Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity (Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Soundtracking GermanyPopular Music and National IdentityBy Melanie SchillerRowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.Copyright © 2018 Melanie SchillerAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78660-622-8ContentsAcknowledgments: Danke!, vii, Introduction: Made in Germany, 1, 1 The Natives of Trizonesia: Germanness without a Nation, 39, 2 The Sound of Uncanny Silence: Beat, the Silent Nation, and International Imaginaries, 85, 3 Fun Fun Fun on the Autobahn: Kraftwerk and the Open-Ended Narrative of the Nation, 123, 4 Hitler on the Dance Floor: Queering the Nation, 147, 5 Most German of the Arts? Techno and the Celebration of the Nation, 181, Conclusion: Another Time of Writing, 221, Bibliography, 235, Index, 263, CHAPTER 1The Natives of TrizonesiaGermanness without a Nation"Nothing connects us all, but imagined sound." Benedict Anderson states in his celebration of unisonality in collectively singing the national anthem, "People wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody. ... If we are aware that others are singing these songs precisely when and as we are, we have no idea who they may be, or even where, out of earshot, they are singing." It is in this simultaneity of singing the anthem, Anderson argues, that the nation is manifested in the imagination of the people, across homogenous, empty time. John Connell and Chris Gibson also describe the national anthem as "the culmination of the role of music in constructions of national identity ... the embodiment of nation in song." However, both of these accounts of national identification through music obviously presuppose an existing nation as well as a representative anthem. But how can music play a role in the creation of imagined nationhood? How can the collective experience of singing rhetorically and affectively bring about the very notion of national belonging? What if the "embodiment of nation" is a popular Schlager song, celebrating a nation that does not yet exist? In the words of Etienne Balibar, "What makes a nation a 'community'?" Is the collective musical celebration of the nation temporally as "homogeneous and empty," as Anderson claims, or does it not rather imply multiple (potentially conflicting) imagined histories? Finally, what if we take Jacques Attali's famous claim of music predicting the future into account when analyzing a Schlager song as the "national anthem" of postwar Germany?As outlined in the introduction, the central aim of this study is to examine the interrelations of popular music, national identity, and postwar Germanness. In order to pursue this inquiry, I will begin by illuminating how popular music (in this case, Schlager) assumes a pivotal role in the performative (re)imagination of the West German national people after "zero hour," and is fundamental to the narrative construction of what will become the Federal Republic. I want to begin my tracking of German national identity as it is performed in and through popular music by analyzing how the German people — after unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945, and subsequent disintegration into four occupational zones — reconfigured national belonging musically. In a time and place where the direct consequences of extreme nationalist ideology were more tangible than ever in the rubble of a physically and spiritually destroyed nation that had to face its own guilt, and when previously clearly defined terms of identification and national belonging had become obsolete, traumatized Germany had to reconfigure itself as an imagined community. This rethinking, reimagining, reperforming, renarrating of Germanness was initially not framed in the institution of a nation-state, as the Allied forces had taken over the country and divided it into four administrative sectors. Yet, as I will show, the people musically reproduced national imaginaries based on collective narratives.These musical national narratives, as I will analyze in deta