#71: Too Much Future
When disaffected teens in East Berlin first heard the Sex Pistols on British military radio in 1977, they couldn\u2019t have known that those radio waves would spark a revolution. In the DDR, or East Germany, everyday life was obsessively planned and oppressively boring. To be punk was to be an individual, someone who wasn\u2019t having any of the state\u2019s rules. That didn\u2019t exactly endear punks to the Stasi, the DDR\u2019s dreaded secret police. Punks lost their jobs and families, were spied on for years by their own friends, had their homes searched and trashed by the police, and were even thrown in prison for dissidence. But every time the state cracked down, the punks only fanned the flames of resistance, ultimately firing up a nationwide, mainstream protest movement. American writer, translator, and former Berlin DJ Tim Mohr joins us on the podcast to tell the story of how punk rock brought down the Wall\u2014on this day 29 years ago.
Go beyond the episode:
- Tim Mohr\u2019s Burning Down the Haus
- For photographs of East German punks, peruse the online gallery for the exhibition Ostpunk! Too Much Future
- We\u2019ve compiled a playlist of DDR punk songs\u2014many of them demos or live recordings from the \u201980s\u2014which include hits from Namenlos, Schleim Keim, Planlos, and M\xfcllstation, of varying sound quality
- For something a little less scratchy, check out this 2007 remaster and rerelease of Feeling B\u2019s songs from the Ostpunk era, Gr\xfcn und Blau
- If you understand German, check out the documentary Too Much Future: Punk in der DDR. Another good one, sadly only available on DVD from Germany, is Fl\xfcstern und Schreien, which was released in 1989.
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Music featured from Namenlos (\u201cAlptraum\u201d) and Schleim Keim (\u201cKriege machen menschen\u201d). Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
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