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Witness History: East Germany's punks

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East Germany's punks

03/01/2020 GMT

BBC World Service - Witness History, East Germany's punks

How the communist secret police, the Stasi, tried to crush a youth subculture.

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)

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