On the death of Bettina Köster: Legend of the West Berlin postpunk scene

Maybe it was the commanding tone that Bettina Köster developed in the West Berlin music scene from the late 1970s onwards. Born in 1958 in Herford, grew up in the walled city, Köster opened the Eisengrau together with Gudrun Gut in 1979 on Goltzstrasse in Schöneberg. The shop apartment became an avant-garde meeting place that gave birth to bands such as Die Tödliche Doris and Einstreichende Neuhäusern.

“It was a time for experimentation because we completely rejected what was already there,” Köster recalled in a 2017 Rbb documentary. This rejection manifested itself, among other things, in unpolished, rebellious music.

Köster first played the saxophone with Din A Testbild and then founded the band Mania D. with Gut and Beate Bartel, which broke up in 1981. To the five-person, all-female follow-up project Malaria! belonged again to Gut and Köster, who lived openly as a lesbian.

The group immediately attracted attention with their gritty postpunk sound. Songs like “Kaltes Klares Wasser” and “Your Turn To Run” were underground hits. Malaria! toured with Siouxsie and the Banshees and Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party and appeared at the opening night of Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982.

The following year, Bettina Köster moved to New York, and in 1984 Malaria! on. The band members had fallen out. For years, Köster and Gut only communicated with each other through lawyers. In the USA, Köster got by with various jobs, music was just a hobby – until things started to tingle again in the noughties.

The album “Autonervous” was released in 2006 and three years later “Queen of Noise” – that’s what the legendary British radio presenter John Peel once called her. The sound palette collected ranged from Beatles covers to minimalist spoken word tracks to rough postpunk with a Malaria! vibe.

And Köster, who now lived partly in Italy, was also seen from time to time in Berlin. As a 2021 book and exhibition tribute to the bands Mania D., Malaria! and Matador appeared under the title “M_Documents”, there was a reconciliation between the band members, who were on stage together again in Silent Green. Köster released his last album, “Kolonel Silvertop,” in 2017 and had his own show on Radio Eins for a few years.

As has now become known through an obituary shared by Gudrun Gut on Facebook, among others, Bettina Köster died on March 16th in Capaccio Paestum, Italy. She was 66 years old.