Tim Mohr, Journalist and Author With Duff McKagan and Paul Stanley, Dead at 55

Tim Mohr, the acclaimed journalist, author, and translator who collaborated on memoirs with Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan and Kiss frontman Paul Stanley, died Monday at his home in Brooklyn, New York. He was 55.

Mohr’s publisher, Europa Editions, confirmed his death in a message from executive publisher Michael Reynolds. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

“I loved and admired Tim for his eloquence, his moral compass, his large, rebel heart, his consummate cool,” Reynolds wrote. “He had many friends – a testament to his genuine curiosity about other people and their life experiences, his warm heart and open mind, and to the energy and effort he put into maintaining friendships – and I know that today, like me, they are devastated.”

Mohr started his career as a club DJ in Berlin for much of the 1990s before transitioning to journalism, where his work appeared in New York, The New York Times Book Review, and Details, among others. He was a staff editor for Playboy for several years, editing such diverse voices as Hunter S. Thompson, John Dean, and comic book writer Harvey Pekar. It was there that he hired McKagan in 2008 to write a regular column about finance and the economy.

“To be in Tim’s literary world was a crash-course lesson on how to be concise and informative, with nudges of humor here and there,” McKagan tells Rolling Stone. “He nudged me to be great at all times, and to have humor every breathing second … Tim was mainly responsible for guiding me and pushing me to write my first book It’s So Easy (and other lies). I am forever grateful for his guidance … We lost a good man, a family man, a friend, and a literary lion.”

Following McKagan’s book in 2012, Mohr was recruited to complete Gil Scott-Heron’s unfinished memoir The Last Holiday, released one year after the jazz-funk luminary’s death. He worked alongside Stanley on his 2014 memoir Face the Music: A Life Exposed and industrial pioneer Genesis P-Orridge on the posthumously released 2021 book Nonbinary.

“My dear friend, literary collaborator, pure soul, brilliant mind, street food gourmet and so much more has died from pancreatic cancer,” Stanley wrote on X. “I’m heartbroken. If you knew him, you loved him. The world has lost a bright light.”

But it was Mohr’s own book — one that he worked on for nearly a decade — that would become his defining work. Released in 2018, Burning Down the Haus told the definitive story of the role 1980s East German punks played in bringing down the Berlin Wall and functioned as, as Mohr noted in 2023, a “corrective to the American triumphalist view of the end of the Cold War.” (Rolling Stone dubbed it “a thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world.”)

“I realized I’d been fed the typical American mythology of the importance of Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ speech and how Easterners just wanted to have Big Macs and Levis and all that shit,” Mohr told Rolling Stone in 2018. “Then, here I was confronted with the people who had actually done the work: they had sacrificed their bodies to fight the dictatorship. It takes a lot more than a latent desire for hamburgers to bring down a dictatorship.”

Rolling Stone named Haus, which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, as one of its best books of the year. “I’ve been waiting for a punk book to come out that’s as good as Please Kill Me,” music journalist Legs McNeil said of his landmark oral history of the genre.

“It’s amazing to me that a bunch of kids with bad haircuts could change their society. … The punks kept fighting,” Mohr said in 2018. “They’re being arrested, beaten and sent to jail. They would come out of jail and put their leather jacket back on and go back out to that fight. That paved the way for that whole opposition. It showed others that it was possible to resist and survive.”

Since 2008, Mohr also found success as a German-to-English translator, bringing to life seven novels from lauded German novelist Alina Bronsky alongside books by Dorothea Dieckmann, Charlotte Roche, and Stefanie de Velasco.

“[His] ear for the cadences of his source language was second-to-none and whose facility and inventiveness with English made his translations exciting to read,” Reynolds wrote. “[He] was determined to establish his reputation as a translator of female voices, and, at the same time, of voices from outside the mainstream.”

“I was devastated to hear about Tim’s death. I still cannot believe it, because the world of literature and translation has its own rules and to me people who created great things never die,” Bronsky adds. “I always felt my novels were completely safe with him, being treated in his very own, unique, sensitive, and brilliant way. I am so grateful that his name will stay forever on the front pages of my American translations.”