Kirkland A. Fulk (ed.) - Sounds German: Popular Music in Postwar Germany at the Crossroads of the National and Transnational

SOUNDS GERMAN

Popular Music in Postwar Germany at the Crossroads of the National and Transnational

Edited by
KIRKLAND A. FULK

Published in 2021 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2021 Berghahn Books

Originally published as a special issue of German Politics & Society, Volume 34, issue 2 (2017)

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948461

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-740-8 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-475-9 paperback

ISBN 978-1-78920-473-5 ebook

Introduction
Into the Music Rooms

Kirkland A. Fulk

Chapter 1
Licht ausSpot an: How Schlager (ZDF 19691984) Beat Disco (ZDF 19711982)

Sunka Simon

Chapter 2
The Birth of Autotune and the Loop of (West) German Identity

Cyrus Shahan

Chapter 3
Wenn eine Band lange Zeit lebt: Puhdys, Politics, and Popularity

John Littlejohn

Chapter 4
DIY, im Eigenverlag: East German Tamizdat LPs

Seth Howes

Chapter 5
Poetry of an Alien: Black Tape, Silo Nation, and the Historiography of German Hip-Hops Alte Schule

Kai-Uwe Werbeck

Chapter 6
Death in June and the Apoliteic Specter of Neofolk in Germany

Mirko M. Hall

Chapter 7
Knitted Naked Suits and Shedding Skins: The Body Politics of Popfeminist Musical Performances in the Twenty-first Century

Maria Stehle

Chapter 8
Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: On Writing, New Wave, and the Ends of Cultural Studies

Richard Langston

I want to begin at the end, the end, that is, of the present volume. In his conclusion to the final chapter, Richard Langston remarks on Diedrich Diederichsens short music columns published in the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel between 2000 and 2004. Diederichsen, perhaps Germanys most well-known music and cultural critic, titled these columns Musikzimmer [the music room]. Here, as Diederichsen put it in his introduction to the 2005 republished collection of these sixty-two, roughly 600-word music columns, he endeavored to bring together as many disparate things as possible under the designation music. In any one of these music rooms, readers encounter curious and unexpected combinations and constellations: the (West) German (post-)punk band Fehlfarben is discussed in conjunction with British mod group Small Faces, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen; the Australian-American feminist music group and performance art ensemble Chicks on Speed is brought together with German hip-hop and reggae musician Jan Delay; and the German avant-garde trio BST (which notably includes the well-known German cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit on guitar) finds a place alongside the jazz collective Art Ensemble of Chicago as well as the pioneering Hamburg indie-rock band Blumfeld. I start this introduction to the subsequent essays on postwar German popular music at the end station of this volume, in Diederichsens music rooms, because in many ways they serve as an analogy for what this volume sets out to do, namely traffic in the intersections, entanglements, and flows between the national and transnational.

Like Diederichsens music rooms, this volume is neither an all-encompassing nor a typical accounting of German popular music, but rather points to the importance of thinking about the constellations of popular music within and across national boundaries as well as to the ways in which popular music facilitates and indeed calls for such thinking. In particular, the contributions to this volume, each in its own way, examines how popular music moves through time and space and across media and musical technologiesbe it through television programs and films, musical technologies such as the MOOG synthesizer, vinyl records and samples, or the writing of columns such as Diederichsensand how this movement alters and accentuates our understanding of (East, West, reunified, and global) German times and spaces. While most of the popular music discussed here is decidedly German (e.g., the East German rock group the Puhdys and West German Schlager) some of it is most definitely not (e.g., the British neofolk band Death in June and the electro-trash stylings of Peaches). A consideration of how popular music moved within West Germany, between East and West Germany, and continues to flow within and into a reunified Germany doesnt undercut the national particularities of German popular music but rather recognizes that the national cannot be thought apart from the transnational. The title of this volume, Sounds German, is, then, meant to be slightly ambiguous and even provocative. As a declarative statement it is almost immediately undercut by the possibility that it poses a questiona question of what it means for something to sound German and how this in turn is always inflected by the transnational movements of sounds and music from elsewhere that take part in the contestations over the definitions and redefinitions of what sounds German. It is in the struggle and interaction between the national and transnational that, I hope, this volume contributes to the continued conceptualizations and discussions of German popular music and popular music broadly speaking.

It goes without saying that a musical undercurrent has long permeated German culture and intellectual life. Theories and practices of folk, art, and classical musicvariously understood both in their mutual interrelation and as entirely distincthave for centuries served to anchor definitions of German national identity and German culture in both (deceptively) nonpolitical ways and politically nationalist ones. This is perhaps best spelled out in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potters edited volume Music and German National Identity (2002). Here, for instance, they detail the eclectic nature of the intersection of music with German identity from the eighteenth century through the immediate postwar period and show that this preoccupation is not exclusively a musical project but far more a complex of ideas and agendas originating from a wide range of players in German cultural and political life.

When we turn our attention to recent works that focus specifically on postwar German popular music, the fault lines of the national and transnational come into sharper relief. On the one hand, for instance, Uwe Schttes volume German Pop Music: A Companion (2017) stresses not only the national and regional dimensions of popular music, but also tethers itself to German-language music, West Germany, and a conception of popular music that excludes commercially successful and supposedly affirmative, rather than subversive, popular music. Moreover, the present volume applies the transnational interaction of scholarship to the national and transnational flows of popular music itself and thus adds another lens through which to refract the light of Ahlers and Jackes popular music kaleidoscope.