Did Punk Rock Tear Down the Wall?

Carsten Koall / Getty Images The untold story of East Germany's anarchic underground punk scene and the critical role it played bringing down the Berlin Wall.

On November 9, 1989, the East German underground guitar band Die Anderen—the Others—had a gig on the other side of the Berlin Wall. They were playing the Pike Club, in the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg, home to the legendarily decadent and anarchic scene that inspired David Bowie and Iggy Pop and Nick Cave.

It was actually to be their second concert on the other side of the anti-fascist protection barrier, as it was officially known in the East. The GDR had in recent months started granting travel permission to some bands—even bands from the conspicuously non-conformist punk scene. Die Anderen played West Berlin for the first time on May 26, 1989, crossing the death strip at the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint in an official-looking van being driven by a government apparatchik who was accompanying them. It was the type of van used by the police and traveling sports teams.

“It was more about teenage rebellion—it was fun and cool. For me personally, I only began to think about that sort of thing once the harassment started. Politicization was something the Stasi did.”

“A border guard came onto the bus and asked whether we had anyone hidden in the van or anything,” says Die Anderen frontman Toster, an East Berliner who had never before been to the West. “We said no, no. I was practically shitting myself with anticipation. Then we drove on through. And just a few yards beyond was a completely different world. It was unbelievable. I thought of all my friends who had left the country in various waves over the past years. And now I was seeing what it was they put themselves through all that trouble to get.”

The Pike Club was in a back courtyard a few hundred feet into West Berlin from the checkpoint at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse. This time the band took public transport to the gig. As they ripped through their set, they started to see familiar faces coming into the club. But this wasn’t unusual—the same thing happened the first time they played in the West. Tens of thousands of East Germans—including friends of theirs from East Berlin—had been fleeing the country via Hungary and Czechoslovakia since the summer and making their way back to West Berlin.

• More Daily Beast takes on the Berlin Wall anniversaryPeople in the audience were holding up East German IDs and waving them in the air to the music. “We were drunk, and figured they were drunk, too, making fun of us or whatever.”

Then they spotted the singer of another Eastern band whom they’d seen back in East Berlin earlier that day. “We knew he hadn’t fled,” says guitar player Dafty. And suddenly Dafty understood why people were waving their IDs.

It’s no coincidence that a band like Die Anderen was at the forefront of the sweeping changes in East Germany right up to the night of November 9, 1989. The underground music scene—a scene that grew out of East Berlin’s punk movement—played a key role in fomenting and steeling opposition in the country throughout the 1980s.

In the late 1970s, there were only about two dozen punks in all of East Germany. A handful of teenagers in East Berlin picked up on the sound via John Peel’s show, broadcast on British forces' radio in West Berlin. The first self-styled punks ripped their clothes and crafted homemade patches with slogans on them—often just band names like Sex Pistols or the Clash, but also critiques such as “destroy what’s destroying you” and the logo of Poland’s Solidarity movement. Though punks ran into constant trouble with the police, they initially had few aspirations beyond drinking heavily and wishing they were in London.