101ELDER JAIME MIRANDA ABURTO

“Deutschland, deutschland, alles ist vorbei”: Punk and German Identity

Kebab-dreams in the Wall City Turkish culture behind barbed wire the new-Izmir is in the GDR Atatürk the new general Nationness for the USSR A spy in every fast food joint

in the Central Committee, agents from Turkey Germany, Germany, everything is no more Kebab-dreams... Nationality...

Kebab-dreams... Nationality... We are the Turks of tomorrow We are the Turks of tomorrow...

Fehlfarben, “Militürk,” Monarchie und Alltag (EMI 1C 064-46 150, 1980)

At the heart of Hilsberg’s vision was an emphasis on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) activism that could create and then nourish the institutions necessary for alternative music to be successful in the Federal Republic—structures that we will explore in Chapter 5—and the belief that German popular music should be sung in German not English to provide a more realistic engagement with everyday life that delved deeply into the personal and subjective, a conviction that is the subject of this chapter. At the heart of the matter was punk’s ability to communicate directly and honestly—to speak to youths about the problems of daily life—that sought to distinguish the genre from other popular music forms during this period. Whereas popular music since the 1960s sought to transcend Germanness as we saw, punk attempted to consciously mobilize language as a means of rethinking what it meant to be German in a specific time and place. As Hilsberg told

an interviewer in the early 1980s, “I hold these at times very isolated individual expressive forms to be very important. They are the expressive forms of a very real lack of communication and also an attempt to communicate with others.”535

Singing in their native-tongue about

contemporary issues was conceptualized as a means of emancipating German musical production from Anglo-American dominance. Whereas older artists had sung in German for commercial purposes, punks endeavored to create a new musical and cultural entity—German rock’n’roll. To this end, Hilsberg pushed youths towards a more subjective engagement with the contemporary Federal Republic that resulted in a repoliticization of the public sphere and reassertion of the private as political. Singing about everyday concerns enabled young Germans to reframe their past, debate the nature of the present, and vocalize their visions for the future of the Federal Republic—endeavors Hilsberg hoped would reconcile youths to the past, an acceptance necessary to move forward with a national popular music genre without fear of historical demons.

The decision to sing in German in order to critique daily life in the Federal Republic is important historically for several reasons. Punk and the NDW created a musical tradition in the FRG that has subsequently become the basis for alternative music in Germany generally and a number of more specialized genres such as techno, hip-hop, and the Hamburger Schule. Prior to punk, German acts almost universally sang and made music that imitated Anglo-American artists although many translated American songs into German. But only after punk and the NDW did German become an acceptable language for rock’n’roll and the basis for new forms of popular music.536 Whereas Krautrock sought sonic inspiration that was explicitly non-national—outer

535

Günter Franzen and Boris Penth, Last Exist. Punk: Leben im toten Herz der Städte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), p.206.

536 _{Hollow Skai, Alles nur geträumt: Fluch und Segen der Neuen Deutschen Welle (Innsbruck: Hannibal, 2009),}

space—and Kraftwerk made denationalized music inspired by modern life—autobahns, trains, computers—punk was the first postwar West German popular music genre that strove to marry German lyrics with German sounds. Singing in German necessitated a search for new rhythms, instruments and sounds that could complement new lyrical styles that continually pushed the boundaries of Hilsberg’s emphasis on diversity, driving the genre into new—and contentious— musical soundscapes. German lyrics became a means of discussing contemporary conditions and in so doing, helped challenge dominant discourses and hierarchies in the Federal Republic in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Songs about Nazism, reconstruction, the 1960s and terrorism became a means by which youths could question the past, present, and future of the Federal Republic as the lyrics to “Militürk,” Mittagspause’s famous anthem that opened this chapter above suggest. Punks were instant historians who were historically aware of the moment in which they lived, and their attempts to comment and resolve the contradications and transformations they were experiencing indicates a remarkable level of self-consciousness within the subculture. The gritty depictions of daily life and playful irony by which punks talked frankly about contemporary society gave cultural legitimacy to musical production in the FRG, and at the same time meant that youths were wrestling with the debris of the past and the clogged possibilities for the future, part and parcel of Germans’ coming to terms with their own history in the 1970s and 1980s.

Scholarly literature on what Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung is now quite immense. Until the 1980s, work on how the postwar German states dealt with the Nazi past mostly revolved around what the Mitscherlichs’ famously called ‘the inability to mourn’—

namely, German efforts to avoid dealing with the nation’s role in the Holocaust in the interests of postwar reconstruction.537 Patchy de-nazification efforts by the occupying powers, and the

537 _{Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York:}

United States’ quick rehabilitation of West Germany in the interests of the emerging Cold War confrontation with the communist East only seemed to confirm the belief that silence

characterized how Germans evaded their genocidal past.538 Only recently has scholarly literature disabused the notion that Germans avoided the past, as numerous studies now show how

Germans dealt with Nazism in various ways during the 1940s and 1950s and how the past came to influence politics, foreign policy, social and gender policy, cultural endeavours, and other concerns.539 The 1960s generational revolt was part of an effort by youths to come to terms with their elders’ contribution to Nazism and silence afterwards. Beginning in the 1960s, several high- profile trials against former Nazis in West German courts—the 1963-1965 Auschwitz Trial being especially important for ’68ers—were critical in fostering dialogue about the Nazi past as

scholars have shown.540 In the 1970s and 1980s, several large media events—most notably the American television series Holocaust (1978) but also Edgar Reiz’s sprawling Heimat film

538 _{See Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, trans. by Joel}

Golb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

539

In the English language alone, this literature grows continuously. See Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945-

1955 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Boston: Brill, 2005); Dagmar

Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006); David Monod, German Music, Denazification, & the

Americans, 1945-1953 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton

University Press, 2005); Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: the German-American encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search

for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2000); Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status

in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997); Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill & London: The

University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family

in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

540

See Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2009); Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963-1965: Genocide, History

and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

(1984)—likewise prompted more engaged discussion about the Nazi past.541 Indeed, scholars have argued that in the aftermath of the Third Reich, the national narrative was moribund and some have even go so far as to suggest that ‘Germans,’ especially after the Eastern Treaties in the 1970s, increasingly began to see themselves as ‘Europeans’ rather than as national

subjects.542

The history of punk and the NDW challenge these assumptions. Already in the late 1970s we can see the emergence of a distinctly national popular music culture in punk and the NDW, a development suggesting that German youths were beginning to posite a national identity based not in ethnicity or historical traditions, but in diversity and culture that had begun already in the 1970s as a reaction to the New Left and the experience of the 1960s. Usually, the renewed engagement with Germanness in the 1980s is associated with the coming to power of Helmut Kohl and the conservative Christian Democrats in 1982-1983. But in punk we have ostensible progressives engaging in a similar project well before Ernst Nolte asked whether ‘the past, that will not pass’ should pass, suggesting that a re-emerging German national identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s is neither Left nor Right but perhaps post-1960s.543 Whereas

conservatives sought to base their patriotic politics in an over-coming of the past while liberals fearfully tried to eradicate any hint of nationalism from citizenship in the Federal Republic, Hilsberg and punks argued that the continued existence of the past in the present was a necessary

541 _{See Alon Confino, “Edgar Reitz’s Heimat and German Nationhood: Film, Memory, and Understandings of the}

Past,” in German History, Vol.16, Nr.2 (1998), pp.185-208; and Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of

History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. chapter 6.

542 _{See Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton &}

Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided

Continent (New York: Random House, 1993).

543 _{See Ernst Nolte, “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delievered,” in Forever}

in the Shadow of Hitler?: Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993).

precondition for future German national distinctiveness and that popular culture was the means to reconcile the divisive identity politics.

Punk became a vehicle by which young individuals began to envision a new German identity distinct from American hegemony and cultural dependence, influenced by the 1960s but crucially divorced from its dogmatism and utopianism, and rooted in an ironic celebration of individuality and difference. Critically, punks sought to incorporate Nazism, terrorism and other controversial subject matter into their lyrical lexicon as a means of ‘normalizing’ the past and present, an acceptance that would permit a national popular music culture in the future. While conservatives sought to draw a line in the historical sand, punks argued that German history was an essential part of daily life in the Federal Republic in the present, and through these efforts we can perhaps here begin to speak of a post-Auschwitz German identity that recognized the belatedness of birth but also the constant shadowy presence of the past. After the bitter clash between ’68ers and their parents, young Germans were able to begin re-working Germanness without the emotional baggage of their elders, and punk gives us a window into the everyday world of youths engaging in these efforts. Locating this new Germanness in diversity and experimentation, punks tried to help Germans feel comfortable—in often very uncomfortable ways—with the idea of difference. While scholars have begun to explore how the margins have begun to rework the center—especially the political, social, and cultural presence of Turkish migrants to West Germany as Gastarbeiter (guest workers)—much more work is needed.544 By introducing new lyrics, instruments, sounds and rhythms to rock’n’roll, punk paved the way towards the acceptance of difference as the basis in popular music and—by extension—German

544

Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008); Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman, eds.

culture and society more generally. And by helping youths create an indigenous popular music, Hilsberg and others helped facilitate young Germans coming to terms with their own nationality. What emerged was a more robust national identity, one that was experimental and diverse, that celebrated different, but was unmistakably German.

“Schwarz, Rot, Gold”: Language and the Critique of Everyday Life

On horseback, the Federal Vulture in his robes The master riders are in charge again

Black – the skies of our future Red – the soil of our past Gold – the teeth of our fathers

Jet pilots suddenly become weak in the hips Master rider waves his toy gun in the air Black – the skies of our future

Red – the soil of our past Gold – the teeth of our fathers

Someone will win with the nation’s favourite TV uncle Master rider, the butler brings the raincoat in

Black – the skies of our future Red – the soil of our past Gold – the teeth of our fathers

Mittagspause, “Herrenreiter,” Herrenreiter (Rondo 02, 1979)

The belief that German bands should sing in German to engage more directly and honestly with their audiences about difficult subject matter was revolutionary. Prior to punk, West German popular music genres, emphasized imitation, copying Anglo-American rock’n’roll and even going so far as to translate songs into German or even sing in English. What was different about punk was the single-mindedness of the effort to use German-language lyrics and the rhetoric of

newness that accompanied these efforts. According to Einstürzende Neubauten’s percussionist Axel Dill, German as a language of rock’n’roll was unthinkable in the 1970s: “Back then it [German] sounded crazy. The German language was accepted as completely unmusical.”545 Punks cast themselves as innovators. It was helpful that pathbreakers such as Udo Lindenberg’s use of German was so obviously a calculated commercial endeavor or that Krautrock pioneers such as Can and later Kraftwerk de-emphasized lyrics in favor of meandering sonic soundscapes. Thus, we want to be careful about the rhtetoric accompanying punk pursuits into the unknown while remaining aware that they themselves understood themselves as such.

But the detailed engagement with contemporary issues of everyday life in the Federal Republic suddenly authorized innumerable new expressionistic vistas. According to D.A.F. and later Fehlfarben bassist Michael Kemner, Peter Hein was more responsible than any for this shift: “[b]ack then, it was understood that you absolutely could not sing in German because it sounded too embarrassing. But Peter simply turned his brain off. He simply spit everything out without thinking. Without stop: ‘Did that work?’ And it worked.”546 And the shift towards a more subjective understanding of the realities of daily life had influence well beyond popular music. According to the author Peter Glaser, in his search for a more realistic prose style in the early 1980s that would come to define his later bestsellers such as Der große Hirnrisse, the first time he heard Mittagspause, “my heart started pounding.” “I had the need for clarity,” he continued, “I wanted to narrate reality. But I also wanted it to be beautiful. I did not want fall back into pessimism.”547

By emphasizing the personal as political, and the expressive as German, punk opened the door for popular music to become a vehicle for national identity. And critically,

545 _{Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende Deine Jugend: Ein Doku-Roman über den deutschen Punk und New Wave (Frankfurt}

am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), p.62.

546 _{Teipel, Verschwende, p.258.}

547 _{Teipel, Verschwende, p.262. See Richard McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West}

by detailing the everyday world of West Germany in the late 1970s—its trials and tribulations, its beauties and ugliness—punk lent its self-proclaimed authenticity and credibility to German as a language of rock’n’roll expression that has never since been questioned.

While influenced by earlier German political acts such as Ton Steine Scherben and the folk movement, what separated punk from earlier German popular music genres in the postwar period was its mindful emphasis on German-language lyrics and contents, and—as we will see in the next section—German sounds. These developments had attracted Hilsberg to the genre in the first place, and he immediately felt that they set punk off from the earlier Anglo-American incarnations because German-language lyrics enabled youths to confront the daily tribulations of their lives in a manner that was less alienating, and more personal and authentic. This subjective emphasis linked punk to the other major cultural trends in the 1970s such as the New German Cinema for example that had sought to reinsert the subjective into film as a means of returning the personal to the political.548 Critically, the language shift was intended as a means of

emancipating German cultural productions from the international hegemony of Anglo-American rock’n’roll. The transition to German-language lyrics would be difficult as it would demand a confrontation with the problematic German past but it had the potential to re-work Germanness from the ground up and thus allow youths to become much more confident with their nation and national belonging.

Hilsberg did not initiate the move towards German-language lyrics and contents, but due to his position of power at Sounds, he was able to publicize singing in German as an ideological imperative and was thus central in promoting and supporting the drive towards nationalization. Already in 1978, as we have seen, bands in the Düsseldorf region such as Mittagspause, Male, and S.Y.P.H. had begun to sing in German. At first, the decision to sing in German was banal:

Janie Jones has recounted how he and Monroe were eating lunch when they decided to write some lyrics; the television happened to be on, and so ‘Testbild’ was born.549

Male, in an

interview for the Hamburg-fanzine Rock Musik has likewise claimed that they began singing in German because “in the first place, we were mainly playing in front of Germans. And nobody understood our earlier lyrics.”550 Quickly, however, Male, Mittagspause, and others began to recognize that to write lyrics in German was a political act. As S.Y.P.H. and later Fehlfarben guitarist Thomas Schwebel has claimed, “from the very beginning it was clear that it [our music] should be in German. We didn’t think twice about it. It should be genuine and authentic.”551