Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

Berlin learned to make art from its woulds. By the late 1970s, the city was a collage of ghosts and scaffolding — half-rubble, half-rehearsal space. The Wall sliced through its heart like a bad scar, dividing not just politics but psychology. Yet in that crack, something began to grow: a scene that turned desolation into theatre. Squats became studios, bunkers became nightclubs, and every abandoned factory echoed with the clatter of typewriters and drum machines. Electricity was borrowed, paint was stolen, and rules were optional. The air smelled of damp concrete and hairspray — a mix that could either kill you or inspire you, depending on the night. Women like Nina Hagen , Gudrun Gut , and the members of Malaria! took punk’s raw nerve and wired it into performance art. They didn’t want to imitate London’s fury or New York’s poetry; they wanted to reinvent the body itself — to turn sound into gesture, movement into manifesto. In Berlin, punk wasn’t a style; it was a survival mechan...