An Afternoon with Robert Lippok

For this second instalment, I reflect on an afternoon spent with the seminal East German musician and artist Robert Lippok.

West Berlin in the 1980s was an island city, surrounded by a wall inside the communist East. It was the physical and ideological border between them and us, between democracy and communism—the perfect embodiment of the Cold War in a single city. The world order seemed settled, even eternal. That it was entering its final winter was not obvious to me at the time. Still, there were signs. Perestroika opened the East to Western musicians, and I began touring there in the late 1980s. On one occasion, I saw rows of Soviet tanks on flatbed trucks outside an East German roadhouse, waiting to begin their journey back to Russia. But in my intoxicated, self-absorbed world, it never occurred to me that such an earthquake was imminent.

The West Berlin I knew was a no man’s land of artists, anarchists, and assorted malcontents—an underground city-state. My interactions with the state were minimal, mostly limited to border crossings, which, while slow, were relatively light of touch. Others may have experienced it differently, but for me and those in Kreuzberg, Neukölln, and Schöneberg, the state felt distant. We lived like bedraggled princes and princesses, free from interference but also largely without support. You were on your own. Your network was everything.

What was it like for artists on the other side?

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Just beyond the wall was another world. A city I could visit, but whose residents, for the most part, could not visit me. What was it like for artists on the other side? How did their experience differ from mine? To answer that question, I spent an afternoon with Lippok, speaking about our parallel lives as young musicians—two people who had lived within five kilometres of each other in very different Berlins.

What stayed with me was a deep appreciation of the human need to express oneself—to say “this is who I am”—even when the full weight of the state stands against it. And with that, an appreciation of the ingenuity required to do so.

Concerts required official approval, so musicians played in private apartments, studios, and churches. Theatre was censored, so playwrights wrote in code. Artists without state sponsorship found jobs that allowed them to continue their work unofficially—grave digging was a favoured occupation among poets. One artist lit ovens at a chess club. Lippok worked as a shoemaker at the state theatre, a skill that made him invaluable to punks needing repairs to their boots. Electronic instruments were difficult to obtain, so relatives brought them from the West. This is how Lippok acquired his first synthesiser.

Music circulated through unofficial means. Tapes were copied and distributed. Western artists sometimes found their way into the East. John Peel attended a punk gathering. At the same time, East German artists were not uncritical admirers of the West. They rejected their government, but also viewed Western capitalism with suspicion. This reflected my own experiences in Poland in the late 1980s, where opposition to communism did not translate into unqualified support for its alternatives.

The secret police infiltrated networks, pressured individuals to inform, and threatened families.

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For all the ingenuity, however, there was a cost. Artists were surveilled, harassed, arrested, and imprisoned. The secret police infiltrated networks, pressured individuals to inform, and threatened families. The psychological toll was significant. That art persisted under such conditions speaks to the depth of the human drive for expression and identity.

Much of what I heard aligned with what I thought I knew—assembled from visits, stories, history, and imagination. But the details mattered. The lived experiences, the practical realities, gave the history weight. They made it personal. They deepened my understanding and reminded me that history is incomplete unless it is understood not only in geopolitical terms, but at the human level.