Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [84]
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.