Uva-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Sound-tracking Germany: 70 years of imagining the nation from Schlager to Techno Schiller, M.M. Publication date 2016 Document Version Other version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Schiller, M. M. (2016). Sound-tracking Germany: 70 years of imagining the nation from Schlager to Techno. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:02 Oct 2021 SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING 181 Another Time of Writing [Conclusion] In “Wir sind Wir” Peter Heppner and Paul van Dyk celebrate the German unification of the many into one (whole) as an imagined community with a shared past of achievements. Five years after the performance of their “endurance hit” at the official fes- tivities for the 15th anniversary of the of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Paul van Dyk pre- sented another “kitsch anthem”978: now even more literally called “We are One”.979 On November 9, 2009, van Dyk, this time with singer Johnny McDaid, concluded the (now) 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was celebrated as the “Festival of Freedom” on the Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.980 “This time our time has come / no more barriers / we can be as one / Build a bridge with love / We can be as one together” the lyrics of this “lighters-in-the-air Trance ballad”981 go while the performance and festival were concluded with a gigantic fireworks display to intensify the affective quality of the music and culminate in the ultimate “goose bump feeling” of national simultaneity and togetherness.982 Rammstein, on the other hand, reverses this unitary rhetoric in “Mein Land”. As indicated in the introduction of this thesis, the video’s sixties California “beach par- ty” ironically celebrates an untroubled togetherness. The allusion to a Beach Boys riff in the opening of the video, the bright colors, sunshine, happy dancing and beautiful girls initially seem to present a lighthearted community. However, the protagonists’ cemented smiles and fake tans, and the harsh disparity with Rammstein’s character- istic sound clearly undermines the shallow and only seemingly harmonic conviviali- ty. Their narrative of Germanness—as visually filtered through the lens of American stereotypes and sonically contrasted with the band’s Teutonic sound—not only chal- lenges the boundaries of the local (lost GDR Heimat) and the global (American popular culture) as mutually constitutive in the nation as the “middle ground”. Rather, instead of celebrating the “becoming-one” in the first person plural of the national “we”, like Paul van Dyk does in “Wir sind Wir” and “We are One”, Rammstein narrates the search for national identity as an ongoing and disorienting process of “one-becoming-multiple”: “Where are you going? Where to?” asks the protagonist and answers himself: “I am going with myself, from East to South, etc.” as “Mein Land” stages an inner dialogue of national displacement. The nation is split in Rammstein’s narration into a chasmic 978 Sean Nye, “Teutonic Time-Slip: Travels in Electronic Music Technology, and German Identity 1968-2009” (PhD diss, University of Minnesota, 2013), 132. 979 Unknown, “We Are One”, Paul van Dyk Feat. Johnny McDaid, Vandit Records ‎PVD003, 2009, MP3. 980 Nye, “Teutonic”, 132. 981 Ibid. 982 The festival, moderated by the “world famous in Germany” TV legend Thomas Gottschalk, was broadcasted live on public television channel ZDF. 182 SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING subject, a blurred “you” and “me” (or rather the possessive “your country” and “mine”) and a fragmented geography of East, West, North and South. In this scatteredness of a neither unified nor unitary relation to itself, identification is rendered impossible, and the national protagonist remains heimatlos, while ultimately, the final ambiguity of “forgetting/forgotten” acts of expulsion also point to the nation’s disjunctive temporality. These two outer poles of van Dyk’s unitary rhetoric on the one side, and Rammstein’s disjunctive identification on the other, constitute the ambiguities of national narra- tions. As the quote in the epigraph of this thesis indicates, Homi Bhabha suggests that for a comprehensive understanding of the multiple ambiguities of the problematic “modern” experiences of the Western nation, we need “another time of writing”. 983 By this, Bhabha calls for, on the one hand, recognizing the nation’s disjunctive temporality as caught between pedagogic accounts of a shared teleological past—the tradition of the people—resulting in discourses of unitary collective experiences and a unanimous identity in the present: the many as one, and, on the other, contemporary performative rhetorical strategies of hybridity, deformation, masking and inversion, which are signs of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproduc- tive process. In this ambivalence, Bhabha sees the chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the disjunctive temporality of nationness. To write the story of the nation, he concludes, demands the articulation of this ambiguity. In my attempt to write a story of Germany, as narrated in pop music, I have elaborated on the temporal ambiguities of the narrative strategies, its “language and rhetoric”, its sound and visu- alization, its disjunctive discourses, and have I questioned the idea of a national holism of “the people”. In my study of Germanness through its narrative address in pop music I did however not only pay attention to its “language” and analyze its rhetoric strategies; by modifying Bhabha’s concept of a double-and-split national time into what I consider to be a more pertinent model for addressing the narratives of Germanness and their temporal ambiguities as trifold, I have also altered the conceptual object of German- ness as a multi-temporal and equivocal narrative. My analysis of national narratives in pop music has shown that Germanness is always negotiated along three lines of temporal collocation: first, the metaphoric dimension, which like Bhabha’s pedagogic, focuses on shared experiences of the past and emphasizes sameness. In this mode, Germanness is narrated as holistic first person plural: “Wir sind Wir!” This metaphoric national “we” as rhetoric strategy is not only based on shared past experiences (collective suffering like the post-war period and the “cultural vacuum” of lost identity in its wake, and achievements like the economic miracle or the fall of the wall that give cause to national pride), but also shared characteristics based on tradition (like the “Trizonesian” culture, humor, intellect, pertinacity and applica- tion manifested, for instance, in having to rebuild the destroyed nation). An illustrative example, to come back to the initial case discussed in the introduction, is Rammstein’s continual nostalgic references to a German cultural heritage and folklore in their im- 983 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 141. SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING 183 agery, performance style, and use of language, as they invoke a metaphoric national identification based on a unifying legacy of Germanness. The fact that Rammstein’s cultural references (Grimm’s fairytales, Goethe, Brecht, etc.), originate before the rup- ture of the war and the subsequent split into East and West, particularly in German Ro- manticism and Weimar Modernism, notably reinforces the unifying rhetoric of such choices and evokes a notion of the German “natural” people-as-one. Secondly, I argued the metonymic dimension, based on Bhabha’s performative, of coeval narrative strategies of the present as a (potentially) discursive deviation from the metaphoric claim to national unity emphasizes difference. The metonymic dimension re-narrates the nation from a contemporary perspective, and entails an alteration of the national discourse, a repositioning towards itself or reshuffling of national identification, generally indicating cracks or ruptures in the “metaphoric rhetoric” and pointing to failures, flaws, silences or absences. This may be a re-configuration of an inner-identification like rejecting the parental generation as perpetrators as the Beat youth did, or highlighting the inherent queer element of the national myth itself, but also the ever-present delineation from both “America” and “the East” as the ambiv- alent Other. The national protagonist of Rammstein’s “Mein Land”, for instance, al- legorizes the metonymic dimension as being inherently split, (“I go—with myself”) and emblematizes a continuously riven Germany in relation to itself (East/West) and its national past. As Rammstein bemoans the loss of their socialist (GDR) Heimat, the “detraditionalisation” [“Enttraditionalisierung“]984 and the demise of “authenticity” in the face of Western capitalism, “Mein Land” also adheres to a metonymic perspective of Germanness as a narrative from the “forgotten margins” of the nation. Partic- ularly their negotiation of the contemporary Federal Republic’s national identity (as self-identified citizens of the factually no-longer existing GDR),985 in the (ironic) mim- icry of ultimately fake “Americanness” points to the always already presence of the “Other” as inherent to the national self.

Load more