On November 9, 1989, Faith No More finished a concert in West Berlin. Behind the scenes, the San Francisco group is informed that the wall that has ideologically and geographically separated the city since 1961 is falling. Back on stage for an encore, he begins the Black Sabbath classic War Pigs. On the recording of the show, Mike Patton can be heard screaming «The wall is gone! » (“The wall has disappeared!”).
In the crowd is Jan Lubitzki, a young man who fled the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after a stay in prison for illegally trying to leave it. Coming home, the man who, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, was a member of a heavy metal band called Blackout, finds comrades from the GDR outside his door. They explain to him what is happening. His response: “Come in, I have to play Faith No More for you!” »
This anecdote, like dozens of others listed by the German historian and researcher Nikolai Okunew in his doctoral thesis, is part of the materials that shaped the exhibition Heavy Metal in the GDRpresented until February 9, 2025 at the Museum in der Kulturbrauerei, Berlin. A look at the final days of the Eastern Bloc through the eyes of an unlikely community: the metalheads of the GDR.
A necessity mother of invention
Under communism, work was a right and a duty. The utopia of full employment was accompanied by that of the near impossibility of getting fired. Thefts were common. Thousands of rivets thus found a new function when young fans of Judas Priest and Venom began to make their own clothes to imitate their idols.
Claudia Bamberg was among them. One of her homemade bracelets is a centerpiece of the exhibition Heavy Metal in the GDR. “My father brought me nails from his work, as well as chains that I wore as belts,” she explains. For the metalheads of the GDR, this subculture is not only a matter of music, recalls the German. “Buying band merchandise was not an option; you had to be creative. »
Franziska Gottschling, historian and curator of this exhibition born in the wake of the publication of Nikolai Okunew’s book Red Metal: The heavy metal subculture of the GDRhighlights the paradigm that young people then face: “The balance between daily life under socialism and the appeal of Western pop culture. »
On one of the walls with a look inspired by teenage bedrooms from the 1980s, Mme Gottschling attracts the attention of Duty on an identification diagram of what the Stasi, the political police of the GDR, described as “decadent negative youth”. Skinheads, punks, new romantics, teddy boys and others heavies » compose in a way a summary for dummies of what the work Subcultures. The sense of styleby the British sociologist Dick Hebdige, analyzed with finesse in 1979.
According to Nikolai Okunew, the Stasi was above all a huge reservoir of “small bureaucrats with boring lives”. Indeed, as explained by New Yorker last May, if nearly 300,000 people worked directly or indirectly for “the shield and the sword of the party”, out of a population of around 16 million inhabitants, we would almost be talking here of a “spy” by group of 55 individuals. Mr. Okunew adds that when the latter was dissolved, employees attempted to destroy the archives. However, there is still the equivalent of some 111 kilometers of meticulously collected files.
Circumvent censorship
“Unlike punks, most metalheads called themselves apolitical and worked without too much reluctance,” says Franziska Gottschling. This partly explains why this scene, which depended on the goodwill of officials, was able to continue to exist.
Throughout the exhibition, we come across radio host Jens Molle, who, from 1987 to 1989, was behind the microphone of a show devoted to metal on DT 64, the state radio. He says that at the time, the abrasive nature of the content was itself a way of circumventing censorship. Several young people recorded his show on cassettes which they exchanged for pirated albums. Many of these were brought back illegally by grandparents (retirees being the only ones able to travel outside the GDR) who had endured the humiliation of having to pronounce strange titles in English in record stores in the West. Marcus Marth, a follower met by Okunew, had for example requested a Venom album… and received a Wham!
As the State controlled both the production and distribution of content, these various vaguenesses could have worked in favor of some groups discussed in the exhibition, such as Formel 1 or even MBC, which we can see at halfway through, covering Motörhead. “A lot of people, however, including security at the concerts, didn’t know what to do with these young people,” says M.me Gottschling. “The Macbeth group had one of its shows interrupted by the police. Later, the singer was imprisoned for a ridiculous crime. He subsequently committed suicide. »
A little bit of Quebec in metal
This kind of incomprehension, Michel “Away” Langevin, of the Quebec group Voïvoid, remembers it well. “I remember a show in Germany, with Possessed, where there was a riot because security didn’t understand what was happening in the mosh pit. I came across a line of police with dogs and a line of punks spitting at the police. »
Voïvod was then on the rise, notably because the group Celtic Frost had allowed him to sign with the German label Noise Records. The group recorded two cult albums in West Berlin, with Harris Johns, producer of the industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten, in 1987 and 1988: Killing Technology et Dimension Hätross.
When it was mentioned to him that a considerable number of young and old fans of the GDR wore t-shirts bearing the image of his group in the exhibition, Langevin replied that at the time, he had been impressed by the dedication and creativity of the followers of his music, who did not hesitate to zealously personalize the pirated cassettes that they exchanged on the side of the wall where everything seemed strangely grayer, even daylight.
Post-reunification
As the last fires of socialism fade, extreme forms of metal emerge. It is towards these that many will turn.
The writer Abo Alsleben, who edited the fanzine Cadaver, Corpse & Bowels from Leipzig, in the GDR, remembers the disconcerting ease with which everyone had access to clothes and records after the fall of the wall. The man to whom we owe the legendary album of the black metal group Mayhem Live in Leipzig (1990) still remembers the demands of the quartet: “I organized around 150 concerts. Mayhem’s are legendary. I had to get some pig’s heads and a long knife with which Dead [le chanteur] cut his arms. »
Claudia Bamberg agrees: “When the borders opened, we had a fantastic feeling. But all that freedom wasn’t worth much if you didn’t have money; solidarity has collapsed. The scene in the GDR was unique. Borders had deprived us of possibilities, and this had created a real community. »
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