Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

DON’T DIE IN THE WAITING ROOM OF THE FUTURE! It began with a glimpse of a Western magazine or a snatch of a song overheard on illegal radio: the first punks in East Germany in the early 1980s were galvanized. Wow! Punk was something beyond new, something they had never seen or heard—a person dressing like he didn’t care what the rest of the world thought of him; a person making music that sounded like enraged noise! And in their gray, communist world where everyone’s path was preordained from birth and no one was allowed to be an individual—where freedom of speech was nonexistent—for a handful of kids punk quickly became everything. At first they just wanted to dress however they wanted and write and sing about their lives however they wanted, but as the brutal East German authorities began to crack down on even that—as they were kicked out of schools and workplaces, surveilled by the feared Stasi secret police, beaten, interrogated, imprisoned, punk grew into so much more. In the words of author Tim Mohr, it became a middle finger pointed directly at the repressive East German state that thought it could control the kids. In this page-turning story of the individual teenagers with names like Chaos and Major, as the 1980s wore on the punks became more than a youth movement; they became a part of the revolution that ultimately brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fun, cinematic, deeply researched, highly readable, and shockingly topical, Burning Down the Haus is a fiery testament to the irrepressible spirit of revolution.