Henryk Gericke (oben) & Conny Lösch (unten)
How much does a regime allow? What channels of individual growth remain, or how might one create those channels for her/himself? And how does a scene develop? The GDR was a dictatorship, a state that sought to shape its citizens according to a socialist ideal of unity. In spite of that, there was a very active underground music scene. Henryk Gericke, the singer of the punk band The Leistungsleichen and the editor of several illegal publications, belonged to this scene.
Together with moderator Conny Lösch, Gericke discusses the conditions in the underground scene at the time. Lösch, a native Berliner, was an editor of the feuilleton at the leftist newspaper Junge Welt before starting to work as a translator in parallel. She has translated authors like Don Winslow, Gail Jones, and Ian Rankin as well as numerous standard works about punk by Jon Savage, Viv Albertine, and Simon Reynolds into German.
This event will take place in German.
About »Too Much Future«
It doesn’t downplay the role of punk in the West to say that in the East, in the GDR, it was a different, absolutely crucial affair. In East Berlin and elsewhere, politics came before pop; young people reacted to scarcity rather than to consumerist hell, and offered resistance against an invasive, dogmatic system. However, involuntarily hopes, demands, and needs made people within the forced collective into outsiders. Today an author, DJ, and curator, Henryk Gericke was a singer in the East Berlin punk band The Leistungsleichen in the early 80s and later put out many publications in the political and artistic underground. In connection with numerous exhibitions and publications he’s co-organised, Gericke now looks for three consecutive festival days at subculture on the other side of the Wall(s), and at the punk movement in particular. This programme focus combines talks, musical talk-performances as »preludes«, a film screening, and a DJ set.