant-gardes. Hebdige’s work, which was rooted in that of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, developed a semiotics of working-class youth subcultures that drew in equal measure on Gramscian analyses of hegemony and the high-structuralist Barthes of Elements of Semiology. In the history of subcultural signification which Hebdige and his Birmingham colleagues had to offer, postwar youth subcultures drew upon the recontextualization and creative assembly of sartorial elements past and present in order to

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