Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [83]
Klaus Renft is the bad boy of East German rock’n’roll. The Klaus Renft Combo became the wildest and the most popular rock band in the GDR.
Klaus started off playing Chuck Berry and Bill Haley covers in the fifties, and then moved on in the sixties to the Animals, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and in the seventies to Steppenwolf, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Often these records were banned outright so Klaus and his friends listened illegally to western RIAS radio, and recorded the songs on huge tape decks in order to work out the music. They sang, screaming, ‘A ken’t get nö, zetizfektion.’
I’m amazed that the authorities let them get away with the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, a song which, if it became an anthem for desire of all kinds in the west, was bound to be a rallying cry against the whole system in the east. ‘Did they know what it meant?’ I ask.
‘We didn’t know what it meant,’ Klaus laughs, prodding down tobacco and small burnt beads of hash into a white-handled pipe. His laugh is deep and innocent, he is a man with the gift of pleasure. His smile heats the room.
Over time, the Klaus Renft Combo played more and more of their own songs, and when Gerulf Pannach joined in 1969 the lyrics suggested rebellion, poignancy and hope, or, as one magazine put it, ‘soul, frailty and pain’. In the ersatz world of the Lipsi, Renft was something authentic and unauthorised. But there was only one record company, AMIGA, and Klaus says that the lyrics to every one of their songs were changed before they could be recorded. Renft took, he says, the ‘holy things’ of the GDR—the army and the Wall—and sang about them, because they wanted to ‘scratch the GDR at its marrow’.
Klaus gets up from the chair, his movements quick as a cat, although maybe I’m starting to see things slower. I’m trying to think what it would mean to have all your experience of rock music brought to you live, but second-hand—wondering: did Jagger, Plant and Daltry know of their doppelgängers in the east?
But as soon as Klaus puts the music on, I am a believer. There is something about good rock that defies thought. It is pure and base at the same time, and it moves you inside in ways you can’t say. The singer, Christian ‘Kuno’ Kunert, was trained in a church choir in Leipzig and his voice hits you like the truth. He sings their famous ‘Die Ketten werden knapper’ (The Chains Are Getting Tighter) and ‘The Ballad of Little Otto’, who longed to reach his brother in the west. Klaus sits down again and puffs happily. When the songs are over, he keeps talking.
Renft were not permitted to play in towns, so they played to enormous crowds which came out to the villages. ‘Woodstock every day.’ He grins. ‘You know for us the GDR wasn’t just Stasi, Stasi, Stasi. It was “Sex und Drugs und Rock’n’Roll”,’ he says in English. By drugs he means alcohol and cigarettes which were all the drugs they had, but they made the most of them. ‘I mean we really lived!’ he says. ‘And it was fun.’
‘Some towns we went to, the main street would have its buildings painted only halfway up! The top part would be bare grey concrete.’ He looks at me as if he has posed a riddle, which he has. ‘It was because when Honecker came through, that was the level he could see to from the back seat of the limousine. They didn’t have enough paint to go further up!’ I know about this, and about the butchers’ shops full of smallgoods for the drive-by, which would vanish again after Honecker or other officials had been through. Klaus finds all this hysterically funny. Then he says, ‘This society, it was built on lies—lie after lie after lie.’
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