Berlin Calling
A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin
An exhilarating journey through the subcultures, the occupied squats, and late-night scenes in the anarchic first few years of Berlin after the fall of the Wall
Berlin Calling is a never-before-told account of the Berlin Wall’s momentous crash, seen through the eyes of the divided city’s street artists and punk rockers, impresarios and underground agitators. Berlin-based writer Paul Hockenos offers us an original chronicle of 1989’s “peaceful revolution,” which upended communism in East Germany, and the wild, permissive years of artistic ferment and pirate utopias that followed when protest and idealism, techno clubs and sprawling squats were the order of the day.
This is a story stocked with larger-than-life characters from Berlin’s highly political subcultures—including David Bowie and Iggy Pop, the internationally known French Wall artist Thierry Noir, cult figure Blixa Bargeld of the industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, and a clandestine cell of East Berlin anarchists. Hockenos argues that the do-it-yourself energy and raw urban vibe of the early 1990s shaped the new Berlin and still pulses through the city today.
Paul Hockenos is an American journalist and author who writes regularly for the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Policy, and many other publications. He has held fellowships with the American Academy in Berlin, the European Journalism College, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Free to Hate and lives in Berlin.
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