Tim Mohr, Who Chronicled the East German Punk Scene and Co-Wrote Rock Memoirs, Dies at 55
Tim Mohr (Photo by Thomas Hoefgen)
Tim Mohr, the journalist and translator who chronicled the political importance of the 1980s East German punk scene and co-wrote memoirs with Guns N' Roses' Duff McKagan and Kiss leader Paul Stanley, has died. Michael Reynolds, Mohr's friend and publisher at Europa Editions, confirmed the news in a statement to Pitchfork, writing that Mohr died at his home in Brooklyn. Reynolds confirmed in a statement to Rolling Stone that the cause of death was pancreatic cancer. Mohr was 55.
'Tim was not only someone I knew professionally; he was also a good and dear friend with whom I have had a lot of fun over the almost twenty years we knew each other and with whom I shared many important moments,' Reynolds wrote in a heartfelt statement about Mohr. He continued: 'I am inconsolable at his passing. I am furious with the universe. I miss him terribly. I loved and admired Tim for his eloquence, his moral compass, his large, rebel heart, his consummate cool.'
Mohr began his career as a DJ living in Berlin in the 1990s before returning to the States and working as a journalist in New York. Over the years, he published stories in The New York Times Book Review, Details, Inked, and New York Magazine, and eventually became an editor at Playboy. Toward the end of the aughts, Mohr hired Guns N' Roses' bassist Duff McKagan to write a financial column for Playboy—a relationship that would lead to the two men collaborating on McKagan's 2012 memoir It's So Easy (and other lies). McKagan remembered Mohr in a post on X today (April 2), writing: 'We lost a good man, a FAMILY man, a friend, and a literary LION.'
Mohr also worked on Gil Scott-Heron's unfinished memoir The Last Holiday, Paul Stanley's 2014 memoir Face the Music: A Life Exposed, and Genesis P-Orridge's posthumously published book Nonbinary from 2021.
In 2018, Mohr released his own book, Burning Down the Haus, which chronicled the role of East German punks in the political shifts of 1980s Germany—and the toppling of the Berlin Wall. The book was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
For many years, Mohr worked as a German-to-English translator who translated Alina Bronsky's seven novels as well as works by Dorothea Dieckmann, Charlotte Rochee, Stefanie de Velasco, and Alex Beer. He especially focused on female writers and texts outside of mainstream literature.
Revisit 'How to Create the Underground in Times of Surveillance: On Tim Mohr's East German Punk History, Burning Down the Haus.'
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
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