The emperor has no clothes! The buildings are half-naked! Renft might have started off with borrowed western rock songs, but there were so many lies that singing the truth guaranteed them both hero and criminal status. By the mid-seventies the band embodied a lethal combination of rock, anti-establishment message and mass adoration. They were shaggy men with bellbottoms and attitude, they were hot, they were rich by GDR standards, and they were way too explosive for the regime.
Performers needed a licence to work. In September 1975 Renft were called to play for the Ministry of Culture in Leipzig to have theirs renewed. Klaus gets up again to reach for a folder under the mezzanine. ‘I can look up the details of my life now in the files,’ he smiles, ‘which is just as well.’ He once referred to the state of his brain as ‘dog food’. I like him for his self-knowledge, and smile back. Shortly before the licence-renewal hearing he was offered a passport, hard currency and a smooth ride through life—here or in the west—if he would separate from two of the most politically outspoken band members, Pannach and Kunert. He refused. ‘I knew then, that was a death sentence for us,’ he says.
‘It must have taken guts to turn that down.’
He shrugs. ‘It was much worse under Hitler,’ he says. ‘We would have been whisked off to a concentration camp.’
The smoke is sweet and time is losing its grip on the evening. There is a guilelessness about Klaus, for a rock star; none of his answers come pat. ‘It’s hard to describe,’ he says, ‘on the one hand I suppose it shows character or something. But on the other, if you’re honest you know you were shitting yourself…’ He starts laughing. Then he stops. ‘It looked like we’d all go to prison—that would have been the usual thing,’ he says soberly. ‘And people there were treated worse than animals. Of course we didn’t want that.’
Now that he has the documents from his file he can see the sequence of events from the other side. He flicks through the folder, then stops. ‘This is funny,’ he says. ‘This was from Honecker to Mielke.’ He reads: ‘Dear Erich, Please attend to the case of Jentzsch, Klaus, as speedily as possible. Regards, Erich.’ He laughs, ‘Get that? From one Erich to another.’ But it could have quickly stopped being funny. At one point Mielke asked his officers in Leipzig, ‘Why can’t you just grab them? Why aren’t they liquidated?’ But Renft members were too famous to handle so directly.
Klaus turns more pages and finds a formal complaint from the administration of the ‘Klubhaus Marx Engels’ where Renft had performed a fortnight before. It is to Comrade Ruth Oelschlägel, chairperson of the licensing committee they were about to face.
‘You’ll like this one,’ he says, and reads it out. Klaus is the only person I know who gets such distinct pleasure from the story-telling in their file. The clubhouse administration complained about the group’s drinking: ‘After the end of the concert, approx. forty bottles of wine were found…it is incomprehensible to us that a musical ensemble should require the consumption of such a quantity of alcohol to attain the right mood.’ It complained about ‘belching into the microphone, use of words such as “shit”’. I start to laugh, harder than this is probably worth, but who cares? Klaus is swinging a leg over the side of the chair and laughing too. He continues, ‘We protest the use of inflammatory calls from the stage such as, “It’s the society that’s decadent, we are the opposite,” “Today, I feel free,” “There are people sitting in this room reporting on us,” or “You are the audience that will experience the group Renft for the last time, because we are about to be banned.”’ Klaus’s laugh moves down to his chest and turns into a cough. He takes a long draught of beer, and then starts rolling a joint.
‘I had some western money,’ he says, ‘so before the licensing hearing I bought a small cassette recorder from an Intershop.’ When performing, Klaus holds his guitar idiosyncratically upright, more like a double bass player. He runs the strap over his left shoulder, down his back and between his legs, encircling his body. While they were setting up to play for the committee he turned the cassette recorder on and hid it between his guitar and his groin, held up by the strap.
But they didn’t get to play. Comrade Oelschlägel asked them to approach the desk. She said the committee would not be listening to ‘the musical version of what you have seen fit to put to us in writing’ because ‘the lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with our socialist reality…the working class is insulted and the state and defence organisations are defamed’.
Klaus leans in and picks up his tin of tobacco. ‘And then she said to us, “We are here to inform you today, that you don’t exist any more.”’
There was silence. One of the band members signalled to a roadie to stop setting up. Kuno asked, ‘Does that mean we’re banned?’
‘We didn’t say you were banned,’ Comrade Oelschlägel said. ‘We said you don’t exist.’
Klaus is flicking his Zippo trying to get the flame to lick his spliff. He sucks and looks over it at me and starts exhaling, laughing. ‘Then I said, “But…we’re…still…here.” She looked me straight in the face. “As a combo,” she said, “you no longer exist.”’
They were dismissed. Klaus managed to pass the tape to his girlfriend Angelika. ‘She didn’t know what it was,’ he says, ‘but she knew it was important.’ Angelika hid it in her scarf and took it back to their flat. When he got home after drinking all afternoon in the Ratskeller, Klaus wrote ‘Fats Domino’ in big letters on the cassette and put it up on the shelf.
Angelika had a Greek passport, which meant she could travel to the west. The next day Klaus asked her to go over to West Berlin for a day trip, ‘to get toothpaste or whatever’. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t be strip-searched at the border so she didn’t take the tape, but he wanted the authorities to see she’d been over and back. Then he let it be known in Leipzig that he had made a recording of the decree of the licensing committee, that it was now at the RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) radio station in West Berlin, and that if anything happened to them it would be broadcast immediately.
It is hard to say how much protection that gave them, if any. Renft records disappeared from the shops overnight. The band ceased to be written about or played on the radio. The recording company AMIGA reprinted its entire catalogue so it could leave them out. ‘In the end it was as they had said: we simply did not exist any more,’ he says, ‘just like in Orwell.’
Rumours were put about by the state that the band had split up, that it was in difficulties. It was: it couldn’t play. Some members wanted to stay in the GDR, others knew they’d have to leave. Pannach and Kunert were arrested and imprisoned until August 1977 when they were bought free by the west. The other two, ‘the more unpolitical ones’, Klaus says, stayed in the east with their manager. He shifts in his chair. ‘Have you heard of the group Karussell?’ he asks.
‘No.’
Klaus explains that the manager who stayed with the pliable members turned out to be a Stasi man. Under him, Renft regrouped as Karussell and went on to record Renft songs, ‘note for note’. ‘They copied us so exactly you can’t tell,’ Klaus says, ‘whether it’s Renft, or it’s Karussell.’ The Stasi were satisfying the needs of the people, but with a band it could control.
‘Weren’t you furious?’
He shrugs. Someone else might have found this a betrayal, reason to dwell on this part of their life. After all it marked, for Klaus, the beginning of a fifteen-year hiatus. But he has the gift of taking things easy. Cushioned by alcohol, his landings are soft. He seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat.
From the end of 1975, Klaus was left with nothing to do, no-one to do it with. After the usual chicanery from the authorities, he was let out with his girlfriend into West Berlin. It was hard to go from money and fame to nothing. Renft’s cachet did not translate over the Wall. He was bewildered. His fans were rebels, and they were not here. Klaus worked for years in the west as a sound-man in the theatre. After the Wall came down, he found out that ‘we’d become a cult band in the GDR—our records were more expensive than a Pink Floyd album’. Since then the band members have been getting back together, but the line-up has changed and Pannach, their wordsmith, died.
I’ve been reading about Pannach’s death lately. He died prematurely of an unusual kind of cancer, as did Jürgen Fuchs and Rudolf Bahro, both dissidents and writers. All of them had been in Stasi prisons at around the same time. When a radiation machine was found in one of these prisons, the Stasi File Authority began to investigate the possible use of radiation against dissidents. What it uncovered shocked a people used to bad news.
The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. It developed a range of radioactive tags including irradiated pins it could surreptitiously insert into a person’s clothing, radioactive magnets to place on cars, and radioactive pellets to shoot into tyres. It developed hand-pump sprays so Stasi operatives could approach people in a crowd and impregnate them with radiation or secretly spray their floor at home so they would leave radioactive footprints everywhere they went. Rudolf Bahro’s manuscript was irradiated so it could be traced to recipients, even in the west. To detect the marked person or object, the Stasi developed personal geiger counters that could be strapped to the body, and would silently vibrate if the officer got a reading. And in the prison and remand centres, the Stasi sometimes used radiation machines as well as cameras where the prisoners’ mug shots were taken. The File Authority report was cautious. It found no evidence that radiation was used to kill off marked men and women. But it did find that it was used with reckless disregard for people’s health. And it recommended that former prisoners of the Stasi get regular medical check-ups.
Although Pannach died, Kuno is well, and he is now fronting the reformed Klaus Renft Combo. They are on tour again through the old GDR, playing to sell-out crowds hungry for something that was theirs, that was untainted, and that was good. They play a mixture of old and new songs. Their latest album is called
As If Nothing Had Happened
. The cover is a picture of a full ashtray, emtpy beer cans and an open bottle of whisky. Part joke, part revenge, and part explanation for the lost years, the last item on the CD is the authentic 1975 recording of the Oelschlägel interchange, declaring them to no longer exist.
Our conversation is sliding back and forward. Klaus is still thinking about my question of whether it took courage to turn down the initial offers to leave, or to play along with the Stasi. ‘I don’t know whether it was courage,’ he says. ‘More like some kind of naivety, that protected me, I think.’ I think he’s right here, but it is a naivety that is carefully nurtured and maintained, an innocence that he did not let them damage. ‘I mean, we didn’t all get huge villas on the Mugglesee like the Puhdys, but I can look at myself in the mirror in the morning and say, “Klaus, you did all right.” Material things are not what matter to me.’
He leans back. The smoke leaving his mouth obscures it in a haze of grey, and grey beard. ‘I think the Stasi people have been punished enough.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, if they’ve got any conscience at all…’
‘And if not?’ I think of Herr Winz and Herr Christian and Herr Koch and the different kinds of conscience there are.
‘I’m not that interested,’ he says. ‘I didn’t let them get to me.’
This, I think, is his victory. This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. If there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory.
He looks at me. Over the evening he seems to have become more insightful and nimble-minded while I am inert as a sponge. ‘Do you want to hear something beautiful?’ he asks. I nod. He puts on a video of the band performing a song Pannach wrote shortly before he died. Kuno looks now like a butcher or a bikie, but his voice is mellow and grand, fine as it ever was.
I sing my blues for a man
Who could tell you
How red the dreams were in the ruins
Where the concrete towers are now
And do you want to know what’s left
Of that man’s dreams? Then ask the walls
Of Cell 307 in Hohenschönhausen
I sing the blues in red
For one who can’t hear me
As a child in the dark
Sings a song to himself…
For this moment the song soars and nothing else exists; I have no body, and time stops passing. Klaus stretches in his chair. When it finishes he says, ‘You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can.’ He’s right, of course. And to drink. By my reckoning, I am pacing him at about 1:3 but I am not so sure of my counting. He picks up a guitar and starts to stroke it absent-mindedly, lovingly across its curved wooden body. I see through the bottom of my glass—the table, the ashtray and the cans of beer. They look weirdly small and far away. I take my face out of the glass in a hurry and realise it’s the CD cover I’m looking at. But the table is covered in ashtrays and beer cans—the same scene in two different sizes. It’s time to go.
I don’t feel the cold, I don’t feel much. Rolling stone. Stone rolling home. The cobbles are wet, and the streetlamps make puddles of yellow light on the ground. I think of my friend in his room, singing himself happy.
The phone calls keep coming.
‘Bock.’ A quiet voice, an old man’s heavy breath on the receiver. ‘In response to your notice.’
‘Ah. Yes. Herr Bock. Thank you for calling me.’ Before I can explain what I’m doing he says, ‘I can tell you all there is to know about the Ministry of State Security. Everything you need, young woman, I can give you, because I was a professor at the training academy of the ministry. In fact, I taught
Spezialdisziplin
.’