Burning Down the Haus, Tim Mohr
Burning Down the Haus, Tim Mohr
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Burning Down the Haus
Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Author: Tim Mohr

Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies

Unabridged: 11 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/11/2018

Synopsis

It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: In their gray surroundings, where everyone's future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy—quite literally, as it turned out.

But as the East German punks became more numerous, more visible, and more rebellious, security forces—including the dreaded secret police, the Stasi—targeted them. They were spied on by friends and even members of their own families; they were expelled from schools and jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of backing down, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

The story of East German punk rock is about much more than music; it is a spellbinding cultural and political history that also serves as a rallying cry against authoritarianism everywhere.

About Tim Mohr

Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of authors including Alina Bronsky, Wolfgang Herrndorf, and Charlotte Roche. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Gil Scott-Heron, Duff McKagan of Guns n' Roses, and Paul Stanley of KISS. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and Inked, among other publications, and he spent several years as a staff editor at Playboy magazine, where he edited Hunter S. Thompson, Matt Taibbi, and Harvey Pekar, among others. Prior to starting his writing career he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Valerity (Val) on August 12, 2018

(3.5 out of 5 stars) This was a unique kind of book about the part that punk rock played in firing people up as to bringing down the wall in Berlin. Author Tim Mohr used his many sources of current and former punk rockers to share how the movement got going, how it differed from other countries, and......more

Goodreads review by Mel on September 03, 2019

If, like me, you are hungry for a time you’ll never know, books like this will suck you in so easily, transporting you to scenes you couldn’t have imagined. I admire the kids who, almost 40 years after the separation of Germany, and 20 years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, realize that the gov......more

Goodreads review by Ashley on November 17, 2018

Say it, speak it, shout it out loud. The punk ethos has always been about DIY from the ground up. True, it is also about rebellion- and in a politically oppressive environment that stifles freedom of expression, that rebellion rages like fire. Burning Down the Haus explores the punk movement in East B......more

Goodreads review by Bill on September 30, 2018

I'm practically a target market for this book. 20-odd pages in, I'm afraid the author is checking off quite a list of my pet peeves. On p.10, on the "first punk in East Berlin", What the fuck is this, she wondered, fascinated by their ripped clothes and sneering faces. This was 1977 in East Berlin. Tee......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on April 19, 2019

Im not quite sure how to review this book. It is equal parts interesting, boring, political, and Idealistic. You start to get bored with the ad nauseum stories of disenfranchised youths who discovered the sex pistol and starting cutting their hair, but at the same time the political history of the e......more

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