KOMBAT ROCK

KOMBAT ROCK 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 Berlin's current status as Europe's capital of cool and the most buzzed about city in the world.

In the tradition of Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Change Your Life, and Positively 4th Street, KOMBAT ROCK represents a story of survival with appeal far beyond the punk rock community or the community of Cold War buffs. Based on extensive interviews with members of the East German punk scene and a decade's worth of Stasi files, the book will include records from the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur and the Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, as well as contemporary news reports from East and West media, and additional primary and secondary sources. Tim Mohr earned his living for almost a decade as a club DJ in Berlin, before joining Playboy magazine, where he edited such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Matt Taibbi, Harvey Pekar, John Dean, George McGovern, and Ana Marie Cox. He is also an award-winning translator of German novels, and has co-authored and edited two major celebrity memoirs. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Daily Beast, New York magazine, the Huffington Post, the eXile, Details, Time Out (UK), Playboy, and other publications. He has extensive experience as an interviewer, having interviewed everyone from Tommy Lee to Cornell West, as well as members of congress and cover models. Kombat Rock represents a confluence of Mohr's deepest obsessions: music, politics, and Berlin. He is the co-author of IT'S SO EASY (and other lies), the autobiography of founding Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver bassist Duff McKagan, published simultaneously by Touchstone in the US and Orion in the UK on October 4, 2011. In January, 2012, Grove/Atlantic and Canongate will simultaneously publish THE LAST HOLIDAY, Gil Scott-Heron's memoir, edited (with in-book credit) by Mohr. His final project with Hunter S. Thompson anchors the book ANCIENT GONZO WISDOM, published by Da Capo in 2009. He is the translator of five German books: GUANTANAMO, by Dorothea Dieckmann, published by Soft Skull, which won the Three Percent award for best translation of 2007; the international bestseller WETLANDS, by Charlotte Roche, published by Grove/Atlantic in 2009; BROKEN GLASS PARK, by Alina Bronsky, published by Europa Editions in 2010; THE HOTTEST DISHES OF THE TARTAR CUISINE, also by Bronsky and published by Europa in 2011; and HERE IS BERLIN, by JM Stim, to be published in February 2012 by Datum Verlag. His work on WETLANDS saw him profiled in German Vanity Fair and Bild, the largest circulation newspaper in Germany. In the US, he was profiled in Heeb and Glamour. The book received a full-page review in the New York Times Book Review, and extensive coverage in Slate, Salon, Nerve.com, and literally hundreds of blogs. The paperback was selected by Urban Outfitters for its book table. Writing about GUANTANAMO in the Guardian, Michel Faber said Mohr had "excelled himself, rendering the prose pitch-perfect, poetically sprung, psychologically nuanced yet natural." The Times Literary Supplement wrote that he had "created a liquid and seemingly effortless English text, one that will help to secure a place for this novel alongside the best of international war literature." The book was also lauded in a New Yorker review. BROKEN GLASS PARK received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was praised in Vogue, Ms., and the Financial Times, among other publications. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine was favorably reviewed in PW, Kirkus (starred review), the New Yorker, T the New York Times Style Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and elsewhere.