11-26-2019, 10:47 PM
I just finished reading this book, and enjoyed it very much: Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, by Tim Mohr (2018). It's about young punk rockers in East Germany in the 1980s, their persecution by the Stasi, who classified them as the number 1 most threatening youth culture of the day, and their role in the underground movements that brought down the Wall. Their motto (one of their mottos): "Don't die in the waiting room of the future."
"Like visual artists and writers, political activists could melt back into anonymity after a demonstration. While politically focused activists might appear at first glance to to have represented a more serious threat to the dictatorship, their protests were discrete events separate from everyday life. Punks, by contrast, because of the way they looked, represented active constant opposition any time they appeared in public. You couldn't spray hoses on punks and throw them in the slammer overnight to stop their particular form of protest. Because the next day they would just walk down the street again, embodying constant active protest, an all-encompassing protest tied to their very person and being. From the perspective of the Stasi, punk was a menacing outsider cult causing more and more kids to opt out of the preordained future the government had in mind for them." --from the book
"Like visual artists and writers, political activists could melt back into anonymity after a demonstration. While politically focused activists might appear at first glance to to have represented a more serious threat to the dictatorship, their protests were discrete events separate from everyday life. Punks, by contrast, because of the way they looked, represented active constant opposition any time they appeared in public. You couldn't spray hoses on punks and throw them in the slammer overnight to stop their particular form of protest. Because the next day they would just walk down the street again, embodying constant active protest, an all-encompassing protest tied to their very person and being. From the perspective of the Stasi, punk was a menacing outsider cult causing more and more kids to opt out of the preordained future the government had in mind for them." --from the book