Like every Tuesday we are also on October 24, 1989 in the alternative West Berlin station "Radio 100" to broadcast our nightly program "Shlim-Line Show" live. For this special night Johannes (Joe) Beck and I have come up with something special. The listening adventure should start inconspicuously, with the friendly musician Christoph Dreher we talk in the first 25 minutes about the upcoming album of his band "Die Haut", about his collaboration with Nick Cave, Kid Congo Powers or Lydia Lunch.
In the small studio on Potsdamer Straße, we all throw ourselves complacent glances at 2.25 am, before I adjust the microphone. So now! I'm excited, my voice trembles. But that fits the incredible dpa breaking news, which I now read:
"As has been reported by generally well-informed circles in East Berlin, the SED leadership secretly decided to open the inner-German border in both directions, which should be announced at a press conference at 12 noon today and take effect immediately be."
A message that seems completely absurd at the time. The audience reacts immediately - all phones in the studio start to ring. So begins a miraculous journey through the night.
Reminiscences of 1989, West Berlin: The sounds of extinct devices from the pre-internet era also belong to the immersion. The "ticker" for example - these oversized machines were still in the newsrooms of newspapers, radios, TV stations and spat out news of a distant world. I still hear exactly this hum and rattle. Almost concrete music.
Imagine pictures of the sounds. West Berlin of the eighties - of course in black and white. This felt small, walled, creatively seething island. The streets, the nightlife, the friends at the counters and in the record shops. I look at music studios Scripts and make my first films. Emotional Places: the "Risk", the "Hansa Studio", the "Poison", the "Ex'n'Pop", the Mornings in "Café M" and then tired in the seminars of the Film Academy. Yearning = s / w. The East, "Berlin - capital of the GDR", just as gray.
photo gallery
7 pictures
Fall of the Berlin Wall too soon: "Hello, this is God"I preferred to move to New York, London or Paris at the end of the 80s. West Berlin, this creative playground, came to an end, slowly fading out. It was felt. East Berlin was even further. And color came later anyway.
Always flashy in the midst of this West Berlin flashes our radio show "Shlim-Line Show", in which we have long been exploring the limits of radio production experimentally. The broadcast of October 24, 89 will be the final highlight, without our suspecting.
Caller Stefan: "I'm totally out of socks." This is a message through the radio, such as: Tomorrow the sun shines for the first time in 100,000 years! Yesterday I saw this report, about Mother Earth and how dark it looks. According to ARD anyway only 30 years remain, wa ... ". We in the studio: "So reunification does not use us any more, but now we have to survive 30 years of Germany as a whole."
In these radio nights on the FM frequency 103.4, we develop wild acoustic trips through music genres, chopping up with self-recorded or film-sampled audio clips. The improvised live character is emphasized by the telephone lines, which we open to the listeners for direct interaction. Although the programs are conceptually conceived, we never know how they will develop. We see ourselves as acoustic buccaneers.
Joe and I meet every Tuesday before midnight in the Schöneberg night bar "Ex'n'Pop" with briefcases full of music cassettes, our broadcast material - they are fast forward to the starting points. Then it goes into the transmitter. Sometimes we invite guests to recite texts between sounds and fragments of music or to talk about their art and music projects.
The idea for the "fall of the Berlin Wall" arose after the show one week earlier: Studiogast on October 17, '89 was Gudrun Gut of the Berlin band Malaria !, when suddenly the ticker in the nocturnal empty editorial room next to the studio rummaged wildly. Long sheets of paper heralded a dramatic earthquake in San Francisco. We tore off the leaves and read fragments live together on our prepared sound collage. As a cut-up, as real poetry.
All this worked like fiction, so the real news was also perceived - as a radio play. The callers said they do not believe us. It was not until the next day that they learned from the media that the catastrophe had actually happened.
"Hello, I also heard the San Francisco message last week, and that has just the reverse effect of this radio drama on aliens or the 'millionaire game' of crowd, people say information about TV or radio stations are just But your broadcast has the character of a radio play, without it being, it happened to me on the show last week, then I went to bed thinking it was a good radio play, and the next morning I wake up and see First, this collapsed bridge. "
One week later, we are ready for anything, we want to go much further, inspired by the play with the reactions and fascinated by the radio-making as a possibility of fictional narration. In the next show we want to top the whole thing in the immeasurable! And what is the most absurd at the time? What comes next in October '89 to a landing of aliens, in the spirit of the radio drama "The War of the Worlds" by Orson Welles in 1938?
Even more unlikely was the sudden opening of the wall. But immediately we notice from the direct reactions that this vision is already conceivable. As soon as the message is read, the telephones are in the studio. The people are partly emotionally completely dissolved and enthusiastic, partly upset and thoughtful. They tell their own personal East / West stories.
Caller: "Oh man, that can not be, is that really real now? That changes everything, I have a lover over there ..."
Of course, some listeners question the message, calling it a "duck" and then losing themselves to comparisons in the animal kingdom, or even calling it a "duck." Others find reasons why it can only be a hoax:
Caller: " Because of the message that you have just brought, there are several things why this is impossible because our Chancellor would never join in. He would not let people, without asking him, the Opening the border ... That will not work, that brings with it international complications! "
Some callers ironically play the fictional story.
Caller: "Krenz, Egon here, this is Western propaganda! I have to defend myself against it in the most decisive way - nothing against the decision as such, but it is reserved for me!"
At the same time, we sample fragments of the calls, creating an almost Dadaist audio collage. Some scraps of conversation seem completely meaningless and clumsy - and yet some of the West / East prejudices and conflicts are already playing their part, which later on will also occupy people in the following years of reunification.
There is the West German with a Swabian accent, who wants to open a pub in the eastern part of the city right away, "to confront those over there with what's going on in the pub area". But also the reverse reaction. A caller - from the East, she says - does not want that now all the Wessis come over, do not want to be forced out of their Prenzlauer Berg.
Caller: " I want to stay here! I do not want to go over there! I do not want to leave! What am I going to do over there, you with your freedom, what am I going to do with it? What's so great?"
Also we in the studio jokingly, but also naively "übergriffig" take on Western / Eastern takeover fantasies by imagining how easy it could be now to buy houses at the lakes or even entire castles.
Soon a chaotic state is reached in the studio. While Christoph Dreher and I are accepting the many calls, Joe and Suzie are in the process of driving the program out of the snippets of sound into an almost painful cacophony, which is nothing like the overblown emotional response to the real fall of the Wall two weeks later has to do. And if I listen to the show today, despite the surreal humor, in spite of this zeitgeist momentum, something metaphorically threatening resonates with this premature, fake wall-fall sound document.
Everything culminates in the call of a listener who calls himself "God" and wants his supposed little sister to sing a song. She agrees to the second verse of the Deutschlandlied - banned on the radio, because it is connected to Nazi Germany. We let them sing without comment and put the "Internationale", the battle song of the workers' movement, against it.
The next morning it turns out that this action marks the end of the "Shlim Line Show". In the plenum of the left-alternative station, the "overly postmodern" reaction to the German anthem is perceived as incorrect and the program "with immediate effect" discontinued. Not criticized is the actual concept of fictional wall-opening. When only 16 days after our broadcast on November 9, the wall actually falls out of nowhere, we are speechless.
We are innocent!
