Greetings from the Zone. The Lost Post Punk Ost or A Personal Journey into the Magnetbanduntergrund GDR

Whatever surprise this might be, even to those who lived there back in the 80s, also the GDR – probably the most boring and strictly state-controlled country in the Eastern bloc called Zone (shorthand for "Soviet occupied zone") by many West Germans – had its own underground scene. This free-style lecture will explore the context of GDR post punk through music, poetry, art/performances and super-8-movies, including some really weird materials (hopefully, never heard or seen before) with early works of electronic music artists, pretty well-known by now, like Frank Bretschneider and other Rasternoton artists of the Karl-Marx-Stadt scene, the Lippok brothers (together with a third musician known as To Rococo Rot these days ), Tarwater, and last but not least the members of Rammstein in their 80s projects. This is to guide, in quite the same vein as the Stalker in Tarkovski’s movie, muddling through a pretty bizarre (time) zone...

Alexander Pehlemann, born in 1969 in Berlin (East), lives in Leipzig, is a former wrestler (Greek-Roman), art historian, music journalist, publisher of Zonic and the Zonic special editions (“Spannung. Leistung. Widerstand. Magnetbanduntergrund DDR 1979–1990”, “Go Ost! Klang - Zeit – Raum. Reisen in die Subkulturzonen Osteuropas” and “1984! Block an Block. Subkulturen im Orwell-Jahr”), dj, producer, curator and cultural networker.

This lecture is part of a lecture series presented within the course "Counter-Cultures and Power during State Socialism 1960-1990"