Never Mind the Stasi

Published Sep 24, 2020, 9:00 AM

East Berlin, 1983. A teenage punk rocker finds himself in a Stasi interrogation cell. The choice is simple: inform on his friends, or go to prison. Hari travels to Berlin to meet the punks and spies whose cat and mouse game in the last years of the GDR predicted the privacy wars of today.

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Pushkin. The place is East Berlin, the year nineteen eighty three. We're in an interrogation room in the offices of the Ministry of State Security known as the Stasi. There's a filing cabinet, a dirty neck curtain at the window, a view outside of gray concrete blocks. In the middle of the room. There's a cheap wood veneered desk. On it as a phone, an intercombox with an array of cool buttons, and a big old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder. Behind the desk is the interrogator. He wears a uniform, a gray military jacket, a shirt and tar a peak cat placed carefully on the desk beside him. He's a committed communist who's sworn an oath to defend the German Democratic Republic the GDR, commonly known to the rest of the world as East Germany. The interrogator has the authority to do more or less whatever he wants, and he doesn't have to worry about privacy. He can have people followed, listen to their phone calls, break into their apartments, arrest them. Usually his interested in dissidence. Political types who meet to talk about democracy or the environment will make plans to escape to the West, but today he has a different kind of problem on his hands. Sitting at the end of the desk in front of the microphone is a skinny teenage boy. He has bleached spiky hair, a dog collar and an old suit jacket with an A for anarchy spray painted on the back. The kid is something completely new, something never before seen in the GDR. He's a pump. Everyone calls him Pancau after the North Berlin neighborhood where he comes from. And he's the lead singer of a band, East Germany's very first punk band. They're called plan Loos, which you could translate as aimless, having no plan. By most standards, they're barely a band at all, but to the Starzi they're a threat to the very foundations of the state. This is Into the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how borders are never as clear as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru. This episode is about government power and individual liberty. It's about how you look in public and what you think in private, and what it was like to live in a country that wanted to abolish privacy altogether. And it's about one of the most powerful binary oppositions in modern history, the Cold War in Flabbentro, in ostarch Land, Belan Gibson, Punk and plant Fu and the Bent. That's what Pankou sounds like. Now. His real name is Michael, but everyone still calls him by his old nickname, and he still lives in the neighborhood of Pankau. He's telling me about the Stasi, how they thought in a very top down way. The word he uses as patriarchal the stars. He reasoned like this, Berlin is the center of East Germany. In Berlin there's one punk band, plan Loss. Therefore, they are the leading band and the singer as its head. If we can get him, then we can neutralize the threat of punks. In that interrogation room in nineteen eighty three, the Stasi officer has one goal. He wants to turn Pancao into an informer for the state. The officer thinks if he can get this one kid to work for him, then he'll be able to control the whole punk movement. The officer will be a hero. They'll probably give him a medal. I grew up during the Cold War. If he went around at that time, it's hard to imagine the degree to which the Cold War organized everything, the whole world into one big us versus them. You knew you were on one side. On the other, there was a sort of mirror world, totally different, and of course the two worlds had nuclear weapons pointed at each other. It was madness. One summer when I was fifteen, I went on an exchange program, staying with the family in West Germany. One day we went to the border somewhere out in the country to look at the barbed wire fence and the watchtowers. It was a weird feeling. We'd read George Orwell's nineteen eighty four in school, and I imagined on the other side of the wire as a gray world where everyone had to be exactly alike but all the same. I was curious. If I'd been a bit older, I would have wanted to cross over to see for myself, because it truly was a different world for the unlucky inhabitants of the eastern half of Germany. The horrors of the Nazi period were followed by the Soviet patient, then the regime of the GDR. The GDR was governed ontotalitarian lines. The Communist Party controlled everything including where you worked or went to school, how you spent your leisure time. Berlin was central to the identity of both East and West Germany. Though the city lay deep in East German territory, it had been divided just after the war. The city was split in two. West Berlin was connected to Western Europe only by a long walled off highway. West Berlin was an outpost, like a probe stuck into the side of the Eastern bloc. In nineteen sixty one, the East German government built what it called the anti Fascistictis Schutzva, the Anti Fascist Protection Wall, to separate West and East Berlin. The government said the war was to keep its citizens safe from the fascists in the West, but everyone knew really to keep them from leaving. The East. German communist leaders had lived almost unimaginably hard and terrifying lives. They'd lived through stylinist purges, the Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps. Their reality was paranoid and violent, and they were determined that their enemies would never get the jump on them, so they set up a sprawling domestic intelligence service dedicated to watching the citizens for the slightest sign of descent the stars. He had informers everywhere. An informer could be your colleague at work, one of your roommates, even someone in your family. Add to the informers another two point two million party members who had a duty to report whether other citizens were following orders, and you had one of the most pervasive spying machines ever to exist on planet Earth. But right in the middle of the GDR was an island, a place the spying machine couldn't control, a hotbed of dissident culture and radical ideas. West Berlin. My name is Mark Reader. I'm a music producer and over the record label Cole masterminded for success known as MFS, and now I've lived in Berlin for false and Wild. In nineteen seventy eight, Mark Reader was living in the North of England in Manchester, dreaming of making it in the music business. He worked in a record store and he'd fallen in love with the sound of West German bands who were experimenting with futuristic new sounds, bands like Can the Cosmic, Joker's Noise, craft Work and Tangerine Dream. Mark was so obsessed with this music that he decided to visit the place where it came from. When he came to Berlin. What was he able to describe it? Just what it looked, what it looked like. It was different from from the city that you knew, the fact that it was bullet riddled and gray, and rows of houses where obviously bombs had fallen and kind of destroyed the houses, and so he had a lot of gaps in the buildings and stuff. It was like Manchester was a bit kind of like a bit decrepit, falling apart, but Berlin was the same, but bullet riddled. But first, let's put the picture straight. This film tells the time when we had all the discovers, girls still had their pubic hair, and boys wore perms and makeup. Mark loved Berlin so much that he never went home. He's lived there for more than forty years now. A few years ago he made a documentary about the city's music scene in the eighties. It's called b movie Lust and Sound in Berlin. If you want to feel jealous of someone else's misspent youth, it's well worth watching. It was a time when you could smoke him pubs and on TV. One had a record player and the wartman. There were Scottied Houses, no Hood Band, the Red Armorfraction, packed telephone boxes, Polar rode nod Dishwashers, Super eight film, anti gay laws, the Deutsch Mark, the German Democratic Republic, the Wall and West Berlin. Mark knew everybody. He hung out with the pioneers of industrial music, the band Einstead Send any Bouton. Mark shared a squat with Nick Cave, the young Gothic eminence behind the Birthday Party. He stayed up late, made movies, played music and became part of the Berlin underground. But you became a sort of connection between the Manchester scene and Berlin. And from what I understand, you bought joy Division univered to Berlin. Yea a convinced to come to Berlin before transit of Annan came from from Manchester and drove all the way down to put all the way down to Berlin. Really, you know, you know, Berlin had a different attitude to what we had in Manchester. You know, Manchester we are you're in a punk band or you're in a band any for any reason. It was just just to get away. You know, if you if you made it, you'd be able to escape miserable Manchester. Berlin was very different. Everyone had already escaped here. It was like the place where if you were a male of a certain age, you would obliged to go to the military. But if you lived in Berlin, you didn't have to go to military. So if you were a pacifist, or you were gay, transvestile, or ever anything weird, you know, artist, or you'll just didn't want to go the army. You know, you came to Berlin, you could live here and escape going to the army. Because of all the countercultural refugees, the West Berlin punk scene was one of the most vibrant in the world. But Mark wasn't satisfied with knowing just the western half of his new city. Like me, he'd grown up wondering what lay on the other side of the Iron curtain. Now he had a chance to find out. It was a completely different world on the other side of the building wall. Can you describe the experience of crossing over, Yeah, it was scary, you know, it was. It was scary. It was it was like because you didn't know what to expect on the other side. It was a completely different kind of regime and everything, you know, like everything that we'd taken for granted here in the West didn't exist in the East. Incense, you know. It was like I didn't know what was letting myself in full to be honest, you know, I just started just go and see what it was like and where did you find there? I thought it was it was like stepping back in time. It was like a time machine. On his first trip, Mark just walked around, but he kept going back. For most of his West Berlin friends, it was an administrative hassle to get a visa across the border. They had to apply days or weeks in advance. But strangely enough, with Mark's British passport, he could come and go as he pleased. The fascination of that this place, you know, it's like it was like like no other place I've been to. It's like I felt there was a an ambient stare that was like desperate in a sense, and I got quite addicted to that and this feeling of like big brothers watching you kind of thing. Despite that, Mark got talking to other young people and soon he had friends in East Berlin. He began to smuggle in cassettes of the music his friends were listening to and making in the West I'd record all the records that I bought and record all every you know, every omni record collection as much as possible. Even later on, you know, I didn't want them just to listen to punk rock, ordered them to listen to all the kinds of music as well. So I'd record, like, you know, underground disco music. And it wasn't just about punk rock, It's about everything. And how much did young people in East Berlin know about what was going on on your side of the wall. Well, the only information they really got was from TV or radio, most of them not unless they had relatives who came to visit them. Then his dead relatives that they get a bit more information. Book. You know, if your anti Betty comes to visity, you know you're not going to talk about the punk rock scene Berlin because you won't know anything about that, you know. For Mark, going to East Berlin was an adventure like being in a movie. For his young friends, those tapes were a thread that connected them to another world. In West Berlin, you could go and see Joy Division or the birthday party. In East Berlin, youth culture was a little different. Recently, I was in Berlin and I met up with my old friend Anya, a German artist and filmmaker. I first met her a while back when she lived in London. I helped out on a film she made called Trail of the Spider, a spaghetti western about gentrification, with people from our eastern neighborhood dressed up like lawman and bandits. Anya also played in a band with some other artist friends. It was more art rock than punk, but Anya is not unpunk right now. She's even got kind of a mohawk haircut. I wanted Anya to come with me to a place that houses some of the most painful memories of the GDR, an office building just off Alexander Platz, the old center of Communist East Berlin. Alex As Berliners call it as a big open square dominated by the fans tourm the TV Tower, still the tallest structure in Germany. It's a space age needle with a shiny ball skewered through it. It looks like a giant version of a lamp put for sale in a mid century modern furniture store, A massive symbol of the communist state's futuristic ambitions. And we're coming up to the officers of STARSI Archive, and I have a thin in that there'll be a little nervous if we record on the way. But I don't know. Maybe you never the woman after the wall fell the stars. You did its best to destroy evidence of its crimes and human rights violations, but it couldn't get rid of everything. There were millions of documents, tape recordings, piles of shredded paper. The new reunified German government set up the Starzi Records Archive to administrate what was left behind. Mind people could apply to see the files that were kept on them and in some cases find out who had been spying on them. We come to see Doug Mahovstadt, who's the press spokesperson for the archive and knows more than almost anyone about the Stasie. I wanted to understand more about what life in the GDR was like for young punks like Punkau, what was expected of them. Why would the government care what music they liked or how they dressed. There is this idea that socialism leads to a better society, but socialism requires everybody to believe in this idea in the way that it was organized, and in this case we're talking about Eastern European communist states. Very much modeled after the Soviet idea, the Soviets Revolution of ninety in seventeen. Who was always afraid that somebody will take away this path to the better society. So there was from the very beginning an enemy that would squash the revolution, that would persecute the idea of a socialist society. And so you had to be aware all the time of the enemies who are against you. And it very much is summed up in this idea that the dissenter is the enemy. Then yeah, thoughts as must if Yune and again not on an and deadish land, to Laban, on to Campern. That's Eric Honecker, the East German leader, addressing a massive rally of the Free German Youth, the official East German youth organization. If you wanted to get ahead in East Germany, it was a good idea to be a member of the Free German Youth and wear their distinctive blue shirt with the sunrise emblem on the arm. Conker is saying that only socialism can give young people a goal and the future. So these were state organized youth organizations, and to refuse to become part of them already made you very suspicious. And you were not part of the mainstream anymore, and that would continue. If you wanted to study, certain wanted to study at all, as a young man, you would have to sign up for military service. That was mandatory military service. And as a young woman, if you wanted to study, for instance, journalism, it was mandatory that you would eventually join the party, so you would become a candidate for the party in order to join the party in order to study journalism. That's what was on offer. To be a good East German young person, you would join the FDJ, go camping and hiking and sing jolly songs with verses in English and Russian. To show that you were a true internationalist. You wore the blue uniform shirt and clapped along because if you didn't, you weren't going to be able to have a good life. In East Germany, you had to have a job. It was illegal not to have one. But if you didn't play the game, you would just be cleaning toilets or unloading trucks. There was a real risk to being a rebel. As for music, East Germany had one record company owned and operated by the government. To be in a band and play live, you needed a license. That's right. You couldn't just go out and play a gig in a local bar. The cops would break it up and you'd get arrested. To get a license, you needed two things. You had to have done your military service, and you had to pass an audition in front of a panel of judges from the Musicians Union. And in the middle of this, imagine your Panco, an angry fifteen year old who pissed off with your violent dad and needs something, anything, to happen, otherwise you're going to go mad. Then one day you hear the Stranglers on a bootleg cassette tape, perhaps copied from a copy brought over by an English guy called Mark. You see a picture of the band and you want to look like them, so you tear some holes in your t shirt and walk out of your front door with your hair spiked up with soap. You go to Alexander Platz, where you find some other kids like you if you're not doing anything, just hanging around. But the cops come and you get arrested. They ask some questions and tell you to clean yourself up. The next day you go there again and the same thing happens. The cops are nervous because this is a tourist spot right next to the famous TV tower. The government likes foreigners to see the architectural and technological achievements of socialism. It doesn't like foreigners to see that East Germany has punks. So you end up in an interrogation room facing a guy in a uniform who wants to know if you're an enemy of the state. This was Pancou's reality as a teenager. He ran up against the full might of the GDR. I want to go and talk to him, but he doesn't speak English and my German isn't good enough to do an interview. So I asked my artist friend Anya if she'll come along with me. Clearly still a little bit impaired, thanks for coming along on this small adventure. So we're on a tram traveling out of the center of Berlin Northwoods. We're in a district of Punka to see somebody who's called Punko. The neighborhood of Punko is a little way out of the center, and it turns out neither Ana nor Oliver the producer, have ever been there before. To me, it looks like a lot of places on the East side of the city. We get there early and it's starting to rain, so we hang around under a bus shelter like board teenage punks and yeah, and Oliver smoked cigarettes. People like to smoke in Berlin. Smoking is part of the culture, like nude sunbathing and techno music. So yeah, this looks like not the new Berlin. It's an old, old building cover and graffiti him with a sort of messed up wooden door and no bell. So I'm going to see if actually opens. So it does, comment, I'm hurry. Punko turns out to be a wiry guy in his fifties. He's dressed in jeans and a hoodie and looks more like a rock climber than a rock musician. Has the punk one angist piece Dima n front and then tut as fast ring Us Normal heros sexpisodevmenton Bollocks on the door, Plata fun Damdaman, do you have a little They were in names of the records, and they were passed around, and he got them from a friend, and then he copied them to cassette, and he made a hundred eighty copies of and and and passed them on again to all his other maids. Punko had never really ventured out of his neighborhood, but somehow he found his way to the south of the city to a youth club where some other punks hung out. I asked him how many punks there were in East Berlin at this time, about twenty. He says, for which funny flag John Rotten as the cutters and polls stuff on his expisode on Johnny Rotten. Soon enough, Punkou's idol was Johnny Rotten. He had a poster of him, and he had the tape of never Mind the Bollocks that he copied from his friend. So the first time he went to a youth club at that time, He's son who was really punk already, but he was a huge fan of Udo Lindenberg. And actually he dressed like Udo Lindberg at that point and also had this hair club on this Panic belt. So Udo Lindenburg is a West German rock star who circa nineteen eighty had long hair and wore a big metal belt buckle that's spelled out Panic. On YouTube, you can find him doing a satirical cover of All Things Chattanooga Chu Chu called Special Train to Punkau, where he's singing for whatever reason to a dwarf dressed as an East German railway conductor about how he wants to go to East Berlin to sing if only Eric Honeker and the Communist Party would let him. The whole Udo Lindenburg thing is kind of weird and very specifically German. For our purposes. Really need to know is that sixteen year old Punkau thought he was cool, but he really wasn't. Panco dyed his hair blonde, which wasn't easy to do in East Berlin, but he'd met a hairdresser at a gay bar in Prince Lauerberg who helped him. Punko and his friends used to hang out at this gay bar because it was one of the few places where they wouldn't get kicked out. Some of Punkou's experiences sound pretty typical for teen rebels anywhere in the world. The neighbors stared at him, his dad was angry. He got chased by football hooligans who wanted to beat him up. Since most people in East Berlin had never seen a punk, people would ask him questions on the tram, sometimes hostile, sometimes just curious. Then he did something genuinely dangerous. He joined a band. He joined a band at best already existed that they didn't have a singer, and they were called if like the Wall. But at the time they got together, that name in itself already seemed too provocative, and so they've found a new name, and they called the Plan Laws. As I mentioned, plan Laws means aimless, with no direction. Life in the GDR was preprogrammed. You studied, got a job, you retired. There's a famous English punk slogan spat out by Johnny Rotten on the song God Save the Queen. There's no future, he snarls in England's Dreaming no future. For East German punks, it was the opposite. They had too much future. Everything was planned for them. Punkous bandmates, friends from the little gang of punks that hung around in Alexander. Platz Kaiser played bass, Cobbs, the guitarist, was a pretty good musician, but the drummer Ladder couldn't really keep time and wanted to be the front man. It didn't really matter. It wasn't about getting famous or even being good musicians. Punko and his friends wanted the unexpected. They wanted to get to a place where they knew nothing when nothing was fixed they wanted, as he puts it, alf Nuligan to start again from zero plus. Rehearsed in a coal cellar with mattresses against the walls for soundproofing. They didn't even have proper equipment. They had to plug everything into one amplifier, so the drums drowned out everything else. Of course, punk I was banned. Didn't have a license to perform. Even rehearsing was risky. The varatrich Pezzi Amacrimino Buddish or not, it was criminal, he says bluntly. Without a license, you could be put in prison. Writing lyrics was particularly dangerous. Keeping anything on paper meant the possibility that it could be read by the Stasi as it cut. He was afraid from the beginning, I mean even to the point of being paranoid. And he used to um like, write the songs, then immediately memorize them, and then he would burn the paper that you've written them on. And actually you would even be to paranoid to just hear it aptly. He literally burned it so it would be gone. The bandmates had to trust each other. Despite the risks. Plan Lows did perform live. Their gigs were usually very small, twenty to thirty people in sellers or abandoned buildings. They managed to get hold of a tape recorder and recorded their songs at one of their rehearsals. But Punk says he's heard other recordings, live recordings that they themselves didn't make. He doesn't know who would have been able to record a plant low skig. He thinks it was most likely the stars. I'm waiting in line at the Curry Worst stand sings Punk lyrics written by the guitarist Cobbs. Curry Worst is one of the iconic snack foods of Berlin, slices of sausage slathered in a very mild spicy ketchup. Calling it curry is Klein of overstating the case. But whatever, Punker's in line for a snack, I don't turn around, he sings, I've already seen you, you and my shadow wherever I go, a dark spot on the sun. He's singing, of course, about his starsy tail. Sometimes they'd follow him without doing anything. Sometimes they just shove him in the back of a car and take him in for interrogation. And so here we are with the teenage Punk and the secret policeman, staring at each other across the table. Punko's interrogator belongs to a unit called Abtailongs Spansish Department twenty, whose special remit is political dissent. Punko has begun to realize the Stasi are desperate for information. They've been completely blindsided by punk. For more than ten years. In East Germany, there have been what they call blusers, long haired kids who listen to rock music and go hitchhiking, hitchhiking being one of the many things that is illegal in this country. But punk is different. They're not just hippies. They seem to be rejecting every kind of authority. Who or what is behind them? Could it be Western intelligence agencies? Are Plan Loos and the twenty East Berlin punks all working for the CIA. Other punks wouldn't necessarily talk, or they would have no interest to have a conversation with the guy from the Stasi. But the person from the Stasi that was always having the conversations with him or the interrogassion, he would literally tell his superiors here is someone that actually really wants to engage and also I think ultimately we can win him over to work for us as an informal midda bser. The phrase is actually in a fitzil mita bitter unofficial co worker. This is the Starsi's name for informers on the street, they're called spitzland or snitches. When they wanted you to work with them, what did they suggest? Did they offer you money or is it did they threaten you? How did they try and persuade you to become an em with stuntn urban vige married to target. He would be arrested every two days probably, But for him as nobody and then later on as a singer of or yeah it's a singer of plans was first of all he felt sort of somehow affirmed by it. They were taking him serious, they felt threatened by him, and for him, the conversations that he had with them were also a kind of um, they were schooling him in some way and do as uh becauz. That's so, that's just that's only had this priligios. This is where it gets really strange. The police would just come and break heads. They just wanted the punks off the street and they didn't care how it happened. But the Stasi were more like Sun, you're going down the wrong path. And inadvertently they were giving this scrappy kid a political education. Intervu mandufound Spider tired as okay, so like at first he just he felt more like an agitator in that situation. I mean, he knew he had to be careful um what to say, because you knew that he could go to prison if he said anything against the States. So it was Ko that that was the fine line. But at the same time he found that he was sort of somehow also in the process of convincing this Stazzi guy. He may have been fun for a while, but the stakes were getting higher. Finally they asked him outright whether he was willing to become an informer. He refused. After that it was clear that the Stasi were going to find a way to get him sooner or later, and they did. It all happened because of a T shirt. Punko's girlfriend, he went by the nickname Nasa or Knows, made him a shirt with a political quote on it, when injustice becomes law resistance as a duty. That's essentially a massive subtweet of the East German government. And in case it wasn't provocative enough, the T shirt also had the logo of the terrorist group the Red Army Faction. Not only did Punkout go out wearing this shirt, he wore it to a big meeting where foreign journalists were present, and he got up on a chair and gave a speech. He was immediately pulled down and arrested. He faced almost three years in prison. That was when the Stars He turned up the heat. I've done Rutlan done Clars. They got his girlfriend to come in and they said, your boyfriend's going into prison for three years if you don't work with us. So then she agreed to work with them. Um and it was quite clear to her that she would not give them any information, but that she was trying to save him from going to prison for three years. This was a dangerous game, but it worked. Thinking they'd recruited NASA the Stars he let Pancar go. Clark and his girlfriend didn't want to give the STARSI any real information. As soon as they got back to their friends, they told them about the deal they'd made. Punkou trusted his girlfriend, but the other members of Plan Los weren't so sure she'd agreed to work for the Starzi. The members of Plan Los had good reason to be paranoid. The Stasi weren't just watching people and raiding apartments. They were also trying to undermine the punks psychologically, trying to get into their heads. Information gathering on them is just not enough. You want to destroy what they start forming. So the Stasi, especially in the seventies and eighties, came up with the methodology they called tazetun demolition of personality. This is Doug Mahoverstadt again at the STARSI Archives. So all the information you gather on a very individual, sometimes intimate level, about a person, you would use to debase their sense of self and their security and of themselves. And so this says that song strategy meant that you would start spreading rumors about a person coincidentally, or rather not coincidentally. One of a more effective rumor was to say that that person was an informant for the Stasi. In more extreme cases, the Starzi used to raid the apartments of a person and they did little psychological things. They would change around the towel that you were certain to have put to the right side of the think, and when you came home it was on the left side of the sink, and you would just think, what happened here? And you would. You know, it's so minimal, it's just banal little thing, but they start messing with your sense of self, your sense of security, who you are the Stasi. We're using a zette song strategy on the punk scene and it worked. Everyone was paranoid. Thebers of Planlow stopped trusting each other. Finally, Punko's friends gave him an ultimatum, drop his girlfriend or leave the band. Punkar told them to go fuck themselves. Though the stars he never managed to turn punkal, they got their way. In the end, the first these Berlin punk band was dead. I got interested in the Starzi in twenty sixteen when I took my family to live in Berlin for six months. I've been offered a fellowship at the American Academy, an institution out in the far western suburb of Vanze. I was going to spend my time researching and writing the book that eventually became read Pill. There are all sorts of practical issues when you moved to another country. My wife, Katie is also a writer. Our son was two. When she was pregnant with our daughter, we needed to find a preschool somewhere close to where we'd be living. I went online to look, hopeful that i'd find something in walking distance. I found a couple of possible places, and I went on street View to look at them. To my surprise, they were blurred out. German law requires Google to blur out street view images if people request it. Germany has some of the strongest privacy laws in the world. Germans don't like sharing their personal information. They don't like being tracked online. Doug Mahoverstad of the Stasi Archives says this is the legacy both of Communism and the Nazis the idea that a citizen is sort of corrupted through the state, and that the balance between the individual and the state between who I am as a citizen and what the state does, my government does to me and how we interact is much more fraught from the history, and so there's a larger sensitivity of how we balance ideas of security and privacy of the individual and the state, and how we come to a compromise between our respective spheres. We tend to think if privacy is the right not to be watched or overheard, and also the ability to keep control of our personal information. But it's more than that. Privacy is the space where we can experiment the space where we work out how to be ourselves before we have to step out into the social world. Emily Dickinson called it a finite infinity, and it's true. There's something sublime about it, something that makes it very disturbing to us when it's violated. Sooner or later. In any conversation about privacy, someone will say, why do you care? If you've got nothing to hide, why should we care. The philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who thought about privacy very deeply, wrote this, In actual fact, society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one's own reality, and of one's ability to give himself to society or to refuse that gift. He's saying that without privacy, without the ability to make basic decisions for yourself, society couldn't exist unless you have freedom to act and can take responsibility for your actions. You're not human in society. You're just a function, a cog in a totalitarian machine. Perhaps that's why so many Germans ask for their homes to be blurred out on Google street View. Right now, with eavesdropping home devices and a tracker in every phone, privacy is under threat like never before. We have an unfocused paranoia about corporations and the government, but we're never sure who exactly is listening to us, whether they're really paying attention, or what their agenda might be. That wasn't true during the Cold War. The citizens of East Germany knew who was watching the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. But I also think that once you grew up in a system like that and you befriend yourself with the father, the state that I live in shoots me if I travel west, and if I speak my mind completely, I might run into trouble. Okay, so I better. I just better give them what they want, and so I can be left in peace, and I just do my thing, and I have a normal life and celebrate my birthday and my Christmases and my little career. Everything's fine, But you have voluntarily limited the space you're entitled to. And I think that's a long lasting effect. After the Stars he broke up Plan Loos. Pankou didn't join another band. Reluctantly, he went off to do his military service. When he returned to Berlin eighteen months later, his friends had scattered, Some were in prison or the army, some had gone to the West. He felt out of place again. The East German government said tonight they were going to make more openings in the wall, at least a dozen more put bulldozers right through the wall so that more people could cross to the west. When the wall came down in nineteen eighty nine, Pankoo had mixed feelings. He was excited to see the East German regime falling, but he was also worried about the prospect of joining the capitalist West. I wanted to know if he was still worried, if he was concerned about all the ways which we can now be or feel watched. I thought, all predominoscence, why perspective another extremely shreatened. I mean, I think he says he thinks it's frightening, but at the same time it's something that he knows very well. So in that sense, he never had a moment where he had any kind of illusions about that it would be different. Can someone who spent his youth being watched by the most paranoid secret police force in history tell me what to do about today's pervasive surveillance. I'm expecting Punkau to condemn it, to say that we need to fight governments and tech companies instead, he says to me. Sure, you can spend a lot of time focusing on the idea that you're being surveiled, figuring out exactly how much, but that always puts you into a sort of negative frame of mind. You feel hopeless. He lived for years knowing he was being watched night and day. Now, he says, it's important to make a clear choice. Do you stay inside your fear or do you push through? Do you put fear in its place and start making decisions for yourself? And this is the thing I go away with as I ride the tram back to the center of Berlin, that you don't wait to act until you feel you're free to do so. It's the action that you take in spite of your fear that counts. That's what it means to be punk. Turns out, Johnny Rotten was wrong for punk musicians like Pancau and surveillors like the STARSI there would be a future, specifically in Hanover, where another German is about to engineer how the future our present will sound. And as a listener, you also recognize the conscient between these two things. You recognize that if it that it's the patterns that you sounds that make it beautiful, and it's also the fact that the patterns do not repeat themselves perfectly that make it exquisitely beautiful. Finding the needle of a signal in a haystack of noise that's next week on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is produced by Rider Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mire La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is engineer. Music for this episode composed by Izzyokampo, also known as Student. Our theme song is composed by Sarah k Peedinatti also known as lip Talk. Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick and Maggie Taylor. Special thanks to our Berlin producers Oliver Martin and Johannes Nikola. And the very special thanks to Annie Kirschner for all her help for this episode. To hear what Mark Reader is up to now, go to www mfs Berlin dot com. An archive of Punkau's material can be found at substitute dot net. Into the Zone is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The best way to do this is by rate tist on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review for more East German punk head to our Into the Zone playlist on Spotify, and you can find me on Twitter at Harry Quin's room. See you next time. Pressure. That was wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was wrong with that? What was wrong with that?

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Into the Zone

Into the Zone is a podcast about opposites, and how borders are never as clear as we think. With a n 
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