Changing Skins. Rock Music in the GDR and the Eastern Bloc

by Norman Aechtler

The well-known riff of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” opens Andreas Dresen’s movie Changing Skins (Raus aus der Haut, 1997). The film opens in a crowded music club where young people are dancing ecstatically, turned on by pulsing rock and roll. This could be a trite depiction of youth culture if it were not located in a country that suppressed this kind of music: the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It is therefore worth reflecting on the social and political controversy in the former East Germany that, finally in the 1970s, permitted the performance of rock music and even imports from the capitalist part of the world. By the late 1970s, different kinds of rock music were not only an integral part of Western youth culture but also commonly heard but not always accepted in the GDR and the Eastern Bloc.

In terms of youth culture and rock music in the East, Kaspar Maase summarizes the 1960s as a “hot phase of conflict-ridden enforcement” (15). In 1965, the SED’s Eleventh Party Plenum banned the “escalation of the beat rhythms” along with nearly an entire year’s film production. Erich Honecker, later party leader and head of state, pointed out that rock music and the “decadent” lifestyle of the beatniks was not in accordance with the goals of the socialist worldview. Adolescents would be hopped up by the music and driven to an excessive way of life. The possibility for bands to perform in public was drastically constrained; young beatniks were forced to cut their hair. The situation escalated when in October 1965 the so-called “beat riot” took place in Leipzig against the stage ban of amateur music groups. The participants were beaten by police and arrested.

In the same year on the other hand, the first Beatles-LP was released in the GDR by the state-owned label Amiga. Though the GDR authorities had tried to establish a counter program against the cultural “imperialism” of Western Europe and the U.S.A., the party could not suppress the possibility of listening to Feindsender (adversary stations) and watching West German TV. Beat and rock music spread all over the GDR and imported records circulated on the black market. The government finally had to accept the fact that rock and roll had become an integral part of youth culture even in the socialist bloc.

At the Eighth SED Congress in 1971, Honecker announced an about-face. The needs of young people – as they were an important part of socialist society – should no longer be ignored. Therefore, music from the West was allowed to be broadcast on radio stations (most popular was the youth station “DT64”), special editions of famous musicians like Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on were released, and local bands were allowed again to perform in newly founded music clubs and discotheques.

In 1973, with the establishment of the Committee for Entertainment Music as part of the Culture Ministry and the arrangement of the International Youth Festival in East Berlin, beat music was officially rehabilitated. Basically since around 1970, “popular culture in fact was the core of a common culture” (Maase 15). As a matter of fact, with the accommodation of rock and roll to official culture the government now was better able to control songwriters and musicians. With the groups dependent on the benefits of the Ministry, which arranged concerts and supplied the required equipment as well as providing recording contracts, the officials could force the artists to conform to the party line.

In the 1970s the Puhdies, a band still well known in Germany, “emerged as the quintessential state-sponsored ensemble” (Ryback 135). The musicians totally fit into the official agenda, their texts were ideologically proper and their outfits as well as their rhythms were moderate compared to the much wilder behavior of their most important competition, the Klaus Renft Combo. This band plays another important role in Dresen’s movie. The second song performed by the band in the film is written by Renft and is called Als ich wie ein Vogel war (“When I Was Like a Bird”). In fact, Changing Skins (Raus aus der Haut) gets its title from a passage of that song.

The story of Changing Skins takes place in 1977, two years after the real-life Klaus Renft Combo was disbanded by the Council of Culture, its songs forbidden, and the members forced to emigrate to the Federal Republic. The musicians had refused to work within ideological guidelines and presented very critical texts in their hard-driven music. The reaction of the fictional band in the film, when the vocalist Randy starts to sing the Renft song, is understandable: under protest his comrades leave the stage while Randy is captured by the State Security police and imprisoned for six months.

After the banning of Renft in 1975 and the expatriation of the famous oppositional singer and songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976, GDR culture experienced an exodus of intellectuals to West Germany. The regime had shown its teeth: “Whoever is not with us is against us.” After a period of thaw, of an apparent cultural tolerance, the rules became stricter again. Musicians had to be careful of what they said, sang and performed.

Nonetheless the government lost the struggle over youth culture. Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” appears in Changing Skins as an example of how deeply the young people in the GDR were influenced by rock music imported from the West. Even on the eastern side of the Wall, as the East German author Lutz Dettmann points out, there were four worldviews: “socialism, capitalism, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.”

Strict policies towards rock musicians as the voice of youth -- and towards artists in general – could be experienced not only in the GDR. The emergence of a youth culture oriented more toward music and fashion from the West than to the officially propagated socialist lifestyle was a phenomenon all over the Eastern Bloc. Thus, sooner or later, all the communist regimes had to react to the rapid changes within the younger generation. In most of the Warsaw Pact countries the governments established a vigorous system of rules and control mechanisms, which attempted to suppress any spontaneous development of public music culture.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 a period of cultural thaw began in the communist part of the world. The Sixth World Youth Festival in Moscow 1957 was a milestone of Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization in which jazz and rock and roll were officially accepted as tolerated musical styles. But already by the end of the decade the officials’ mood towards rock music drastically changed after it became obvious that NATO strategists, aware of the subversive potential of the new rhythms, started to discuss “the military potential of rock and roll” (Ryback 26).

Since the beginning of the 1960s, with the exception of Hungary and Poland, which maintained the liberal policy of more or less musical freedom, rock bands repeatedly had to defend themselves against governmental control. Cultural functionaries, for example, created alternative dances less provocative than the twist such as the GDR’s “Lipsi.” After the breakout of Beatlemania in the early 1960s the Soviets established so-called Vocal Instrument Ensembles (VIAs), registered state-sponsored and state-controlled bands who appeared as tamed substitutes for the Fab Four and other beat imports from the West. This method became a common but unavailing strategy to manipulate the youth. It stands to reason that most Eastern European adolescents refused to accept these imposed puppet bands.

The consequence was a movement of youth culture into the underground since the late 1960s. A whole black market business emerged around the pressing and trading of pirate copies of Beatles or Rolling Stones albums, and the distribution of merchandise and even instruments. Hundreds of rock bands were secretly formed who played illegal concerts in unofficial rock clubs in the big cities. Several locales with greater cultural freedom became melting pots of an independent rock scene, such as the Baltic Republics in the Soviet Union, which turned out to be “ a Mecca of Soviet hippies” throughout the 1970s, or discotheques in the tourist resorts along the Bulgarian coastline (Ryback 112).

The most famous underground movement was situated in Czechoslovakia around the band The Plastic People of the Universe. Deeply influenced by Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground and the famous visit of the notorious American beat poet Allen Ginsberg to Prague in 1965, The Plastic People thrived under the artistic and theoretical guidance of their manager, art historian Ivan Jirous. They became “perhaps the greatest obscure rock band of all time” (Yanosik). After the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, the newly installed conservative regime initiated a “normalization” program, which broke up all liberal tendencies under the former government of Alexander Dubček. Although The Plastic People were by no means political, their general nonconformity with party restrictions and the scoring of texts written by dissident poet Egon Bondy soon led to the revocation of their professional license in 1970.

The actual effect of this ban was the establishment of an unofficial “Second Culture” in contrast to the state-ordained “First Culture,” which included not only musicians but also all kinds of dissident artists and intellectuals -- including the future president of the first post-communist government, Vaclav Havel, as well as many Christian activists (Yanosik, Unterberger). Several happenings were organized in the countryside, far away from ministerial attention, with hundreds of fans flocking to the festivals from throughout the country. The last such event took place in February 1976 and caused a wave of imprisonments including the members of The Plastic People. But this strike against the “Second Culture” in Czechoslovakia “initiated a process of solidarity among the dissidents never before experienced” (Faktor). After massive protests and the support of international political and cultural leaders, the Czech government had to reduce the punishments against the band members. The spontaneous protest movement of intellectuals was formalized in the foundation of the so-called “Charta 77,” the human rights organization, which played a crucial role in the peaceful revolution of 1989 to overcome the communist system in Czechoslovakia.

The close relationship of music and dissident politics in the former Czechoslovakia is just an explicit example of the important role rock music played in the confrontation of independent (youth) culture and official communist doctrine. The immense longing for Western imports among the younger generation of the East European countries reflects a phenomenon which at first has nothing to do with politics: An integral part of adolescence is to challenge the norms and values of the older generation and the attempt to distance oneself from them. In a political environment where youth were not even recognized as an important social group, objects of identification had to be found elsewhere. Rock music from the West delivered a means to rebel against the establishment – a rebellion that eventually transcended to a political level in the Eastern Bloc. As Mikhail Safonov claims: “It was [John] Lennon who murdered the Soviet Union” (LaFontana).

Works cited:

Dettmann, Lutz. Die Beatles in der DDR. <www.herbig.net/autorenforum/beitraege/dettmann_beatles.htm>

Faktor, Jan. "Knockin’ im Untergrund." Jungle World, July 16, 2003. <www.jungle-world.com/seiten/2003/29/1319.php>

LaFontana, Dave. You say you want a Velvet Revolution? John Lennon and the Fall of the Soviet Union. <www.beatles.ncf.ca/dave_lafontana.html>

Maase, Kaspar. Körper, Konsum Genuss – Jugendkultur und mentaler Wandel. Bpb 45 (2003).

Ryback, Timothy. Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Unterberger, Richie. The Plastic People of the Universe <www.richieunterberger.com/ppu.html>

Yanosik, Joseph. The Plastic People of the Universe <www.furious.com/perfect/pulnoc.html>