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This paper argues that crosstown traffic in the East and West German punk subculture was an essential aspect of how popular music helped to challenge the political legitimacy of the East German government. West German punks frequently crossed the border to attend Eastern punk concerts, meet with friends and trade stories and experiences, connections that helped to foster a transnational community of alternative youths. These interactions denied official claims that punk was the result of capitalist decadence while undermining the East German government's efforts at cultivating a distinctive socialist identity. Nor were border crossings unidirectional, as Eastern punks made daring attempts to connect with their Western cousins. Writing for West German fanzines, appearing in the Western press and even managing to release Eastern recordings smuggled westwards, Eastern punks crossed the Iron Curtain and in so doing, worked to present an alternative vision of Eastern youth to the world and join the global punk scene.

In 1987, an East Berlin punk concert was attacked by Skinheads. This event and others like it provoked sustained outcry in the German Democratic Republic in the last years of the 1980s. The political opposition transformed public outrage over Skinhead violence into broader critiques about 'real-existing socialism', especially by using the Western media to circumvent the state's information monopoly. Thus dialogue opened up by violence going public helped to undermine the political legitimacy of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) by giving ordinary Easterners channels to express their disappointments over state policy. In the end, the SED felt compelled to make decisions concerning state youth policy which opened up new avenues for oppositional activity, pointing to the ways in which the SED responded to momentum from below in ways which only weakened its political hegemony further. By exploring how manifestations of public violence were used to chip away at the political authority of the SED, I suggest that the 'Krawall in der Zionskirche' and events like it help to explain why a small dissident movement was able to spread its message of discontent much more broadly.

Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating towards cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity-endeavors considered to be more 'real' and 'genuine.' Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities during the Cold War, Culture from the Slums details how punk became the site of historical change during this era: in the West, concerning national identity, commercialism, and politicization; while in the East, over repression, resistance, and collaboration. But on either side of the Iron Curtain, punks' struggles for individuality and independence forced their societies to come to terms with their political, social, and aesthetic challenges, confrontations which pluralized both states, a surprising similarity connecting democratic, capitalist West Germany with socialist, authoritarian East Germany. In this manner, Culture from the Slums suggests that the ideas, practices, and communities which youths called into being transformed both German societies along more diverse and ultimately democratic lines. Using a wealth of previously untapped archival documentation, this study reorients German and European history during this period by integrating alternative culture and music subculture into broader narratives of postwar inquiry and explains how punk rock shaped divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.

Scholars are increasingly turning to rock'n'roll and its many genres as a means of exploring the recent past. What is electrifying about popular music in all its myriad forms is that it becomes a channel for rethinking social relations and affective communities (those held together by emotional ties) in the post-war period. These new identities and unconventional groupings exploded onto national societies, and their emancipatory programmes and inventive scenes drove democratisation. Societal responses to rock'n'roll indicate that popular music and the spaces where it manifested were highly contested, confrontations that enable scholars to reconsider historical narratives from alternative perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, as an expressive genre both driving and recording change, popular music is uniquely positioned to initiate and then document, through its material output, the efforts by individuals to alter everyday life and, as such, is an ideal vehicle for exploring the tremendous transformations that society has undergone in the post-war era.

Following the convulsions of 1968, one element uniting many of the disparate social movements that arose across Europe was the pursuit of an elusive "authenticity" that could help activists to understand fundamental truths about themselves-their feelings, aspirations, sexualities, and disappointments. This volume offers a fascinating exploration of the politics of authenticity as they manifested themselves among such groups as Italian leftists, East German lesbian activists, and punks on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Together they show not only how authenticity came to define varied social contexts, but also how it helped to usher in the neoliberalism of a subsequent era