Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [85]
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,