But a precious few were real posters from West Berlin, still shiny and glossy. During concerts, West Berliners would fold the posters into paper airplanes and sail them over the Wall. It was rare for one of them to make it over all the fortifications—rarer still for someone to nab it up before the Stasi got to it. But if you got ahold of one of these, you need only smooth it out and tack it up and you had instant ‘street cred’ with the rest of the punks.
Lena only had two: the first was of the ever-strange David Bowie, aka Ziggy Stardust, clad in crazy alien makeup. The other featured the band Genesis who Lena had even heard on the radio. If you could believe it, the drummer, Phil Collins, was the actual lead singer of the band!
She also had a large collection of zines; handmade underground rags that could contain nearly anything. One, Menschliche Verschwendung, was a zine that covered the goings on of the local underground punk scenes interspersed with artful photography. If it was a good month the paper would all be mostly the same and contain many articles. More often than not, though, the stock would change dramatically page-to-page and contain only a few hand-burnt photographs. There were a few gay rags that chronicled the oppression homosexuals received from the Eastern bloc, along with their triumphs in spite of it all. Another zine, Shönheit, was a militant women’s rag that had crept its way in from the West to find a new home. The images of women clad in denim and bandanas and flexing their biceps spoke to Lena. The articles spoke of freedom, empowerment, and all sorts of other things that the Politburo would absolutely hate—yet another reason to furiously devour the contents. These were also filled with triumphant stories of homosexuality behind the Iron Curtain. While this wasn’t a struggle Lena personally resonated with, the images elicited a sort of familial kinship. They were soldiers, same as her—all fighting in a silent war together. These sat in a pile next to a few photocopied photocopies of a worse photocopy of two Punk Magazine issues—a rag straight from America!
Obviously, Menschliche was her favorite, having written and submitted a few articles herself under her pseudonym Madeline Dangerbunny (where she pretended to be British!). But her second-favorite zine of all time was Die Straße Schlägt: the GDR’s premiere (and very underground) hip-hop zine. Contained within were pictures of home-made fashions, pictures of boom boxes and how much they cost in the West, along with the lyrics to songs that had been recently produced. While the hip-hop scene was completely different than the punk scene, they found common ground in a lot of ways. Both were youth culture, both were utterly hated by the Stasi and the Politburo, both were ‘DIY’ as a rule, and both were a strong, tight-knit community.
Of all the punk-rock paraphernalia that Lena had managed to procure, however, her most coveted item was her Never Mind the Bollocks album. Gifted to her by a dear friend who played in another band, this masterpiece was a veritable weapon of titanic proportions. It was openly despised by the Politburo and absolutely reviled by the entire Soviet Union to the East. Lena wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if an entire war broke out over the lyrics. This was mostly thanks to the first song which spoke in open and sarcastic disgust of both the Wall and what it meant to the youth in both the East and the West.
It was this album that had first turned Lena on to her calling. Seeing it every night and holding it in her hands somehow made the scene all the more real, as if it was psychically connecting her with all the punks around the world. This album meant something—something more.
When she listened to it (practically every night), she was transported out of the large concrete apartment building in which she lived into the streets right outside the infamous ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ (as the Americans so christened it). Yet it wasn’t the streets of East Berlin as she knew it, no. While they were the same streets physically, they were altogether different. In her imagination they were filled with people, and the people were all her kind—a sea of spiky-haired and leather-clad ne’er-do-wells carrying torches, hollering, and tossing their empty bottles in the street. The police would ignore it as they had better things to do than mess with an angry mob. The Stasi would, of course, take violent exception. But fueled by the raging and wholly irreverent chorus of “God Save the Queen”, “Anarchy in the UK” and “Holiday in the Sun”, the mob of greasy punks would easily overwhelm them, sending the lackwits and their jackboot knickers high-tailing back into their complex to hide for their lives.
Oh… and the Politburo. Lena imagined a small group of short squat men, drastically overweight for their diminutive size with bespectacled faces and wormy facial expressions drooping with disapproval. She imagined them looking on the crowd with profound disgust, pants pulled high over their fat bellies, as they dodged bottles being thrown their way. She imagined them raising strong objections like, “Now see here!” and “This is out of sorts!” and “Can’t you see you’re disturbing us?!” She imagined all of this and she loved it.
Lena desperately wanted to fall asleep in her room surrounded by her prized possessions and dreaming of Hans. She was exhausted and had more than earned a good night’s sleep. But first she had to attend to something more important than her precious rest.
Walking over to her window, she opened it up and peered outside. She was one of the lucky few in her building to have her own fire escape—a rickety metal affair that ran all the way up to the roof and down to the streets below. She stayed here for some time, just looking. It was very important that she was not seen by anyone on the street, as that could jeopardize the entire thing. She stayed here for what seemed like five minutes. That had been the time she had been told to wait. If she didn’t see any movement in five minutes, then it meant the streets were empty. And if the streets were empty, the Police would probably be too bored to lurk about in search of teenagers out after bedtime.
Five minutes passed along with an extra minute or two for good measure. She couldn’t very well afford to blow the entire thing. Yet once she was satisfied of her security, she crawled out into the cold night air and started winding slowly and silently up the fire escape.
She loved this rusty iron contraption. Though it may have originally been intended to save some lives in the event of a tragic fire, years of both disuse and misuse had reduced it to the thing it was today—a jungle gym for those that ought not to be doing whatever it is that they were doing. And make no mistakes about it—she ought not to be doing what she was doing.
A few minutes climbing the steep staircase left her slightly winded. “These things are dangerous!” she thought, chuckling to herself. She had always had a wild, chaotic streak and often relished the thought of swinging off the thing like a monkey. Another day perhaps—certainly not in times like these. Finally, after much effort, she crested the apex of the building to be welcomed by the sounds of Van Halen blaring through a radio: “Girl… you really got me now… you got me so I can’t sleep at night…” There, just a few meters away from her, sat her very most precious secret.