Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE

'Mohr digs into the subject of East German punk like nobody before' Rolling Stone Germany

Tim Mohr brings us the secret history of punks in East Germany. Burning Down the Haus is a reclamation and an exaltation of youth culture and youthful idealism as not only an instigator for discourse, but as an actual catalyst for political upheaval - and radical, fierce, irrepressible change.

The first punk in East Germany named herself Major. She was sixteen when she was put on a surveillance watch list by the Stasi. Punks like Major were interrogated and arrested and beaten and forced into hard labor. They were unable to get jobs, let alone hold jobs, and were ultimately plunged into a cycle of arrest and anarchy. But they created enclaves for themselves outside of society, self-sustaining communities that continued to project their disrespect for a world of bleak conformity. The punk scene in east Germany was not a music sub-culture as we know it in the west, but a dangerous political statement that required bravery and sacrifice.

'Burning Down the Haus is not just an immersion into the punk rock scene of East Berlin, it's the story of the cultural and political battles that have shaped the world we live in today' DW Gibson, author of The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century