Berlin calling A story of anarchy, music, the wall, and the birth of the new Berlin

PAUL HOCKENOS HAS WRITTEN a detailed, doggedly researched, personally involved history of Berlin's political and musical underground over the last 50 years. "Berlin Calling" should be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the German capital's still-hip music and street politics, and to get a flavor of that turbulent city's dark history and stubborn spirit. At the same time, Hockenos leaves out so much, and deluges the innocent reader with such a plethora of undescribed bands and techno D.J.s and communes and protest movements that the book turns into something of an obsessive blur. This is a kind of Baedeker or Lonely Planet guide to underground Berlin, though as Hockenos himself writes, "once it's in the travel books, it's dead." He's a serviceable writer but not an eloquent or evocative one. Yet his story remains fascinating, and he seems to have pulled together primary and secondary sources, alongside his own interviews and firsthand knowledge of the city, to tell it. He begins with a portrait of West Berlin before the Wall came down in 1989. Isolated within grim East Germany, the city became a subsidized showcase for capitalism and democracy inside the Soviet bloc, full of young West Germans fleeing what they saw as their country's hypocritical commercialism and, for the men, the draft(since residence in Berlin exempted them from military service). The result was a large community of underground music, politics, drugs and lifestyle experiments that lured foreigners along with West Germans, including the likes of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who were drawn to a dream vision of Weimar Republic libertinism. But Bowie and Iggy also managed to make some wonderful albums while living in West Berlin. Curiously content within their bubble, the Western hipsters tended to ignore East Berlin, Hockenos writes, but in fact there was a lively if necessarily secretive scene there, too. The fall of the Wall was greeted with euphoria among young people both East and West, even if the Westerners felt their underground idyll was being threatened by exposure to the wider world and the Easterners felt patronized. Helmut Kohl's successful push for rapid German reunification looked to overwhelm Berlin's underground. Yet protest, musical and political, persisted. It was forced to the city's margins but is still alive, as of now. Hockenos tells a lot of this story well - particularly his summary of the political developments. Here he seems to have relied more on his research than firsthand experience, but he makes good use of his sources. His personal involvement with communes and squats and concerts and musicians and scene-makers is often vividly portrayed, even if he fails to really evoke the music and the personalities with writerly flair. At one point he describes the young members of an East Berlin movement called Church From Below as having "fused counterculture and politics so tightly that it was impossible to pry them apart." That's justification for his narrow focus, but it ignores so much of what made and still makes Berlin exciting. Yes, depressing East Berlin had a secretive rock scene unknown to most West Berliners. But it also had brilliant writers and thrilling opera and theater (Hockenos mentions in passing the Swiss stage director Benno Besson, long active in the East, but ignores so much more). High culture was vital in West Berlin, too, and interacted more fluidly with the underground than Hockenos allows. In the 2000s, was the West Berlin leftreally so cold and dogmatic as portrayed here? Were the East Berlin post-Wall squatters so nobly creative? And while it might have diffused his story, was all of Berlin's "high art" (museums, opera, classical concerts, theater, dance) so utterly irrelevant to young Berliners from the '70s to now? (He's a little better on film.) Even within his chosen scene, Hockenos seems to slight much, as when he refers to "the ethnic politics of Berlin's violent underground" without pursuing the matter. In describing a mass demonstration on the eve of the Wall's fall, he concedes that his underground participants amounted to "an inconspicuous fleck" in the multitude of 500,000 people who had gathered in the Alexanderplatz. He also says that the left's idealism about a new kind of democratic socialism was "steamrolled by the nationalist juggernaut." Do we need a whole book about a steamrolled fleck? Maybe. Later on, with a life partner and a son, living in formerly radical, now gentrified Prenzlauer Berg just east of the old Wall, surrounded by his friends in the "creative class" that has contributed much to Berlin's shaky economy, he strikes a more optimistic tone. Always suspicious of the troublemaking anarchists, he concludes that his underground musicians and life-style experimenters didn't sell out; they "challenged the status quo - and changed it, inspiring others along the way." Even if diluted, the underground exerted a beneficent influence, Hockenos believes. "The subculture's loss is the mainstream's gain. It becomes broader, richer, more hybrid." With its evocations of that hybrid scene, "Berlin Calling" can serve as a Baedeker for those eager to visit Berlin and to experience its still lively spirit for themselves. Musical and political protest have been forced to the margins of Berlin, but it remains alive. JOHN ROCKWELL, The Times's rock critic in the 1970s, wrote his doctoral dissertation on left-wing opera reform in Berlin in the 1920s and has lived in or regularly visited the city for the last 71 years.

*Starred Review* Though certainly unplanned, the timeliness of Hockenos' intelligent analysis of the effect of a wall on a people and their culture is uncanny. Here, Berlin-based Hockenos (Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic, 2008) uses music as the lens through which to understand the subcultures, countercultures, evolutions, and devolutions that echoed through a West Berlin isolated by a wall whose first iteration was barbed wire and guards and whose final iteration was the world's biggest art gallery. Hockenos bore witness to punk rock's egalitarian dissonance, political and anarchistic in its assertion that everyone could make punk. This book is a study in complexity. Hockenos debunks the idea, for example, that counterculture was absent from East Berlin. West Berlin's unique circumstance also created a haven for queer culture. Over several years, David Bowie had a romance with Romy Haag, a beloved transsexual (in the language of the time) who finished her act with a gender-bending deconstruction of costume. The tearing down of the wall on November 9, 1989, led to more complex consequences; squatters occupied East Berlin, and neo-Nazis dug in. Now, Hockenos sees a current Berlin that thrives while remembering its bohemian roots.--Dziuban, Emily Copyright 2017 Booklist

In 1985, Hockenos (Free To Hate), philosopher in training, stepped off a train in West Berlin with only his savings and works by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his duffel. He quickly became a habitué of the rich subculture found, rubbing shoulders with the squatters and rockers, graffiti and performance artists, and other nonconformists drawn to Berlin. When the Wall fell in 1989, the subsidies that had bought the time and space to experiment with new social and artistic arrangements ended. Hockenos's insightful book captures the history of that subculture and the adjustments made after the government collapse, detailing them with sympathy and an analytic eye. A flood of oversized personalities cross the scene, including musician David Bowie and his transgender muse Romy Haag, industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, charismatic anarchist Silvio Meier, and Warhol-inspired artist Thierry Noir. VERDICT This wide-ranging book will appeal to everyone from music devotees to history scholars. In addition to looking at history from a different perspective, Hockenos illustrates this work with photos and posters that stimulate the mind and delight the eye.-David Keymer, Modesto, CA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An introduction to the countercultures of Berlin.In the years before the Berlin Wall came down, West Berlin, writes American journalist Hockenos (Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany, 2007, etc.), was "a sanctuary for contrarians looking to lose themselves, to search and reinvent." East Berlin, too, "sheltered a bohme every bit as raw and inventive as [West Berlin's], perhaps even more so." Dissent took many forms, "from sporting punk coiffeurs to communal living," each one subject to reprisal. In his new book, the author offers a love letter of sorts to both halves of the city. He describes the "broad society of new wavers and punks, queers of all types," and the artists, musicians, and squatters who created the countercultural life, whether above- or belowground, of both Berlins. Hockenos, who has spent most of his adult life in Berlin, divides the book geographically: he begins with the West, moves on to the East, and, at the end, includes a slim section on the "new" Berlin, the city of reunification. Despite those divisions, the narrative is largely unstructured and rambling. The author moves loosely from one topic to another, never digging deeply enough. He introduces us to many colorful charactersincluding fashion designer Danielle de Picciotto, French street artist Thierry Noir, and actress and musician Christiane F.but doesn't stick with any one of them for long. Hockenos also relies on clich, a habit that doesn't suit much of his subject mattere.g., artistic innovation. A random sampling: "sowed the seeds," "a thorn in the side," "started a ball rolling," "showed him the door," "when push came to shove"not to mention the too-frequent use of the phrase "do-it-yourself." The author's loyalty and love for Berlin are evident and may well be contagious, but he is short on analysis and insight. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.