One of the blemishes that dimmed the triumph of the peaceful reunification of Germany in the 1990s was the appearance of neonazi skinheads and violence directed against foreigners and non-German residents of Germany. Skinheadism had been a rising problem within the FRG before reunification, but there was also a strong GDR cohort to the 1990s skins. To outside observers this rise in eastern skinheads was an unexpected development for not only was the GDR an explicitly antifascist state, the SED dictatorship maintained an extensive domestic security apparatus that clamped down on such behavior. Nonetheless, skinheadism and other gang behavior did not spring fully-formed in 1991 and had been a low-key problem for many years within the GDR. While such gangs lacked the visibility of FRG youth subcultures, they were an issue the GDR government tried to hide. Gangs were not only a reality in the GDR, they were related to various social ills created by the unique conditions within the GDR.

Youth hooliganism and other problems associated with the young had been a problem for both Germanys since their inception. Nazism, loss of many parental figures due to the war, and the wider disruptions of society both in the war's terminal phases and the postwar did create a cohort of children who came of age without visible authority figures. The discrediting of Nazism, avidly reinforced by all the occupation governments, encouraged alternative subcultures. American mass culture and consumer trends proved to be alluring to many of this wartime generation. This was not just limited to Germany as with many aspects of youth culture in the postwar period, American movies, music, and fashion held cultural charisma. In both Germanys in the 1940s and 50s, so-called Halbstarke took cues on rebellion from James Dean and Marlon Brando with blue jeans, greased hair, and leather jackets. The GDR Halbstarke became a problem for the nascent police forces of the GDR as many of these youths saw the police as the enemy during gang feuds (in another case of Americanization, the Halbstarke termed Volkspolizei "sheriffs," using the English word).

In what would become a standard response to the problem of wayward youth, the SED blamed Western influences and conspiracies for its youth problems. There was some kernel of truth to this in that West Berlin was a major nodal point for acquiring Western fashions and GDR youth did cross over to the Western half of the city to see the latest American films. GDR films like Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser acknowledged problems with delinquency, but placed blame for the misdeeds of German youth on the decadence and permissiveness of the capitalist West. As with other attempts to both bring the West's cultural decadence to task and beat Western culture at their own game, the GDR youth films of the 1950s featured their own breezy jazz scores even while it portrayed such Halbstarke culture as both un-German and ill-becoming of sober socialism.

As with the Halbstarke in the West, youth culture and mores changed as the disruption of the postwar years abated and the Wall cut off direct contacts. Counter-intuitively, the Wall marked a period in which GDR society stabilized and the SED and the larger population came to a type of modus vivendi of sorts. Honecker's Neues Ökonomisches System (New Economic System/NES) of the 1960s dialed back on the tight controls of the domestic economy and deemphasized heavy industry as the foundation of the planned economy. Consumer goods were now more available, even if shortages remained endemic, and there was a greater public participation in SED programs and initiatives. Football, for example, became a major aspect of GDR leisure in this period and various clubs emerged as did their respective fandoms.

Yet the stable years of the 1960s and early 70s were not a utopia. The SED's paternalist approach to leisure and life's comforts did rankle with many GDR citizens and while many realized they had to play the supplicant to the state to get the goods, this did not endear the SED to the public. Nor did the public appreciate SED corruption. In the realm of leisure this was seen in Berlin's moved from Dresden to East Berlin at Mielke's behest and it poached some of the best players and had access to higher quality facilities. Not surprisingly, football fans also noted referees were noticeably lax in carding Dynamo. All of this meant that whenever Berlin Dynamo played away games, especially in their former Dresden home, local fans would make a scene. When Schwerin's club lost narrowly to Berlin in 1968, fans threw bottles at the referee and both undercover Stasi and VoPos arrested some twenty Schwerin fans. The 1968 raucous was a sign of the growing undercurrent of football hooliganism within GDR football, especially if hooliganism could be channeled into wider disgruntlement with the state. Outside of Mielke, most of the SED's leadership held that football was a necessary evil and mistrusted an audience culture it could not control. Like its tacit encouragement of rock music with bands like the Puhdys, the SED felt it needed an outlet of Western-style culture, even if it looked askance at them. But this lukewarm sponsorship in turn created subcultures that were semi-autonomous from state control or oversight, such as garage bands aping Western psychedelia such as Pink Floyd or Deep Purple.

One of the looming problems for the GDR in the mid-70s was the failures of the NES and the wider cratering of the planned economy. One of the problems or this slow-motion collapse of the planned economy was that the state's constitutional guarantee of employment resulted in a vast cohort of underemployed youth. The sputtering of the economy and shortages engendered cynicism about the future that the participatory dictatorship encouraged. Hippy subcultures and other loose groups of GDR youth dropping out of society became an emerging problem in the late 1970s. Ingo Hasselbach was an example of this process. The child of two SED loyalists in East Berlin, Hasselbach drifted into a hippy commune when he felt there was no real future for him within the system. Hasselbach's memoir notes that these hippies tended to pull in various disaffected youths and one of their common grievances was the dislike for the SED and hatred of the Soviet "friends." The police and Stasi for their part tried to regulate and arrest the counterculture, but it was like punching at air.

Hasselbach's story though did not end with his hippy life, but he drifted into the nascent skinhead movement in the 1980s. Increased contacts with the West as well as state media's incessant exposes of Neonazism in the West had exposed a number of East Germans to the concept of skinheadism. Neonazi ideas had a low-level degree of organization before the 1980s, but the stagnation of the 1980s led to a steady stream of recruits. The presence of increasing number of foreign Gastarbeiter from friendly socialist countries like Cuba or Vietnam also proved a lighting rod for racism and galvanized some youth into skinheadism. These skinheads would often prey on foreigners or other outcasts like homosexuals for petty crimes knowing that the such individuals could not rely upon the full protection of the authorities.

Skinheadism caught the GDR's security apparatus flatfooted in the 1980s. It had already encouraged discrimination on a sublevel by Stasi investigations of Germans whose friendships with foreign Gastarbeiters went beyond socialist brotherhood into something more personal. The Stasi itself also believed the SEDs own propaganda line to an extent believing that skinheads were a nefarious Western import and devoted resources into chasing down a non-existent pipeline to the West. The state media could also not publicize skinheadism as one of the central axioms of the SED was fascism could only exist in a capitalist milieu, thus key elements of wider GDR society were ignorant of this problem. It as only by the mid-1980s that the police and Stasi began to tackle the problem in a coherent manner. Stasi estimates of skinheadism in 1987 discerned some thirty-seven discrete groups, some with avowedly neonazi orientation and others more concerned with general punk subcultures as well as football teams.

GDR skinheadism, like other GDR subcultures, had a tendency to conflate the the nonconformist subculture with anti-state protest. Skinheadism's neonazi tendencies became one of its selling points given the SED's explicit identification of fascism as its political opposite. Hasselbach, along with Andre Riechart founded in 1988 the January 30 Movement, an explicit, if covert, neonazi organization of skinheads. January 30 Movement's use of slogans like "Heil Hitler" or swastikas was not just an expression of racism, but also a protest against the regime. In 1987, skinhead violence at a punk concert in East Berlin's Zionskirche caused over 3000 DM of damage and exposed the existence of GDR neonazis in a way that was not easy to ignore. Again, both state media and the Stasi blamed the Zionskirche events on Western interlopers, but the Stasi did start to try and infiltrate these groups. The problem was that the usual methods of Stasi infiltration and gaining IMs did not work very well for hardened and small subgroups like January 30. These young men were already cut off from wider society, so the Stasi could not use this threat as a lever to gain an informant. The small size of these cliques also made it much harder to infiltrate. Finally, the implosion of the SED state and wider protests provided the Stasi with a much bigger and ultimately unsolvable problem.