The conversion
I had been in the punk scene in Kiel for over a year now and still wasn't sure if I was accepted by everyone without exception. Barne called me a pseudo several times to provoke me and bring me out of my shell. Punks were called pseudos if they participated only half-heartedly and played a subordinate role in the scene. Therefore the so-called pseudo had to resist and profile himself. I didn't have much imagination and soon I started to threaten to get a skinhead haircut. In the punk scene this was considered a crude affront and betrayal. I was frustrated by the many hostilities I had to endure as a punk from all sides, from rockers, from teachers and die-hard Nazis and wanted to put an end to this. Skinheads were considered something new from Great Britain. It came just in time.
Kiel punks ran the risk of shaving their head out of frustration after they ended up in prison, in court, in a police questioning or ID treatment. I was a little surprised when Gonnrad and the Konz brothers had suddenly turned into skinheads. That's why I was all the more interested in skinhead-life, which spilled over from the island. I just wanted to see what was going on.
For me it was always a big thing to be allowed to go out with the established punks, and when some of the protagonists were suddenly spotted as skinheads, I saw just like a handful of other punks, no other option than to become skinhead as well. That was on the brink of puppy love. Although it were several former chief-punks who mutated into skinheads, the remaining punks turned mostly to rejection and hatred. The scene in Kiel became radical almost overnight. At the same time, street clubs shot up like mushrooms, among them the "Mad Boys", the "Tigers", the "Mad Fighters", the "Smileys", later the "Bloody Eagles" and the "Living Deads" – to name but a few.
When I stood on Asmus Bremer Place at the end of the summer with Ranke, the punk with the purple mohawk, I revealed to him,
"I'd like to shave my head and be a skinhead."
Ranke replied,
"We can start right now. I'll get a razor blade and shave your skull bald."
That was too extreme for me. I imagined him rasping my scalp bloody with a razor blade. That's why I hesitated and didn't want to rush into anything. When I found out that Steff had got an electric hair clipper, I finally had my hair shaved off despite all the prophecies of doom. We first used a six-millimetre attachment, then a three-millimetre attachment. When the hair trickled onto the floor in small tufts like big, dark brown snowflakes, I suddenly got the feeling that I had finished something. As a former Chaos U.K. fan, I started walking around shaven-headed.
At the following time various people who saw me with my new haircut wanted to stroke me with their hand over the stubble. At first I enjoyed it. Later, I didn't take it anymore.
Next I needed a bomber jacket, that I got cheap in a department store in the city centre. I still only had combat boots and no real Doc Martens. That's why I ordered a pair of Docs from Blue Moon in Berlin by cash on delivery. Now I was a real skinhead. My new cherry-red 14-hole Docs with steel caps were first tested in the city centre on the seated Asmus Bremer statue, which produced a dull metallic sound and gave me bloody toes.
Unfortunately, I often strapped the Docs too tightly, so that the skin in the middle of the shins and at the back of the calves was rubbed. Sometimes I tied bloody rings around my lower legs that were scarred over badly. It always became dramatic and painful during the days when I never once took off my boots from early in the morning until late at night.
Another step in my conversion was the sale of my punk accessories. I talked to Piet, the bizarre fashion punk, who together with his mate Marquee was a permanent guest in the Pfefferminz. I offered Piet a special price for the leather jacket, studded belt, studded bracelet and a few punk tapes, which he immediately accepted.
On the tapes were the best songs of my punk single and LP collection, most of which I had already sold out to Tutti Frutti and my friends out of financial difficulties. The tapes with core pieces of early 80s punk that I sold proved to be a bitter loss later on.
Piece by piece I rejected my old identity – everything that reminded me so much of my punk times, at last other important centrepieces of my record collection, that I loved so much. I sold the lion's share at Tutti Frutti. Although there were several rarities among the singles, I sold them ruthlessly. Most of the money raised was converted into alcoholic beverages.
I met fashion punk Piet a few more times in the Pfefferminz. Once we were the only ones on the dance floor pogoing to "Dancing with Myself", he as fashion punk, me as skinhead – a clear clashing with the style. I never saw him in my old leather jacket. Maybe it was too embarrassing for him. For all together I received a total of 30 Deutschmark. Everyone was wondering why I suddenly wanted to get rid of the stuff.
Slowly I became curious how my environment reacted to my new appearance and especially how the older skinheads would welcome me. For me this all still could be called punk.
After I was shaven-headed, I never saw Ranke again. At Asmus-Bremer-Place he was no longer legally allowed to stay, and I slowly but surely lost contact with the Kiel punks.
As a skinhead I now expected more acceptance from the people around me. I hoped everything would become easier, even with the punks – a fallacy.
At the time, there were several British bands, consisting of both punks and skins, including The Business, Infa Riot, and BLITZ.
From now on there was no more pressure from the punks for me to get ever crazier haircuts. I also had the feeling that nobody in my parents' house and at school felt disturbed when I was walking around in my bomber jacket and sporting my shaved head and Doc Martens. It was different with my punk outfit. It seemed easier and low-maintenance to shave my hair regularly than to keep it up with beer and soap.
It didn't occur to me, however that being a skinhead brought with it other unexpected constraints. I also didn't understand what subcultural achievements I was giving up, especially my punk weekends and my record collection.
I was asked by many why I now wore such a short hairstyle. I justified this with the fact that my upper body would be stronger emphasized and hair loss would be prevented. I claimed that even the amount of my dandruff was reduced. Secretly I didn't want to end up like the wasted punks shown on the cover of the third Punk and Disorderly compilation. These visually broken punks represented a warning of how far you could fall as a punk.
Skinheads were something absolutely new and unusual in Kiel's cityscape. Some fellow citizens already suspected that it could be a new wave from England. There were rows of horrible comments. Many people, especially in the sports club, made derogatory remarks about my new appearance,
"Do you have cancer?"
"Are you doing chemotherapy?"
"You look like a KL prisoner."
Even my father named me KL prisoner. He also said,
"You look like a Turk!"
"Have you only got light in the head!"
"Have they shit in your brain!"
and
"Listen, do you have a nail in your head?"
When it was thematized that I was now skinhead, he replied mockingly,
"You're a spinhead!"
That hit me hard. I heard from my father as usual the whole line-up: from nest-polluter to traitor of the fatherland. I usually reacted recalcitrant to it. Nevertheless, there was still a hailstorm of discriminatory slogans. As mentioned, he could also be fair and taught me the boxing tricks I trained in shadow boxing in my room. That helped me later on the road.
Of course I heard again
"You are a disgrace to Germany,"
just like during punk times.
As a compensation, I regularly stole a lot of beer from my father's cellar, maybe even out of revenge. When I appeared with my new haircut one Saturday as a spectator on the League Pitch of the SV Friedrichsort, the middle one of the Braune brothers, a radical Holstein and Cotzbrocken fan, screamed at me
"You Jew!"
Off to Tutti
Tutti Frutti was at that time 30 metres to the left of the Metro cinema on Holtenauer Strasse. I absolutely needed suitable music to underscore my new attitude to life – the soundtrack to my life as a skinhead, the music for my film. Tutti was always very friendly. I searched the record shelves and soon found The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from the English skinhead band The 4-Skins. I didn't even listen to the record beforehand, because I had already read in a Sound magazine offered in the district library that the record would be outstanding. No question I had to have it. It consisted of a studio and a live side. This was my first skinhead record. In the following time, nothing else was heard until I bought the Oi!-4 sampler from Tutti. Later I also got the remaining Oi!-samplers and as well the Oi!-sampler single Back on the Streets including a band called Skin Disease with "I'm thick". I misunderstood the song title and sang "I'm sick" all the time. The music heated me up like a water boiler. I was just bubbling over with aggression. Now I was also a real skinhead mentally. Since I came from an SPD family (Social Democratic Party), my political attitude has always been left-wing. From now on Oi!-punk was increasingly heard: Business, Cockney Rejects, Blitz, Infa Riot, The Last Resort, Red Alert, Angelic Upstarts, Peter & The Test Tube Babies, Sham 69, Cock Sparrer, The Oppressed, Gonads and Toy Dolls.
My Domestos jeans
I now owned my cheap bomber jacket from C&A and the 14-hole Doc Martens in cherry-red from Blue Moon, but as a real skinhead I needed real Domestos jeans as well. So I took the best jeans out of my closet, a 10 litre bucket half-full of water and poured half a bottle of Domestos into it. I crumpled the jeans and dipped them several times into the bucket with a stick. It was dripping and losing colour. I hooked the stick into one of the belt loops, let the trousers drip off briefly and hung them over the clothesline in the garden. My first Domestos jeans were ready. That's exactly how I wanted it. Last but not least, I put them through my mother's washing machine with clear water to free them from the remaining pollutants. From now on my Domestos jeans were worn regularly and the trousers' legs were rolled up several times, so that the boot leg of my Docs came into focus even better. Last but not least I ordered a skinheadzine and a skazine. Finally, a brand-new suburban skinhead was born.
First mispurchases
There was no right-wing extremist music scene at that time. One day Vielmann played me a bootleg from the band Böhse Onkels. When I heard the refrain "Turks out", I urged him to switch off the tape immediately,
"Turn that filth off now!"
"They're on the second 'Soundtracks zum Untergang' sampler."
"I don't care. Turn that shit off!"
which he did. That's when I realized it was right-wing extremist music. I did not know that this kind of music scene existed. We should have destroyed the tape immediately. A short time later Ringo and I ordered another parcel with records from Vinyl Boogie. Among other things, we ordered one single each from the English band Skrewdriver, who in their early days were still considered punks and suddenly converted to skinheads. The band went through a radical change of mind since their first album, of which we knew nothing before ordering. Skrewdriver were now clearly right-wing radical. We only realized this when we put on the two singles for the first time. We were shocked by the lyrics and wanted to get rid of the singles as soon as possible. We should have sent them back to Vinyl Boogie, but that was too complicated for us. We did not understand why Vinyl Boogie sold such bullshit. Besides, Vinyl Boogie usually wrote a corresponding abbreviation in brackets behind the band's name in the Piss-Yellow Punk-List, what kind of punk genre it was, whether (US-HC), (HC), (77), (F) for female band, (SKIN), (F-Skin), (Oi), (deutsch-Oi), (Oi and Pogo), (Goten) for Gothic and so on. For the offered Skrewdriver singles, however, there was no additional entry in brackets. We were pretty pissed about that. Finally we went to Vielmann with the unpopular singles, because we thought he could get rid of them best. He finally took them and sold them on. We constantly resented Vinyl Boogie for obviously selling right-wing extremist records and not marking them as such in the list. Later they stopped their mail-order, even though the shop in Berlin-Schöneberg continued to exist for a few more years. We were happy when we discovered Malibu from Hamburg as a new record shipment which we trusted. Personally, to this day I can't say if the Nazi-skinhead scene was initiated by Böhse Onkels or Skrewdriver. In any case, we were totally disgusted and had to double-check when we ordered records in the future. We were warned.
On a school trip to Berlin
Hecker and Wisent already had to repeat the class in the school year before. I met both of them again in my new class. We were very ashamed to repeat another year. A part of my ex-class went to London a short time later. That was extremely bitter for me, of course. I was a real Oi!-skinhead by now. My math teacher Altsauer said one morning during class,
"Since Rollant has short hair, he has become much better at maths!"
This encouraged me in my views. I was surprised that the punk outfit was forbidden at school, but my skinhead outfit including steel caps did not cause any complaints. That spoke volumes. My favourite songs at the time were "Razors in the Night", "Never Surrender", "New Age", "Urban Soldier", "Urban Guerilla", "Last Night Another Soldier", "England", "Never Say Die" "On yer Bike, "Woman in Disguise", "Jack the Lad", "Evil", "Youth", "Plastic Gangsters", "Summer of '81", "Suburban Rebels" , "Mull of Kintyre", "King of the Jungle" , "Smash the Discos", "Blame it on the Youth", "Lorraine", "She goes to Finos" , "Keep Britain Untidy", "4Q", "Chaos", "September Part 1", "Sink with California", "Hersham Boys", "In for a Riot", "Revenge", "Nellie The Elephant", "Lean on me", "In Britain", "Drink Problem" and last but not least "War on the Terraces".
I hadn't expected it at all, but suddenly they gave me the opportunity to enjoy a school trip even though we weren't heading to London. My new class was to go to Berlin for a week and I was actually allowed to participate. They accomodated us in the Youth Sports Hotel at Kurfürstenstrasse, just besides a street noted for prostitution. The prostitutes stood almost directly in front of the hotel's entrance portal. In our small clique we briefly addressed Christiane F.[1] The disco Sound was only a few hundred metres away from our location. Of course we made a visit to where the Sound was. There wasn't much going on in the disco at this hour. Unfortunately, the DJ did not even remotely play our taste in music. We were drunk and played frolicsome air guitar to bad Heavy Metal music, which drove the few present hard rockers nuts. They were standing close to the dance floor and would have loved to intervene but just gave us cautionary looks.
It was striking how much booze we sank on the trip. Franka, who in the meantime was exclusively devoted to new wave music, refused to talk to me true to her principles, but when she wanted to visit an alternative shopping street with countless second hand shops in Schöneberg, she asked me at the end if I could accompany her because she was afraid to go shopping alone in Berlin. I accompanied her selflessly, but I was supposed to stay outside while she rummaged through the shops for clothes and tried on little things. Later she refused to talk to me again.
Our class had a full program. We visited the Bendlerblock (where the German Resistance of "20 July plot" was executed), the Museum of Technology, the Federal Agency for Civic Education as well as the Zeughaus Museum in East Berlin. Because of the high alcohol consumption in our alcohol affine clique many things passed us by without a trace. During the lecture at the Federal Agency for Civic Education I stared into space just like during school lessons. When we visited typical Berlin backyards in Kreuzberg, which was especially embarrassing for our little Franka, we were insulted by a Kreuzberg woman from the balcony who threw objects at us,
"You fucking tourists, get out of here. We don't want you here!"
When the teacher left us for free time, I went on tour alone. I really wanted to visit Vinyl Boogie, the former infamous punk mail order company that still ran its small shop in Berlin-Schöneberg in Gleditschstrasse. I started moving with my crumpled Falkplan (German city map) and walked the whole distance from Kurfürstenstrasse 132 to Gleditschstrasse 45. I passed a pub called "Ruine", whose name I already knew from the Piss-Yellow Punk-List. There were indeed lots of pieces of rubble lying around, so that the pub lived up to its name. At Vinyl Boogie the punk vendors greeted me warmly. Gerd had assigned me to bring him the new Slime Live LP, that was fresh on the market because he still liked German punk. With astonished eyes I walked through the shop in which everywhere the most punky record covers hung on the walls. Since I had to look after my money, I only bought the Slime-Live, for which Gerd had given me enough money beforehand. I took out my neck pouch at the cash desk with all my money and wanted to pay. When the punk at the cash desk spotted my neck pouch, he said cynically,
"There's never been a skinhead robbed in Berlin!"
That made me smile. I received the change and disappeared with the live LP. Later we went shopping at a shop called Garage, a kilo boutique where I bought tattered jeans and a long-sleeved white undershirt. We, the hard core of the class, were basically drunk every night. The class teacher didn't care. When we drove one Wednesday over to East Berlin to visit the Zeughaus Museum, we had the rest of the afternoon off again and were supposed to look around East Berlin on our own. Near the Brandenburg Gate on the eastern side I was scolded a GDR schoolboy,
"All you represent here is capitalist, unfree Germany."
"Yes, come over and visit us in the West, if you're free here!"
I snapped back, and the conversation was over.
We walked across Alexander Place, bought Club, Karo and Cabinet cigarettes, wondered about the uniforms of the East Cops, got lost in the S-Bahn (city train) and ended up at Ostkreuz station.
The Karo-cigarettes pleased us most, because they hurt strongly in the lungs. We constantly amused ourselves at the unsophisticated world of the East. As planned, we went with a handful of pupils to the SEZ (Sports and Recreation Centre) on Leninallee for a swim. In Pankow we finally ate the most expensive meal on the menu in a restaurant: roast duck. The food was disappointing, but we were able to make friends with the GDR beer prices, even though the East beer banged less than "our" beer. At the end of our Berlin trip we took the obligatory wall photo near Potsdamer Place with our little clique. Back in Kiel Gerd was happy about the Slime live LP, but he was a skinhead and used to listen to songs like "Ferien in Afghanistan" (Holidays in Afghanistan) from a band called Stosstrupp. We regained hope that Slime would put him on the right track.
The England tour of my "mates"
In autumn Seehuber, Ringo, Hecker, Heimerich and Vielmann went to England. They didn't even ask me whether I'd like to join them. It was a biased trial that made my blood boil. I didn't know about the trip to England until after they got back. This intrigue dragged me down. Seehuber, who was already 18, chauffeured the young people with an old Mercedes 200 D. They had a lot of fun on the tour – without me. They ended up in Coventry, Kiel's twin town, where they met many great people and especially the English drinking customs, which they later exported to Kiel. Ringo stocked up on tons of 7-inches, among them rarities like "Friggin in the Riggin" by the Sex Pistols, "Sound of the Suburbs" by The Members and "Something that I said" by The Ruts. He also bought several round Oi! patches with the black Oi! logo printed on a Union Jack.
When they returned back to Kiel, Ringo gave me the scratched Ruts single and one of the Oi! patches. It seemed to me as if he had a guilty conscience because they left me at home in Kiel. It was obvious: the single and the patch were supposed to appease me. I became a Ruts fan, of course, and when I finally discovered a hole in my jeans' arse area, I sewed Ringo's Oi! patch to that spot. That was a tremendous eye-catcher.
The trip to England gave my friends and their environment an enormous linguistic kick, because from then on English words and idioms were increasingly adopted into their own language use. It wasn't "Prost! " and "Danke" any more but "Cheers, mate!" and "Thanks a lot!". Postcards and letters were preferably sent with the greeting formula "Greetings". In addition, expressions such as "Wanker", "Bastard" or "Bullshit" were increasingly used. A short time later, Hecker and Vielmann together went back to the island to take an InterRail trip. Fresh on the island, however, they got into a fierce fight, separated once and for all and hated each other like the plague.
[1] Christiane F. was a German heroin addict and prostitute who later successfully wrote a bestseller about her life.
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