Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk 9781501314087, 9781501314094, 9781501314117

Citation preview

Beyond No Future

Beyond No Future Cultures of German Punk Edited by

Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan, 2016 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Harald Hauswald/OSTKREUZ All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1408-7 PB: 978-1-5013-1412-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1411-7 ePub: 978-1-5013-1410-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures vii Notes on Contributors viii Acknowledgments x

1 Punk Matters: An Introduction Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan

PART ONE

Punk Spaces

2 “I’d rather choose the curb”: Topographical Writing in Recent German Punk Dennis Borghardt 17 3 Beyond Boredom: Engaged Living in the Wilhelmine Wandervogel and West German Punk Matthew Sikarskie 35

PART TWO Performative Politics 4 The Politics of Lyrics in German Punk Peter Brandes 55 5 Subcultural Studies between the Blocs: Unexpected Cosmopolitanism and Stubborn Blind Spots in East German Theories of Punk Seth Howes 71

1

vi

PART THREE

CONTENTS

Against Fascism

6 Nazi Signifiers and the Narrative of Class Warfare in British Punk Karen Fournier 91 7 “1979 Deutschland”: Holocaust, West German Memory Culture, and Punk’s Intervention into the Everyday Melanie Eis and Fabian Eckert 109 8 Sex in the Bunker: DAF’s Staging of Punk Pleasure Cyrus M. Shahan 129 9 Cold Wave: French Post-Punk Fantasies of Berlin Mirko M. Hall 149 10 German Mania: A Coda Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan

Select Bibliography 171 Index 174

167

LIST OF FIGURES

2.1 Front album cover of Bombing your Kleinstadt by Nein Nein Nein/Kaput Krauts (Twisted Chords, 2007, CD). Courtesy Kidnap Music—Tante Guerilla GbR. 23 2.2 Front album cover of Du machst die Stadt kaputt! by Kotzreiz (Aggressive Punk Produktionen, 2011, CD). Courtesy F&M FERAL MEDIA. 28 8.1 Front album cover of Gold und Liebe by DAF (Virgin, 1981, CD). Courtesy Gabi Delgado. 140 8.2 Back album cover of Gold und Liebe by DAF (Virgin, 1981, CD). Courtesy Gabi Delgado. 8.3 Front album cover of Alles ist gut by DAF (Virgin/Conny Plan, 1980, LP). Courtesy Gabi Delgado. 142 8.4 Back album cover of Alles ist gut by DAF (Virgin/Conny Plan, 1980, LP). Courtesy Gabi Delgado. 143

141

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Dennis Borghardt is Research Assistant in German Studies at the University of Duisburg–Essen. He is completing a dissertation on the reception of antiquity in eighteenth-century Germany. His research focuses on the relationship between natural philosophy and aesthetics in the eighteenth century, literary theory, the reception of antiquity, the poetics of genre, and recent German literature. Peter Brandes is Adjunct Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He is the author of Goethes Faust. Poetik der Gabe und Selbstreflexion der Dichtung (2003), Leben die Bilder bald? Ästhetische Konzepte bildlicher Lebendigkeit in der Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (2013), and a number of essays on various authors such as Goethe, Heine, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, and Celan. Fabian Eckert is Research Associate in the Department of History (History Education) at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His research focuses on sound studies and app-based learning. He is the author and producer of the multimedia audio tour “Potsdam 1989. 14 Orte der Friedlichen Revolution.” Melanie Eis is Research Fellow in the Department of North American Studies at the University of Cologne. She has recently completed her dissertation on the literary self-presentation of authors of the Beat Generation. Her research interests include popular culture, Cold War culture, representations of the Holocaust and Civil Rights, as well as literature and science. Karen Fournier is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has recently authored The Words and Music of Alanis Morissette and is at work on revisions to a monograph for Oxford University Press on the role played by women in the early British punk movement.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ix

Mirko M. Hall is Associate Professor of German Studies and Chair of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures at Converse College. He is the author of Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking against the Grain, 1800–1980 and a number of essays on the aesthetics and intellectual history of music. Seth Howes is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His research examines the unofficial filmmaking, music, performance art, and poetry scenes of the late German Democratic Republic. He has published essays on popular culture, subculture, and literature in the German Studies Review, the Germanic Review, and the Journal of Popular Culture. Cyrus M. Shahan is Assistant Professor of German at Colby College. He is the author of Punk Rock and German Crises: Adaptation and Resistance after 1977 and co-translator on Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy, and has published essays on media and terrorism, technology and music, and globalization and agency. Matthew Sikarskie is Assistant Professor of German at Michigan State University, where he received his PhD in December 2014. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of participatory culture and technology, specializing in twentieth-century German youth groups.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No book comes together without expert editorial support, and for this we are glad to be able to thank Ally-Jane Grossan, Michelle Chen, and Leah Babb-Rosenfeld at Bloomsbury Academic. We also thank all of the musicians whose lyrics, artwork, and public commentary form the basis of our book’s individual chapters. We are grateful to our colleagues, who reviewed the various stages of our manuscript; their thoughtful and insightful comments were indispensable to us as we worked with our contributors on a cohesive book. Thanks also to Richard Langston for the detailed commentary that he provided as the discussant for the 2012 German Studies Association panel from which this project germinated. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Harald Hauswald and the OSTKREUZ photographers’ agency for permission to use the photograph on the front cover of this book, taken at the East Berlin Bluesmesse, in 1983. The high historical-documentary value of Mr. Hauswald’s pioneering work is exceeded only by the quality of its composition, and we are excited to include this piece in the book.

1 Punk Matters: An Introduction Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan

Postwar German history was defined by a broad spectrum of cultural, political, and aesthetic reconstructions. Indeed, the decades after 1945 witnessed a breakneck rate of official and unofficial shifts in and strategies for defining (East and West) Germany via economic, military, and popular means. In West Germany, taking their cues from Marlon Brando and James Dean, “hooligan” youths found an inadvertent challenge to the unequal “economic miracle” of the 1950s in the form of t-shirts, Levis jeans, and auto repair. They unsettled, thereby, West German normalization with their embrace of working class suffering. Meanwhile, in the other German territory circumscribed by the emergent Cold War paradigm—the German Democratic Republic—young people balanced their socialization within vehemently anticapitalist educational institutions, professional settings, and social structures against their avid consumption of Western popular culture, leading to complicated appropriations and modifications of Western youthsubcultural activity to fit their East German life contexts.1 Responding to West Germany’s geostrategic role as a launching pad for the US war in Vietnam and the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, students in the Federal Republic picked up protest cries for social equality from around the globe circa 1968. But protestors’ indictment of states—of fascist politics coming to the aid of capitalist interests—had radically different affective, psychological, and historical impact in the land that had brought Taylorist efficiency to killing. Across the Wall, internecine struggles over the direction of economic management began that would lead, in 1971, to a

2

BEYOND NO FUTURE

power transfer from Walter Ulbricht to Erich Honecker, and a transition to the consumerist emphases of so-called real existing socialism. As this transpired, West German media coverage of the tragedy of the Prague Spring ran simultaneously with East German broadcasters’ inveighing against American (and West German) involvement in Vietnam. Global conflicts and class-based, historical, and contemporary tensions rooted in postwar life in Germany, in particular, laid the groundwork for chaos, contradiction, and weirdness to take hold of both Germanies after 1968. The student revolutions in West Germany ultimately gave way to armed insurrection in the form of West German domestic terrorism, a decades-long battle that saw both the state and terrorists enact proto-fascist tendencies each disavowed. In 1976, a decade after he was blacklisted from performing in East Germany, the dissident musician and poet Wolf Biermann, one of the GDR’s most influential musicians, was expatriated while on tour in West Germany. Yet, rather than solidify the East German state’s position in cultural affairs, this decisive move only fostered uncertainty and embarrassment; a petition in support of Biermann signed by many of East Germany’s most prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals humiliated the political leadership, and prompted criticism of the expatriation and cultural crackdown from communist and left-wing parties in West Germany. Now, like never before, the Party’s insistence on univocality seemed like a sign of weakness; the florescence of alternative political activisms, unorthodox cultural practices, and dropout lifestyles in the interstices of the Republic— the courtyards of tenements, the private apartments of artists and writers, the cafés in evangelical churches—only accelerated after Biermann’s expulsion. When considering the history of the German 1980s, given how the decade ended, it is tempting to construe the 1989–1990 Wende as a logical telos—as Fukuyama’s “end of history,” as a final and predestined comity toward which all political or social developments in the two Germanies had inexorably pointed all along. “Now what belongs together will grow together,” the former German chancellor Willy Brandt is reputed to have proclaimed on the eve of German unification. Springing forth from this organicism comes a whole raft of assumptions about the natural wholeness of German culture, identity, and nationhood, once wounded, now whole. To this pseudo-biological theodicy, one must counterpose the cultures of German punk: a lewd and shocking aesthetic, regarded as a threat to public order by both Germanies’ police forces, that set itself against the statesponsored and citizen-initiated projects meant to rescue Germanness from its past for the sparkling promise of a democratic future. While punk had been given its name in the Anglo-American media, German musicians, writers, artists, and journalists near-instantaneously made punk their own thing. As in the United Kingdom or the United States—or, for that matter, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium—records were pressed, concerts organized, and zines published before the end of 1977. Inasmuch as all German punks’

PUNK MATTERS: AN INTRODUCTION

3

interventions engaged with the peculiarities of German cultural history, this book’s explorations of the cultures of punk in both Germanies are likewise bound to the particularly German weirdness and tensions sketched above. Punk rock seems so inevitable to German cultural history precisely because of the tensions in Germany’s Nazi past and present, its division post-1949, and the international Cold War powers dominating daily life. Though punk’s origins are Anglo—first London’s East End, then New York City—its apocalyptic mantra “no future,” its investment in detritus, and its desire for shock found particularly fertile ground in a West German landscape speckled with US nuclear missiles, in a rubble-filled Berlin, and in a land where even into the 1980s, there were new revelations about perpetrators of Nazi atrocities in positions of economic and political power. These contradictions at the core of postwar reconstruction are legible all over punk rock. Band names such as Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) and Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime, a reference to Adolf Loos’s infamous manifesto-cum-provocation of 1908), concerts such as the famously misspelled “Geniale Dilletanten” (Ingenious Dilletantes), or songs such as “Angriff auf’s Schlaraffenland” (Attack on the Land of Plenty) all took aim at the dead-end trap of the economic miracle, new construction, and theories of social intervention. The first German punk bands formed in 1976, and punk concerts began to be organized shortly thereafter; the first German punk records began appearing, with both major and independent labels, in 1977 and 1978. Notwithstanding facile pronouncements of punk’s death in the early 1980s, it has never gone away. As even a cursory encounter with German punk’s lyrical conceits or musical stylistics reveals, in its four decades of existence, German punk has balanced resolute openness to aesthetic and political developments taking place abroad with an insistence on the unique stakes of Germany’s own complicated history, its political and social problems, and its geopolitical positioning within Europe—first during the Cold War, and then during its aftermath. A particularly limpid example of this transnational–national duality is offered by S.Y.P.H.’s exhortations against progress, as these aimed to stave off a resurgent fascist state in the form of the Federal Republic, buttressed by the United States as an aspect of Cold War geostrategy; the global and the local scale were always intertwined, in German punk, and remain so. Specifically, German texts and contexts positively haunt the transnational, multicontinental history of the evolving aesthetic practice that people call “punk.” Accordingly, the individual contributions to this anthology demonstrate how the chimeric glow of German punk style—its sonic, physical, and aesthetic presentations—bathed each of the two Germanies’ insistence on monovocal historical progress, as embodied by their states’ very existence, in a sickly light that revealed myriad imperfections. In halting the homogenizing momentum of jubilee-oriented, monarchic narrativities,

4

BEYOND NO FUTURE

English punks appropriated the uniformed look and master symbols of the worst episode in German history, National Socialism’s twelve-year reign. From these British punks, East and West German punks borrowed noise, self-abasement, and anarchy symbols but recalibrated them to challenge their own Republics’ mastery of the past. Symbolic exchange, borrowing, and appropriation have long defined the transnational history of punk, a history that—pace Crass, who sang “Punk is Dead” in 1978—is still ongoing. Moving beyond “no future”— that is, moving beyond confirming punk as chaos or style—this anthology illustrates how paradigmatically German punk traced the global fissures effaced by the construction of two Germanies in the postwar period. If the images and sounds of Germany’s reunification in 1990 were transmitted worldwide, in an emblematic and highly mediated performance of digital globalization, German punks had made their own preliminary contributions to this moment—they had sprayed graffiti on the Wall, transgressed the Cold War’s most impermeable barrier to perform concerts, and had even serenaded the end of German division avant la lettre, decrying both the stability of German division (and indeed, of all social formations) as they went. Wherever punk is found, and nowhere more than in Germany, its anti-élan—its noninternalization of contradictions—visually registered the knowledge of a fraught historical situation, a knowledge twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin once described as coming in a “lightning flash.” With its music, and influential aesthetic of incompetence, punk’s textual afterlives added the “long roll of thunder that follows,”2 a corpus of unequivocally chaotic but thematically and strategically heterogeneous texts that exploded binaries, rejected teleologies, and profaned customs. Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk combines eight chapters by scholars working in a variety of disciplines. Each contributor studies a particular moment, a unique gesture, and a specific constellation of political and aesthetic considerations, in the cultural and social history of punk in German-speaking Europe. Drawing as they do upon philosophical accounts of boredom, speech-act theory, and performance studies, this book models a truly interdisciplinary practice of punk studies. Taking for granted the multimediality of punk culture itself, then, the contributors incorporate insights from across the disciplines into their accounts of German texts and contexts as these were mobilized by, or refracted through, punk. If German punk can be understood as a rejection of the transnational forces—economic and political—that traced a military–political fault line onto Germany’s very geography, then the recent reanimation of those fault lines (in particular, the use of the “Cold War” as a theoretical model for interpreting the present) makes understanding German punk crucial for understanding punk’s global-born self-articulation. (The line from late 1970s West Berlin’s Ätztussis to present-day Moscow’s Pussy Riot, for instance, begs to be traced.) By connecting the concerns of punk to broader problems of (post)

PUNK MATTERS: AN INTRODUCTION

5

modern experience, and exploring the profound influence punk has exerted on a variety of cultural subspheres in the decades since its first emergence, German punk studies have the opportunity and task of recovering an untold story from history’s dustbin.

Decentering Anglophone punk “Look at me,” the Australian musician and author Nick Cave sings, “I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, I’m glowing.”3 A Sisyphean tale of love, the 2013 song “Jubilee Street” by the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds may seem an unlikely foil for an anthology on German punk cultures—even if the reader remembers Cave’s onscreen appearance, with his post-punk group the Bad Seeds, in Wim Wenders’s indelible Berlin film Wings of Desire (1987). After all, images and sounds typically conjured by punk have little to do with love and even less to do with Australia. But then again, contemporary images of punk have little to do with that anarchic and ephemeral signifier (and nothing to do with Germany), as New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gala exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which juxtaposed fashion photography with portraits of punks, made painfully clear.4 One assemblage has Sid Vicious on the left, and a model’s presentation of haut couture designer Karl Lagerfeld’s contemporary iteration of his trash aesthetic for House of Chanel on the right; despite their proximity on the page, one would be hard-pressed to confuse the two self-presentations. The textural tension between the two kinds of images invites us to distinguish “authentic” from “co-opted” cultural moments. But understanding why the image on the right is not in itself punk, and instead an image marshaling punk’s visual force to sell clothing concepts, involves understanding the connection between the Bad Seeds’ “Jubilee Street” and the 1980 cries of “Zurück zum Beton” (Back to Concrete) by the West German punk band S.Y.P.H.5 Namely, notwithstanding Malcolm McClaren’s or Vivien Westwood’s commercial ambitions, when the punk aesthetic as practiced by thousands of musicians, writers, and self-stylers on every continent invited us to look at it, regard it in all its vibrations and contradictions, this was a means to the unquantifiable, unmarketable end of symbolic disturbance and aesthetic chaos—not an attempt to sell clothing, records, or exhibition catalogs. And even if some few bands saw major label deals, punk, as practiced throughout the world, was by no means a standardized commodity whose dissemination was centrally directed from record-industry boardrooms. No: resounding in dozens of different countries beginning in the late 1970s, punk’s symbolic noise—its kaleidoscopy of détournements, its vulgarities, its oscillations between minimalism and maximalism—always appropriated and adapted, but never slavishly duplicated, the Sex Pistols’ or Ramones’ initial sneers.

6

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Nick Cave’s career is inextricable from the German terrain his band Birthday Party called home in the early 1980s: from the West Berlin mapped in his lyrics of the period, the West Berlin in which his shrieks resounded during the band’s infamous live performances. And punk’s unfolding, in Germany and elsewhere, is unthinkable without his contributions. To judge from their choice of analytic objects, several generations of scholars writing in English considered punk’s social history and multimedia aesthetic to be largely Anglo-American in nature. This was perhaps understandable in 1978, when Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style: a book nearing its thirtieth printing whose enormous influence cannot be overstated, notwithstanding subsequent debates about the validity of subculture as an analytic category.6 Even there, Hebdige’s work pointed out past the borders of Britain and the United States proper, to the West Indies and Jamaica—the rapid and irreversible internationalization of punk culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s made all such assumptions about punk’s binationality and monolinguality untenable. If London was ground zero, the place where in 1976 punk was first made and consumed as a mass-mediated phenomenon accompanied by its very own moral panic, within five years punk records had been written, recorded, and distributed from São Paulo to Tokyo, from Tampere to Johannesburg. Nevertheless, punk scholarship, even when at its strongest and most influential—as it is in the work of Hebdige, or of Stacy Thompson, Tricia Henry, and Neil Nehring7—has focused primarily, or indeed exclusively, on the Anglo-American beginnings (and self-styled endings) of punk culture, often to the complete exclusion of non-Anglophone, non-English and non-American, and non-1970s punk phenomena. This scholarly focus on Anglo-American punk (con)texts also registers in writing for popular audiences. For example, a 2006 Encyclopedia of Punk offered a map of punk whose proportionality says perhaps all that needs to be said about popular representations of punk’s cultural geography, as viewed by those who write in English about it: The United States dominates more than three-fifths of the world map of punk, with “UK & Ireland” providing an additional fifth of the illustrated terrain. Meanwhile, Africa, Asia, continental Europe, and Australia, drawn smaller than “UK & Ireland,” have merely four countries identified as ever having produced a punk band: Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and France. Mercator, have mercy! The Encyclopedia of Punk’s editors declaim any pretension to comprehensiveness or definitiveness; and to be sure, no such map could hope to include every punk band’s name, no matter how finely it was printed. Nonetheless, views like these suffer not simply from a case of being too rigorous about policing canonicity (what is punk?) and periodicity (when was punk?), but more generally from a distorted view of political geography in punk’s (and our own) age of mass mediation, and of the globalized production and circulation of culture.

PUNK MATTERS: AN INTRODUCTION

7

Notwithstanding distortive representations like this one, the radical transnationality of punk’s history, a history spanning continents that was lived across a wide variety of languages and national contexts, has begun to come into view. If crackdowns on Indonesian punks’ self-styling and the imprisonment of Russia’s Pussy Riot dominate the headlines internationally, recent scholarship on punk has moved beyond the Anglo-American frame that characterized earlier work, looking instead at punk’s lability and portability, its ability to be adapted to fit (i.e., to critique or ironize) economic and social settings radically different from those it had originally inhabited. This has been true not just of Anglophone scholarship on punk, whose recent forays into the exploration of non-European punk cultures include pioneering work on Indonesia by Jeremy Wallach and Joanna Pickles8 along with new writing on the Czech Republic by Ondřej Císař and Martin Koubek.9 Increasingly, writing in languages other than English has begun to account for punk’s internationalization not as a secondary phenomenon, to be understood from the perspective of punk’s putative point of origin in London and New York, but from plural local perspectives. Such work, exemplified on the scholarly end of the spectrum by Marc Gras’s Punk: Tres décadas de resistencia10 and on the archival end by work like Rémi Pépin’s Rebelles: une histoire de rock alternatif,11 about France, or Sezgin Boynik’s and Tolga Güldallı’s volume on Turkish punk,12 represents an important geographical corrective merely by existing, and offers vital theoretical insights, as well. Telling stories about punk that begin in times and places far removed from conventional punk narratives, and considering the social and political circumstances that conditioned the emergence of these other punk cultures, such contributions productively decenter punk studies. Indeed, they unsettle its basic assumptions about the directionality of punk’s lines of influence, and about the primacy (or derivativeness) of non-English-speaking punk cultures operating on an unstudied periphery, outside the Anglo-American center. Documenting the adaptive and appropriative practices by which punk practitioners in a variety of different places made punk’s performative force their own, such accounts rewrite punk history in a very important way. They replace longstanding scholarly indifference to punk’s globalization with a nuanced, differentiated account of cultural innovation that emphasizes the polyvalence of punk signifiers, the imbrication of local and global ways of making culture, and the active participation of non-Anglophone punks in the reception, and reproduction, of punk culture.

Remembering Deutschpunk Nowhere has the recent proliferation of writing on non-Anglo-American punk been more pronounced than in Germany. In 1999, Ronald Galenza

8

BEYOND NO FUTURE

and Heinz Havemeister’s Wir wollen immer artig sein13 incorporated scholarly insights alongside interviews with principals of the East German punk (and alternative) music scenes; the book is now in its third edition, and counting. Two years later, no less estimable a publisher than Suhrkamp Verlag published Jürgen Teipel’s Verschwende deine Jugend, a curated oral history of West German punk and post-punk cultures. And in the interim, books on specific bands or figures,14 short volumes on particular cities’ scenes,15 and monographs on new wave and post-punk like Frank Apunkt Schneider’s and Hollow Skai’s16 have appeared, supplementing and occasionally contradicting one another in their retrospective stock-taking of German punk’s history and significance within the broader sweep of postwar cultural history. Alongside these synthetic works, a welter of memoirs, documentary films,17 and even novels,18 have appeared to further fill out a rich, diverse, and ever-growing body of knowledge about German punk. Accompanying these retrospective projects, the (re)publication of punk and post-punk manifestos and archival documents—ranging from Wolfgang Müller’s Geniale Dilletanten19 to the influential edited collection Rawums,20 both back in print—has given new generations of scholars, and fans, access to some of German punk’s primary (and primal) texts. This archival impulse extends beyond the recovering the printed page, to reproducing the spiral scratch of the phonograph. Reissue efforts and even dedicated reissue labels, like Hanover’s Höhnie Records, have made hundreds of German punk records in both digital and analog formats, salvaging records first available in one-off micro-pressings during the 1980s and keeping acknowledged “classics”—like Slime’s first LP, or A+P’s debut album—in print. This productivity and reproduction raises the question as to why there is such interest in a subculture that, according to West Germany’s selfdeclared “first punk” Peter Hein, lasted for one year, in one city, in one bar. Accurate within the logic of punk, Hein’s delimiting punk history as “summer 1977 to summer 1978” in Düsseldorf’s Ratinger Hof is not an attempt to devalue any allegiance to or enactment of the subculture post1978. Rather, his assertion must be framed through the idea of “no future,” a necessary disavowal of futurity advanced at a moment where foreswearing duration and codification had real stakes. But Hein’s temporal-philosophical cleverness in bracketing punk is not the reason for a resurgent investment in punk. Nor are financially flush former punks who want to read stories about their pasts to blame. What makes reading German punk today so imperative is what made its practitioners see it as what cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg calls a “mattering machine.”21 A flexible continuum of practices that youth in the late 1970s and 1980s felt made possible a rejection—and subversion—of daily life as dictated from above, West German punk rejected and unveiled as banal the contemporaneous fantasies of many Anglo politicians for the future of the civilized world. The American nuclear warheads dotting the West German

PUNK MATTERS: AN INTRODUCTION

9

landscape, the making real of barriers between the Soviet Union and the West, and the faux denazification of political leaders (Chancellor KurtGeorg Kiesinger, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and Siegfried Buback to name but three) embody the sabre rattling between global powers then jostling for supremacy. In the erstwhile allies’ calculus, the middle class of West Germany was the crucial location of hegemonic consent, the place where the future the West desired could be secured. It was that future against which German youth subcultures—from the Halbstarken (hooligans) to hippies to domestic terrorists—had previously positioned themselves, that future whose affective, aesthetic, and cultural strategies punk resolutely rejected. While their unwilled status as US pawns was certainly not lost on many West Germans, the lived experience was dominated by more national concerns, as voiced by the discontented youth of their present. Thus, another reason for the centrality of German punk for cultural studies lies in punk’s relation to the kinds of protests in the 1960s and 1970s. The familiar student-led demonstrations from Mexico City, Paris, Tokyo, and Berkeley played out in Berlin and Frankfurt too, but there the context was simultaneously local and global. The legacies of German fascism—and the political and economic leaders with fascist pasts who were reinstalled in positions of power in the interests of expeditiously securing the West from the forward march of communism by the United States (and its allies)—signals a quintessential object of cultural studies: a local moment made possible by global actions. West German punk viewed the protests associated with the year 1968 as failures, and used that transnational moment of uprising as a foil against which to position its domestic intervention. That punk project of negation enframes a subculture whose strategy was always already beyond a negation of German domestic issues; the conditions of possibility for punk in Germany make legible its efficacy beyond any “original” moment of punk.

Beyond No Future: Considering Deutschpunk in English The United States and United Kingdom have witnessed a comparable flurry of activity with respect to their own (shared) punk past. The curatorial, popular, and scholarly interest in punk which has given rise to cottage industries in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere thus reflects a broader, transnational process of reappraisal by which the history of Cold War (sub)cultures has become not only a signal interest for scholars and popular audiences alike, but also a monetizable commercial property for publishers and producers across a variety of print and audiovisual media. For example, punk, always a famously photogenic and thus salable phenomenon, has become the province of major motion

10

BEYOND NO FUTURE

pictures in both Germany and the United States. Movies like Dorfpunks (2009), financed in part by the Norddeutscher Rundfunk, and an (as-yetuntitled) Ramones biopic, to be directed by Martin Scorcese, provide ample testament to this fact.22 Amidst a growing availability in German translation of scholarly work in punk studies, Anglophone scholarship in cultural studies, German Studies, and history has also devoted increasing attention to the cultures of German punk. Individual, largely isolated essays published in the 1990s and early 200023 have been supplemented by dissertations24 and published monographs,25 resulting in the gradual emergence of what by now must be termed a subfield. It is into this moment that Beyond No Future hopes to intervene, bringing together a variety of scholarly voices under the aegis of a single project. The chapters of this book can certainly be read singly, but insofar as they introduce multiple methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives alongside a variety of heretofore unexamined punk objects, they collectively model German punk studies in the form the authors feel it should take: as a subdiscipline characterized by openness to interdisciplinary inquiry, by an interest in pre- and post-punk developments, and by a commitment to recovering punk’s resonances within German politics and society, past and present.

Resonances and interventions examined This book eschews a chronological or geographical framing of punk to instead highlight through three distinct critical parts the close thematic and methodological affinities between individual chapters. Part One of the book involves the theory and practice of punk spaces as these were constituted and performed in both urban and rural Germany. In Chapter 2, “‘I’d rather choose the curb’: Topographical Writing in Recent German Punk,” Dennis Borghardt argues that by contrast with their AngloAmerican precursors, German punks focused in their music and writing on quotidian aspects of urban life, incorporating the physical characteristics of the built environment into fragmentary narratives. German punks, Borghardt proposes, created original stories and statements about German urbanity, which critically confronted the openness and closure of city spaces, and their implication in authoritarian practices. In Chapter 3, “Beyond Boredom: Engaged Living in the Wilhelmine Wandervogel and West German Punk,” Matthew Sikarskie connects the early-twentiethcentury Wandervogel movement to punk, showing how both punk and the Wandervogel movement formed the basis for new kinds of sociability among youths, and for the creation of informal communication networks that operated outside the adult- and elite-dominated established print public

PUNK MATTERS: AN INTRODUCTION

11

spheres, and sometimes outside of the space and time of the urban milieu itself. Part Two of the book involves punk’s performative politics. It comprises two chapters, Chapters 4 and 5, dealing with the means by which punks themselves, and theories about punk, define the concept of the political within public performance itself. In Chapter 4, “The Politics of Lyrics in German Punk,” Peter Brandes addresses philologically and politically how punk lyrics astutely engaged language and the law. Examining punk’s music investiture in the problem of discourse and exploring how linguistic practices can produce both meaning and noise, speech and silence, Brandes analyzes German punk texts’ creation of political identities through lyrical innovation and complexly calibrated citational practices that invoke the long history of protest in German letters. In Chapter 5, “Subcultural Studies between the Blocs: Unexpected Cosmopolitanism and Stubborn Blind Spots in East German Theories of Punk,” Seth Howes analyzes theories of punk developed by East German journalists, cultural critics, and sociologists. Focusing in particular on how East German thinkers dismissed punk’s political potential even as they insisted it told real truths about capitalist malaise, Howes also shows how dependent Eastern analyses were on Western theory and tracks how when punk crossed the Iron Curtain, so too did theories for thinking about its (and other subcultures’) origins in class conflict. Beyond No Future’s final section, Part Three, concerns punk’s complicated relationship to Germany’s fascist past. Tracing punk’s UK-to-Germany route back to London of the late 1970s, in Chapter 6, “Nazi Signifiers and the Narrative of Class Warfare in British Punk,” Karen Fournier explores how Germany and its past provided potent symbols within Anglo-American punk iconographies. She reconstructs the polyvalence and malevolence of the famous “punk swastika” in their relationship to one another, offering a richly contextualized account of what Germany, and things German, meant within English punk’s cosmology. Then, in Chapter 7, “‘1979 Deutschland’: Holocaust, West German Memory Culture, and Punk’s Intervention into the Everyday,” Fabian Eckert and Melanie Eis examine how West German punk performances, whether lyrical or corporeal in nature, were linked to individual and collective memories of the Holocaust. Consulting West German punk songs, fanzines, and interviews, they argue that punks staged a memorial counteraesthetic to that which was on offer in the American miniseries Holocaust, airing on German television in 1979. In Chapter 8, “Sex in the Bunker: DAF’s Staging of Punk Pleasure,” Cyrus M. Shahan focuses upon the West German punk band Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, contextualizing the group’s détournement of sex and pleasure in songs like “Sex unter Wasser” and “Absolute Körperkontrolle” with respect to fascist body politics and German fairy tales. Offering close readings of DAF’s lyrics and performance aesthetics, and connecting their lyrics to the German canonical literature they often (ironically) cite, Shahan

12

BEYOND NO FUTURE

proposes that the group sought an escape from dead-end binaries of social intervention that they felt had turned the 1980s into a sociopolitical and psychosexual bunker after 1977. Finally, in Chapter 9, “Cold Wave: French Post-Punk Fantasies of Berlin,” Mirko M. Hall explores how German punks were joined by sympathizers from France in their critique of Cold War politics and European neoliberalism. He argues how a number of French post-punks recognized themselves in the affective medium of dark synthetic music and looked toward the radical historical energies of Berlin as redeemable moments of aesthetic autopoiesis and political resilience. Beyond No Future concludes with a short editorial contribution that brings the collection back to Germany, specifically the important role that punk memories and memories of punk play as part of the official lingua franca of a unified Germany—one that narrates a shared past— in the machination of a new nation that continues to instrumentalize the marginal and margins of youth cultures and their associated ephemera. Thus, whereas the collection positions German punk as a vital point within the broader constellation of transnational cultural studies, it concludes by making the case for analyzing punk’s continuing presence in the German public sphere and its position in German memory culture. For whether serving as backdrops in the Academy Award winning The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006), taking the stage like Nick Cave in Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987), or sitting upon the erstwhile demarcation of East and West at the dawn of the Berlin Republic, the German punks stand out.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock “n” Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold War East Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2007). Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 456. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away, Bad Seed Ltd., 2013, LP. See MOMA’s website for ample examples of this problematic visuality, available online at http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/punk (accessed January 1, 2016). Cave’s lyrics in “Jubilee Street” define the subculture’s malleability and dynamism, inventorying parts of its subversive strategy and gesturing toward punk’s deep investment in the visual. They lay bare MOMA’s fundamental misunderstanding of the subculture; punk’s chaos is inseparable from its ironic investment in couture—there can never be a “to” between chaos and couture, only a “through.”

PUNK MATTERS: AN INTRODUCTION

6

7

8

9

10 11

12 13

14

15

16

13

See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1978). Such debates have critiqued Hebdige, and others working in the orbit of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, for neglecting aspects of gender, for having produced a framework only narrowly applicable to English society in the 1970s, and for mystifying some of punk’s texts through overly allusive analysis, where a straightforward account might have been more revealing. See The Subcultures Reader, eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London: Routledge, 1997). Published after the reader appeared, and proving enormously influential was Andy Bennett, “Subcultures or NeoTribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste,” Sociology 33.3 (August 1999): 599–617. See Stacy Thompson, Punk Productions: Unfinished Business (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); Tricia Henry, Break All Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of a Style (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989); and Neil Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). See Jeremy Wallach, “Underground Rock Music and Democratization in Indonesia,” World Literature Today 79.3–4 (September 2005): 16–20; “Living the Punk Lifestyle in Jakarta,” Ethnomusicology 52.1 (January 2008): 98–116; and Joanna Pickles, “Punk, Pop, and Protest: The Birth and Decline of Political Punk in Bandung,” RIMA: Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 41.2 (2007): 223–46. See Ondřej Císař and Martin Koubek, “Include ‘em all?: Culture, Politics, and a Local Hardcore/Punk Scene in the Czech Republic,” Poetics 40.1 (February 2012): 1–21. See Marc Gras, Punk: Tres décadas de resistencia (Llinars del Vallès: Quarentena Ediciones, 2005). See Rémi Pépin, Rebelles: Une histoire de rock alternatif (Paris: Hugo, 2007) or, assembled as a collage, Arno Rudeboy, Nyark nyark! Fragments de scénes punk et rock alternatif en France, 1976–1989 (Paris: Zones, 2007). Both books take the mid-1970s, and punk, as a point of departure. See Sezgin Boynik and Tolga Güldallı, Türkiye’de Punk ve Yeraltı Kaynaklarının Kesintili Tarihi 1978–1999 (Istanbul: BAS, 2007). See Ronald Galenza and Heinz Havemeister, Wir wollen immer artig sein: Punk, New Wave, HipHop, und Independent-Szene in der DDR 1980–1990 (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag, 2013). See Daniel Ryser, Slime: Deutschland muss sterben (München: Heyne, 2013) and Anne Hahn, Frank Willmann, and Montezuma Sauerbier, Satan, kannst du mir noch mal verzeihen: Otze Ehrlich, Schleimkeim, und der ganze Rest (Mainz: Ventil, 2013). See Bernd Lindner and Mark M. Westhusen, Von Müllstation zu Größenwahn: Punk in der halleschen Provinz (Halle: Hasen-Edition, 2007) and C. Remath and R. Schneider, Haare auf Krawall: Jugendsubkultur in Leipzig 1980 bis 1991 (Leipzig: Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1999). See Frank Apunkt Schneider, Als die Welt noch unterging: von Punk zu NDW (Mainz: Ventil, 2006) and Hollow Skai, Alles nur geträumt: Fluch und Segen der Neuen Deutschen Welle (Innsbruck: Hannibal/Koch, 2009).

14

BEYOND NO FUTURE

17 See Ostpunk! Too Much Future, directed by Carsten Fiebeler and Michael Boehlke (Berlin: Neue Visionen, 2006), DVD and Störung Ost—Punks in Ostberlin 1981–1983, directed by Mechthild Katzorke and Cornelia Schneider (Berlin: Anita AV, 1996), DVD. 18 See Jan Off, Vorkriegsjugend (Mainz: Ventil, 2003) and Rocko Schamoni, Dorfpunks (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004). 19 See Wolfgang Müller, Geniale Dilletanten (Berlin: Merve, 1996) and Subkultur Westberlin 1979–1989: Freizeit (Berlin: Fundus, 2012). 20 See Peter Glaser, ed. Rawums: Texte zum Thema (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). 21 Lawrence Grossberg, “Is there Rock after Punk?” in On Record, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 111–23, 114. See also Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 222–32. 22 See Brennan Carley, “Martin Scorsese’s Ramones Movie Will Come Out in 2016,” Spin (August 27, 2014), available online at http://www.spin. com/2014/08/martin-scorsese-ramones-movie-biopic-director (accessed January 1, 2016). 23 See Patricia Anne Simpson, “Soundtracks: GDR Music from ‘Revolution’ to ‘Reunification,’” in The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 227–48 and Timothy S. Brown, “Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and Nazi Rock in England and Germany,” Journal of Social History 38.1 (Fall 2004): 157–78. 24 See Jeff Hayton, Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock, Authenticity, and Alternative Culture in East and West Germany (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013) and Seth Howes, Punk Avant-Gardes: Disengagement and the End of East Germany (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2012). 25 See Cyrus M. Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis: Adaptation and Resistance after 1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Mirko M. Hall, Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking against the Grain, 1800–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

PART ONE

Punk Spaces

2 “I’d rather choose the curb”: Topographical Writing in Recent German Punk Dennis Borghardt

Preface “In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space.”1 These significant and far-reaching lines from Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces,” a short essay written in 1967 and published in 1984, imagines a scholarly privileging of spatial views of cultural-literary objects over descriptions of their chronological conditions. A relatively noncanonical text by Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” has proven quite clairvoyant. For over the last few decades, the European humanities in general, and German cultural studies in particular,2 have witnessed “a conceptual redefining of a category in cultural and social science up to the level of spatial representation,”3 a paradigmatic shift widely known as the spatial or topographical turn in Germany. Scholarly analysis in this vein is often synchronic and temporally unbounded, which places space-conscious scholarship squarely within the tradition of the linguistic turn.4 This spatial turn thus aims to analyze objects by the conceptual structures that they contain, or the structures within which they are felt to relate to other objects. As a result, I am very grateful for the kind permission of Casanovas Schwule Seite, Chefdenker, Die Sterne, Duesenjaeger, Kaput Krauts, Kotzreiz, Pascow, Slime, Tocotronic, and Turbostaat to cite their lyrics. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are my own.

18

BEYOND NO FUTURE

we hardly ever find Newtonian or Einsteinian concepts developed to account for physical relationships brought to bear on discussions of cultural space; in scholarship of the spatial turn, it is thus not abstract space, but the spatial experience of relationships between subjects and objects that is at stake.5 Foucault developed these ideas some decades ago, but even as his work has weathered all of the succeeding post-structuralist attacks that the academy could muster, this thesis regarding spatial anxiety is still useful for describing the relationship between aesthetics and politics. After all, the transition from an ideological world (the Cold War era) to a postideological world (the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall)6 established new rules for how modern subjects orient themselves; no longer was the world divided into two mutually opposed blocs, with each seeking to bring the global South into its own politico-economic orbit. Instead of identifying with one (spatially defined) ideological camp, and confining their economic and political activity to one area of the globe while other spaces remained off-limits, subjects now define and navigate the spaces of their daily lives, including those experienced and constituted in electronic media, quite differently. Brought to bear on the object of this book, German punk music, as Cyrus Shahan has shown, refused ideological employment from its very inception: [p]unk did not want to establish a new order to stave off chaos of the past. Punk wanted chaos. Punk did not want to erect barriers between fascism and the present. It wanted to tear down the present. Punk did not want an anti-fascist position. It wanted positions that had nothing to do with binaries of fascism.7 In a way, German punk thus anticipated the post-ideological transition, even as its political rhetoric(s) have, since 1989, remained staunchly opposed to what we might term “the ideology of the post-ideological.” This opposition to ideology also extended to the distribution of space. Accordingly, in its spatial discourse, German punk discusses not only the iconic sites—such as the Brandenburg Gate or Checkpoint Charlie—that had anchored the ideological life of Cold War division in city space, but also the routine, micro-level spatial experiences that impinged directly and individually on the life of each lyrical I. This process is reciprocal; as punk lyrical creativity (re)orders and (re) values space, so too does space determine lyrical style. I take German punk lyricism to be an act of what Nelson Goodman terms “world-writing,”8 a procedure of topographical writing that is not limited to purely describing the surrounding world, but also extends to producing it in the first place. In order to clarify how lyrical spatializations (and spatial lyricizations) of German punk’s world worked, I would like to offer a close, discrete reading of its methods after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A focus on those new attempts

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

19

and methods from the early 1990s onward—through which German punk demonstrates a dedication to space-focused forms of world-writing— highlights how punk again anticipated, or was at least in tune with, the ideological patterns of its times. For the lyrics below are clear antipodes to the “end of history” crowds, led by Francis Fukuyama, whose recuperation of the Cold War’s end was paradigmatic in its focus on time, temporality, and history.9 Situated in a complex constellation of Left and Right political systems after the Second World War, Germany not only had to deal with the political dichotomy of the United States and the USSR during the Cold War, but also with the competition of two very different states and political systems: the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Long skeptical of historical pathos, German punks never embraced the muchballyhooed “culture of change” (Wendekultur) that supposedly defined Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For punks, with their “No Future” sloganeering, have always been skeptical of linear and continuous historical narratives, fixating instead (as Matthew Sikarskie argues in this book) upon boredom, rather than progress, as the characteristic modality of temporal experience. In songs that contrasted sharply with the Scorpions’ historiographically minded paean to German reunification, “Wind of Change” (1990), German punk bands instead described their newly reunified “homeland” by telling stories about sites and spaces of disillusionment. Rather than duplicate the “city cults” established by early Anglo-American punks around London and New York, and focus on these faraway cities, West German punk traditionally had three epicenters: Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Hamburg. Aside from West Berlin’s favorable economic conditions and the whole city’s long history of political and aesthetic radicalism,10 there is no obvious reason why these cities were significant, but nevertheless, they were. There is no “Düsseldorf Calling,” nor yet a “Berlin’s Burning,” but German punks did narrate their hometowns—often as boring or dreary, sometimes as causing desperation. But even beyond being critiqued as they really existed, in their lyrical figuration these cities became fields of aesthetic experimentation. As Foucault explains: We do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.11 Constituted by social relations that are themselves historically formed, what Foucault calls sites are defined by their mutual distinction from one another, their inability to be reduced to one another. As we will see, the German punks of the Berlin Republic reject the globalist’s notion that all spaces

20

BEYOND NO FUTURE

can be caught up in a single productive process, emplaced in a coherent symbolic structure within which all positions are isomorphic to one another. German punks therefore did not presume the essence of all cities by means of analogical equation, superimposing a Berlin or a Düsseldorf onto a New York or London, by substituting the Kurfürstendamm for the King’s Road or the Reeperbahn for the Bowery. Rather, they busy themselves with the material specificity of their own very German cities and, therefore, have a more sensorial access to the construction, and constructedness, of places in the world and their relationships to one another. This characteristic can be found in Sven Regener’s highly successful Berlin Blues (2001) and other contemporary portrayals of daily life in urban subcultures. The novel’s protagonist, Frank Lehmann, who lives in West Berlin right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, refuses to accept the concept of “empty space,” especially as something that needs to be filled to comply with a supposedly pedantic way of life: Is life a glass or a bottle or a bucket—a container to be filled with something, a container you have to fill, in fact, because for some reason the whole world seems to agree that fulfillment is an absolute must. Is that what life is—just a container for something else?12 Consequently, when discussing daily life, extraordinary events are no longer extraordinary in the novel. The fall of the Wall and Herr Lehmann’s thirtieth birthday are on the same day, and the protagonist does not care about either; he is doing what he does every day: sitting and working in a pub and drinking Beck’s beer.

Urbanity and relationality: Shattered spaces The term “urbanity” not only defines the qualities of a city, but also constitutes the term “city” itself (in opposition to “town” or “village”). In a recent essay, architectural theorist Joachim Huber states that [u]rbanity, as an awareness of life, as culture, and as living space is characterized by its diverse internal boundary marks, changes of perspective, and porosity: The “marginal” does not take place at the periphery, but is distributed all over the rimless city.13 In this relational sense, theorizing “urbanity” is less a question of writing the history and future of urban institutions, or of mapping urban spaces from above with an eye to improving services or expanding public works, than it is a question of understanding how specific sites in a city become

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

21

meaningful to individuals, or groups, who inhabit, traverse, and gather in them. For insofar as such practices are capable of constituting city spaces as practically or emotionally meaningful in the first place—and insofar as they proffer spatial use-values or meanings that run contrary to those “intended” by architects, government officials, or corporations—what Huber calls the “marginal” can be found everywhere that the boundaries (i.e., the margins) of spatial norms are transgressed. Critical Mass cycling routes that disrupt traffic patterns; the informal post and transportation systems used by immigrants; counter-monuments and walking tours informed by critical pedagogy: All of these remap, and revalue, the experience of the city. Thus, in the new urbanity’s reorganization of urban space, peripheries are established and transgressed in every urban center. Combining Foucault’s insistence upon the mutual incommensurability of spaces with a disdain for the governmentally prescribed hierarchy of value that places the Brandenburg Gate on a pedestal, far above the Köpi squat, as more constitutive of the urban order we call “Berlin,” German punk departs from the officialities of city management and planning. By focusing on smaller aspects of daily life and recombining them into fragmentary (non-) narratives, German punk bands create stories and statements genuinely in line with the precarious and peripheral nature of Huber’s notion of urbanity. Nevertheless, the German punks critique the urbanist canon just as much as they ignore it; on a spatial register, they therefore engage in precisely the same iconoclastic brand of genealogical research, or Ahnenforschung, that Cyrus Shahan discusses in his contribution to this book. (And in this connection, one should not neglect the decidedly canonical origins of one of the most important punk ideas: chaos, both etymologically and conceptually derived from Greek and Latin literature [e.g., Hesiod and Ovid].) One final aspect of the post-Wall German punks’ approach to urban world-writing is definitive: its interiority. Indeed, the German punk lyrical I inhabits the inside of city spaces and urban sites, which in their turn become thematic material that is found to reflect the lyrical I’s interior life. In German punk, a city’s topology is no longer defined by its ideological inscription by Cold War geostrategic thinking. But by creating the city’s sites from richly textured personal experience rather than grandiose historiography, they engage in an interiority-focused method of world-writing best understood against the backdrop of metaphorical writing, which is well-known for its long-standing political force. The specific relationship that urbanity and aesthetics have shared in the post-War, and post-Wall, German context bears closer examination. This is the imagination of cities as/in ruins—a topic that has historically been of great importance in German letters,14 and that has seen renewed emphasis in German Studies more recently.15 Of course, shattering and smashing things into pieces represents a typical punk topic, fulfilling as it does two of the most basic punk concerns: anarchy and criticism.

22

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Many German punk songs make metaphorical use of breaking things and of broken things themselves. In this sense, the lyrical treatment of collapsing towers, walls, or dikes can harbor commentary on the weakness of social support systems. The influential Hamburg band Slime, for instance, sang the following on Schweineherbst (1993), their most successful record: “Golden towers don’t grow endlessly,/they collapse.” “Shouting, smashing, getting away!” they continue, in a song that is titled by this very phrase.16 “Broken towers”—this figure of speech can be easily decoded by the listener: Towers define the skyline, representing urbanist grandiosity as far back as the work of the early Brecht, who wrote in his “Primer for City-Dwellers” of modernist city structures and their ruination: We have settled, a whimsical tribe In dwellings it pleased us to think of as indestructible (In the same spirit we built the tall constructions on the island of Manhattan And the thin antennae that underwire the Atlantic Ocean). Of these cities there will remain only what passed through them, the wind.17 While it is not gold, the Heinrich-Hertz-Turm, a telecommunications tower, may well be the structure that is at issue here. A well-known feature of the city’s skyline, the tower whose collapse Slime imagine with gusto was also a key early component of West Germany’s telecommunications infrastructure. But Slime, as had Brecht before them, regards the built environment with a wonder directed not merely at the achievements of planners and builders, but at the potential of seeing all their work come crashing down. One decade later, the Hamburg band Kettcar (with former members of the punk band …But Alive) sang, “Dikes are breached completely, or they aren’t at all” on “Deiche,” the opening track of their album Von Spatzen und Tauben, Dächern und Händen (2005).18 This is a metaphor for the decaying social security scheme; dikes draw a line between the earth and the sea, as well as between social solidarity and neoliberalism.19 But rather than propose a specific policy reform, Kettcar’s vision of a vulnerable moment before the deluge, surely out of step with the post-ideological moment of its formulation, is voiced in the form of an alternative: either Germany will collapse into ruins, or it will continue to maintain self-endangering inequities. This anticipation of the end is given visual arrangement on the cover of the record Bombing your Kleinstadt (2007)20 shared by the bands Nein Nein Nein and the Kaput Krauts, which shows Berlin as a “small city” (Kleinstadt) that is being bombed, and whose bombing is announced half in English, the language spoken by those Americans and English primarily responsible for the bombing of German cities some six decades ago (Figure 2.1).21

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

23

FIGURE 2.1 Front album cover of Bombing your Kleinstadt by Nein Nein Nein/Kaput Krauts (Twisted Chords, 2007, CD). Courtesy Kidnap Music—Tante Guerilla GbR.

This topic is further explored by the Kaput Krauts on their latest record Straße, Kreuzung, Hochhaus, Antenne (2012), and rather drastically on their song “Abrissparty”: “I hate buildings./I hate buildings./world history, housing density,/skyscrapers, where once was space./I hate buildings,/ exemplarily, vicariously.” These exclamations culminate in the chorus of “All I want is ruins./All I want is ruins.”22 In light of the air war visited upon German cities, German punk lyrics’ and images’ spatial inscription of a destructive desire has a specific point of historical reference. The German punk city of 1993, or of 2007, is not reducible to the Anglo-American punk cities of 1976—London and New York may well have had their garbage strikes and crime waves, respectively, but punk fantasies of urban ruination had quite a different resonance in Germany.

24

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Topographical writings from the inside out While calling Berlin a small city—or even bombing this poor city into a ruinous state—might represent the treatment of a national capital that German punk would find proportionate, this ironic suggestion still comes across as quite ordinary and figurative. Since this thematic connection of cities and ruins figures in a number of musical genres and literary modes, one cannot describe it as a characteristic exclusive to German punk. Nevertheless, it seems to be a necessary gesture of negativity—that is to say, an effort to think through a cataclysm that might redefine urban spaces less by their sedimented traditions and preordained uses, but more from a subjective, intrinsic point of view. The alignment of subjective spatial perception and melancholy within German punk was initiated in the early 1990s and reached a high point on the alternative punk record Digital ist besser (1995) by Tocotronic.23 This debut album was critically acclaimed right from its release; it had the potential to unify most of the German subcultures that were sharing similar “anti-establishment” attitudes in the broadest sense of the term. At the same time, it explicitly appealed not only to working-class kids, but also to those who had gone through a college preparatory education and its accompanying exit examination (Abitur).24 With phrases such as “I don’t know why I hate you that much,/dance theaters of this city” on the opening song “Freiburg,”25 which also cycles through other inexplicable hatreds directed at (for example) backgammon players, Tocotronic gave special emphasis to a hometown motif as negative as it is melancholic. This approach was overdetermined by lead singer Dirk von Lotzow’s negative attitude to his own hometown. Many well-known and successful scene bands like Muff Potter, Knochenfabrik, Turbostaat,26 Pascow, and Kotzreiz predominantly deal with urban spaces by reflecting on the lacunae in city life. These lacunae are not physically existing gaps in infrastructure, but are rather derived from an inner dialectic. Decoding the topographical lyricization of city structures requires, therefore, an understanding of the singer’s state of mind. A narrative relationship emerges that is structured by a mapping of meaning that is both materially ground and emotionally particular at once. The lyrical space is populated by old urban places like the “curb” (Bordsteinkante), “building site” (Baustelle), “drain cover” (Gullideckel), “asphalt” (Asphalt), “staircase” (Treppe), “escalator” (Rolltreppe), “metal railing” (Metallgeländer), or sometimes even the soil (Boden) itself. In their meaning and in their tone, these entities are explicitly exposed not in their functional aspects, but rather in the shivering disaffection with which the lyrical I confronts their clammy nastiness. They do not contain this aesthetic potential “in and of themselves,” since they are—with respect to their “real world” functions—ordinary, utilitarian, and functional. They are part of the architectural inventory that each city of a certain size needs, but these

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

25

needs are not necessarily appreciated by the city’s inhabitants—or at least are not so appreciated that the ugly appearance and staid usefulness of these architectural elements can be overlooked. For everyday citizens, following certain prejudices, perhaps these curbs and manhole covers are less annoying than punks themselves.27 However, from punk’s viewpoint, they are imbued with subcultural capital and ultimately achieve poetic status. They become a field of emotional projection and new meaning as their topographical relationships constitute the singer’s attitude toward urban life in general. This attitude can be melancholic, nostalgic, frustrated, polemical, or sarcastic, but it must always appear enclosed in the form of statements that present themselves as both genuine (by contrast with standard urban superficiality) and necessary (by contrast with equivocal or indifferent). It is the punk’s lyrical seizure of the terrain between the drain cover and the building site as his own that might disturb Joe Schmo; for in punk lyrics, oft-ignored urban elements themselves are rendered visible in their brick and concrete specificity, losing their abstract functionality even as they acquire a dank materiality. One of German punk’s favorite leitmotifs of the last two decades is the curb (Bordsteinkante). It has, for instance, found its first prominent use in the title of Muff Potter’s cult record Bordsteinkantengeschichten (2000). Bands like Pascow, Turbostaat, and Duesenjaeger give such motifs both a melancholic and a sarcastic touch. Sometimes they even make use of differing attributes, thereby playing a kind of poetic game by switching between them. Since 1989 German punks have increasingly thematized re-unified Germany’s capital as a topographic reference point for their emotions: a prime example is “Zuviel für Berlin,” on Pascow’s album, Nächster Halt gefliester Boden. Here, one sees both melancholy and sarcasm in play. This topographical method is evident in a number of wretched representations, which are accompanied by melancholic chords in the first stanza of the above song: Next stop tiled floor and the staircase right after stop along the way: metal banisters How to wait now, and for what? I’d rather choose the curb. It would be tender, if it could. Anyway, we’ll see us both again. Goodbye, stonebiter, stay solid!28 The curb, addressed in the final line by the original neologism “stonebiter” (Steinbeißer),29 is placed in the very middle of the stanza: “I’d rather choose the curb.” Both a physical object and a fate that can be chosen, this curb is

26

BEYOND NO FUTURE

extended in interior and exterior space, since it seems to preoccupy both the singer’s mind and body. This ambiguity between the outside and the inside recurs in the later lines of the last stanza: “On Ritalin in Berlin,/and the head still full of shit.”30 One now sees a person, who either suffers from ADHD or has voluntarily experimented with narcotic substances. The metonymy links “Berlin” and the singer’s “head,” ascribing topographical character to individual substance abuse even as it likens Berlin’s transformation through capital flows and financialization to an overly busy acceleration experienced as a head rush or a bad trip. By creating scenes from the singer’s self-manipulated perspective, and not falling back on punk’s wellworn metaphysical concepts (such as “the system,” “justice,” or something similar), the topographical location, Berlin, appears shattered in the same way as the singer’s soul. Therefore, we cannot speak of a self-consistent “narrator” anymore, as he and the city are linked through lyrics that project the singer’s inner state as well as the image of a disturbed hometown. Of course, this anomie is not entirely negative; after all, the subject identifies with Berlin. Indeed, it seems even a punk must always keep in mind the fact that this place is his or her home, too. For example, the band Turbostaat is both critical and possessive in “Drei Ecken, ein Elvers” on their debut record Flamingo (2001): The congestion in your head diverts you from everything. What did you want up here? Good view from the roof! Down there lies the city; that’s where you always wanted to be. But what’s the way down there: Run up, dude, run up! Let the idiots just scream. That’s your home, too!31 The suggestive relationship between the inner “congestion in your head” and the hometown that lies “down there” makes these phrases heavily poetic.32 The topic of “congestion” itself, as well as the subject that the song deals with, seems to be brought to the rooftops. In this way, committing suicide is identical to plunging oneself onto the city—a final incorporation of the self into the environment. The only topic to which this city might be reduced is suicide. The song nevertheless develops a sarcastic edge. In the stanza that follows, the addressed person is even “grateful for the view.” He left the city to recognize that—by committing suicide—he will immediately return to it. In this sense, in the moment of a suicidal contemplation heavily ironized (and spatialized) by the lyrics’ admiration of “the view” a plunge from the rooftops will afford, the city appears as what Foucault calls a heterotopia: There are, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places— places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

27

which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.33 The indication of this particular heterotopia is undertaken as an expression of suicidal intent. One can find further motifs of escape, for instance, in Duesenjaeger’s “Stadt, hau ab,” taken from the album Las Palmas O.K. (2003): “And he says: ‘I just wanna to escape from that city./I have enough of you all’.”34 Although the city is apostrophized in the title (“City, buzz off!”), it is not the city itself, but the singer’s injured emotions (namely, lovesickness) that motivate his will to escape.35 In a similar quasi-ironic, but more generalized sense, Tocotronic asks and answers this with the remark “But living here? No, thanks!” on their album Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen (2005).36 If the title cautions, with its reference to Kant’s first critique, against allowing the triumph of Enlightenment rationality to dictate social conditions, the lyrics attend to the suburban flight by the German petite bourgeoisie, who are full of prejudices against specific milieus and city areas. This feeling is mutual. The rich, it seems, mutilate the city and its values. Thus, the Hamburg School band Die Sterne states in “Stadt der Reichen,” from their album 24/7 (2010): “There are thousand corpses/in the city of the rich.” The phrase is cited over twenty times on the whole track and is accompanied by a drastic image: “And the rivers run red with blood.”37 A city that is occupied by the rich from the outset is contaminated and must, therefore, be seen as negative. Urban crises come into focus as the handiwork of the upper class, the rich, the yuppies—failing investment, suburban flight, and gentrification are all cognate processes within a broader dynamic. Since gentrifiers in particular literally occupy urban spaces, provoking resistance, gentrification stands out as one of the most popular subjects in German punk. One can consistently find this main topic in Kotzreiz’s Du machst die Stadt kaputt! (2011), especially in the song “Bauarbeiter Stürb” [sic!]. The nostalgic and humorous impact of Kotzreiz’s very own mode of expression can be found in this song: A dog shits in the park, cause it’s his own property. I listen to loud music, even though it disturbs you all. The city is being rebuilt against everyone’s will. Today there is a Lidl, where once was a grill.38 The syntagmatic order of the phrase “where once was a grill” comes across as quite extravagant; one usually says in German: “where once a grill was.” This rephrasing, which forces a rhyme by visiting grammatical damage on a lament about the composition of the city, scans as both sarcasm

28

BEYOND NO FUTURE

FIGURE 2.2 Front album cover of Du machst die Stadt kaputt! by Kotzreiz (Aggressive Punk Produktionen, 2011, CD). Courtesy F&M FERAL MEDIA.

and urgency, and emphasizes the band’s rhetorical desire to present their demands. Hereafter, the brachial chorus takes over: “Construction worker, die,/construction worker, die,/you destroy the city!” All in all, one now sees a witty and cynical commentary on urban gentrification that paradoxically takes aim at construction workers—hardly an upper class in the Berlin Republic—as a proxy for the faceless and emotionless capital alliances actually behind revitalization initiatives.39 Moreover, the singer’s inner constitution (i.e., his mind or heart) needs to also be involved in this poetic game: “My heart gets smashed into pieces, when the wrecking ball swings./The city loses its tone when the construction worker sings” (Figure 2.2).40 The self is the habitable city, and both have been marked for demolition. The portrayed act of urban renewal is not renewal at all, but rather an

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

29

act of some superior, arbitrary power, and the singer’s heart breaks, shaken to pieces by the sounds of the construction site. Just as Slime and Kettcar contemplated ruination—of a tower, of a dike—one can find here two other ruins: the singer’s inner state and outer environment. There are many ways to enunciate heterotopic spaces within cities, rather than pursuing the escapist option that might take one back to the land. But there are also many ways that punk heterotopias like occupied houses, or informal performance venues, once established, can be turned to new uses by each generation or group that navigates them. Hence, Foucault’s observation that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another.41 In German punk of the Berlin Republic era, notwithstanding the critical force and political implications of the lyrics, the functions of the heterotopic spaces enunciated in song lyrics are often devoted to sarcastic joy, and sometimes even to elements of pure fun. There has, after all, always simultaneously been a hedonistic aspect in punk music—“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” sang Joey Ramone back in 1976.42 This can also find expression in German punk’s witty city writings. Kotzreiz’s anti-panegyric “Berlin” tells us of the place where they once enjoyed drinking vodka with Muff Potter: “We’re just sitting in front of the RAW/drinking vodka/to the good old times.” The chorus lines portray Berlin as a person who is beloved by the singer, but who rejects him anyway: “Berlin, I think of you./Berlin, you’re shitting on me.”43 (Here the topographical logic of the lyrics apparently places the speaker below the city.) Claus Lüer, well-known as the singer and songwriter of Knochenfabrik and Chefdenker, makes jokes, for example, about his globe-trotting on his side project Casanovas Schwule Seite. While the verses of the song “Grafenwöhr” list an overwhelming number of cities that the singer has visited, the chorus repeats: “I know every church, every club, every toilet/ in Tehran and Istanbul, in Grafenwöhr and Gütersloh.”44 This sensory overload of the city experience uses a repetitive anticlimax, moving from church to toilet, that parallels the decline in destinations’ notability from world-famous cities, like Tehran and Istanbul, to squat regional towns like Grafenwöhr and Gütersloh. We might call this a kind of poetic coursecharting, which not only consists of switching directions between concepts of heterotopia, dystopia, and the void, but also seems to bring them all together in a remapping of the world according to its churches and toilets, which draws Tehran, Istanbul, and Gütersloh together.

30

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Conclusion In the preceding pages, we have seen how German punks make use of a high degree of ambiguity by lyrically constructing cities. In this context, two key characteristics can be pointed out: On the one hand, German punk overcomes the semantic divide between the traditional concepts of heterotopian (locus amoenus) and dystopian thinking (locus terribilis)— sometimes the places of punk lyrics are both other and terrible. In this sense, one can find a new and less unequivocal relationship that is set between the “beauty” and the “ugliness” of the city. As a general rule, German punk lyrics suggest that one can no longer write the aesthetics of a city without also telling poetic truths about its coldness and filth. But the city’s beauty and ugliness are part of the same necessary semantic pattern, and just as likely to afford purchase for heterotopic practices as they are to frustrate anti-gentrification agitators. This pattern can be described as a new kind of emotionality evolving from an innovative mode of connecting feelings together if they were sites. On the other hand, this marks the second characteristic that one can find in topographical writings of German punk: The song’s protagonists construct new aesthetic spaces by letting their emotions run through concrete entities, and permitting concrete entities to enter their own selfconceptions and occasionally their physical forms—as in the case of biting the curb. The lyrics benefit from the psychological implications that are endemic to traditional punk topics: frustration, anger, and sarcasm. But rather than retrace the lines punks have traditionally drawn between states, systems, and ideologies, the city-focused, spatially minded punks of the last twenty-five years intertwine interior states and processes with the practice of urbanity. These ways of world-writing, thus, connect spatial-relational constructions of an outer environment with an inner mapping of the mind and heart. The homeland and the hometown with its curbs are not the same entities as they seemed to be before. By resemanticizing elements of the built environment in terms of emotional dispositions such as depression, anger, frustration, and sarcasm, German punks do not write stories about cities in a narrow sense—but rather write them. The poetic methodology that is brought into focus is quite specific and definitive. This form of fragmentary narration of the city is integral to the self-awareness of contemporary German punk. In general, this self-awareness is negative, specifically derived from a discontent social perspective—and this despite the fact that significant parts of the punk scene do not live in a precarious situation or even claim a “working class” status. (Nor can it be taken for granted that punk has somehow proletarianized since the beginning of the 1990s.) The post-ideological era inaugurated by the fall of the Wall seems to have permitted new, more subjective forms of world-

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

31

writing that depart from the more abstractly or universally formulated, programmatic critiques of the Cold War era. Thus, while German punks in the 1980s declared “No Future” as one of their main paradigms, German punks after 1990 declared that they have a city that does not exist or, at least, one that is highly problematic. In this context, cities are no longer reducible to any kind of (post-) ideological program, especially those imbued with lofty descriptions of their historical background. A reunified Berlin could indeed have offered new potentials for a world-historical reevaluation of “No Future” after the fall of the Wall, German punks went another direction. They replace the relationships between past, present, and (no) future with relationships between the interior world, the spatial environment, and an ambivalent city. Thus, the city itself is used as one of the main symbols to transform former historical paradigms into spatial paradigms. German punks of the post-Wall period dispense with the mantra of “No Future,” but still contest the past, albeit in the realm of its endurance in city space, by giving their hometowns, and thereby their homeland, new aesthetic connotations. They do this by simply “thinking of Berlin”: whether it is just “shitting on [them],” by being “on Ritalin in Berlin” or—most radically—by bombing the “small city” of Berlin. These topics drift away from explicit meditation on history and time, traversing urban spaces instead, and are, therefore, located beyond the purely temporal coordinates of the past, present, and (no) future.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1984): 23. See Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2006); Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, eds. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielman (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007); and Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur-und Medienwissenschaften, ed. Stephan Günzel (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007). Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns, 284. For a standard anthology, see The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method ed. Richard M. Rorty, 2nd ed., (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). For more information on how cultural theory pays special attention to spatial phenomena, see Stephan Günzel, Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften, 13–29. Here “room is no longer interpreted as a threefold dimensional entity, but is rather described by elements that are analyzed in their mutual relations” (17). This thought can also be traced back to Foucault: “Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.” Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23.

32

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

BEYOND NO FUTURE

See, for instance, Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992). Schulze describes the social structure of Germany as a pattern of milieus that are not primarily generated by the ideology of its members, but rather by the events they share. The concept of the “aesthetic of daily life schemes” is important here (125–68). Cyrus Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis: Adaptation and Resistance after 1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 13. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Michael White, Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23. Sven Regener, Berlin Blues, trans. John Brownjohn (London: Vintage, 2003), 45. Joachim Huber quoted in Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns, 211. In the German poetic tradition, the motif of ruination is often associated with melancholy and sometimes tragedy. See Walter Benjamin, “About Ruins,” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 2003), 155–60 and Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and a Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff, trans. David Kettler (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 124–30. Julia Hell and Andreas Schoenle, eds. Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Slime, Schweineherbst, Indigo, 1994, CD. Bertolt Brecht, “Of Poor B.B.,” trans. Michael Hofmann, Poetry (April 2006): 40–1. Kettcar, Von Spatzen und Tauben, Dächern und Händen, Grand Hotel van Cleef, 2005, CD. Kettcar’s singer and main songwriter Marcus Wiebusch confirms the importance of this aspect in an interview from 2005: “And the other song ‘Deiche,’ is much more explicit, of course. It deals with the fact that you recognize at a certain time that many people are sick to death of the circumstances here. Because of the fact that everything is distributed unjustly. And I for myself think that you can reduce it to this old, simple motif.” Rasmus Engler, “Kettcar—Wider den Kanon der Beschissenheit: Interview mit Marcus Wiebusch,” Intro Magazine (February 25, 2005), available online at www.intro.de/kuenstler/interviews/23015435/kettcar-wider-den-kanon-derbeschissenheit (accessed August 1, 2015). Nein Nein Nein/Kaput Krauts, Bombing your Kleinstadt, Twisted Chords, 2007, CD. A similar motif can be found on the cover of Missstand’s Die netten Jahre sind vorbei (2014). Kaput Krauts, Straße, Kreuzung, Hochhaus, Antenne, Twisted Chords, 2012, CD. The Hamburg School (Hamburger Schule) is a pop-cultural phenomenon that combines elements from punk, new wave, and sophisticated pop. Formed in the late 1980s, many of the scene’s bands are still active today, including Blumfeld, Tocotronic, Die Sterne, and Die Goldenen Zitronen. These bands had a significant influence on the use of the German language in German pop,

TOPOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN RECENT GERMAN PUNK

24

25

26

27

28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44

33

rock, and punk. For a history of the Hamburg School, see Läden, Schuppen, Kaschemmen: Eine Hamburger Popkulturgeschichte, eds. Christoph Twickel and Michele Avantario (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2003). In this respect, one should keep in mind that “[u]nlike in England, punk in Germany consisted of mostly middle-class kids.” Shahan, Punk Music and German Crises, 12. Tocotronic, Digital ist besser, L’Age D’Or, 1995, CD. C+A: von Lowtzow, Dirk / Müller, Jan-Klaas / Zank, Arne. © 2004 Gold Musik Verlag and Hanseatic Musikverlag GmbH & Co. KG. Turbostaat has always experimented with urban motifs in their songs—for example, in “Drei Ecken, ein Elvers” (2001), “M—Eine Stadt sucht ihren Mörder” (2003), or “Eine Stadt gibt auf” (2013). In German punk, social prejudices—as well as the criticism of it—are often expressed by spatial differences. See The Wohlstandskinder’s song “Gegenüber,” in which gegenüber (as in “on the other side of the street”) is an anaphora often used to demonstrate the stereotype of a pedantic, conventional citizen, especially in phrases such as “On the other side of the street only social misfits live.” The Wohlstandskinder, Für Recht und Ordnung, Vitaminepillen Records, 1997, CD. Pascow, Nächster Halt gefliester Boden, Kidnap Music, 2008, CD. The expression “Steinbeißer” denotes a freshwater fish (“spined loach”), which makes no literal sense here at all. In this context of the song, however, it means that the subject “bites” on the curb’s stone. Pascow, Nächster Halt gefliester Boden. Turbostaat, Flamingo, Schiffen, 2001, CD. This turns out to be one of the most popular motifs of German punk in the 2000s. Muff Potter, for example, makes use of almost the exact same words in “Antifamilia” on the album Von Wegen (2005): “That’s your home, your family, you’re born here./And you ask yourself: ‘What, except for my childhood, is holding me here?’” Muff Potter, Von Wegen, Huck’s Plattenkiste, 2005, CD. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. Duesenjaeger, Las Palmas O.K., Go-Kart Records, 2003, CD. Furthermore, Duesenjaeger make use of this motif in the song “Las Palmas O.K.” on the album Schimmern: “Cheer up, kick up that ass, keep going!/I hope I won’t keep standing here.” Duesenjaeger, Schimmern, Go-Kart Records, 2006, CD. Tocotronic, Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen, L’Age D’Or, 2006, CD. Die Sterne, 24/7, Materie Records, 2010, CD. Kotzreiz, Du machst die Stadt kaputt!, Aggressive Punk Produktionen, 2011, CD. As the band also states in an interview: “Everything is getting torn down and rebuilt. There is no damn shit given about the culture and the people who live there and who have formed that culture.” See Rene Brocher, “‘Der Iro ist auch bloß eine Frisur’: Kotzreiz Interview,” Useless Fanzine (n.d.), available online at www.uselessfanzine.de/magazin/1195-kotzreiz-interview (accessed August 1, 2015). Kotzreiz, Du machst die Stadt kaputt!. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25. Ramones, Ramones, Sire, 1977. Kotzreiz, Du machst die Stadt kaputt!. Casanovas Schwule Seite, Das Rock’n Roll Imperium schlägt zurück.

3 Beyond Boredom: Engaged Living in the Wilhelmine Wandervogel and West German Punk Matthew Sikarskie

Introduction Boredom. It was explored in a song by the Buzzcocks on their first EP, Spiral Scratch, in 1977. Peter Hein, guitarist and singer for some of West Germany’s earliest punk groups and one of the founders of its earliest fanzine, The Ostrich,1 lamented its prevalence in West Germany in the mid-1970s. Youth across the world have decried it and, through punk, been inspired to seek alternatives to it. But despite the many appearances it makes in songs, zines, and interviews, far too little consideration has been given to the relationship between punk and boredom in punk studies. Thus, Nicholas Rombes asks of punk’s origins in the United States: “Was it out of the boredom of the early seventies that punk was born?”2 He doesn’t answer the hypothetical, but if it wasn’t the direct cause of punk in the United States, it was most certainly a contributing factor—as it was in both Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD). Internationally, punks may have taken issue with elements unique to their respective societies, but underneath these differences, there existed boredom—as has existed since long before punk. This chapter traces West German punks’ diagnoses of their own boredom, and in discussing the do-it-yourself (DIY) cultural practices they developed in response to it, identifies an antecedent to punk’s DIY engagement in

36

BEYOND NO FUTURE

the work of another group of German youth: the Wandervögel of the late-Wilhelmine era.3 What is it about boredom, in its specifically modern incarnation, that spurred German youths in two very different periods of German history to offer analogous complaints about the lack of excitement and compelling opportunities that defined their daily lives? The answer, I will show, lies in enlightened, capitalist modernity itself: an epoch in which new technologies, new fads, new sights, and new sounds are consumed and then discarded in a process that has led not to a state of perpetual amusement, but rather, at the level of subjectivity itself, to a deeply felt concern about the inadequacy of such distractions and the lack of meaningful modes of intellectual engagement—a lack which, as we will see, manifests as boredom. I argue here that both punk and the Wandervogel movement arose out of this confrontation with modernity and a boredom induced, or at least assisted, by technology. In their confrontations with boredom, both Wandervögel and punks showed that mere words were insufficient when available vocabularies of experience failed to allow for adequate expression. What was needed was action—an ensemble of participatory cultural practices that stood as alternatives to a consumer culture they regarded as mass-produced, mass-mediated, and anti-participatory. In short, this chapter explores two twentieth-century alternatives to boredom: the Wandervogel ethic of Selbsterziehung (self-upbringing), on the one hand, and the punk adoption of DIY cultural production, on the other. Punk and the Wandervogel movement were, to be sure, historically, ideologically, formally, and organizationally divergent phenomena. But they were nevertheless both responses to what punk and Wandervogel movement alike viewed as insufficient variety and novelty in life—not to mention limited economic opportunities, unattractive professional futures, and to limitations on self-expression. To mass production and mass consumption, Selbsterziehung and DIY counterposed direct and active participation in the small-scale production of culture. Each ethic was to underpin a lifestyle that might resolve the seeming aporia of living a worthwhile and fulfilling life in modern societies where traditional bastions of meaning had broken down but had not yet been replaced for many by anything better than technology-aided distraction. This chapter is organized into three sections. In the first section, a discussion of boredom, modernity, and the technological provides some theoretical and terminological grounding for the subsequent discussion. The second section tells a brief history of the Wandervogel movement and its origins in Wilhelmine Germany as an introduction to a youth culture with which many readers may be unfamiliar, before transitioning in the third section to a brief comparison with the late-1970s West German punks. This final section then provides examples of the Wandervogel and punk alternatives in action, examining their repurposing of existing and emerging technologies ranging from the train, outdoor gear, and industrialized

BEYOND BOREDOM

37

foodways (Wandervögel) to the photocopier, tape, synthesizers, and the establishment of independent recording channels (West German punks). Bending mass-produced and commodified technological goods to the task of making new lifestyles predicated on direct engagement and participation, their application of these technologies both demonstrated this exploratory and adventurous mind-set and aided them tremendously in creating worthwhile futures and a life less boring.

Boredom, modernity, and the technological Scholar of boredom Sean Desmond Healy suggests that [t]here would at first glance seem to be no good reason for supposing that boredom, any more than any other mental or spiritual state, should have steadily and continuously increased in modern times. In fact, one might have supposed the opposite, given the vastly more numerous diversions and entertainments that have become available, the increase in time for play, the expansion of opportunities for finding and pursuing constructive interests. But instead, “what was once a rare state of mind … has now become the property of the bored horde.”4 In short, the proliferation of what Healy later labels hyperboredom seems to be a major consequence (for some more pronounced than for others) of life in modernity modeled by (and inaugurated during) the Western European Enlightenment. While the acedia of solitary religious life or the ennui of the pre-Revolutionary French nobility offers clear antecedents, the proliferation of a new type of widespread boredom in modernity is unparalleled.5 But what has led to modern boredom? Leslie proposes that the erosion of an “ethic of private self-cultivation is the basis of the nineteenth-century emergence of boredom as a widespread, culturally recognizable phenomenon in the Western world.”6 Elizabeth Goodstein writes, “As a discursively articulated phenomenon … boredom is at once objective and subjective, emotion and intellectualization—not just a response to the modern world but also an historically constituted strategy for coping with its discontents.”7 And thus this “experience without qualities” serves as a bulwark against modernity, as a response that is both rational and affective to a world that has lost traditional registers of meaning. When was the modernity to which boredom became a natural response initiated? Already in 1719, Jean-Baptist Dubos proposed in Réflexions critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture8 that increasing emphases of rationalism and objectivity were themselves partially responsible for affective stupefaction,

38

BEYOND NO FUTURE

writing that humanity was “moved much more by art and animated emotion rather than through reason and science.”9 Dubos’s early writings on boredom were the first to link the mood to the rational worldview that Dubos, like Habermas,10 locates at the heart of the project of modernity. The hope that such a worldview predicated on reason and objectivity could usher in not only an age of scientific discovery but also one characterized by justice, morality, and a deepened understanding of the self was, Habermas notes, shattered by the catastrophic events of the twentieth century. I use “modernity” in this chapter in much the same vein, but am also informed by sociologist Alejandro Portes’s classic sociological definitions of modernity as having articulations at the structural level (industrialization, urbanization, democratization, and economic development), the cultural level (consistent values and societal expectations), and the individual level (an ability to process increased stimuli but also the adoption of “an ideal type of behaviors proper to urban-industrial societies”).11 With this definition in mind, the connection between modernity and boredom starts to become visible. In 1899, William James proclaimed, “[a]n irremediable flatness is coming over the world.”12 The individual’s place in the rational systems of modern existence is diminished, conforming to what Portes called “an ideal type of behaviors proper to urban-industrial societies.” For many, modern life is, despite a staggering number of entertaining distractions and an increasingly interconnected world, experienced as flat. It is thus little wonder that so many youth in the twentieth century, the Wandervögel and punks included, became dissatisfied with the rationally ordered life, oriented toward economic productivity and commercial consumption, which they experienced as characterizing the present. The apotheosis of the individual and the increases in leisure time and decisive freedom that attended modernization in the West have thus often had the effect of eroding differences between individuals and reducing the range of alternate life choices one might make beyond entering the labor force as both a producer and consumer of goods. But for many youth in the twentieth century who had not yet internalized these structures, or did not desire to do so, the social and cultural confines of their particular modern presents were uninspiring—the prospect of their futures in them distressing. For these discontents, the idea that everything in the natural world must be systematically knowable is dull and reductive. The rational attempt to understand, categorize, and organize all aspects of social life—including boredom itself—is even duller. Those disaffected with the very fabric of societies predicated upon these values become, in a sense, bored with boredom. Punk and the Wandervogel can be thus seen as attempts to formulate new engagements with life at two distinct moments in modern time. Far from being anti-modern, though, punk and Wandervogel interventions often sought to salvage modern living’s potentially liberating elements from its often alienating and objectifying aspects.13 Punk and the Wandervogel

BEYOND BOREDOM

39

movement, each in its own way and in response to historically contingent sets of circumstances—reverberating crises of the postwar consensus that had assured West Germany’s “economic miracle” in the 1950s and 1960s; accelerating urbanization in the first years of the twentieth century— responded to boredom by developing anti-rational yet internally coherent orientations, aesthetics, and rhetorical modes that resisted rational attempts to define them. These new engagements beyond the stasis of bored life housed the potential to explore futures in a different mold. A self-authorizing revivification of one’s approach to modern life is not, to be sure, unique to the Wandervögel or to punks. But these particular cultural phenomena offer intriguing glimpses into analogous interventions conceptualized and implemented by young people facing boredom in two quite different social climates. Eschewing social convention is rarely a straightforward endeavor, though, and a technological response to the overtechnologization of life in general has its disadvantages. On this point, following Heidegger, Leslie Paul Thiele concludes that attempting to escape boredom by embracing technological innovation and consumption as practiced in the technological age “undermines the practice of philosophy and the inherently political human task of discovering a home in the world.”14 If caring about existence is a prerequisite to questioning it, then boredom—as a side-effect of technological, consumption-driven being—yields an inability to care about the world, or about one’s role in it. This manifests either in the inability to do anything or in a frenzied state of action without awareness of one’s own being in an attempt to escape it. This sort of frenzied activity is particularly at home in the technological age. For Heidegger, writing in 1929, it is the mood of the age—the water through which all (often unwittingly) swim.15 It is here, in the repurposing and reinterpretation of the technological, that the Selbsterziehung of the Wandervögel and the punks’ DIY approach to living offered a response to technologically induced modern boredom.

The Wandervogel: Youth in flux The Wandervogel movement began innocuously in 1896 in Steglitz through a small after-school stenography study group. After finding the hiking journals of its leader, Hermann Hoffmann-Völkersamb, a university student from Berlin, several of the circle’s members expressed an interest in doing it themselves, and the first hikes began.16 Around the turn of the century, Steglitz was a growing middle-class town on the verge of being absorbed into Greater Berlin. It would be representative of the type of place in which the Wandervögel would proliferate. Composed almost exclusively of the sons (and later daughters) of the Bildungsbürgertum (the educated German

40

BEYOND NO FUTURE

middle class), which consisted largely of bureaucrats, scholars, teachers, doctors, and lawyers, the Wandervögel hailed with few exceptions from Germany’s cities. This is especially relevant, given the transformation in the social landscape underway in Germany at the time. From Steglitz, the Wandervogel movement expanded into several organizations across the German-speaking world, all carrying the Wandervogel name and comprising an estimated 25,000 youths by the outbreak of the First World War. This expansion was punctuated by often contentious discussions about issues such as the participation of women, the status of alcohol or tobacco use, and the question of Jewish membership, and by more philosophical debates about the meaning of the broader idea of Wandern. This led to many schisms within the Wandervogel movement. These organizations’ activities appealed to a wide variety of the membership’s interests. From weekend and after-school hikes to month-long and longer treks across Europe led entirely by the youth themselves, the Fahrt (journey) was the major endeavor to which all of their other activities were linked. Photography, one example of the application of newly democratized technologies used by the Wandervögel, was extremely popular, with many Wandervögel taking relatively affordable portable cameras such as the Kodak Brownie on hikes. Many youth then developed photos in darkrooms and shared them in photography circles maintained by the groups themselves. The thousands of photographs housed at the Archive of the German Youth Movement at Burg Ludwigstein attest to the importance of the medium. The Wandervögel also repopularized the guitar in Germany as part of their interest in folk music, and one of their major legacies has been their remarkable compilation of folk songs and dances, which they collected and played while traveling and while at home in what they called the Nest. These songs were shared in person between groups, through compilations like the Zupfgeignhansl (Zupfgeige being an old German word for guitar), as well as through their publications, which were often edited by the older members. These journals included everything from recipes and advice on clothing and gear to recounts of previous trips, photos, drawings, and poetry. Whatever saw publication was carefully screened by the supervisory councils of the Wandervögel, and adults often directly ran journals and contributed articles. The degree of autonomy these youths enjoyed was not, however, accorded in a vacuum. The Wandervögel were allowed an unprecedented degree of freedom in Wilhelmine Germany, but it was often hard-won. Despite several splits and reconciliations over the early years of the twentieth century, Wandervögel fought for and created autonomous spaces for themselves while navigating a strict and conservative culture and, by dint of their very existence, sparked debates about the limits of youth autonomy in Wilhelmine Germany. The Wandervogel philosophy eschewed any overt agendas, resting instead on the idea of Selbsterziehung, a form of teaching oneself through experience in an effort to create individuals less conditioned

BEYOND BOREDOM

41

by Wilhelmine society—in their view, a traditional bourgeois climate caught in rapid social, economic, and industrial modernization. This critique is evident from the earliest days of the movement. In an invited foreword to the first issue of the first Wandervogel periodical, the Wandervogel Illustrierte Monatsschrift in March 1904, Professor Dr. Heinrich Albrecht, who advised and advocated for the original, pre-schism Wandervogel, makes a case for the necessity of the organization, writing a Georg Simmel-inspired critique of bourgeois-Wilhelmine society couched in the pedagogical-reformative language of many adult allies of the organization. He writes that: We live in a time in which unfortunately an ever more pronounced Blasé attitude (Blasiertheit) threatens to usurp our so-called better society … Instead of, as in our fathers’ time, allowing youth to run riot in freedom [a dubious proclamation on his part—M.S.], we put them in kid gloves and direct them to children’s societies (Kindergesellschaften) and dancing bees (Tanzkränchen) or to other premature enjoyments.17 The activities conceived and carried out by Wandervogel youth, on the other hand, emphasized exploring and growing on their own terms, free from Wilhelmine conventions and demands to conform. This imperial Germany was markedly different from both the Germany of today and from the Federal Republic facing West German punks in the late 1970s. Wilhelmine Germany was caught between two worlds. Rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, Germany was nevertheless still ruled by a conservative aristocracy and monarchy; though its economic circumstances were in a state of flux, Prussian aristocratic tradition remained intact. As people flocked to the cities, the agrarian existence that had characterized life for so many, for hundreds of years, was eroding. A rapidly expanding working class taxed the infrastructures of large cities and redefined the social structure of the nation.18 The Wandervögel were allowed a unique degree of autonomy by sympathetic adults in positions of pedagogic, religious, political, and cultural authority, who otherwise attempted to directly guide youth through Jugendpflege (youth cultivation) groups. Such groups, Williams notes, were “organizationally divided into sectors that paralleled the ideological divisions in Wilhelmine Germany. The most significant of these domains were bourgeois-reformist, Catholic, Social Democratic, and conservativemilitarist.”19 By contrast, the Wandervögel espoused what they called a Programmlosigkeit, or programlessness, which was meant both to keep the organizations aloof from major social and political events, and to foster an open culture capable of embracing a variety of perspectives.20 The freedom granted to the Wandervögel (a freedom granted largely because of their privileged social position) was cherished and protected. The Wandervogel groups’ refusal to ally themselves with progressive elements of Wilhelmine

42

BEYOND NO FUTURE

society mirrors, in an intriguing way, the West German punks’ rejection of the serious, programmatic politics of the New Left. As their name suggests, the most important part of the Wandervogel undertaking was contained in the metaphor of the journey summed up in their conceptualization of “Wandern,” a meaning-loaded word for these youths translatable as something like “wandering” or “rambling,” but also referring back to a historical German hiking tradition fused with a Romantic conceptualization of nature that could be claimed and put into action by German youths. Wandern evolved within Wandervogel as a process that elapsed over time and where the experience itself was of immeasurably more importance than the goal of where they ended up. In this, the Wandervögel happened upon a means to restart the suspended time of liberal modernity that manifested as boredom.21 West German punks responded differently, instead acting out the meaninglessness of liberal-modern existence by staging the instability of meaning itself, and thereby confronting their society with what they viewed as its own intrinsic pointlessness. But though the Wandervogel’s project was couched in teleological terms, the punks’ was, notwithstanding its diagnosis of hopelessness (“no future”), also convinced of the pointlessness of the present. By different means, both the Wandervögel and the punks were able, at least for a time, to initiate movements in the sense of modeling modes of individual and collective action through which one might, however provisionally, opt out of Wilhelmine and Cold War West German professional, educational, and ideological routines. Wandervogel and punk both represented attempts to make dynamic the static presents that offered these youth little hope in personally fulfilling futures. The Wandervogel preoccupation with adventure is an innately hopeful and future-oriented potential solution to this cycle of boredom. Punk—notwithstanding its “no future” ethos—actually employs many of the same strategies, albeit without affording “hope” any rhetorical purchase. And in their implementation of several important emerging technologies of their days, I see these youth not simply pursuing distraction, but exploring the technological as providing tools to meaningfully engage with and express themselves in a complex and changing world.

Confronting modernity, re-appraising technology The Wandervögel used technologies that often allowed them to gain physical distance from the bastions of bourgeois Wilhelmine society, a distance that granted them freedom and autonomy. As Borghardt explored in Chapter 1, punks had a close connection to the city. With their schools, factories, shopwindows, and tenements, cities were the milieu of disaffection and boredom,

BEYOND BOREDOM

43

but at the same time also the site where autonomy from routine might be won—often by means of punks’ performing their apartness from the boring everyday in the streets, as publicly and confrontationally as possible. Here we think not only of the Kings’ Road, but of countless punk record sleeves, starting with the Ramones’ 1976 LP, featuring photographs of band members, and their friends, laying crude claim to public space merely by dint of looking strange in public. An insert for Slime’s first EP, Wir wollen keine Bullenschweine,22 continues the gesture for the West German punk record tradition, though the most famous examples of German punks’ public self-display remain the 1982 Chaostage or “chaos days,” a gatheringturned-miniature-riot that was planned as an attempt to overwhelm the Hannover police department’s punk surveillance program with an excess of visual data.23 In a more strategic sense, cities were also where rebellion had to be mediated—for it was in the cities that record labels and pressing plants, recording studios and television stations were located. The punk understanding of the technological metropolis put the rationalized built environment and its mass-media technologies to use, to literally amplify their own voices, their unruly shouts issuing from inside the industries of culture. In a sense—and they were often the first to admit this—they had their cake and ate it, too: in cities, and within the media-technological establishments they housed, punks could publicly distance themselves from mass-mediation’s production of modern alienation without needing to gain physical distance from mass-media institutions. To be sure, punk was not entirely a metropolitan phenomenon. Some punks from the country flocked to cities to be part of emerging scenes and attend shows, while others explored punk’s possibilities in their own village environments. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the publication of zines such as Der aktuelle Mülleimer (The Topical Trashcan) out of Böblingen, Alles tot (Everything Dead, but also Everything Sterile) from Rinseln, Marionett in Regensburg, and dozens of others from small or remote towns and cities across West Germany testifies to the reception of punk outside of West Germany’s major urban centers and the resonance it found in far-flung locales across the nation.24 And while the Wandervögel may have been oriented toward the countryside and nature, it must be remembered that they were themselves also an urban phenomenon in origin, as the popular Wandervogel hiking song “Aus grauer Städte Mauern” (“Out of Grey City Walls”) alludes— which title Alfred Hilsberg would borrow for his three-part 1979 series on West German punk and the Neue Deutsche Welle in Sounds.25 And while they have been seen as escaping into a romanticized past, their ready implementation of the most advanced relevant technologies of their day complicates this view and provides a much different and more nuanced conceptualization of their activities.

44

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Hiking and camping gear were naturally of utmost importance for any Wandervogel outing, and Wandervogel publications are filled with discussions of appropriate attire and advertisements for shops and mailorder services, selling everything from waterproofed outerwear and reinforced hiking boots to alcohol-burning camp stoves and even early battery-powered flashlights. In addition to purchasing (and advertising) mass-produced goods through their publications, the Wandervögel also relied on some of the German state’s central institutions. They used the postal service, of course, to send journals, exchange music, and correspond with Wandervögel in other cities across the nation. But the postal service also helped made long hikes possible; when leaving a town, Wandervogel groups would often ship excess clothing and gear many days in advance when they had a firm plan of where they were headed. They did the same with provisions, stocking up on food to be sent ahead to points where they would need it. This allowed them to keep a light pack weight while being prepared for long stretches where food might be difficult to obtain. Food, a necessity for any outing, was also centrally present within Wandervogel endeavors—but not in some putatively “natural” or premodern form. In the first issue, the Wandervogel Illustrierte, the same issue in which Dr. Albrecht gave his foreword, the Dr. Volkmar Klopfer Nahrungsmittelfabrik (food factory) ran an ad for their soup tablets (Suppentafeln) and pea-flour sausage (Erbswürste).26 Erbswurst emerged around the founding of the German nation-state. The product, when mixed with water and heated, produced a nutritious and quick meal. It found an immediate home amongst the Wandervögel. Other industrial foodstuffs rapidly appeared on the market, perhaps most prevalently and popularly the chemically and mechanically separated vegetable extracts of Julius Maggi, who expanded his line of products after opening a factory in Singen in 1897. The plant-based derivatives, offering a rich flavor similar to meat at a fraction of the price, provided convenience, nutrition, and value and were an ever-present companion of Wandervögel across the country on their outings.27 Of the many different products advertised in Wandervogel publications, industrial foodstuffs were among the most represented, and recipes and alternate uses for these products found their way into articles and tips from the youths themselves. Wandervögel often pointed specifically to their dietary-culinary practices, entangled though they were with industrial production of foodstuffs, as exemplifying Selbsterziehung in everyday action. Wolfgang Meyen, who first suggested the name of the organization and had become a leader in the Alt-Wandervogel (“Old Wandervogel”) group after a rupture of leadership in 1904, contributed an article entitled “Ein Abkochen im Regen” (A Boil in the Rain) to the November 1904 issue of the Wandervogel Illustrierte. He details an episode of Wandervogel gastronomic experimentation, from

BEYOND BOREDOM

45

gathering water to preparing a simple Erbswurst in a downpour. It reads as a sort of recipe, but is written in an informal and lighthearted tone. In a move typical of Wandervogel writing, the ingredient list of this recipe becomes rather a list of experiences that rhetorically integrates the preparation of a dehydrated, factory-produced foodstuff into a natural setting: So first go get water for a strong Erbsuppe! The water may seem stirredup and cloudy from the rain, but that doesn’t matter. So take a hearty potful! After getting underway, stumbling over a molehill and running into a few trees, you’ll arrive back with a half-full pot. Now the real cooking can begin. While breaking up the Erbswurst we notice to our horror a nice big water beetle jauntily swimming about in our soup. After the removal of the intruder we wait patiently and pointlessly for the soup to cook. Since in the meantime it has stopped simply raining gently, it means first we seek refuge from an involuntary dilution of the soup. Quickly we pack our things back up, beforehand first burning our finger, and find protection under the trees.28 The simple task of cooking in the rain, replete with collecting and spilling water, fishing out a stowaway beetle and burning fingers in an attempt to escape the escalating downpour, takes on a new dimension of experiential meaning and becomes an adventure.29 The momentary and the uncontrollable, not the standardized or proceduralized, stand out as the salient elements of this meal preparation. Other Wandervogel Meyen describes as experiencing similar difficulties, including one youth who has complicated matters by adding salt instead of sugar to his red jelly (rote Grütze). Another has issues with pine needles and dried leaves finding their way into his omelet, which has naturally also been watered down by the rain. Despite all of these setbacks, or more likely precisely because of them, the group emerges in high spirits: “But despite everything it was beautiful— the boil in the rain.” The challenges to be overcome and the lessons learned in this outdoorsy endeavor display the project of Selbsterziehung in action. Mundane though it may be, in the trial and error approach to cooking, we see an engaged amateurism that characterized the Wandervogel lifestyle in all of its facets. In any activity, one gets the sense from reading their publications, there existed the potential for exploration and adventure. And in viewing even the most mundane tasks as potential experiences, in a strong and transformative sense, the world the Wandervögel made for themselves within the broader world of mass-produced goods and rationally ordered life emerged as much less boring. Punk arrived in West Germany through international radio and news outlets, as well as domestic publications like the popular teen magazine Bravo. West German punk’s indebtedness to communication technologies was thus already cemented from the very beginning. Given the degree to

46

BEYOND NO FUTURE

which its mediated, consumer-oriented delivery was an integral part of its own aesthetic, with promotion work and publicity famously playing as important a role for English punk’s commercial success as songwriting, and the high-fashion industry responding promptly to punk style as a resource to be capitalized upon, simple fashion or music would have remained constrained to the same cycle of boredom discussed in this chapter—another flash-in-the-pan distraction to consume and discard before moving on to the next thing. And punk was disposable culture. From its inception. The musical and aesthetic styles and even its political and overt social commentary were not meant to last; punk never articulated a political program or plan of action oriented toward the realization of specific goals. But embedded in punk’s trappings, in its purposefully anachronistic redeployment of the garbage of postwar youth cultures,30 there was an insistence on taking action within the loathed, boring techno-culture that resonates with the Wandervögel’s approach. While punk was indebted to communication technologies for its initial spread, as had been the case with the Wandervögel’s use of the postal system and food-packaging industry, these technologies took on new meaning in the hands of punks themselves as they explored the wasteland of West German consumer society itself. In this, one of the most important technologies for punks was the photocopier. The zines punks produced on these machines, readily available in copy shops throughout West Germany in the 1970s, allowed them a platform to photoreproduce, in a scalable fashion at negligible cost, their own individual takes on punk—cultural productions that often alluded to the mediated boredom of West German consumer society.31 Making music was another major element of West German punk, which similarly prized the amateur’s ability to produce, and experiences gained from doing so, over an abstractly imagined consumer’s ability to consume. While mechanical sound recording was in its infancy in the age of the Wandervögel, by the late 1970s, with the arrival of affordable tape recorders, the medium was available to all. Cassette exchanges and an independent cassette scene emerged in West Germany in full force in the early 1980s, but punks had begun experimenting with the medium as early as 1977.32 The cassette recorder was also portable, which allowed for groups to experiment with the sounds different environments offered. The group Einstürzende Neubauten, pioneers in the Geniale Dilletanten (Brilliant Dilletantes—note the intentional misspelling) scene in West Berlin that often incorporated so-called found sound, recorded their first album on cassette in a small underground space under a busy road.33 The availability of the medium, combined with punk’s resolutely anti-hierarchical aesthetic sensibilities, meant anyone could do it. It was also affordable and immediate, and like making a zine all it required was the desire to get involved.

BEYOND BOREDOM

47

While cassettes offered the lowest barrier to entry, punks founded independent recording companies, which, owing to a risk-averse (and within punk often vilified) music industry whose major labels had little interest in signing punk groups after 1978, allowed an outlet, organized on the grassroots level, for punk music that otherwise would not have existed. Among the most successful was the label Ata Tak, initially established in Wuppertal as Warning Records. Ata Tak was founded in 1979 by members of the various punk/NDW/early-electronica groups in the orbit of Der Plan and DAF (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft). The name Ata Tak was an adaptation of the art gallery/scene gathering spot Art Attack, founded by two of the label’s founders, Moritz Reichelt and Frank Fenstermacher. Aside from much of their own work, they released albums from S.Y.P.H., Minus Delta t, Die tödliche Doris, Fehlfarben, and, in their biggest and most surprising success, a song from sixteen-year-old Andreas Dorau, who in 1981 reached number twenty-one in the West German charts with the runaway hit “Fred vom Jupiter.” While this commercial success was accidental, rather than having been sought out, and an exception rather than a rule, Ata Tak’s prolific run during the late 1970s and early 1980s captures the importance of the DIY mentality in punk and also the importance of the appropriation and rearticulation of the technologies of mass-production in the exploratory efforts of West German punks. While the familiar guitar, bass, and drum setup common to rock music provided punks with one set of tools to use in composing and performing their texts, experimenting with electronic or industrial sounds provided another. While the Wandervögel used the acoustic guitar at the beginning of the twentieth century, punk musicians tested the lower bounds of electric guitar playing with simplistic riffs processed for maximum distortion. Other groups, such as DAF, sought to distance themselves from them entirely; DAF composer and singer Gabi Delgado recounts their thoughts on the instrument: “At the time we really hated guitars. We couldn’t look at them anymore. They were like the final remains of the old world. They had to be eliminated.”34 As Frank Apunkt Schneider notes, while the now traditional rock setup remained a fixture, “The mass media of German New Wave par excellence … was the synthesizer.”35 What had as recently as the early 1970s been prohibitively expensive technology, primarily the means of production employed by experimental musicians in the orbit of Krautrock, concerned not with three-minute performances but with longer, ambient compositions, was suddenly available for amateur experimentation. Thus, the embracing of an amateurish engagement and exploration with electronic music became possible and was held up against professional musicianship as a sometimes confrontational alternative. While the form of baiting and demeaning of what many punks saw as a static mainstream culture was an impossibility for Wandervögel in Wilhelmine Germany, they nevertheless brought forth serious critiques against the consumer society

48

BEYOND NO FUTURE

of their day as well. A favorite object of Wandervogel derision was the tourist. The difference between them is explored in “Oratio pro domo,” an anonymous article from the Steglitz Wandervogel’s July 1908 newsletter: There are two types of travelling: as a “tourist” and as a “Wandervogel.” That has always been clear to us … The tourist is always going along a narrow ridge, white unknown land to the right and left that has no worth … His way is defined by guidebooks and guest houses, he wants to have good weather, views and rail connections. He wants to see, in his sad variety, the sunset on some particular mountains. We for our part can and want to assert: we don’t need that. Mere wandering gives us the highest exhilaration of free men.36 The form of travel of the tourist here becomes a microcosm of boring life and the inflexibility that accompanies over-rationalization. Focusing singlemindedly on reaching a destination efficiently, experiencing good weather, carefully planning and following an itinerary revolving around which towns to visit and in which hotels to stay, while ignoring the infinite possibilities that present themselves along the way, is to reduce travel to another commodity, fit for enjoyment only in exactly the way one has imagined beforehand, and thus to resituate oneself on the well-trodden path of rationalization one had sought to deviate from in the first place. By contrast, the Wandervögel treated travel as a way of life that, as another anonymous writer in a 1911 article in the Jung-Wandervogel Zeitschrift wrote, “despite low costs, makes us ever richer in enjoyment, experience and experiences.”37 (Here we’ll merely note the inherent contradiction of this stance with the use of the postal system to send supplies ahead to a specific destination, so they could be reached at a very particular time.) These anonymous Wandervögel thus critique, albeit in a polite fashion quite different from punk provocation, the meaninglessness of the modern outlook through a discussion of tourism; at the same time, of course, s/he is happily writing about an alternative form of engaged, reflective travel open to chance. But punks did not look to escape back to the land, or to find, through travel, alternatives to the city; for them it was often precisely the ugliness of modern society they were most interested in discussing and reveling in. In the September 1980 issue of the zine Propaganda, the poem “ALL DAY” [“DEN GANZEN TAG”] confronts the realities of modern boredom in the West German context from a first person perspective. The following translation is my own, and retains their rough orthography: ALL DAY all day i lie in bed to lie in bed i find quite nice i lie in bed all day

BEYOND BOREDOM

49

i lie in bed as long as i want all day I stand around dumb the boredom kills me stand around dumb all day i stand around dumb as long as i want all day i listen to music listening to music is dear to me I listen to music all day i listen to music as long as i want all day long i watch tv watching tv i do gladly i watch TV all day long i watch TV as long as i want man38 There is a freedom expressed in the punk poem. The lyrical subject stays in bed, stands around, listens to music, and watches television as long as s/he chooses, but this freedom is so perfunctory, so dependent upon passive being, and thus so paradoxically restrictive that it can hardly be seen as freedom at all. At stake in this repetitive, satirical presentation is the illusory freedom of distraction through consumption that, in its extreme confinement, diminishes the potentials of living to a list of activities that lead inexorably to boredom. Like the tourist who follows a guidebook to a narrow mountain pass to watch the sunset over the mountains, while neglecting everything they could experience along the way, the disaffected subject of “ALL DAY” has become confined to a closed cycle of mediated experience from which no worthwhile future can arise. But in the act of acknowledging and confronting this limited lifestyle by satirically reproducing it in stultifying, purposefully simplistic lyric form, the author of “ALL DAY” demonstrates the punk alternative ex negativo. That is, the activities mentioned are not, in fact, being embraced—they are being ruled out. This is the ironic and critical inversion of the Wandervögel’s genuinely excited paean to the experiential potential of cooking in the rain. In both cases, DIY divergence is being championed, and boredom being criticized, even if the tonality and specific details of the subject matter may in each case be different.

Beyond boredom At the very beginning of the twentieth century, and at a crisis point during its second half, the Wandervögel and the punks viewed German society as rigid, overly rationalized, and intrinsically meaningless—as boring. Counterposing a genuine emotional charge to an over-administered world,

50

BEYOND NO FUTURE

and appropriating the very technologies that they felt tended to accelerate individuals’ estrangement from lived experience in order to reestablish the primacy of the visceral, these superficially different youth cultures explored, and lived, alternatives to what they viewed as insufficiently engaging, overly commoditized and pseudo-differentiated ways of spending leisure time. Both Wandervogel and punk provide examples of how self-naming subcultures sought to make boring life meaningful through action. In the intervening years between the fin-de-siècle and the German autumn, two World Wars and a failed republic seem only to have temporarily disrupted, not permanently dislodged, the monotony, the boredom, the “experience without qualities” against which the Wandervögel had directed their activities, and in response to which the punks undertook theirs. Rationalization, urbanization, and the systematization of work and play had survived even the ruination of 1945, and so too had the affective condition proper to them: boredom. And while neither phenomenon upended the society that had produced it, that had never been the point—the Wandervögel’s appropriative work with technology, like that of the punks,39 constituted a kind of immanent critique, a momentary intervention that rekindled the flame of visceral experience they felt modern boredom had snuffed out. The seeming mundaneness and pervasiveness of boredom has allowed it to be taken both for granted and too lightly. Sean Desmond Healy calls this the “trivial view of boredom … the supposedly commonsense perception of [boredom] as a virtually unavoidable occupational hazard, disagreeable but harmless.”40 This perception, which adds to the difficulty of engaging with boredom and continues to misrepresent it as a universal but innocuous accompanier of existence has, along with the mood itself, remained one of the remarkable consistencies of life in modernity. In studying the punks and the Wandervögel together, we see that boredom and the administrative circumstances that produce it have their own historicity, their own periodspecific features. But we also see that boredom crosscuts the periodicity of twentieth-century German history, cropping up in two German societies that were very different from one another. The history of subcultures is often written in terms of succession and supersession, where mutually distinct subcultures, each appropriate to its own moment, appear and then disappear as if on cue. Punk, we recall Hebdige saying, wore this history of supersession on its sleeve, as a symbolic archaeology of its own origins. But what might the history of subcultures in general (and German subcultures in particular) look like, if we wrote it as a history of boredom and its discontents? Commonalities between subcultures, rather than heterogeneities, might begin to come into view. And continuity, rather than difference, might characterize our discussions of phenomena as different from one another as Maggi bouillon cubes and safety-pin earrings. How does boredom pervade a stable Wilhelmine state with both liberal and authoritarian characteristics, outlast war, and

BEYOND BOREDOM

51

resurface in a liberal democracy beset by crisis and wracked by terrorism? Studying subcultures’ diagnostic approaches to boredom, and the methods they developed to combat it, might yield profound new insights into this most modern of experiential conditions.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13

14 15 16

Franz Bielmeier and Peter Hein, eds. The Ostrich 1.1 (1977). Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (London: Continuum, 2009), 28. When written Wandervogel, it is a pluralization used similarly to “punks.” When written Wandervogel, it is either a single member of the group (as in “a punk”) or, more frequently, used for the whole phenomenon in general (similar to “punk” or, if you believe it can be called a movement, “the punk movement”). Seán Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self, and Culture (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1984), 15. Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2005), 279–80. See Isis I. Leslie, “From Idleness to Boredom: On the Historical Development of Modern Boredom,” Critical Studies 31.1 (2009): 35–59; 36 cited here. Goodstein, Experience without Qualities, 3. See Abbé Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: J. Nourse, 1748). Martina Kessel, Langeweile: Zum Umgang mit Zeit und Gefühlen in Deutschland vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 40. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” trans. Seyla Benhabib, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14. Alejandro Portes, “The Factorial Structure of Modernity: Empirical Replications and a Critique,” American Journal of Sociology 79.1 (1973): 15–44; 16 cited here. William James and Robert D. Richardson, The Heart of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 168. I am not arguing that all punks and the Wandervogel shared this vision. Rather, what I am suggesting is that both punks and Wandervogel encouraged and fostered lifestyles predicated upon active engagement (physical, emotional, or intellectual) and placed an exceedingly high value on experience, expression, and production, which helped them to lead what they felt were more meaningful and purposive lives. Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology,” Polity 29.4 (Fall 1997): 489–517. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland, 1977). The group remained nameless until 1901, when it adopted the name Wandervogel.

52

BEYOND NO FUTURE

17 “Geleitwort,” Wandervogel Illustrierte 1.1 (1904): 2. 18 For a more detailed description of Germany’s rapid industrial growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Ulrich Aufmuth, Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung unter soziologischem Aspekt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 119. 19 See J. A. Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), 111. 20 The cry of “Our strength is our programmlessness” (“Unsere Stärke ist unsere Programmlosigkeit”) was a popular credo within the Wandervogel. For a longer discussion of this, see Christa Berg, Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol 4 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991), 135–36. 21 Matthew J. Sikarskie, “Bored with Boredom: Engaging Modernity in Wilhelmine Wandervogel and West German Punk Subcultures” (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 2014). 22 Slime, Wir wollen keine Bullenschweine, Moderne Musik Tonträger, 1980, EP. 23 Birgit Reichardt, “Chaostage oder die ‘Schutt-und-Asche’-Legende,” NDR.de (December 19, 2012), available online at http://www.ndr.de/kultur/geschichte/ schauplaetze/chaostage101.html (accessed August 5, 2015). 24 Rocko Schamoni, Dorfpunks (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2009). 25 Alfred Hilsberg, “Neue Deutsche Welle,” Sounds 10–12 (1979). 26 Volkmar Klopfer Nahrungsmittelfabrik, advertisements for “Suppentafeln” and “Erbswürste,” Wandervogel Illustrierte 1.1 (1904): 8. 27 Maggi GmbH, Magginalien von A bis Z—100 Jahre (Frankfurt: Maggi, Hauptabteilung Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, 1996). 28 Wolfgang Meyen, “Ein Abkochen im Regen,” Wandervogel Illustrierte 1.11 (1904): 101. 29 Dennis Brissett and Robert P. Snow, “Boredom: Where the Future Isn’t,” Symbolic Interaction 16.3 (1999): 237–56. 30 See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1978), 26. 31 Matthew J. Sikarskie, “Scaling the Barricade: DIY and Technology in the West German Punk Movement,” EDGE-A Graduate Journal for German and Scandinavian Studies 2.1 (2011): 11–14. 32 Frank Apunkt Schneider, Als die Welt noch unterging: von Punk zu NDW (Mainz: Ventil, 2007). 33 Wolfgang Müller, ed. Geniale Dilletanten (Berlin: Merve, 1982). 34 Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende Deine Jugend: Ein Doku-Roman über den Deutschen Punk und New Wave (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 293. 35 Frank Apunkt Schneider, Als die Welt noch unterging: von Punk zu NDW (Mainz: Ventil, 2007), 153. 36 “Oratio pro domo,” Nachrichtenblatt des Wandervogel: Eingetragener Verein zu Steglitz bei Berlin 5.4 (1908): 37. 37 “Oh Wandern, o Wandern, du freie Burschenlust!” Jung-Wandervogel Zeitschrift 1.5 (1911): 67. 38 “DEN GANZEN TAG,” Propaganda 1.4 (1980). 39 Sikarskie, “Scaling the Barricade.” 40 Healy, Boredom, Self, and Culture, 9.

PART TWO

Performative Politics

4 The Politics of Lyrics in German Punk Peter Brandes

Politics of literature While Bob Dylan’s lyrics have long been read as poetry capable of holding up under literary analysis,1 punk lyrics—which typically either advance a straightforward political message or offer only scatology and nonsense— present the critic a more daunting task. To be sure, the same devices like rhyme and meter that serve to justify close readings of Dylan and other pop-rock lyricists2 also characterize punk lyricism. This is true even if punk’s most famous rhyme, Johnny Rotten’s “anti-Christ”/“anarchist,” does wry damage to the words it pairs in verse. Less ironically, the anarcho-punk band Crass made use of humble couplets in the first lines of the controversial song “Punk is dead.”3 Beyond rhyme, other rhetorical devices that we might think of as literary structure punk texts. At the political level, punk lyrics do not so much articulate an anarchistic ideology as enunciate individual or collective identifications by the literary means of rhyme, metaphor, and irony. And even though cause-driven sloganeering has its place in German punk lyricism, the importance for punk aesthetics of the Situationists’ understanding of politics, so key in the

This chapter owes a lot to the untiring efforts of Mirko Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus Shahan whose inspiring comments and suggestions helped enhance my chapter. I am also very thankful for the kind permissions of Andreas Frege (ZK, Tote Hosen), Martin Kircher (EA80), Tommy Koeppe (Canalterror), Stefan Mahler & Michael Mayer (Slime), and Jörg Walldorf (Toxoplasma) to cite their lyrics. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are my own.

56

BEYOND NO FUTURE

assembly of punk couture and album art,4 plays an attenuated role. Indeed, in German punk lyrics politics is inseparable from, rather than hampered by or at odds with, lyrical style. The thought of French philosopher Jacques Rancière helps us to conceive of this relationship between politics and aesthetics in a way that acknowledges the intransigency, opacity, and complexity of specifically lyrical advancements of political ideas. Political practice, Rancière writes, is always a communicative act; and within the sphere of communication, Rancière distinguishes between an intransitive and a communicative use of language. While literary language use corresponds to the former, political speech is linked to the latter. But even this border between literature and politics is not as clear as it seems: “Literature is indissolubly both a science of society and the creation of a new mythology. This is the basis on which the sameness of a poetics and a politics can be defined” (emphasis mine).5 And yet by contrast with the tragedy of antiquity, the moderns’ lyrical ‘I’ cannot pose a problem to the ‘we’ of the community.”6 Even a refusal to address the “we” of the commons can constitute a rejection of the terms by which that community has forged itself in discourse. Thus, can the tormented, fragmented “I” of the modernist lyric, the “I” beyond and against collectivity, be understood as representing the failures of community-forging discourses and literary modalities? The literariness of punk lyrics, and especially their use of modern lyricism’s panoply of techniques to enunciate an “I” against “we,” thus anchors their politics. A brief reading of the song “Tage wie diese” (“Days Like These”) by Die Toten Hosen will help introduce my method.

Lyricism In 2012, the famous German punk band Die Toten Hosen released their fifteenth album, Ballast der Republik (Ballast of the Republic), thirty years after the initial formation of the band. The song “Days Like These” became immediately a number one hit in Germany. This impressive triumph of front man Campino and his band is part of a general phenomenon of German pop music in the early first decade of the millennium: the comeback of German punk rock. But in contrast to the early work of Die Toten Hosen, the song “Days Like These” sounds like a World Cup championship song. It is not surprising that it was the favorite song of the German soccer team during the 2012 European championship. What is striking about the lyrics is the strong emphasis on the internal rhyme: “Through the elbowing of the bustling crowd/we’re paving the old familiar way/along the streets to the terraces on the Rhine” (“Durch das Gedränge, der Menschenmenge/Bahnen wir uns den altbekannten Weg/Entlang der Gassen, zu den Rheinterrassen”).7

THE POLITICS OF LYRICS IN GERMAN PUNK

57

The rhyme gives the reader or listener the impression of elegiac harmony. Moreover, the keyword “Rhein terrace” draws a line to German Romanticism and Heinrich Heine’s notion of Father Rhein. For Heine, the Rhein is the mythical home of German poetry and so is it in “Tage wie diese.” The speaker of the text returns to the places of his youth: “I’ve waited weeks for this day/and I’m dancing on the asphalt with joy/as if it were a rhythm, as if it were a song/that keeps luring me through the streets” (“Ich wart seit Wochen, auf diesen Tag/und tanz vor Freude, über den Asphalt/ Als wär’s ein Rythmus, als gäb’s ein Lied/Das mich immer weiter, durch die Straßen zieht”).8 This fusion of song with the environment is Romantic to its core; in Eichendorff’s poem “Wünschelrute” (“Divining Rod”), the word “song” functions as a key term for the harmonizing language of nature: “Sleeps a song in all things/That dream on and on/And the world will start singing/If you only match the magic word.”9 The aesthetic structure of the text seems to be far off from Campino’s early works like the famous song “Dosenbier” (“Canned Beer”) by his former band ZK (originally Zentralkomitee Stadtmitte). ZK, founded in 1978 and one of the pioneers of German punk, employed rather simpler lyrical strategies in “Dosenbier”: “Canned beer—that’s what we want/ Bottled beer—not with me/Canned beer—that’s what we want/Draft beer— that’s what I hate/Canned beer—that’s what we want” (“Dosenbier—wollen wir/Flaschenbier—nicht mit mir/Dosenbier—wollen wir/Bier aus dem Faß, ist was ich haß’/Dosenbier—wollen wir”).10 Beyond praising beer, this song adopts a first-person plural to advance a self-consciously lowbrow, antibourgeois statement. While the German bourgeois drinks bottled or draft beer, the cheap canned beer is preferred by punks. The main lyrical structure, the internal rhyme, is a mere parody of rhyme. The sense of the rhyme is simultaneously the negation of the structure, which signifies the a priori of punk. While the lyrics of “Days Like These” have their origin in the tradition of German Romanticism, the early ZK song rhymes only to call attention to how badly it does so. If the late work of Die Toten Hosen makes use of more or less conventional lyricism, which represents a significant departure from ZK’s crudity—an evolution from rough-hewn irony to mature refinement that a cynical soul might map onto Campino’s bands’ change in commercial fortunes. ZK’s simplistic humor is mirrored in the lyrical work of other early punk bands, and especially those from Düsseldorf—S.Y.P.H., KFC (Kriminalitätsförderungsclub), Male, and Mittagspause. This is also true for most comedy-based “fun punk” bands such as Walter 11, Abstürzende Brieftauben, or Die Goldenen Zitronen in their early years. However, many hard-core bands of the early 1980s lean, in composing their lyrics, on the German poetic tradition. A special sense for rhyme and lyrical meter can be found in the songs by Canalterror, a hard-core band founded in 1981 that released its first and only studio album Zu spät (Too Late) in 1983. Canalterror’s lyrics are characterized by a simple, but catchy

58

BEYOND NO FUTURE

use of rhythm and rhyme. Take the song “Staatsfeind” (“Enemy of the State”) for an example: I shit on politics It’s only cheap trickery I refuse all kind of leadership Because it will kill us all. … Lies have short legs Just like fat bigwigs But I have a bit of advice Tear down the German state. (ich scheiße auf die politik das ist doch alles fauler trick ich lehne jede herrschaft ab die bringt uns alle nur ins grab … lügen haben kurze beine wie die fetten bonzenschweine, doch da weiß ich einen rat nieder mit dem deutschen staat.)11 The structure of these song lyrics is somewhat conventional as each stanza consists of four lines with a rhyming couplet. The continuous use of the rhyme gives the whole song a clear and even organization, although it is not sung in a harmonic way. Corroborating the rhyme’s construction of sonic orderliness, the use of German proverbs (“lies have short legs”) renders the song’s critique familiar. By contrast with ZK’s enunciation of a beer-swilling, lower-class “we,” this text summons an “I,” calling itself an “enemy of the state,” into being. This performative speech act of selfnaming, produced through prosody, is the main political message of the text. Hardly pure noise, the voice of punk lyricism at work in this song communicates quite clearly. In another song by Canalterror, the end rhyme plays a less vital role and must be buttressed by alliteration. The text “Bonn-Duell” (“Bonn Duel”) consists of four verses without rhyme, except for the sixth and the eighth line of each stanza: Dirty kids on the street Playing with toy guns Handsome people in a coffee shop Talking elitist crap At the corner lies a bum With a bottle of wine

THE POLITICS OF LYRICS IN GERMAN PUNK

59

Wasted old junkies Shooting heroin into their veins Fat kids, cool cops Stare at each other with dull sight Punks and poppers at the corner Waiting for the first step Politics, a few blocks away In the government district Where they rule Germany And they hate each other just like us. Concrete city—concrete city Bonn Concrete city—concrete city Bonn Germany, you are dying It starts here, in Bonn. (schmutzige kinder auf der straße spielzeugpistolen in der hand schöne menschen im kaffeehaus reden elitären mist an der ecke liegt ein penner neben sich ne bombe wein abgefahrene alte fixer ziehen sich ’ne nadel rein dicke kinder, coole bullen starr’n dich an mit stumpfem blick punx und popper an der ecke warten auf den ersten schritt politik ein paar häuser weiter im regierungsviertel hier dort regiert man über deutschland und man haßt sich so wie wir betonstadt—betonstadt bonn betonstadt—betonstadt bonn deutschland, du bist am verrecken hier in bonn da geht es los.)12 Here the opposition of the ugly and the beautiful is not synthesized by the use of rhyme. The first verse ends in German with an alternate rhyme “wein/ rein” (“wine/‘into’”) that simply doubles the theme of substance abuse. More striking is the frequent use of alliteration: “abgefahrene alte fixer” (“wasted

60

BEYOND NO FUTURE

old junkies”); “punx und popper” (“punks and poppers”); “betonstadt bonn” (“concrete city Bonn”); and “deutschland, du” (“Germany, you”). Whereas the alliterative expression “concrete city Bonn” describes the punk attitude toward life in the former capital of West Germany, articulating a vision of the city akin to the other punk urbanisms that Dennis Borghardt explores in this book, the personification “deutschland” constitutes a counterpart in discourse, an entity to whom the “I” can speak directly. Slime’s infamous punk song “Deutschland,” with its line “Deutschland muss sterben, damit wir leben können” (“Germany has to die so that we can live”) inverts the Nazi-sympathizing poet Heinrich Lersch’s line “Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen” (“Germany has to live even though we must die”).13 Here, the personified Germany is spoken to in dialogue, even if by an enemy, rather than described as something that must die.14 In lyrics by Canalterror, no subversion of the communicative function of speech takes place. In the song “Mallorca,” for instance, the band critiques German vacationers on the Spanish island of Mallorca, eventually concluding with the line “Ich bleib lieber hier in Deutschland—hier hab ich Abgas pur” (“I’d better stay in Germany—here I have pure exhaust”).15 This bashful patriotism, in the form of a decision to stay at home and have fun, is tinged with bitter irony. The homeland is beloved not because of its beautiful landscape, but because of its air pollution, a subject of Canalterror’s ironic boast that becomes even more uncomfortable when the reader, pursuing the band’s pun further (the word “abgas” as used here can describe both “vehicle exhaust” and “letting off a little steam”), recalls that Germany was the country of gas chambers. This form of irony is quite typical for punk lyrics. Well known is the song text of “Belsen Was a Gas” by the Sex Pistols,16 in which a pun reliant on the different meanings of the word “gas” expresses an angry impiety. Irony of this kind is not an isolated case in German punk lyrics. Play with ambiguity and the double meanings of words runs directly counter to postwar German standards of political discourse that prized clarity, economy, and sobriety in self-expression; by lyricizing the political, Canalterror departs from the standards of the political public sphere. A similar function of political lyrics can be found in the work of Toxoplasma, founded in 1981 in Neuwied, Rhineland–Palatinate. Their first album Toxoplasma was released in 1983. The song “Wir warten” (“We Wait”) compares the future feared by German adolescents with the historical suffering undergone by the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: We are the ashes of tomorrow We are awaiting the big bang We already hear the noise of the bomb And all will tear down …

THE POLITICS OF LYRICS IN GERMAN PUNK

61

Nagasaki, Hiroshima—the city bursted, it crashed greatly Whatever happens with the bomb—the last will be taken by the German armed forces Nagasaki, Hiroshima—the city bursted, it crashed greatly Whatever happens with the bomb—the last will be taken by the German armed forces Hey, Nuclear Adam, we love you! (Wir sind die Asche von morgen wir warten auf den großen Knall wir hör‘n die Bombe schon pfeiffen und alles kommt zum Fall … Nagasaki, Hiroshima—die Stadt ging hoch, es krachte prima Bombe hin und Bombe her—den letzten holt die Bundeswehr Nagasaki, Hiroshima—die Stadt ging hoch, es krachte prima Bombe hin und Bombe her—den letzten holt die Bundeswehr der letzte wird der erste sein Hey, Nuclear Adam, we love yoooou!)17 With less taste than enthusiasm, the song ironizes the apocalyptic situation that it describes. The nuclear threat becomes the meaning of creation and new life (“Nuclear Adam”). The lyrical “We” adopts the position of victims: “We are the ashes of tomorrow.” With the word “ashes,” Toxoplasma picks up a metonym frequently used by Paul Celan, most famously in the expression “[y]our ashen hair Sulamith” from the poem “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”),18 perhaps the single most important and widely read contribution to post-Holocaust poetics. In the cultural memory of West Germany after 1945, “ashes” became a signal word for the Holocaust; Celan’s poetry, cited explicitly by Slime was certainly part of the West German punks’ archive.19 Making troubling use of this rhetorical figure to compare their own situation to that of both the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and to the bombed civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the song by Toxoplasma makes uneasy and intensely problematic connections to the poetic heritage.20 What differentiates the punk lyrics from Celan’s poetry is crude irony and casuistry; moreover, the use of a conventional lyrical style that is beggared by the complex, polylogical and polyglossic structure of “Deathfugue” or other poems by Celan. Further departing from this paradigmatic text of postwar Germanophone poetics, the stressed singing of the lyrics by Toxoplasma’s singer ignores the elegiac tone of Celan’s work, adding histrionic affective charge to the apocalyptic textual style.

62

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Reading References to German poetry are not only implicit in German punk lyrics. Some punk lyrics make use of literary quotations, intertextuality or hermeneutical re-reading.21 The band Schwarze Feuer from Göttingen created a musical version of Rilkes’s poem “Der Panther” (“The Panther”), which reads the texts as a critique on animal abuse.22 Their rendering of Rilke is rather trivial, but in some cases the practice of quotation is more sophisticated. The song “zu kalt” (“Too Cold”) appeared on the Hamburg band Slime’s 1983 album Alle gegen Alle, whose title likely cites Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the chaotic state of nature as a bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all). “Zu kalt” slightly adapts a short poem by Heinrich Heine. Heine’s original text is “Seldom did you understand me,/ Nor I you, in all the past;/Only when in filth we land,/We understand each other fast.”23 The piece stems from the cycle “Heimkehr” (“Homecoming”) of his early work Das Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs). The second poem of “Homecoming” is the well-known “Lorelei,”24 a female beauty who sits on the rocks above the Rhine and sings a song that causes the boatmen to founder on the rocks. Coming home is a dangerous journey, as the narrative of the “Lorelei” seems to indicate. But even in the homeland, misunderstanding grows, as the first line of the piece quoted by Slime indicates: “Seldom did you understand me.” Of all things, it is dirt that makes an understanding possible: “Im Kot” (in feces, in the dirt), which can also be understood as a situation of turmoil or crisis (á la the English expression “in the shit”). Slime makes this vernacular update, and Heine’s Kot thus reappears as aesthetic driftwood in the vulgar, garbage-strewn citational practices of punk, and specifically in a narrative on human coldness: Seldom did you understand me Seldom did I understand you But if we are sitting together in shit Immediately we understand each other No feelings, everybody is next Until it becomes too cold to sit down Too cold. If the ulcer grows And you don’t have any antidote Pick up a piece of warmness around the corner No feelings, everybody is next Until it becomes too cold to sit down Too cold.

THE POLITICS OF LYRICS IN GERMAN PUNK

63

No feelings, no bareness A cry that only fades away Nobody has the guts to speak Wherever you are it is too cold. (selten habt ihr mich verstanden kaum verstand ich euch doch wenn wir in der scheiße sitzen dann verstehen wir uns gleich keine gefühle jeder ist mal dran daß man vor kälte kaum noch sitzen kann zu kalt. wenn das geschwür groß wird und man kein gegenmittel hat holt man sich um die ecke eine portion wärme ab keine gefühle jeder ist mal dran das man vor kälte kaum noch sitzen kann zu kalt. keine gefühle keine blöße ein schrei der nur verhallt keiner hat den mut zu reden wo man ist ist es zu kalt.)25 Instead of “im Kot” (“in feces”), the text by Slime says “in der Scheiße” (“in shit”), an update that corresponds more to the youth language of the 1980s than to Heine’s word usage. Furthermore, Heine’s usage of the anaphora—“seldom …/seldom”—is cut down in the song text. The main rhetorical figure remains the term “shit,” a punk chestnut in Germany as in the Anglophone punk idioms, which here, paraphrasing Heine, states that the speaker of the text is in difficulties. Heine’s ambiguous verse is updated and incorporated into an earnest and essentially unambiguous critique of Kohl’s Federal Republic; in the process, Heine’s poem, marked by irony and wit, becomes a univocal cog in a protest machine. Here lyrical material from the history of German literature is pressed into the service of a more transparent complaint. A deeper sense of irony can be found in the lyrics by EA80, founded in 1980 in Mönchengladbach. Though the band is well-known for it is introspective and sophisticated lyrics, by contrast to most other German punk bands, EA80 rarely makes use of rhyme. Nevertheless, their texts employ lyric poetry’s play with ambiguity, uncertain referentiality, and sonority. In an article on EA80 by the Ox Fanzine, the author characterizes their lyrics’ ambiguity as follows: “You can’t decipher the lyrics directly; they don’t contain a concrete

64

BEYOND NO FUTURE

statement, message or confession, but they are nevertheless something more than a personal, enigmatic stringing together of words.”26 The song “Ritter” (“Knight”), from EA80’s first album Vorsicht Schreie (Caution Screams), exemplifies how the band hovers between clarity and incomprehensibility. The song deals with a very untypical theme for punk rock lyrics, the knight in crisis: He is a knight but his time is over, He is a knight … and he realizes: He is a knight but his time is over … What shall he do, he is a knight … Dragons, princesses, Bloody battles, Traitors, who try to kill him, farewell … Flashing swords, Spritzing blood in tournaments, Proved braveness, Farewell … he is a knight, farewell. (er ist ein ritter, doch seine zeit ist vorbei, er ist ein ritter … und er erkennt: er ist ein ritter, doch seine zeit ist vorbei … was soll er tun, er ist ein ritter … drachen prinzessinnen, blutige schlachten, verräter, die nach seinem leben trachten, ade … blitzende schwerter, spritzendes blut in turnieren bewiesener heldenmut, ade … er ist ein ritter, ade.)27 The text describes the anachronism of knighthood. Although the name Sir Lancelot is mentioned explicitly, the lyrics bring to mind the story of Don Quixote. But whereas Don Quixote lives in the illusion of being a true knight, the fictitious knight from the EA80 song is well aware of his own anachronicity. In the context of the punk rock discourse, this short narrative can be understood as a parable on masculine punk role models such as Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols) or Tommi Stumpf (KFC). A subsequent song on the album, called “Heinrich,” returns to the theme, and portrays a new image of the male punk rocker:

THE POLITICS OF LYRICS IN GERMAN PUNK

65

Mother wants that she marries well: Johannes Heesters, Heino or the pope, But she only wants Heinrich … Also father wants that she marries well: Beckenbauer, Helmut Kohl or the pope, But she only wants Heinrich … Heinrich is a sensitive punk with glasses, Who reads, very calm, Tender poems to her … And when he meets her, he takes down his badges, Washes the color out of his hair, and smiles, Yes, Heinrich … Also grandma wants that she marries well: The pope, the pope, or at least a cardinal, But she only wants Heinrich … So she goes to the window and she cries … (mutter will ’ne gute partie für sie johannes heesters, heino, oder den papst, doch sie will nur den heinrich … auch vater will ’ne gute partie für sie: beckenbauer, helmut kohl, oder den papst, doch sie will nur den heinrich … heinrich ist ein zarter punk mit brille, der liest ihr in aller stille, zarte gedichte vor … und wenn er sie trifft, nimmt er seine badges ab, spült die farbe aus seinem haar und lächelt, ja heinrich … auch oma will ’ne gute partei für sie: den papst, den papst, oder zumindest nen kardinal, doch sie will nur den heinrich … und so tritt sie ans fenster und schreit …)28 In the history of German literature, the name Heinrich is well-known and closely connected to Goethe’s Faust and Gretchen’s last words in the first part: “Heinrich. I fear and loathe you.”29 Odd, transformed, or degraded proper names have a prominent status in the history of punk as one

66

BEYOND NO FUTURE

can see by names such as Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), Steve Ignorant (Crass), and Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten).30 It is deeply ironic to give a punk rocker the name Heinrich, who is, moreover, described as a poet. The oxymoron “sensitive punk” makes fun of the typical male punk attitude.31 Here, punk lyrics are grounded in the literary canon (Don Quixote and Faust). The politics of lyrics turn out to be politics of the name. EA80’s second album, 2 Takte später (2 Beats Later), explicitly reinterprets Heinrich Böll’s “Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen” (“Murke’s Collected Silences”), a short story first published in the German journal Frankfurter Hefte in 1955. In it, the radio editor Dr. Murke collects pieces of audiotapes on which nothing is recorded. He calls himself a collector of silence: “When I have to cut tapes, in the places where the speakers sometimes pause for a moment—or sigh, or take a breath, or there is absolute silence—I don’t throw that away, I collect it.”32 When his supervisor asks why he does this, he answers: “I splice it together and play back the tape when I’m at home in the evening. There’s not much yet, I only have three minutes so far—but then people aren’t silent very often.”33 In another scene, at the end of the text, Murke has a rendezvous with his girlfriend. He asks her to let him record her silence: “‘Oh hell,’ he said, ‘Tina dear, now I’ve got to cut all that out; do be sensible, be a good girl, and put just five more minutes silence on the tape’.”34 Although the girl calls the recording of her silence “immoral,”35 she is willing to do it. Murke’s passion for recorded silence is, of course, a kind of fetishism. The radio man, who longs for silence, comes across as abnormal in a society of communication and chatter. Böll’s satire critiques the empty chatter of the Federal Republic in the 1950s. The song by EA80 sets the focus on the recording of Tina’s silence: The pauses of your sentences, spoken on tapes, I cut them together and wind them on a spool, I collect your silence, This everlasting quietness, and if I am sad I listen to you. This is the freedom, I always wanted I hear, What you say, And it’s always good, This is the way, I always was looking for, And if I am sad, You will encourage me

THE POLITICS OF LYRICS IN GERMAN PUNK

67

Like a book I once read, Of which I forgot the title, Or was it: Dr. Murke’s collected silences. (die pausen deiner sätze auf bänder gesprochen, ich schneide sie zusammen und ich spule sie auf, ich sammel dein schweigen, diese ewige ruh, und bin ich traurig, höre ich ihm zu dies ist der freiraum, den ich immer wollte, ich hör’ was du sagst, und es ist immer gut, dies ist der weg, den ich immer wollte und bin ich traurig, du gibst mir den mut, wie ein buch das ich einst las, dessen titel ich vergaß, oder wars: dr. murkes gesammeltes schweigen.)36 The text describes a reading scene. If the final “I” of the text is the reader of Böll’s short story, for most of the song it is that story’s protagonist, Dr. Murke. We thus have two layers of contemplation: Dr. Murke’s contemplation of his recordings, and our contemplation of Böll’s text describing Dr. Murke’s production and review of silent media. EA80’s lyric is not a parody of Böll’s short story, but rather a pastiche, an imitation that honors the literary piece it mimics and, at the close, also an interpretation of Murke’s strange behavior. The initial “I” of the text listens, as Murke, to the recorded silence, because it gives him consolation. Murke’s possession for silence is figured as understandable, a sign of sadness. The recorded silence, not merely of his girlfriend but of anybody who (however momentarily) falls quiet, is a cure for the noise of an information age—in Böll’s story, represented by the radio. In the EA80 text, if noise is a key descriptor for punk rock, the band’s citational affirmation of silence, through Böll, can be read as a critique of the ideology of punk, and of West Germany’s branch of the culture industry, at one and the same time. Negating punk by means of literature, EA80 negates its own genre’s critical impetus. One of the most literary texts of German punk rock becomes, thus, the most autocritical, and thus the most political. Of course, as a political performance, it remains paradoxical. While the “I”

68

BEYOND NO FUTURE

speaks of silence at the thematic level, formally speaking, the song comprises music or, depending on the viewpoint, noise. Nevertheless, the speech of the lyrical “I” refers to the constitutive experience of silence, that is, the practice of reading. Rereading—that is, the lesson of EA80: writing as an initial practice of punk lyrics, or to be more precise, punk literature. The experience of the lyrics of EA80 is, on the one hand, singular in German punk history. But, on the other hand, it reveals the literary grounding of punk lyrics—not just at the level of lyrical stylistics (anaphora, rhyme, meter) but also at the level of thematic concerns (citation, paraphrase, pastiche). The political speech of punk lyrics depends strongly on the literary use of language, and on the linguistic use of literature. The political force of the texts lies not so much in their ideological statement, or subscription to a specific plan for action, but in how they channel literary discourse. Through the use of rhyme and irony, bands like Canalterror and Toxoplasma police the politics of national identity, occasionally at the cost of reflexivity; and whereas intertextual play sometimes simplifies the politics of literary language (Slime), the lyrics of EA80 create a new form of political literature that is neither pure literature nor pure message. In West German punk, the political and the literary mutually reinforce one another, and provide one another with critical purchase.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8

See, for example, Heinrich Detering, Bob Dylan (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag, 2007). The musicologist Dai Griffiths rightly pointed out that rhyme is “central in pop music” and that some pop songs “are driven by rhyme alone.” Dai Griffiths, “From Lyric to Anti-Lyric: Analyzing the Words in Pop Song,” in Analysing Popular Music, ed. Alan F. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39–59, 50. Crass, The Feeding of the 5000, Crass Records, 1978, EP. Greil Marcus describes the relationship between lettrism and the Sex Pistols as follows: “[N]ow it seems to me that the Lettrist International … was itself a bomb, unnoticed in its own time, which would explode decades later as ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ and ‘Holiday in the Sun’.” Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces. A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 22. Jacques Rancière, Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 20. Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words. The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 11. Tote Hosen, Tage wie diese, Jochens kleine Plattenfirma, 2012, CD. Ibid.

THE POLITICS OF LYRICS IN GERMAN PUNK

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

69

Joseph von Eichendorff, Gedichte. Versepen, ed. Hartwig Schulz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 328. ZK, Eddie’s Salon, Rondo, 1981, LP. Canalterror, Zu spät, Suppenkazpers, 1997, CD. Ibid. The line is engraved on a war memorial in Hamburg, which was the object of several controversial debates. See Daniel Ryser, Slime. Deutschland muss sterben (München: Wilhelm Heyne, 2013), 60–1. For a detailed discussion of the topology of homeland in German punk, see Dennis Borghardt’s article in this book. Canalterror, Zu spät. See Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 116–19, and Karen Fournier’s comments on “Belsen Was a Gas” in this book. Toxoplasma, Toxoplasma, Aggressive Rockproduktionen, 1983, LP. Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), 30–1. However, the song “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” (“Death is a Master from Germany”) by Slime gives proof that the work of Celan was not only known, but also acknowledged by at least some German punk bands: “Then Celan’s story comes to mind/Death is a master from Deutschland” (“da fällt mir celans geschichte ein/der tod ist ein meister aus deutschland”). Slime, Schweineherbst, Indigo, 1994, CD. This identification with the victims of the Holocaust is not an isolated case in the discourse of German punk rock. In the cover version of the “Moorsoldatenlied” (“Song of the Moor Soldiers”), which was created by prisoners of the concentration camp Bögermoor, the band Inferno states: “The same will happen to us as well” (“aUCH sO wIRD eS uNS eRGEHEN”). Inferno, Tod und Wahnsinn, Mülleimer Records, 1983, LP. For a closer examination of the representation of the Holocaust in German punk songs, see the article by Melanie Eis and Fabian Eckert in this book. For the importance of intertextuality in German punk lyrics, see also Cyrus Shahan’s chapter on DAF in this book. Schwarze Feuer, Schwarze Feuer, Bonzen Records, 1991, EP. Heinrich Heine, The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version, trans. Hal Draper (Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), 107. Ibid., 76–7. Slime, Alle gegen Alle, Aggressive Rockproduktionen, 1983, LP. Joachim Hiller, “EA80,” in Ox-Fanzine (June/July/August 2000), available online at http://www.ox-fanzine.de/web/itv/113/interviews.212.html (accessed August 1, 2015). EA80, Vorsicht Schreie, self-released, 1983, LP. Ibid. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins (Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1984), 119. See also Tobias Lau, Die heiligen Narren. Punk 1976–1986 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992), 101. Ridiculing male role models was of great importance to several German punk bands. For further readings, see Melanie Eis’s and Fabian Eckert’s interpretation

70

32 33 34 35 36

BEYOND NO FUTURE

of Mittagspause’s song “Herrenreiter” as well as Cyrus Shahan’s analysis of the songs “Sex unter Wasser” and “Absolute Körperkontrolle” by DAF in this book. Heinrich Böll, The Stories of Heinrich Böll, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Knopf, 1986), 510. Ibid. Ibid., 511. Ibid. EA80, 2 Takte später, self-release, 1985, LP.

5 Subcultural Studies between the Blocs: Unexpected Cosmopolitanism and Stubborn Blind Spots in East German Theories of Punk Seth Howes

Introduction When East German fans of punk recall their first encounters with the music, Western radio broadcasts figure prominently: It was shortly after the middle of the 1970s. Rock music in the East didn’t merit discussion anyway. At my friend’s house, I listened, bored, to two songs by the new hard-rock band Sex Pistols. No, wait! That wasn’t hard-rock at all, but rather rock n’ roll in its purest form! The new phenomenon was called punk. The next months were occupied with collecting what little information was available, and finding out what exactly this was.1 Many young people had similar experiences, and would go on to become the musicians, zine printers, concert organizers, graphic designers, of the punk scenes of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). But future punks were not the only ones paying attention to this multimedial headline maker, or to the moral panics it provoked. Newspaper editorialists, musicologists

72

BEYOND NO FUTURE

and sociologists, and the secret police were watching this multimedial phenomenon—in foreign media coverage and, increasingly, in their own Republic’s city streets. The harsh consequences of measures taken by the Ministry for State Security (hereafter MfS) and the German People’s Police have prompted revealing studies of Stasi assessments of punk. Michael Rauhut,2 Jeff Hayton,3 and Juliane Brauer4 have analyzed how from the late 1970s up to the fall of the Wall in 1989, the Stasi MfS produced a body of criminological writing on punk with its own genre traits, periodicity, strategic concerns, and theoretical infrastructure. As Rauhut sees it, the MfS aimed to answer the “Chekist question, ‘who is who?’” and thus to “shed light on each individual punk, in order to then present their data in clean, clear blacklists.”5 Hayton has shown how MfS caseworkers assembled what he calls “punk biographies”: character portraits that individuate punk deviance by ascribing transgressive characteristics to individual East German youths’ personal failings, rather than to a broader social malaise, and thereby “locating the site of punk ‘conversion’ within the home, and blam[ing] individual moral weakness rather than collective socialist failures.”6 And Brauer reveals that specific emphases on the affective register of punk performances—mood, feeling, and sensation—shaped MfS caseworkers’ thoughts on punk deviance: “As the Stasi understood it, their music was aggressive, full of pessimism, and dominated by an apocalyptic mood.”7 This chapter examines non-criminological East German engagements with subcultures and punk, examining how East German commentators understood punk’s relationship to the social and economic contexts producing it. Early journalistic commentary on punk, Thomas Heubner’s 1985 Rebellion of the Deceived, and music scholar Peter Wicke’s demanding and sophisticated discussions of popular music, informed by sociological, anthropological, and economic theory, all offered different readings of punk. And yet each account of punk offered what we might term a symptomatology of punk, and other postwar youth subcultures, taking them for indices of capitalism’s advance, and decay. In police circles, punk and other subcultural “appearances,” or Erscheinungen, were held to be weaponized ideologemes, carefully managed by capitalist governments and deployed internationally via the airwaves, all for the specific purpose of sapping Eastern morale and undermining socialist social cohesion. For example, a January 1988 strategy paper on deviant youth behavior, developed by the Main Department of Criminal Investigation of the East German People’s Police, warned of the [class] enemy who develops numerous activities to destabilize socialism in general, and the GDR in particular, by any means. The opponent desires the unhindered liberalization of society and attempts with pluralistic slogans to provide young people with “models” for their thoughts and actions. […] Methodically and deftly, he confronts young people

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

73

politically-philosophically, but culturally-aesthetically, with his positions, and attempts to degrade their socialist value-orientations.8 In examining non-criminological writing on punk published over the course of the 1970s, we discover that this grim and bloody-minded assessment of “cultural-aesthetic” weapons was by no means the only account of punk, of subculture, or of Western culture more broadly, on offer in eastern letters. Indeed, refusing to intentionalize British punk or misconstrue it as a weapon, and yet acknowledging its inextricability from capitalism, each of the writers examined in this chapter views the sights and sounds of Western popular culture not as instruments for promoting its advance, but rather as symptoms of its decline.

Negative impressions: East German punk studies, 1977–1985 Commentary on punk began appearing in the East German media in 1977 and 1978. “It is possible,” Gisela Herrmann wrote in March 1978 in the Berliner Zeitung, “that ‘the Jerks,’ as they call themselves, were at the beginning only interested in making a stink about the manure they see themselves to have landed in: young people without chances at an education or career, without a path or goal.” Sympathetic to young people in capitalist countries facing an insoluble predicament, yet dismissive of their responses, Herrmann’s account is typical of the East German public sphere’s early engagement with punk. “But as real products of their capitalist environment, the ‘punks’ (pronounced pahnks) from the impoverished neighborhoods of Britain offer their shrill howls of protest with a practical eye toward turning a profit,” Herrmann writes. Punning on Stütze, which can mean “support” through welfare transfers, but also moral or political support, she further observes that “It is as contradictory as it is true: here, complainers receiving support become welcome support for capitalist society”—specifically, by creating hits for the rock charts and the fashion industry.9 Similar mockeries of punk contradiction appear that year in brief position statements in other major East German newspapers.10 For a slightly different audience, neues leben, a monthly publication of the Free German Youth, published the article “Punk-Rock: The Newest Wave of Western Pop Music” in March 1978. Theorizing the figure of the punk at slightly greater length but from a similar vantage, it contrasted punk’s political disorganization to institutionalized class struggle as practiced by the German Democratic Republic: the isolation of this movement from organized class struggle and the lack of clear understanding of its largely very young adherents as to the

74

BEYOND NO FUTURE

cause of their suffering, and as to the paths and goals of anti-imperialist struggle, led to petit-bourgeois-anarchistic fantasies. […] The political confusion of the punks shows itself in the fact that they wear swastikas in order to shock, to demonstrate that they place themselves beyond all political taboos.11 Insofar as the punk realizes his circumstances are unjust, and rejects them, his response is authentic symptomatic, that is, indicative of a real underlying predicament. But petit bourgeois and anarchistic ideals impinge upon the progressive potential of his response, so the punk articulates simple anger, rather than goal-oriented radicalism. Isolated from the broader currents of (communist) revolutionary politics, the punk text signifies nothing. A standard set of assumptions unites these early journalistic treatments of punk’s social situation. First, punk is a product of capitalism’s failure to produce economic opportunities for many young people who live in capitalist societies. Second, punk is both a symptom of decay and a profitable bit of business that is absorbed instantly into the music and fashion industries. Third, punk is incapable of fomenting revolutionary sentiment or organizing political action. These assessments of punk’s politics are accompanied by aesthetic critiques of its incoherent textuality. Bossenz, Mewis, and Schmidt, and the Neue Zeit all offer rather dim readings of punk’s formal properties as music. For Bossenz, who considers Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee (1978) and Nigel Williams’s play Class Enemy (1978) as verisimilar documentations of British social decay, punk music “resembles in its primitiveness the clothing and lifestyle of this culture.” It is therefore not surprising that venues can be found “for singers smeared with paint and blood who curse their audience, spit at it, and exhort it to senseless destruction.” For Mewis and Schmidt, punk is “distinguished by simple hard-rock structures, aggressive sound, noise, a wild stage show elevated to ecstasy” (4). Published just a few years after the expulsion of the dissident East German singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann had led to an embarrassing public outcry, and uncertainty about what kind of lyrical or musical experimentation the state would tolerate,12 these aesthetic critiques of punk music had two objectives: first, to apprise East German readers, disapprovingly, of the latest in Western pop-cultural nonsense and to proscribe its adoption by East German musicians as an aesthetic; and second, to explain that this music is nothing but a chaotic symptom of advanced capitalism, absorbed by industry as quickly as it was generated. Despite its negative initial reception in both East and West German media, punk endured. Punk was a rock genre, an ensemble of fashion choices, a rhetorical mode, and a principle around which young people in both German states organized themselves into groups, and it became a feature of life in East and West Berlin, in Düsseldorf and Halle, and in Hamburg and Erfurt

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

75

alike. But as the early trend pieces on this rude, crude Western phenomenon died out, and punk put down roots, more involved inquiries into what it was, what social circumstances had produced it, and what it might mean, began to appear. One sustained treatment was Thomas Heubner’s Rebellion of the Deceived, which was published in 1985 in Verlag Neues Leben’s popular series nl konkret. Reprintings in 1986 and 1987 followed.13 Over some 200 pages, Heubner maps out a broad chronology of youthful rebellion under capitalism, largely by reading press clippings against song lyrics, record sales figures against unemployment numbers, and self-styling against geopolitics. Several questions guide his analysis, but they boil down to one: Are Western youth subcultures all just meaningless agitation that diverts revolutionary energy from other pursuits, or do they harbor the potential to affect real social change? The book’s argument oscillates between extreme disapproval and grudging acceptance. Rebellion analyzes the relationship between youthful rebellion, popular culture (largely music and fashion), and industry with an eye to economic circumstances and social class: In the history of class society there have at all times been individuals or groups of people who live, work, and think differently from [those in] their environment. They no longer fit into the habituated frame, broke with theretofore normal social norms, set different values, questioned taboos. They doubted their contemporaries, social circumstances, or themselves, wanted to change something, sought new ideals and lifegoals and re-oriented their action accordingly. (14) Youthful rebellion is also eminently of its time, since young people respond to “their environment” and the social norms that condition it, yet transhistorical as well—a phenomenon that, “in the history of class society,” has been there “at all times.” Subcultures are therefore discrete instantiations of a continuous process. While the form they take at a specific conjuncture can be explained historically, the reason they appear at all—class struggle— remains constant. In his chronology of revolutionary sentiment, Heubner records Jesus of Nazareth, Diogenes of Sinope, and Francis of Assisi as precursor figures to the punks (13–14), which suggests that the history of rebellion has a longer timeline than the history of advanced capitalism—and that the former therefore cannot be defined entirely in terms of the latter. (Heubner’s sweeping transhistorical scope, and his free associative commentary, resemble the technique of Greil Marcus in some respects, and—with the mention of Diogenes—of Peter Sloterdijk in others.)14 But Heubner is primarily interested in reading post-Second World War youth subcultures in Western Europe and the United States—beatniks, hippies, Teds, mods, rockers, and punks—as symptoms of specific phases in the development of

76

BEYOND NO FUTURE

imperialism-capitalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Thus, the beatniks—defined as a beaten, “geschlagene” generation and as Kerouac’s “beatific, beautiful” generation—take to the road, embracing motion as an alternative to the inertia of the “squarvilles” [sic], the “residential areas of the bourgeoisie and squares” whose “crusted-over conventions and superficial lifestyles” had to be attacked (34). Similarly, the West German Halbstarken—linked by Heubner’s analysis to such manifestations of Americanism as the Teds and mods of England and the French Blouses Noires (46)—are responding to economic striation specifically in postwar Western Europe: More than half the “Halbstarken” grew up in a household without a father—a long-term effect of the World War. Most of them come from working-class families and the poorly-paid salaried class, and/or were themselves apprentices or workers. The youths experienced the prestige-, consumption-, and status-seeking of their elders, measured in automobiles and other superficialities, in the time of the Federal Republic’s “economic miracle” and “prosperity society” in the 1950s. (48) Further explaining the Halbstarken rebellion is the geopolitical tension of the moment. For Heubner US- and NATO-led attempts to “coordinate” Western European countries politically and militarily (and here the verb gleichschalten’s resonance with the Nazis’ consolidation of power is hardly accidental), and the banning of the West German communist party (the KPD) in 1956, mark a “caesura in history” (49). As part of a broader reactionary turn in West German leadership during the 1950s—the loathed Hallstein doctrine—these actions not only established the social rigidity and economic stratification against which the Halbstarken chafed, but also facilitated the spread of the Americanism that these West German youths, with their leather jackets and ducktail haircuts, drew upon.15 Heubner’s analysis of political events largely conforms to what one might expect from an East German scholar of Western culture. His reading of the hippies against the Vietnam War practically writes itself (75–106), and his spotty sourcing leads to laughable assertions from time to time— for instance, his claim that the Jonestown mass suicides in November 1978 had “revealed themselves, upon closer investigation, to be a secret operation of the CIA with the code-name MK-ULTRA” (132). However, in marked contrast to this conspiracy-theoretical canard, his discussions of punk are relatively well-sourced, relying not just on an analysis of (spottily translated) Sex Pistols lyrics, statements by British and American punks to English media outlets, or the punk coverage of pop music trade publications such as Bravo or general audience weeklies such as stern, but also on the work of Anglophone cultural studies scholars such as Simon Frith and Dick Hebdige.

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

77

Appearing within a history of the twentieth century recounted as a succession of unique disaffections inevitably produced by capitalist excess, Heubner’s assessment of punk is at least consistent with his broader argument. He begins by describing punk aesthetics as the product of “Chaos” and an “aggressive type of posturing for effect [Effekthascherei].” He then links these textual preoccupations to what produced them, making punk an index of its environment. In point of fact, what was going on in Great Britain at the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s looked, at least on its surface, like Chaos and Anarchy. For example, in 1981: all the luster of the preparations for the so-called wedding of the century between the British heir Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, was not sufficient to dispel the shadows that had long lain over merry old England. For in these days and weeks an unprecedented wave of violence rocked the London districts of Southall and Toxteth, and Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Wolverhampton, and Hull. Thousands of youths showed up in the slums, but also on the wealthy promenades, to engage in bitter streetfighting with the police. Shop windows were broken, stores were looted, cars and houses burned. The fuel for this social eruption had long been piling up: mass unemployment with particularly devastating consequences for British youths, stagnating industrial production associated with an inflation rate growing unchecked, catastrophic living conditions and racism growing apace. (185) There is too much detail here for us to cast this into the dustbin as careless and superficial Cold-Warrior nonsense. It may well be that, but not only that. The comparison of Charles’s marriage and the Southall riots might be tendentious, but even an ungenerous reader of Heubner must admit that such contrasts between mass-media preoccupations and actual events are both factual and striking. Moreover, his understanding of why punk looked and sounded the way it did, and what it can tell an observer about the social circumstances that produced it, mirrors not only those of the East German journalists preceding him, but Frith and Hebdige as well. Heubner often turns these to his own purposes. Take, for instance, Frith’s assessment that punk distinguishes itself from other subcultures because punks “originally had no connection to the working class.”16 Since proximity to the social circumstances and lived experiences of the working class was the standard for judging any cultural object in the GDR, Heubner quotes Frith to disqualify punk as an actual working-class culture (186). Having shored up his disqualification of punk as a working-class culture by citing a British expert, Heubner then further argues that the slippage between punk’s bourgeois characteristics and lumpenproletariat filthiness placed it between two of advanced capitalism’s paradigmatic social classes,

78

BEYOND NO FUTURE

a bifurcation that registers as indecision in punk’s own rhetoric: “What the punks think, express, and do reflects extreme contradictoriness: one the one hand, protest and rebellion, on the other apathy and ‘no interest in anything’; their own misery and [the] hopelessness of the capitalist environment may be felt, but the deeper causes and connections remain, however, largely undiscovered” (190). This is not a mis-reading of Frith, exactly; it is instead a serious consideration of Frith’s claim, and a re-deployment of that claim in the service of a larger argument Frith himself had no interest in advancing. Heubner makes Western theory work for him. Heubner does similar work with East German commentary on punk. Quoting Peter Wicke, Heubner concedes that “neither defamation, nor anti-human charlatanry, nor the stylization of a salon revolution quite captures punk” (191). Of course, here Wicke cautions against analytic closure when discussing punk. But notwithstanding this admission of punk’s complexity, Heubner’s eventual conclusion is unambiguous: punk is a protest only in scare quotes, reduced by the capitalist system to “nothing more than a symbolic or sham protest.” Indeed, any “resistance against capitalism that does not direct itself against the root of this society cannot escape this fate” (197). Whatever truth-telling punk may have managed to do in the tense summer when it first made headlines, East German commentators in the late 1970s were certain that its message went unheard and its rhetorical force immediately dissipated, absorbed into a monopolized culture industry highly adept at disarming system internal threats before they endangered the foundations. This proved not to be the case, as punk entrenched itself as one rock aesthetic (among many others) to take root in the Western European public sphere over the course of the 1980s. More importantly, by the time Heubner’s work was published, East German punk had become an enduring feature of the GDR’s tape-trading circuit,17 church concerts, and city streets,18 making the omission even more obvious. Thus, Heubner argued for British punk’s symptomatic truth, linking its emergence to underlying social problems while refusing to address the implications of that argument with respect to the existence of East German punk—even as an asked-andanswered line of argumentation.

Subculture theory between the blocs: Peter Wicke’s Rockmusik When he published Rockmusik: Zur Ästhetik und Soziologie eines Massenmediums in 1987, Peter Wicke was one of the East German academy’s leading voices on the sociology of music. Director of the Research Center for Popular Music and a member of the musicology faculty at the

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

79

Humboldt University in Berlin, he also served as an expert referee for the Ministry for Culture, offering learned comment on the feasibility and likely social value of proposed projects like the 1987 DEFA documentary Flüstern und Schreien: Ein Rockreport.19 By 1987, in addition to Rockmusik, he had written Anatomie des Rock,20 a book with often overlapping concerns. Years before Rockmusik was translated into English as Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics, and Sociology and published by Cambridge University Press in 1990, Wicke’s work had already found international resonance. A 1982 article from Popular Music—the flagship journal for the field published by Cambridge University Press—offers a clear view of the analytic rigor and theoretical framing of Wicke’s approach. His pronounced interest in sociological and economic questions is reflected in his frequent citation of Lenin and Marx, and references to “Marxist–Leninist social theory” in diagnosing rock music’s entanglement in capitalist machination.21 In this chapter’s conclusion, punk is a catalyst for important developments in the history of rock’s political self-becoming. But curiously, it does not bear its own name: Out of the inescapable disillusionment of the mid-1970s new ideas also inevitably emerged, directed not only at musical structures but also, and primarily, at the institutionally organized structures of production and distribution of rock music. These had the aim, in fact, of deploying the music’s potentialities in favour of a progressive political commitment orientated towards contemporary class struggles. Large-scale movements such as, in Britain, “Rock against Racism” (see Hetscher 1980) and, in the German Federal Republic, “Rock against the Right” (see Floh de Cologne 1980, Leukert 1980) have developed, and small co-operatives of musicians (for instance, “Rock in Opposition”: see Wicke 1981) have formed a political and cultural avant-garde for alternative kinds of production and distribution of rock music. From here it would be possible to trace the line of argument further and discuss the development of rock music within the framework of a socialist culture and form of life. This, however, raises wide-ranging questions and would call for the outlining of a socialist mass culture. (240) Punk was, of course, one of the “new ideas” emerging from the disillusionment of the mid-1970s. And given the early-1980s formation of independent punk labels like California’s SST, West Berlin’s Aggressive Rockproduktionen, Hamburg’s ZickZack, London’s Rough Trade and Crass Records, and Tokyo’s City Rocker, Wicke’s reference to “alternative kinds of production and distribution of rock music” appearing in the West during the mid-1970s necessarily refers in large part to punk. The politics are right; as Karen Fournier shows in this book, punk provided the soundtrack and the personnel that would form the core of the Rock against Racism program in

80

BEYOND NO FUTURE

its initial phases (104), and the West German Rock gegen Rechts took its cue from the English action. But rather than letting punk become a shorthand for, or even overwhelm, his diagnosis of a potentially radical strand in rock music, Wicke does not mention punk anywhere in the essay. Instead, when asking whether alternative forms of cultural production and media circulation might disrupt the entrenched, top-down practices that define the global music industry, he looks to the RAR movements: two organizational outgrowths of punk itself. This 1982 passage displays a number of the qualities that make Wicke’s 1987 books such striking reads today. First, he insists that pop music simultaneously has political content and emerges from a particular political (because socially and economically determined) predicament. Second, he also considers pop music’s social situation in Eastern Europe, a geographically defined field of musical production he (rightfully) treats as a fundamentally distinct setting within which musicians, producers, industry leaders, and audiences interacted. Third, there is Wicke’s broad knowledge of Western popular music and easy command of Western music scholarship; the 1982 article’s bibliography includes works in social theory, musicology, music theory, and media theory in two languages and from five different countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, Hungary, and both Germanies. Finally, Wicke is markedly positive about music’s social power and the practices of consumption that emerged in punk’s wake. Though he does not make this connection explicit, his account of “a political and cultural avantgarde for alternative kinds of production and distribution of rock music” is quite a stretch from the powerless, ineffective rebellion of the deceived. Rockmusik is divided into eight chapters, each bearing the name of a song from the period in rock history under discussion as its title. Subtitles then provide Wicke’s own categorization of the epoch, so “Roll over Beethoven,” “We’re Only in It for the Money,” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” are linked to “new experiences in the medium of art,” “the business of rock,” and “the rebellion of punk,” respectively. Wicke’s overarching argument entwines individual lines of argumentation about the aesthetic novelty, political potential, economic-industrial entrapment, and social importance of rock music. He clarifies the stakes of this transdisciplinary inquiry in his afterword: With rock music, a form of cultural practice in the everyday of young people emerged that despite its commercialized organization is more dynamic, and in its essence more democratic, than is suggested by looking exclusively at the capitalist relations of its production and distribution. It has its social origin in the lifeways of working-class youths, in the problematic of their class experience in industrially highly developed, state monopoly capitalism. It therefore stands in the middle of the cultural class struggle of this society, is inflected by the antagonistic contradictoriness of the interests thereby brought to expression. (241)

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

81

Although Wicke in each chapter draws on rich empirical evidence to describe how a vertically integrated music industry continually attempts to divorce rock from its working-class contexts and sell it across class lines and national borders, he also insists that rock music has retained a necessarily proletarian nature. One way this class character manifests itself in the lives of rock’s practitioners and consumers is through subculture, a central term in both Rockmusik, which explores at great length, and with respect to class conflict, rock music as “a component of complex cultural relations … in which its modes of being played and stylistic forms receive in each case a specific meaning, and bear meanings and values that allow it [rock] to become a medium for lived everyday experiences,”—and in Anatomie des Rock, which offers the following definition: It belongs among the peculiarities of the cultural development of capitalism that with the entrenchment of its social contradictions and the growing splintering of its social structure as a result of educational privileges and long-term unemployment, youth unemployment, the increasing numbers of underemployed, and the proletarianization of ever-broader swathes of the middle classes, youth subcultures develop. In them, the problematic experience of social class circumstances finds an age-specific expression. (96) Each subculture has a class-conflictual origin, because each emerges from “problematic experience of social class circumstances” that then bear upon the specific stylistic or rhetorical markers young people adopt to assert their membership in a subcultural grouping. This holds true in Wicke’s analysis of British punk, even as he turns from subcultural practitioners to punk-theproduct: the commercial property, the salable commodity, that was Malcolm McClaren’s and the Sex Pistols’ stock-in-trade. In Rockmusik, Wicke warns that “it would be a mistake to perceive behind [punk’s spectacle] a politically motivated attack on the capitalist mechanisms of the music business” (209). But when punk-the-subculture and its social causes are the topic, the political ground is much firmer: “the punks gave unemployment a cultural and aesthetic form, insofar as they functioned as performers and designers of their own everyday lives” (202). Punk’s analytic status thus depends upon whether you are talking about subcultures, which do have working-class character, or products, which do not. This interest in the working-class character of Western subcultures bespeaks Wicke’s broad engagement with the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Founded in 1964, throughout the 1960s and 1970s the Centre offered a running commentary on the emergence of youth subcultures in British society, and in the process, shaped the development of cultural studies as an interdisciplinary method

82

BEYOND NO FUTURE

for thinking about the texts, state actors, audiences, media, and industries that constituted mass culture in industrial societies after the Second World War. In postwar Britain, working-class culture “has consistently ‘won space’ from the dominant culture” (42), and within that process, youth subcultures have furthermore sought to “win space for the young: cultural space in the neighborhood and institutions, real time for leisure and recreation, actual room on the street or street-corner” (45–47).22 But these seizures of space have not disturbed the basic economic substrate or political organization of life in postwar Britain: there is no “subcultural solution” to working-class youth unemployment, educational disadvantage, compulsory miseducation, dead-end jobs, the routinization and specialization of labor, low pay and the loss of skills. Sub-cultural strategies cannot match, meet, or answer the structuring dimensions emerging in this period for the class as a whole. So, when the post-war subcultures address the problematics of their class experience, they often do so in ways which reproduce the gaps and discrepancies between real negotiations and symbolically displaced “resolutions.” They “solve,” but in an imaginary way, problems which at the concrete material level remain unresolved. (47–48) Though rooted in Marxist analysis, cultural studies was not an emancipatory discourse that championed youth subcultures’ revolutionary potential. Like Peter Wicke’s work, it examined British youth subcultures’ limited responses to a set of often bleak economic circumstances by focusing on how such subcultures made social contradictions visible, without going so far as to argue that the subculture practitioners could change the situation. Now in its eighteenth printing, Dick Hebdige’s 1978 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style is the clearest methodological forebear for Wicke’s work on subcultures.23 Hebdige offers a sophisticated argument for punk’s symptomatic relationship to the postwar history of Great Britain, and to its demography and immigration history in particular. For Hebdige, the succession of subcultural formations—Mod, skinhead, glam rock, and so on—can be read as “a series of mediated responses to the presence in Britain of a sizeable black community” (73). This sequence provided punk with the raw material for its own subcultural styling—a layered, palimpsestic aesthetic that “reproduced the entire sartorial history of post-war workingclass youth cultures in ‘cut up’ form” (26). But however radical or innovative its style may have been, and however much of a break it represented with the standards of taste circumscribing fashion, rock music, and public speech in 1976, punk’s occupation of the British (and then American) public sphere ended nearly as quickly as it had begun. Like the avant-gardes Hebdige links to punk’s shock aesthetic, punk chaos represented a discrete transformation, but not a continuous or

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

83

evolving one. Despite its self-awareness, like the subcultures preceding it, punk remained an epiphenomenal intervention. Punk was reincorporated, and the commercializing, neutralizing, incorporative subroutines that organize and guarantee life under capitalism continued functioning: The media, as Stuart Hall has argued, not only record resistance, they “situate it within the dominant framework of meanings” and those young people who choose to inhabit a spectacular youth culture are simultaneously returned, as they are represented on TV and in the newspapers, to the place where common sense would have them fit (as “animals” certainly, but also “in the family,” “out of work,” “up to date,” etc.). It is through this continual process of recuperation that the fractured order is repaired and the subculture incorporated as a diverting spectacle within the dominant mythology from which it in part emanates: as “folk devil,” as Other, as Enemy. (94) Hebdige and Wicke both describe punk’s fate, like that of all subcultures, in terms of a process of stabilization. However genuinely it may have indexed real, existing social problems, punk is robbed of its ugliness, and therefore its power, by a series of immune mechanisms inherent in all capitalist (symbolic) economies that neutralize threats, however, small, to further accumulation. Reading Hebdige and Wicke together, we become privy to a circuit of analytical methods between the Cold War’s two blocs that gives the lie to the supposition that Eastern and Western social theory defended mutually incommensurable positions.

Subcultures outside capitalism? Based as it was in large part on Western media commentary,24 it is perhaps unsurprising to see that initial East German journalist assessments of punk music held the same dim view of its aesthetic quality that the British scandal sheets did. Along these same lines, Heubner’s thesis about the “rebellion of the deceived” was likely the only one available to him that would have both toed the party line about the political irrelevance of Western subcultures and at the same time permitted him to investigate their symptomatic truth. But Peter Wicke’s more involved account of the contradictions and political inefficacies that hamstring punk music’s industrial power turns the earlier contributions’ equation around, balancing these shortcomings against the argument that punk, as subculture, makes visible a class predicament, a socioeconomic crisis, whose veracity is beyond question. In the process, Wicke consults and continues the work of the cultural-studies account of subcultures developed in England in the 1970s, adapting the Birmingham

84

BEYOND NO FUTURE

scholars’ Gramscian focus on class conflict, and a number of their key arguments about subcultures’ susceptibility to cooptation, into his own account of subculture. As a result, Wicke’s work attests—merely by existing—to a theoretical openness to unorthodox (Western) Marxist methods, and to an analytical generosity toward low cultural forms, that was completely at odds with the criminological establishment. This establishment continued, into the very late 1980s, to discuss punk alongside musical styles it associated with punk (like heavy metal and new wave), and their attendant subcultural practices, in terms of negativity, decadence, and neo-fascist agitation—even as the Free German Youth, Ministry for Culture, and a host of other organizations and institutions loosened their genre-based proscriptions of punk and heavy metal, and punk concerts, record releases, and radio broadcasts became possible. GDR commentary on punk, by embracing the symptomatic explanation of subculture as it did, necessarily produced a conceptual blind spot within which East German punks (and heavy metal fans, and self-styled New Romantics, etc.) went to work as makers of music, recorders of demo tapes, organizers of concerts and festivals—but not, from any perspective allowed by East German writing about punk, as a subculture. For once one accepts that subcultures are a function specifically of class conflict under capitalist conditions after the Second World War, it becomes impossible to describe the doers and makers of punk culture in the GDR as having constituted a subculture at all. After all, there were conflicts and contradictions of many kinds in the GDR (generational, organizational, philosophical), but class struggle, the specific one to which subcultures were held to be a response, was the social contradiction that the East German government most vehemently insisted on having solved. After all, the most serious symptoms of class conflict to which British punk was taken to be a response—unequal access to education, increasing Gini coefficients, structural unemployment, malnourishment due to acute poverty, disparities in access to health care— had indeed been abolished in East Germany, even if the society was by no means classless, or experienced as such.25 In the late 1980s, cultural gatekeepers outside the police force, like programmers at the FDJ clubs where concerts could take place, began to mitigate their own stance. The outcome of this gradual movement toward a tolerance of punk, beginning in the mid-1980s, was formalized by a 1988 decree in which the FDJ leadership conceded—even after repeating Stasi formulae regarding the Western-influenced decadence of punk (and other subcultural) appearances—that “the FDJ will continue to take the measure of each young person primarily on his stance toward, and achievements for, socialism, and not on the basis of his outward appearance.”26 Notwithstanding this ameliorative development, records by East German bands that played punk rock music were not released and marketed by the

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

85

state-owned Amiga label with the designation punk.27 Rather, when in 1988 and 1989 some few East German punk bands were able to release records with Amiga, there they were classified as “die anderen Bands” [the other bands], a terminological shift that denied the music the explicit genre marker of punk even though undeniably punk sounds—quick tempos, simple riffs, chanted choruses, lyrical anomie, punk outfits worn onstage—could now issue forth, with official sanction, on the airwaves. Such officially recognized bands, and even unsigned punk bands, gradually made their way to the airwaves, as well, through the radio show Parocktikum, hosted by Lutz Schramm, who played both officially available songs from the Kleeblatt and Die anderen Bands sampler LPs and self-made cassette recordings sent in by listeners who had bands. Punk, new wave, post-punk, hip-hop, and other genres were on offer, there. Even this late laxity, though, was not total. In a post-Wende interview, Schramm described the limits that accompanied his freedom as a programmer. One Fanatische Frisöre song protesting neo-Nazis in the wrong way couldn’t be played in the run-up to the West German elections, and everything by Schleim-Keim was entirely off-limits.28 Nor were any officially sanctioned punk concerts promoted as such, though—particularly by 1987—unclassified punk bands could join the bill at events held at FDJ clubs and similar venues. This increasing tolerance, in public spaces and on the airwaves, for a oncereviled genre’s chaotic sound, not only bespeaks a growing administrative declension of the East German state, never all-knowing, all-seeing, or allcontrolling to begin with, but also points to a conceptual compromise resulting from the specific theoretical model used to explain Western subcultures’ indexical truth while maligning their political ambit. Wicke’s discussion, like that of the other journalistic commentators and Heubner, diverged sharply from the Stasi’s criminological theory of punk, which held that punk style was a radically anti-socialist, proto-fascist ideologeme carefully developed by Western agents to subvert young socialists’ morals. But the mechanism by which Wicke, Heubner, and others salvaged punk’s symptomatic accuracy was the very thing that made it impossible to use the word “subculture” to talk about East German punk, or to recognize it as a phenomenon analogous to Western punk. Wicke discusses GDR rock music at great length in both of his monographs, and takes great care to explore its generic variegation within a recording industry whose functioning was, indeed, fundamentally different from that of the Western oligopolies—even if many aspiring musicians were excluded from it. But nowhere does he discuss punk’s presence within the East German musical public sphere as a subcultural phenomenon. For to discuss punk in subcultural terms would require an indexicality, a symptomatic status, ruled out by the very definition of subculture that Wicke and Hebdige worked with. There was no classical class antagonism in East Germany, no intensification of proletarianization that punk could traumatically

86

BEYOND NO FUTURE

express. We inherit this definitional difficulty, I think. If we compare the GDR and Britain, the music industry, fashion industry, advertising landscape, touring and promotion infrastructure, labor market, historiographic discourses, political establishment faced by punks—all contextual elements to which accounts of Western punk invariably refer—couldn’t have been more different. Easterners could play punk, but they couldn’t be punks—and punk couldn’t be a subculture, there. What was it, then? As the growing body of historical and interpretative scholarship on East German punk music and punk culture attests, there is a great deal of scholarly interest in figuring out how young East Germans made punk their own, and why. Returning to contemporary East German commentary on punk, and subculture, as I have done in this essay, suggests that part of the work of answering these two questions will either involve challenging and radically expanding the notion of subculture that require us to extract the idea of the subcultural from the capitalist context to which subcultures were first held to be a symptomatic response, or scrapping it altogether. We therefore do not return to the East German newspapers, to Heubner, and especially to Wicke, merely to dance on Communism’s grave or profess a self-satisfied theoretical superiority to these benighted commentators. Rather, particularly when punk practices in Eastern Europe are at issue, we return to Eastern (Marxist) theories of what punk was, and what it represented, to see precisely where our own theoretical assumptions have been in need of expansion or revision all along. For by the very definition of subculture pioneered in (and adapted from) Birmingham, punk in East Germany would be proletarian absent proleterianization, rebellion without a cause.

Notes 1

2 3

4

Michael Horschig, “In der DDR hat es nie Punks gegeben,” in Wir wollen immer artig sein: Punk, New Wave, HipHop, Independent-Szene in der DDR 1980–1990 (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1999), 17. Michael Rauhut, Rock in der DDR (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2002), 113–24. Jeff Hayton, “Härte gegen Punk: Popular Music, Western Media, and State Response in the German Democratic Republic,” German History 31.4 (2013): 523–49; and Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock, Authenticity, and Alternative Culture in East and West Germany (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013). Juliane Brauer, “‘ With Power and Aggression, and a Great Sadness’: Emotional Clashes between Punk Culture and GDR Youth Policy in the 1980s,” Twentieth Century Communism 4 (2012): 75–101 and “Clashes of Emotions: Punk Music, Youth Subculture, and Authority in the GDR,” Social Justice 38.4 (2012): 53–70.

SUBCULTURAL STUDIES BETWEEN THE BLOCS

5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21

87

Rauhut, Rock in der DDR, 115. Hayton, “Härte gegen Punk,” 529. Brauer, “Clashes of Emotion,” 59. SAPMO-BArch DP2/Nr. 2643, “Information zu Erscheinungen normabweichenden und strafrechtswidrigen Verhaltens von Personen und Personengruppen in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” 4. Gisela Herrmann, “‘Punk’ macht Stunk: Mit heruntergelassenen Hosen läßt sich schlecht kämpfen,” Berliner Zeitung 66 (March 18–19, 1978): 3. Ingolf Bossenz’s “Crisis Culture from the Garbage Heap,” in Neues Deutschland, June 3–4, 1978 and the editorial “Youth of Two Worlds” in the June 15, 1978 issue of Neue Zeit, the official newspaper of the East German version of the Christian Democratic Union, are two examples. See Annette Mewis and Lutz Schmidt, “Punk-Rock: die jüngste Welle der westlichen Popmusik,” Neues Leben 3.78 (March 1978): 4–5. For materials relating to both Biermann’s criticism and the East German state’s response to it, see Dietmar Keller and Matthias Kirchner, eds. Biermann und Kein Ende. Eine Dokumentation zur DDR-Kulturpolitik (Berlin: Dietz, 1991). Two fine essays on aesthetic and political aspects of the Biermann affair are Peter Thompson, “Wolf Biermann: Die Heimat ist weit,” in Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 199–226 and David Robb, “The Cat-and-Mouse Game with Censorship and Institutions,” in Protest Song, 227–54. Thomas Heubner, Die Rebellion der Betrogenen: Rocker, Popper, Punks und Hippies. Modewellen und Protest in der westlichen Welt? (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1985). Marcus connects 1918 to 1976 to 1649 to 1961, arranging Richard Huelsenbeck, Johnny Rotten, Abiezer Coppe, and Guy DeBord in a single evocative constellation. Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), 27. It is highly unlikely, though theoretically possible, that Heubner read Sloterdijk, whose discussion of Diogenes of Sinope is central to the Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Andreas Huyssen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp. 101–6. Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Simon Frith, “The Punk Bohemians,” New Society 805.43 (1978): 535–6. Ronald Galenza und Alexander Pehlemann, Spannung. Leistung. Widerstand. Magnetbanduntergrund DDR 1979–1990 (Berlin: Verbrecher, 2006). The indelible visual presence of punks in East German cities by the mid-1980s is attested to by the photography of Harald Hauswald, of which an example adorns the cover of this book. SAPMO-BArch DR118 Nr. 2658, “Gutachen zur Grundkonzeption ‘Rockreport DDR’,” 373–8. Wicke, Anatomie des Rock (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1987). Peter Wicke, “Rock Music: A Musical-Aesthetic Study,” trans. Richard Deveson, Popular Music 2 (1982): 219–43. On Marxist–Leninist social theory specifically, see 233.

88

BEYOND NO FUTURE

22 John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts, “Subcultures, Cultures, and Class: A Theoretical Overview,” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004), 39. 23 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). Now published by Routledge. 24 Hayton, Culture from the Slums, 425–6. 25 For an illuminating discussion of the different ways in which the inequality of access to social goods manifested itself in the GDR, see Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 44–8. 26 Translated by the author from the official FDJ communique, quoted and analyzed for its indebtedness to Stasi thinking in Michael Rauhut, “Ohr an Masse—Rockmusik im Fadenkreuz der Stasi,” in Rockmusik und Politik. Analysen, Interviews und Dokumente, eds. Peter Wicke and Lothar Müller (Berlin: Christoph Links, 1996), 47. 27 Hayton, Culture from the Slums, 555–60. For a contemporary note regarding the East German punk/new-wave band Keks, see “Zensur aus Pankow,” Spiegel 28 (July 12, 1982): 14. 28 “Spule, Feedback, und Zensur,” interview with Lutz Schramm in Wir wollen immer artig sein, 559–70.

PART THREE

Against Fascism

6 Nazi Signifiers and the Narrative of Class Warfare in British Punk Karen Fournier

Introduction One of the defining characteristics of the early British punk subculture (1976–1978) was an identifiable “look” that reflected the urban squalor and decay typical of postwar British cities and that embraced tokens of “bad taste” as a way to challenge and resist the values of middle- and upper-class Britons who tended to shield themselves from, and therefore to claim ignorance of, the plight of the country’s urban working class. Punk created its visual landscape as a mash-up of diverse throw-away items like safety pins and bin liners, symbols of earlier youth subcultures like brothel creepers or leather jackets, and items of clothing that were typically hidden from public view such as torn panties or bondage wear, with dabs of dayglo added to the mix for the sake of interest. Writing in the immediate wake of the early punk movement, Dick Hebdige observed that, from a visual perspective, “punk reproduced the entire sartorial history of workingclass youth cultures in ‘cut up’ form” and he argued that the cacophony of clashing visual elements that comprised punk’s “look” tended to be met with “horrified and fascinated attention” by those who observed the subculture from the outside.1 The horror to which Hebdige alludes tended to stem from the subculture’s occasional, but noteworthy, appropriation of signifiers that were revered by the majority of outside viewers and therefore deemed to be off-limits to any form of “cut up.” Symbols of British pride and patriotism like the Union Jack, the Royal Family’s personal “Royal Stewart” tartan, or the official portrait of the Monarch that marked her 1977 Silver Jubilee became important

92

BEYOND NO FUTURE

components of punk’s visual collage, where they were used to critique and ridicule the values of members of the British ruling elite for whom these signifiers held great importance. The conventional meanings attached to these symbols were up-ended in punk, and each became imbued with a new set of meanings according to its relationship with other signifiers with which it was placed in a particular punk configuration. The British flag and royal tartan, torn into pieces that were inexpertly patched back together with safety pins by the punk artist Jamie Reid and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, respectively, came to denote the broken promises of an empire that was falling to pieces, while the Queen’s portrait, defaced by Reid with ransomnote lettering and swastikas, was understood by many outside observers as a threat to the personal safety of the Monarch by members of a subculture that was believed to harbor anarchists and other political extremists. Taken together with punk’s alternative national anthem, for which the Sex Pistols were famously unapologetic during a Thames Television interview with Bill Grundy on December 1, 1976, these images sparked a public outcry that was swift and unequivocal. Bernard Brook-Partridge, a Conservative member of the Greater London Council, gave voice to the sentiments of many shocked viewers when he described punk in a televised interview as nauseating, disgusting, degrading, ghastly, sleazy, prurient, voyeuristic, and generally nauseating. I think that just about covers it, as far as I’m concerned. I think most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death.2 While the (mis)use of patriotic signifiers by punks might have aroused BrookPartridge’s disapproval, it was the combination of these revered tokens with the swastika that garnered special contempt. For unlike the safety pin or the ransom-note script, whose potential associations are benign by comparison, the Nazi emblem fueled, and continues to fuel, a mistaken belief that the subculture was sympathetic to Nazi policies regarding race and ethnicity, despite much evidence to the contrary. This interpretation of punk stems largely from historical circumstances within which the subculture arose, where record unemployment, combined with immigration from Africa and the Caribbean, had given rise to unfettered expressions of racial hatred in England among the small but vocal group of neo-fascist intolerants that comprised Britain’s National Front (NF) party. The NF’s adoption of the swastika as a badge of white supremacy coincided with the appropriation of the signifier by some British punks, for whom it was simply a signifier like any other, waiting to be cut out of its original context and pasted into a new one to create the punk “look.” As I explore in this chapter, the swastika was not the only reference to Germany within the British punk subculture, which signaled its identification

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

93

with that country more broadly through signifiers drawn not only from Nazi Germany, but also from the Weimar and Cold War periods. Punks used these references to express a kinship with what they perceived to be the humiliated loser of both World Wars, rather than to indicate any sympathy with Nazi sentiments about the Jewish “other” or with later NF policies about the immigrant “other.” Put another way, the punk swastika3 was an act of historical borrowing that symbolically mapped a class war perceived by punks to have been waged against Britain’s underclass (the “losers”) by those who held power in Britain in the mid-1970s (the “winners”). This is a war in which punk’s attempt to symbolically seize a subordinated position—the life-from-below vantage point of an oppressed class—resulted in a volatile, impious identification with National Socialism. Even as they embraced the swastika as one of many tokens of a German disaffection, punks expressed their contempt for the fascist politics of the NF by participating in such political movements as Rock against Racism (RAR) and the Anti-Nazi League. That this was possible is owed entirely to the slippage of signification.

Signifying “Germany”: The swastika, the Nazis, and Germany in British punk While many readers will be familiar with at least some examples of the punk swastika as an element of punk’s “cut up” aesthetic, the following discussion will highlight some of the more memorable references in British punk to Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republic from which it originated, and the divided Germany that ensued in its wake, as these expressed themselves in punk fashion, visual art, song lyrics, and films. Both the historical meaning of the swastika, in its context as the iconographic center of German fascism, and the swastika’s meaning in 1970s Britain were confoundingly at stake in punk aesthetics. The fashion designer Vivienne Westwood spearheaded the use of the swastika as a fashion statement in the British punk subculture, crafting novelty t-shirts that were provocatively designed with painted slogans, pornographic images, tokens of British nationalism and patriotism, and photographs clipped from the newspapers of the time and chosen for their shock value (the most notorious of which was the hooded face of the Cambridge rapist, Peter Cook, who had terrorized that university city in the spring of 1975). Into this chaos of signifiers, Westwood would occasionally insert a swastika, most memorably as the backdrop to an upended depiction of the crucifixion over which she scrawled the directive “Destroy.” On its surface, this image clearly conveys Westwood’s seeming view of religion as an oppressive force, but examined more closely, the upside-down crucifix

94

BEYOND NO FUTURE

also suggests an inversion of religious values by organized institutions that, in her view, have replaced charity with greed and caring with self-interest. The directive encourages the destruction of these oppressive institutions, presumably by those who are subjugated to them. Some of the content of Westwood’s punk fashions were also reflected in punk visual art, particularly in the work of the visual artist Jamie Reid. Like Westwood, Reid played freely with the swastika, and contributed the now-iconic doctored portraits of the Queen, with her irises replaced by swastikas and her lips pierced by an oversized safety-pin, to accompany the Sex Pistols’ 1977 single, “God Save the Queen.” Reid’s use of the swastika in association with the Monarch dehumanized her portrait and reflected the song’s narrative, which questioned the need for a figurehead in a country that had “no future.” While images of the swastika peppered punk’s visual landscape, more oblique references to Nazi Germany were also a feature of British punk. In one of his earliest films, Julien Temple, who forged his career as the chronicler of British punk in such documentaries as The Great Rock“n” Roll Swindle (1979), The Filth and The Fury (2000), and The Sex Pistols: There’ll Always Be an England (2008), collaborated with the seminal British punk band, U.K. Subs, on a mock wartime documentary entitled Punk Can Take It (1979). In this early film, Temple draws a vivid visual connection between the aftereffects of the Blitz on London in 1941 and the effects of the crumbling postwar economy on the city in the mid-1970s. To drive the analogy home, the film enlisted the BBC wartime commentator John Snagge, whose familiar voice leads the viewer through a reenactment of the Blitz superimposed upon, and created as an amalgam of images taken from, a punk concert. Rather than seeking shelter from the raid, as Britons had been instructed to do during the war, members of the punk audience appear to revel in the mayhem, comporting themselves in front of the camera as if they are part of the attack. Depictions of aggressive punk behaviors in the audience of this punk “newsreel,” and the faux gravitas of the commentary provided by Snagge, seem to be designed to provoke the same kind of fear in the outside viewer as wartime footage of the Blitz might have engendered in the viewer of newsreels in the 1940s. Here the “threat” of Nazi warfare underwrites punk’s own threatening self-presentation, even as the devastation of bombing and economic stagnation are equated to one another. Beyond these visual references to England’s war with Germany, British punk’s fascination with Nazi Germany, and with the aftermath of the war, also featured prominently in punk songs themselves. The Sex Pistols’ “Holiday in the Sun” (1977), for example, makes direct reference to the Berlin Wall and to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as symbols of containment. Sonically, the sense of imprisonment both behind the Wall and within the camp is depicted at the beginning of the song, where the

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

95

sound of marching footsteps evokes the image of military patrols. These footsteps also draw a parallel between wartime (and Cold War) Germany and working-class Britain in the 1970s, whose streets were marked by the sound of endless union strikes and protest marches against the economic deprivations of the time. The opening gambit of “Holiday” thereby becomes a sonic link between two dispossessed populations—those concealed behind such physical barriers as the barbed-wire fences of Bergen-Belsen or the cement barrier of the Berlin Wall, and those rendered silent and invisible by virtue of class. Sid Vicious’s only contribution to the band’s repertoire, the ham-fisted “Belsen Was a Gas” (1979), picked up on one of the themes of “Holiday in the Sun,” criticizing any Briton who might have been fooled by warera Nazi propaganda films that depicted the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a pleasant, well-run lodging for Jews who, in their description in the song, wrote cheerful postcards to family and friends as they awaited deportation from Germany. Criticized for lacking the evocative sonic palette and lyrical subtlety of the earlier song, “Belsen” has been dismissed by some critics as “a crude, cheesy number … seemingly affirming nothing but its own vulgarity.”4 The song was clearly designed to touch a nerve, and even among punk insiders, it was described as “the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard.”5 Again, though, the mere existence of the song raises the question of what broader purpose might have been served by its unapologetic reference to Hitler’s so-called Final Solution. One possibility is that Vicious’s seemingly glib and flippant description of life in BergenBelsen simply looks to resist any form of censorship or communicative restraint, including (and especially) what Gillian Rose has called “Holocaust piety.”6 But Matthew Boswell has shown that the song also harbors a tricky (and surprising) historical accuracy, insofar as “Belsen Was a Gas” describes something that actually took place—the requirement, imposed by Nazi camp guards on Jewish inmates, that rosy depictions of the camp be offered in correspondence with the outside world.7 Critiquing cruelty, and performing an identification with the Jewish inmates of Bergen-Belsen, but doing both of these things in an offensive way, “Belsen Was a Gas” points up the ignorance and disinterest of those who view suffering (of the Jews or of the British working class) from a safe distance or who turn a blind eye to suffering altogether, especially—as Boswell further demonstrates—when that rarified view of concentration camps has been, in the case of postwar Britain, subsumed under a self-satisfied pride at having liberated the camps’ inmates. If punks had really wanted to seize the position of the victimized, one might have expected a stronger identification with the persecuted Jews— perhaps signaled by a punk adoption of the yellow Star of David. Instead, by embracing the swastika, it appears that punks aimed to align themselves with those Germans who unequivocally were oppressors. (Of course, such a

96

BEYOND NO FUTURE

performance of solidarity, in light of the sharp differences between the plight of the European Jews and the “plight” of White working-class Britons, strikes one as no less thoughtless and tactless.) Nevertheless, the fact that the punks deployed the swastika alongside a host of other references to Germany, German fascism, war, and the Holocaust, suggests that whatever the punk swastika was meant to do, it wasn’t there by accident. This targeted impiety was not the Sex Pistols’ alone. Nazi references were not unique to the London punk subculture. London SS, for instance, was formed in 1975 by Mick Jones as a precursor to The Clash. The Manchester punk band Warsaw, precursor to the more famous Joy Division, which adopted its name from Freudenabteilung, a phrase used in the 1955 novel House of Dolls to denote groups of sexual slaves supposedly held by the Nazis,8 composed a variety of lyrics that suggested Nazi themes, including “Leaders of Men” (1978), which refers to “past holy wars” and a “final ultimatum,” and “They Walked in Line” (1981), which alludes to Nazi troops and to military patrols on the Berlin Wall, “dressed in uniforms so fine.”9 More substantively, as one of the first punks to wear the swastika, Siouxsie Sioux argued that “political correctness becomes imprisoning. It’s very— what’s the word—Nazi! It’s ironic, but this PC-ness is so fucking fascist … and the irony is, they [those who have been critical of the punk swastika] don’t get it!”10 Emboldened by the designs of artists like Westwood and Reid, some punks appropriated the swastika as their own form of personal decoration. Siouxsie Sioux, for example, was famously photographed wearing a Nazistyle armband during her debut performance at the 100 Club Punk Festival in London in September 1976, during which she improvised a song based on the Lord’s Prayer (reasserting an association already posited by Westwood between fascism and religion). Siouxie, like the members of the “Bromley Contingent” of early punk fans with which she was identified, was also influenced by the fashions of Weimar-era cabaret, adopting its theatrical make-up, stylized tuxedos, and attire that suggested sexual liberation. Adding movement to image, Siouxsie Sioux further developed a performance aesthetic that included goose-steps and the Nazi salute. This left little room for alternate interpretations of lyrics in which she states that there were “too many Jews for my liking” (from the 1979 song “Love in a Void”). Much has been made of this lyric by punk scholars who have written about the issue of race in punk, and it is interesting to note that Siouxsie renounced the lyric soon after the song was composed, replacing “Jews” with “bigots.”11 But many of Siouxsie’s songs also explored and exposed a variety of social ills, ranging from the subjugation of women, in the parody “Suburban Relapse,” to the alienation experienced within the industrial world in “Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)” (a song whose dedication to the memory of the anti-Nazi artist John Heartfield throws doubt on any possible misinterpretation of the political leanings of its performer). In a description that could easily

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

97

be mapped onto punk, one cabaret scholar writes that by “using everyday themes such as inflation, bankruptcy, apartment shortages, fashions, bars, dance trends, [cabaret singers] conjure up and often irreverently mock the changing morality, the petty hypocrisy, and lunacy of the times.”12 Beyond performing this historical work, the swastika also took aim at contemporary trends. Punk scholar Mark Sinker writes that “Sid and Siouxsie wore swastikas because they weren’t Nazis … [and because they felt that] the only acceptable function of [punk] fashion was the overthrow (for all time) of the very metaphysics of fashion.”13 The thought of Pierre Bourdieu is especially instructive in understanding how punk tastelessness functioned with respect to taste, and fashion. According to Bourdieu’s famous account,14 individuals who aspire to membership in the dominant group must accumulate the “cultural capital” that defines that group, by which Bourdieu means that they must amass the symbolic objects, and achieve mastery of the cultural texts, that define value for the members of the group. Members of the dominant group acquire the “tastes” that define that group, and the cultural capital that marks it, over a lifetime of socialization, enculturation, and education. By contrast, “outsiders,” who are defined by Bourdieu as those with little access to the currency of signifiers in which the dominant group trades, seem fated to their subordinate positions in the field of cultural production. Punk’s initial answer to the privilege accorded to dominant “tastes” was to give up any attempt to secure membership in that exclusionary group and, instead, to create a parallel culture, or a subculture, that would define its values in opposition to those of the hegemonic group. In real terms, this meant that punk would resist any markers of middle-class, white, Britishborn, male, and heterosexual society. Notably, punk achieved this goal by adopting a “bottom-up” approach to cultural production that would allow, and even encourage, each individual to create his or her own style from signifiers “pilfered” or “torn away” from the dominant culture and “pasted” or “pinned” together into a new set of cultural artifacts. Through this use of the French Situationists’ détournement, punks aimed to “interrupt everyday experience and expectation in such a way that people [would be] forced to confront the familiar from an altered perspective.”15 By this method, anything that constituted “good taste” for the dominant culture was taken to represent “bad taste” for punks. Objects that represented “bad taste” for the mainstream consumer were appropriated and retooled by punks to critique the dominant culture from which such aesthetic values arose.16 In addition to the role that it played in punk’s satirical critique of taste, the punk swastika is also commonly understood by scholars as a component of a broader political statement made by punks about unacknowledged class disparities in England and, in particular, about the silent suffering of the working class that is presumably embodied by the punk who wears the signifier or who uses it in a work of art.17 Such readings suggest that the

98

BEYOND NO FUTURE

power of swastika to draw the attention of an outside viewer made it the perfect symbol for punks who wanted to force viewers to acknowledge and confront the anger of the silenced class. Some scholars would argue that the punk swastika taps into a latent political agenda within the subculture in which “punk’s sense of oppression suggested it provided a ready pool of disaffection for recruitment and, potentially at least, mobilization” into revolutionary political movements.18 Other commentators hold that “the imperative to shock and disturb above all led some punks to display the Nazi swastika, not out of allegiance to fascism or the growing ranks of British fascists surrounding them, but as an irresponsible addition to their confusing montage of degeneracy and depravity.”19 Scholarly analysis written after punk’s heyday is not the only place where the swastika’s meaning was debated; indeed, such debates occurred contemporaneously. Writing in 1977, during the heyday of first-wave British punk, the controversial rock journalist Garry Bushell argued that, for the working-class British youth who opted to wear it, the punk swastika was a “reaction to a society collapsing around them.”20 Not only marring the Jubilee celebration’s visual pageantry of British victory, the swastika critiques the meaninglessness of the Allied “victory” for working class, which disproportionately inhabited those British neighborhoods most badly damaged during the war—neighborhoods that in many cases had yet to be entirely repaired by the mid-1970s. The punk swastika thereby served as a pointed and shocking reminder of a war from which only certain classes had recovered, of a victory from which only certain classes had profited.21 Then again, the punk swastika was seen as meaningless, viewed as having nothing more to communicate than anger. DJ Don Letts, who is the son of Jamaican immigrants and is often credited for introducing reggae to British punks who visited Acme Attractions, the clothing store that he owned and managed on London’s King’s Road, explains that the signifier “was a small part of [punk] and for a very short time. When you are at school, what’s the most rebellious thing you could draw on your book? Exactly. A swastika.”22 In line with this reading, Siouxsie Sioux also explained that it “was always very much an anti-mums and anti-dads thing … we hated older people—not across the board but particularly in suburbia—always harping on about Hitler, ‘we showed him’ and that smug pride.”23 Siouxsie, who was a nineteen-year old at the time of her debut, captures the cynicism of British working-class youth of the time, whose grim future prospects erased any pride and patriotism that might have been experienced by their parents after the war. Whether justified or not, then, the swastika and references to a postwar divided Germany were appropriated both to represent an “oppressed” population (for Siouxsie, as for many punks, this population comprised disenfranchised British youth, often from the working class, who had “no future” in the waning

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

99

British Empire). For Letts as for Siouxsie, the trappings of bygone German power were appealing principally because they angered their parents, for whom the war, and its associated privations, had shaped a world-view that punks felt was limiting. In this reading, the punk swastika became a way not only to distance its wearer from his or her parents, but also to suggest that any future to which Britain might aspire will only be hampered by memories of the past. Ironic, vulgar, meaningless, or overdetermined—and all of these at once— the punk swastika engendered strong reactions in those who view the early British punk subculture from the outside. It thus seems to represent a unique kind of signifier that has proven to be far more divisive and polarizing than any other in punk’s visual landscape. Unlike the Mohawk hairstyle, the bondage trousers, the defiled Union Jack, or other such common punk tropes, the swastika seems to be richly coded for some viewers and entirely univocal for others. As we see in comparing punks’ own comments to those scholars, and each of these to contemporary commentators’ assessments, the meanings that come to be attributed to this signifier seem therefore to depend largely on the position of its interpreter either within or outside the subculture. In order to understand exactly how the punk swastika was used to draw a parallel between the alienation felt by the British working class in the mid-1970s and the isolation felt by Germany’s population in the wake of the First World War, and how this display of the swastika scanned in a British public sphere beset by racist speech, a detailed discussion of the actual national histories at stake in this transhistorical appropriation seems in order.

Class, history, and the swastika Writing in The Atlantic Monthly a few months before the signing of the Treaty that marked the end of the war, the journalist Charles Downer Hazen remarked that while the terms imposed on Germany “may abate somewhat her contempt of other nations. It is not likely to diminish her hatred of them. It is far more likely to intensify that hatred. Men do not love their enemies any the more because their enemies have compelled them to bite the dust.”24 The alienation described here and the future that it foreshadowed, as historical research has shown, ultimately set the stage for the Nazi ascendency in 1933 and fueled the xenophobic “stab-in-the back” myth that portrayed German Jews and Bolsheviks as a reason for the country’s failure in the war. This defeated population figured prominently, in popular discussions after the Second World War, of the reason the Nazis found popular support for the vilification of neighboring states and embracement of rearmament and warlike swagger.25

100

BEYOND NO FUTURE

While “Belsen Was a Gas” may have betokened an identification with the Jews persecuted under National Socialist rule, in light of punk’s and post-punk’s broader interest in Weimar Germany I would like to propose an alternative reading, or an additional reading, that would suggest punk’s use of the swastika is even more fraught, even more rancorous, than the “shock factor” reading would admit. In this reading, the punk swastika did not point to the defeated National Socialism of 1945–1976, or to the years of Hitler’s reign, but rather to the ascendant National Socialism of 1920–1933. No cenotaph for a vanquished foe, the punk swastika instead recalled a subordinate group’s efforts to seize control of the Weimar state and dismantle it, pointing to the disaffected German veterans and fringe elements who would become Nazis. Transplanted from this scenario, and adherent to this particular identification across historical time, the punk swastika comes paradoxically to represent disaffected young Britons who felt themselves powerless in the face of political and social forces beyond their control. In carefully keeping their distance from Enoch Powell’s ilk and Nazi ideologemes while at the same time playing with the swastika’s representation of Weimar’s disaffected, the punks also spoke about Germany’s present: its division in the Cold War era. Thus, in punk usage, the Berlin Wall was a powerful and negative symbol of containment that was appropriated by punks to convey the complicated (and contradictory) sentiment, “that contemporary Britain was a welfare-state parody of fascism, where people had no freedom to make their own lives.”26 As the Sex Pistols state in “Holiday in the Sun,” the objective should be to “go under the Berlin Wall,” or to abolish the barrier that separated East from West. Possibly identifying with the “oppressed” caught behind the Wall, the Sex Pistols conflated its image with the swastika, and used the latter to represent, and represent their own ironic solidarity with those who were trapped behind the Iron Curtain and denied the “freedoms” of the West. The Wall also represented what punks perceived as the ongoing persecution of Germany that began with Treaty of Versailles, and through the Nazi symbol, punks drew the parallel between the alienation of drab, trapped life in East Berlin (and the German Democratic Republic more broadly) and the isolation of Weimar Germany in interwar Europe, the latter of which had set the stage for the rise of the Nazi party. Navigating this chaotic and counterintuitive historical-geopolitical terrain, the alienated British punk studies demilitarized, divided, and ruined Germany as an example of what can happen if a population is contained and oppressed. Images of defeated and ruined Germany, of Germany the victimized, collided with the most ominous symbol of oppression there was, as punk eked out a chaotic and historically tenuous identification with Germany that was far more effective at enraging older Britons than it was at communicating an idea. Of course, as Siouxsie Sioux’s elusive commentary indicates, perhaps that was the point.

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

101

Interpreting from outside the subculture: The punk swastika as a token of racism The readings of the swastika we have offered so far, which took it as a symbol of a feared “other,” as a token of isolation and alienation, or as the signifier of the defeated “victor,” have emphasized the view of the swastika from within punk circles, studying what punks meant to do or say with the swastika. But the outsider, who has no access to the subculture, the meanings attributable to the punk swastika, can only derive from historical and cultural context in which the Nazi symbol appears. Hebdige distinguishes between these two interpretative possibilities, one for insiders and one for outsiders, as “blocked” and “preferred” readings, respectively (86). However, this play with (il)legibility was a dangerous game; given the strong associations of the symbol with the Nazis’ so-called Final Solution, and its adoption by the National Front movement in England during the mid-1970s, it is not surprising that for the outsider, the swastika could only mean “racism.” Indeed, the historical context within which the punk swastika appears in the mid-1970s could easily lead to an interpretation in which the punk is not a member of the working-class “oppressed” but is, instead, a member of the dominant race and, more ominously, an aspiring “oppressor” of foreign-born (i.e., black) British residents or citizens. The punk subculture coincided with a particularly volatile period in the economic and political history of Britain during which the country witnessed record levels of inflation, unemployment, and soaring immigration, all of which combined to spark a sharp rise in racial intolerance. Indeed, many of the problems faced by the country amplified class differences, particularly for working-class youth who attempted to enter the shrinking workforce at a time when Britain’s industrial foundation was crumbling and there was intense and growing competition for a dwindling number of jobs. Specifically, those who found themselves on the unemployment line would broaden their conception of what constituted the “haves,” placing anyone into that group who held, or (more important for our purposes here) even competed against white, male, British-born citizens for, a paying job. Britain’s economic climate became a breeding ground for racism and intolerance, as the unemployed “have-nots” (or those who feared that they might be forced to join them on the dole) mobilized against anyone who, in their view, threatened the livelihoods of those who were considered, by virtue of having been born in Britain, to be “more deserving” of a job. With actual racism ascendant during the period, the swastika’s reappearance—whether on punk jackets, or as graffiti on slum walls—was hardly unambiguous. The history of race relations in Britain is inextricably tied to the country’s economic history, and this was especially true of the postwar period, when Commonwealth immigrants flocked to the country to assist

102

BEYOND NO FUTURE

in reconstruction. Immigration in the wake of the war had been facilitated by the British Nationality Act (1948), which granted British citizenship to any immigrant who was born or naturalized in a British colony, but, by the 1960s, governments were pressured to review this “open door” policy by British citizens who were concerned about the impact of growing minority populations on the country’s economic system. In 1965, and again in 1968, new legislation, drafted to differentiate between British citizens and commonwealth “immigrants,” made it increasingly difficult for those born elsewhere to gain entry to the country. By 1971, these policies were enhanced by “right of abode” legislation that limited entry to Britain to those who could demonstrate familial ties to the country. Seen by many as discriminatory against would-be immigrants from Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, the “right of abode” drew sharp distinctions between “desirable” immigrants, who could trace their lineage to Britishborn (by implication, white) ancestors and their “undesirable” (black) immigrant counterparts. Although immigration had become increasingly restrictive over the course of the 1960s, race relations in Britain continued to sour in the decade that followed, as a deteriorating economic climate lead to fierce competition among working-class whites and minorities for a dwindling number of jobs in the low-skilled industrial and service sectors that were most vulnerable to the economic downturn experienced during the 1970s. The economic crisis, and the racial tensions that it fueled, coalesced around two international events that had far-reaching domestic consequences. First, under pressure to curb the mounting costs of the war in Vietnam, America unilaterally withdrew from the 1948 Bretton Woods agreement in a move that closed the chapter on fixed currency and ushered in the system of floating currency that is in practice today. The transition was not a smooth one for Britain, which saw a sharp drop in the purchasing power of British pound and an increase in inflation rates to almost 20 percent by 1973.27 Second, in retribution for Western support of Israel during the 1973 Arab–Israeli (“Yom Kippur”) War, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo that increased oil prices by almost 70 percent and cut production by 25 percent, just as the value of the pound was sinking. On the domestic front, the effects of the recession were particularly acute for the working class, who tended to hold lower-paying jobs in Britain’s crumbling manufacturing industry that were vulnerable to cutbacks. These were the workers who faced job insecurity and who felt the increasing pinch of their devalued wages. The powerful Trade Union Congress (TUC) attempted to advocate for workings in manufacturing by pressing the British government repeatedly to impose price controls but, constrained by events beyond its control, the government was unable to comply. In 1972 and 1974, the TUC responded with nationwide coal miner’s strikes that added to the effects of the OPEC embargo. In an attempt to conserve fast-depleting energy

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

103

reserves, a “three day week” was imposed on nonessential businesses and factories in January 1974, but this only led to further job losses as industries responded with layoffs. By the end of that month, almost 1.5 million workers had registered themselves as unemployed as a result of the shortened working week, while inflation continued to rise steadily, eventually topping out at 24 percent by 1975. The normal five-day working week was reestablished two months later, but the effects on the employment numbers persisted, leading the Prime Minister James Callaghan to state that “if I was a young man [in 1976], I would emigrate.”28 As the punk subculture was establishing itself in cities like London and Manchester, Britain was negotiating an unprecedented £2.3 billion loan (equivalent at the time to roughly $3.9 billion US dollars) from the International Monetary Fund that would cripple the economy in the short term. The loan was granted on the condition that the British government would impose heavy cuts in public expenditures, stiff wage controls, and tax increases to help with its repayment, all of which hit the working class particularly hard. These measures sparked an ongoing series of strikes through the next two years that involved, at various times, auto-workers, transport drivers, public sector employees, gravediggers, and trash collectors. The country was brought to a standstill as unburied coffins piled up in Liverpool, goods remained undelivered by idle lorry drivers, and London’s Leicester Square, in the heart of the city’s famous theater district, was commandeered as a temporary garbage dump. Adding to the misery, Britain experienced a season of record cold temperatures in 1978, prompting those who were forced to limit their energy consumption because they were unemployed or could find no source of fuel to refer to the year as Britain’s “winter of discontent.” As Britain’s fragile economy lurched through the decade, the country witnessed an upsurge in racist political speech that took its cue from Enoch Powell, a Conservative Member of Parliament, who in April 1968 delivered a racist rant that has become known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech. With its suggestion that uncontrolled immigration would permanently alter the face of Britain, the speech was simultaneously condemned by the prime minister and supported by proponents of the far-right National Front (NF) party, which had been founded the year before. Support for the NF began to grow in 1972, as Britain witnessed the immigration of almost 28,000 South Asian nationals who had been living in Uganda before being expelled by Idi Amin. By 1976, membership in the NF had grown to almost 20,000 members, and the party ran a slate of candidates in local and general elections, albeit without gaining any seats, on a platform of compulsory and immediate repatriation of any immigrant who had moved to Britain under the 1948 British Nationality Act. By this point the party’s racist platform had become so familiar that it reverberated through popular culture, where it found support in unusual

104

BEYOND NO FUTURE

places. On May 2, 1976, David Bowie was photographed at London’s Victoria Station as he gave what appeared to be a Nazi salute, while on August 5, 1976, Eric Clapton shouted “keep Britain white!” at a concert in Birmingham. As one observer has noted, “Clapton’s speech was not made in a vacuum and aimed to exploit the racial tensions that were brewing on the British landscape in 1976.”29 Punk’s use of Nazi signifiers, and specifically its appropriation of the swastika, thus emerged during a volatile time in postwar British history, when active xenophobia and racism, and the British National Front, had great currency. In light of this, it is understandably tempting to dismiss punk, as some outside observers did, as a racist enterprise that used images like the swastika to express bigoted views like those the NF’s members expressed by displaying their swastikas. This conclusion finds support in the later appropriation of punk by the white-supremacist skinhead subculture, notably through the band Skrewdriver, which formed in 1976 as a nonracist British punk band before its lead singer, Ian Stuart Donaldson, embraced the white-power movement and transformed the band into one of the most famous neo-Nazi acts of the early 1980s.30 Despite the path taken by this particular punk band, the punk subculture was not generally racist, despite its use of signifiers that seemed to point in that direction. Although it shared the swastika with punk, the skinhead subculture had its own repertoire of signifiers (shaved heads, straight-legged jeans, button-down shirts, and suspenders) that formed a different semiotic environment for the Nazi symbol. In the hands of the skins, the swastika would come to mean something quite different than it did in punk. Moreover, in spite of visual cues that might seem to align punk with racism for those viewing punk from the outside, the punk subculture played a central role in the Rock against Racism (RAR) concerts held in Hackney and South London in 1978 in support of the Anti-Nazi League’s quest to promote racial harmony in Britain. And finally, as Sabin (1999) and Stratton (2005) have discussed, many punks were themselves of Jewish heritage, with figures that were central to the subculture, like Bernie Rhodes (the manager of The Clash) and Malcolm McLaren (who considered himself to be creative force behind the Sex Pistols), numbering among them.

Reconciling “Inside” and “Outside” readings of the punk swastika The punk swastika simultaneously refers to an oppressed and an oppressor, depending upon whether it is understood from within the subculture or viewed from without. On the one hand, the signifier was appropriated by punks to draw attention to any group that found itself subordinate to, and alienated by, a dominant culture (in punk’s moment, this tended to be

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

105

read in terms of class). The swastika was curiously revived by punks as a token of “the oppressed” not because of its association with wartime Nazis (who were, in the complicated punk view, clearly oppressors) but, rather, (again, in the punk view) because of the swastika’s symbolism of an earlier historical event: the 1918 Armistice and subsequent Treaty of Versailles. As we have seen from our discussion of Julien Temple’s Punk Can Take It, punks identified with the humiliated and alienated interwar German population. They thus revived the swastika, looking past its symbolism of the Nazi party to see if they could make it a symbol of the political and social conditions that had ultimately paved the way for that party’s rise. Read this way, according to punk’s contrarian and purposefully inconclusive play with meaning, the swastika is a symbol of the empowerment through violence of a once-subordinated group, and, however dubiously, represents their quest to seize control of a situation in which they have been stripped of power, hope, and self-worth. The implication in this reading is that the swastika represents an “oppressed” (in this narrative, the interwar German) who will eventually resist and rebel against the oppressor (the victorious Allies of the First World War). Irrespective of whether or not their reading of history is accurate— and it is not—we see how punk could have mapped this German historical narrative onto the experiences of the exploited British working class as chronicled in punk songs, even as they thematized symbols of contemporary German problems—the Berlin Wall—in expressing an odd solidarity with those in the Eastern bloc. Given this radical reinterpretation of the swastika as a token of “the oppressed,” we can also understand how it came to be embraced by Jewish members of the punk subculture like Malcolm McLaren, who was instrumental in spearheading its incorporation into punk fashion along with his partner, Vivenne Westwood. For punks, the swastika gains its meanings from a complex and contradictory narrative, involving a shifting network of identifications and disavowals, whose plot would likely confound anyone outside the subculture. For the outside viewer, the signifier can only reference an “oppressor,” and specifically the Nazi oppressor, in a familiar historical narrative that sees Germany as the aggressor in the Second World War (but that does not look further back in time to offer an admittedly tasteless sympathetic reading of the source of that aggression). It was and is common knowledge that the Nazis wore the swastika, that Nazi Germany was oppressive (particularly toward its Jewish population), and that the swastika must therefore signify “oppressor.” For punks, however, this reading emerged from the self-satisfaction of Britons, who saw themselves as the “victors” in spite of the evidence that surrounded them in recession-plagued England. The punk swastika was therefore meant to point out the hollowness of Britain’s supposed victory. The various meanings that arise in relation to the punk swastika reveal its importance as a marker of difference in punk. Where punk embraces

106

BEYOND NO FUTURE

the Nazi symbol, with all of its potential meanings, the outside observer rejects it, principally because they perceive that it can only possess a singular meaning. Perhaps more than any other signifier, the swastika draws a sharp line between “insiders,” who are, as Hebdige and Thornton have suggested, “in the know” about the meanings of the punk swastika, and “outsiders,” who have no framework within which to decode its punk meaning. More than any other signifier, the swastika inscribes and reinforces the boundary between the punk “us” and the non-punk “them,” and helps to protect against the unwanted intrusion of “them” into the subculture. The problem in a reading such as this, however, lies in the greater question of whether punk merely engages in critique for its own sake, or whether there is a greater purpose in punk’s use of the swastika beyond reinscribing the boundary that separates punks from their observers. In my view, one possible answer might be found in locating a potential point of agreement about the swastika between punks and non-punks. This agreement can be found in the view, held both by punks and non-punks, of the Nazi as an oppressor. This narrative emerges out of historical documentation of the war, and also informs punk’s participation in the RAR movement. The difference is one of identification. For members of the dominant class, whose social position obscures any other possible reading of the Nazi, the swastika represents “oppressor.” For the punk, however, the experience of being oppressed by class colors the historical view of the Nazi oppressor, and admits that “oppressor” is an emergent category that sometimes results from having been the “oppressed.” In this reading, the swastika becomes a token of emergent power seized by a group that had been rendered powerless.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 26. See “Bernard Brook Partridge” (n.d.), available online at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=bLBr98UOBX0 (accessed September 12, 2015). Because the underlying intention of the NF’s appropriation of the swastika differs from that of their punk contemporaries, I will hereafter characterize the latter usage as the “punk swastika” to distinguish it from its NF correlate and that political party’s Nazi antecedent. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 116–17. Lester Bangs, Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (New York: Anchor Press, 2003), 246. Gillian Rose, “Beginnings of the Day: Fascism and Representation,” in Modernity, Culture, and “The Jew,” eds. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 242–56.

NAZI SIGNIFIERS AND THE NARRATIVE OF CL ASS

7 8

9 10

11

12 13

14 15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

107

Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music, and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 104–10. For a definitive study of the subject, see Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell. Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009). Boswell, Holocaust Impiety, 114–23. Simon Goddard, “Siouxsie Sioux: The Lives and Loves of the She-Devil,” Uncut (January 2005), available online at http://www.untiedundone. com/020105b.html (accessed April 1, 2015). See Roger Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By’: Rethinking Punk and Racism,” in Punk Rock: So What?, ed. Roger Sabin (London: Routledge, 1999), 199–218, and Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punks and the Holocaust: From the Velvet Underground to the Ramones, The Jewish-American Story,” Popular Music 24.1 (January 2005): 79–105. Alan Lareau, “The German Cabaret Movement during the Weimar Republic,” Theater Journal 43.4 (December 1991): 474. Mark Sinker, “Concrete so as to Self-Destruct: The Etiquette of Punk, Its Habits, Rules, Values and Dilemmas,” in Punk Rock: So What?, ed. Roger Sabin (London: Routledge, 1999), 125. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Tom Ward, “The Situationists Reconsidered,” in Cultures and Contention, eds. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier (Seattle: Real Comet, 1986): 150. A recent example inverts the familiar McDonald’s “M” logo, creating a “W” that serves as the first letter in the word “weight.” The logo has thereby been détourned to draw a perceived connection between fast food and obesity. Sarah Thornton has suggested that, in the same way that participants in mainstream culture are driven to acquire the cultural capital that marks success in that culture, punks organized themselves around what she characterizes as “subcultural capital.” Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 11–12. Geoffrey Sirc, “Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where’s the Sex Pistols,” College Composition and Communication 48.1 (February 1997): 9–29; 21–2 cited here. Matthew Worley, “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk,” Twentieth Century British History 24.4 (March 2013): 620. Ryan Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction,” The Communication Review 7 (2004): 312. Garry Bushell, “Sex Pistols: Whose Finger on the Trigger?” Socialist Worker (December 18, 1977), 11. Sinker, “Concrete so as to Self-Destruct,” 120–40. Quoted in Paul Marko, The Roxy London WC2: A Punk History (London: Punk77 Books, 2007), 119. Siouxsie Sioux, as quoted in Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, 241. Charles Downer Hazen, “Redrawing the Map of Europe,” The Atlantic Monthly 123 (April 1919), 553.

108

BEYOND NO FUTURE

25 George C. Marshall, “Against Hunger, Poverty, Desperation, and Chaos: The Harvard Speech,” Foreign Affairs 5 (May–June 1997): 160–1. 26 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 117–18. 27 All statistics draw from Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman, and John McIlroy, British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, 1945–1979: The Post-war Compromise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000), 103; and Trevor Noble, “Inflation and Earnings Relativities in Britain after 1970,” The British Journal of Sociology 36.2 (June, 1985): 238–58; esp. 239. 28 Prime Minister James Callaghan, as quoted in Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 175. 29 Rupa Huq, “Youth Culture and Anti-Racism in the New Britain: From the Margins to the Mainstream?” International Journal of Sociology 38.2 (Summer 2008): 45–53; 44–5 cited here. 30 See Timothy S. Brown, “Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and ‘Nazi Rock’ in England and Germany,” Journal of Social History 38.1 (Autumn 2004): 157–78.

7 “1979 Deutschland”: Holocaust, West German Memory Culture, and Punk’s Intervention into the Everyday Melanie Eis and Fabian Eckert

In 1979, the NBC network miniseries Holocaust aired on West German television. A great success, Holocaust’s influential presence in the media and in intellectual as well as everyday discussions, was unprecedented. Its public presence went so far that the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache (Association for German Language) voted “Holocaust” the word of the year. While celebrated in the mainstream, the West German political left—especially those influenced by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory’s skeptical approach toward mass culture—harshly criticized the series for not providing a complete historical explanation for fascism, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. In turn, the left itself was attacked for its “instrumentalization of the suffering of the Jews for the purpose of criticizing capitalism then and today,” as Andreas Huyssen’s influential article “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama” posits. Therein, Huyssen argues that not only official commemoration culture circa 1979, but also the left’s criticisms of it were “a symptom of postwar German amnesia” that, in this case, accused abstract capitalism, but not the German people themselves, of engendering and supporting the Holocaust.1 Despite such contemporaneous denigration, the television series was widely watched and discussed in West Germany. Flanked by broad journalistic and Mittagspause, “1979 Deutschland” on Mittagspause, 1979, LP. All translations, if not otherwise indicated, by the authors.

110

BEYOND NO FUTURE

political debate, each episode reached, as Susanne Brandt notes, between ten and thirteen million viewers (30–40 percent of the West German audience) or, as Alf Lüdtke clarifies, “more than 50 percent of the adult population.”2 While media in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), historians such as Lüdtke, and literary scholars such as Huyssen identified in Holocaust the emergence and construction of a new form of Holocaust memorialization— one triggered by the audiences’ “identification” with the Weisses (the German Jewish family portrayed in Holocaust)—some protagonists of the West German punk scene approached the “post-war German amnesia” diagnosed by Huyssen in an entirely different manner.3 Concurrent with the television series broadcast, in the West German cities of Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, the bands Mittagspause and Middle Class Fantasies released their songs “Herrenreiter” and “Party in der Gaskammer.” Both songs are interventions, we argue, into the debate of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of coming to terms with Germany’s Nazi past). Our close readings of these two songs demonstrate how specific instances of FRG punk aesthetics opposed mainstream and leftist strategies of Holocaust memory, and where they operate in similar parameters. Even though there are some continuities between punk and the institutionalized leftist progressivism embodied by West Germany’s Green Party, we argue that largely in contrast to this rhetoric, West German punk resurrected avant-gardist strategies to negotiate ambivalences in existing West German Holocaust commemoration— ambivalences that surfaced in their own songs. After giving an overview of West German reception of the Holocaust series and its influence on public Holocaust commemoration as well as leftist criticism of the NBC production, we turn toward West German punk and its avant-gardist form. Punk’s systematic failure to remain within the boundaries of both leftist and mainstream West German Holocaust commemoration, together with its function as self-reflexive youth culture, creates ambivalences that we analyze in three songs released in and around punk’s self-perceived death around the year 1979.

NBC’s Holocaust series and West German memory culture The series’ personalized narrative and its reception Holocaust aired on the regional channels of one of the two West German public TV stations, the ARD. Narrating two related family stories, one Jewish, and the other involved with the Nazi regime, the series has often

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

111

been cited as implementing a paradigm change in West German Holocaust commemoration because it addresses the audience’s affective response instead of aiming at historical accuracy. This focus on Alltagsgeschichte (the personal experience of ordinary individuals) presents an emotional approach to history; Holocaust tells the story of the Nazi persecution of Jews through the lives of a Jewish family (the Weisses), and that of a perpetrator family (the Dorfs). Both families’ histories are intertwined, connected through dramatic twists and coincidences. While Erik Dorf, influenced by his ambitious wife, becomes a direct subordinate of the head of SS, Reinhard Heydrich, and thereby plays the role of a high-ranking Nazi perpetrator, the family of the Jewish doctor Josef Weiss, on the other hand, largely does not survive the Holocaust. The last of the four-part series narrates the death of Josef Weiss in Auschwitz, his son’s escape (he becomes one of the two survivors in the family), and Erik Dorf’s suicide after the American army captures him. Importantly, Dorf’s family represents his death as heroic until a relative cannot bear the lie any longer and speaks out on Dorf’s crimes against humanity. That the series would have a “tremendous emotional impact,” as Andreas Huyssen observes, was “totally unanticipated and unintended” since it was, at the time, a new phenomenon for a television event to arouse heated discussions in the West German public.4 Although there had been notable public controversy over Nazi crimes since the 1960s, that discussion had mainly focused on singular events such as the 1961 trial in Jerusalem against Adolf Eichmann, or the 1963 Frankfurt Auschwitz lawsuit.5 Though the late-1960s student movement as well as the political left might have targeted insufficient Holocaust commemoration, they had mainly focused on a structural and economic interpretation instead of a history of the everyday, as we detail in our next section. In 1979, the screening of Holocaust, conversely, instigated a change in public discourse by tracing the Nazi violence experienced by the Weisses; the series thereby strongly personalized and individualized its Holocaust narrative. Separately and together, Peter Märthesheimer and Andreas Huyssen have argued that this narrative strategy enabled the audience’s “identification” with the protagonists and thus triggered at least a temporary “break down [of] the mechanisms of denial and suppression.”6 Märthesheimer reads the screening and the concomitant public discussion as a social-psychological event: This narrative strategy places us on the side of the victims, makes us suffer with them and fear the killers. It thus frees us from the horrible, paralyzing anxiety that has remained repressed for decades, that in truth we were in league with the murderers. Instead we are able to experience, […] every phase of horror—which we were supposed to have committed against the other—in ourselves […] to feel and suffer it—and thereby finally in the truest sense of the word to deal with it as our own trauma.7

112

BEYOND NO FUTURE

This identification of the viewers with the victims was enabled by the fact that by the end of the 1970s, for the first time in FRG postwar history, the majority of television viewers had no personal memories of the Nazi past.8 However, as we argue in our analysis of song lyrics, the notion of such an acquittal of perpetrators through feeling with the victims is highly problematic, as it blurs the distinction between the two, coming, in Märthesheimer’s text, close to an imagined religious absolution of all guilt. At the same time, writing at a moment in German cultural history—1979—when most Germans lived with an only rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust—as MüllerBauseneik writes, “through the anonymous veil of ‘six million victims,’ the whole scale of Nazi crimes had not reached most Germans on a deeper level of their consciousness”—Huyssen and Märthesheimer’s arguments for an emotional approach to Holocaust commemoration are compelling.9 At a time when people had suppressed their own (at best) passive-accomplice role in Nazi war crimes, the television series’ melodramatic structure enabled the German public to (at a minimum) begin their necessary task of feeling with victims. In effect, Holocaust helped to enable a shift in FRG memory culture, which manifested itself in public discussion thereof: The West German audience empathized with the Weiss family and was, through them, grappling with scenes of mass murder and the suffering of the Jewish people in Nazi Germany. As Alf Lüdtke, one of the theoretical founders of Alltagsgeschichte, argues, West German public Holocaust commemoration had long suffered from a disregard of its necessary emotional component. In the decades following the war, West German officials had feared to stir public emotions in commemoration ceremonies. But, more to the point, commemoration remained extremely limited, for example, leaving concentration camp sites more or less abandoned until far into the 1980s. As Lüdtke writes, public commemoration never mentioned the names of ordinary victims or perpetrators. He continues: Thus, public commemoration of Nazism and the war glosses over the concrete suffering and grief of the mourners. The very format of these meetings buries the sorrow of the mourners again under the “big numbers” of the millions who were killed. Thus, fascism, which was produced by people and took place in a historical setting, becomes or remains isolated from its very context.10 Lüdtke criticizes that postwar West German Holocaust commemoration remained abstract and distinct from real people’s experience. Epitomizing this state of affairs were abandoned sites of former concentration camps. Only the late 1970s had catapulted historical context in the form of the concentration camp sites into the focus of pedagogical interest, once a latter generation started to criticize their parents’ or grandparents’ role

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

113

as perpetrators. The latter had, in line with subdued public efforts of commemoration, tried to forget their own role as Nazi perpetrators and accomplices.11 In that political climate, not only did a remarkably large number of West Germans watch and thus show interest in the NBC series, but, as Lüdtke argues, Holocaust also had a measureable impact as an opening onto the experiences of the victims of the Holocaust. He writes: Among those who had watched the film, votes approving a “moral obligation of Germany to pay compensation and restitution” increased remarkably, [by nine percent]. Also, the statement that all adults during nazism [sic] “shared at least some guilt” was rated positive by more people after they had watched the film (16 percent before, 22 percent afterward).12 While a majority of West Germans opposed paying compensation to the victims of the Holocaust, this number decreased in the series’ audience, which also had a larger tendency to accept that ordinary Germans shared some of the responsibility for Nazism’s atrocities. The audience was affected deeply by the dense narrative the series spun. Every screening was accompanied by a televised discussion with historians, where members of the audience had the chance to phone in and pose their questions. As Lüdtke sums up, “millions of spectators could—or, more precisely, had to—listen to dozens of unknown voices attempting to express their utter bewilderment and despair in public: How could it have been? How could it happen?”13 For those viewers, watching the series catalyzed many uneasy questions they had apparently never uttered before. However, Lüdtke also admits to a historic “decontextualization of personal emotions and experiences” in the series as well as in reactions to it.14 This is also what Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor, had warned of in a reaction to the American broadcast of Holocaust. Wiesel worried that the audience would be unable to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic characters, between those that bundle every possible experience of the Holocaust or deed of Nazi perpetrators, and those secondary characters whose experiences are closer to what survivors remember. This, he argues, could lead to the audience questioning the whole narrative: “Contrived situations, sentimental episodes, implausible coincidences: If they make you cry, you will cry for the wrong reasons.”15 The melodramatic structure of the series could have ambivalent effects. As Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer write about the melodramatic genre, “the specific achievement of literary and filmic melodrama might well be to symbolically enact conflicts and problems that seem irresolvable at the time of enactment,” instead of aiming at historical contextualization.16 Yet Holocaust’s ability to engage with its audience’s emotions might have served a goal apart from rigid historical analysis. For the series’ West German audience, its focus on Alltagsgeschichte

114

BEYOND NO FUTURE

enabled at least an opening toward personal memory, and might, as Lüdtke’s data suggests, even have lead toward at least a beginning of a culture of listening to the survivors.

The political left, popular music, and Holocaust commemoration If the West German political left had criticized the series Holocaust for its lack of historical contextualization, Andreas Huyssen dismisses this perspective, which he largely attributes to the left’s Frankfurt Schoolinspired predisposition toward the avant-garde, and its dismissal of “culture industry” productions as theorized by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Marxist-influenced Dialectic of Enlightenment. As Huyssen argues, the avant-garde productions favored by the left had, when dealing with the Holocaust, a weakness opposite to that of the emotionalizing NBC production: They rendered it impossible for the audience to empathize with “the historic specificity of Jewish suffering in the Third Reich” due to their estranging aesthetics.17 Huyssen continues: The vehemence of some left objections to “Holocaust” would then not only point to the blindness of the German left to the specificity of the Holocaust; it could furthermore be interpreted as a rear-guard struggle to hold on to an avant-garde aesthetic and politics of an earlier period which by now has become historical, if not obsolete, in its claim to universality and rationality.18 Huyssen reproaches the left for their own “instrumentalization of the suffering of the Jews for the purpose of criticizing capitalism then and today,” itself “a symptom of post-war German amnesia.”19 The leftist narrative as criticized by Huyssen is quickly summed up: In its logic, National Socialism became the result of the most reactionary, imperialist and chauvinistic form of finance capital, an argument popularized by Georgi Dimitrov20 at the end of the 1920s and still one of the most popular leftist explanations of the rise of National Socialism in Germany. This thinking was also reflected in leftist West German folk and rock music, an environment that punk protagonists explicitly sought to differentiate themselves from, as we show in the next section. The cultural historian Ole Löding examines different structures of Holocaust commemoration represented in leftist music from the 1960s to German reunification, and detects two main narratives in the musicians’ approach toward Nazism, the first, that Huyssen criticized, being Dimitrov’s leftist narrative, which universalized the Holocaust as a metaphor for social inequalities and crimes

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

115

against humanity in general.21 The other narrative, the disclosure strategy, aims at exposing former Nazi perpetrators who still held important political or economic positions in West Germany. The punk songs analyzed below, we argue, continue with this leftist tradition of disclosing perpetrators. At the same time, they depart from the strategies Löding has described as generic for West German leftist music at that time, and mark a recuperated avant-gardist moment in West German popular music’s representation of the Holocaust. Punk’s aesthetic strategies, as Huyssen has characterized the avant-garde, undoubtedly have the potential to estrange the audience. In the following sections, we test if they also connote the same “blindness […] to the specificity of the Holocaust” with which Huyssen diagnosed the West German left, and that, in turn, critics of Holocaust also charged the television series with.22

“Alles ganz einfach?”23 German punk and Nazi symbolism While West German punk was, for many of its proponents, a youth culture that served their self-distinction, it was not a clear-cut political movement, but rather an artistic avant-garde, as Cyrus Shahan argues in Punk Rock and German Crisis. Nevertheless, as he writes, West German punk followed a creative strategy that had the political impetus of resisting the institutionalization of the leftist politics of the student movement as well as the “protofascist tendencies” of the domestic terrorism of the RAF, an impetus that “internalized such dialectical contradictions as springboards for contestations of the present.”24 It is the ambivalences resulting from these tensions that guide our analyses below. While punk protagonists sought to express their political discontent with alternatives to the “long hair and baggy clothes” favored by Hippies, as Düsseldorf band Mittagspause singer Peter Hein contends,25 and found these alternatives in British and American punk role models, German media immediately attacked their provocative punk gestures. Frank Apunkt Schneider has noted that German punks not only adopted the play with Nazi symbols from British and American punks—through the exchange of bands and fans—but ironically, also from FRG mainstream media that had utilized the shock value of images of British punks in Nazi outfits.26 Now, with German punks citing doubly displaced symbolism (once through British and American punks, once through West German mass media appropriation), the West German public was confused. Punk protagonists, however, developed their own aesthetics.27 As Hein continues, the Hippies from whom punks distanced themselves had already become part and parcel of mainstream political culture and were thus “out of the picture” as a source of protest.28 In

116

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Jürgen Teipel’s documentary novel Verschwende deine Jugend, Padeluum, a part-time member of Zurich’s performance and noise combo Minus Delta t, understands punk’s provocative and often problematical repetition of Nazi vocabulary as a reaction against leftists: “These people had occupied everything that was called protest. So I had to deal with them. That meant for example walking into a leftist bookstore and saying: ‘Heil Hitler, comrade.’”29 Another voice quoted by Teipel, Moritz Reichelt, member of Düsseldorf’s band Der Plan, further contextualizes how such provocations were aimed at a destruction of the leading discourse in the West German understanding of the Nazi past. Reichelt explains how punk was an important step in developing new ways of dealing critically with Germany’s past, distancing itself from the widespread moralizing tendency of leftist historical narratives. “If you were talking to hippies,” Reichelt remembers, “after five minutes the topic would turn to nuclear power, and after ten minutes you would end up with such a bleak picture of the world that you would feel like killing yourself. That’s why punk was so necessary. I realized through punk that there were other people bothered by this.”30 This early proponent of punk in West Germany felt the political left’s strategies merely offered him boredom at best, a crushing pessimism at worst. Consequently, for Reichelt, what mainstream media often identified as punk’s cynicism was actually an ironic strategy meant to expose the political left’s now institutionalized, emotionalized, and moralizing historical narratives—the same kind of narratives that Ole Löding identifies as characteristic for leftist rock music at the time, and that had also swept a large audience off their feet watching Holocaust. Since the left had already occupied nonconformist positions, punks felt they could only express their repudiation of both middle class and political left through irony. Thus, West German punk’s aesthetic might have drawn upon British and American predecessors, but punks also transferred their examples’ aesthetics to express their own departure from a moralizing West German Holocaust discourse. Transnational influences were a catalyst for German punk, but FRG punks’ utilization of Nazi symbols followed different rules than it had in New York, to where the original UK semiotic provocation had previously migrated and picked up distinctly American antagonisms. For example, the most famous American example, the Ramones, did not mention the Holocaust directly, but unsettled their audience’s expectations with switching their own role from Nazi enemy to “I’m a Nazi schatzi,” a quotation from the song “Today your love, tomorrow the world,” itself a parody of the Nazi propaganda slogan “Today we own Germany, tomorrow the whole world.”31 Despite the inspiration FRG punks drew from the Ramones, a significant distinction between US and West German punk emerges here: While the Jewish members of the Ramones merely wittily switched the roles of victims and perpetrators, those German punk lyrics that dealt with the Holocaust, as Schneider argues, had excessive Nazi violence as their focus. Whereas New

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

117

York punk ridiculed Nazi rhetoric and symbolism, West German punk’s destructive rhetoric, for Schneider, “insisted […] on their meaning as politics of annihilation.” For Schneider, this means that German punks “reconstructed [Nazi perpetrators], as it were, by reconstructing their deeds.” However, another result of this narrative reconstruction, as Schneider calls it, was that those moralizing strategies that had become the official language for discussing the Holocaust were exposed as useless. German punks revealed what they felt everyday Germans still tried to ignore: A majority of Germans had been, to various degrees, Nazi perpetrators.32 Schneider ends with a critical note toward punk, however. West German punks’ strategies for distancing themselves from their nationality by exposing German societies’ unpaid dues were often insensitive to survivors because of their provocative tone.33 The juxtaposition of indicting everyday Germans while performing ambivalence toward survivors that Schneider hints at leads to the questions we would like to pursue further: How can punk be situated in a historical discourse that struggled not only for a common language to teach future generations about the Holocaust, but also for an agreement on how to understand it? If West German punk lyrics charged moralization strategies and the evasion of most Germans from taking responsibility, which side did they take in this discourse? For the Der Plan member Reichelt, reading punk as “reconstructing” Nazi crimes, as Schneider does, means taking it too literally. “Punk was finest irony from the beginning,” Reichelt, as quoted in Teipel, insists. “‘No future’—that was an ironic statement for me. I never believed in it. I was quite optimistic. This ambiguous sense of humor was often misunderstood. That it was a symbol of cultural freedom to run around with a swastika was something that most people didn’t get.”34 Punk, thusly explicated, is not simply a political statement, but an ambivalent aesthetic strategy. Clearly, the rhetoric of irony and humor serves to testify a personal aversion to accept what is morally agreed upon: “it was a symbol of cultural freedom to run around with a swastika” (emphasis added). But it is not only that. The shock of seeing members of a punk band equipped with swastikas is intended to question culturally agreed upon norms by reminding the public that fascism is a historical fact that cannot be glossed over. Reminding of this history, however insensitively, is not the same as resurrecting it. The slogan “no future,” popularized by The Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen,” represents another example that illustrates how the meaning of punk lyrics and sartorial statements reside in the rhetorical rather than the literal. Klaus Farin, another protagonist and critical chronicler of the West German punk scene, points out that the lyrics “There’s no future” continue with “for you.” Other lines clarify that “there is no future in England’s dreaming” and “we are the future, your future.” For Farin, what the Sex Pistols argue is that they refuse to carry on with England’s national(istic) goals that mirrored the mistakes of the older generations. “If it’s soon going

118

BEYOND NO FUTURE

to be over [with this world] let’s have fun for as long as we can and show those who took our future chances from us […] what we think of them. This was why the appropriation of public spaces became an important activity of the scene.”35 Here, what seems like a nihilistic statement becomes an incentive for action—for reclaiming public space—a strategy that refused direct political proclamations while contributing to what Shahan calls punk’s public “self-fracturing.” This strategy reflects that “punk,” as he writes, “was never concerned with its own institutionalization, and its apocalyptic visions of the present sought explicitly to avoid steadfast oppositions.”36 There were, we argue, two reasons for this seemingly evasive strategy: West German punk’s aesthetic opposed both the backward-looking emotionalization and universalization of what had by then become mainstream Holocaust memory as well as the moralizing strategies of the political left. They exposed the limits of these discourses’ straightforward opposition through destructive irony.37 We argue that punk’s aesthetics offered a revised Holocaust representation that was inextricably, and often problematically, intertwined with punk actors’ autobiographical examinations of family history, and sometimes close to the universalizing, melodramatic narratives they criticized. Consequently, punk’s revisions and renewed fictionalizations were a reaction against, but paradoxically sometimes also a continuation of, the narratives that had determined the political left’s Holocaust commemoration and discussion. Our analysis of song lyrics below sheds further light on the complexities of punks’ Holocaust representations.

“Herrenreiter” Released in 1979, the song “Herrenreiter” by one of the best-known bands of Düsseldorf punk, the band Mittagspause, reflects the Holocaust not only as everyday history of ordinary individuals, that is Alltagsgeschichte, but also with a focus on the social history of the FRG. Peter Hein, their singer, saw punk as an aesthetic strategy opposing counterculture leftists. However, we argue that “Herrenreiter,” similar to the left’s social movements, powerfully exposes the Nazi complicity of their fathers’ generation during the Holocaust, and thereby enacts the disclosure strategy Ole Löding has identified as characterizing leftist rock and folk music. At the same time, however, “Herrenreiter” ironizes this strategy’s moralizing tendencies. The song, whose title can be tentatively translated as “Master Trooper,” references Adolf Hitler’s early vice chancellor Franz von Papen and his derogatory nickname “Herrenreiter,” and is a narrative indictment of Mittagspause’s fathers’ generation’s complicity with Hitler’s rise to power, just as von Papen had been indicted during the Nuremburg trials. The first half of the song looks upon the father generation’s violence during the

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

119

Second World War (“Red the earth of the past”) and links it with their contemporary privileged social positions in West Germany (“gold the teeth of our fathers”). The federal eagle, the symbol of the FRG, turns into a federal vulture, feeding on the dead of the past: High on horseback, the federal vulture on their garments Master troopers have a say again in this country Black the sky of our future Red the earth of the past Gold the teeth of our fathers If approached solely through an analysis of the lyrics, the song might give the impression of following the two main narratives of reckoning with the Holocaust and Nazi era (as conceptualized by Ole Löding) that can be traced for West German leftist rock music. For Löding, the National Socialist regime had lost its historical singularity in the 1970s and now served as a metaphor, which stood for social inequalities and crimes against humanity in general. If quoted in leftist rock music, it often hinted at the general discontent of the younger with the older generation, but also more specifically at the social inequalities produced by capitalism. Although punks circa 1979 are, so to speak, the younger brothers of the new left that had been at the height of their political activism a decade earlier, a major shift between the new left’s and the punk generation’s dissociation with their parents’ Nazi past is hardly visible. The discontent with the fathers becomes a mode to express a larger dissent with the general political and social situation of the nation. Accusing their fathers of appropriating the wealth of those whom they sought to annihilate (“Red the earth of the past, gold the teeth of our fathers”), Mittagspause point their fingers directly at the culprit. The capitalistic state is unveiled as proto-fascist; master troopers-cum-collaborators are in power and ready to pry gold fillings from concentration camp inmates’ teeth just as the Nazis had before. Thus understood, Mittagspause seem to follow the leftist narrative that reads fascism as the most regressive part of capitalism. However, the sound of the song disrupts such an analysis. Sonically, “Herrenreiter” does not support a reading that presumes a mimetic representation of personal or social history. Neither fast and angry nor sad and intense, “Herrenreiter’s” sound remains distanced, creating an auditory experience that resembles singer Peter Hein’s later post-punk sound with the more widely known band Fehlfarben. This auditory impression is supported by an analysis of the second stanza, which reads: Jet pilots suddenly feel weak in their hips Master troopers with toy guns in the air Somebody will win at the nation’s favorite’s TV show host Master trooper, the butler is bringing the rain jacket

120

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Parodying the metaphor of the strong trooper evoked in the first stanza, military characters are ridiculed; their osteoporosis makes them “weak in their hips” as they play with “toy guns.” Not only physically, but also financially defeated, the master trooper seems to have lost his wealth since he now approaches the TV show host for the capital he seems to be in need of. The phrase used here to denote the TV show host literally translates as “TV uncle,” a derogative term that only partially deconstructs the patriarchal authority of an established television host; the master trooper, now no longer a murderous Nazi but a child with a toy gun, seems to look up to him. Yet, the trooper-turned-child also offers an ironic perspective on Mittagspause’s own generation that naively copies their parents’ generation’s militarism, stupidly looking up to them, hoping to win their approval in the form of financial benefit. The metaphor for rain jacket that Mittagspause chose literally translates as “East Frisian mink coat,” connoting not only the assumed cultural and economic poverty and rainy weather of the region by the North Sea, but also the wearer’s potential wish for social upward mobility. These metaphors all ridicule everyday Nazi collaborators and render it unnecessary to express anger, disgust, and guilt directly: Thus, Mittagspause avoids the emotionalizing and moralizing strategies of popular Holocaust memory witnessed in and encouraged by television series as well as the universalizing strategies of the political left. The rain coat with which the master trooper tries to brace himself is also an accessory regularly used in a contemporaneous West German television show featuring Hans Joachim Kuhlenkampff called “Somebody Will Win”: Mittagspause’s audience would immediately have understood the reference. At the end of the show, a butler brought the host Kuhlenkampff a fur coat and ironically commented on the events of the evening, a position Hein takes himself when singing the song, channeling his political convictions into a witty parody instead of uttering a clear call for political action. “Herrenreiter,” as such, shows how punk’s output was partially motivated by its proponents’ desire to resist what they perceived as moralizing strategies of the new left. Mittagspause personally positioned themselves against their fathers’ Nazi generation, while at the same time striving to develop a strategy different not only from the left’s narratives of Holocaust commemoration, but also popular meldodramatizing mass media narratives such as Holocaust. The song does not ask its audience to empathize with “Herrenreiter’s” victims, but focuses on ridiculing the perpetrators and questioning their continuing privileged social position, a rhetoric strategy that references influences such as The Ramones’ “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.” Even if ridicule complicates the song’s charge against the fathers, this distancing rhetoric strategy cannot mute the lyrics’ personal component. Focusing on one actor’s experience, the lyrics draw on Alltagsgeschichte’s method to channel history through personal and everyday life. In “Herrenreiter’s” case, this is not only the father’s guilt, but also the son’s

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

121

potential compliance with and ultimately his resistance against his father. Like most West German punk protagonists, Mittagspause’s members were young men, not simply expressing their critique of bourgeois society, but also self-fashioning their own generation through this critique. While this critique aims at rhetorically disempowering the fathers, it attributes to the sons, who perform the ridicule through the lyrics, an asserted strength. At the same time, their fathers’ generation is ridiculed as childish and thus symbolically castrated. Thus, the speaker’s political convictions are entangled with the transference of social power from one generation to the next. As Detlef Diederichsen sums up, punk “simply defined itself to a large part as antithesis to what came before.” However, as signaled by the claim “punk is dead,” punk needed to repeatedly destroy what came before, even if that aesthetic mantra had to be expanded to punk’s own achievements. At the same time, it was also a rhetoric strategy that served the self-asserting ends of a generation’s self-distinction; its anti-fascist stance was inextricably intertwined with its refusal of, while simultaneous dependency on, the discursive treatment of the Holocaust by the left. Yet punk, as Diederichsen claims, was to be understood “only partially as an authentic assessment.”38 It was punk’s aesthetic strategy of unsettling the seeming self-evidence of Holocaust commemoration that drew attention to the rhetoricity of these historical narratives; in some cases, however, the absence of the voices of the victims of the Holocaust this aesthetic strategy depends on tends to produce a problematical aestheticization of potentially traumatizing violent historic events.

“Party in der Gaskammer” Middle Class Fantasies’ 1981 song “Party in der Gaskammer” (Party in the Gas Chamber) proves a valuable departure point for further discussing the problematical component of punk lyrics that allegorized the Holocaust. The lyrics by the Frankfurt band have understandably been read as thoughtless toward Holocaust survivors.39 Their tone, as much as the song’s sonic quality, are more aggressive than “Herrenreiter’s.” However, while Frank Apunkt Schneider reads such aggression as insensitivity to survivors, he also writes that the song exposes the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, which had been widespread not only among Nazi officials, but also the general German population.40 Since Middle Class Fantasies’ singer seems to speak from the position of a perpetrator, the song calls attention to the fact that their criminality was not reduced to a few monstrous personalities, but sadly common throughout Nazi Germany, a focus indebted to the changing historical narratives incorporating the discursive effects of Alltagsgeschichte. “Party in der Gaskammer” deliberately avoids thoughtful rhetoric and forces the listener to partake in the gruesome scenario instead, an effect that

122

BEYOND NO FUTURE

is not so different from that of Holocaust’s melodramatic genre. However, “Party” parodies the tendency toward emotionalization and moralization the privileging of survivors’ testimony can result in when intertwined with the melodramatic representation of the series Holocaust. Instead, it shocks with its singer’s aggressive incorporation of the role of a Nazi perpetrator of the ranks of a concentration camp overseer, and thus distinguishes itself from both political mainstream and leftist Holocaust commemoration. The song’s lyrics focus on a perpetrator, who sadistically revels in rendering his victims’ death in the gas chamber a party not to be missed: Come with me I’m inviting you. It’s gonna be an awesome party. All the others are already here. We’re only waiting for you. […] Party in the gas chamber, come give me your hand. Party in the gas chamber, gas cocktail at the Zyklon beach. Can you see all these naked bodies? Come on let’s dance. Hold your nose up in the air, stretch yourself, bend your ass. Little eyes bulging from their sockets, skin gets fallow and pale. Hold your nose up in the air. The climax has almost been reached Come on don’t be shy. Nobody stays sober tonight. Nobody goes home tonight. One more sip and it’s over. Certainly, lyrics like these cannot be accused of didacticism or moralization. On the contrary, Middle Class Fantasies’ song is a smack in the face to not only those who empathize with the victims of the Holocaust—it is also insulting to the victims themselves. The band does not linger to find metaphors for the blatantly clear fantasy of sexualized violence the lyrics express, but forces the listener into the perpetrator’s point of view and ultimately, to take part in his crime. While this rhetoric strategy arguably forces the descendants of perpetrators to consider their own responsibilities, it at the same time refuses a dialogue with the victims. The song revels in sadistic fantasies, unabashedly exploiting Nazi violence’s ability to shock, accepting that this strategy has the effect of trivializing the existence of concentration camps as a function in an individual actor’s fantasies and running danger of foregrounding an aesthetic fascination with fascism’s atrocities.41 This lack of historical contextualization is, in a sense, parallel to the leftist universalizing narratives punk protagonists often contested, and the fact that the song does not mark a complete renunciation of discourses of the political left becomes clear when it assumes that homosexual power fantasies potentially motivate the perpetrator.42 The speaker lecherously watches the scene, assuming the victims enjoyed their own suffocating. That the suffocating people could be both male or female, both options apparently equally interesting to the narrator, resonates with a cliché among the political left which has sought to explain at least part of the Holocaust’s

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

123

atrocities with the perpetrators’ sublimated (homo)sexual desire and again exposes a continuance between punk and the rhetoric of the left.43 At the same time, the song refrains from renouncing fascist aesthetics, but instead utilizes the “erotic surface” that Susan Sontag attests these aesthetics with in her essay “Fascinating Fascism.”44 However, “Party” can also be read as the self-indictment of a band whose members evoke the horror of genocide only to accept their own inscription in a genealogy of perpetrators. Since it does not accept the excuse many Germans used when talking about their role in the Holocaust (“We didn’t know what was really going on”), but aggressively reveals Nazi violence, it does not exempt the band’s members from their obligation to consider what becomes, through their incorporation of the perpetrator role, their personal guilt. Schneider has argued that songs like “Party” anticipated what Daniel J. Goldhagen would years later discuss in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. For Goldhagen, ordinary Germans were raised in an anti-Semitic culture that left them “ready and willing” to commit anti-Semitic crimes up to the scale of murder, as Schneider paraphrases Goldhagen.45 It is undoubtedly true that the song renders the singer, as well as listeners, potential perpetrators. Still it remains an isolated critique, a cry of anger, pathologizing perpetrators instead of submitting their deeds to historical analysis. The effect, from the singer’s perspective, is that he does, after all, reenact the perpetrators’ deeds: He stages their violence and their guilt as his own. As Susan Sontag argues, observing a surge of interest in Nazi regalia that “has become a reference of sexual adventurism” in popular culture worldwide, fascism’s choreographed mass excitement easily lends itself to influence similarly staged sadomasochistic sexual fantasies. Middle Class Fantasies’ song performs this culturally tabooed sadomasochistic fantasy not purely out of curiosity, but in the context of other punk musicians, who sought to distinguish themselves from the moralizing strategies of the left as well as from the didactic strategies of hegemonic historical discourse. “Party” serves this subcultural distinction through enacting a violent fantasy. “Crossing over from sadomasochistic fantasies,” Sontag writes, “which are common enough, into action itself carries with it the thrill of transgression, blasphemy, entry into the kind of defiling experience that ‘nice’ and ‘civilized’ people can never have.”46 The anger and frustration of belonging to the perpetrators’ genealogy that the song performs is intertwined with a passionate enactment, and embracement of feelings of guilt. The sonic and lyric aggression of the song thus turns against those who perform it and does not only illustrate their charge against their parents’ generation’s insufficient Vergangenheitsbewältigung, but also the self-destruction that is innate to punk. After all, it is a party that Middle Class Fantasies perform, a reason for joy—but the loosening of inhibition the song’s lyrics perform turns into destruction, exhilaration turns into death, rendering “Party” as much a comment on Germany’s Nazi past

124

BEYOND NO FUTURE

as enactment of the self-destruction of punk. The anger and self-mutilation central to Middle Class Fantasies’ performance thus allegorize the violence of the Holocaust for staging the band’s members’ self-destruction.47 Its personal and highly unsettling quality remains ambiguous—it is a charge against Nazi crimes, but it also displays a fascination with fascist aesthetics in reenacting Nazi violence.

Coda: Punk’s legacy When Düsseldorf’s Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF) released their song “Tanz den Mussolini” (Dance the Mussolini) in 1981, their version of punk had already turned into post-punk, realizing its inbuilt destruction. Expanding punk’s aesthetic strategy, DAF already carry irony and ambivalence in their own name: The acronym is not only short for German–American friendship, but also for Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German workers’ front), the Nazi association for both workers and employers, an all-encompassing union. This reference as well as their performance did, for some, position DAF in proximity to fascism’s aesthetic. The implications of DAF’s aesthetic are, however, in parallel to punk’s, much more complex. Robert Görl, one of DAF’s two founding members, explained in a 2009 interview with Thomas Winkler how their performance was a vision directed toward showing their respective bodies’ power, “its muscles, but combining it with purist, mechanical music. Body and machine were amalgamated and sweating in unison. We were a vision of the future, we were cyborgs.” He explicitly references avant-garde aesthetic strategies, but turns punk’s selfmutilation and “no future” into its opposite with a vision of cyborg utopia. Similarly to punk’s negations, this affirmation is, however, immediately deconstructed. If “Tanz den Mussolini” with its line “Dance the Mussolini […] dance the Adolf Hitler” has been a provocation to some, a closer look reveals that DAF only carries to an extreme what Mittagspause, of whom DAF’s second member, Gabi Delgado, was a founding member, began. The song’s lyrics consist of nothing but instructions of how to step left and right and move different body parts, guiding its audience through farcical dance moves as if they were puppets. It exposes the absurdity of individuals turning into an anonymous mass that follows a fascist, or, for that matter, any kind of leader. Since DAF’s audience is supposed to not only dance to Hitler and Mussolini, but also to Jesus, “Tanz den Mussolini” turns into a general ridicule of authorities and institutions, reaching a new level of abstraction. All three songs, “Tanz den Mussolini,” “Herrenreiter,” and “Party in der Gaskammer” are characterized by rhythmic dissonances that cannot but distance singer and audience from their songs’ semantic content. While in Middle Class Fantasies’ lyrics an uneasy mixture of subjective

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

125

feelings of guilt and aggression against the perpetrators prevails—but is somewhat neutralized by the song’s sound—the same ambivalence is somewhat less present in Mittagspause’s “Herrenreiter,” where the son’s rebellion against the fathers is accompanied by a complex negotiation of historical narratives about the Holocaust. Both “Party in der Gaskammer” and “Herrenreiter,” however, distance themselves from the Holocaust as media event in the form of the TV series. “Herrenreiter” ridicules precisely the popular Saturday night entertainment Holocaust could be counted as, while “Party in der Gaskammer” offers its audience no recourse from its violence. Yet, similarly to the series Holocaust, “Party” might, with its intense emotionalization, run the danger of silencing the victims’ stories—but it does not, as the series could be read to do, invite the audience to cathartically free themselves from their feeling of guilt. On the contrary, “Party” uneasily reminds its audience of their close relation with the perpetrators. If neither the series nor the songs were fully able to realize Alf Lüdtke’s hope for a focus on Holocaust Alltagsgeschichte to finally tell the victims’ stories, both represent an opening toward personal reflection of the Holocaust. Both the series and the songs mark a particular moment in West German Vergangenheitsbewältigung that was catalyzed by Holocaust’s unprecedented and extremely influential presence in media, in intellectual as well as everyday discussions in 1979. As is visible in Middle Class Fantasies’ “Party in der Gaskammer,” released in 1981, this particular discussion did not cease with the 1970s. However, DAF’s “Tanz den Mussolini,” also released in 1981, documents not only punk’s development into post-punk, but also a shift in punk’s approach to Germany’s past toward further abstraction of a theme that had, by then, underwent a broader social discussion than ever before.

Notes 1

2

3 4

Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 94–114, 95. Alf Lüdtke, “‘Coming to Terms with the Past’: Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany,” The Journal of Modern History 63.3 (1993): 542–72, 545n1. See also Susanne Brandt, “‘Wenig Anschauung? Die Ausstrahlung des Film ‘Holocaust’ im westdeutschen Fernsehen (1978/79),” in Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945, eds. Christoph Cornelißen, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Wolfgang Schwentker (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003), 89–91. Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification,” 95. Ibid., 94. See also Jens Müller-Bauseneik, “Die US-Fernsehserie ‘Holocaust’ im Spiegel der deutschen Presse (Januar–März 1979): Eine Dokumentation,” in Die Fernsehserie “Holocaust”– Rückblicke auf eine “betroffene Nation,” Zeitgeschichte-

126

5

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20

21

22 23

24 25

BEYOND NO FUTURE

online, ed. Christoph Classen, available online at http://www.zeitgeschichte-online. de/md=FSHolocaust-Mueller-Bauseneik (accessed July 13, 2015). The trial against Otto Adolf Eichmann, one of the major Nazi organizers of the Holocaust, was videotaped and sent to television networks all over the world within twenty-four hours of each court session. Eichmann’s trial was the first large-scale opportunity for over a hundred Holocaust survivors to publicly give testimony, which also marks the trial as the beginning of a public history of survivor testimony. Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification,” 113. Peter Märthesheimer and Ivo Frenzel, “Vorbemerkungen der Herausgeber,” in Im Kreuzfeuer: Der Fernsehfilm ‘Holocaust’: Eine Nation ist betroffen, eds. Peter Märthesheimer and Ivo Frenzel (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979). Translation by Huyssen in “The Politics of Identification,” 99. See Wulf Kantsteiner’s argument in “Nazis, Viewers, and Statistics: Television History, Television Audience Research and Collective Memory in West Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 575–98, 585. Müller-Bauseneik, “Die US-Fernsehserie ‘Holocaust,’” 1. Lüdtke, “Coming to Terms with the Past,” 559. Ibid., 556. Ibid., 545n10. Ibid., 546. Ibid., 544. Elie Wiesel, “Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction,” New York Times, April 16, 1978, 75. Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer, “The Melodramatic Mode Revisited: An Introduction,” in Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood, eds. Frank Kelleter, Barbara Krah and Ruth Mayer (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 7–17, 13. For more on melodrama and German punk, see Cyrus Shahan’s contribution to this collection. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 102. Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification,” 114. Ibid., 95. Georgi Dimitrov first led the Third Communist International under Josef Stalin from 1934 to 1943 and then became the first communist leader of Bulgaria from 1946 to 1949. Ole Löding, “Deutschland Katastrophenstaat:” Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Song der Bundesrepublik (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010). See also Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification,” 264–77. Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification,” 114. The title of an article by Peter Hein, roughly translatable with “As simple as that,” published in Zurück zum Beton: Die Anfänge von Punk und New Wave in Deutschland 1977-’82, eds. Ulrike Groos, Peter Gorschlüter and Jürgen Teipel (Köln: König, 2002). Cyrus Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis: Adaptation and Resistance after 1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4. Hein, “Alles ganz einfach,” 131.

1979 DEUTSCHL AND

127

26 Frank Apunkt Schneider, “‘My Future in the SS’: Zur Identifikation mit den Täter_innen im deutschen (Post-)Punk,” in We Are Ugly but We Have the Music: Eine ungewöhnliche Spurensuche in Sachen jüdischer Erfahrung und Subkultur, eds. Jonas Engelmann, Hans-Peter Frühauf, Werner Nell and Peter Waldmann (Mainz: Ventil, 2012), 152. 27 In her contribution to this collection, Karen Fournier discusses the swastika as a ubiquitous signifier in British punk. Fournier explains how British punks appropriated it as a signal of defiance against their parents, who still reveled in beating their wartime Nazi enemies. British punks saw no reason to feel victorious; Britain’s class structure had remained largely intact, disaffecting its working-class youth. Yet, we would like to add that, if in this context the swastika for some punks became a symbol for the power of social outsiders to potentially overthrow the state, as Fournier writes, this is a historical reference to the Nazis’ usurping of power in Weimar Germany, a reference that also often appears in neo-fascist thought, which is characterized by its proponents’ self-conception as social outsiders. 28 Hein, “Alles ganz einfach,” 132. 29 Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 73. 30 Ibid., 83. 31 “Heute gehört uns Deutschland, und morgen die ganze Welt” is a line from Hans Baumann’s “Es zittern die morschen Knochen,” a song written for and sung in Nazi youth organizations. 32 Schneider, “My Future in the SS,” 153–4. 33 Ibid., 159 34 Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 85. 35 Klaus Farin, “Punk-Protest und Provokation,” Zeitbilder: Jugendkulturen in Deutschland 1950–1989, Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung March 17, 2010, available online at http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/kultur/ jugendkulturen-in-deutschland/36215/protest-und-provokation (accessed September 28, 2015). 36 Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis, 6. 37 For more on punk’s destructive character, see Ibid., 30–35. 38 See Detlef Diederichsen, “Wie ich mal meine Jugend verschwendete,” in Zurück zum Beton, 114–15. 39 See Schneider, “My Future in the SS,” 159. 40 See Ibid., 154–5. 41 For a critique of the aestheticization of Holocaust representation, see Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 42 Again, for more on West German punk and homosexuality, see Shahan’s contribution to this collection. 43 Klaus Theweleit, very widely discussed not only in leftist subcultures, but also among bourgeois media, later based his argument in part on Wilhelm Reich’s argument that suppressed sexual desire was the origin of fascism’s advance. See Sven Reichardt, “Klaus Theweleits ‘Männerphantasien’: Ein Erfolgsbuch der 1970er-Jahre,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2006), available online at http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen. de/16126041-Reichardt-3-2006 (accessed September 11, 2013).

128

BEYOND NO FUTURE

44 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books 22.1 (February 6, 1975), available online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/ archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/ (accessed September 23, 2015). 45 Schneider, “My Future in the SS,” 155. 46 Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.” 47 For more on self-mutilation and punk see Shahan’s chapter “Psycho Punk and the Legacies of State Emergency,” in Punk Rock and German Crisis, 53–84.

8 Sex in the Bunker: DAF’s Staging of Punk Pleasure Cyrus M. Shahan

West German punk’s drive to invert the rhetoric and means of societal and cultural renewal espoused by the students of 1968 and German terrorism contested those forces seeking, in punk’s eyes, to level the present, to erase the past, and to speed a powerful reemergence for Germany in a disquieting future. A unique moment in punk’s pursuit of aesthetic anarchy, the band Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF, German–American Friendship) drew its élan from the subculture’s penchant for shock, but it eschewed punk chaos for sex and pleasure, though DAF’s celebration of sex and pleasure as such is not what makes it particularly interesting for an understanding of early-eighties punk. After all, ever since Malcolm McLaren siphoned attire from his bondage shop “Sex” to create Britain’s Sex Pistols, punk’s sartorial style had always drawn from fetish clothing. DAF’s experimentation with the aesthetics and performance of pleasure is crucial for framing West German punk because it demarks the band’s absolute disinterest in merely miming its British predecessors, but also because it details the dialectical relationship in which the band stood vis-à-vis national subcultures. DAF’s alternatingly working class, fascist, or leather-fetish aesthetic détourned corporeal pleasures, the German literary canon, and fascist body politics through a sonics of “monotony and minimalism” to engineer what would come to be called the DAF-Machine.1 Germinated from what band member Robert Görl called “a cell […] that could stand on its own,” DAF’s synchronic misuse of utopic fantasies past and present and of punk’s bulwark against conservative impulses make clear the band’s appraisal of its times: that the reflexivity of social forces—including punk—operating in 1980s West Germany drew upon nostalgia in order to linger and to grant authenticity to what the band saw as the homeostatic

130

BEYOND NO FUTURE

system of the West German eighties.2 In what follows, I focus on how DAF’s misuse of the humanistic for pleasure and its analog manipulations of cultural markers through the large and small mechanics of the DAF-Machine tested the effects of disrupting their present’s historical failures. I thereby seek to illustrate how DAF went beyond West German punk’s rhetoric of dystopia to channel for its own ends the centrifugal forces of German history that had metamorphosized the German cultural canon into a logic for catastrophes. As such, this essay posits DAF as a sonic and visual-performative riposte to the failures of German literature in the “making-whole” of post-Second World War Germany, most famously polemicized decades later by W.G. Sebald in his essay “On the Natural History of Destruction.” Therein Sebald indicts postwar German literature of effacing the reality of bombed-out cities and charred bodies on the ground and of thereby effacing precisely the narratives necessary for any genuine reckoning with the past.3 My reading of DAF’s body politics shows the critical purchase attention to West German punk brings for understanding the aporia springing forth from inauthentic aesthetic-cultural reckoning with the corporeal past that foreclosed, Sebald would later claim, the promise of cultural production for prosperity. Highly productive and retroactively seen as the vanguard of electronic body music, DAF was Gabi Delgado, Robert Görl, Wolfgang Spelmans, Michael Kemner, and Chrislo Haas, though Delgado and Görl were the core and most durable members. Moving with and decidedly against its sworn enemy and violent forefathers, but also against the 1977 iteration of punk whose angst-laden sounds its members considered worn out, DAF détourned sex and pleasure to cut open the straightjacket of West German affect from within. The thereby programmatic dehumanization at the core of the band wielded the overwhelming force of hegemonic cultural constructs against itself by seeking pleasure in taboos and by disavowing the stability of German sociocultural history. In this chapter, I detail first by reconstructing DAF’s misuse of the German literary canon, and then through an examination of fascist body politics, how the band’s unique corporeal iteration of “no future” operated at the visual and sonic level. When coupled through their experimentation with an array of Korg synthesizers and sequencers, the détourning of both these narratives—the literary one structuring German (cultural) history and the bodies that acted throughout that history, the other structuring DAF’s present—emerge as keys to unlocking the matrix of DAF’s mechanistic dystopia. As such, the band made unmistakable how the individual articulation of embodiment—of inanimate objects or of people “enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture”— makes it inherently destabilizing.4 A clear tenet of “no future,” DAF’s dystopic sexual machine, this chapter shows, transformed punk’s original dystopia into a posthuman pleasure dome through a “mix of sweat and electronics.” While seeking out a starkly different affective response than the “cold synthetic music” Mirko Hall reads in French cold wave (150), the

SEX IN THE BUNKER

131

resulting DAF-Machine nevertheless traffics in a similar kind of existential angst, one that, as frontman Gabi Delgado claims, was the catalyst for sounds and performances lacking any appeal to “a humanistic background, we didn’t want to make anything better or more beautiful for humanity.”5 In the band’s concurrent investments in machines meant to push at the boundaries of pleasurable sounds, and in cultural narratives that highlighted the dystopic violence in humanist traditions of music and literature, it is not difficult to hear echoes of F.T. Marinetti’s futurist manifesto, wherein he championed “violence, cruelty, and injustice” in defiance of dominant national identity.6 Indeed, just like its punk forefathers, the DAF-Machine had its theoretical roots in historical avant-gardes that for the band—in contradistinction to Jürgen Habermas’s contemporaneous estimation that avant-gardes meant to introduce happiness into society—still contained subversive potential.7 Narrating the theoretical underpinnings of the DAF-Machine, Delgado specifically connected Dada and DAF: One of my first texts was “Kebap dreams.” That was already basically in the direction of Dada. Pretty soon we were more interested in Dada than punk. And we found interesting analogies. Above all in all the manifestos. That revolutionary element: “We are going to do something really different and blow up society with it. Or at least shock it.” We were also influenced by Futurism.8 Though the aesthetic disruption introduced by the historical avant-gardes is crucial to accurately frame German punk and DAF, Delgado does not claim that DAF simply picked up the pieces of Dada, Futurism, or punk and brought them unaltered into the eighties. As detailed below, the band certainly “sing[s] the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness [… and] exalt[s] movements of aggression.”9 However, because DAF simultaneously performed the antithesis of that futurist-cum-punk revolt through a fascist aesthetic (short haircuts, leather uniforms, and muscle), when they tapped into patterns of historical avant-gardes they signaled something other than a mere continuation of “no future.” The band’s harnessing of the avantgarde and punk is also markedly different from its national contemporaries’ because of its investment in, and performance of, pleasure through punk’s antipodes. In brief, DAF’s version of “no future” must be understood as the unraveling of source DNA and the willful mismatching of genetic code: while the basic aesthetic nucleotides remain, the band specifically sought out a-complementary sequencing. More concretely, when coupled with the celebration of the hedonistic DAF-Machine, the band’s use of 1920’s aesthetic theories differentiates DAF from its contemporaries; its celebration of pleasurable sights and sounds channeled the performance, feeling, and mechanistic fantasies of Weimar while simultaneously mining

132

BEYOND NO FUTURE

that period’s inverse, namely the sanitized aesthetic and nationalized affect of National Socialism. Unfolded thusly, DAF can be understood as a band that took advantage of what N. Katherine Hayles, writing on cybernetics and the posthuman, calls the “explosive tensions between cultural codes that familiarize the action and neologistic splices that dislocate traditional expectation.”10 Important for framing West German punk in the eighties, three years after the band Fehlfarben declared the subculture dead,11 DAF, in sum, continuously left unfulfilled its audiences’ expectations of punk, of Germany’s cultural canon, and of its violent past.12 The dialectic of familarization and dislocation that Hayles diagnoses is evidenced historically by the band’s sonic and sartorial ability to incite fights at their concerts, while simultaneously having mainstream, institutional effects. Though fights were not the sole province of DAF—indeed bands such as Kriminalitätsförderungsclub (KFC, Criminality-incitement club) were resolutely invested in fighting—the violence incited by DAF was alternatingly accidental and intentional.13 The latter’s performance of violence enacted a feedback loop between affect and discourse, and affect and aesthetics, a coupling so normal it mimed a steady state system, one wherein, as Hayles points out, “economic and political systems produced a complementary notion of the liberal self as an autonomous, self-regulating subject.” In addition to exposing the charade of the liberal self at the core of social-democratic rebirth in the Federal Republic, DAF’s coupling was able to unleash such disquiet because it also exposed the bond between German affect and National Socialism, specifically pleasure. That was what makes DAF notable and made its aesthetics that of an “uneasy alliance” for its audiences.14 The violent reflexivity of the steady state system of the FRG— its pathological dead end for aesthetics and pleasure—was precisely what DAF’s dystopic pleasure machine reengineered. Whereas the postwar years were undeniably linked to political, affective, aesthetic reckonings with Germany’s Nazi past—procedures which were alternatingly silent, violent, and often deadly—DAF recathected youth to the past. So unsettling was DAF’s centering of fascism for pleasure, DAF-contemporary Peter Glaser argues that despite years of swastika-wearing punks in the Federal Republic, “all social pedagogues hit the roof because of DAF” (V 304–307). This analysis unveils the logic behind that reaction, for such aftershocks testify to how DAF enacted a form of punk “less as a speaking voice” against punk’s imagined and real enemies, and more as a “series of fissures and dislocation that push[ed] toward a new kind of subjectivity” (Posthuman 45). DAF’s ability to achieve both subcultural and mainstream disruption testifies to how effectively it staged a subjectivity driven by the kinds of psychosexual politics conjoined, simultaneously and thus paradoxically, to National Socialism and West German countercultures of the sixties and seventies. DAF’s fascist punk highlights the band’s transition away from an ethos of anarchy in favor of a hedonistic barricade to the kinds of progress

SEX IN THE BUNKER

133

sought out by students and terrorists. This iteration of punk subversively performed the problematic imaginary and pathological repression of postwar German sexuality, a sexuality that historian Dagmar Herzog identified as engendered by the distortions of successive regimes and their attempts to regulate and discipline West German bodies. By plugging the distortions of fascist sexuality witnessed in the sixties and beyond into the negative feedback loop of the DAF-Machine, DAF’s narratives about fascism, sex, homosociality, and the body operated in the eighties as an indictment of German public and private remembrance of fascism.15 While the band’s turn away from the “liberation” of sexuality in the sixties is unsurprising given punk’s mythic opposition to hippies, that the kind of sex that DAF turned to was not the kind that was “freed” in the sixties signals again the uniqueness of DAF’s within the West German punk scene. As punk Moritz Reichelt argues, DAF’s was “a new presentation of the male body that was also important for boys. The sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s only presented a new image of women.”16 While the positive reflection on the past that lurks in Reichlet’s assessment of the sixties’ sexual revolution (“naked, sexy, and self-confident”) ignores the well-documented misogyny that sped the demise of the German Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the unrest emanating from universities, DAF’s presentation of the male body is a marker of what the punk literary figure Diedrich Diederichsen called a “negative ’68.”17 At its core, the macho body politics performed by DAF merely turned up the volume on 68ers’ performance of ostensibly effaced masculinity. DAF’s performances drew from a subcultural logic positioned dialectically vis-à-vis student revolutionaries’ failures and successes, in order to reinvigorate the “necessity of content for [its] demands” independent from any established mainstream or marginal political organization that by the eighties was viewed as either bankrupt or mainstreamed.18 Particularly via its fusion of the biological and mechanical through the past and against the present, DAF signals precisely what Diederichsen calls “the end of SecondOrder-Music [(i.e., subcultural music) …] and the start of something new, the catalyst of a new counterculture.”19 DAF’s particular iteration of a “negative ’68” was staged in part by Delgado’s “fist-fuck” performance of masculinity, a stark departure from both the theory-buttressed, faux-effaced masculinity of student revolutionaries and their violent inversion in the macho actions of terrorist Andreas Baader and his celebration of what period politics regarded as regressive, hetero-normative sexuality (V 306).20 Concurrent with their retooling of the RAF’s masculine bravado, DAF operated askew to punk’s typical vector. Whereas the latter sought to unleash “complete disruption” with its paradoxical feigning of fascism and terrorism through cacophonic sounds, the former chose the neatness and cleanliness of NSaesthetics, sexual pleasure, and the pulsing organization of electronic beats as dystopic springboards.21 The songs analyzed here—“Der Räuber und der

134

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Prinz,” “Sex unter Wasser,” and “Absolute Körperkontrolle”—are sterling examples of how the band sought to mine and to blow up the sociopolitical and psychosexual bunker created by bogged-down theory and repressed libidinal drives. As argued most canonically by cultural theoretician Klaus Theweleit, the structuring force of male fantasies—and fears—in National Socialism underwrote aesthetic representations and performances during the NS-era as well as the broader mode of acting, feeling, and consuming aesthetic products (pulp literature) on the battlefield.22 In their attempts to recode their fathers’ well-documented sanitized body aesthetics, and turn silence to noise, the student revolutionaries of the sixties and their countercultural iteration—hippies—liberated the look of masculinity and brought into the light of day discourses of sex. Beards, long hair, and patchwork clothing were clearly a far cry from the clean, hard lines and uniformed discipline of Nazi male ideals, the success of their attempt to invert the impingement of libidinal drives on middle-class sexual economies is less clear. While the cultural and linguistic practices of sex had effects beyond ostentatious performance, they produced meanings that undeniably buttressed male privilege, heteronormative sex, and women’s marginalization under the guise of promiscuity.23 In the wake of the sixties’ turmoil, and mainly invested in inverting students’ modus operandi, West German domestic terrorism in the form of Baader-Meinhof reclaimed male agency in its quest to violently continue West German students’ revolutionary fantasies. Such fantasies linked their struggles against the capitalist oppression of “third world” countries, and against former National Socialists in positions of political or economic power (such as chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger and industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer), with those of the Vietcong against American capitalist imperialism. Whereas the male student’s authority was claimed intellectually through theory, and his sexuality thereby allegedly effaced, Andreas Baader inverted that charade sartorially with Ray-Bans and BMWs, and in action through an arsenal of guns. But the most salient marker is the well-documented overt misogyny at the core of Baader’s interactions with, and dominance of, female members of Baader-Meinhof. DAF coupled the RAF’s performance of sex and violence with ostentatious macho homosexuality, while concurrently culling from the demise of West German punk’s first wave the penchant for misappropriated representations of National Socialism. Differently, however, DAF went further back in time to subvert National Socialism’s own misuse of canonical German cultural markers: the Ur-ideal of Germany latent in the tales of the Brothers Grimm or Friedrich Schiller.24 For it is in those ossified narratives, catalysts of German discourses of the nation in the 1980s, that DAF found perhaps the ultimate means of ensuring “no future” for the Federal Republic, specifically its aversion to any kind of dynamic reckoning with the historical affect of the self against the chimera of a democratic system. Parsing DAF’s diachronic sampling—how they tapped into narrative tracks of the past and present

SEX IN THE BUNKER

135

in their attempt to stave off any future—and their unyielding devotion to performance as provocation makes clear how the band assaulted defunct ciphers of subcultures past and present, ciphers that lingered, following the band’s calculus, because they had presented themselves as immemorial and eternal. This amalgam demarks an iteration of aggression and art for pleasure, through which the band sought to damagingly breach German taboos of the left and right. In the heat generated by splitting the punk atom, DAF looked to forge a form of punk capable of unleashing the experiences and feelings walled off by normative narratives of Germany’s past.

Punk melodrama: “The Robber and the Prince” DAF’s song “Der Räuber und der Prinz” from the album Alles ist gut [Everything is good] tells a story familiar to anyone acquainted with Grimm’s fairy tales or classical German literature. The song tells of a band of robbers who capture a prince lost in the woods at night. Delgado sings: a beautiful young prince. got lost in the wood. suddenly night fell. so the robbers caught him. but one of the robbers loved the prince. i love you my prince. i love you my robber.25 The narrative recalls the canonical adventures of Schiller’s Karl Moor and countless tales from the Grimms: The forest is simultaneously dangerous and full of romantic magic, the site of revolutionary anarchy and familial redemption. Peter Brandes reads the image of the knight in EA80’s song “Ritter” as anachronistic and a signal of punk’s rejection of heroic figures, even those such as the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten or KFC’s Tommi Stumpf (Brandes 64). But what does it mean to retell melodramatic tales for DAF? Schiller’s drama Die Räuber (The Robbers 1781) pits rationality against feeling and law against freedom through the brothers Karl and Franz Moor, who embody idealist, romantic lawlessness and materialist rationalism, respectively. While the heroism Karl finds with his band of robbers withers— he decides that the utopic ends do not justify the deadly means—Franz’s maniacal quest for wealth and power succumbs to its own nihilistic core. But Schiller’s drama narrates more than mere individual failures, for the brother’s concomitant self-recusal is willed: Both resign in order to preserve “German” order. Precisely that quality of Die Räuber makes it such a logical choice for DAF’s antihumanist punk. For “no future” in Delgado and Görl’s hands was no antidote to hippie’s utopic fantasies, but a unique and disingenuous position signaling punk’s will to failure. And the will to failure was sacrosanct; it was the realization of punk’s unwavering strategy of

136

BEYOND NO FUTURE

ironic nihilism that turned the structural force of the German literary canon into punk ephemera, into something worthless but nevertheless producing powerful effects. In DAF’s 35-word version of Schiller’s story, Delgado’s nameless prince— an everyman German—becomes lost in the forest and is surprised by sudden darkness. No mere détourned dramatic scenario from the “Storm and Stress” period of German literature, Delgado’s text also clearly rescripts the thenrecent German Autumn, when the victim had become the sympathizer, an echo of FRG fears of youth cultures’ fascination with RAF terrorists. A sonic riposte, Delgado’s deadpan delivery of the narrative is a stark inversion of the panic typical in FRG media reports of domestic terrorism.26 By narrating the present through the security of the past, and retelling a love story begging for audience identification, Delgado’s performance and the song’s narrative posit that Germany should not be, or have been, surprised by the violence of the 1970s. After all, eighteenth-century narratives of law, power, and masculinity that supported the rhetoric of Aryan superiority still circulated as the forces in society capable of allying associations and institutions: witness Baader-Meinhof. In addition to reminding the listener of this narrative past, “Der Räuber und der Prinz” simultaneously unveils the historical logic of Germany’s “Economic Miracle.” True to any miracle, it is part of a fairy tale—one that, following the Grimms, continually returns to a mythical forest from whose fertile soil springs Germanness, order, and law. Of course, punk’s sworn enemies had sought out solutions to their fathers’ pasts in precisely such forests, and German punk had rejected any hippie-like return to Teutonic nature, most canonically in S.Y.P.H.’s “Zurück zum Beton” (Back to concrete 1980). For DAF, the violence and hate germinating in the forest was their means to seek out an end instead of a future: Their song turns to a love forbidden by discriminating laws and persecution—the law of the Father that in 1980s Germany was inextricable from Nazi war crimes and silence vis-à-vis the past. When they tapped the Grimms and Schiller for inspiration, DAF, in effect, searches for the aesthetic traces of potential solutions hidden in trusted narratives that engendered the inhumanity of the past. The band thereby demonstrates a kind of optimistic pessimism about the possibility of subverting the stable trajectory offered by Germany’s canon. Their minimalist keyboard accompaniment to the truncated plot enters askew into affirmative circulation of material that buttressed not only National Socialism’s ideal of “Blood and Soil,” but also the postwar myth of Germany as a phoenix arisen from ashes. When DAF misuses the successful deployment of such narratives for agendas past, it avoids choosing a side in the battle in and over the legacy and future of German culture. Instead, because that battle’s conservative belligerents celebrated the sacrifice of revolutionary ideals for the preservation of an unjust, backward-oriented social system, DAF’s song outlines a logic that might potentially authorize a kind of social intervention through astute use of anarchic textual materials. This would be

SEX IN THE BUNKER

137

an intervention resistant to their present’s failure to transform the legacy of its canon. In a commentary on the revolutions of 1848, Walter Benjamin details a vision of destructive social warfare similar to DAF’s booby-trapping of a canonical bedrock of German rationalism. Benjamin theorized the internal actions of a group that “no longer advances through the streets […] A path is opened within the interior of houses, by breaking through walls [… and] to prevent the return of the adversary, one immediately mines the conquered ground.”27 This logic is evidenced by DAF’s misuse of German traditions that embraced conservative narratives in order to turn such traditions against a governmentally administered culture. The narrative in “Der Räuber und der Prinz” unveiled the German canon as a dangerous banality that fertilized social malaise and revitalized conservatism. But the song’s lyrics are merely the first part of a punk triptych indicting German history by misappropriating it. The video and music further unlock the band’s subversive performance of the artifacts and affects belatedly impacting DAF’s present. The video takes place in two distinct spaces: one, an antiquarian shop over-full of eerie marionettes, yellowed posters, skeletons, grandfather clocks, gramophones, and dark cabinets packed with masks; and the other, dangerous woods that in the video seem much more like an innocuous city park with a quaint bridge and stream.28 The video sets up visually the narrative’s inverse spaces: whereas the antiquarian shop is packed with historical, manmade objects, the woods, the locus of mythical Germanic history and the site where Schiller’s brothers resigned their own futures to an order both knew was unjust and regressive, is merely occupied by Görl and Delgado, the former with a mask, the latter with a scepter as their only identifying objects. Both also occupy the antiquarian space, Görl playing a child-size xylophone and Delgado ostensibly reading the song’s narrative from a folio-sized text. Because they are agents in both milieus, the two in effect indict themselves as part of the contemporaneous practices that fed canonical tradition into Germany’s past and continued to structure its present.29 But the two do not merely reenact German fantasies of reliving simpler times. Delgado and Görl replace the strained affect of fascism and hedonism of Weimar when they present the past, as Benjamin Kohlmann argues regarding the political potential of melodrama, “not as a teleological progression from a closed-off past to a present […] but as a process whereby the present is reconfigured in terms that may seem anachronistic and alien to it.”30 The antiquated shirts, cliché bandit masks, and transformation of Schiller’s tale from one about order and law into a story of forbidden love together form a narrative for popular entertainment, one as easy to follow as the child-like series of keyboard notes that is the song’s notation.31 As such, when the duo perform and court “powerful affects” of love, banditry, and German history, they do so “to forge a unity of feeling among a passive audience,” a situation that clearly locates the song and video “at odds with the avant-garde desire to ‘make it new’.”32 Also seemingly in conflict with DAF’s antihumanist

138

BEYOND NO FUTURE

intentions, the video appears to abandon any modernist resistance to unified feelings between spectators and actors when it centers the reality of the story in an antiques shop full of objects with overdetermined historical value and is unabashed in its visualization of forbidden love come true. Closer inspection reveals, however, that the band created a bond between their viewers and détourned traditions of Germany’s past. When DAF morphed the grandness of Beethoven into electronic bleeps and twerps, fantasied about mundane anarchy, and fronted the homoeroticism in classical German literature, they effectively embraced modernism’s affective Other to work against the confines of its literary-cultural tradition—Schiller, the Grimms, and “Germanness.” The pop keyboard minimalism and Delgado’s breathy narration are easy to follow and familiar; “Der Räuber und der Prinz” constantly works against the normative miming of the song’s sociocultural baggage in part through the band’s antagonistic credentials and in part through a disquieting affirmation that was DAF’s strategy of estrangement.33 It is not hard to imagine the sounds of “Der Räuber” as the soundtrack to the “feeling of flatness” that Matt Sikarskie identifies as the impetus for punks and Wandervogel to seek out escapes from the social and cultural confines of their present (38). The “monotony and minimalism” central to the DAF-Machine here seeks to escape the dead-end trap of binary antagonisms—good and evil, love and hate, Schiller and DAF—when the band acts out their own fantasies of reprising Schiller’s canonical tale and as such inscribes these fantasies on the established corpus of Germanness. A sterling example of the minimalist cell out of which Görl and Delgado built the DAF-Machine and prominent key to unlocking the song’s subversiveness is Görl’s synthesizer. The sonic counterpoint to DAF’s misuse of Schiller, the reduction of a song to single musical notes—one can sense their being played with a single finger—turns the frenetic and bombastic loudness of Schiller’s musical contemporary Ludwig van Beethoven into proto-techno. However, the band is not merely the inverse of Beethoven’s compositions; when they reengineered their Korg sequencers to produce loops and distortion, one can hear the punk adaptation of the deaf composer’s reconnoitering of his piano (i.e., when he cut off its legs or used acoustic cornets to create alternative pathways to hearing). The song’s sonic insurrection is at its best when it is most overt: The child-like synthesizer notes cannot be adequately reconciled with the sexualized images of album covers (discussed below), and are repeatedly interrupted by melodramatic cymbals, bells, and gongs at seemingly dramatic turning points in the narrative. However, they occur slightly out of synch with any real drama, and their sound is more naïve than illuminated. Combined with the dead-pan delivery of the lines, the prince’s capture, and the love declaration between the two illicit lovers, these sounds constitute what Neil Nehring called punk moments of “irruption.”34 Through DAF’s astute use of chaotic montage, “Der Räuber und der Prinz” violates boundaries of “high” and “low” cultural forms, an illustration

SEX IN THE BUNKER

139

of their indebtedness to the avant-garde as the band worked through and against culture. Correspondingly, DAF tested effects at the subcultural and mainstream levels; they moved beyond punk to reject the fantasy of West German wholeness in the wake of the enduring “Emergency Laws.” However, their overt interest in pleasure is what distinguishes DAF’s punk poetics from its contemporaries. The band’s dialectical appropriation of modernism and its antipodes (melodrama) were crucial for their disinterest in continuing punk’s original invective. DAF brought to bear on punk itself punk’s intentions, as Nehring writes on punk “irruption,” of “overthrowing the fragmentation of cultural experience, among institutions like academia and mass media, [that itself] is essential to a more widespread, lucid rejection of the authoritarian plutocracy that dominates the globe.”35 The male–male love that Delgado and Görl performed in the video and on stage was the central coordinate of a techno-homosexuality through which DAF misused precisely the worn-out logic of social engineering and social intervention to escape the trap of postmodernism that Habermas in 1980 identified as a “pretext for various conservative positions.”36 In “Der Räuber und der Prinz,” DAF internalizes the catastrophe of the moment—failed social movements, jailed and assassinated terrorists, a resurgent right in the person of Kohl—to disrupt temporal continuity and to annihilate ideas of progress founded upon vulgar materialism and on a sublimation of the body as economically rather than sexually functional. DAF’s détournement of the Grimms and Schiller, of cultural icons whose narratives underwrite the logic of German greatness and nationalism, was conjured by ghosts of Germany’s historical avant-gardes but feed off a feedback loop between materiality and discourse. And therein lies the distinct marker of DAF’s temporal sampling: They misused both the aesthetics that bled into National Socialism’s and the narratives mobilized by Nazi propaganda machines to create a new kind of pleasure-seeking and -producing machine. DAF envisioned a machine, powered by musical circuitry, that could escape the critical rationality of ’68 and ’77 and thereby end the homeostatic stability of subcultural resistance-cum-cooption, but that also constituted a matrix able to foster a form of affect that made accessible, and pleasurable, their present’s leaden dystopia.

Bodies and spaces of pleasure The songs “Sex unter Wasser” and “Absolute Körperkontrolle,” on DAF’s 1981 album Gold und Liebe, have none of the overt narrative underpinnings of “Der Räuber und der Prinz.” “Absolute Körperkontrolle” [Absolute body control] is an instrumental whose pulsating rhythms, when conjoined with the leather outfits of Görl and Delgado on the cover for Gold und Liebe

140

BEYOND NO FUTURE

FIGURE 8.1 Front album cover of Gold und Liebe by DAF (Virgin, 1981, CD). Courtesy Gabi Delgado.

[Gold and love], are the tonalization of flesh on flesh (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). But the song reproduces more than the sequencer’s representation of the prince and robber’s bodies coming together, and more than the antithesis of West Germany’s postwar countercultures’ body politics. Unmistakable in a title that echoes National Socialist body politics, “Absolute Körperkontrolle” is DAF’s aural representation of their fascist aesthetic. The duo’s panting, sweaty visages on the cover of Alles ist gut (Figures 8.3 and 8.4), and the seductive looks and leather uniforms Görl and Delgado wear on the cover for Gold und Liebe visually signal their albums’ promised provocation. The specter of fascism lurking on the album covers was part of a strategy intent on confounding DAF’s audience and reception in the broadcast and print media. This strategy depended on widespread recognition of what the images were signifying at personal and sociopolitical levels.

SEX IN THE BUNKER

141

FIGURE 8.2 Back album cover of Gold und Liebe by DAF (Virgin, 1981, CD). Courtesy Gabi Delgado.

The albums’ reference to National Socialism, to the aesthetics of “Germanness,” and to the disquiet of West German youth were all intended to undermine the psychological barrier that had left West Germans not only unable to mourn, but unable to rejoice as well.37 As Delgado claimed in 1980, Germany’s scars from the Second World War and a tumultuous two decades of protest were not merely evident in its pockmarked buildings. Despite the stability offered by the US presence and its buttressing of a revamped FRG, Delgado did not see a peaceful democratic society. Germany, he argued: Thinks it is like a safe castle of the Western world […] but behind this bunker, this façade, there is a lot going on that has nothing to do with the image Germany wants of itself. It’s not so straight as people think it is—it

142

BEYOND NO FUTURE

FIGURE 8.3 Front album cover of Alles ist gut by DAF (Virgin/Conny Plan, 1980, LP). Courtesy Gabi Delgado.

is very neurotic. People want to get excited and go over the top but they can’t because they’re in this bunker, so they explode inside themselves instead.38 Impossible to overlook, Delgado elucidates the negative logic behind “Absolute Körperkontrolle,” namely the unchained release of affective energies directed squarely against the German state. Thus, whereas Franz and Karl Moor made the explicit choice not to implode their static system— choosing instead to live “In tirannos,” as the drama’s epigraph reads—the DAF-Machine created the conditions of possibility for such a release. However, a tension becomes evident in the band’s disinterest in “making anything better for humanity,” and in realizing an affective release theretofore

SEX IN THE BUNKER

143

FIGURE 8.4 Back album cover of Alles ist gut by DAF (Virgin/Conny Plan, 1980, LP). Courtesy Gabi Delgado.

unfulfilled in the public sphere. But if “exploding inside themselves” can be understood as an affective process that, rather than remaining entirely unfulfilled, had realized itself fractally in Germany’s present in the forms of street protests and terrorism—and Delgado’s assertion can be read as insinuating this partial release—then the locution “Absolute Körperkontrolle” describes a mechanism whose countertendency is the legacy of theoretical and violent insurrection witnessed in the sixties and seventies. As such, the song must be understood dialectically, as both an indictment of ineffective and sold-out practices present and past, and as a harbinger for alternative practices. The instrumental song leaves unremarked the homeostatic system that had foreclosed healthy and pleasurable affective release in Germany,

144

BEYOND NO FUTURE

while its dark and demanding rhythm encourages the opposite of its titular modus operandi. Thus, while sonically distanced from punk, the conjoining of pleasure and pain, the self-control given over to the musical imperatives of the song, and the visual (and then, in concert, performative) presentation of a male body divorced from compulsory heteronormativity together form a response to national silence vis-à-vis the past and shockwaves of the present. The melancholy that the Mitscherlichs saw as absent in West Germany’s past was a premier impingement to any redemptive memory in the present. But when Delgado argues that the conditions of possibility for repression and denial of the Nazi past were absent from postwar German consciousness, he posits the opposite. For DAF, total body control was a willed condition, a humanistic bunker protecting one from having to redeem the past on any corporeal basis. That bunker’s (in)stable foundation—the German sociocultural canon—ensured the existence of fissures through which destructive affective energies—1968, Baader-Meinhof, and punk— would escape in moments of “irruption.” Rhetoric of total body control, of fairy tales, and of psychic normalcy ensured that the private capacity to mourn was not particularly available because of the total administered steady-state system of West Germany post-1945. In effect, the DAF-Machine serves as a means to jump-start an insurrection against the systematic efforts to create community based on suppressing, denying, or sublimating specters of the past. The band’s aversion to the canon of community, reconciliation, and reconstruction is perfectly clear in the underwater fornication in “Sex unter Wasser” [Sex under water]. By proposing alternate readings of German cultural traditions, “Der Räuber und der Prinz” sought to unleash into the cultural possibilities of those traditions as a shield against the disquieting progress of the Federal Republic while dialectically occupying the core spaces of German culture (material history in the antiques shop, and mythical history in the forest). “Sex unter Wasser” channels that spatial disquiet obliquely when it takes up fluid space—water—as a location resistant to the fixity of Germany’s sociohistorical past. Here DAF locates Germany’s historical auto-narrative in a dynamic (fluid) space outside those normally occupied by subcultures, but being underwater is not merely about a new place; when Delgado’s lyrics erupt from a state of asphyxiation, it is more than singing out of breath. Indeed, the lyrics in “Sex unter Wasser” signal an EBM response to the strictures on public freedoms enduring in the wake of the “German Autumn.” When the band performs the occupation of ostensibly impossible spaces—water as metaphor for the FRG’s psychosexual bunker—they demark the desperation of DAF’s antihumanist aesthetic. While the aquatic pleasures in “Sex unter Wasser” seem again to demand melodramatic identification, when heard in tandem with “Der Räuber und der Prinz” and “Absolute Körperkontrolle” the operations of the DAF-Machine become discernable: Together, these songs are the schematic for DAF’s quest to

SEX IN THE BUNKER

145

constitute a different category of pleasure, one fundamental to any hope of avoiding the reenactment of failures past. The latter tracks can be heard as the diachronic process through which DAF sought to misuse canonical cultural markers; meanwhile, the former presents a crucial third contribution to a triptych of corporeal pleasure neither linked to nor impinged by the legacies of National Socialism. Either with their song titles, or panting lyrics for the voyeur—Delgado sings: “ah come/oh come/come with/in the water/ because you/and sex/and water/the most beautiful thing/when you love me in water”—DAF’s narratives give voice to fascist bodies and the vacuum of pleasure in the FRG in the band’s efforts to destroy once and for all the prison of binaries vis-à-vis fascism. Embracing fascist aesthetics and practices was DAF’s attempt to end the endless either/or, us/them of fascism. As such, when they put fascism front and center what they really did was quintessentially punk; their antihumanism was indeed a variant of punk’s originary “no future.” DAF did not want “no future” tout court; they simply did not want the future promised by their present. They did not want a future whose counterpoint was forever National Socialism. They did not want a future that was destined to be forever trapped in a Germanic bunker whose walls were continuously reinforced by an endless chain of processing the sociocultural narratives of the past in the same ways. The humanism that DAF rejected was the canonical humanism of Schiller, Beethoven, and the Grimms, a humanism that had only—in punk’s logic—ensured the stable traversing of the past’s cataclysmic abyss without considering to what end all the psychic and physical energies of reconstruction were contributing. If the present had deadened the ability to mourn, to feel, or to experience pleasure, then the DAF-Machine was a means to invest excessive amount of energy in the inverse: in an insurrection of punk affect against the German psyche. But if the band’s riposte against hippies’ bodies, terrorist violence, and mainstream silence vis-à-vis West Germany’s Nazi past transcended earlier punk techniques, DAF also unmasks a failure of their own distancing from 1977, from the violent aesthetic strategies of punk that had proven themselves failures. Early punk found inspiration in the call for a new kind of opposition that was not “simply an imitation of the militaristic, but rather one that they cannot simply shoot out of our hands” voiced in the “Buback Obituary.”39 Through channeling the carrier of Germanness, of German idealist philosophy par excellence—the idea of Geist—DAF’s own brand of what Delgado called an erotic “meta-fascist spirit [Geist]” likewise sought to unleash a way out of the hermetically sealed mass-media representations of Germany into the ears and eyes of the public. But it also wanted a new kind of affective strategy, one based not on fear, repression, and angst, but rather on love and power. As Görl remarked on DAF’s “body culture” [Körperkultur]: “if we came off militaristic because of that—for some that came off in like the SS—, that was nevertheless for us pure fantasy outfits […] they were just a

146

BEYOND NO FUTURE

trigger.”40 When the band misused the work of their canonical or subcultural forefathers—following Görl’s logic—what they did was escape a logic of the past with a fantasy of the end. DAF’s sonic fantasies tapped into modes of affective engagement blocked by the narrative bunker of postwar, post-68, post-77 German cultural experience; the band performed a hermeneutics of the present by mobilizing aesthetic strategies of the past. DAF’s was an effort to unveil and foster the creation of new concepts in order to mobilize a projected truth, in order to forge different political alliances not—so the band hoped—susceptible to the bitterness and resignation of a defeated left, or to the faith of a resurgent right.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

Robert Görl quoted in Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend: Ein DokuRoman über den deutschen Punk und New Wave (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 293. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s own. Görl quoted in Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 293. See W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003). See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University Press, 1999), 197. Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 293, 110. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 43. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 78–9. Marinetti, “Manifesto,” 43. Hayles, Posthuman, 45. Peter Hein, liner notes, Verschwende deine Jugend, Universal, 2002, 2xCD, n.p. Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 231. DAF’s staging of the hard male body for pleasure and power earned them unanticipated concerts in front of 600–800 British skinheads (see Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 125–9). For a very different kind of punk and a different kind of fight, witness the fight at Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle’s (FSK, Voluntary self-censorship) second concert in the Prunksall of the Munich Art Academy. Band member Thomas Meinecke recalls “the audience erupted immediately into a massive fight. Because of what we were representing there. They didn’t know: Is that a sect? Are they being paid by the GDR? Are they fascists?” (Thomas Meinecke, liner notes, Verschwende deine Jugend, CD). Hayles, Posthuman, 86.

SEX IN THE BUNKER

147

15 See Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism. Memory and Morality in TwentiethCentury Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 16 Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 306. 17 Diedrich Diederichsen, Sexbeat: 1972 bis heute (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1983), 158. 18 Ibid., 165. 19 Ibid., 134. Einstürzende Neubauten is another early punk band trafficking in the mechanical refuse of the past and present for its version of destructive punk, but none of DAF’s pleasure-seeking ethos or NS-aesthetic resonates in the former’s music or performance. For more on Einstürzende Neubauten, see for example Hall, Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking against the Grain, 1800–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 20 For more on misogyny and the RAF, and to the RAF in general, see The German Issue, ed. Heidi El Kholti (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e) and Sternberg Press, 1982). 21 Thomas Schwebel quoted in Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 51. 22 See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Polity Press, 1987). 23 See for example Jeremy Varon’s, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) or Sabine von Dirke’s, “All Power to the Imagination!”: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 24 For more on the image of the Brothers Grimm in the Federal Republic and the politics of reclaiming outside National Socialism the idea of Germanness, see for example, Kluge and Negt’s History and Obstinacy; Jack Zipes, “The Struggle for the Grimm’s Throne: The Legacy of the Grimms’ Tales in the FRG and GDR since 1945,” in The Reception of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, ed. Donald Haase (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993), 167–206; Margarete Johanna Landwehr, “Märchen as Trauma Narrative: Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Film Germany, Pale Mother,” in Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture, eds. Sharon R. Sherman and Mikel J. Koven (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007), 130–48, or more recently the film Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen, directed by Sönke Wortmann, Little Shark Entertainment GmbH and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 2006, DVD. 25 Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, Alles ist gut, Virgin/Conny Plan, 1980, LP. Translated by Gabi Delgado. Not to be overlooked, the all-lowercase typography in the text is another smack in the face of canonical Germanness and the dominance of heteronormative writing/grammar rules. 26 For different reactions to the mainstream media’s representation of the RAF, see, for example, the songs “klammheimlich” [clandestine] by the band S.Y.P.H. (Viel Feind, viel Ehr, Pure Freude, 1979, LP) or the songs “Gudrun E.” (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, Teilnehmende Beobachtung, ZickZack, 1981, 7") and “In Mogadischu” (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, Stürmer, ZickZack, 1982, LP). 27 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), a1a, 1.

148

BEYOND NO FUTURE

28 The video is (currently) viewable via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3UKya3sQDNc (accessed August 14, 2015). 29 For a very different but telling example of how German fairy tales continued to structure a reconstructed West Germany, see Die Patriotin, directed by Alexander Kluge, Karos-Film, 1979, DVD. 30 Benjamin Kohlmann, “Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect,” PMLA 128.2 (2013): 337–52, 337. 31 Any fan of DAF would immediately notice another sonic element marking the childish nature of this song, namely that “Räuber” is pitch-shifted dramatically higher than their other songs, including “Sex unter Wasser” and “Absolute Körperkontrolle.” 32 Kohlmann, “Awkward Moments,” 339. 33 Ibid., 343. 34 Neil Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 2. 35 Ibid., 2. 36 Cited in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, eds. Maurizio Passin D’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), 54. 37 Here I am referencing Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s groundbreaking study of German reckoning with the atrocities of the Nazi past in Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press: distributed by Random House, 1975). 38 Quoted in English from Biba Kopf, liner notes in Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, Gold und Liebe LP, Virgin Records, 1981, n.p. 39 Originally published in the Göttinger Nachrichten, April 25, 1977, 10–12. 40 Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend, 304.

9 Cold Wave: French Post-Punk Fantasies of Berlin Mirko M. Hall

The critically acclaimed publication of journalist Jürgen Teipel’s Verschwende deine Jugend (2001)—an oral history of punk, post-punk, and new wave— inaugurated a renewed interest in the German alternative music scene of the 1980s.1 As a result, a number of high-profile publications, exhibitions, and multimedia compilations have been released by an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars working in higher education, the popular press, and even the Goethe Institute, Germany’s worldwide cultural center.2 These retrospectives often focused on the countercultural epicenter of Cold War Berlin, which experienced during this period a unique explosion of artistic experimentation and left-wing political activism. On the very cusp of this brave new world, singer David Bowie referred to the city as the “greatest cultural extravaganza that one could imagine,” having recorded his famous trilogy of albums, Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger (1977–1979) there.3 Using philosophical insights, avant-garde techniques, and new media technologies, many artists, musicians, and writers critiqued—through their performative aesthetic interventions—the dawn of a political wasteland created by the elections of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, US President Ronald

I am very grateful for the kind permission of Yves Royer (Guerre Froide) and Stéphane Marchi (Little Nemo) to cite their lyrics. Special thanks to musicians Gilbert and Marie-José Deffais, Fabrice Fruchart, and Ron Le Sergent, as well as the curator of Nordwaves, Emmanuel Delmarre, for helping me to better contextualize the French cold wave scene. I also appreciate Martin Law for sharing his technical expertise on post-punk musical aesthetics. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German and French are my own.

150

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Reagan, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. These years were characterized by a state of emergency that was marked by the resurgence of reactionary social values, an unrelenting colonization of communal life by the culture industry, increased networks of bureaucratic surveillance, and the permanent threat of nuclear annihilation. The artistic contributions of these bands (including those centered around the short-lived performance art collective, Geniale Dilletanten)4 helped to promote the view of Berlin as an explosively creative metropolis since the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, the avant-garde aesthetics and politics of the divided city reinforced, well before reunification, the modern myth of “Berlin”— to borrow novelist Peter Schneider’s oft-cited remark—as the “capital of creative [and politically conscious] people from around the world.”5 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, members of the alternative movement in West Berlin were joined by sympathizers from France in their critique of European late capitalism and neoliberalism.6 Cultural critic Jean-François Sanz has argued how French youth were “torn between the sensation of living on the edge of an abyss and hope for the dawning of a new world.”7 To overcome this anesthetizing condition and find a new sense of common identity, some of these youth formed post-punk bands that reproduced a certain strand of German-inspired romanticism: They recognized themselves in the affective medium of “dark lyrics [… and] cold synthetic music.”8 These French post-punks also found themselves looking toward the radical historical energies of Berlin. Despite the existential angst of the Cold War, and its historical traumas, the city has always held—according to critics like Walter Benjamin9—a reservoir of untapped critical impulses that could be mobilized for new cultural revolutions. Although their German counterparts were critiquing, in part, specific national concerns, these French musicians shared with them two elective affinities: (1) the working-through of a general sense of malaise that permeated the era and (2) the advocacy of a “Berlin-as-world-city fantasy”10 that attempted to actualize its hidden emancipatory potential for new forms of freedom. What is so intriguing about their fascination with Berlin (notwithstanding their knowledge of its dynamic music culture) is that one never encounters a sustained discussion of the exact usage and origins of this fantasy. It simply circulates in examples of French post-punk discourse as an overdetermined signifier that is understood to function as a code word for aesthetic autopoiesis, underground street cred, and political resilience. The above nexus of history and music is clearly seen in cold wave (la vague froide), a relatively short-lived Francophone genre of dark independent music that was an exciting fusion of minimal post-punk guitars and electronics. In the following pages, I would like to highlight some of the key aesthetic and cultural–political coordinates of this discursive exchange between cold wave and the concept of Berlin as a culturally and politically vanguard metropolis. Although my analysis involves a special Gallic–Teutonic alliance, I write

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

151

this text from the perspective of a German Studies scholar working at the crossroads of cultural history and sound studies. The relative brevity of my discussion is the result of a simple archival problem: Many of the bands that were associated with the scene left very few records, both literally and figuratively. The scarcity of reviews, interviews, and commentary, particularly in the early years, can be traced back to the fact that these bands were largely do-it-yourself endeavors in nonmetropolitan surroundings. Additionally, some of the available recordings have poor sound quality (especially from background noise and tape hiss) that makes their musical and lyrical content difficult to decipher. Despite these challenges, however, the study of French cold wave offers intriguing insights into how the myth of Berlin—once a very German leitmotiv—operates as a rhetorical marker in punk and post-punk cultures beyond traditional national borders. A significant revival of the cold wave scene, beginning around 2010, has now opened up this musical phenomenon to greater scholarly inquiry.

Cold wave aesthetics The term “cold wave” originally described the music of German electropop pioneers Kraftwerk and the English post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees as being simultaneously “[c]old, machine-like and passionate.” It first appeared in the United Kingdom weekly music paper Sounds in 1977.11 Thereafter, it was used to label the music of a number of UK post-punk bands, such as the Cure and Joy Division, before finally coalescing around its later French variant. Already by 1980, the cold wave sound was predominantly a “guitar-driven form of ‘Wave Music’,”12 which drew upon the musical innovations of producer Martin Hannett, who invented the legendary sound of Factory Records from Manchester, England. Clearly heard on Joy Division’s two studio albums Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980), Hannett pioneered an emotionally fraught soundscape through the use of “reverbed drums, echoing vocals, icy synthesizers, clanking/crashing sound effects, prominent bass, and effected guitars.”13 As the decade progressed, the guitars in cold wave were increasingly complemented by the motorik beats of Kraftwerk and Krautrock bands like Can, Faust, and NEU!, as well as the apocalyptic atmosphere of early industrial bands like Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, and Throbbing Gristle. Here, the pulsating rhythm of the drum machine was partnered with analog synthesizers—such as the Arp Omni, Korg MS, and Roland Juno series—to produce cold, punchy sounds instead of the more warm, squelchy vibe of synth-inspired new wave.14 In its “classic” incarnation by the early 1980s, French cold wave was a musical symbiosis of UK post-punk guitars and German industrial electronics that rhetorically mimicked—through dark melancholic sonorities—the

152

BEYOND NO FUTURE

acoustic contours of Europe’s angst-ridden cultural landscape. As one reviewer noted, it was the music of “goth-inflected industrial pop songs played on mechanized drum machines and glassy synths.”15 Its signature sound was characterized by the use of electronic beats, melody-carrying bass lines, disjointed “angular” guitars, atmospheric analog synths, and raw disaffected vocals. The designation “cold wave,” however, has taken on over time a much larger semantic field: It can now refer to any French post-punk music that resonates with an aesthetic of dark emotionality. As a result, it has also been applied to compositions that are purely electronic—hence, the more recent monikers of “death disco” and “miminal synth.” Despite its obvious usefulness for contextualizing aesthetics and thematics, attempts to classify bands and songs into specialized genres is always problematic, because it restricts the creative forces behind artistic works into rigid categories.16 For my purposes here, I classify compositions as “cold wave” based on the general consensus of fans and critics alike. According to The Guardian’s head rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis, cold wave was a “scene that was never a scene … [and] virtually ignored by pop historians.”17 Its musicians were young people hailing from suburban and regional pockets of France, southern Belgium, and western Switzerland, who preferred singing in their native French. Using the new affordability of sequencers, synthesizers, and drum machines, and working outside the modern studio with its audiophile accouterments, they recorded their music on small print runs of records or home-recorded cassettes and promoted them through a samizdat-like network of small gigs, tape trading, and fanzines. By the mid- to late 1980s, the original scene had largely dissipated. Although some cold wave bands did receive wider national and international recognition (like KaS Product, Little Nemo, Martin Dupont, and Trisomie 21), the works of many others remained hard to find until connoisseurs began curating their music—via blogs, club nights, compilations, and reissues—for a new generation of listeners around the year 2007.18 Cold wave emerged directly out of the explosion of post-punk, a highly experimental and sonorically diverse aesthetic program that developed from 1978 to 1984 and dedicated itself to “fulfilling punk’s unfinished musical [and political] revolution.”19 The punk movement advocated a cultural politics of “no future” that foreclosed the possibility of transforming the emancipatory potential of the past and present into the future service of human freedom. By highlighting this futility, punks wanted to work through the persistence of an authoritarian substratum of Western culture and its blatant co-option of social justice initiatives ranging from civil rights to nuclear disarmament. Post-punks and cold wavers agreed with these societal faults, but expressed a more utopian orientation: they were “constantly looking forward” and wanted—in addition to cultural critique—to “transform the world even if only through altering one individual’s perceptions or enlarging one’s sense of possibility” (emphasis in original).20 To accomplish this task, these musicians

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

153

drew not only upon punk’s confrontational aesthetics (i.e., its “structure of feeling”), but also the entire inventory of the historical avant-garde’s strategies of defamiliarization and experimentation. Sanz, who curated the 2008 Parisian exhibition on French post-punk and new wave, “Des jeunes gens mödernes” (“Young Modern People”), writes: Taking advantage of the “Do It Yourself” method and of provocation elevated to the status of activist strategy … [these genres] drew upon artistic avant-garde movements from the past (Constructivism, Futurism, Symbolism, Dadaism, socialist realism and so on), as well as literature (Romanticism, science fiction etc.), cinema (New Wave, German expressionist cinema) and the latest technological advances (electronic, robotic, nuclear).21 These strategies were combined into shocking new aesthetic juxtapositions that resonated with unexpected cognitive and affective insights: a sonoric space that created, however limited and momentarily, a new opening of socially conscious potentiality. For French cold wavers, this ever-expansive space was a realm beyond the power chords of punks to the dark ambiance of synthesized sounds that better resonated their “apocalyptic fears, their futurist dreams, [and] their gloriously naive love songs.”22

Mythos Berlin For many punk and post-punk artists and musicians across the world, “Berlin” was a countercultural signifier, a guiding image (Leitbild) par excellence.23 As the troubled location where many of the twentieth century’s political dramas played out—from the Third Reich to the Cold War—Berlin has been a site of intense historical trauma and melancholic remembrance. (The celebration of the Wall’s claustrophobic paranoia by punk’s fabled progenitors, the Sex Pistols, in their 1977 song “Holidays in the Sun” is exemplary here.24) In light of its legacy as the cultural fulcrum of a liberal republic between and after two World Wars, however, the city has also given rise to powerful impulses imbued with historically conscious creativity, critique, and resistance on both sides of the (former) Wall. During these two periods, which spanned the Weimar Republic, the protest era of 1968, and the punk/post-post scenes, Berlin was a highly “experimental workshop for a new aesthetics” that was politically committed to the goals of progressive political thought and social action.25 This workshop involved everything from artistic movements (Expressionism, Dada, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, agitprop, street art) to political strategies (representative democracy, denazification, student activism) of the past century. These radical artists,

154

BEYOND NO FUTURE

musicians, and writers were troubled by a cultural and political landscape that perpetuated either a traditional authoritarian or a neoliberal consumerist mentality and ignored larger issues of social justice. They sought to explode aesthetic hierarchies—as extensions of officially sanctioned norms—and rescue those counterhegemonic energies embedded within both canonical and marginalized cultural figures and artifacts. Their overarching cultural– political project was not the nihilistic negation of German society, but rather its transvaluation and ultimate redemption. Because of this unique synergy between despair and hope, Berlin’s aesthetic, cultural, and political topography became an ideal place to experience, study, and overcome the trials and tribulations of modernity. It still offered a crucial lesson for exploring how a public space might be energized with an aesthetic program of experimentation, subversion, and democratization that can ultimately triumph—even at the very moment of intense danger.26 Certainly, today’s vibrant and multicultural city is a proud testament to this program (but one increasingly threatened as an upcoming theme park for global capitalism). A striking number of French post-punk songs from cold wave to new wave make explicit references to the “Berlin-as-world-city fantasy,” particularly as a cosmopolitan site of intense historical affect. They are in chronological order: Guerre Froide’s “Demain Berlin” (1981); Ausweis’s “Berlin” (1984); Gestalt’s “Ditja Berlina” (1987); L’An III’s “Berlin” (1987); Martin Dupont’s “Berlin Wall” (1987); and Little Nemo’s “Berlin” (1989).27 Interestingly, these compositions run the complete political trajectory of Reagan’s two-term presidency: from his aggressive foreign policy against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union to a period of mutual rapprochement that later facilitated the fall of the Wall. They recount the emotional state of different lyrical protagonists, who work through similar feelings—such as unrequited love, anxiety, and confusion, and sober introspection—among the city’s historical ruins, within its alternative neighborhoods, or along the Wall. This atmosphere of melancholy, which is keenly actualized by the music, is reminiscent of the mood established by Wim Wenders in his 1987 cinematic masterpiece, Wings of Desire. One only needs to recall here those stunning sepia-toned black-and-white scenes of the angels Damiel and Cassiel, who contemplated similar issues of human finitude at a desolate Potsdamer Platz or along the graffiti-covered Wall.28 The transferential attachment of cold wave to Berlin is noteworthy. As French blogger Bartelby observes, an entire generation of Francophone post-punks now “exalted … in the creative renewal of a country [i.e., Germany] that was believed [by others] to have been culturally wiped out,”29 seemingly the only statement in the fan literature that directly addresses this myth from their perspective. This statement is a curious inversion of the political affiliations of many Europeans over the past two centuries, including a large number of German intellectuals from Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. As members of

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

155

the French-speaking world, these musicians might have been expected to engage the rich political history of Paris in their wider critique of European neoliberalism: the nineteenth-century metropolis would have provided them with a powerful tradition. The French capital has held a very special place in the global political imaginary,30 from the French Revolution of 1789–1799 through the July Revolution of 1830 and the Paris Commune of 1871, as the personification of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Parliamentary democracy, universal male suffrage, freedom of the press, and free secular education were examples of the values offered by Paris, especially from around the 1830s onward. Given the political climate of the Cold War, though, it is not surprising that Berlin’s very public engagement with the past—by way of mourning work (Trauerarbeit) and remembrance—would offer a counterhegemonic model for understanding and overcoming historical limitations and failures. As American civil rights activist Angela Davis would later underscore, while visiting the city in support of political refugees in 2015: “Paris embodies the past, Berlin the future.”31

Tomorrow Berlin One of the most celebrated French cold wave bands is Guerre Froide (Cold War),32 which was founded in June 1980 by four young men (eighteen to twenty-four-years old) in a basement in the historic city of Amiens, seventyfive miles north of Paris. The band underwent several lineup changes before disbanding in 1982 and reuniting in 2006 in Lille, near the Belgian border. During those two years, they released a cassette and an eponymous 12" EP that has now become a highly sought-after collector’s item. Their song “Demain Berlin” (“Tomorrow Berlin”)—recorded in 1981, the year of Reagan’s presidential inauguration—is not only emblematic of the genre’s musical style, but its lyrical content most clearly exemplifies the scene’s captivation with Berlin. Singer and front man Yves Royer wrote the lyrics and multi-instrumentalist Fabrice Fruchart (guitar, synthesizer) composed the music.33 The work is a tribute to Marlene Dietrich, the iconic GermanAmerican actress and singer from Berlin, who became the archetype of the femme fatale in classic Hollywood film. For the remainder of this chapter, I would like to undertake a close reading of this song against the backdrop of the “Berlin-as-world-city fantasy” and the role that melancholy might play for a new culturally transformative praxis of music. Running just under five minutes, “Demain Berlin” begins with a slight rhythmic stutter that leads into a 4/4 beat programmed on a Korg Rhythm 55 drum machine. These beats are followed by an evocative four-chord sequence in F-minor on a Roland SH-09 monophonic analog synthesizer. The synthesized melody is also played on bass guitar shortly thereafter. As

156

BEYOND NO FUTURE

the song unfolds, the lyrics begin and continue for the rest of the track. From around 1:50 to 3:20, the beat accelerates and a memorable eruption of electric guitar scuzz—played most likely on a classic Fender Telecaster with distortion pedal—ensues. It is, however, the special partnership between the synthesizer and bass that constitutes the song’s underlying soundscape. In the musical doctrine of affects, which was widely used during the German Baroque, the key of F-minor was described as “express[ing] beautifully a black helpless melancholy.”34 The lyrics of “Demain Berlin” consist of five stanzas that do not follow a standard verse-refrain pattern. They are sung in a slow mournful mix of French, German, and English. Royer intentionally chose these languages to convey a “very European” sense of cosmopolitanism.35 The text follows a lyrical I that recounts his journey across a presumably defeated Germany from Berchtesgaden via Nuremberg to Berlin, all historically charged sites during the Third Reich.36 The first three stanzas recall how the protagonist—a love-struck soul—encountered a seductive woman, who is as “cold as an iceberg” and “dressed all in black.” She is identified as the “naughty Lola” (“die fesche Lola”) and is “from head to toe ready for love” (“von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt”). The verses are repeated at the end of two separate stanzas to emphasize that Lola has “only one idea in mind”: that is, love.37 These German-language references are taken from the titles of two songs by famed German-American film composer Friedrich Hollaender.38 These songs are performed by Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film, The Blue Angel, a prime example of Weimar cinema.39 The film showcases her most famous performance as the seductive singer Lola Lola in a sleazy nightclub of the same name. With a smoky voice and cutaway skirt revealing her tight black garters and pale thighs, she represents—in the words of controversial American philosopher Allan Bloom, no less—the “charming, neurotic, sexy, decadent longing for some hazy fulfillment not quite present to consciousness.”40 Taken together with the music’s overall somber ambiance, these references to “The Blue Angel” allude to a kind of dark eroticism that suggests, by way of other verses, either involuntary self-abandonment (“vibrations [of love] broke the mirror”) or voluntary seduction (“I was sure that [love] should happen”).41 The song’s climatic guitar scuzz occurs at the precise moment that the lyrical I describes how they—the two lovers—“will meet in the ruins of Berlin,” the final destination of the narrative.42 This statement is repeated as the first verse of the last three stanzas. It strongly suggests that their (erotic) love can only be realized or, perhaps even consummated, in the ruins of the now destroyed city. In this regard, it does not appear coincidental that the cover of the band’s 1980 cassette “Cicatrice,” which includes an earlier version of the song, features the picture of a bombed-out metropolis very similar to the famous aerial photography taken by the Allies over a defeated Berlin in July 1945.43 References to ruination, whether literal or metaphorical, are part of an influential aesthetic tradition that was

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

157

harnessed by the early German Romantics and later highlighted by scholars of modernity like Benjamin.44 On the one hand, ruins and rubble—as allegorical fragments—destroy historical and political pretenses to progress, totality, and inevitability (here, the destruction of Nazi ideology). On the other hand, ruins and rubble sever narratives of cultural domination from their traditional contexts and reassemble them into new configurations of human emancipation (here, the city as a site of love). These two strands of thought are united in the final two stanzas of the text. The above imagery, which highlights the dialectical relationship between eros and thanatos, appears throughout the lyrical repertoire of cold wave, right up until the fall of the Wall. Another example of this relationship is articulated in the 1989 song “Berlin” by Little Nemo. Founded in the picturesque Chevreuse Valley outside of metropolitan Paris in 1983, the band’s music spans both the cold wave and new wave genres.45 The composition is the B side of their successful single “New Flood,” which was recognized by the UK music journal New Musical Express as a “Single of the Week.”46 The music was composed by front man and multi-instrumentalist Vincent Le Gallo. It is an electronic waltz in A-minor with prominent piano and accordion parts. The song is reminiscent of the typical soundtrack for a “sad clown,” a major theme of post-Romantic French artists and writers and one popularized by the mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau’s portrayal of Pierrot in the early 1800s.47 Interestingly enough, the cover of the single has a photograph of a clown in a striped costume beating on a drum, which is a wonderful link to the melancholy atmosphere of the traveling circus in Wings of Desire. Although Le Gallo normally sings in English, the lyrics were written in French and some German by Stéphane Marchi, a close friend of the band. The text again features a contemplative lyrical I, who explores the “decadence” and “moribund bacchanalia” of East Berlin. It is the enchanting mood of light rain showers that allows him to “dream in its drizzle.” The protagonist appears to be slowly walking—like a flâneur, the famed urban connoisseur of French nineteenth-century literature—on the other side of the Wall. He specifically mentions the Mauerstrasse (located near Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Allied crossing point between the divided city) and an unnamed street in Prenzlauer Berg, the key countercultural borough in the Soviet sector. In this walk, he encounters the “vague sounding smells” of taffeta, a lustrous fabric that is often used for high-end dresses. This poetic allegory precedes the appearance of an “exhumed whore,” who is “pale and dark.”48 These images can be understood as metaphors for a milieu of unbounded revelry that leads to decaying erotic love, but also heightened consciousness, since he directly asks the city: “Do you know what I know?” In this way, Berlin appears to not only be the personification of a seductress much like Lola, but also—by suggesting through what is not said—something akin to the split personality of the sad clown: expressing outward gaiety (West

158

BEYOND NO FUTURE

Berlin), while possessing inward gloom (East Berlin). Unlike “Demain Berlin,” however, there does not appear to be an explicit redemptive moment other than the self-knowledge of loss. By explicitly engaging the already established myth of Berlin,49 Guerre Froide and Little Nemo capture that erotically charged atmosphere of melancholy—from Weimar-era cabaret to the dark romanticism of German post-punk/new wave—that has perpetually haunted the city in the twentieth century. This atmosphere has an important precedent in Bowie’s famous song, “‘Heroes’,” which tells the story of the illicit rendezvous of two lovers from opposite sides of the Wall. Even amidst the threat posed by the armed guards in the watchtowers, their unconditional love is allowed to thrive within the liminal space of one single moment within one single day. Because of the Wall’s separation, however, it is ultimately doomed to fail.50 In light of this rhetorical framework, “Demain Berlin” contains a powerful utopian dimension. By reclaiming the unfulfilled energies of the city’s avantgarde traditions through a process of remembrance and redemption (i.e., working-through the core antagonisms of the city’s historical traumas), a radical space for a more humane and just world is possible. But it is a process always laden with danger, for as Royer explains in choosing the song’s title, “tomorrow is always better … or worse!”51 Nevertheless, as the work of Benjamin again reminds us, such moments of salvation appear— only truly—in those moments when danger is the most extreme.52 The embrace of two kindred spirits in death, even symbolically, preserves this experience of reconciliation forever. Indeed, for the lyrical I and his love object in “Demain Berlin,” this moment is “to the end,” where both “will laugh ’cause death ain’t a sin.”53

Affect as revolution The reciprocal effectivity between sorrowful sounds and melancholic remembrance, which is exhibited by these cold wave songs, is part of a model of musical aesthetics that has considerable appeal to both musicians and listeners. Joe Daniels, founder of Angular Recording Corporation, has highlighted how cold wave creates (notwithstanding his use of some mystifying language) an “impossible romance” that is activated by a “tape with three songs on it all in French, and a single black and white photograph.”54 This romance is directly linked to a psychoanalytic function of melancholy and nostalgia that can reorient human subjectivity toward a reserve of cultural-revolutionary promise that has yet to be realized. Since the scene’s resurgence some twenty years after Berlin’s reunification, fans have benefitted from the critical commentary of American conceptual artist Pieter Schoolwerth,55 the chief promoter of and commentator on cold wave.

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

159

An astute reader of European intellectual history and art, Schoolwerth has discussed how cold wave is, in fact, a politicized aesthetic practice grounded in an “aggressive, life-affirming spirit of resistance.” It is not only a “longing for true human connection conveyed through emotionally somber sounds,” but also—following the post-punk project mentioned earlier—a clear “refus[al] to give up on the world, as brutally abstract as it all may be.”56 Although Schoolwerth frames his observation in the context of society’s atomization (where individuals are socially conditioned to be lonely and competitive), this analysis also reflects the pessimistic cultural milieu surrounding French youth of the 1980s. In order to engender new transformative spaces for cultural creativity, critique, and resistance, cold wavers undertook not only a melancholic search for possibilities of freedom in a world-historical metropolis marked by cultural and political struggles, but also a nostalgic longing for its previous moments of revolutionary defiance (whether real or imaginary). Unlike Joy Division’s classic 1980 song “Love Will Tear Us Apart,”57 these moments argued that love, even in death, conquers all things. In this new search for liberated subjectivity, melancholy is not necessarily a debilitating emotional state nor is nostalgia just a wistful dream for a happier past. The definition of the former condition, as advanced by Sigmund Freud in his 1917 paper, “Mourning and Melancholia,” remains firmly rooted in the popular consciousness.58 It argues that the psychic pain inflicted upon the subject by the loss of a love object causes a massive collapse of self-esteem and significant withdrawal from the world. Nevertheless, as thinkers since the Renaissance have argued, melancholy also involves the distinct “pleasure of reflection and contemplation of things we love and long for, so that the hope of having them adds a touch of sweetness that makes [life] bearable.”59 This sweetness—or, perhaps, bitter sweetness—is intimately connected with nostalgia. Just as melancholy acknowledges both the negativity and positivity that is associated with love and the longing for a past memory, so too does nostalgia acknowledge the affirmative qualities of loss through the constructive rebuilding of its fragments and ruins. For Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the eighteenth-century superstar of German literature, nostalgia was all about “reviv[ing] an innocent past with sweet melancholy.”60 However, the past is never innocent; it is always a battlefield of competing cultural values. As recent psychological research has shown, nostalgia effectively mobilizes its sentimentality to make loss much less frightening and instill a stronger sense of inspiration, optimism, and rootedness of place in people. In the words of Greek psychologist Constantine Sedikides, nostalgia “connect[s] the past with the present, pointing optimistically to the future.”61 This very connection is the key foundation of cold wave’s larger philosophical program: using musical strategies to project hope and create spaces of critical reflection, discussion, and debate that counteract institutionalized practices of social manipulation and indoctrination.

160

BEYOND NO FUTURE

If French cold wave and post-punk attempted to resurrect the criticalnegative power of Berlin’s avant-garde substratum in the face of a neoliberal backlash, it is not surprising that the genre’s resurgence occurred during the tragic presidency of George W. Bush. It was an era that included a number of Machiavellian conspiracies, from reactionary attacks on civil liberties to disastrous military adventurism. Perhaps, in their search for the dormant forces of democracy, freedom, and justice, these new millennial fans of cold wave wished to redeem the hidden legacies of the post-punk movement. Whether scavenging for obscure records in old brick-and-mortar stores, curating its musical sounds in online collections, or investigating its aesthetic origins on underground blogs, these fans also became “so young but so cold”62 in order to actualize a new horizon of progressive wants, hopes, and aspirations.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend: Ein Doku-Roman über den deutschen Punk und New Wave (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001). An expanded version of this book was published in 2012. See also the editors’ introduction for a discussion of the scholarly engagement with cultures of German punk in the new millennium. “About,” Berlin Music Week (n.d.), available online at http://www.berlinmusic-week.de/en/about/ (accessed August 1, 2015). This quote is regularly cited online by promoters of Berlin’s music culture; unfortunately, I have been unable to find its original source, even in Thomas Jerome Seabrook, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (London: Jawbone, 2008). See also David Bowie, Low, RCA Victor, 1977, LP; “Heroes,” RCA Victor, 1977, LP; and Lodger, RCA Victor, 1979, LP. Geniale Dilletanten (with its notorious spelling error, the double L) sought to implode aesthetic hierarchies and rescue the critical energies hidden within German canonical culture. Bands such as Die Tödliche Doris, Din-A-Testbild, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Malaria!, that were successful in their own right, were featured members of this collective. For more background information, see Geniale Dilletanten, ed. Wolfgang Müller (Berlin: Merve, 1982). Peter Schneider, Berlin Now. The City after the Wall, trans. Sophie Schlondorff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 8. Although my chapter focuses on the artistic milieu of West Germany and the Allied-occupied sectors of western Berlin, I do not wish to deny the richness of the countercultural scenes in East Germany and the Soviet-occupied sector of eastern Berlin during the Cold War. But given the East German communist regime’s restrictions and censorship on cultural exchange, the music of West Berlin was more easily accessible to these French post-punks. If there was a transfer of musical ideas, it moved largely from West to East by way of more open, yet still clandestine networks of radio, television, and record/tape circulation.

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

7

8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

161

Jean-François Sanz, “BB012—Des Jeunes Gens Modernes 1978–1983,” Born Bad Records (April 3, 2008), available online at http://www.bornbadrecords. net/releases/des-jeunes-gens-modernes-1978–1983 (accessed August 1, 2015). Sanz’s remarks are consistent with French cultural politics of the 1980s. Intellectual historian Jean-Philippe Mathy has identified a climate of cultural pessimism that took hold around 1978 and held the view that the great republican values of France had been eclipsed by the triumphant march of neoliberalism. Jean-Philippe Mathy, Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). At the same time, however, the French socialist victory of 1981 provided an opening for, if only rhetorically, a new “liberation of feeling” and the “seething and effervescence of imaginations.” President François Mitterand quoted in David Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (New York: Berg, 2003), 145. Sanz, “Des Jeunes Gens Modernes.” For my reading of Benjamin’s cultural critique and how it might apply to music as a cultural-revolutionary project of freedom, see Mirko M. Hall, Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking against the Grain, 1800–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp. 53–80. I borrow this phrase from Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Picador, 2004), 385. Vivien Goldman, “Siouxsie and the Banshees,” Sounds (December 3, 1977), available online at http:www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsieand-the-banshees (accessed August 1, 2015). For the specific reference to Kraftwerk, see the footer “New Musick: The Cold Wave” on the front page of Sounds, November 26, 1977. Pieter Schoolwerth quoted in Kev Kharas, “Shiver into Existence: Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics,” The Quietus (June 29, 2010), available online at http://thequietus.com/articles/04529-cold-wave-and-minimal-electronicsfeature-pieter-wierd-joe-angular (accessed August 1, 2015). Larry Crane and Chris Hewitt, “Joy Division, Buzzcocks, & ‘Walls Rushing In & Out’: The Endless Echoes of Martin Hannett,” TapeOp (September/October 2014), available online at http://www.tapeop.com/interviews/103/martinhannett (accessed August 1, 2015). See Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, Factory Records, 1979, LP and Closer, Factory Records, 1980, LP. “This Is Coldwave,” Angular Recording Corporation (December 8, 2009), available online at http://www.arc018.com/news/entry/this-is-coldwave (accessed August 1, 2015). There is some disagreement among fans as to which instruments create the “true” cold wave sound—even the use of Casio Casiotone digital synthesizers are mentioned. In fact, many of the aforementioned synthesizers cross the often-porous boundaries between postpunk and new wave. Sam Thorne, review of “The Minimal Wave Tapes Volume One,” Frieze Magazine (April 2010), available online at http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/ minimal (accessed August 1, 2015). Yves Royer and Fabrice Fruchart of the band Guerre Froide also problematize the efforts to classify their music as “boring,” too “simplistic,” and even

162

17

18

19 20 21

22

23

24

25

26 27

BEYOND NO FUTURE

“pejorative.” Royer prefers the term “Dadaist.” See Pall Nattsol Zarutskiy, “Interview with Guerre Froide,” Grave Jibes Fanzine (2010), available online at http://gravejibes.ru/archives/2010-2/7-2/interview-with-guerre-froide (accessed August 1, 2015). Alexis Petridis, “Music Weekly: Cold Wave Special,” The Guardian (March 26, 2010), available online at http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/ audio/2010/mar/24/music-weekly-cold-wave (accessed August 1, 2015). The resurgence of cold wave can be traced to a number of carefully annotated music blogs, most notably New York-based musician Frank Deserto’s blog Systems of Romance (2007–present), which feature MP3 files of obscure songs and albums. See Systems of Romance, available online at http://www. systemsofromance.com/blog (accessed August 1, 2015). Likewise, two important compilation albums from 2010 brought a new awareness of cold wave into homes and clubs: Cold Waves + Minimal Electronics Volume One, Angular Recording Corporation, 2010, CD and The Minimal Wave Tapes Volume One, Stone Throw Records, 2010, CD. Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 1. Ibid., 391, 399. Sanz, “Des Jeunes Gens Modernes.” For a narrative overview of the French independent music scene, see Mario Glénadel, Christophe Lorentz, and Stéphane Burlot, Carnets noirs: musiques, attitudes, cultures gothiques, électroniques & industrielles. Acte 2: La scène francophone (Paris: E-dite, 2006). For music and video anthologies, see Des jeunes gens mödernes: post punk, cold wave et culture novö en France 1978–1983, Naïve Records, 2008, 2xCD and RVB~Transfert: Images de la scène indépendante française 1979–1991, directed by Alexandre Louis, Cyril Adam, and Pierre Belouin (Hardricourt: Infrastition, 2006), DVD. Dan Nixon, “The Dummy Guide to Cold Wave,” Dummy Magazine (January 10, 2010), available online at http://www.dummymag.com/Features/thedummy-guide-to-cold-wave (accessed August 1, 2015). For two recent scholarly articles on Berlin as a subcultural (musical) mecca, see Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy. Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Wynchester: Zero Books, 2014), 72–131 and John C. Schofield, “Characterizing the Cold War: Music and Memories of Berlin (1960–1989),” in Sounds and the City: Popular Music, Place, and Globalization, eds. Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen, and Stephen Wagg (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 273–84. Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks. Here’s the Sex Pistols, Virgin Records, 1977, LP. See also Lars J. Kristiansen, Joseph R. Blaney, Philip J. Chidester, and Brent K. Simonds, Screaming for Change: Articulating a Unifying Philosophy of Punk Rock (Landham, MA: Lexington Books, 2010), 68–71. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1977), 20. Hall, Musical Revolutions in German Culture, 111–14. Ausweis, “Berlin,” on Murnaü, L’Invitation Au Suicide, 1984, LP; Martin Dupont, “Berlin Wall,” on Hot Paradox, Facteurs d’Ambiance, 1987, LP; Gestalt, “Ditja Berlina,” on Le sommeil du singe, Just’In Distribution, 1987,

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

28 29

30

31

32

33

34

35 36

163

LP; Guerre Froide, “Demain Berlin,” on (Untitled), Stechak, 1981, EP; L’An III, “Berlin,” on (Untitled), self-released, 1987, CS; and Little Nemo, “Berlin,” on New Flood/Berlin, Lively Art, 1989, 7". Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders (1987; Irvington, NY: Criterion, 2009), DVD. Bartelby (pseud.), “Yves Royer, leader de guerre froide reprend les armes avec un superbe album,” Bartelby (June 29, 2014), available online at https:// barlteby.wordpress.com/2014/06/29/yves-royer-leader-de-guerre-froidereprend-les-armes-avec-un-superbe-album (accessed August 1, 2015). In his influential study of modernity, the Arcades Project (1927–1940), Benjamin argued that the Paris of the Second Empire, the era of nineteenthcentury French poet Charles Baudelaire, was the epitome of the modern metropolis. For him, the city was not only a site of great capitalist innovation and ingenuity, but also one of profound human alienation. This latter condition could still be neutralized through the resurrection of the culturalrevolutionary potential that was buried within its discarded objects and figures. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Quoted in Muhamed Amjahid, “US-Bürgerrechtlerin in Berlin Angela Davis will Flüchtlingsbewegung neuen Schub geben,” Tagespiegel (May 15, 2015), available online at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/us-buergerrechtlerin-inberlin-angela-davis-will-fluechtlingsbewegung-neuen-schub-geben/11779582. html (accessed August 1, 2015). The band chose this name because it was—as musicians born during the Cold War—a “common historical reference to all of [them] … and the wall was still there.” Royer in Zarutskiy, “Interview with Guerre Froide.” Because of a change in the band’s lineup, Fruchart did not participate in the recording of “Demain Berlin” on this EP, which is itself a retitled remix of the track “Berlin 81” from Guerre Froide, Cicatrice, Cryogénisation Report, 1980, CS. This particular version is cited the most by fans and critics. The song’s alternate titles have included “Eva (Berlin 81)” and “Demain Berlin (Zum Ende).” Its thematic conception dates back to 1978, when Royer was part of the punk trio Genocide. For a history of this song, see Yves R[oyer], “BB073 Guerre Froide S/T,” Born Bad Records (April 18, 2015), available online at http://www.bornbadrecords.net/releases/bb072-guerre-froide-st (accessed August 1, 2015) and Santucci (pseud.), “Guerre Froide: 33 ans après, certains l’aiment encore chaud,” Gonzaï Magazine (May 2015), available online at http://gonzai.com/guerre-froide-33-ans-apres-certains-laiment-encore-chaud (accessed August 1, 2015). This phrase is taken from music theorist Johann Mattheson’s treatise The Newly Opened Orchestra (1713). Rita Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 262. Royer quoted in Santucci, “Guerre Froide.” In addition to Berlin’s role as the capital of Germany, Berchtesgaden was Hitler’s summer retreat in the Bavarian Alps and Nuremberg was the location of the large Nazi Party rallies made famous by Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935

164

37 38

39

40 41 42 43

44

45

46 47 48 49

BEYOND NO FUTURE

propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Nuremberg also hosted the military tribunals held by the Allied Powers right after the Second World War. Guerre Froide, “Demain Berlin.” Hollaender wrote “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt” and— together with German screenwriter Robert Liebmann—“Ich bin die fesche Lola” in 1930. Escaping the Nazi regime in 1933, Hollaender, who would eventually receive four Academy Award nominations, wrote songs and musical scores in Hollywood and later again in Germany. Liebmann died in Auschwitz in 1942. The English-language title of the former song has been rather loosely translated as “Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It).” The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg (1930; New York: Kino on Video, 2001), DVD. Based on the book Professor Unrat (1905) by Heinrich Mann, the film shows the downfall of a respectable professor, who falls in love with a cabaret star. For a cultural history of the film, see Barbara Kosta, Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture (New York: Berghahn, 2009). Allan Bloom, “How Nietzsche Conquered America,” The Wilson Quarterly (Summer 1987): 89. Guerre Froide, “Demain Berlin.” Ibid. See the cassette’s cover at “Cicatrice (album),” Nordwaves (January 4, 2012), available online at http://nordwaves.fr/index.php?title=Cicatrice_(album) (accessed August 1, 2015). Over the past two decades, the study of ruins and derelict spaces has emerged as a major research interest for humanities scholars. See, for example, Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) and Michel Makarius, Ruins, trans. David Radzinowicz (Paris: Flammarion, 2004). See also Dennis Borghardt’s discussion of punk lyrics and city ruins in this volume. The band was named after the American comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” (1905–1926) by Winsor McCay, which features a child’s fantastic dreams that were interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. Known for its “synthesis of new wave melancholy and melodies,” the band was active from 1983 to 1992 before reuniting in 2008. It was a member of the so-called Touching Pop Movement that included bands like Asylum Party, Babel 17, and Mary Goes Round. For an introduction to the band, see The Joker, “Private Life. L’histoire du groupe,” Torquoise Fields (Site consacré à Little Nemo) (2005), available online at http://turquoisefields.free.fr/histoire/ histoirefr.htm (accessed August 1, 2015). Little Nemo, “The Story,” Little Nemo (n.d.), available online at http://www. littlenemo.org/home/story/ (accessed August 1, 2015). Louisa E. Jones, Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots: Literature and the Popular Comic Arts (Louisville, KY: French Forum, 1984). Little Nemo, “Berlin.” Despite my reading of the post-punk movement and the “Berlin-as-world-city fantasy” as political discourse, Royer has stated that he and his fellow band members were “not politically engaged … no card, no party,” even though they came from “very left” families. Rather, they had, as many post-punks of the

FRENCH POST-PUNK FANTASIES OF BERLIN

50 51 52 53 54

55

56

57 58 59

60 61

62

165

era, a “spiritual commitment” to leftist ideals—“[m]aybe a little Trotskyist” (i.e., the advocacy of political revolution through humane socialism). Royer quoted in Santucci, “Guerre Froide.” See Bowie, Low. R[oyer], “BB073 Guerre Froide.” Hall, Musical Revolutions in German Culture, 1. Guerre Froide, “Demain Berlin.” Quoted in William Rauscher, review of “Various Artists—The Minimal Wave Tapes Vol. 1/Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol. 1,” Resident Advisor (February 12, 2010), available online at http://www.residentadvisor.net/reviewview.aspx?id=7131 (accessed August 1, 2015). Schoolwerth founded the minimal electronica record label Wierd Records in New York and also hosted the now-defunct “Wierd” series of weekly DJ nights at the Southside Lounge (Brooklyn) and Home Sweet Home (Manhattan) from 2003 to 2013. Quoted in Michael Giebel, “There Is Freedom in the Minimum,” skug: Journal für Musik (March 27, 2010), available online at http://www.skug.at/ article4852.htm (accessed August 1, 2015). Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Factory, 1980, 7". Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 584–9. Emily Brady and Arto Haapala, “Melancholy as an Aesthetic Emotion,” Contemporary Aesthetics (2003), available online at http://www. contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=214 (accessed August 1, 2015). Quoted in Aaron Santesso, A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 13. Quoted in Tim Adams, “Look Back in Joy: The Power of Nostalgia,” The Guardian (November 9, 2014), available online at http://www.theguardian. com/society/2014/nov/09/look-back-in-joy-the-power-of-nostalgia (accessed August 1, 2015). KaS Product, “So Young but So Cold,” on Try Out, RCA Victor, 1982, LP.

10 German Mania: A Coda Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan

Punk has been an unmistakable part of the visual experience of Germany since the late 1970s. At the moment of its birth, it would have been unsurprising to see youth quite similar to those on the cover of this book loitering next to a newsstand selling copies of Der Spiegel’s 1978 issue, featuring the cover story “Punk: Kultur aus den Slums: brutal und häßlich” (“Punk: Culture from the Slums: Brutal and Ugly”).1 And while one can today find strikingly similar-looking punks occupying similar public spaces—what German Bahnhof lacks its punk ornaments?—the aestheticspatial duration of punk’s presence in the German city is but one marker of punk’s continued presence in contemporary Germany’s sociocultural fabric more broadly. German punk’s persistent timeliness, or perhaps its persistence in untimeliness, seems to be a central feature. This problem comes immediately into view when one looks not at German punk itself, or German punks themselves, but rather at the discourse complex that has coalesced around the cultures of German punk—a complex into which this book, of course, also intervenes. In our introduction, we discussed German punk’s musealization alongside the work of re-producing (re-pressing, re-issuing, re-printing) punk texts. Exhibitions, exhibition catalogs, reissue series, coffee table books, and even punk-themed walking tours of Berlin—all these undertakings are inherently retrospective, and aim to excavate the sights and sounds of German punk. Ensconced on pages, in exhibit vitrines, or in the historical imagination of Berlin pedestrians for perusal, punk becomes at times a phantasmagoric marker for the affirmative, resistive, and legitimizing discourses of Germanies past and present. And in the burgeoning genre of autobiographical or semiautobiographical writing

168

BEYOND NO FUTURE

about German punk, it is not only the sights and sounds of punk that are at stake, but punk affects as well: The historically and geographically contingent feelings of hopelessness, rage, boredom, nervousness one could respond to, or alleviate, by becoming a punk. All these efforts and affects, which we might collect under the heading of the memorial cultures of German punk, evince a deep belief in the significance of materiality, of the artifact, for punk history. Just as serious is their commitment to the idea that punk was not just made but lived, experienced, and inhabited in real time. That understanding of punk was not created after the fact, but rather is audible in punk’s own time, in all of punk’s own times, as a problem needing to be worked through. Witness, for example, punk’s vitriolic retort two years after the Spiegel broadcast its misunderstanding of punk to the world. The band Mania D’s dystopic 1980 song “Herzschlag” (“Heartbeat”), a mix of noise and distortion, English and French lyrics, jazz and post-punk, mocks the instrumentalization of punk as a scapegoat for social ills or for codified social insurrection by punks themselves. In English rather than the typical German, singer Bettina Köster screams “You’re punk rock? What the fuck is that? I don’t know.”2 In addition to probing the capaciousness of the definition of punk at both a formal and thematic level, the band’s name itself—Mania: Germany—provided a diagnosis of contemporaneous German culture, with its euphoria and delusions, that would prove strikingly prescient at the close of the decade. Testament to punk’s unwillingness to cede itself to its own blatant failure to halt the processes it sought and seeks to undermine, Mania D and “Herzschlag” are emblematic of the subculture’s unique temporality. Its originary mantra “no future” moved beyond the dominant rhetoric of progress on both sides of the Berlin Wall upon which punks sat in the fall of 1989, and can today be recounted and communicated through the memorial practices that keep the punk archive current. These practices comprise the curation and annotation of reissued records, the collection of new essays on regional scenes, the re-publication of old zines’ print runs, the compilation of new oral histories, and so forth. In this sense, the emerging historiography of German punk undertakes, like many similar projects underway in this third decade of the Berlin Republic, to marshal sources and source-criticism alongside one another in order to make the past present, to convey to contemporary audiences “how it really was”—wie es eigentlich gewesen. (These are the words of historian Leopold von Ranke, perhaps the least punk German who ever lived.) In order to make the past present, one must of course also make it past. This is not hard to do in situ, in light of the sweeping (and accelerating) architectural and socioeconomic changes that have taken place, especially in the last twenty-seven years, and transformed and gentrified the German cityscapes that punks have inhabited since 1976.3 Procedures of periodization, canonization, and distancing have established temporal

GERMAN MANIA: A CODA

169

distance more broadly in the memorial cultures of German punk, often to the effects of separating the reader, viewer, listener, or museum-goer from the punk practice at hand. Those procedures mistakenly frame Slime’s “Deutschland muss sterben” as a message in a bottle from a bygone era of crisis whose contradictions were solved on the night of November 9, 1989, when big-H history ended, or present Einstürzende Neubauten’s Berlin as a time-space that the band itself had no idea was in the process of vanishing. To the contrary, punks themselves predicted their own historicity before the fact, and, in the specific case of Neubauten, offered dour commentary in kind. Witness the 2009 film Elektrokohle (von wegen), a documentation of that band’s December 21, 1989 concert in the grand assembly hall of VEB Elektrokohle, in an East Berlin quickly becoming the former East Berlin. Footage of the concert itself is interlaced with footage of concert attendees retracing their steps toward the venue twenty years after the fact, reflecting on the city’s physical and cultural transformations. In the 1989 footage, as Neubauten’s crew crosses the chaotic, trash-strewn checkpoints allowing passage between sectors of the formerly divided city, guitarist Alexander Hacke ironically sings, “Ich wünsch’ mir ’ne neue Blockade/Berlin soll wieder eine Insel sein”: I wish there were a new blockade, Berlin should become an island again. The contributions on the cultures of German punk collected in this book are entirely dependent upon the careful historical scholarship, upon the increasing numbers of autobiographies by former punks, and upon the exacting curatorial work of label-runners who dedicate time, and resources, to making punk records newly available. But it has not been our ambition to circumscribe the emerging scholarly field of German punk studies—whether through the selection of topics discussed in this book’s individual chapters, or through our framing remarks. The places German punk studies can go are legion, from individuals such as Jana Schlosser, Mita Schamal, and Conny Schleime, who anchored some of the most important punk bands in the GDR’s history, to the “trans-Teutonic feedback loop”4 of interpersonal and mediated interactions between punks in the two Germanies,5 to extremely dubious punk interventions (cf. OHL’s “Türkenlied”) and right-wing agitation distributed, in part, by punk labels like Herbert Egoldt’s Rock-O-Rama.6 Invariably retrospective due to a focus on places, and times, that are not the here and now, the contributions in this book indeed reproduce the past tense of historical (and scholarly) discourse in dealing with the cultures of German punk, but we hope that our conviction that punk’s period is not past is clear: our conviction that the dust has not entirely settled, and that the punk practices of 1977 have only proliferated, and endured, since Germans in both Republics first made punk their own. Punk was not; it is. And while debates about authenticity—a word that rears its head in Ranke’s understanding of historical discourse’s task, in the form of its derivate

170

BEYOND NO FUTURE

eigentlich—have always preoccupied punks, and continue to do so, it has not been this book’s ambition to draw historical caesura, or wall off punk practices from the present in order to catalog, explain, or contextualize them. Moving beyond punk’s past to read the forms of German mania that themselves have moved beyond the future punk never wanted, this book has highlighted the astounding duration of the aesthetics and politics of a subculture whose dedication to the fleeting, to detritus, to the dustbin of its present, continues in spite of (and as agitator to) the euphoria and delusions of German memory culture fostered by the broad spectrum of cultural, political, and aesthetic reconstructions in the German public sphere.

Notes 1 We frame the Spiegel’s title as a misunderstanding because punk was anything but “culture from the slums.” In Germany as in the United Kingdom, and even in the United States, it was overwhelmingly middle-class kids donning clothes who sought to refute their privilege. The class analysis is, of course, quite a bit more complex for the East German case. For a copy of the Spiegel cover, see Der Spiegel (January 23, 1978), available online at http://www.spiegel.de/ spiegel/print/d-21113180.html (accessed August 15, 2015). 2 See Mania D, Track 4, Monogam 002, 1980, 7". 3 One really needs the walking tour, these days, to attach significance to the Prenzlauer Berg’s former squats, or to Kreuzberg’s; even if Tacheles’s edifice still stands, you can’t go inside. 4 We coin this phrase in reference to the “trans-Atlantic feedback loop” theorized in song by the post-punk band Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle and in text by its singer (and author) Thomas Meinecke. See for example, Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle’s albums Stürmer, ZickZack, 1982, LP or The Sound of Music, Sub-Up, 1993, LP. See Thomas Meinecke, Mode & Verzweiflung (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1998) or Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). 5 After all, records, radio broadcasts, zines, and even punks themselves crossed the German-German border; the regional (and national) German punk aesthetics that developed over the course of the 1980s thus did so not in mutual isolation, but in some sense in response to one another. 6 Timothy S. Brown, “Subcultures, Pop Music, and Politics: Skinheads and ‘Nazi Rock’ in England and Germany,” Journal of Social History 38.1 (2004): 157–78.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Bargeld, Blixa. Stimme frißt Feuer (Berlin: Merve, 1988). Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music, and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Büsser, Martin. If the Kids Are United: von Punk zu Hardcore und Zurück (Mainz: Ventil, 2000). Davies, Jude. “The Future of ‘No Future’: Punk Rock and Postmodern Theory,” Journal of Popular Culture 29.4 (1996): 3–25. Dennis, Mike and Norman Laporte, eds. State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2011). Diederichsen, Diedrich. Sexbeat: 1972 bis heute (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1983). El Kholti, Heidi, ed. The German Issue (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e) and Sternberg Press, 1982). Fenemore, Mark. Sex, Thugs and Rock “n” Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold War East Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2007). Frith, Simon and Andrew Goodwin, eds. On Record (New York: Pantheon, 1990). Galenza, Ronald and Alexander Pehlemann, eds. Spannung. Leistung. Widerstand. Magnetbanduntergrund DDR 1979–1990 (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2006). Galenza, Ronald and Heinz Havemeister. Wir wollen immer artig sein: Punk, New Wave, HipHop, und Independent-Szene in der DDR 1980–1990 (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag, 2013). Gelder, Ken and Sarah Thornton, eds. The Subcultures Reader (London: Routledge, 1997). Glaser, Peter, ed. Rawums: Texte zum Thema (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). Groos, Ulrike, Peter Gorschlüter and Jürgen Teipel, eds. Zurück zum Beton: Die Anfänge von Punk und New Wave in Deutschland 1977–’82: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 7. Juli–15. September 2002 (Köln: König, 2002). Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). Groys, Boris. The Total Artwork of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (London: Verso, 2011). Hall, Mirko M. Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking against the Grain, 1800–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

172

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hell, Julia and Andreas Schoenle, eds. Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Hayton, Jeff. Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock, Authenticity, and Alternative Culture in East and West Germany (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013). Hayton, Jeff. “Härte gegen Punk: Popular Music, Western Media, and State Response in the German Democratic Republic,” German History 31.4 (December 2013): 523–49. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methune, 1979). Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland, 1977). Henry, Tricia. Break All Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of a Style (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989). Heylin, Clinton. From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a PostPunk World (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). Howes, Seth. “‘Killersatellit’ und Randerscheinung: Punk and the Prenzlauer Berg,” German Studies Review 36.3 (October 2013): 579–601. Howes, Seth. Punk Avant-Gardes: Disengagement and the End of East Germany (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2012). Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Kristiansen, Lars J., Joseph R. Blaney, Philip J. Chidester, and Brent K. Simonds. Screaming for Change: Articulating a Unifying Philosophy of Punk Rock (Landham, MA: Lexington Books, 2010). Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1985). Lau, Thomas. Die heiligen Narren. Punk 1976–1986 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992). Lindner, Bernd and Mark M. Westhusen. Von Müllstation zu Größenwahn: Punk in der halleschen Provinz (Halle: Hasen-Edition, 2007). Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Meinert, Philipp and Martin Seeliger, eds. Punk in Deutschland: Sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). Müller, Wolfgang, ed. Geniale Dilletanten (Berlin: Merve, 1996). Nehring, Neil. Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Rancière, Jacques. Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011). Remath, C. and R. Schneider. Haare auf Krawall: Jugendsubkultur in Leipzig 1980 bis 1991 (Leipzig: Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1999). Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). Rombes, Nicholas. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (London: Continuum, 2009). Sabin, Roger, ed. Punk Rock: So What? (London: Routledge, 1999). Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Griffen, 2002). Schneider, Frank Apunkt. Als die Welt noch unterging: von Punk zu NDW (Mainz: Ventil, 2006).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

173

Shahan, Cyrus M. Punk Rock and German Crisis: Adaptation and Resistance after 1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Shahan, Cyrus M. “The Sounds of Terror: Punk, Post-Punk and the RAF after 1977,” Popular Music and Society 34.3 (July, 2011): 369–86. Sikarskie, Matthew. Bored with Boredom: Engaging Modernity in Wilhelmine Wandervogel and West German Punk Subcultures (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 2014). Skai, Hollow. Alles nur geträumt: Fluch und Segen der Neuen Deutschen Welle (Innsbruck: Hannibal/Koch, 2009). Teipel, Jürgel. Verschwende deine Jugend: Ein Doku-Roman über den deutschen Punk und New Wave (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Thompson, Stacy. Punk Productions: Unfinished Business (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995). Wicke, Peter. Rockmusik: Zur Ästhetik und Soziologie eines Massenmediums (Leipzig: Reclam, 1987). Willmann, Frank, ed. Leck mich am Leben: Punk im Osten (Berlin: Neues Leben, 2011). Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). von Dirke, Sabine. “All Power to the Imagination!”: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

INDEX

Note: locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes Absolute Körperkontrolle (song) 11, 134, 139–44 Abstürzende Brieftauben (band) 57 Aggressive Rockproduktionen (label) 79 agitprop 153 Alltagsgeschichte 111–13, 118, 120–1, 125 Alt-Wandervogel (Old Wandervogel) 44 American punks 76, 115 Amiga (label) 85 Anti-Nazi League 93, 104 anti-Semitism 109, 121–4 Baader-Meinhof Group 134, 136, 144 Ballast der Republik (album) 56 Bargeld, Blixa (Einstürzende Neubauten) 66 Bauarbeiter Stürb (song) 27 Beethoven, Ludwig van 80, 138, 145 Belsen Was a Gas (song) 60, 95, 100 Benjamin, Walter 4, 137, 150–8 Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 94–5 Berlin. See also Demain Berlin (song) and Cold wave aesthetics 150–2, 154–5, 157–60 avant-garde history 149–50, 153–4, 160 melancholy atmosphere 151–9 as inspiration for song lyrics 154 as site of new wave and post-punk 149–58 Berlin Wall 18–20, 94–6, 100, 105, 154, 168 Berlin Blues (Regener novel) 20 Biafra, Jello (Dead Kennedys) 65

Bildungsbürgertum 39–40 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 81–3 The Blue Angel (film) 156, 164 n.39 Böll, Heinrich 65–7 Bombing your Kleinstadt (album) 22–3 Bonn-Duell (song) 58–9 Bordsteinkantengeschichten (album) 25 boredom 35–9 bourgeoisie 27 and East German critiques of West Germany 76–7 and Wilhelmine society 41–2 Bowie, David 104, 149, 158 Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger (albums) 149 Bravo (magazine) 45, 76 British Nationality Act (1948) 102, 103 British punks 91–106 and East German commentary 73–80 and National Front (NF) party 92–3, 103–4 and Nazi signifiers 92–3, 97, 101, 104–6 and Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement 93, 104, 106 Brooke-Partridge, Bernard 92 Bushell, Garry 98 Buzzcocks (band) 35 Cabaret Voltaire (band) 151 Canalterror (band) 55, 57–8, 60 capitalism 73–8, 80–1, 83, 109, 114, 119, 150, 154 Cicatrice (cassette) 156

INDEX

City Rocker (band) 79 city space and the curb 24–5 and Critical Mass cycling 21 and punk lyrics 23–9 The Clash (band) 96, 104 Class Enemy (play) 74 class struggle 73–80, 84 Cold War 1, 3–4, 9, 12, 18–19, 21, 31, 42, 77, 83, 93, 95, 100, 149–50, 153, 155 consumption 1, 36, 38–9, 49, 76, 80, 103 cosmopolitanism 11, 154, 156 Crass (band) 4, 55, 65, 79 Dadaism 131, 153 DAF (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft) band and antihumanist intentions 135, 137, 144 and DAF-Machine 129–31, 133, 138, 142, 144–5 and fairy tales 135–9 and fascist aesthetics 131–4, 136, 139–146 daily life 3, 8, 20–1, 36 Davis, Angela 155 Days Like These (song) 56–7 Dead Kennedys (band) 65 Delgado, Gabi 47, 124, 130–45 Delta Minus t (band) 47, 116 Demain Berlin (song) 154–6, 158 democratization 38, 154 denazification 9, 153 Der Panther (Rilke poem) 61 Der Plan (band) 47, 116–17 Der Räuber und der Prinz (song) 134–9, 144 Der Spiegel (news magazine) 167–8 Deutschland (song) 60 Deutschpunk 7–10 Die anderen Bands (compilation) 85 Diederichsen, Detlef 121 Diederichsen, Diedrich 133 Die Goldenen Zitronen (band) 57 Die Räuber (drama) 135 Die Sterne (band) 27, 32 n.23

175

Die tödliche Doris (band) 47, 160 n.4 Die Toten Hosen (band) 56–7 Dietrich, Marlene 155–6 Digital ist besser (album) 24 do-it-yourself (DIY) cultural practices 35–6, 39, 47, 49, 151, 153 Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen (short story and song) 65–6 Donaldson, Ian Stuart 104 Don Quixote (book) 64–5 Dorau, Andreas 47 Dosenbier (song) 57 Dubos, Jean-Baptist 37–8 Duesenjaeger (band) 25, 27 Du machst die Stadt kaputt! (album) 27–8 Dylan, Bob 55 EA80 (band) 63–8, 135 East German punks and Amiga label 85 Stasi and police theories of 72–3, 84–5 economic miracle 1, 3, 39, 76, 136 Egoldt, Herbert 169 Eichmann, Otto Adolf 111 Einstürzende Neubauten (band) 3, 46, 169 Emergency Laws 139, 150 fall of the Berlin Wall 30–1, 154, 157, 169 fascism 9, 18 and Holocaust in West German punk 109–28 and masculinity 136–7 as viewed from England 93–100 Faust (Goethe) 65 Fehlfarben (band) 47, 119, 132 Final Solution 95, 101 First World War 40, 99, 105 Flamingo (album) 26 Flüstern und Schreien: Ein Rockreport (documentary) 79 Fred vom Jupiter (song) 47 Free German Youth 73, 84 and clubs 84–5 Freiburg (song) 24

176

INDEX

French cold wave 130–1, 149, 151–3, 155, 160 Frith, Simon 76–8 Fruchart, Fabrice 155 Fukuyama, Francis 2, 19 Futurism 131, 153 Geist 145 Geniale Dilletanten (band) 3, 8, 46, 150 German cultural canon 130, 132, 144 German literature 63, 65, 130, 135–6, 138, 159 German punks. See also specific entries and Anglophone scholarship on 7, 10 and memory culture 167–70 and resonances and interventions 10–12 German Romanticism 57, 150, 153, 158 Glaser, Peter 132 God Save the Queen (song) 94, 117 Goldhagen, Daniel J. 123 Gold und Liebe (album) 139–41 Goodman, Nelson 18 Goodstein, Elizabeth 37 Görl, Robert 124, 129–30, 135, 137–40. See also DAF(DeutschAmerikanische Freundschaft) band Grafenwöhr (song) 29 The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (documentary) 94 Grimm’s fairy tales. 135–6, 138–9, 145. See also DAF (DeutschAmerikanische Freundschaft) band Grossberg, Lawrence 8 Guerre Froide 149, 155, 158 Haas, Chrislo 130 Habermas, Jürgen 38, 131, 139 Hacke, Alexander 169 Hannett, Martin 151 Hayles, N. Katherine 132 Hazen, Charles Downer 99 Healy, Sean Desmond 37, 50 Heartfield, John 96

Hebdige, Dick 6, 7, 50, 76, 77, 82–3, 85, 91, 101, 106 hedonism 29, 131–3 Heidegger, Martin 39 Heimkehr (song) 62 Hein, Peter 8, 35, 115, 118–20 Heine, Heinrich 57, 62–3, 154 Heinrich (song) 64 Heroes (song) 158 Herrenreiter (song) 110, 118–21, 124–5 Herrmann, Gisela 73 Herzog, Dagmar 133 Herzschlag (song) 168 heterotopia 26–7, 29–30 Heubner, Thomas 72, 75–8, 83, 85–6 Hilsberg, Alfred 43 hippies 9, 75–6, 115–16, 133–4, 145 Hitler, Adolf 95, 98, 100, 118, 124 Hobbes, Thomas 62 Höhnie Records (label) 8 Holiday in the Sun (song) 94–5, 100, 153 Hollaender, Friedrich 156 Holocaust memorialization. See also Herrenreiter (song); Party in der Gaskammer (song) and historical narratives 116, 121, 125 Holocaust (NBC series) 109–16, 120, 125 Homecoming (poem) 62 homosociality 133 Honecker, Erich 2 hooligans 1, 9 House of Dolls (novel) 96 Huber, Joachim 20–1 100 Club Punk Festival 96 Huyssen, Andreas 109–12, 114–15 Ignorant, Steve (Crass) 65 immigration 82, 92, 101–3 James, William 38 the Jerks (band) 73 Joy Division (band) 151 Closer (album) 151 Love Will Tear Us Apart (song) 159 Jubilee (film) 74 Jubilee Street (song) 5, 12 n.5

INDEX

Kaput Krauts (band) 22–3 Kelleter, Frank 113 Kettcar (band) 22, 29 Kircher, Martin 55 Knochenfabrik (band) 24, 29 Kohl, Helmut 149 Köster, Bettina 168 Kot (song) 62 Kotzreiz (band) 24, 27–9 Kraftwerk (band) 151 Krautrock 151 Kriminalitätsförderungsclub (KFC) (band) 57, 64, 132 Kuhlenkampff, Hans Joachim 120 Lagerfeld, Karl 5 Las Palmas O.K. (album) 27 Leaders of Men (song) 96 Le Gallo, Vincent 157 Lenin 79 Lersch, Heinrich 60 Letts, Don 98 Little Nemo (band) 149, 152, 157–8 Löding, Ole 114–16, 118–19 London Blitz 94 Love in a Void (song) 96 LP (band) 8 Lüdtke, Alf 110, 112–14, 125 Lüer, Claus 29 lyrical spatializations 18–19 lyricism 56–61 Male (band) 57 Mallorca (song) 60 Mania D (band) 168 Marchi, Stéphane 157 Marcus, Greil 108 Marinetti, F.T. 131 Marionett (zine) 43 Märthesheimer, Peter 111–12 Marxism 79, 82, 84, 86, 114, 154 Mayer, Ruth 113 McClaren, Malcolm 5, 81 Metal Postcard (song) 96 Meyen, Wolfgang 44 middle class 9, 39–40, 81, 97, 116, 134 Middle Class Fantasies (band) 110, 121–5

177

Ministry for Culture 79, 84 Ministry for State Security (MfS) 72 Mittagspause (band) 57, 109–10, 115, 118–21, 124–5 modernity 36–8, 42, 50, 154, 157 Moor, Karl 135, 142 Mourning and Melancholia (Freud) 159 Muff Potter (band) 24–5, 29 Von Wegen (album) 33 n.32 Müller, Wolfgang 8 Nächster Halt gefliester Boden (album) 25 National Socialism 4, 93, 100, 114, 132, 134, 136, 139, 141, 145 Nazi signifiers 92–3, 97, 104 Nehring, Neil 138–9 neo-Nazism 85, 104 The Nest (folk songs) 40 Neue Deutsche Welle. 43. See also Hilsberg, Alfred Neue Zeit (newspaper) 74 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (band) 5–6, 12 1979 Deutschland (song) 109–25 nl konkret (publication) 75 “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault’s essay) 17 On the Natural History of Destruction (Sebald’s essay) 130 Ornament und Verbrechen (band) 3 The Ostrich (zine) 35 ox fanzine (zine) 63 Paris 154–5 Parocktikum (radio show) 85 Party in der Gaskammer (song) 110, 121–5 Pascow (band) 24–5 pessimism 72, 116, 136 Petridis, Alexis 152 photography 5, 40, 156 Popular Music (journal) 79 Portes, Alejandro 38 Powell, Enoch 100, 103 Prague Spring 2 Punk Can Take It (documentary) 94 Punk is dead (song) 4, 55, 121

178

INDEX

punk lyrics 11, 23, 25, 30 and alliteration, use of 59–60 and literariness 55–6 and poetic tradition 57–61 and urban elements 24–9 Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen (album) 27 racism 77, 101–4 Ramones (band) 5, 10, 43, 116, 120 Rancière, Jacques 56 Ratinger Hof (bar) 8 Rawums (publication) 8 Reagan, Ronald 149–50, 154–5 Red Army Faction (RAF) 115, 136. See also terrorism Regener, Sven 20 Reichelt, Moritz 47, 116–17, 133 Reid, Jamie 92, 94, 96 Rhodes, Bernie 104 Rilke, Rainer Maria 61 Ritter (song) 63 Rock against Racism (RAR) 79–80, 93, 104 Rock-O-Rama (label) 169 Rose, Gillian 95 Rotten, Johnny 55, 64, 135 Rough Trade (label) 79 Royer, Yves 149, 155–6, 158 Sanz, Jean-François 150, 153 Schamal, Mita 169 Schiller, Friedrich 134–9, 145 Schleime, Conny 169 Schleim-Keim (band) 85 Schleyer, Hanns-Martin 9, 134 Schlosser, Jana 169 Schneider, Frank Apunkt 47, 115–17, 121, 123 Schoolwerth, Pieter 158–9 Schramm, Lutz 85 Second World War 19, 82, 84, 99, 105, 119, 130, 141 and air war 23–4, 94, 130 Sedikides, Constantine 159 Sex Pistols (band) 5, 60, 64, 71, 76, 81, 92, 94, 96, 100, 104, 117, 129, 135, 153

The Filth and The Fury (documentary) 94 Sex unter Wasser (song) 11, 139, 144 shattered spaces 20–3 Sinker, Mark 97 Sioux, Siouxsie 96–100 Siouxsie and the Banshees (band) 151 Skai, Hollow 8 skinhead subculture 82, 104 Skrewdriver (band) 104 Slime (band) 8, 13, 22, 43, 60–3, 169 Alle gegen Alle (album) 62 Schweineherbst (album) 22 Snagge, John 94 Sontag, Susan 123 spatial perceptions 17–18, 21, 23–4, 26, 30–1, 144, 167 Spiral Scratch (EP) 35 SPK (band) 151 SST (label) 79 Staatsfeind (song) 58 Stadt der Reichen (song) 27 Straße, Kreuzung, Hochhaus, Antenne (album) 23 student movement, late-1960s 111, 115 Stumpf, Tommi 64, 135 Subculture: The Meaning of Style 6, 82. See also Hebdige, Dick subculture theory 78–86 and capitalism 83–6 and class conflict and 11 and East Germany 72–3 Suburban Relapse (song) 96 swastika 11, 74, 92–101, 104, 117, 132 symbolism 105, 115–18, 153 synthesizers use by DAF 138 use in cold wave 151–56 S.Y.P.H. (band) 3, 5, 47, 57, 136 Tage wie diese (song) 56 2 Takte später (album) 65–6 Tanz den Mussolini (song) 124–5 Teipel, Jürgel 8, 116, 149 terrorism 2, 51, 115, 129, 133–4, 136, 139, 143 Theweleit, Klaus 134 Thiele, Leslie Paul 39

INDEX

Thompson, Stacy 6 Thornton, Sarah 106 Throbbing Gristle (band) 151 Tocotronic (band) 24, 27 Today your love, tomorrow the world (song) 116, 120 Toxoplasma (band) 55, 60–1, 68 Turbostaat (band) 24–6 24/7 (album) 27 U.K. Subs (band) 94 Ulbricht, Walter 2 Union Jack 91, 99 Unknown Pleasures (album) 151 urbanity/urbanization 10, 20–3, 30, 38–9, 50 Verlag Neues Leben 73, 75 Vergangenheitsbewältigung 110, 123, 125 Verschwende deine Jugend (book) 8, 116, 146 Vicious, Sid 5, 95 von Eichendorff, Joseph 57 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 65, 159 Vorsicht Schreie (album) 63 Walldorf, Jörg 55 Walter 11 (band) 57 Wandervögel 33–54

179

Wandervogel Illustrierte (publication) 41, 44 Warsaw (band) 96 Weimar era 93, 96, 100, 131–2, 137, 153, 156, 158 Wenders, Wim 5, 12, 154 West German communist party (KPD) 76 Westwood, Vivien 5, 93–4 Wicke, Peter 78–81 Wiesel, Elie 113 Wilhelmine era 36, 40–2, 47, 50 Wings of Desire (film) 5, 12, 154, 157 Wir warten (song) 60–1 Wir wollen keine Bullenschweine (album) 43 working class 1, 24, 30, 41, 76–7, 80–2, 91, 95–9, 101–3, 105, 129 Wünschelrute (poem) 57 xenophobia 99, 104 ZickZack (label) 79 zines 43, 48–9 ZK (band) 55, 57 zu kalt (song) 62–3 Zurück zum Beton (song) 5, 136 Zu spät (album) 57 Zuviel für Berlin (song) 25