Bettina Köster, a singer, songwriter, saxophonist and leading figure in the cultural vanguard of 1980s West Berlin, died on March 16 at her home in Capaccio, Italy. She was 66.
Her friend and former bandmate Gudrun Gut announced the death on social media but did not provide a cause.
During the Cold War, West Berlin was a 185-square-mile patch of West Germany deep inside the Communist east, encircled by walls and armed guards and kept alive by government subsidies. Large sections of the city still bore the bullet holes and rubble fields of World War II.
By the late 1970s, it had become a refuge and a destination for artists like Ms. Köster, who had lived in West Berlin as a student. Young Germans went there to avoid the military draft and stayed because of the cheap rent. Underground spaces did triple duty as music venues, art galleries and informal squats.
Cut off from the West, a native, wholly original culture of D.I.Y. creativity flourished among the ruins.
“West Berlin, especially with the Wall around it, was basically like a shabby but fun private club,” Ms. Köster said in a 2017 interview with the website Jungle World. “None of us had any money, so there was a great sense of solidarity.”
After playing in a number of short-lived bands, Ms. Köster joined Ms. Gut and three other women in 1979 to form Mania D, one of the few all-female bands in the city. Though every member of the group played an instrument, one of the founding principles was that they should each play something else: Trained on classical guitar, Ms. Köster picked up the saxophone.
“We just traipsed through the tulips and made music,” she told Kaput magazine in 2021.
Like much of the scene, Mania D was resolutely anti-commercial: They rarely recorded their performances and released just one single, “Track 4,” a recording that came about almost accidentally, during a 1981 studio visit with the famed BBC D.J. John Peel.
Mr. Peel called the quintet the “queens of noise” and said the unnamed song that they had performed on the air was among his favorites that year.
In addition to performing in the band, Ms. Köster and Ms. Gut opened a clothing store, Eisengrau, where they also sold records, gave haircuts, hosted art shows and performed. It became a cultural hub for the city’s bustling avant-garde.
In 1981, the two split off from Mania D to form Malaria!, named for a stray cat they had taken in. The band was more refined and focused, reflecting the shift from the scruffiness of punk to the dark melodies of post-punk and new wave.
Fitting their cool, distant stage presence, the women dressed entirely in black — riding boots, jodhpurs, tight tunics — and wore red carnations, the symbol of the Socialist movement.
The band toured extensively in Europe and the United States, opening for or pairing with groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Birthday Party and New Order.
In New York City, they opened for John Cale, a founding member of the Velvet Underground, at the Mudd Room and for Nina Hagen, one of the German punk scene’s pioneers, at Studio 54.
The band had a single hit, “Kaltes Klares Wasser” (“Cold Clear Water”), though “hit” is relative — it didn’t chart, and its popularity remained within the confines of the post-punk universe.
But as a distillation of the Berlin post-punk sound, “Kaltes Klares Wasser” became a favorite of critics and fans, and even today is heralded as a touchstone for the era.
“We never thought that we sounded like the Eighties,” Ms. Köster told Kaput. “The Eighties sounded like us.”
Bettina Köster was born on June 5, 1959, in Herford, a town in central West Germany, where she studied classical guitar and piano as a child.
When she was 10, she moved to West Berlin with her family, but she returned to West Germany six years later. In 1978, she was drawn back to the city, this time to study at the College for the Arts (now the University of the Arts).
Her time atop the West Berlin underground scene was brief. In 1983, she relocated to New York City. Disenchanted with making music, she left Malaria! the next year.
For a while, Ms. Köster worked as a house cleaner, and then as an accountant for Danceteria, a nightclub in the Flatiron district. Eventually, she became a market analyst for a German bank.
Ms. Köster’s re-entry into music came slowly. During the late 1980s, she recorded in private and rarely performed in public, she told TAZ, a German news site, in 2017.
She composed the music for the 12-minute-long movie “Peppermills” (1997), which won an award for best short film at the 1998 Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2006, she and Jessie Evans, a musician from San Francisco, released the album “Autonervous.” Three years later, Ms. Köster released her first solo project, “Queen of Noise.” Another solo album, “Kolonel Silvertop,” appeared in 2017.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Köster left New York in the 2000s for a peripatetic life in Europe, living for stretches in Italy and Austria before settling in Capaccio, a town south of Naples.
In 2021, she told the German magazine L.Mag that she identified as nonbinary.
She never made much money, and nearly went bankrupt financing her last album. But she insisted that it was worth it.
“You have to be prepared to maybe even go hungry sometimes,” she told TAZ. “But in return, that sacrifice allows you an artistic freedom that’s otherwise impossible. You have to decide: Do I want to live to create? Or create to live?”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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