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

Original and inspiring . . . Mr. Mohr has writ­ten an im­por­tant work of Cold War cul­tural his­tory. --The Wall Street Journal

Wildly entertaining . . . A thrilling tale . . . A joy in the way it brings back punks fury and high stakes.--Vogue

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 everyones future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy--quite literally, as it turned out.

But as these young kids tried to form bands and became more visible, 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 fired from jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of conforming, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall.