The SPUR ("traces") project was developed in cooperation with the Pop History research group at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF). For the duration of the project, the ZZF's historians and pop experts Nikolai Okunew, Tom Koltermann and Florian Völker are on hand to advise on technical matters and scientific assessments. The Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur is funding the project at the Archive of Youth Cultures.
The Archive of Youth Cultures (AdJ) in Berlin has been collecting material from and about youth pop and subcultures for over 25 years. Its fanzine collection is particularly extensive, with over 20,000 individual issues published in the most diverse scenes worldwide from the 1950s to the present day.
However, there are hardly any fanzines from the GDR in this unique collection. This is due to the fact that in authoritarian regimes such as the SED state, non-conformist pop and subcultures were subjected to state repression and persecution and the scene's own forms of expression were massively suppressed and censored. Until the autumn of 1989, it was almost impossible for members of such scenes to publish their own fanzines.
They only had the chance to place their own articles in fanzines outside the GDR. Fanzines with such articles rarely found their way back into the GDR. In the vast majority of cases, they were intercepted by the Stasi. Nevertheless, members of so-called ‘negative-decadent’ scenes repeatedly used fanzines from the West as a mouthpiece – above all punks from the GDR, many of whose articles can be found in fanzines from the AdJ collection.
So far, only a fraction of such ‘traces’ of pop and subcultural scenes from the GDR have been discovered in the archive's own collection. The SPUR project aims to remedy this situation. Individual fanzine collections from the 1950s to the mid-1990s from the fields of beat, rock'n'roll, punk, heavy metal, gothic/dark wave, (indie) rock, skinheads, science fiction and football will be systematically researched. The ‘traces’ found are compiled in a bibliography, digitised as PDF/A documents and made accessible for research at a digital workstation in the AdJ.
In a second step, a source edition will be compiled from the ‘traces’ of pop and subcultural scenes found in the GDR.
You can find out more about the SPUR project on the website of the Archive of Youth Cultures.