East Germany's punks

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 1980s, thousands of young people in communist East German became punks, attracted by the DIY culture and anti-establishment attitude.

But the East German secret police the Stasi believed the subculture represented an existential threat to the state and tried to crush the movement.

Lucy Burns speaks to former punk Jürgen Gutjahr, aka Chaos, and Tim Mohr, author of "Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall."

Photo: Young punks posing in Lenin Square (now United Nations Square), East Berlin. 1982. (Credit: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC
0:35.4	Sounds.
0:36.4	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:40.9	My name's Linda Davies and I commissioned
0:43.0	podcast for BBC Sounds.
0:45.0	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality,
0:49.0	featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:54.4	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
1:00.9	poltergeist, cricket and conspiracy theories, Cricket, and Conspiracy Theories.
1:04.3	And that's just a few examples.
1:06.2	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected,
1:09.4	find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. Hi and thanks for downloading witness history from the BBC World Service, first-hand accounts of the
1:22.0	moments that shaped our world.
1:24.0	I'm Lucy Burns and today we're going back to Leipzig in East Germany and the birth of a
1:28.9	subculture that horrified the country's repressive secret police.
1:33.0	This is the story of East Germany's punks.
1:36.0	It was 1978.
	...

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