Mark Reeder: The Man who Punked the Iron Curtain

Figure 1. Mark Reeder in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Divided Berlin (1980s). Source: B Book: Lust and Sound in West Berlin 1979-1989, 2017, Archiv der Jugendkulturen. Photo used with permission from Mark Reeder.

The punk connection between East and West Germany was largely due to the actions of one man: Mark Reeder. Born in Manchester in 1958, the musical scene of this English industrial hub captivated Reeder. In 1979, Reeder left Britain for West Berlin to chase the sound emanating from this divided city.[1] Once in West Berlin, he became entranced by the rawness of the former capital, prompting a desire to learn more about its people and the music they played on this walled-off island. His journey led him to enter the Berlin music scene and become not only a part of it, but a leading figure of sound and culture. He worked with prominent bands and artists like Die Toten Hosen, Nena, and Joy Division/New Order among others. During the 1980s, Reeder enabled East Germans to experience western punk rock music. Upon the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany in 1990, he helped support the genre of techno by pioneering trance techno music and playing gigs in abandoned factories in former East Berlin (Figure 1).

In this piece, I provide a first-hand account based on my oral history interview with Mark Reeder conducted in 2023, which I triangulated with other primary and secondary sources to create an immersive story. I explore Reeder’s adventures to East Berlin and the Soviet Bloc in an effort to demonstrate the flow of music and ideas from the West to the East and vice versa. Although Reeder was an outsider by virtue of being a Briton, punks welcomed him on either side of the Berlin Wall. His story challenges the widespread narrative that the Iron Curtain existed an impenetrable wall that kept Western influence out of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Whereas many West Berliners did not care or could not be bothered with the laborious process to travel into communist East Germany, Reeder had an insatiable desire to experience East Berlin culture while simultaneously introducing Western culture to East Germans. Reeder spoke about his West German friends who had no desire to venture into East Germany. They felt that the West provided them with everything they needed, making excursions to the East meaningless to them.[2] West Berlin existed as an island in a communist ocean, with a population which rejected West German norms. Many of the men living in West Berlin did so to avoid being drafted into the German military.[3] The Allied powers put up with this to keep West Berlin populated. This legitimate form of draft-dodging provided West German citizens with the opportunity to live freely in West Berlin. The city became a haven for artists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and young adults wanting to live an avant-garde lifestyle.[4] It was a place for those wishing to challenge western society, the likes of which had not been seen before. Therefore, it was easy for West Berliners to remain happily secluded on their island and not care for what occurred on the other side of the Wall.

Reeder quickly recognized that East Germans were missing out when it came to the vibrant culture of West Berlin: “It was about bringing something they didn’t have. They were sitting in East Berlin dreaming about seeing the bands that I could see…it was a fantasy [for them].”[5] The occasional west German radio waves transmitting punk rock that drifted into East Berlin as well as smuggled punk fanzines provided East Berliners with a glimpse of western punk music and culture.[6] In order to bring East Germans a bit more Western culture, Reeder began to smuggle audio cassette tapes across the border and into the East. As a British citizen, he was able to cross the border into East Berlin with greater ease than a West German citizen. This allowed him to traverse the border multiple times a week. Reeder spoke of how he would “go to the club Saturday night and write down all the tracks I thought people would like. I would then go to the record shop on Monday and buy them, put them onto the cassettes, and by Thursday I’d be giving them [East Berliners] the tapes.”[7]

In order to avoid detection by East German border guards, he dressed smartly and would only smuggle a single cassette at a time. After he passed it off to his friends, the cassette would do the rounds in East Berlin and sometimes end up in cities as far away as Leipzig because “cassettes were a lifeblood. In a society where the state maintained an iron-fisted grip and official monopoly on mass communication, tapes represented an alternative grassroots form of media, a shadow system free from government oversight and censorship.”[8] Reeder recorded all types of music, ranging from punk rock to early techno all in an effort to bring East Germans western music and remind them that they had not been forgotten by the west.[9]

Figure 2. Mark Reeder (left), performing with his band Shark Vegas in West Berlin. Source: B Book: Lust and Sound in West Berlin 1979-1989, 2017, Archiv der Jugendkulturen. Photo used with permission from Mark Reeder.

While smuggled-in cassettes helped alter and diversify the eastern soundscape, there was no substitute for live concerts and Reeder was keen to perform. Therefore in 1981, Reeder brought his band from West Berlin to Czechoslovakia and performed an illegal concert at a friend’s wedding. Months before the concert, Reeder befriended a Czech named David, a staunch anticommunist, while drinking in a Czech bar. After David said he was to be married, Reeder received a half-joking invitation to perform with his punk band at David’s wedding. David said that if Reeder could find instruments, he could play the gig. Ecstatic, Reeder told his bandmates, and they agreed to travel across the Iron Curtain and play at the wedding. All they needed to do now was locate instruments. Due to their drummer being unable to go with them, Mark recorded the drum set for the entire gig on a cassette and smuggled it across the border with the rest of the band.

The gig was to be played 40 kilometers outside of Prague in a Napoleonic era service station. As Reeder recounted how he and his band showed up to the wedding venue, he laughed and said “it was like Czechoslovakia’s most wanted all converged on this place and it was fascinating. It was like the Alamo! It was just in the middle of nowhere.”[10] After successfully playing the gig, Reeder left the cassette with the recorded drum set with his new Czech friends in Prague, thinking that his band would return and play again. While they never played in Czechoslovakia again, this performance laid the groundwork for future concerts in East Germany under the watchful eye of the Stasi (Figure 2).

“If we can do it in Czechoslovakia,” thought Reeder, “maybe we can do it in East Berlin.”[11] Although Reeder desperately wanted to perform in East Berlin, he knew the limitations of pulling off such a stunt. According to Reeder, the state “didn’t mind you sitting around a campfire singing Bob Dylan songs, but they certainly minded if you got an electric guitar.”[12] The fact that Reeder’s band lacked a drummer paired with their eventual need to obtain instruments once they were inside East Germany seemed to put an end to the idea. However, Reeder had another solution for bringing western punk rock across the Wall.

In 1982, Reeder worked as a sound engineer for the punk band Die Toten Hosen and thought it would be easier to convince them to play a gig in East Berlin. Before Reeder could ask Die Toten Hosen, he first needed to ensure that the band would have a suitable venue at which to perform. This was a monumental task that would have to be carried out under Stasi surveillance. Reeder was not daunted by the challenge but instead embraced it. Soon, Reeder came to learn how punks and other groups, such as hippies, made use of churches in East Berlin. According to Reeder, it was during a casual meeting in a neighborhood bar with an East German hippie where he learned about blues masses. Once the hippie got over his initial shock of meeting a British person, he told Reeder about churches in East Berlin that held blues masses at which people could perform music such as Bob Dylan songs. The hippie also told Mark about the Erlöserkirche located in the Rummelsburg neighborhood in East Berlin where it might be possible to play a punk gig. Enthralled at the discovery of a potential venue, Reeder visited the church and pitched the idea of a punk rock concert to the priest. Intrigued, the priest told Mark that he would allow the gig to be played at his church. Western punk-rock was coming to East Berlin.[13]

With the pieces falling into place for Die Toten Hosen’s eastern gig, the next step would be to ensure the support of Reeder’s East German friends. He told two of his friends in East Berlin about the priest’s answer and urged them to think carefully about their decision to hold and attend the concert. If they were caught, the Stasi would question them, raid their apartments, and, in the worst cases, imprison, conscript them into the military, or even deport them to the West. After Reeder said this, “It took them about four seconds to think and then they said: Yeah, we’ll do it.”[14]

Locating Instruments for Die Toten Hosen in East Berlin was the next hurdle. The issue: “Everything was made on a 5-year plan…you’d get slippers in the summer and sandals in the winter. That was East Germany. So, to get a guitar and a bass was nearly impossible.”[15] However, it was not totally impossible. The East German punk band Planlos owned an amplifier and Pankow, the lead singer, agreed to let Die Toten Hosen use it with the condition Planlos would headline the blues mass. Kaiser, a member of Planlos, confirmed this in an interview in 2005, recalling how he created connections with an English punk who smuggled music into the East and even organized a gig for the West German band Die Toten Hosen at one point.[16] Such stories demonstrate the incredible and lasting impact Reeder had on the East German punk scene.

Figure 3. Die Toten Hosen and others waiting to cross into East Berlin, April 1988. Photo taken by Holm Friedrich and used with permission.

After securing the amplifier, all that was left to be done was spread the word about the concert. Reeder instructed one of his girlfriends, Kirsten, to only invite 30 people. He did this for two reasons: 1) fewer attendees would attract less attention from the Stasi and 2) Reeder wanted to emulate the first-ever punk concert by the Sex Pistols, held in June 1976 in Manchester, which had only had 30 people in attendance. For Reeder, this number felt symbolic. He believed that if punk could grow from such a small group in England into the transnational movement it had become, so too could punk blossom in East Germany from such a small concert.[17] When it was time for the concert, the loudspeaker had to be pushed up the street to the church because no one had a car. When Reeder and the respective bands arrived at the church, they were not greeted by 30 people, but instead by over 100.[18] It was too late to cancel. The show had to go on and it did with the first ever western punk band performing in East Berlin on March 27, 1983, in the Gemeindehaus behind the Erlöserkirche (Figure 3).[19] Due to the large number of concertgoers, the Stasi surveilled the gig and would continue to monitor all punks who attended thereafter.

For Reeder, this concert solidified the notion that he could organize more gigs in East Berlin. However, the Stasi’s hardened approach against punks (Härte gegen Punk) in the 1980s made contact between Reeder and his friends tenuous and the idea of another gig unfathomable at the time.[20] It was not until 1988 when Reeder was able to organize another performance of a West German punk band in East Berlin. This second gig in East Berlin further demonstrated the way in which Western individuals and ideas crossed over the Iron Curtain and fundamentally altered East German culture. In 1988, Reeder’s friend, Trevor Wilson, who ran the fanzine Ich und mein Staubsauger (Me and my Vacuum Cleaner), ran into trouble and needed funds to pay for his legal fees. Wilson then came up with the idea to hold a benefit concert in West Berlin to raise money. He asked Reeder, who at the time still worked with Die Toten Hosen, if he could get the band to play at his concert. Reeder asked the band who responded that they would play the gig only if Reeder organized another blues mass for them in East Berlin. Reeder agreed and started organizing the concert, locating the Hoffnungskirche in the suburb of Pankow as an appropriate venue.

Reeder knew he would need an East German band to serve as both the cover and the opener for the gig. He reached out to the East German band Die Vision, whose members obtained an Einstufung, a rating mechanism issued by the state to control and regulate artistic expression, and could legally play in East Germany. As well as an Einstufung, Die Vision owned working instruments and were not afraid to play the clandestine church gig with Die Toten Hosen. They knew the cost of being caught by the Stasi for performing with a West German band but to them it was of little concern.[21] Even though they worked within the system of the GDR to legally play concerts, they were still punks at heart and willing to break a few rules. At least, that is what Reeder believed at the time.

After securing a location and a line up, Reeder had to solve the challenge of smuggling himself and Die Toten Hosen across the border and into East Berlin. Fortunately, Reeder knew an American soldier, who was also a punk, and he agreed to take Reeder and the instruments in his car into East Berlin. “This car enabled us to smuggle things into East Berlin that you otherwise weren’t able to smuggle.”[22] Paradoxically, while so many from the Eastern Bloc risked their lives to smuggle themselves into West Berlin, Reeder was heading in the opposite direction with an array of instruments. For the Englishman “it was like smuggling in a Kalashnikov.”[23]

Once making it past the border without a hitch, Reeder arrived at Hoffnungskirche in the East Berlin neighborhood of Pankow. While Reeder smuggled the instruments, Die Toten Hosen donned slightly more normal clothing and crossed at Friedrichstraße Station into East Berlin (Figure 3).[24] Upon arriving at the church, a priest came up to Reeder and told him Die Toten Hosen could not play due to the heavy Stasi surveillance and the risk of unofficial Stasi collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) in the church. Thinking on his feet, Reeder told the priest to inform everyone that a punk band from Dresden was here to play instead of Die Toten Hosen. After all, Reeder thought the Stasi would have no idea what Die Toten Hosen looked like. The priest blankly stared at Reeder, “you crazy Englishman” he said.[25]Die Toten Hosen then played outside the Hoffnungskirche in a sand pit of a children’s playground before a crowd of several hundred.[26] Holm Friederich, a western punk that came to the concert, stated in Wilson’s magazine, Ich und mein Staubsauger, “I felt like I’d been transported back a few years to the best times of punk.”[27] Holm snapped away on his camera and documented the now iconic punk performance (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Die Toten Hosen playing at Hoffnungskirche on April 9, 1988, as an eager Mark Reeder stands next to a tree in the background with a camera slung around his neck. Photo taken by Holm Friedrich and used with permission.

The concert lasted 45 minutes before someone alerted the Stasi that it was in fact Die Toten Hosen and not a band from Dresden. The Stasi broke up the gig but in a strange turn of events they did not arrest Reeder and his friends. However, in the days after the concert, the Stasi raided and photographed the apartments of East German concertgoers.[28] The Stasi’s decision not to arrest Reeder and other punks demonstrates a loosening in Stasi control regarding the policing of music and peoples at this time. Although Härte gegen Punk was strongly enforced during the mid-1980s, moments such as Die Toten Hosen’s concert in 1988 highlight the growing ambivalence the Stasi showed when they would otherwise use extreme force to keep undesirable elements, such as punks, out of the public sphere.

Unbeknownst to Reeder, the lead singer of Die Vision, Uwe Geyer, was a Stasi informer and aided the state in monitoring Reeder. In the years after Germany’s reunification, Reeder accessed his Stasi files and learned that Geyer had been compromised. The Stasi therefore knew about Die Toten Hosen coming to East Berlin in 1988 and the performance they scheduled at the church. What they did not know was that Reeder would be smuggling West German instruments across the border through his friend the American serviceman. In an effort to learn more about Reeder and his fascination with East Berlin, the Stasi devised a plan. It was late 1989 and Geyer was instructed to invite Reeder to East Berlin to work on a record with Die Vision. One September evening, as Reeder tended bar at the Pinguin-Club in West Berlin, Geyer causally strolled through the door of the establishment, leaving Reeder dumbfounded. An East German did not simply leave the GDR without reason. After speaking for a moment, Geyer told Reeder that he was able to leave the GDR because he was an invalid, to which Reeder responded with rising suspicion, “you’re fucking joking, you’re the fittest person I know!”[29] Geyer ignored Reeder’s comment and told him that he had a deal with Amiga, the GDR state-sponsored record label, to create Die Vision’s debut album and wanted Reeder’s help in producing the record.

The album would become known as Torture, an ironic name for a record that was a complete nightmare to produce due to the awful studio conditions in East Berlin.[30] The album served as a successful front for the Stasi to monitor Reeder and learn more about why an Englishman went out of his way to travel into East Berlin and fraternize with the supposed enemy. Reeder later learned from his Stasi files that while Geyer was the only member of Die Vision that was an informant, everyone else working in the recording studio was a Stasi informant.[31] Torture would be one of the last albums coming out of the GDR as Reeder and Die Vision finished the album on November 2, 1989, exactly a week before the fall of the Berlin Wall.


[1] B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989, directed by Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck, Heiko Lange, and Miriam Dehne (ZDF, 2015), 5:25, https://www.documentaryarea.com/video/B-Movie:+Lust+and+Sound+in+West-Berlin+1979-1989/.

[2] Mark Reeder, interview by Robert Bentley, June 20, 2023, 11:30.

[3] UK Parliament, “West Berlin (Military Service),” accessed February 5, 2024, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1960-06-29/debates/d1956602-b61b-4207-8740-91fb20a8aa06/WestBerlin(MilitaryService).

[4] Visit Berlin, “Living in a Divided City: West-Berlin,” accessed February 5, 2024, https://www.visitberlin.de/en/living-divided-city-west-berlin.

[5] Reeder, interview, 14:20.

[6] Jeff Hayton, “Crosstown Traffic: Punk Rock, Space, and the Porosity of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s,” Contemporary European History 26, no. 2 (2017): 356.

[7] Reeder, interview, 33:50.

[8] Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2018), 237.

[9] Reeder, interview, 35:00.

[10] Reeder, interview, 6:30.

[11] Reeder, interview, 8:02.

[12] Reeder, interview, 10:04.

[13] Reeder, interview, 16:00.

[14] Reeder, interview, 18:46.

[15] Reeder, interview, 20:40.

[16] Bodo Mrozek, “Interview with the East German Band Planlos,” in Punk in der DDR: too much future, edited by Michael Boehlke and Henryk Gericke (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2007), 52.

[17] Sidney Saffron, “The Sex Pistols and the Gig That Changed the World,” Medium, last modified June 22, 2022, https://medium.com/@rockandrollshitshow/the-sex-pistols-and-the-gig-that-changed-the-world-db95cb459336#:~:text=It%27s%20been%20called%20 “the%20gig,as%20many%20as%2040%20people.

[18] While Reeder states that over 100 people attended the concert, Kaiser from Planlos stipulated that only 30 people were there. Mrozek, “Interview,” 52.

[19] Mark Reeder, “The man who smuggled punk rock across the Berlin Wall,” interview by Paul Hanford, Witness History, BBC, July 29, 2024, audio, 6:03, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5yh2.

[20] Jeff Hayton, “Härte gegen Punk: Popular Music, Western Media, and State Response in the German Democratic Republic,” German History 31, no. 4 (2013): 528. 

[21] Reeder, interview, 58:30.

[22] Reeder, interview, 1:02:39.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Holm Friedrich, “Ich sauge sein,” Ich und Mein Staubsauger, May 1988, 9.

[25] Reeder, interview, 1:08:25.

[26] Friedrich, “Ich sauge sein,” 9.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Joseph Delves, “Punk, Priest, Stasi, Spy: Meet the Man Who Smuggled Punk into East Berlin,” FACT, accessed February 11, 2024, https://www.factmag.com/2016/09/24/punk-priest-stasi-spy-east-berlin-mark-reeder/#:~:text=Joseph%20Delves%20tells%20the%20story,that%20looked%20like%20Mark%20Reeder.

[29] Reeder, interview, 1:10:00.

[30] Reeder spoke about power surges that would occur while Die Vision recorded their instruments and noted that when the power came back on, it triggered something in the tape recorder and all the channels would be turned on “record” so that it would record over everything immediately; Delves, “Punk, Priest, Stasi.”

[31] Reeder, interview, 1:12:22.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Robert Bentley (August 29, 2025). Mark Reeder: The Man who Punked the Iron Curtain. PopHistory. Retrieved January 18, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14jte


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