Rocking the Pulpit: East German Punks in the Protestant Churches of the German Democratic Republic

In December 1981, the first punk concert in a Protestant Church took place at the Johannes-Lang-Haus in Erfurt, East Germany. Playing before 150 excited youths, Schleim-Keim, Ernst F. All, and The Madmans inaugurated a new dimension to public performance and youth subculture in the German Democratic Republic. During the 1980s, punk bands staged dozens of concerts in Protestant Churches and these unlikely sites gave youths the opportunity to make music and construct subculture relatively free from state coercion until the GDR collapsed in 1989.

Exploring how and why punks were able to stage concerts in East German Protestant Churches provides a fascinating window into alternative cultural production and youth subculture under socialist dictatorship. Religious figures quarreled about including punks in their houses of worship, and yet were committed to offering a haven for troubled youths as part of their outreach programs. State officials saw punk actions as a threat to their authority and sought to eliminate them; except, the secret police wanted to use punk informers to infiltrate dissident circles also gathering in the churches. Youths saw these spaces are rare sites to enact their cultural rebellion but chafed at their hosts’ many restrictions which they believed hindered their punk identities and community. These competing motives, purposes, and understandings speak to how space under state socialism remained fraught with tensions, neither solely sites of state domination, nor oppositional resistance.

Thus, tracing the history of punks in the Protestant Churches demonstrates how these spaces became essential in the construction of the punk subculture in East Germany, and why they became sites of contestation over youth, music, religion, and socialism. And perhaps most importantly, it facilitates an exploration of state authority, citizen conformity, and clandestine resistance to help elucidate the opportunities and limits of punk and dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic.