Post by petrolino on Jan 1, 2021 2:14:42 GMT
The Berlin Wall (1961 - 1989)
I touched briefly upon punk in Germany in a previous post on this thread ('Strict Punk Principles, Shifting Political Landscapes And International Film Markets'), mentioning the crossover in the work of punk musicians, cabaret artists and filmmakers associated with the 'New German Cinema' movement. Creative collaborators Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ulli Lommel brought a clear punk aesthetic to some of their work. Lommel had been a member of Andy Warhol's Factory and he remained an associate of Warhol throughout the punk era. It's during this time that Lommel directed 'Cocaine Cowboys' (1979) and 'Blank Generation' (1980).
Another member of Fassbinder's stock company, actor Roger Fritz, directed the disturbing drama 'Frankfurt : The Face Of A City' (1981) which became a symbol of urban punk alienation and dislocation.
Wim Wenders and Uli Edel also held connections to the emerging punk movement and this was most clearly reflected in some of their casting choices. Edel directed 'Christiane F.' (1981) which appears in many lists of the greatest punk movies to this day.
"What an unlikely mix. Here is Hanna Schygulla, one of Europe's most acclaimed movie stars, who has been directed by R. W. Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Ettore Scola, Andrzej Wajda, Volker Schlondorff and Wim Wenders. She has chosen to make her first film in America with a little-known Israeli who happens to be the son of Jerusalem's famous mayor and has only two rather quirky movies before this to his credit. Working beside Miss Schygulla are two women rock stars, one known as a ''punk Garbo'' and the other a former lead singer for a band called The Shirts.
Miss Schygulla is in virtually every frame of ''Forever Lulu,'' which Amos Kollek, the son of Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem, wrote and directed and has just finished shooting on location in and around New York. Her co-stars are Deborah Harry, the blonde of the ''Blondie'' band, who is the Lulu of the movie's title but barely utters a word in it, and Annie Golden, who plays Miss Schygulla's nymphomaniac best friend.
On this particular day, Miss Schygulla, West Germany's most famous screen face by far, star of 18 Fassbinder films including ''The Marriage of Maria Braun,'' Mr. Scola's ''Nuit de Varennes'' and Mr. Wajda's ''Love in Germany,'' is bobbing up and down on a floating chair in the sky-high pool of the United Nations Plaza Hotel. She emits a tinkly laugh from time to time, but never fluffs a line.
Crew members in swim trunks circle her like waterbugs, slapping the surface to make little ripples. Mr. Kollek fidgets near the pool's edge behind his cinematographer, Lisa Rinzler. The temperature is in the high 80's, intensified by glaring white lights; the humidity reminds one of New Orleans in July. A drop of sweat hangs from the tip of Mr. Kollek's long, melancholy nose, and his T-shirt is sopping wet. Miss Schygulla, however, looks as dainty as a May morning in her pink bathing suit shot with gold. Every hair of her bleached blonde beehive is in place."
Miss Schygulla is in virtually every frame of ''Forever Lulu,'' which Amos Kollek, the son of Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem, wrote and directed and has just finished shooting on location in and around New York. Her co-stars are Deborah Harry, the blonde of the ''Blondie'' band, who is the Lulu of the movie's title but barely utters a word in it, and Annie Golden, who plays Miss Schygulla's nymphomaniac best friend.
On this particular day, Miss Schygulla, West Germany's most famous screen face by far, star of 18 Fassbinder films including ''The Marriage of Maria Braun,'' Mr. Scola's ''Nuit de Varennes'' and Mr. Wajda's ''Love in Germany,'' is bobbing up and down on a floating chair in the sky-high pool of the United Nations Plaza Hotel. She emits a tinkly laugh from time to time, but never fluffs a line.
Crew members in swim trunks circle her like waterbugs, slapping the surface to make little ripples. Mr. Kollek fidgets near the pool's edge behind his cinematographer, Lisa Rinzler. The temperature is in the high 80's, intensified by glaring white lights; the humidity reminds one of New Orleans in July. A drop of sweat hangs from the tip of Mr. Kollek's long, melancholy nose, and his T-shirt is sopping wet. Miss Schygulla, however, looks as dainty as a May morning in her pink bathing suit shot with gold. Every hair of her bleached blonde beehive is in place."
- Nan Robertson, The New York Times
Nastassja Kinski & electric cabaret artist Hanna Schygulla in Wim Wenders' 'Wrong Move' (1975)
One of the things that interests me is the mythology around punk culture and its part in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on all that I've seen, heard and read over the years, I think this has sometimes been exaggerated, but it's true that punk was embraced by pockets of agitators in all the nations that came under direct Soviet influence, or at least the idea of punk was adopted as a form of free rebellion.
One filmmaker who straddled the late 1970s and the late 1980s is Wolfgang Buld. Here in the U K, we know Buld well as he's spent a significant amount of time working here. Like Ulli Lommel, he's perhaps best known as a horror filmmaker, but he's tackled a variety of genres in his time (we shouldn't forget that Lommel even directed a homoerotic arthouse take on the classic Bavarian sex comedy, 'Yodelling Is Not A Sin' (1974), which has recently been restored on dvd).
Buld shot a lot of raw footage on the English punk scene and conducted interviews with various musicians based in London. He ended up creating the documentaries 'Punk In London' (1977), 'Punk In England' (1980) and 'Women In Punk' (1981), a rather slapdash set of scratchy documents that have been released and re-released under a variety of different titles.
Upon his return home to Germany, Buld directed the musical 'Hangin' Out' (1983) which showcases pop singer Nena (Gabriele Kerner), frontwoman of the "Neue Deutsche Welle" band Nena. He then co-directed the documentary 'Berlin Now' (1985) with Sissi Kelling, which is significant as it was made with the musical collective Einsturzende Neubauten. They are one of several German groups whose career trajectory runs from the punk era through the rise of industrial dance music. Another is Rammstein, though I believe members of this band were in different groups early on (and also got involved in German filmmaking).
"American journalist and author Tim Mohr admits that when he first arrived in Berlin in 1992, he was clueless to the reality of what the post-Wall city would look like. “I thought all of Germany was Oktoberfest basically,” he told punk writer Legs McNeil at Brooklyn record store Rough Trade last week to celebrate the release of his new book Burning Down the Haus. “I was shocked when I got off the plane and everyone wasn’t wearing lederhosen and holding giant beer steins.”
Rather than a Teutonic cartoon landscape, he ended up in the gray high-rise blocks near the old East Berlin zoo. “You could hear animals howling at night,” he says. “They were shockingly grim surroundings to me as a newly arrived American.” Soon, he discovered the nightlife scene, the squats and clubs and met many of the East German punks who had created a progressive DIY world. Working as a DJ in that almost-mythical realm until the end of 1998, Mohr befriended many of the people who had been interrogated by the Stasi and imprisoned by the GDR. Their stories stuck with him so much that a decade later, he returned to begin researching what would become Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world."
Rather than a Teutonic cartoon landscape, he ended up in the gray high-rise blocks near the old East Berlin zoo. “You could hear animals howling at night,” he says. “They were shockingly grim surroundings to me as a newly arrived American.” Soon, he discovered the nightlife scene, the squats and clubs and met many of the East German punks who had created a progressive DIY world. Working as a DJ in that almost-mythical realm until the end of 1998, Mohr befriended many of the people who had been interrogated by the Stasi and imprisoned by the GDR. Their stories stuck with him so much that a decade later, he returned to begin researching what would become Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world."
- Jerry Portwood, Rolling Stone
Blixa Bargeld & Nick Cave
Wolfgang Buld scored a commercial success when he directed the car comedy 'Manta, Manta' (1991). Around the same time, filmmaker Peter Timm directed 'Manta - Der Film' (1991). Automobiles became a powerful symbol of the German reunification movement. Timm also directed 'Go Trabi Go' (1991) in which a family go on holiday in a Trabant vehicle. Buld co-directed a sequel, 'Go Trabi Go 2' (1992), with Reinhard Klooss.
The character Jacqueline Struutz (Claudia Schmutzler) in the 'Trabi' cycle is looking to gain freedom and independence. She became a reference point for punk icon Alina Lina in Jochen Taubert's comic horror 'The Pope's Daughter : We Come In The Name Of The Lord' (2020). The makers of the 'Trabi' series drew inspiration from Dutch film director Dick Maas' popular 'Flodder' trilogy which helped launch the career of Croatian singer Tatjana Simic.
"In 1977, a 15-year-old German girl called Britta Bergmann kickstarted a movement that ultimately helped bring down the Berlin Wall.
Bergmann, who lived in East Berlin, discovered the Sex Pistols in a teen magazine acquired by her older half-sister from West Berlin, and became entranced by their spiky image and rabble-rousing sound. She began mirroring the trailblazing band’s aesthetic, chopping off her hair and adorning her clothes with rips and epaulets of safety pins. She soon decided that punk was the thing for her, becoming acquainted with the politically-minded zeal of British groups like X-Ray Spex and relaying the rebellious messages she heard on western radio back to her peers. Earning herself the nickname of ‘Major’, a small scene grew up around her. In less than a year, the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police agency) had opened a file on Bergmann and she was considered an enemy of the state.
A stream of homegrown DIY punk bands formed in the years that followed, giving a voice to the repressed and creating a vehicle for resistance. This under-the-radar movement thrived against the odds; there were no legal venues to perform in, artists couldn’t get into studios to record, and materials like photocopiers were nonexistent. Bands staged illegal concerts in churches – one of the safest spaces in East Germany at the time – and would record these concerts and circulate the tapes. East Germany’s underground punk network quickly became a dangerous source of political dissidence and a magnet for Stasi surveillance; even stepping out in punk garb was viewed as an oppositional statement.
“One reason that punk became such a threat was that it quickly became something uniquely Eastern”, explains journalist Tim Mohr, the author of a recent book chronicling the movement, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. “When they started putting these bands together, they were doing it all in German and it was all about their own lives. British punks were singing about their futures and socio-economic conditions, while the problem in East Germany was almost the direct opposite; they had too much future. There was no unemployment in East Germany, and their lives were scripted by the party.”
Key bands like Wutanfall (which translates to ‘Tantrum’), Planlos (‘Aimless’) and Namenlos (‘Nameless’) became symbols of anti-authoritarianism. In their lyrics, they criticised the Stasi and sung about uniquely East German issues, like trying to regain control over the big decisions in their own lives. Jana Schlosser, singer of the band Namenlos, was sent to Stasi jail for two years after comparing the Stasi to Hilter’s SS. Punks served longer jail sentences than any activist group in the 70s and 80s, and they were also blacklisted from jobs, having to take work as gravediggers or hospital waste operators.
Punk musicians defied the state to make art and were banned from public spaces in 1981. “These are the people who really fought the dictatorship and paid a price,” says Mohr. “The punks were detained and interrogated and kicked out of school and conscripted into the army. They paid with their bodies to bring down the dictatorship.” Major later spent a year in Stasi prison."
Bergmann, who lived in East Berlin, discovered the Sex Pistols in a teen magazine acquired by her older half-sister from West Berlin, and became entranced by their spiky image and rabble-rousing sound. She began mirroring the trailblazing band’s aesthetic, chopping off her hair and adorning her clothes with rips and epaulets of safety pins. She soon decided that punk was the thing for her, becoming acquainted with the politically-minded zeal of British groups like X-Ray Spex and relaying the rebellious messages she heard on western radio back to her peers. Earning herself the nickname of ‘Major’, a small scene grew up around her. In less than a year, the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police agency) had opened a file on Bergmann and she was considered an enemy of the state.
A stream of homegrown DIY punk bands formed in the years that followed, giving a voice to the repressed and creating a vehicle for resistance. This under-the-radar movement thrived against the odds; there were no legal venues to perform in, artists couldn’t get into studios to record, and materials like photocopiers were nonexistent. Bands staged illegal concerts in churches – one of the safest spaces in East Germany at the time – and would record these concerts and circulate the tapes. East Germany’s underground punk network quickly became a dangerous source of political dissidence and a magnet for Stasi surveillance; even stepping out in punk garb was viewed as an oppositional statement.
“One reason that punk became such a threat was that it quickly became something uniquely Eastern”, explains journalist Tim Mohr, the author of a recent book chronicling the movement, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. “When they started putting these bands together, they were doing it all in German and it was all about their own lives. British punks were singing about their futures and socio-economic conditions, while the problem in East Germany was almost the direct opposite; they had too much future. There was no unemployment in East Germany, and their lives were scripted by the party.”
Key bands like Wutanfall (which translates to ‘Tantrum’), Planlos (‘Aimless’) and Namenlos (‘Nameless’) became symbols of anti-authoritarianism. In their lyrics, they criticised the Stasi and sung about uniquely East German issues, like trying to regain control over the big decisions in their own lives. Jana Schlosser, singer of the band Namenlos, was sent to Stasi jail for two years after comparing the Stasi to Hilter’s SS. Punks served longer jail sentences than any activist group in the 70s and 80s, and they were also blacklisted from jobs, having to take work as gravediggers or hospital waste operators.
Punk musicians defied the state to make art and were banned from public spaces in 1981. “These are the people who really fought the dictatorship and paid a price,” says Mohr. “The punks were detained and interrogated and kicked out of school and conscripted into the army. They paid with their bodies to bring down the dictatorship.” Major later spent a year in Stasi prison."
- April Clare Welsh, Dazed Digital
Marie Gruber, Claudia Schmutzler & cabaret artist Wolfgang Stumph pose for a publicity still for the 'Go Trabi Go' film series
There are other examples worth looking into. I've not seen Heiner Carow's drama 'Coming Out' (1989) which addresses homosexuality in East Germany where far-right groups had taken hold. There was an animated film made called 'The Little Punkers' (1992), based upon the work of punk illustrator Jackie Niebisch. It's really only since the Wall came tumbling down that films from the former East Germany have started surfacing in the U K. I like the work of Peter Timm that I've been able to see and I hope to see more of his work in future.
"Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s secret police regarded punks as the most dangerous youth element in the country and ‘the leading force’ behind anti-government activities. These unnamed police mugshots from the former DDR demonstrate the lengths to which the security services would surveil, harass and detain punk ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathisers’."
- Tim Mohr, 'Punk Persecution : How East Germany Cracked Down On Alternative Lifestyles'
- Tim Mohr, 'Punk Persecution : How East Germany Cracked Down On Alternative Lifestyles'
The Little Punkers
