Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr

I have to confess, when I first starting reading Tim Mohr’s social history of the East German punk scene, I was disappointed.

It had nothing at all to do with the quality of his research or the story he was telling, it was simply to do with expectations and tone of voice. In short, I’d had it in my head that the author was German, not American, and as such the very American tone it’s written in really jarred with me when I first started reading it. Once I was able to get beyond that, I found myself really enjoying the book. 

As regular punk watchers will know, there are scenes and bands within punk that have been written about time and time again, but when it comes to making a list of scenes that remain strangely undocumented, or under documented, the East German punk scene would be high on the list. 

Punks in East Germany faced a unique set of circumstances that not only made it harder to be punks, and to find other punks, but which also specifically threatened their liberty: Punks in London, New York or Canberra were never up against the risk of being monitored by the Stasi, arrested and tortured, forcibly re-located away from friends and family, or - as a final move - deportation to West Germany. 

Mohr’s account begins with one 15 year old punk girl in Berlin, and goes on to document and describe a gradual network of friends building, coalescing, protesting, forming bands… and the ways in which the East German government and police tried, and failed, to shut it down. 

It would be impossible to divorce the East German punks from their surroundings and socio-political climate, so it’s not surprising that Mohr documents the scene throughout the 1980s and to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. What is surprising, perhaps, is that he chooses not to end with this moment, instead carrying on and making it clear that things didn’t change over night and that change, when it did come, also brought the less welcome spectre of gentrification. Needless to say, this had a very negative impact on the punks of East Germany. In some ways, the post-Wall section of the book is the most fascinating because it doesn’t provide a nice tidy romanticised ending, and instead asks a series of valid questions about who benefitted from the fallout of the collapse of communism.

Burning Down The Haus is a fascinating read that shines a light onto an area of punk history that I would suspect is rarely discussed outside of the former East Germany.

If you want to read an interesting piece about today’s Berlin punk scene, there’s a nice piece in Vice from March 2025.