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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.

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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 challenges 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 narrations. 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) mimicry of ultimately fake “Americanness” points to the always already presence of the “Other” as inherent to the national self. Finally, in the newly elaborated third temporal dimension of national narratives, the melancholic, the very distinction of history, tradition and contemporariness does not hold any longer, as past and present coincide. As I have elaborated, the third narrative dimension of Germanness is based on the traumatic experiences from the past (the national myth) that can neither be fully remembered nor forgotten as they are beyond the realm of representation. As such, the melancholic dimension marks the impossibility of remembering/forgetting the past, which is always already constitutive to the national present. As the melancholic cannot leave behind the traumatic experiences as belonging to the past, they continually reappear as uncanny repetitions or haunting ghosts in the present. The Trizonesians cannot positively identify themselves without disavowing their “cannibalism”, the Beat youth cannot entirely escape their

984 Rainer Schmidt Torsten Groß, “Rammstein: Exklusives Interview mit Till Lindemann und Flake Lorenz”, Rolling Stone, December 12, 2011, accessed June 16, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.de/rammstein-exklusives-interview-mit-till-lindemann-und-flake-lorenz-343190/. 985 Ibid. 184 SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING

Germanness however hard they try to disclaim it, and Kraftwerk’s Germanness, however disjunctive, unravels on the “Führer’s roads”, which remain the central infrastruc- tural backbone of the Federal Republic. Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF) let Hitler dance in the disco, and even in the most obvious metaphoric narrative of “Wir sind Wir”, a celebration of unity and national achievements, eventually the “forgotten” war past uncannily flickers in the cracks between the “national history” documentary frames, and the destroyed Reichstag haunts the images of the modern patriotic nation. In Rammstein’s national narrative, the split identity of the national protagonist of “Mein Land” also relates to the traumatic national past as always disintegrated in its impossible reconciliation. Rammstein’s Teutonic image and continual reference to the problematic German past in the play with Nazi aesthetics, Lindemann’s martial sprechgesang in particular, as well as the video’s final carnivalesque celebration of a dark “German authenticity” as monstrous and violent, are uncanny reminders of the traumatic past, are ghosts of a “different” legacy that is constitutive for the melancholic national present that is permanently stuck in the repetition of its traumatic form. Ac- cordingly, “Mein Land” ends with the highly significant ambivalence of simultaneously forgetting/forgotten past and present tense acts of national exclusions (“expelled— expelling—forgetting/forgotten”), which ultimately embodies the three temporalities of the nation as neither total in themselves, nor clearly separated from each other, but mutually constitutive. Pop Blurring the Center/Margin Dichotomy In Bhabha’s account of national narratives, the performative dimension is marked as most “creative” in its potential to alter existing and dominant national narratives. His performative, which I have labelled the metonymic, is primarily productive in the margins of the national imagery, as the excluded with their alternative narratives may challenge the imagined stability of unison as promoted by the pedagogic rhetoric of history and tradition. Bhabha insists on the high relevance of the obscured margins of the nation and their (potentially) destabilizing force. However, what my analyses of popular music as commodity and cultural form—commercially and critically successful songs at the height of their cultural relevance—have revealed, is that the national “center” itself is not as holistic as Bhabha seems to suggest; in fact the very distinction between “center” and “margin” becomes blurred. My analyses have shown that re-narrations and metonymic rhetoric strategies of the nation not only originate in the margins or subcultural scenes, but also “mainstream” (popular musical) narratives of the nation are equivocal, multi-temporal and consist of destabilizing elements—across time and musical genres as well as cultural contexts. Rammstein, again, illustrates this point very well. Ever since their very first release in 1995, every album of the band was placed in the German top 10,986 and from the

986 Rammstein, Herzeleid, Motor Music 529160-2, 1995, CD Album. When Herzeleid was initially released in 1995 its highest position was 99, but after the success of the second album (Rammstein, Sehnsucht, Motor Music 537 304-2, 1997, CD Al- bum.), it eventually peaked at position 6 and remained in the Top 100 for over 100 weeks, Offiziellecharts, accessed July 15, 2015. https://www.offiziellecharts.de/album-details-2564. SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING 185 second one on, every new album (including two live albums and the discussed “Best of” Made in Germany987) were number one successes in Germany.988 Rammstein has won numerous awards, 47 platinum and 40 golden discs for sales worldwide,989 has sold roughly nine million records, and sells out their live concerts generally within an hour. Judging by sheer commercial and critical success, though controversial at times, Rammstein is not “marginal”. However, as I have argued, its Germanness is by no means unambiguous: it simultaneously entails metaphoric elements that nostalgically evoke national cultural traditions in a meaningful choice of language and vocal as well as visual style, yet the incessantly recurring references to the nation’s Nazi past and the violent “authenticity” as performed in their music videos and stage performances disrupt the rhetoric of national consistency and sameness. All the case studies of this thesis were indeed chosen based on broad popularity, commercial success and cultural relevance, and hence suggest a focus on the dominant narratives at the time. However, all the cases (to different degrees) entail destabilizing moments and elements of metonymic deferral that challenge the metaphoric rhetoric of national sameness. As such, my study shows how popular music operates precisely at the intersection of domina- tion and subordination and highlights how pop is always a site of conflict and negotiation, containment and resistance. Rammstein, as commercially successful and widely popular as they are, can however also be considered “marginal” in the sense that they continually highlight their East-German origin and nostalgically refer to their lost Hei- mat: Rammstein’s metonymic deferral of national identification oscillates between the lost GDR and the deprecated Federal Republic, and continuously questions national unison while highlighting Germany’s perpetual “strangeness to itself”.

Pop and National Narratives: Between the State and the Popular As my case studies substantiate, twentieth century history has indeed posed for Ger- man musicians and audiences particular problems of national identity, as Simon Frith argues in the second quote in the epigraph. However, I hope to have illuminated how popular music (studies) and theories of national identity can benefit from each other, beyond the singularity of Germany. The Trizonesien-Song as discussed in chapter one shows most compellingly how pop can function as a language for “writing” national narratives. Complementing Bhbaha’s favored written narratives, pop narratives operate as temporal arts and highlight the transitory nature of narratives as always in progress. The song centrally promotes a metaphoric unity of the imaginary nation (“we, the-Trizonesians-as-one”) and a strong rhetoric of patriotic nationalism (“we are proud of our country”) as based on a common past, culture, language and territory. However, it simultaneously metonymically challenges the “state ideology” of contemporary Germanness as imposed by the occupying (“colonizing”) allies. In the interstice

987 Made in Germany remained a staggering 67 weeks in the German Top 100. Offiziellecharts, accessed July 15, 2015, https://www.offiziellecharts.de/album-details-183793. 988 and Austria. 989 “Rammstein/Auszeichnungen für Musikverkäufe”, Wikipedia, accessed July 15, 2015, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramm- stein/Auszeichnungen_f%C3%BCr_Musikverk%C3%A4ufe. 186 SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING of the cultural landscape at its time and availing itself of the carnivalesque potential inversion of hierarchies, popular music enables the “people to produce themselves” and to performatively (re)narrate “their” nation by collectively celebrating togetherness. Popular music, as most clearly epitomized in the German Beat youth’s melancholic mimicry of “Britishness”, embodies the problematic of articulating national traumas and illustrates the double move of national forgetting/remembering in national narratives. The uncanny silence of Beat embodies the implied struggle with the impossibility of addressing or incorporating the traumatic experiences of WWII, the unwillingness to engage with the past, while simultaneously being haunted by its impossible mem- ories. Beat’s strong desire to reimagine Germanness through the Other as a modern cosmopolitan nation beyond its own history, and its immanent failure, shows how the repressed past is always already constitutive of the national present as uncanny reminders of the “forgotten” history. As the Beat youth tried to become what they imagine “British”, Kraftwerk “turns the camera” and become what they imagine to be the stereotypic Germans, and Autobahn embodies how popular music can illuminate the multiplicity of national narratives. As Kraftwerk’s multi-temporal, multi-spatial narrative with multiple subjectivities shows, national imaginaries are always an open-ended process. Their almost literal journey, again, exemplifies how narratives entail elements of metaphoric rhetoric (based on the common national experience of the lost identity that needs to be re-narrated), metonymic elements of ever-changing signification of national signs and a melancholic dimension: even if the song fades out, the journey continues on the “Führer’s roads”. What Kraftwerk manages most compellingly, is to thematize the very multiple “writings” of national narratives and their changing meanings. In that sense, pop music—as a process, as movement in time—can narrate the nation on many different layers of meaning and it can embody the multiple dimensions of time in their different modes of signification: sound, image, language and discourse. Although, as I have argued, metonymic narratives do not necessarily need to be as- sociated with the marginalized or excluded, DAF exemplifies how pop also provides the means for those “unwanted” of the nation to destabilize its central and totalizing rhetoric. DAF, in their brachial yet fragile sound and in their queer mimicry of fascism, appropriates the very elements that suppress or exclude marginal perspectives and highlight their always inherent instability. In performing a queer version of extreme Germanness, they open up the narrative for alternative identifications, and disrupt the rhetoric of exclusion of Otherness. However metonymic this strategy seems, again, it also entails elements of metaphoricity, in that the aim of Neue Deutsche Welle was precisely to make specifically German music, based on shared national experiences, cultural contexts and—most of all —the German language as central motif. Finally, returning to the celebratory metaphoric Germanness as narrated by Pe- ter Heppner and Paul van Dyk in their Trance anthem “for the German people”, “Wir sind Wir” embodies the repetitive character of music and national identity. In their performative exclusion of Otherness (Techno as “German” art) and their continuous insistence on national unity based on (heroic) past achievements and an overcoming of SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING 187 hardships, Heppner and van Dyk demonstrate precisely how pop music in its multiple medialities can retain national myths. Employing the same nationalistic rhetoric as Schlager did sixty years earlier—albeit with an altered sound and context—“Wir sind Wir”’s simulation of history as rhetorically signifying contemporariness illustrates the repetitive character of national narratives as perpetual iteration loops, retained by repetition. In its visual narrative interpretation, the music video reinforces the re- current quality of a selective past, as Heppner “travels” through time and the viewer is positioned as a witness to history while it unfolds, over and over again. In the end, it is precisely the recurrence that also keeps haunting the nation in the uncanny reap- pearances of those elements that were rather excluded and forgotten, as the ill-favored and shunned but obtrusive past flickers through the celebratory images of the modern, cosmopolitan nation. Paul van Dyk’s aforementioned live and televised performances of “Wir sind Wir” with the Deutsche Filmorchester Babelsberg at the official act of state at the th15 anniversary of Germany’s reunification in Potsdam and “We are One” five years later the “Festival of Freedom” in front of the Brandenburg Gate also exemplify the interrelation of pop music and state politics. These “national anthems”, metaphorically celebrating German unity, smoothly play into the nation-state’s interest of promoting coherence and sustaining the imagined community, while adhering to popular taste. The Schlager “national anthem” of Trizonesien, as discussed in the first chapter, also celebrates the imagined community, however as opposed to the contemporary “nation-state” (the oc- cupational administration by the Allies) and much to the distaste of chancellor-to-be Konrad Adenauer. As such, both “anthems” as the opening and closing of my thesis mark the scope of pop’s oscillation between the “ideological apparatus of state power” as remarked by Bhabha990 on the one hand and “the national-popular”991 on the other. It is in this gamut that national narratives are told, challenged, repeated, altered and con- firmed, that the wide dissemination through which we construct the field of meanings and symbols of national culture is displayed.992

The Open-Ended Narrative It should be clear by now, that the nation still holds high currency within popular music, and in fact maybe more than ever. While writing this conclusion in late summer 2015, the world witnessed the biggest refugee flow since the Second World War. Ac- cording to a report by the UN refugee agency, the number of people living as refugees from war or persecution exceeds 50 million. While Europe violently tries to defend its borders and from refugees mostly originating from Syria, the Middle East and Africa,993

990 Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 3. 991 ibid. 992 ibid. 993 Imogen Foulkes, “Global refugee figures highest since WW2, UN says”, BBC News, June 20, 2014, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-27921938. and “World Refugee Day: Global forced displacement tops 50 million for first time in post-World War II era”,The UN Refugee Agency, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.unhcr.org/53a155bc6.html. 188 SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING the number of those arriving in Germany have more than doubled in comparison to last year and quadrupled since 2010. In July 2015, around 220,000 asylum applications were registered, but the German government expects a total of 800,000 migrants to arrive in Germany within the year, which would double the historical peak of from 1992 with 440,000 asylum pleas resulting from the Yugoslav Wars.994 In the wake of this vast increase of immigration, multiple xenophobically motivated violent attacks have been committed against refugees in Germany. According to the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung in Berlin, more than 500 assaults have been reported, with east Germany (particularly Saxony) and southern Germany (Bavaria) being the regions with the highest rate of violence against foreigners.995 The Other is obviously always and again perceived as a threat to the national “Thing”, and the imagined community arguably needs to defend itself and its culture. The anewed necessity to integrate “new citizens” is also reminis- cent of the post-war years in Germany, when the displaced persons from the East were not exactly welcomed with open arms. “Where are you going? Where to?” is asked in Rammstein’s “Mein Land”, only to receive the answer “there is no space left here, this is my country”. Although van Dyk was celebrating “no more barriers” with fireworks, I believe that “building bridges of love” would look differently. Pop music, as I have discussed throughout my thesis, is a powerful means to mobilize and affect people individually and collectively, and thus is also utilized by both the (extreme) right to promote hate messages, as well as by anti-Neo-Nazi protests to express discontent with the increasing violence towards refugees and by migrants who want to articulate a shared structure of feeling. Collective demonstrations for a welcoming, open and tolerant Germany are starting to be organized (again) in the form NGO ini- tiatives by popular bands like the free “Kein Bock auf Nazis”996 and the “Kein Mensch ist Illegal”,997 samplers with music against racism by different popular pop and punk bands and festivals like “Rock gegen Rechts”,998 which is organized in many different towns all over the nation, or “Forstrock – Für eine bunte Welt”.999 The occurrence of both xenophobic violence against refugees as well as counter-rallies against Neo-Nazis are neither only a German issue nor are they new phenomena. It is therefore also no coin- cidence that songs that were already released during the nineties (the last highpoint of immigration) are now undergoing a renewed popularity: bands like Die Toten Hosen

994 Alberto Nardelli, “How many asylum seekers would other EU countries need to match Germany?”, The Guardian Online, August 20, 2015, accessed August 20, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2015/aug/20/asylum-seekers-eu-comparison-germany-datablog. 995 Paul Middelhoff, “Karte der Gewalt”, Zeit Online, August 26, 2015, accessed August 26, 2015, http://www.zeit.de/politik/ deutschland/2015-08/gewalt-gegen-fluechtlinge-rassismus-deutschland-anschlaege-koerperverletzung. 996 An NGO, which released a free CD sampler with the motto “Rock’n’Roll against Nazis”. The CD includes music by bands like Die Ärzte, Die Toten Hosen, Beatsteaks, Fettes Brot, etc. Various Artists, Kein Bock auf Nazis, Not on Label, 2015, CD Compilation, http://www.keinbockaufnazis.de/. 997 Charity compilation for NGO Pro Asyl with bands like The Donots, Farin Urlaub, Deichkind, Jan Delay, Tocotronic, etc. Various Artists, Kein Mensch ist Illegal. Grönland Records, 2015, CD Compilation, http://groenland.com/2015/09/kein-mensch- ist-illegal/. 998 http://www.rock-gegen-rechts-duesseldorf.de/. 999 http://www.forstrock.de/. SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING 189 are performing their anti-Nazi hit “Sascha – ein aufrichtiger Deutscher”1000 again1001 and Die Ärzte’s “Schrei nach Liebe”1002 (famous for bellowing “Arschloch”[“asshole”] at a fictional Nazi protagonist) is topping the national charts, again.1003 Simultaneously, only three positions below, former hooligan/neo-Nazi affiliated Böhse Onkelz1004 has celebrated a come-back: “We were immortal until we perished—but we believe that time really heals all wounds. Says the ghost/mind [“Geist”] that always answers in the negative […] make room for a new time. Let us together ram the flag into the mountain peak”.1005 I have no doubt that within the next weeks new songs will follow that will reflect upon and constitute current narratives of what is means to be German.

Outlook In my research I have focused on the “text” (in the broadest sense of the word, and including its multiple modalities) of pop musical narratives of the nation. I have discussed their cultural and historical contexts and I have referred to the cultural reception where necessary; however, further research needs to be done on the reception of these narratives and how the audience relates to the imagined community through these texts. My focus on commercially and critically successful pop also leaves out more alternative narratives from more subcultural contexts. I have discussed how pop can provide the means to re-narrate the nation from the margin in my analysis of DAF, but this perspective is certainly worth being further pursued. The most obvious genre to look into would be Hip Hop, in which migrant and marginalized communi- ties articulate their version of Germanness, but also other identity markers like class, sexuality and gender intersect in interesting ways. I have focused on West-Germany in my study, but I believe that my analyses call for their “counter perspective”: how was East-Germanness narrated, and by extension, (how) does the reception of these pop national narratives differ in East and West? Considering the differing ideological upbringings and identification “against each other”, I would expect a different rhetoric and language, and yet also many similarities in form and content. The aim of my thesis was not only to write a story of Germany, but to have con- tributed to a wider understanding of national identity. It was beyond the scope of my project to research popular musical national narratives of other countries, but I am convinced that a study of, for instance, Dutch or Austrian pop would reveal similarities

1000 Andreas Frege and Hanns Christian Müller, “Sascha – Ein Aufrechter Deutscher”, Die Toten Hosen, Totenkopf ‎TOT 41, 1992, CD Single. 1001 Die Toten Hosen played a surprise concert at the small Forstrock festival against xenophobia and “Sascha – Ein aufrechter Deutscher” was the indisputable highlight. “Die Toten Hosen überraschen Jamel”, Das Beste am Norden, August 30, 2015, accessed August 30, 2015, https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/mecklenburg-vorpommern/Die-Toten-Hosen-ueberra- schen-Jamel,jamelfoerster100.html. 1002 Farin Urlaub, „Schrei nach Liebe”, Die Ärzte, Metronome ‎859 619-2, 1993, CD Single. 1003 Official German Charts from September 11, 2015. Offiziellecharts, accessed September 11, 2015, https://www.offiziellecharts.de/charts/single/for-date-1441922400000. 1004 Word play which reads as “evil uncles”. 1005 “Wir waren unsterblich, bis wir gestorben sind. Doch wir glauben, dass die Zeit, wirklich alle Wunden heilt. Sagt der Geist der stets verneint, macht Platz für eine neue Zeit. Lasst uns zusammen Die Fahne in den Gipfel rammen”. Unknown, „Wir bleiben”, Böhse Onkelz, V.I.E.R. Ton & Merch GbR 23042 CDS-E, 2015, CD Single Enhanced. 190 SOUND-TRACKING GERMANY | ANOTHER TIME OF WRITING with what I have argued regarding Germanness. Clearly, the national myths and traumas will not be identical, but I would expect a similar rhetoric at work: a dimension of metaphorically unifying the nation based on a collective history and cultural tradition, a metonymic dimension of deferring national sameness by pointing to inherent elements of otherness—destabilizing the unitary narrative of the nation from a contemporary perspective—and a melancholic dimension, which uncannily reminds the nation of its “forgotten” traumas as constitutive to the present. What has become clear in the course of my research is that analyzing pop music through the lens of national identity reveals pop’s relevance as a medium of collective and individual identity formation in its ability to offer subject positions and affectively engage its audience, not only emotionally but also ideologically. The nation, as I have shown, is a central theme and source of identification as well as discontent throughout diverse genres—from Schlager to Techno—and over the course of seventy years and counting. Fade-out.