East Berlin Quotes

“In hindsight, it's seen as inevitable that the two Germany's would reunite. But none of the people who had laid the groundwork for the fall-those who had started the tremors and endured the security forces' brutality-envisioned a unified Germany. Those people had sacrificed their places in society for the chance to form a new one, something different and distinct, an independent East Germany built form scratch. The hadn't looked to the West for inspiration before, and none of them looked to the West for salvation now that the border was open.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“The ethos of East Berlin punk infused the city with a radical egalitarianism and a DIY approach to maintaining independence-to conjuring up the world you want to live in regardless of the situation or surroundings.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“A softly-spoken German man points to a window on the third floor of a tall building and says, "My grandfather is sitting in that room."
Planting his feet wide apart, the man begins to wave, his arm sweeping through the air in a huge arc. We all step back to give him enough room.If I let my vision swim out of focus, this seems like an ordinary day with an ordinary man greeting someone he loves across the street.
"I'm not expecting to see him again," he says. But he waves on and on, hoping his grandfather has spotted him.
The Englishmen look away.”
― Joanna Campbell, Tying Down the Lion

“She just wanted to be herself, and doing, saying, reading and writing the things that would have made her feel like herself were all verboten.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Kids in tje East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would in fact. For some this fueled nihilistic feelings - one reason Toster from Die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“And as the Stasi began to pay more and more attention to the new network, they made the same mistake they had when trying to break up the punk scene a few years before: they sought to identify leaders and focus on undermining them. The Stasi assumed every organisation had a top-down structure like the Stasi, like the Party, like the dictatorship.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall