German Politics and Society

Audible in the technological aesthetics of West German post punk is a 1980s strategy for escaping the political, cultural, and aesthetic contradictions of a nation trapped by the compulsion to, reconstruction of, and march toward a democratic state. Through the bands Die tödliche Doris and Pyrolator, this article locates potential sonic escapes from the canonical legacy of German experience in post punk’s technological turn. Against the confinement of the Federal Republic’s attendant freedoms, the logic of technologically driven post punk sought to avoid the hermetic fate of associative social forces past and to test the Federal Republic’s experiential limits of liberation and confinement.

Between 1983 and 1989, as the two German pop music industries continued to license one another’s properties, and Amiga continued releasing American and British records, five long-playing records were released by independent labels based in Western Europe that contained music recorded in the German Democratic Republic. They were then smuggled out of the country rather than formally licensed for release abroad. Existing outside the legal framework underlying the East German record industry, and appearing in small pressings with independent labels in West Germany and England, these five tamizdat lps represent intriguing reports from the margins on the mutual entanglement of the two Germanies’ pop music industries. Closely examining these lps’ genesis and formal aspects, this article explores how independent East German musicians framed their own artistic itineraries with respect to (or in opposition to) the commercial pop circuit, as they worked across borders to self-release their music.

During the broadcast era, dominant culture reigned supreme on West German television. Das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen (zdf) achieved ratings of close to 74 percent during the long Saturday slot in the 1970s. This mass reach, especially of its live popular music programs with built-in audience votes, is often disregarded in historical arguments that focus on the political disunion of that decade. This article takes a closer look at two very different, yet exceptionally popular music shows, Deutsche Hitparade (1969–1984) and Disco (1971–1982), to investigate how the anxiety over sociopolitical change is negotiated on live television, how medium specificity intersects with constructions of masculinity and authority, and how different music and television formats question, manage and produce a national imaginary.

The musical aesthetics of neofolk has held a significant place within Germany’s dark alternative scene since the early 1980s. With its keen interest in paganism, dark romanticism, and völkisch mysticism, this genre is often associated with right-wing ideologies. Neofolk has been accused by some of creating acceptable social spaces for fascist cultural ideals, and by others for harnessing contradictory right-wing messages as new modes of aesthetic creativity and provocation. This article explores the continued popularity of the English band, Death in June, in Germany and seeks to problematize critics’ attempts to unequivocally characterize the band and genre as nostalgia-laden hipster fascism.

This article examines the rise of the East German rock band the Puhdys, focusing primarily on the songs collected in their eponymous first album. Such an examination provides a long overdue reappraisal of the Puhdys’ early years, establishing not only that they benefitted from fortuitous timing, but also that their early music and lyrics conveyed sophisticated multivalent messages that helped them reach a youthful rock audience without running afoul of the authorities. This article also reveals the degree to which East German radio and the West German record industry fostered the rise of “ddrock” and later cemented its place in the East German cultural arena.

This article offers a theorization of the politics of politically inspired musical performances in the twenty-first century. The two examples, Peaches’ “Dick in the Air” and Rose McGowan’s “rm486,” both released in fall 2015, offer two very different approaches to contemporary feminist and popfeminist body politics. These songs with their accompanying video and multimedia releases, offer the temporal and auditory frame for reflections about how gendered and racialized bodies are impacted by their surroundings and how, in turn, we impact these surroundings, to the local and the global, to neoliberalism and its discontents. These performances are not acts of provocation, but suggest ways to imagine social futures by creating spaces for relations, shared response, and political intervention.

Starting with the surprising role the soul assumed in the West German music essay from the early 1980s, this article interrogates a peculiar, misunderstood middle passage in dominant historiographies of German pop literature—the new wave music essay—that transformed itself at the dawn of the 1990s—shortly before the literary phenomenon labeled Popliteratur emerged—by embracing then emergent Anglo-American Cultural Studies. The importance of new wave music for the essay’s regard for soul were lost on both pop literature and its attendant literary histories. The “studies model” has, at least in this one instance, smoothed over historical ruptures with unfortunate repercussions for our understanding of the precarious writerly mediation of life and music shortly before the value of poetics for life vanished altogether.