Hacke: ...we all said that the world was going to end in 1984. And until 1984 we were completely convinced of this. That's another reason why the Wall didn't bother us. On the contrary: even when the Wall was still standing we wanted it back.
taz: The Neubauten song "Kollaps" (collapse) from 1981 went: "Bis zum Kollaps ist nicht viel Zeit / Drei Jahre noch." (There's not much time until the collapse / Just three years.)
There you have it. We were totally convinced that the world would end. But that didn't worry us.
Was that a spin-off of the omnipresent Orwell paranoia of the time?
It was certainly linked to George Orwell, but the main thing was that in West Berlin we really thought it would've been great to witness the end of the world.
That wasn't what people were thinking in London or Paris in the early eighties. Not for nothing is the Berlin of the time known for a sort of End Time existentialism, also referred to as "Berlin toughness".
We certainly flirted with this mood of doom. But we also had a lot of fun with it. Life was good, we felt fantastic.
(By the way, Blixa's Rede/Speech cannot be recommended too highly.)
