52 Books in 52 Weeks – Book 31/Week 31 – Related to the Word ‘Fire’
Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr
I picked this book because I’d already wanted to read it and then I realized it had the word ‘Burning’ in the title, which is related to fire.
Star Rating: ★★★★☆
Why I Wanted to Read This Book
I’ve had a general interest in East Germany (the DDR) for a little bit. I think it came from watching The Lives of Others which is about a Stasi officer spying on a family. A little after that, I also got interested in music from Europe in the ‘80s and when I was looking into it, I also started looking into music from the DDR. From that I started to look into the underground music scene there, because there was only one ‘approved’ music label there and a lot of the music was sort of ‘eh’ so I was looking for something else.
It was really hard to find information on that because most of what I found wasn’t in English. I found a documentary all about underground bands at one point but it was entirely in German with no subtitles. So when I found out about this book which is in English, I was really interested in it.
What This Book is About
This book tracks the punk music scene and subculture throughout the life of the DDR. It also details their efforts and other groups’ efforts to effect change in the political actions of the DDR.
It does this primarily through following specific people in the scene. It’s not exactly like narrative nonfiction or a memoir, but it is similar to that in that it has ‘characters’ the way a narrative would.
What I Thought of it
In general, I liked this, but I also don’t have a lot to compare it to since there aren’t many sources in English talking about this topic.
I was mainly interested in this for trying to learn more about bands in the underground scene in the DDR. The beginning of this book isn’t really about that. And the majority of the rest of it isn’t that focused on it either. The beginning of the book is mainly about various people learning about punk subculture by listening to Western radio stations playing Western bands. Toward the end, it also starts to be mainly about political action groups protesting the government.
These were all interesting, it just wasn’t exactly what I was looking for going in.
It does still talk about a lot of different bands, both approved bands and illegal bands. The sections following those groups and the individual punks I found the most interesting.
The sections that focused on church groups or political action groups I didn’t find as interesting. I think this is mainly because there wasn’t really a ‘story’ to them, it was just a lot of action that I didn’t feel particularly connected to.
I’m also going to talk a bit about the form of the book, although I realize the author likely doesn’t have full control over that.
I liked the images included in this book. I read it as an ebook on Kindle which usually doesn’t handle images the best, but the images in this were all good. I could see them easily, they were a good size. I feel like they helped to enhance the book too because I could see what some of the people involved actually looked like and dressed like, which was very important in the subculture.
Something I do wish they had done though was include the music in some way. Like maybe creating a Spotify playlist or something. That’s just because finding music from a lot of these bands is pretty difficult. A lot of them don’t have official releases and fan uploads are usually in German so it’s not easy to find if you’re English speaking. A lot of the names of the bands aren’t very distinct either, so when you’re searching for them it’s hard to find the correct thing. Even if you try to specify, the uploaders are usually labelling them as DDR since they’re German, which if you search for DDR music you just get music from Dance Dance Revolution. You can find a decent amount of it if you’re really willing to search, I just think it would have been nice to make it more easily accessible.
A Book in Three Acts 