A little over a month ago, I got an idea. I’d host an Anti-Communist Film Festival. Rent a theater in D.C., obtain licensing fees for movies like The Lives of Others, Freedom’s Fury and Night People, and you’re off and running.
I didn’t anticipate the enthusiasm for the idea. I heard from Hollywood actors and directors, a foundation potentially interested in supporting the festival, and a lot of fans. One person who put on a film festival at the Kennedy Center contacted me and told me there would have to be speakers, panels, and a book kiosk.
One of the first people I thought of to speak was Tim Mohr, but was saddened to learn that Mohr passed away earlier this year. Mohr was the author of Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Publisher’s Weekly called the book an “up-close-and-personal tour of the punk rock scene of 1980s East Germany” that proves “engaging, enlightening, and well worth checking out.” Mohr also collaborated on memoirs by musicians such as Gil Scott-Heron, Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, and Paul Stanley of KISS.
If we can’t have Mohr at the Anti-Communist Film Festival, we at least can sell his book.
In Burning Down the Haus, Mohr explores how the postwar German Stasi, the secret police of the state, harassed, monitored and beat punk rockers. Between 1981 and 1985 one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece who, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.”
The leader of Wutanfall was a frontman who called himself Chaos. Chaos was interrogated once a week by the Stasi, whose harassment and beatings became so severe that he ultimately gave up. “I’m not doing anything!” he once told his parents, who told Chaos to abandon music. “I just play music and spike my hair up with shaving cream, OK? I just want to have my own brand of fun, that’s all. That’s no reason for them to beat me half to death!”
In the end, the beatings, harassment and censorship were too much. Wutanfall collapsed. “It had always been so fun,” Mohr eulogizes, “the little gang of punks against the idiot overlords. All the difficulties had just brought them closer together. But now he felt overwhelmed. Beaten down. The Stasi’s strategy of degradation had worked.”
Wutanfall is a reminder that the best punk rock of the 1970s and 1980s was about questioning liberalism as much as “social justice.” In a Washington Examiner article, Daniel Wattenberg, part of the New York punk scene in the 1970s, describes it well: “New York punks were unapologetic about their comfortable suburban origins, playful and irreverent in tone, and pretty affirmative about modern American life. Indeed, in many ways, New York punk represented a first skirmish within American popular culture with the then-gathering forces of political correctness.”
He goes on:
A small but very influential segment of the punk community… explicitly rejected at one time or another just about every one of the reverse pieties then associated with the Left: anti-commercialism, anti-Americanism, reverse racism, you name it. This was coupled with an assault on the stale residue of the sixties counterculture, the whole sleepy, slit-eyed, vegetative, sexually, intellectually, and emotionally subdued, value-neutral, tie-dyed, and forever-fried cannabis cult that worked its way through suburban basements and college dorm rooms in the seventies.
Today’s punk bands like Rage Against the Machine don’t play a chord or sign a note in protest when the American Stasi raids the president’s home, censors college students and manipulates social media. They’ve become, in the words of journalist Salena Zito, “the musical equivalent of the swamp.”
When I was in college in the 1980s bands like the Replacements, the Dead Kennedys, and the Clash revolted against racism, war—and the intrusive arm of the state, often controlled by liberals. Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra was particularly angry and articulate about being spied on by government agents. Biafra was arrested, and in 1987 faced off against the people who wanted to shut him down—most notably, Tipper Gore.
My friends and I were punk fans, at the time, and a lot of it was the ability of the bands to question not only Reagan’s America, but Manhattan and Hollywood’s as well. The Replacements, ridiculed androgyny and blasted corporate MTV as fake and boring. The Dead Kennedys, sneered at rich clueless liberals in “Hop with the Jet Set”:
We’ll save the whales
We’ll watch them feed,
Buzz around them in boats
‘Til they won’t breed
Just here for the ride
Then we hop with the jet set tonight
Johnny Ramone once offered this wisdom: “People drift towards liberalism at a young age, and I always hope they change when they see how the world really is.” Ian Curtis, of Joy Division, voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Even Duran Duran complained about high taxes.
It’s a shame that Tim Mohr can’t be at the Anti-Communist Film Festival. The ideas in his book, however, will be.