BURNING FROM THE INSIDE

BURNING FROM THE INSIDE by Tim Mohr is the secret history of the punk music underground in East Germany, from its inception in East Berlin in the late 1970s to its role in helping to catalyze the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and on to the creation of the clubs and art spaces that led to modern Berlin.

Punk in East Germany started with just a handful of kids in the late 1970s, teens who got hooked when they heard the Sex Pistols on British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin. In thrall to the sounds and the images of the London scene they gleaned from smuggled music magazines and surreptitious glimpses of Western TV, they ripped their jeans, wrote the names of their new English idols on their jackets with ball-point pens, and stuck safety pins through their earlobes. Coupled with outlandish haircuts, the look was unmistakable amidst the drab masses of East Berlin, and early punk enthusiasts quickly found each other. The authorities of the police state took notice as well. But this is not some fairytale about the revolutionary appeal of Western pop culture and the humorless, cheap-suited bureaucrats who wanted to keep the kids from rocking. Eastern punks’ apolitical nihilism quickly evolved into a hardcore ideology reflecting their specific surroundings. In the West, punks sang about having “no future,” about being damned to the underclass of capitalist society. In the East, the problem was the opposite: your future had already been determined, pre-scripted by some apparatchik—from communist youth organizations to an apprenticeship to a factory job in the planned economy. The problem in the East wasn’t “no future,” it was “too much future.” BURNING FROM THE INSIDE by Tim Mohr is the secret history of the punk music underground in East Germany, from its inception in East Berlin in the late 1970s to its role in helping to catalyze the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and on to the creation of the clubs and art spaces that led to modern Berlin. In the tradition of Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Positively 4th Street, BURNING FROM THE INSIDE is a story of survival and the unlikely origin of a movement that changed the world. Members of the original East German punk scene are quite insular and suspicious of outsiders. Mohr met the key players as a result of his DJ career in the 1990s -- at that time, a lot of the clubs were run and staffed by former punks. Their stories fascinated him then and have remained with him ever since in the hope that he’d someday be able to tell the whole story to a broad audience. Several of the main characters, including Major, have never spoken about their experiences publicly or to another outsider. Mohr has interviewed approximately fifty people tied to the scene, and these interviews provide the details, immediacy, and visceral feelings needed to tell a story of genuine historical significance in a riveting, cinematic way. He also had access to a complete set of Stasi archives related to the punk scene, and has been permitted by individual punks to see their own personal files. In addition, he has made use of extensive archival materials, additional primary and secondary sources, and contemporary media reports. Tim Mohr spent much of the 1990s as a club DJ in Berlin before joining Playboy magazine in New York for much of the next decade, where he edited such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Matt Taibbi, John Dean, George McGovern, Harvey Pekar, and Ana Marie Cox. The project he was working on with Hunter S. Thompson at the time of Thompson’s death anchors the book Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, published by Da Capo. Mohr is an award-winning translator of German novels, including the global sensations Feuchtgebiete, by Charlotte Roche (translated as Wetlands), and Tschick, by Wolfgang Hernndorf (translated as Why We Took the Car), as well as four novels by German Book Award-nominated author Alina Bronsky. His translation of Dorothea Dieckmann’s Guantanamo won the Three Percent Award for best translation of 2007. “The Hottest Dishes of the Tartary Cuisine,” by Alina Bronsky, was named one of PW’s Ten Best Novels of 2011 and a Los Angeles Public Library Book of the Year. His translations have been covered in the New Yorker, Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, Los Angeles Times, Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, Financial Times, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus, among other places. He has co-authored three critically-acclaimed and best-selling celebrity memoirs: It’s So Easy, by Duff McKagan of Guns n’ Roses; The Last Holiday, by Gil Scott-Heron; and Face the Music, by Paul Stanley of KISS, which reached number two on the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller List in 2014. He is currently collaborating on the memoir of Joe Walsh of the Eagles. Mohr’s writing has been published in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Inked, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, eXile, Playboy, and Details, among other publications.