Burning Down The Haus Book Out Today + Pitchfork Feature + National Book Tour

IBurning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall Out Today
Read The Pitchfork Feature Here
National Book Tour with Special Guests Including Legs McNeil, Penelope Houston (The Avengers)

“The best punk book since Please Kill Me.” —Legs McNeil, author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
“The true story of how teenage kicks turned into political opposition. With meticulous research and impassioned prose, Tim Mohr brings to life the saga of a bunch of East German punk rock kids who broke the state that wanted to break them. A book to warm an old punk’s heart.” —Claire Dederer, author of Love and Trouble
“Equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, Burning Down the House is a fabulously alive history of punk rock behind the Iron Curtain, where simply dressing like a punk could get you hauled in by Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police. Mohr ties the fearless music-driven resistance to authoritarianism and mass surveillance in the 1980s to our current fraught times, showing how even the most formidable forms of oppression can be shaken by highly motivated, creative kids with riotous rage and a driving beat. A thrilling, inspiring read.” —Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House and author of All Tomorrow’s Parties

Author Tim Mohr’s new book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall has been released today via Algonquin Books.  Pitchfork has published an in-depth feature on the book, which can be read here. Mohr will embark on a national book tour with special guests at the events including Legs McNeil, author Peter Ames Carlin and Penelope Houston of The Avengers. Burning Down the Haus is available for purchase here.
Telling the little-known story of a group of East German kids who rebelled and helped set the world on fire, Mohr takes readers on a fascinating trip through the 1980s. Rejecting the dismal, pre-ordained futures the dictatorship tried to impose on them, these teenagers embraced punk—the aesthetic, the music, the liberating feeling of collective anarchy—and defied the state and its security apparatus. Banding together, they faced down surveillance, police violence, blacklisting from schools and jobs, and even imprisonment as they fought to create and control their own individual futures.
Burning Down the Haus is ten years in the making, as Mohr interviewed dozens of key players and researched Stasi files—finding in the process that what had seemed to be just a fascinating story was actually eerily relevant in today’s world. The story of this DIY revolution represents a sort of blueprint for resisting authoritarianism.
Writing with a keen eye for observation and the narrative grace of a novelist, Mohr resurrects this all-but-forgotten story with insight and cinematic urgency. Timely and resonant, Burning Down The Haus is a fiery testament to the power of youthful protest in the face of oppression.

Burning Down The Haus National Book Tour
September 13 – Washington, DC – Kramerbooks & Afterwords
October 2 – Baltimore, MD – Enoch Pratt Free Library
October 3 – Hoboken, NJ – Little City Books w/ Legs McNeil and Future Punx
October 4 – Boston, MA – Boston Public Library
October 9 – Portland, ME – Print: A Bookstore
October 11 – Providence, RI – Riff Raff
October 22 – Austin, TX – Book People
October 25 – Denver, CO –  Tattered Cover in Historic LoDo
October 26 – Seattle, WA – Elliott Bay Book Company
October 29 – Portland, OR – Powell’s Books w/ Peter Ames Carlin
November 1 – Los  Angeles, CA – Book Soup
November 5 – San Francisco, CA – City Lights Bookstore w/ Penelope Houston

ABOUT TIM MOHR
Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of German authors such as Alina Bronsky, Wolfgang Herrndorf, and Charlotte Roche. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Gil Scott-Heron, Duff McKagan of Guns n’ Roses, and Paul Stanley of KISS. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and Inked, among other publications, and he spent several years as a staff editor at Playboy magazine, where he edited Hunter S. Thompson, John Dean, and Harvey Pekar, among others. Prior to starting his writing career he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin.