Beate Bartel, Gudrun Gut, Bettina Köster
Mania D (1979–1980)

Beate: Actually, Mania D had already been around in 1977. My neighbour Sabine Rabe had that name. She was a nurse, and the attendee at the hospital called her Mania D – manic depressive. We started to do music under the name Mania D... Well, mostly karaoke style performance shows at home. When Eva Gössling and her alto saxophone joined me, Mania D started to take shape. Eva and Karin Luner lived in the same flat, and she played drums. Lastly, Gudrun joined us. With her came Bettina. We knew each other slightly – from going to concerts at the SO36 (South East 36) and we found them to be cool. That was in the summer of 79.

Bettina: I immediately thought Gudrun was hot, and we finally met in front of the Eisengrau Store which I had rented just before. Gudrun stopped by in her yellow jumpsuit, so I stopped her…

Gudrun: I thought we knew each other from the Hochschule der Künste (School of Fine Arts).

Bettina: Well, I didn’t go there that much but I was a student there, and when we did the screen-printing for the Mania D posters, I knew how to operate the machinery.

Gudrun: Well, I did study there. I arrived in West Berlin and there was this section – Fachbereich IV at the HDK (UDK today): Visual Communication. I wasn’t into classical painting at all and I wanted to travel the road to new things that correlated more with real life: collages, printing and video. I had already shot some Super 8 films with my sister. It was a good fit.

Beate: I was a freelance sound technician at Sender Freies Berlin. I worked on anything from daily news to editing Adriano Celentano’s playbacks. SFB wanted to hire me full time. Naturally, at precisely that time things became interesting concerning Mania D. Working different shifts, I wouldn’t have had enough time for the band. So, I turned them down.

Gudrun: I am pretty sure that, back then, I already worked at the Zensor record store. On Belziger Strasse. I pretty much always had some kind of job – BAFÖG (Federal Student Financial Support Programme) was never enough. We kind of did Eisengrau mostly for fun. A hang out; we had a pinball machine, reworked flea market clothes and the collections of young Berlin designers. A bit King’s Road. It was on Goltzstraße, just a hop and a skip from Café M, back then it was the Mitropa. The store was great fun.

Bettina: It took me a long time to pay off bills. However, I hadn’t been to London and I didn’t know much about King’s Road. Rather, I was inspired by the Russian constructivist artists – Rodchenko, Malevich and last, not least, Mayakovsky. Leaning that way, I decided to study at Hochschule der Kuenste; before that I had wanted to become a linguist.

Gudrun: Yes, exactly! There was a great fascination for the art of the 20s; Dada, and then there was the Futurist Manifesto. To bring the abstract and the absurd into our lives and music.

Bettina: Basically, Eisengrau was the world’s first concept store, although that concept didn’t exist then. We went on shopping tours to Italy and were the first ones to sell Fiorucci, Santini e Domenici and others, in Berlin.

Gudrun: I did a beautiful knitwear collection using my knitting machine. Back then, I collaborated on a fanzine, called T4, with Frieder (Butzmann) and Burkhardt Seiler, Zensor’s owner. Thomas Kiesel and I printed the poster for the SO36 on my black vinyl-clad floor on Thomas’s home made silkscreen printing machine. That was fantastic. Anything was possible. And no, we never had any money.

Bettina: For food, we went to the Exil on Paul-Lincke-Ufer. We never had to pay there. Michael Schäumer always made our portions huge, and they sat us in the window to attract customers, and they were open late. Back then, Berlin, as opposed to West Germany, had no curfew for bars and corner dives.

Gudrun: That’s why, at 18, I urgently wanted to leave my small village in Lüneburger Heide (heath). I could not imagine any kind of future there for myself. At the end of the 70s it was really getting very claustrophobic in West Germany.

Bettina: However, I lived in Berlin from age ten.

Gudrun: The postwar society had snuggled in comfortably and beautifully: everything was tidy and the front lawns were impeccable. It was so boring one could die. Berlin stood in stark contrast. Inhabited by war widows and young people: students and army service refugees. A very politicised society, with discussions about everything. Not only Kommune I and the APO (extra-parliamentary opposition). At night people were noisy outside and there was a smell in the air.

Bettina: Yes, the smell of coal-fired heating.

Gudrun: Coal and Kebab.

Bettina: In some places a bit mouldy, ha ha …

Gudrun: I found it to be totally exhilarating. I thought, this place is big enough for me, I’ll find something for myself. I can be here.

Beate: That was all totally normal for me. I grew up here. Later, after I moved to Düsseldorf, I started missing the greyish facades and the dirt.

Gudrun: Berlin had this morbid type of charm.

Bettina: It had a lot of bombed out buildings, bullet holes covered the front walls. It was great for photo shoots. It looked so desolate and so gritty, all you had to do was to climb over the rubble.

Gudrun: There were empty lots everywhere and investors and business people had not yet arrived. Berlin was a forgotten island.

Bettina: A playground for the young. Everything was cheap and traffic tickets didn’t exist.

Gudrun: And we all made music. Before Beate asked me to join Mania D., I played with Din A 4 and later with Mark Eins and Coca Cola (Cordula Lippke) in the band Din A Testbild. I remember, I had a bass with yellow polka dots and a stylofone.

Bettina: Actually I played my first real concert in Hamburg, playing saxophone for Din A Testbild. And we listened religiously to John Peel on BFBS radio. He was on Thursday nights.

Gudrun: Wherever you were, you’d get home in time for the John Peel show. Except for Can and Neu!, nothing much earth-shattering was issued on ‘the continent’. Peel played the music we wanted to hear. I heard Brian Eno’s No New York compilation with the bands Mars, DNA, The Contortions and Lydia Lunch, who influenced me immensely, for the first time and it impressed me profoundly. And naturally, dub.

Bettina: Gudrun, don’t forget Boris Policeband!

Gudrun: Oh yeah, I loved The Boris Policeband! I taped every John Peel show. At one point he started playing Mania D.

Beate: He actually called at one point. He wanted to invite us to tape one of his John Peel Sessions. Gudrun happened to answer the phone and hung up on him – she didn’t understand English that well back then …

Gudrun: He had a weird accent, not really the Queen’s English.

Beate: I still have the tape of the show after that call, when he asks anyone who understands English to please ask us to call him back.

Bettina: Burkhardt was important with his Zensor record store. You could find everything cool, new and innovative from everywhere there. It expanded our horizon on music immensely.

Gudrun: Not only from England, also from other countries too. It was the start of the new Independence world. People manufactured their records in small batches and distributed them on their own. The most stylish singles would regularly be arriving from France.

Beate: I wasn’t much of a Homo Vinyle. But I liked Wire. They played a fantastic concert at the SO36 in 1978. Kind of two concerts. The first show was cut short as the cashier had been robbed in the middle. Some Kreuzberg anarcho punks objected to SO36’s admission fees and having been eighty-sixed from the SO36. They objected to this ‘commercial shit’. Therefore, there were hardly any people in the audience. Just me and [Die Haut’s] Christoph Dreher, back then a student at the Film School DFFB, filmed the evening. A few others were there, too. Afterwards we all went to the Exil. The place to meet after concerts.

Gudrun: Everyone knew each other. I was also friends with Blixa Bargeld; before Einstuerzende Neubauten. We both were interested in music. Wolfgang Mueller sold his fanzine at Eisengrau. We also just hung out, chatted, conferred about Neu!. Blixa also worked at the Movement Kino, we also regularly frequented. Beate and him were the only real Berliners, I think, all other friends had come here from outside.

Beate: Berlin was, concerning this scene, very easy to survey. You didn’t need a phone, you just ran into each other.

GUDRUN: The term ‘scene’ didn’t exist back then; we were just friends. And there were always six or seven clubs we all frequented: Dschungel, SO36, Das Andere Ufer, DNC, Exxcess, Music Hall, a bit later, Loft and maybe the Tolstefanz. After the clubs we hung out at the breakfast places.

Beate: Athena Grill, super important spot!

Gudrun: If someone had so-and-so’s new record, we would go home to somebody’s place and listen to it. Tabea Blumenschein was also a friend of ours. In 1980 we recorded with her and Frieder Butzmann a Christmas single for [German] Sounds magazine’s subscribers. Diedrich Diederichsen was the editor and a big fan of our music. The subscribers complained until Easter. They were completely outraged. A real scandal, ha ha.

Beate: We used my parent’s collapsible Christmas tree for the single’s cover.

Bettina: Isabelle Weiss, who later went out with Tabea, sang at two of our shows. She was this well-known wild creature in the Hamburg punk scene. She had just moved to Berlin.

Gudrun: Yes, she looked great and had an incredible stage presence. Everyone played in each other’s bands, anyway. Blixa wanted us to be in Einstuerzende when he started the band. Beate and I played the first year with them, in 1980.

Beate: We spent a lot of time together in the rehearsal room. I organised one for Mania D at Paul-Lincke-Ufer. We didn’t have much time to rehearse for our first concert in Wuppertal. Organised by Karin: music, art, film; two evenings at a gallery, headlined Wuppertal-Total. Do you remember the guys next to our room, who had been rehearsing for the best part of 20 years, asking us what we were doing there? Us: ‘We’re having a concert next week.’ They couldn’t believe we were already having a concert with our kind of music. We just did. No endless discussions and pondering.

M_Dokumente – Mania D, Malaria!, Matador is published by Ventil Verlag. It is reviewed in The Wire 454. Subscribers can read all our latest music book reviews via our digital archive.