TIM MOHR, author of Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Renowned music journalist and award-winning German-language translator Tim Mohr tells 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, as these teens defy the dictatorship, rejecting the dismal, pre-ordained futures that the state tries to impose on them by embracing the aesthetic, music, and liberating feeling of collective anarchy of punk. Banding together, they faced down surveillance, repression, beatings, and even imprisonment as they fought to create and control their own, individual futures.

Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of authors, including 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.