Beyond No Future

Cultures of German Punk

Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, Cyrus M. Shahan, Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, Cyrus M. Shahan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501314100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Punk Music

The first book of its kind in English, Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk explores the texts and contexts of German punk cultures. Notwithstanding its "no future" sloganeering, punk has had a rich and complex life in German art and letters, in German urban landscapes, and in German youth culture. Beyond No Future collects innovative, methodologically diverse scholarly contributions on the life and legacy of these cultures. Focusing on punk politics and aesthetics in order to ask broader questions about German nationhood(s) in a period of rapid transition, this text offers a unique view of the decade bookended by the "German Autumn" and German unification. Consulting sources both published and unpublished, aesthetic and archival, Beyond No Future 's contributors examine German punk's representational strategies, anti-historical consciousness, and refusal of programmatic intervention into contemporary political debates. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the importance of punk culture to historical, political, economic, and cultural developments taking place both in Germany and on a broader transnational scale.

1

Punk Matters: An Introduction

Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus M. Shahan

Postwar German history was defined by a broad spectrum of cultural, political, and aesthetic reconstructions. Indeed, the decades after 1945 witnessed a breakneck rate of official and unofficial shifts in and strategies for defining (East and West) Germany via economic, military, and popular means. In West Germany, taking their cues from Marlon Brando and James Dean, “hooligan” youths found an inadvertent challenge to the unequal “economic miracle” of the 1950s in the form of t-shirts, Levis jeans, and auto repair. They unsettled, thereby, West German normalization with their embrace of working class suffering. Meanwhile, in the other German territory circumscribed by the emergent Cold War paradigm—the German Democratic Republic—young people balanced their socialization within vehemently anticapitalist educational institutions, professional settings, and social structures against their avid consumption of Western popular culture, leading to complicated appropriations and modifications of Western youth-subcultural activity to fit their East German life contexts.¹

Responding to West Germany’s geostrategic role as a launching pad for the US war in Vietnam and the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, students in the Federal Republic picked up protest cries for social equality from around the globe circa 1968. But protestors’ indictment of states—of fascist politics coming to the aid of capitalist interests—had radically different affective, psychological, and historical impact in the land that had brought Taylorist efficiency to killing. Across the Wall, internecine struggles over the direction of economic management began that would lead, in 1971, to a power transfer from Walter Ulbricht to Erich Honecker, and a transition to the consumerist emphases of so-called real existing socialism. As this transpired, West German media coverage of the tragedy of the Prague Spring ran simultaneously with East German broadcasters’ inveighing against American (and West German) involvement in Vietnam. Global conflicts and class-based, historical, and contemporary tensions rooted in postwar life in Germany, in particular, laid the groundwork for chaos, contradiction, and weirdness to take hold of both Germanies after 1968.

The student revolutions in West Germany ultimately gave way to armed insurrection in the form of West German domestic terrorism, a decades-long battle that saw both the state and terrorists enact proto-fascist tendencies each disavowed. In 1976, a decade after he was blacklisted from performing in East Germany, the dissident musician and poet Wolf Biermann, one of the GDR’s most influential musicians, was expatriated while on tour in West Germany. Yet, rather than solidify the East German state’s position in cultural affairs, this decisive move only fostered uncertainty and embarrassment; a petition in support of Biermann signed by many of East Germany’s most prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals humiliated the political leadership, and prompted criticism of the expatriation and cultural crackdown from communist and left-wing parties in West Germany. Now, like never before, the Party’s insistence on univocality seemed like a sign of weakness; the florescence of alternative political activisms, unorthodox cultural practices, and dropout lifestyles in the interstices of the Republic—the courtyards of tenements, the private apartments of artists and writers, the cafés in evangelical churches—only accelerated after Biermann’s expulsion.

When considering the history of the German 1980s, given how the decade ended, it is tempting to construe the 1989–1990 Wende as a logical telos—as Fukuyama’s “end of history,” as a final and predestined comity toward which all political or social developments in the two Germanies had inexorably pointed all along. “Now what belongs together will grow together,” the former German chancellor Willy Brandt is reputed to have proclaimed on the eve of German unification. Springing forth from this organicism comes a whole raft of assumptions about the natural wholeness of German culture, identity, and nationhood, once wounded, now whole. To this pseudo-biological theodicy, one must counterpose the cultures of German punk: a lewd and shocking aesthetic, regarded as a threat to public order by both Germanies’ police forces, that set itself against the state-sponsored and citizen-initiated projects meant to rescue Germanness from its past for the sparkling promise of a democratic future. While punk had been given its name in the Anglo-American media, German musicians, writers, artists, and journalists near-instantaneously made punk their own thing. As in the United Kingdom or the United States—or, for that matter, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium—records were pressed, concerts organized, and zines published before the end of 1977. Inasmuch as all German punks’ interventions engaged with the peculiarities of German cultural history, this book’s explorations of the cultures of punk in both Germanies are likewise bound to the particularly German weirdness and tensions sketched above.

Punk rock seems so inevitable to German cultural history precisely because of the tensions in Germany’s Nazi past and present, its division post-1949, and the international Cold War powers dominating daily life. Though punk’s origins are Anglo—first London’s East End, then New York City—its apocalyptic mantra “no future,” its investment in detritus, and its desire for shock found particularly fertile ground in a West German landscape speckled with US nuclear missiles, in a rubble-filled Berlin, and in a land where even into the 1980s, there were new revelations about perpetrators of Nazi atrocities in positions of economic and political power. These contradictions at the core of postwar reconstruction are legible all over punk rock. Band names such as Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) and Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime, a reference to Adolf Loos’s infamous manifesto-cum-provocation of 1908), concerts such as the famously misspelled “Geniale Dilletanten” (Ingenious Dilletantes), or songs such as “Angriff auf’s Schlaraffenland” (Attack on the Land of Plenty) all took aim at the dead-end trap of the economic miracle, new construction, and theories of social intervention.

The first German punk bands formed in 1976, and punk concerts began to be organized shortly thereafter; the first German punk records began appearing, with both major and independent labels, in 1977 and 1978. Notwithstanding facile pronouncements of punk’s death in the early 1980s, it has never gone away. As even a cursory encounter with German punk’s lyrical conceits or musical stylistics reveals, in its four decades of existence, German punk has balanced resolute openness to aesthetic and political developments taking place abroad with an insistence on the unique stakes of Germany’s own complicated history, its political and social problems, and its geopolitical positioning within Europe—first during the Cold War, and then during its aftermath. A particularly limpid example of this transnational–national duality is offered by S.Y.P.H.’s exhortations against progress, as these aimed to stave off a resurgent fascist state in the form of the Federal Republic, buttressed by the United States as an aspect of Cold War geostrategy; the global and the local scale were always intertwined, in German punk, and remain so.

Specifically, German texts and contexts positively haunt the transnational, multicontinental history of the evolving aesthetic practice that people call “punk.” Accordingly, the individual contributions to this anthology demonstrate how the chimeric glow of German punk style—its sonic, physical, and aesthetic presentations—bathed each of the two Germanies’ insistence on monovocal historical progress, as embodied by their states’ very existence, in a sickly light that revealed myriad imperfections. In halting the homogenizing momentum of jubilee-oriented, monarchic narrativities, English punks appropriated the uniformed look and master symbols of the worst episode in German history, National Socialism’s twelve-year reign. From these British punks, East and West German punks borrowed noise, self-abasement, and anarchy symbols but recalibrated them to challenge their own Republics’ mastery of the past.

Symbolic exchange, borrowing, and appropriation have long defined the transnational history of punk, a history that—pace Crass, who sang “Punk is Dead” in 1978—is still ongoing. Moving beyond “no future”—that is, moving beyond confirming punk as chaos or style—this anthology illustrates how paradigmatically German punk traced the global fissures effaced by the construction of two Germanies in the postwar period. If the images and sounds of Germany’s reunification in 1990 were transmitted worldwide, in an emblematic and highly mediated performance of digital globalization, German punks had made their own preliminary contributions to this moment—they had sprayed graffiti on the Wall, transgressed the Cold War’s most impermeable barrier to perform concerts, and had even serenaded the end of German division avant la lettre, decrying both the stability of German division (and indeed, of all social formations) as they went. Wherever punk is found, and nowhere more than in Germany, its anti-élan—its noninternalization of contradictions—visually registered the knowledge of a fraught historical situation, a knowledge twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin once described as coming in a “lightning flash.” With its music, and influential aesthetic of incompetence, punk’s textual afterlives added the “long roll of thunder that follows,”² a corpus of unequivocally chaotic but thematically and strategically heterogeneous texts that exploded binaries, rejected teleologies, and profaned customs.

Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk combines eight chapters by scholars working in a variety of disciplines. Each contributor studies a particular moment, a unique gesture, and a specific constellation of political and aesthetic considerations, in the cultural and social history of punk in German-speaking Europe. Drawing as they do upon philosophical accounts of boredom, speech-act theory, and performance studies, this book models a truly interdisciplinary practice of punk studies. Taking for granted the multimediality of punk culture itself, then, the contributors incorporate insights from across the disciplines into their accounts of German texts and contexts as these were mobilized by, or refracted through, punk. If German punk can be understood as a rejection of the transnational forces—economic and political—that traced a military–political fault line onto Germany’s very geography, then the recent reanimation of those fault lines (in particular, the use of the “Cold War” as a theoretical model for interpreting the present) makes understanding German punk crucial for understanding punk’s global-born self-articulation. (The line from late 1970s West Berlin’s Ätztussis to present-day Moscow’s Pussy Riot, for instance, begs to be traced.) By connecting the concerns of punk to broader problems of (post)modern experience, and exploring the profound influence punk has exerted on a variety of cultural subspheres in the decades since its first emergence, German punk studies have the opportunity and task of recovering an untold story from history’s dustbin.

Decentering Anglophone punk

“Look at me,” the Australian musician and author Nick Cave sings, “I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, I’m glowing.”³ A Sisyphean tale of love, the 2013 song “Jubilee Street” by the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds may seem an unlikely foil for an anthology on German punk cultures—even if the reader remembers Cave’s onscreen appearance, with his post-punk group the Bad Seeds, in Wim Wenders’s indelible Berlin film Wings of Desire (1987). After all, images and sounds typically conjured by punk have little to do with love and even less to do with Australia. But then again, contemporary images of punk have little to do with that anarchic and ephemeral signifier (and nothing to do with Germany), as New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gala exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which juxtaposed fashion photography with portraits of punks, made painfully clear.⁴ One assemblage has Sid Vicious on the left, and a model’s presentation of haut couture designer Karl Lagerfeld’s contemporary iteration of his trash aesthetic for House of Chanel on the right; despite their proximity on the page, one would be hard-pressed to confuse the two self-presentations. The textural tension between the two kinds of images invites us to distinguish “authentic” from “co-opted” cultural moments. But understanding why the image on the right is not in itself punk, and instead an image marshaling punk’s visual force to sell clothing concepts, involves understanding the connection between the Bad Seeds’ “Jubilee Street” and the 1980 cries of “Zurück zum Beton” (Back to Concrete) by the West German punk band S.Y.P.H.⁵ Namely, notwithstanding Malcolm McClaren’s or Vivien Westwood’s commercial ambitions, when the punk aesthetic as practiced by thousands of musicians, writers, and self-stylers on every continent invited us to look at it, regard it in all its vibrations and contradictions, this was a means to the unquantifiable, unmarketable end of symbolic disturbance and aesthetic chaos—not an attempt to sell clothing, records, or exhibition catalogs. And even if some few bands saw major label deals, punk, as practiced throughout the world, was by no means a standardized commodity whose dissemination was centrally directed from record-industry boardrooms. No: resounding in dozens of different countries beginning in the late 1970s, punk’s symbolic noise—its kaleidoscopy of détournements, its vulgarities, its oscillations between minimalism and maximalism—always appropriated and adapted, but never slavishly duplicated, the Sex Pistols’ or Ramones’ initial sneers.

Nick Cave’s career is inextricable from the German terrain his band Birthday Party called home in the early 1980s: from the West Berlin mapped in his lyrics of the period, the West Berlin in which his shrieks resounded during the band’s infamous live performances. And punk’s unfolding, in Germany and elsewhere, is unthinkable without his contributions. To judge from their choice of analytic objects, several generations of scholars writing in English considered punk’s social history and multimedia aesthetic to be largely Anglo-American in nature. This was perhaps understandable in 1978, when Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style: a book nearing its thirtieth printing whose enormous influence cannot be overstated, notwithstanding subsequent debates about the validity of subculture as an analytic category.⁶ Even there, Hebdige’s work pointed out past the borders of Britain and the United States proper, to the West Indies and Jamaica—the rapid and irreversible internationaliz...