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Ecstatic Melancholic: Ambivalence, Electronic Music and Social Change Around the Fall of the Berlin Wall

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Ecstatic Melancholic: Ambivalence, Electronic Music and Social Change Around the Fall of the Berlin Wall Ecstatic Melancholic: Ambivalence, Electronic Music and Social Change around the Fall of the Berlin Wall Ben Gook The Cold War’s end infused electronic music in Berlin after 1989 with an ecstatic intensity. Enthused communities came together to live out that energy and experiment in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. This techno-scene became an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant) within an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams). Techno parties held out a promise of freedom while Germany’s re-unification quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany, this article adds to accounts of ecstasy by considering it in conjunction with melancholy, arguing for an ambivalent description of ecstatic experience – and of emotional life more broadly. Keywords: German re-unification, electronic dance music, structure of feeling, intimate publics, ambivalence. Everybody was happy Ecstasy shining down on me ... I’m raving, I’m raving But do I really feel the way I feel?1 In Germany around 1989, techno music coursed through a population already energised by the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The years 1989 and 1990 were optimistic for many in Germany and elsewhere. The Cold War’s end heralded a conclusion to various deadlocks. Young Germans acutely felt this release from stasis and rushed to the techno-scene.2 Similar scenes also flourished in neighbouring European countries, the United States and Britain around the 1 ‘Raving I’m Raving,’ Shut up and Dance (UK: Shut Up and Dance Records, 1992), vinyl. Funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Associate Investigator (CE110001011) scheme helped with this work. Many thanks to Katie Barclay for edits and comments, and to two anonymous peer reviewers. 2 For brevity, I largely refer to ‘techno’ throughout. While practical, it also fits the era and location, as ‘techno’ was often used in Germany as a catchall term. Emotions: History, Culture, Society | Vol. 1 No. 2 (2017) | 11 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook same time – but the historical events of those years in Berlin gave techno an impetus that attracted disc jockeys (DJs) and producers from elsewhere, building a legacy evident today. As in other revolutionary sequences, participants in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) regime’s collapse and the Wall’s Fall were engrossed in their enthusiasms and disappointed by paths not taken. Ecstasy and melancholy became subjective registrations of an era and its contradictions. The GDR’s revolution – the issuing of people onto the streets, the rush to overturn and renew what stood in their path – this kernel of disaffection and the hope for something better helped create a moment that broke through the institutional blockages and banal routines of damaged lives. New post-revolutionary subjectivities emerged. Particularly in the socialist East, something happened to people that re-organised their understanding of how desire works within and against social structures. In Lacanian terms, this recognition took place across: the real (it was an excess, something previously blocked in the rigidified symbolic order of the GDR, felt bodily and in the unsayability of feelings); the symbolic (people discovered that their consent secured the virtual power of the order – as the Wall fell, people alternately hugged and spat on border guards, who now appeared ridiculous, their power drained away); and the imaginary (enmities broke down, rivalries momentarily dissolved). In a word, people felt unified. The now overfamiliar footage of joyous embraces at the Berlin Wall in November 1989 shows ecstatic people enjoying a longed-for moment of political disintegration and social unification. It heralded individual, cultural and social disintegration too. In the hours, days and months that followed, people unsurprisingly sought, in other forms, the emotional intensity that attended this collapse. For many, the sound and feeling of the Wall falling came to be the sibilant hiss of smoke machines filling concrete rooms, basements booming with kick drums, bodies mixing and moving without regard for Cold War identities. In this essay, I show how techno retained a trace of that era’s lived experience, and that this carried within it an openness towards others, plus a promise of futurity and change. This initial joyful feeling was particularly strong in Berlin, which I foreground here, but was registered across the cities of the former East, including Leipzig, the revolution’s real origin. In late 1989, urban space, psychic life and cultural expression all came together around a new egalitarianism in social transformation – novel positions, 12 | Emotions: History, Culture, Society | Vol. 1 No. 2 (2017) Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic opportunities and identifications were available.3 Berlin was a place – or, better, a series of voids, openings, gaps, surpluses – where the intensities of an insurgent musical form could be lived out in the suspended everyday of the Wende (the political interregnum between the Fall and re-unification) and its aftermath. Always the aftermath. The revolution was uneven in its results, which is why we need to think not only about ecstasy but also melancholy. The overthrow of some structures revealed outdated features of German society and other ways of living, but it was followed by the imposition of western structures in the East, and the return of mutual suspicion among the German population. For many Germans, then, 1989 saw that initial openness reverting to rigid identity divisions, loss of autonomy, a waning of eastern German hopes and so on.4 Techno parties held a promise of freedom – spaces of anticipation and heightened enjoyment – while re-unification itself quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. The melancholic phase that belatedly broke out within the scene seemed to entail losing a future that promissory moments opened but failed to deliver in a lasting form. An ambivalent history, then. If this is a familiar story of many overwhelming revolutionary outbreaks and the return of a dull everyday life, then what is the attendant relationship between ecstasy and melancholy, two beatific but diametric states? Is it right to assume that ecstasy precedes melancholy – or is that a truncated story of their interrelation? Could we not easily flip the story to see melancholy precede ecstasy? Melancholy would then be the motor that pushes people to seek ecstasy: in this story, the discontents of pre-Fall East Germany would be foregrounded. This too is familiar – and convincing. By keeping ambivalence in mind, we see both/and instead of either/or relations between emotions, thereby suggesting entanglement. Ecstasy and melancholy are commonly endpoints along a continuum of responses: ecstasy is associated with plenitude, melancholy with lack. While that is true, mapping these feelings to good (ecstatic) and bad (melancholic) emotions obscures 3 The scene was not without its tensions: all utopias and collectivities are founded on exclusions. The considerable Turkish-German community in Berlin, for example, seemed actively sidelined from participation – refused entry to clubs – while Regina Baer mentions removing some women who had ‘missed the mark’ by arriving at a club in high heels. Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall, trans. Jenna Krumminga (Norderstedt: BoD, 2014), 110. 4 I make this argument at greater length in: Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany after 1989 (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). Emotions: History, Culture, Society | Vol. 1 No. 2 (2017) | 13 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook their complexity: ecstasy, as we will see, is a sort of painful pleasure, on a knife-edge between pleasure and unpleasure; melancholia, as Freud taught us, is pleasure in unpleasure, an enjoyment of self-abjection.5 Univalence would be mistaken here. Ambivalence more accurately tracks emotional life – or the temporality of affect and emotion as it modulates in experience. As with ‘ambidextrous’, the ambi-prefix of ambivalence implies not a combination, but both. Ambivalence might recognise the dual character of positive and negative feelings. Culture presents us with signals that ambivalence is a degraded form of feeling and thinking, of non-judgement, of indecision. Ideal relationships or beliefs are apparently clear and unambiguous, committed and unwavering. Yet the ability or inability to tolerate ambivalence in the self and other is a fundamental aspect of our psychic life. Our understandings of emotions needs to recognise this and integrate it within our historical accounts. Like other critics interested in ecstasy, I suggest that pure self-presence, as figured by the ecstatic subject’s typical ontology, is impossible, even while appreciating ‘this desire to find a place in which the pleasures and pains of the (speaking) body might be apprehended’.6 Psychoanalytic concepts help elucidate the feeling subject as ambivalent, desiring and protean – caught up in the movements between pleasure and pain, joy and sadness. Two key sites of the early techno-scene will be touchstones throughout: Tekknozid raves, begun by easterners, and the UFO Club, begun by westerners. Like their audiences, these were protean and transient, ultimately taking new forms. The analysis
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