Vergessene Arbeitskämpfe - Ein Punk-Abend

City of Neuss in 1973. Car parts supplier Pierburg. The Federal Republic of Germany is facing a wave of strikes. Foreign workers join forces with German workers for higher wages and better conditions of work. With a view to gender equality, migrant women are taking a strong position to achieve fair pay. 70% of the 3,000 employees, mostly women, earn 4,70 DM in contrast to the men, who are paid 6,10 DM per hour.  They claim “One Deutschmark more!” as 2,000 workers, 1,700 of them from Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece and Spain, walk off the job in the summer of 1973.

These strikes had not been organized by the trade unions. It started with small groups of workers, and after a number of clearly politically motivated arrests, and intimidations from the company management, more and more workers joined the movement. Their call for solidarity did not go unheard, as their German colleagues were beginning to join the strike. Within a week, the production lines came to a halt. The public also showed great solidarity, which eventually forced the management to react. The strikers achieved a pay rise of 30 Pfennig per hour for all the workers. The strike in 1973 was an important step towards more gender equality and equal pay, and a nice example of successful migration.

Messed Up are four young women hailing from Belarus and Ukraine, who have been living in Warsaw as immigrants. The punk band met in the city of Grodno/Belarus near the Polish and Lithuanian borders. Messed Up was formed in 2015 driven by the strong wish to escape the post-Soviet lethargy and the social constraints of their environment, to counter them with a healthy dose of creativity and self-empowerment. The small subcultural scene in Belarus offered at least temporary breaks from the dull daily routines, although there were reprisals and the scene was met with incomprehension from the majority.

Everything You Believe In is not just the title of their album, but the driving force behind the band. Refusing to play a conformist part in the patriarchal and oppressive society of the former USSR, they are loud and shout out what they dislike and disagree with, thus sailing against the stiff wind of the reactionary zeitgeist. Like many of their peers, they‘ve had to leave their country and are now trying to build a new life in Poland.

Messed Up auf facebook

Diensthund are hyper-nervous guitar riffs playing to the beat of the stamps hammering on official forms: notice of rejection, order of punishment, death certificate. The synthesizer is going to drill the final warning right into your paranoid head through the fish eye to finally power you off.

Post-Ost synth-punk from Leipzig & Berlin.

„With its synth lines and frequent rests, this reminds me of the early DEVO demos on Hardcore Devo: Volume One, only heavier.“ – Willis Schenk in maximumrocknroll #461

Diensthund auf bandcamp