A month after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the East German rock star Petra Zieger and her band winched their instruments up to the top of the Brandenburg Gate, looming 85ft over the government district.
For a little over a decade she and her husband, the band’s drummer Peter Taudte, had been testing the boundaries of what artists could get away with under the stifling censorship of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Her hit single Das Eis taut (“The Ice is Thawing”), thought to be the only piece of music ever performed atop the landmark, captured the zeitgeist: a volatile mixture of optimism, wariness, uncertainty and excitement.
