Punks, Up Against The Wall
In 1979, a young East German named Micha Horschig made a prediction: The fall of his country's socialist government, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), would take 10 years.
On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell.
Among the many other things to happen in the decade between was the gestation and maturation of punk in the GDR, a movement that would become stained with blood and colored black and blue, and which has now been fascinatingly traced — through extensive interviews and research that took nearly a decade — in Tim Mohr's new book Burning Down the Haus.
The sound of punk as it has become known — simple, aggressive, sneering and young — was arguably created in New York in the early-to-mid '70s and quickly found purchase in an economically depressed U.K. (kicked off, in no small part, by an early tour from The Ramones, on loan from
