With the GDR’s almost year-long demise in 1989/90, the official mediascape became open to music videos by bands which, a few years prior, would have enjoyed only limited visibility, or rather audibility (primarily via the GDR radio’s indie music show and illegal or semi-legal gigs). These five music-based shorts explore the possibilities of marrying sound and vision and are artefacts of the transition period.

Artist: AG. Geige
Track: «Zeychen & Wunder» (GDR, 1989)
Dir: AG. Geige

A leading light of the electronic tape music scene in Karl-Marx-Stadt (the 1953–1990 name of Saxonian city Chemnitz), AG. Geige took pages from the gesamtkunstwerk playbooks of Western counterparts such as The Residents and Der Plan by integrating absurdly humorous costumes and visuals (on 8mm and 16mm) into their performances. The band cultivated a respectable audience, despite eschewing application for a public performance permit – unusually lenient local cultural authorities allowed them to play anyway, and the punk/new wave show Parocktikum on state youth radio DT-64 featured AG. Geige regularly. In «Zeychen & Wunder» (translatable as «signs and wonders»), various communist, capitalist, and religious symbols flash, intercut with performance footage.

Artist: Electric B
Track: «In My Neighborhood» (GDR, 1990)
Dir: Gabor Steisinger

This short’s director, Gabor Steisinger, worked at the DEFA Studio’s animation unit in Dresden and was part of that citys hip hop scene. «In My Neighborhood», featuring hip hop by Electric B, combines reportage about life in the hood with graffiti-inspired animation.

Artist: Herbst in Peking
Track: «Movie Stops Tomorrow» (GDR 1990)
Dir: Petra Tschörtner

The indie rock (later more dub, psychedelic, and electronic) Herbst in Peking was originally named after a Boris Vian novel (Autumn in Peking), but fell afoul with authorities in the aftermath of the June 1989 crackdown against Chinese pro-democracy protesters, when at a concert, singer Rex Joswig called for a moment of silence to honor the victims. HiP (the band’s ironic acronym) dropped the anthemic «Bakschischrepublik» in mid-1989, decrying the GDR’s decrepit gerontocracy. However, that song’s most widely available music video-like rendition is an April 1990 performance on Elf 99, with haphazardly hung portraits of Erich Honecker, who by then was long gone, as was the Socialist Unity Party (the first free elections in March brought the conservative Christian Democrats into power, forming the last GDR government before accession to West Germany).

More interesting is this vignette in Berlin: Prenzlauer Berg, Petra Tschörtner’s definitive documentary about East Berlin alternative culture in the temporary autonomous zone between the Fall of the Wall and the introduction of West German currency. The music video-like segment sees the band performing a rare English-language song (a comment about conforming to a newly privatized, globalized music market?) near the former border strip. The sequence ends with footage of protests against rampant capitalism and neo-fascism, which many progressives feared reunification would yield.

Artist: Sandow
Track: «Invasion» (GDR, 1989)
Dir: Monika Groth

Sandow from Cottbus, southeast of Berlin, were barely out of their teens when they dropped «Born in the GDR», for which the 1988 East Berlin concert of you-know-who was less the inspiration than the perceived hypocrisy of the authorities who had invited the Boss to curry favor with East German youth. Too little, too late – members of Sandow and many contemporaries had already mentally (and physically) checked out.

Made in the transition year 1989, «Invasion» is likely the band’s first «proper» music video. While it sometimes falls prey to MTV-style excesses of surrealism for its own sake, «Invasion» manages to create moments of genuine dread, not to mention the appearance of masks two decades before the Anonymous and Occupy movements.

Artist: Feeling B
Track: «Langeweile» (GDR, 1980s/2007)

Feeling B were pillars of the East Berlin underground. Singer Aljoscha Rompe also milked the privileges of a Swiss passport (from his biological father) and his mother’s and stepfather’s party connections. Feeling B and Rompe in particular supported the 1980s East Berlin punk and post punk scenes, which he found more creative than what he was able to witness on the other side of the Wall. The anarchic, cheerfully hedonistic and prankishly non-conformist band was eventually granted an amateur public performance permit. In 1988 they released tracks on state label Amiga and in 1990 a debut album followed, after a year of red tape. Rompe revved up his political activism in 1989/90, championing a more democratic GDR as well as squatting, pirate radio, and communal living. Feeling B split in 1993, with Rompe exploring «medieval» indie rock and remaining politically active (until his death in 2000), while other members formed Rammstein.

This music video (song title means «boredom»), featuring solely lo-fi 1980s and 1990s footage of the band, accompanied the 2007 CD Grün & Blau with previously unreleased 1980s recordings alongside well-known songs.