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.

In montage: The works of Hannah Hoch and Linder Sterling

The Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch and the artist Linder Sterling lived several generations apart (Höch died in 1978, just as Linder was becoming known) but both are known in their separate spheres for their subversive, surreal and explicitly feminist use of montage as an art form.

Höch, while patronised by her male peers at the time, received critical acclaim for her political montages critiquing gender roles and the failings of the Weimar Republic, whereas Sterling was respected by her peers in the punk world for her montage work for Buzzcocks and The Secret Public, but it took a long time for her to be accepted by the art establishment as an artist worth taking seriously. 

I first came across Höch, needless to say, while researching Linder and later went on to dig out a book from the art floor at work called Dada’s Women by Ruth Hemus, which reinforced for me the extent to which women were minimised and written out of the history of Dada, much as they have been from multiple other art movements, subcultures, musical genres…  

In an essay concerning the two artists for the book Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years, titled ‘The Exploding Image’, Ariella Yedgar points out that both Höch and Sterling were women operating as the minority within male dominated, heterosexual creative communities, and that they were “very aware” of this. You can see the conclusion of this awareness in Linder’s performance at the Hacienda in the famous meat dress, whereas Höch’s work was banned once the Nazi’s came to power in Germany, forcing her to retreat but not to stop creating work. 

Is montage uniquely a women’s art form? Helen McCookerybook pointed out to me that one of Linder's targets in her work was the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, and his 1956 piece 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?', which suggests that montage isn't a uniquely female art form. It is a very accessible one though and I do wonder if the very accessible nature of it might have contributed to Höch not being taken seriously by the Dadaists in her own time. 

Both Sterling and Höch used their skills as montage artists to critique gender roles and society in their respective cultures. They created work that was unsettling and surreal, and that perhaps made people uncomfortable. It was easy to laugh off their work perhaps, rather than take it seriously, because to take it seriously might have meant asking awkward questions about the societies they were living in. And so called radical artists don’t always want to bite the hand of the state, especially if it is feeding them.

You can read more about the work of Linder Sterling in this piece from the Tribune last year. 

Cut Up: The radical collage of Linder Sterling (Juliet Jacques, Tribune)

Photo of sticker art in North London, 20222 by Ch_pski on Unsplash