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<\/p>\nBy Louis Armand.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Photo: Backstage at SO36, by Jackie Baier, 2010<\/p>\n
\u201cAt \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a desire\u2026 You wish that something might exist, & then you work on it until it does. You want to give something to the world, something truer, more beautiful, more painstaking, more serviceable, or simply something other than what already exists. And right at the start, simultaneous with the wish, you imagine what that \u2018something other’ might be like, or at least you see something \u00ef\u00ac\u201aash by. And then you set o\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac in the direction of the \u00ef\u00ac\u201aash, & you hope you don’t lose your orientation, or forget or betray the wish you had at the beginning.” These are the opening notes of Wim Wenders’s \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst treatment \u2013 \u201can attempted description of an indescribable \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm” \u2013 for Der Himmel \u00c3\u00bcber Berlin<\/em> (Wings of Desire; 1987), a \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm that evokes Walter Benjamin’s angelus novus, or angel of history, as the supervising witness of our blind pursuit of an ever-elusive \u201cideal” future & the seeming futile wish to become one with it.<\/p>\n In Wenders’ \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm, the \u201cangel of history” is no longer purely allegorical, or singular, but takes the form of trenchcoated other-worldly characters who haunt the city of West Berlin in perpetual black-&-white, observing its inhabitants but unable to interact with them, without surrendering their immortality. Which inevitably they do, out of a kind of melancholic longing for uni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation. And if West Berlin acts as a microcosm for the torments of this fallen world (Germany in the aftermath of the War), it’s because, as Wenders says, \u201cthe (hi)story that elsewhere is suppressed or denied is physically & emotionally present here” \u2013 it’s \u201c\u2018an historical site of truth\u2026’ There is more reality in Berlin than any other city” \u2013 precisely because Berlin is the paradigm of the divided city, that primally conflicted zone in which the conscience of the race (to paraphrase Joyce) uneasily dwells: \u201cthe sun shines on the divided city, \/ today, as it did on the ruins in 1945 \/ & the \u2018Front City’ of the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081fties, \/ as it did before there was any city here, \/ & as it will when there is no longer \/ any city.” As Heiner M\u00c3\u00bcller once said, \u201cBerlin is the ultimate. Everything else is prehistory. If history occurs, it will begin in Berlin.”<\/p>\n This privileged yet equally doomed quality of the city is re\u00ef\u00ac\u201aected in its inhabitants, worldly & otherwise, who are all in a sense su\u00ef\u00ac\u20acocated in history while nevertheless kept apart from it. The cinematic Berlin they inhabit like ghosts is in fact a purgatory, a between-place, the nascent state, so to speak, of history itself. And it is this sense of being caught in a type of limbo, of dislocation, between Alphaville’s \u201cCapitale de la douleur ” of the future & the past capital of the fallen Tausendj\u00c3\u00a4hriges Reich, that also conveys the furtive possibility of a present that can still, however unlikely it seems, be brought into being. \u201cIf I were to give my story a prologue,” Wenders writes, \u201cit would go something like this: WHEN GOD, ENDLESSLY DISAPPOINTED, FINALLY PREPARED TO TURN HIS BACK ON THE WORLD FOR EVER, IT HAPPENED THAT SOME OF HIS ANGELS DISAGREED WITH HIM AND TOOK THE SIDE OF MAN, SAYING HE DESERVED TO BE GIVEN ANOTHER CHANCE. ANGRY AT BEING CROSSED, GOD BANISHED THEM TO WHAT WAS THEN THE MOST TERRIBLE PLACE ON EARTH: BERLIN. AND THEN HE TURNED AWAY. ALL THIS HAPPENED AT THE TIME THAT WE TODAY CALL: \u2018THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR.’ SINCE THAT TIME, THESE FALLEN ANGELS FROM THE SECOND ANGELIC REBELLION HAVE BEEN IMPRISONED IN THE CITY, WITH NO PROSPECT OF RELEASE, LET ALONE OF BEING READMITTED TO HEAVEN. THEY ARE CONDEMNED TO BE WITNESSES, FOR EVER NOTHING BUT ONLOOKERS, UNABLE TO AFFECT MEN IN THE SLIGHTEST, OR TO INTERVENE IN THE COURSE OF HISTORY. THEY ARE UNABLE TO SO MUCH AS MOVE A GRAIN OF SAND\u2026”<\/p>\n When Bruno Ganz’s angel \u201cDamiel” falls for the drifting \u201clonely trapeze artist” Solveig Domartin, their \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst physical encounter, in the bar of the Esplanade Hotel, occurs during a live Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds performance, soundtracked by \u201cFrom Her to Eternity.” Cued to such tropes of transcendence, the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm enters the life of the present \u2013 no longer an allegorical Berlin, but the primevally irreal city of allied occupation, geopolitical separation, arti\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cial economy, \u201cspecial status,” stark generationalism & the long shadow of Entnazifizierung (denazi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation).<\/p>\n Potsdamer Platz in Der Himmel \u00c3\u00bcber Berlin, dir. Wim Wenders, 1987<\/p>\n Like the Manhattan of the ’70s & ’80s, Berlin was an island with a wall thrown up around it, whether metaphorical or real: more potently metaphorical because real. As a physically isolated enclave 161 kilometres east of the Inner German border, within the Soviet Zone of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) a.k.a. \u201cEast Germany,” West Berlin assumed a unique signi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cance during the Cold War \u2013 itself a \u201cwar” both more & less metaphorical \u2013 \u201cdeclared” by the Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949), & settling into perpetual stalemate with the completion of the Berlin Wall in 1961. As an \u201cisland of freedom” behind the Iron Curtain, West Berlin served as a showcase of the socalled Free World, & while the 12 boroughs of the Western half of the former Reichshauptstadt remained formally under allied occupation (in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement), they were accorded special privileges & subsidies that increasingly made West Berlin a magnet for artists, students, draftdodgers, & disa\u00ef\u00ac\u20acected youth generally, who gradually transformed this grey ghost of a city into a global counter-culture capital. In his book on the West Berlin underground, Subkultur Westberlin 1979 – 1989, Wolfgang M\u00c3\u00bcller \u2013 founder of the band Die t\u00c3\u00b6dliche Doris (Deadly Doris) \u2013 depicts the city as a \u201cmelting pot for all the outsiders in Germany: for the dropouts, the queers, the lesbians, for all those opposed to militarism, for everyone who didn’t \u00ef\u00ac\u0081t” \u2013 poetic revenge for Hitler’s purge of \u201cdegenerates.”<\/p>\n Berlin’s schizophrenia wasn’t solely the product of being walled-in behind an external political border surveyed by guard towers, machinegun nests & Soviet tanks, but of an equally rigid system of internal borders as well: economic, ideological & generational. \u201cIn West Berlin,” M\u00c3\u00bcller notes, \u201cthere also existed a border between the young & the widows of former Nazis who got good pensions \u2013 they were called the Wilmersdorfer Wittwen. So in West Berlin you have these widows, you had a lot of old Nazis & quite a lot of Cold Warriors. And at the same time all the anti-militants, the opposition, the artists\u2026” Accordingly the city’s cultural institutions, as outposts of the West’s \u201cneo-liberal utopia,” remained both highly conservative & market-centred, so that younger artists like M\u00c3\u00bcller, & others including Chris Dreier, Reinhard Wilhelmi, Steve Reeves & so on \u2013 drawn for lack of realisable alternatives to the example of avantgarde \u201cconceptualists” like Joseph Beuys, Valeska Gort & Dieter Roth \u2013 began pursuing informal avenues within the new subcultural \u201cUntergang,” in the hybrid realm of performance, music, \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lmmaking & experimental living centred around the squatting & club scene: what Beuys called art as social sculpture. The many-divided nature of the city gave this \u201cunderground” a radical impetus as \u201can expression of the times” it might otherwise not have attained (& which ultimately determined its relatively short-lived nature, declining signi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cantly after the fall of the Wall) \u2013 an impetus fuelled by both the city’s \u201cexceptionalism” & decades of \u201cemancipative disillusionment” stemming from the systemic moral corruption of the political Establishment & the impossibility of engaging with it \u201cdemocratically” on its own terms. It was, as Richard Huelsenbeck wrote of Dada, a \u201cchild” of its epoch \u201cwhich one may curse, but cannot deny.” And like Dada, it exposed itself to the risk of its own death.<\/p>\n In 1965 the unacknowledged social crisis which was the major catalyst of this new underground culture was brought dramatically to a head with the publication, by the Nationale Front der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik in East Berlin, of Albert Norden’s notorious Braunbuch<\/em> (The Brown Book: War & Nazi Criminals in West Germany: State, Economy, Administration, Army, Justice, Science). Though at times erroneous, at others incomplete, it was nevertheless the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst document of its kind, naming some 1,800 former Nazi Party members & SS o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cers still serving in positions of authority at that time \u2013 including 15 ministers & deputy ministers, 100 generals & admirals, 828 senior judges & prosecutors, 275 senior Foreign Ministry, embassy & consular sta\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac, & 297 senior police o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cers. These revelations fuelled accusations of a secret \u201cfascist police state” & gave broad credence to a growing militant opposition while casting doubt on the legitimacy of the country’s post-War \u201cdemocratic” institutions. With the perceived betrayal of the May ’68 dissident movements across Europe, frustration & anger among large sections of the counterculture \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nally ignited into violent action, culminating in the \u201cDeutscher Herbst” of Autumn 1977, during which members of the Rote Armee Franktion a.k.a. Baader-Meinhof Group performed a dramatic series of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations & the hijacking of a Lufthansa passenger jet (the \u201cLandshut”) \u2013 events that became the subject of a collaborative \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm between Alexander Kluge & nine other \u201cNew German Cinema” directors, including Fassbinder & Volker Schl\u00c3\u00b6ndor\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac, entitled Deutschland im Herbst<\/em> (Germany in Autumn; 1978) & whose decadence into bourgeois-bohemianism & corporate\/state security collusion was darkly parodied in Fassbinder’s Die Dritte Generation<\/em> (The Third Generation; 1979).<\/p>\n In Das Konzept Stadtguerilla<\/em> (The Urban Guerrilla Concept; 1971), Ulrike Meinhof argued the case for abandoning the path of \u201clegality” & political engagement with an aloof Establishment \u2013 & for the legitimacy, indeed necessity, of socalled \u201cterrorist” acts. \u201cLegality,” she wrote, \u201cis the ideology of parliamentarianism, the social partnership, the plural society. Many of those attempting to challenge the system ignore the fact that telephones are being legally bugged. That the post’s being scrutinised. That neighbours are being legally questioned. That informers are being paid. And that all this State activity’s legal. The organisation of political work & activism \u2013 if you want to keep away from the eyes of State scrutiny \u2013 has to take place on an illegal level, as well as the legal one\u2026 We refuse to rely on some spontaneous anti-fascist mobilisation in the face of this kind of State terror\u2026 To be an urban guerrilla means to launch an o\u00ef\u00ac\u20acensive against imperialism. The Red Army Faction is striking the connection between the legal & illegal resistance. Between national & international resistance. Between national & international struggle\u2026” Among the RAF’s most dramatic actions was a series of kidnappings & executions of high-pro\u00ef\u00ac\u0081le industrialists, politicians & bankers, including Daimler-Benz executive & former SS o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cer Hanns Martin Schleyer, West German attorney-general Siegfried Bubeck & Dresdner Bank chairman J\u00c3\u00bcrgen Panto.<\/p>\n Hanns Martin Schleyer<\/p>\n To some, the RAF’s assault on the \u201cfascist police state” presented itself as a kind of revolutionary performance art, like Andr \u00e9 Breton’s surrealist incitement to take a revolver & \u00ef\u00ac\u0081re it randomly into the street, only in this case not as an acte gratuit but as a socially-transformative action \u2013 aimed at a monolithic power structure disguised as \u201cdemocracy” while in truth serving the interests of actual war criminals. The RAF appeared, in a sense, to accomplish the equivalent in deeds of that inchoate \u201ctreason against the state” barely verbalised (yet almost universally suppressed) in such expressions of anti-collaborationist vitriol as the Sex Pistols’ \u201cGod Save the Queen.” And if the Punk scenes in London & New York initiated the appropriation of taboo Nazi symbolism in order to o\u00ef\u00ac\u20acend & provoke the guardians of polite society, its adoption in the wake of the \u201cGerman Autumn” by elements within the West Berlin underground was both more scandalous & served more incisive ends, by taunting the \u201chidden Nazism” of the Berlin middle classes whose aspirations those symbols had in fact represented merely a generation earlier (& keeping in mind that in Germany, unlike the US, these symbols were now illegal). One of the earliest examples of this was Wolfgang M\u00c3\u00bcller’s 10-minute short \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm, The Life of Sid Vicious<\/em>, \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst screened in 1981 as part of an emerging Super-8 movement, following in the wake of the ’70s \u201cNew German Cinema” of Wenders, Fassbinder & Herzog \u2013 that included \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lmmakers like Ingrid Maye & Volker Rendschmidt, J\u00c3\u00bcrgen Baldiga, Cynthia Beatt, Brigitte B\u00c3\u00bchler & Dieter Hormel, Andrea Hillen & Rolf S. Wolkenstein, Christoph Dreher & Heiner M\u00c3\u00bchlenbrock, Klaus Beyer, Michael Brynntrup, Christoph Doering, Lysanne Thibodeau & Yana Yo. M\u00c3\u00bcller’s Life of Sid Vicious<\/em> provoked controversy on several levels by featuring a two-&-a-half year old child (Oscar Dimitro\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac) as Vicious, wearing a swastika tshirt & carrying a knife, \u201clooking for trouble in West Berlin” \u2013 culminating in a bloody re-enactment of the stabbing murder of Nancy Spungen. Blutige Exzesse im F\u00c3\u00bchrerbunker<\/em> (Bloody Excess in the F\u00c3\u00bchrerbunker; 1982), by J\u00c3\u00b6rg Buttgereit, brought the sentiments even closer to home \u2013 in a context in which the nation’s Nazi past was largely suppressed beneath a veneer of middle-class respectability \u2013 featuring the director in a rubber Hitler mask (smuggled from New York) & shot on location in parts of the original underground F\u00c3\u00bchrerbunker complex. Addressing the camera, Buttgereit’s Hitler introduces himself to the audience with the words, \u201cThe young people among you may not recognize me any more.”<\/p>\n As with manifestations of Punk elsewhere, the ideological orientation of these works was never straightforward, & rarely translated into a recognisably \u201cpolitical message” within the sphere of conventional social discourse \u2013 which was precisely the point. Moreover, during the period following the high degree of radicalism in the late-’70s, the meaning of left-right a\u00ef\u00ac\u0192liations was frequently ambiguous, if not outright contradictory, as in the case of Horst Mahler, founder of the RAF alongside Baader & Ensslin, who, after serving a reduced 14-year prison term (thanks to the work of lawyer Gerhard Schr\u00c3\u00b6der), adopted an increasingly \u201cnationalist” stance against Germany’s ongoing \u201coccupation” & \u201cdebt bondage,” before eventually joining the far-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. During the ’80s & early ’90s, such tensions contributed to the hothouse atmosphere of the West Berlin underground, with its frequent expressions of \u201ccultural extremism”: from bombed-out border zone to non-stop clubbing scene \u2013 from Bowie’s \u201cCapital of Heroin” in the ’70s, to the birth of the Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) in the ’80s, & the \u201ctechno-undeground” rave-revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall (\u201cOne Nation Under a Groove”).<\/p>\n Trans women on Ku’damm, 1985, by Kenton Turk<\/p>\n In 1981, Uli Edel released a low budget \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm set between 1975 & 1977 in & around the S.O.U.N.D. Diskothek & Bahnhof Zoo, a labyrinthine rail & subway station notorious at the time for drug dealing & prostitution, entitled Christiane F. \u2013 Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo<\/em> (Christiane F. \u2013 We Children of Bahnhof Zoo). The \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm, which rapidly achieved a cult status, centred on a 13-year-old girl, \u201cChristiane Felscherinow” (Natja Brunckhorst, who later appeared in Fassbinder’s last \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm, Querelle<\/em>), living with her mother in a housing project on the city’s outskirts & drawn towards the clubbing scene in the Tiergarten district. Christiane’s subsequent descent into addiction & prostitution was recorded in amongst actual junkies, prostitutes & low-lifes on location, serving as a documentary record of \u201cvanished landmarks.” The \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm featured a live performance by David Bowie (\u201cStation to Station”) who also provided the overall soundtrack, drawn from his \u201cBerlin Trilogy” \u2013 most of which was recorded, with Brian Eno & Tony Visconti, at Hansa Studios near Potsdamer Platz, overlooking the Wall \u2013 including \u201cHeroes\/Helden”: \u201cDoch wir konnen siegen, \/ Fur immer und immer! \/ Und wir sind dann Helden, \/ f\u00c3\u00bcr einen tag.” Bowie (like some perennial Warhol-avatar to the \u201cunderground” zeitgeist) resided in the city between 1977-1979, his former apartment at Hauptstra\u00c3\u0178e 155 (Sch\u00c3\u00b6nberg) \u2013 shared with Iggy Pop & Coco Schwab (& brie\u00ef\u00ac\u201ay Lou Reed) \u2013 now a dentist’s o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192ce. Bowie, a regular \u00ef\u00ac\u0081xture at hip nightclubs like Dschungel & Unlimited, was at the time working to straighten out an incipient coke psychosis & escape the downside of increasing fame, while Iggy (with whom he’d just collaborated on the album The Idiot<\/em>, as he later would on Lust for Life<\/em>) struggled with an insoluble smack habit. Ironically, Reed’s 1973 concept album Berlin<\/em> (his second solo record after leaving Velvet Underground three years previous) \u2013 which was \u201call about” amphetamine abuse in the divided city \u2013 was produced before the ex-Velvet ever set foot there, yet somehow approximates a certain \u201cWest Berlin” portentousness (\u201cHow do you think it feels \/ When you’re speeding & lonely\u2026 How do you think it feels \/ & when do you think it stops? WHEN DO YOU THINK IT STOPS?”).<\/p>\n Heavily subsidised by the Federal Republic as a \u201cshop window of the Free World,” West Berlin attracted many kinds of \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lmmakers between the end of the 1970s & November 1989, producing many di\u00ef\u00ac\u20acerent kinds of \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lms drawing upon the ambivalent realities of the \u201cisland city.” Chris Petit, an acolyte of Wenders & a pioneer of British \u201cNew Wave” \u2013 whose debut \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm, Radio On<\/em> (1979), an \u201cexistentialist road movie,” was shot by Martin Sch\u00c3\u00a4fer & featured a soundtrack by Bowie & Kraftwerk (among others) \u2013 made Flight to Berlin<\/em> (1983; \u201can introspective murder mystery” featuring Lisa Kreutzer & Eddie Constantine) & Chinese Boxes<\/em> (1984; \u201ca cheap thriller with an incomprehensible plot about teenage drug deaths, Berlin gangsters & US intelligence”). Describing the West Berlin scene in the early ’80s as an attempt \u201cto reignite Weimar decadence & blank what had followed,” Petit \u2013 who, like Bowie, kept a Berlin address for several years \u2013 summed the place up as \u201cless a city than an advertisement for a controlled kind of hedonism: white powder, sex in taxis, vodka chasers\u2026 Evenings started late & were marked by theatricality \u2013 & a cast of predatory men & feral women, the likes of whom you didn’t come across elsewhere.”<\/p>\n Brian Eno, by Robert Carrithers, 2017<\/p>\n Following Bowie’s 3-year tenure, the city also exercised an allure upon a wide range of Punk & post-Punk musicians, who either passed through or took up long-term residence. Among them, in 1978, Mark Reeder, founder of the Manchester band The Frantic Elevators (together with Mick Hucknall, later of Simply Red, & Neil Moss). Reeder became Factory Records’ German representative while also working as a sound engineer for bands like the all-women avantgroup Malaria! (Gudrun Gut, Bettina K\u00c3\u00b6stler, Eva Gossling) \u2013 who he also co-managed \u2013 & Die Toten Hosen. In 1981, he formed the synthpop-rock duo Die Unbekannten (later Shark Vegas), together with Alistair Gray, which was joined by drummer Thomas Wydler (who later played in Die Haut & with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds). In 1982 Reeder staged a guerrilla concert by Die Toten Hosen in an East Berlin church, disguised as a religious service, later describing the Soviet zone as being \u201clike the hardest club in the world to get into.” Over the years, Reeder’s position in the underground scene allowed him to accumulate an unparalleled array of live recordings & \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm footage, including reels by 74 di\u00ef\u00ac\u20acerent \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm-makers which became the basis of the 2015 documentary, B-Movie: Lust & Sound<\/em> in West Berlin, 1979-1989 directed by J\u00c3\u00b6rg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck & Heiko Lange, with Reeder providing the narration. \u201cEver since Christopher Isherwood wrote the books that later inspired Cabaret<\/em>,” the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm’s promotional literature states, \u201cexiled Brits & other outsiders have \u00ef\u00ac\u201aocked to decadent Berlin in search of personal & artistic liberation. This archetype received a potent reboot in the late 1970s when art-rock superstar David Bowie moved to the city to make some of his most revered albums. In the 1980s, young Bowie acolytes from all across Europe poured into divided Berlin, lured by its cheap rents, edgy reputation & unique Cold War setting as an island of bohemian excess encircled by Communist East Germany.” Re\u00ef\u00ac\u201aecting on the city quarter-of-a-century after the fall of the Wall, Reeder sees it as still a place of inspiration, rather than nostalgia: \u201cBerlin is the last bastion of freethinking.”<\/p>\n Among other \u201cBowie acolytes” to come to the city were The Birthday Party (a band which Wenders described as the \u201cbiggest thing in Berlin” at the time), whose lead singer, Nick Cave, rented a spare room in Reeder’s apartment. In an interview for Lynn-Maree Milburn & Richard Lowenstein’s 2011 documentary, Autoluminescent<\/em>, Cave spelled out West Berlin’s attraction: \u201cIt was frenetic & anarchic & really creative. It didn’t have the same prejudices in the superior way that the British had about our band\u2026” Other musicians followed suit, including Lydia Lunch, Crime & the City Solution, Joy Ryder, The Fall, Alan Vega, Swans, The Cramps, Once Upon A Time \u2013 all of whom at some stage congregated at venues like Risiko (where Blixa Bargeld bar-tended), Ufo, Park, Moon, Metropol, the Georg von Rauch squat, & SO36 (Kreuzberg’s equivalent of CBGB’s). Emerging from the local Punk & \u201cGeniale Dilettanten” movements in the early ’80s, & galvanised by The Birthday Party’s manic yet sartorial style, the Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) fused industrial noise, synthesizers & androgyny to produce bands like Einst\u00c3\u00bcrzende Neubauten (Blixa Bargeld, Marc Chung, Alex Hacke), as well as Liaisons Dangereuses, Eva Braun, Matador, Die t\u00c3\u00b6dliche Doris, Die Haut, Malaria!, Die Goldenen Vampire, Nina Hagen, Mona Mur, Nena, & a raft of others.<\/p>\n Joy Rider, 1982, by Ilse Ruppert<\/p>\n Probably the most fertile collaboration to emerge from this New Wave melting pot was between Nick Cave & Blixa Bargeld in the formation of the Bad Seeds in 1983 (along with Mick Harvey), following the disbandment of the Birthday Party the same year & Cave’s parting-of-the-ways with former co-writer Rowland S. Howard. Cave & Bargeld’s collaboration forms the backdrop to a 1987 Dutch TV documentary, Nick Cave: Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em> (subtitle lifted from Robert Heinlein’s novel), directed by Bram van Splunteren. Cave’s songwriting of the period was almost obsessively concerned with themes of \u201cdeath & betrayal, failure & anger,” \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ltered through an American gothic persona redolent of Dennis Hopper’s barely suppressed nihilism in Das Amerikanische Freund & fuelled by an increasing dependency on speed & heroin. In 1988, Cave checked himself into rehab & in the aftermath published a \u201cfear-&-loathing bad dream of a novel,” When the Ass Saw the Angel<\/em> (1989): \u201cAnd the crows \u2013 they still wing, still wheel, only closer now \u2013 closer now \u2013 closer to me.” During the seven years Cave spent working with Bargeld in Berlin, the Bad Seeds released \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ve albums: beginning with From Her to Eternity<\/em> (1984) \u2013 which Melody Maker described as \u201cwidely & rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest rock albums ever made” \u2013 & including The First Born is Dead<\/em> (1985), Your Funeral\u2026 My Trial<\/em> (1986), Tender Prey<\/em> (1988), & Kicking Against the Pricks<\/em> (1986) \u2013 the title of which was taken from a (1934) collection of Samuel Beckett’s short stories.<\/p>\n Beckett, one of Cave’s many sources of inspiration, had been a frequent visitor to Berlin since the 1930s, & from 1974 until his death in 1989 collaborated closely with director Walter Asmus at the Schiller Theatre in Charlottenburg, where productions also took place during that time of work by G\u00c3\u00bcnter Grass, Thomas Bernhard & Pavel Kohout. In September 1976 Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs & Susan Sontag famously visited Beckett in his borrowed apartment overlooking the Tiergarten, an event recounted by Burroughs as \u201ca hiatus of disinterest,” with Ginsberg describing the author of Not I in a postcard to Peter Orlovsky as \u201clisping thin boyish wrinkled Samuel Beckett.” Despite his generational association with pre-war \u00ef\u00ac\u0081gures such as James Joyce & Gertrude Stein, & the institutionalising of his earlier theatrical texts like En attendant Godot<\/em> (Waiting for Godot; 1949), Beckett’s evolution of post-dramatic theatre & minimalist prose continued to pursue a line of formal experimentation that persisted beyond the widely heralded death of Modernism & gave impetus, alongside the example of Artaud & Burroughs, to new \u201cunderground” writing into the 1970s & beyond.<\/p>\n It so happened that while Beckett was working with Asmus in the West of the city, on the other side of the Wall one of his most accomplished re-interpreters was labouring in the shadow of virtual censorship by the East German state. Heiner M\u00c3\u00bcller, often described as the \u201cmost important spiritual heir” of Berthold Brecht & \u201cthe theatre’s greatest living poet since Beckett,” had devised a form of textual drama built of “synthetic fragments” (\u201cFragments,” he argued, \u201chave a special value today, because all the stories we used to tell ourselves to make sense of life have collapsed”) exempli\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed in his major works of this period, Germania Tod in Berlin<\/em> (Germania Death in Berlin; 1971) & Die Hamletmaschine <\/em>(Hamletmachine; 1979). Confronted with the dual threat of market capitalism in the West & state capitalism in the East, it was M\u00c3\u00bcller’s conviction that \u201cart must awaken a yearning for another world, & this yearning is revolutionary.” As he wrote in Hamletmaschine<\/em>, \u201cAH THE WHOLE GLOBE FOR A REAL SORROW\u2026 \/ I’M LUGGING MY OVERWEIGHT BRAIN LIKE A HUNCHBACK \/ CLOWN NUMBER TWO IN THE SPRING OF COMMUNISM \/ SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE AGE OF HOPE \/ LET’S DELVE IN EARTH & BLOW HER TO THE MOON.”<\/p>\n During the last decade of communism, as M\u00c3\u00bcller’s work began to gain o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial recognition (due mainly to M\u00c3\u00bcller’s standing abroad), the epicentre of East Berlin experimentalism became increasingly focused around the underground Prenzlauer-Berg scene (which had begun in the ’60s as a refuge for the East’s intellectual, artist, student, gay & anarchist communities), closely linked to the socalled \u201cJungen Wilden” identi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed with gra\u00ef\u00ac\u0192ti art, illegal performances, multimedia experimentation & \u201cuno\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial” or \u201csamizdat” zines & publishing collectives (channelling the spirit of Baader & Hausmann’s \u201cDadaist Republik”) \u2013 including musicians, artists, writers & \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lmmakers like Jana Schlosser, Sven Maruardt, Helga Paris, Stefan D\u00c3\u00b6ring, Jan Faktor, Detlef Opitz, Sibylle Bergemann, Micha Brendel, Peter Kahane, Bert Papenfu\u00c3\u0178, Knut Elstermann, Peter Wawerzinek a.k.a. \u201cMopel Schappik,” & the controversial writer, designer, musician & Stasi informer Alexander \u201cSascha” Anderson. The threat of police reprisals created a sense of high-stakes which in the West of the city found its analogue in the illegal & quasi-legal activities of the squatting & underground drug scene, S&M bars, & informal clubs \u2013 documented in \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lms like Brigitte B\u00c3\u00bchler & Dieter Hormel’s a-b-city<\/em> (1985; shot on Super-8 with a score by P\u00c3\u00a8re Ubu & Einst\u00c3\u00bcrzende Neubauten) & in the photographs of Ilse Ruppert, Miron Zownir, Oliver Sch\u00c3\u00bctz, Robert Carrithers & others (Isherwood’s \u201cI am a camera with its shutter open” \u2013 from Goodbye to Berlin<\/em> (1930)). \u201cI loved chaos!” Ruppert recounts, \u201cWest Berlin had a special & unique legal status. Once I hit the town, I went into the groove & didn’t see the daylight for days. I basically shot everything I saw.” Robert Defcon, a barman at Risiko (the legendary club run by Alex K\u00c3\u00b6gler at Yorckstra\u00c3\u0178e 48, next to the S-Bahn bridges in Sch\u00c3\u00b6neberg), described the scene as a gilded paranoid narcissistic doppelg\u00c3\u00a4nger of the police state behind the Wall, cruised by everyone from Martin Kippenberger to Michel Foucault & other \u201ctalented & well-dressed glamorous assholes of anti-culture” in search of a\u00ef\u00ac\u20acected transgression. \u201cWest Berlin,” he recalls, \u201cresembled a fantastical stage before whose profound metropolitan scenery the crazy drug consumption & perpetual sleep deprivation created arti\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cial drama as a means of escaping the latent complacency induced by the city’s special status. Cushioned in western amenities & a protective wall providing shelter from German normality, the cheap rent & low cost of living formed the framework to this really rather unglamorous city in its outsider position. Our fast way of living didn’t leave room for acknowledging the sad characters on the other side. We were only concerned about our own thing.”<\/p>\n Leninplatz Punks, 1982, by Ilse Ruppert<\/p>\n At the beginning of 1981, large-scale government subsidized demolitions of apartment buildings & factories that’d survived Allied bombing & Soviet artillery during the War created widespread controversy in parts of West Berlin, displacing tenants & creating an arti\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cial housing shortage. Entire streets in Sch\u00c3\u00b6neberg & Kreuzberg fell under the wrecking ball. Among the immediate reactions to this blatant land-grab by developers in league with city administrators was an explosion in the squatting movement. By spring of the same year, there were over 100 squats in West Berlin, providing alternative communal living, soup kitchens, concerts, poetry readings, experimental movie screenings & so on. Their appearance elicited a mixed & often unpredictable response of o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial tolerance in some cases & forceful eviction by police in others. The most prominent squat until then had been the Georg-von-Rauch-Haus in Kreuzberg \u2013 a former hospital, renamed in honour of a leader of the radical Tupamaros West Berlin group killed by police in a contentious shootout in Sch\u00c3\u00b6neberg, in December 1971, shortly after the building was \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst occupied. (The Tupamaros, named after a Uruguayan urban guerrilla organisation, \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst came to attention with the attempted bombing \u2013 on February 27th, 1969 \u2013 of Richard Nixon’s Berlin motorcade.) Later that same month, when police sought to remove squatters by force, they were confronted by large-scale protests which were then countered by teargas & batons \u2013 events commemorated in the protest anthem \u201cRauch-Haus-Song” by political rock group Ton Steine Scherben. The scale of opposition was such that the commune survived, becoming an important precursor to the later East Berlin Punk & New Wave scenes in the late ’70s & ’80s, & continues to this day. During the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall & German reuni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation, squatting remained an important mode of resistance to the increasing commodi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation &, in the east, westernisation of the city. From the beginning of the ’90s, Dunckerstra\u00c3\u0178e 15, in the \u201cLSD” (Lychner-, Schliemann-, & Dunckerstra\u00c3\u0178e) section of Prenzlauer Berg, was the largest squat in the newly uni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed city, in a district where squatters accounted for some 40 Wilhelmine apartment houses alone, including the Kastanienallee Squat, which came under frequent attack by neo-Nazi skinheads. From 1998, however, following a series of police raids & evictions, Prenzlauer Berg began experiencing rapid gentri\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation \u2013 a situation more & more frequently witnessed across the city as large-scale privatisation & redevelopment gathered momentum. Originally established as a radical democratic alternative to the state-socialism of the GDR, Dunckerstra\u00c3\u0178e came to emblematise \u2013 alongside the conspicuous commercialisation & eventual closure of the Kunsthaus Tacheles in Mitte (1990-2012) \u2013 the hostile re-colonisation of urban underground culture by the forces of \u201cindividualistic” neo-liberalism that Meinhof, twenty years before, had rightly identi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed as the real terrorism threatening the world. While some squatter communes elected to pursue the route of legalisation, by entering into contractual arrangements with the city, there was no concealing the rear-guard character of such actions, designed to reintegrate & normalise the \u201cunderground” within a programme of capital-driven \u201curban renewal” \u2013 most visibly centred around the Potsdamer Platz redevelopment \u2013 described in Christa Schmidt’s 1999 novel Eselsfest<\/em> as \u201cthe capital’s heart transplant,” echoing the famous reference in Wenders’s Der Himmel \u00c3\u00bcber Berlin about the impossibility of \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nding this former \u201cwasteland” (in fact the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm’s focal point) now transformed into glass & steel highrises, malls & multiplexes: as has often been said, no other place in the city changed so radically after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along with the revelations of the Stasi archives in the former East (the artist Cornelia Schlime, for example, transforms her old Stasi \u00ef\u00ac\u0081les into paintings) & the process of de-communisation (from the toppling of the colossal Leninplatz monument, documented in Du\u00c5\u00a1an Makavejev’s 1991 \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm Gorilla Bathes at Noon, to the \u201cOstalgie” of Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 Goodbye Lenin!), rampant commercial redevelopment galvanised an emergent new writing ambivalent to the mainstream push for the \u201cgreat novel of uni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation” \u2013 including books like Tim Sta\u00ef\u00ac\u20acel’s violently dystopian Terrordom<\/em> (1998), Ingo Schramm’s linguistically dense Fitchers Blau<\/em> (1996), Thomas Hettche’s sadomasochistic Nox<\/em> (1995), Ulrike Draesner’s textually elusive Atmer<\/em> (1998), Tanja D\u00c3\u00bccker’s cross-dressing Spielzone<\/em> (1999), & Katrin R\u00c3\u00b6ggla’s topo-erotic Irres Wetter<\/em> (2000).<\/p>\n West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s previously unthinkable appeal to reuni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation based on monetary union \u2013 \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nessed by a promise to foot the bill of the occupying Soviet forces’ repatriation \u2013 paved the way both for the (mostly) short-lived cultural \u00ef\u00ac\u201aourishing that took place during the six months following the Wall’s collapse, & for the succeeding process of social & economic normalisation politely referred to as gentri\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation. While the GDR had been visibly disintegrating for some time, the end was still spectacular \u2013 \u201cFrom one day to the next,” as Gudrun Gut put it, \u201cBerlin was an uncontrolled city” \u2013 attended by the requisite euphoria, & followed by an institutional aftershock that produced, in the East especially, a sudden atmosphere of laissez faire. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, daily realities became unpredictable. As musician & founder of Berlin Insane Steve Morell recounts, \u201cNothing was functioning. There were all these cars from the East, massive crowds clogged the streets\u2026 Everyone was getting drunk & going wild. No one knew where it would all lead. After all, there were Russian tanks just outside Berlin.” With the sudden freedom of movement between the two halves of the city came an in\u00ef\u00ac\u201aux not only of Easterners into the West, but of Westerners (& others from the squatting, art & music scenes) into the East, seeking to take advantage of the political hiatus. A new \u201cunderground” community rapidly formed right in the heart of East Berlin, around the largely paralysed GDR governmental district centred on Alexanderplatz. Squats appeared along Oranienberger Stra\u00c3\u0178e (where both Tacheles & the Aktionsgalerie established themselves, with Eimer around the corner at Rosenthaler Stra\u00c3\u0178e 68), in an area that was a monochrome wasteland of decayed grey buildings whose facades still bore the battle scars of WW2. Photographer Ben De Biel described it as reminiscent of the \u201czone” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker<\/em>: \u201cAt night barely every other streetlight was lit. The city was bathed in dim, orange light. It was dark. Some streets had no lighting at all. There were hardly any cars. In the heart of the city there were hardly any people on the streets at night\u2026 Mitte was a dead city.” Groups like the Mutoid Waste Company emblematised this post-apocalyptic aesthetic with their \u00ef\u00ac\u0081re-breathing machine sculptures & performance spectaculars, utilising abandoned Soviet military hardware including a junked MiG21 \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ghter jet & a painted T34 (the \u201cpink panzer “). The squatting scene was able to establish itself in Mitte with such surreal abandon due largely to the disarray of the local authorities \u2013 the zone’s availability for experimental living was even openly advertised in publications like the West Berlin anarchist newspaper, Interim, which ran a weekly list of buildings ripe for occupation.<\/p>\n Just after the Fall, 1989, by Kenton Turk<\/p>\n The epicentric shift of both West & East Berlin \u201cundergrounds” to Mitte inaugurated the celebration of a new \u201ccommunality” (\u201cthe single individual has failed” ), accompanied by paradigm shifts in music, away from post-Punk to techno (the end of “Punk negativity” & the birth of DJ\/rave culture), & the de\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ning drug, from heroin & speed to ecstasy \u2013 a shift which, ironically or not, exposed the culture to an even more rampant commercialism by the ’90s mainstream of \u201cmoney, fucking, money, dancing,” anticipating the industrial-scale clubbing scene that would come to be emblematised by venues like Berghain (the new millennium’s equivalent of S.O.U.N.D.), backed by multimillion dollar global media companies like BMG Rights Management soon headquartered in Mitte. But even within six months of the Wall coming down, these shiny happy people & their militant analogues, labelled \u201cAnti-Berliners” by establishment politicians, were already \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ghting a rearguard action against rapidly encroaching vested interests who viewed Mitte not as a utopian experiment in alternative living, but as the future monument to triumphal capitalism. In addition, Oranienberger Stra\u00c3\u0178e became the frontline in the con\u00ef\u00ac\u201aict with an instantly resurgent nationalism, & of the resultant discontent & rootlessness of many younger East Berliners caught up in the surge in unemployment & neo-fascism, as related in novels like Christian Mackrodt’s Ostkreuz<\/em> (Coming of Age During the Transition<\/em>) (2014). From May 1990, high-pro\u00ef\u00ac\u0081le squats like Tacheles became targets of neo-Nazi attacks, including \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rebombings &, from November (the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst anniversary of the Fall), of large-scale eviction action by \u201cWest German” police (according to some estimates, the most massive police deployment since WW2). For those not evicted, the pattern of attacks continued, & by 1992 these included raids on refugee camps at Hoyerswerda & Lichtenhagen. Civil rights, along with the reformist aspirations voiced in the former East (to re-distribute the national wealth to citizens) by the peace movement (B\u00c3\u00bcndnis ’90) & others, were among the earliest casualties of what was revealing itself more & more to be an elaborate land-grab. There had been intimations of this even before the dust had settled on the collapsing Wall. As Alec Empire, founder of Digital Hardcore Recordings observed, \u201cThe East German civil rights activists, who had triggered the events only weeks before, disappeared overnight. Instead, the patriotism of a uni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed Germany was being propagated through the media, with the black, red & gold \u00ef\u00ac\u201aag colours everywhere.” In addition to which, within just \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ve years, some 85% of the East’s assets had fallen into West German hands, with local industry declining by 30%, & the population by 10%, while the level of unemployment among university graduates became the highest in the world. Meanwhile, though the gay community was less e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acected for a number of reasons than in New York (male homosexuality having been legalised in the West since 1969 & in the East since 1968), the city’s high rate of intravenous amphetamine & heroine use, & the prevailing climate of the last decade of the Cold War, meant that uni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed Berlin nevertheless inherited an unacknowledged AIDS crisis \u2013 with the number of people testing HIV-positive in 1990 in the West at 42,000 (& only 133 cases reported in the East). Social reality & political rhetoric are only ever proximate by virtue of grammar & unsurprisingly the shine wasn’t long in coming o\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac the \u201csocial reality” of Helmut Kohl’s grand Christian Democratic scheme of German reuni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation, which opportunists in the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nance sector were nevertheless dubbing a new Wirtschaftswunder, or \u201ceconomic miracle” \u2013 the path through which, ironically enough, seemed increasingly paved with Wall souvenirs & a nostalgia for that rapidly receding decade of \u201c99 Luftballons”: back when, as the saying goes, there was still so much to look forward to.<\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays & Conversations<\/a><\/em>, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Faber, 1991) 73 *\u201cReactionary Sentimentalism” is excerpted from the Introduction to City Primeval: New York, Berlin, Prague<\/a><\/em>, an anthology of underground writing, film, photography & art, curated by Robert Carrithers & Louis Armand, published by Litteraria Pragensia this October, with contributions by Bruno Adams, Penny Arcade, Dale Ashmun, J.Jackie Baier, Mark \u00e9ta Ba\u00c5\u02c6kov\u00c3\u00a1, Varhan Orchestrovi\u00c4\u008d Bauer, Lina Bertucci, Gaby B\u00c3\u00adla-G\u00c3\u00bcnther, Mykel Board, Victor Bockris, Christoph Brandl, Gary Ray Bugarcic, David \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd, Roman \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd, Michal Cihl\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u2122, Antonio Cossa, William Coupon, Max Dax, Christoph Dreher, Sara Driver, Glen Emery, Vincent Farnsworth, Nat Finkelstein, Roxanne Fontana, Thor Garcia, Susanne Gl\u00c3\u00bcck, Carola Goellner, Anthony Haden Guest, Carl Haber, Jere Harshman, Henry Hills, Nhoah Hoena, Michael Holman, John Hood, Chris Hughes, Jolana Izbick\u00c3\u00a1, Timo Jacobs, Bethany Eden Jacobson, Tobi\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u00a1 Jirous, Bettina K\u00c3\u00b6ster, Julius Klein, Hubert Ketzschmar, Jarom\u00c3\u00adr Lelek, Lydia Lunch, Rinat Magsumov, Peter Milne, Steve Morell, Mona Mur, Julia Murakami, Shalom Neuman, Paul Pacey, Puma Perl, Rudolf Piper, Rudi Protrudi, Mark Reeder, Marcia Resnik, Ingrid Rudefors, Ilse Ruppert, \u00c5\u00a0imon \u00c5\u00a0afr\u00c3\u00a1nek, Honza Saka\u00c5\u2122, Oliver Sch\u00c3\u00bctz, Marcia Schofield, Tom Scully, Semra Sevin, Phil Shoenfelt, Peter Smith, Azalea So Sweet, Mark Steiner, Kenton Turk, Andre Werner, Ian Wright, Nick Zedd, Dave Zijlstra, Richard & Winter Zoli, Miron Zownir.<\/p>\n Read Part One here<\/a>.<\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong><\/p>\n Louis Armand is the author of eight novels, including The Combinations<\/a><\/em> (2016), Cairo<\/em> (2014), and Breakfast at Midnight<\/a><\/em> (2012). In addition, he has published ten collections of poetry \u2013 most recently, East Broadway Rundown<\/em> (2015) & The Rube Goldberg Variations<\/em> (2015) \u2013 & is the author of Videology<\/em> (2015) & The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde<\/em> (2013). He lives in Prague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is more reality in Berlin than any other city\u201d\u009d \u2014 precisely because Berlin is the paradigm of the divided city, that primally conflicted zone in which the conscience of the race (to paraphrase Joyce) uneasily dwells: \u201cthe sun shines on the divided city, \/ today, as it did on the ruins in 1945 \/ & the \u2018Front City’ of the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081fties, \/ as it did before there was any city here, \/ & as it will when there is no longer \/ any city.\u201d\u009d As Heiner M\u00c3\u00bcller once said, \u201cBerlin is the ultimate. Everything else is prehistory. If history occurs, it will begin in Berlin.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n Louis Armand<\/strong> on underground Berlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":88006,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87995"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88051,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87995\/revisions\/88051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/2.png\")
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\nKaterina Oikonomakou, Interview with Wolfgang M\u00c3\u00bcller, Berlin Interviews<\/em> (August 28, 2014).
\nChris Petit, \u201cBorder Zones,” Guardian newspaper (July 12, 2016).
\nJoseph Delves, \u201cPunk, Priest, Stasi, Spy: The Man who Smuggled Punk into East Berlin,” Fact Magazine (September 24, 2016)
\nJames Hopkin, \u201cA new \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm brings the inspiration of 1980s Berlin to the present,” New Statesman (20 August 2015).
\nFollowing re-uni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation, M\u00c3\u00bcller became director of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s former company at the Theater am Schi\u00ef\u00ac\u20acbauerdamm in Mitte
\nArthur Holmberg, \u201cIn Germany, a Warning from Heiner M\u00c3\u00bcller,” New York Times (July 8, 1990).
\nRobert Defcon, \u201cMemories From Berlin’s Iconic 1980s Punk Bars,” Electronic Beats (November 26, 2015).
\nRobert Defcon, \u201cSteve Morell,” Spex magazine (April 12, 2007).
\nDax & Defcon, \u201cAn Alternative History of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.”Electronic Beats (September 22, 2016).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/CityPrimeval-book-cover-219x300.jpg\")
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