In BURNING DOWN THE HAUS: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, renowned music journalist and award-winning German-language translator Tim Mohr brilliantly captures this historic moment. Telling the little-known story of a group of East German kids who rebelled and helped set the world on fire, Mohr takes readers on a fascinating trip through the 1980s. Rejecting the dismal, pre-ordained futures that the state tried to impose on them, these teenagers embraced punk—the aesthetic, the music, the liberating feeling of collective anarchy—and defied the dictatorship. Banding together, they faced down surveillance, repression, beatings, and even imprisonment as they fought to create and control their own, individual futures.
Beginning in earnest in the late 1970s, a handful of young people who had lived in the oppressive shadow of the Berlin Wall their entire lives caught snatches of punk music on forbidden British military radio broadcasts, and they began to question authority, daring to dress differently and criticize the government. Living in squats, hassled in the streets, and relentlessly pursued by the Stasi—the legendary East German secret police—these kids would not be deterred in their pursuit of punk. “All the antagonism drew the little gang of punks closer together,” Mohr writes. “Like the British band Sham 69 sang: If the kids are united, they will never be divided.” The movement grew in size and ferocity throughout the 1980s. “They raged against the system, out loud, publicly,” writes Mohr, until the Wall finally came down in 1989. Although the future remained in limbo at that point, one thing was certain—the punks had played an indispensable role in bringing down a postwar empire.
Mohr, who arrived in Berlin in 1992 and discovered a netherworld of dark and dirty clubs in derelict buildings, learned the secret history of punk rock under the dictatorship from those who had lived it, and he fell in love with the world they had created.
Writing with the keen eye for observation and the narrative grace of a novelist, he resurrects this all-but-forgotten story with insight and cinematic urgency. Timely and resonant, Mohr’s incredibly accomplished first book, BURNING DOWN THE HAUS, is a testament to the essential power of youthful protest in the face of authority.

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