On 12 January 1989, the punk subculture was identified as the primary problem in a "youth analysis" produced by the East German (DDR) government.In the early 1980s authorities estimated there were around 1,000 punks in the country, and around 10,000 visibly identifiable punk sympathisers, who had developed a national network to exchange information and ideas, and had links with left wing and anarchist punks in West Germany.
For more about this from the Working Class History website (highly recommended as an addition to any conscious social media feed), click here.
===
If you dig into the subcultural history of the former Soviet Bloc in the few years leading up to 1989, you'll find that punks, some ecologists and some Christians (very few people were all three - and yet: Venn diagrams etc) were amongst those resisting and coming up against the regime(s).
Asserting a right to make, or just to like, the music that you like was also important in Czech dissident circles during the 1970s (shall we talk about Charter 77 and also about the Helsinki Accords?), though Havel and his associates were more into Frank Zappa, the Velvets, prog rock sounds etc.
(One of my best ever gigs: seeing Domácí kapela - who had Plastic People of the Universe DNA - in Prague in 1992, with my friend N.)
(There may be a music-as-potential-dissidence trail here leading off into Plato's suspicion of the arts generally in The Republic).
(For "of course I wouldn't have liked to grow up there" with reference to ABBA - no, really - and the brand-new shiny 2020s, click here).
No comments:
Post a Comment