Made in Germany

Studies in Popular Music

Oliver Seibt, Martin Ringsmut, David-Emil Wickström, Oliver Seibt, Martin Ringsmut, David-Emil Wickström

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351200776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Made in Germany: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary German popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of German music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Germany and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Germany, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Historical Spotlights; Globally German; Also "Made in Germany"; Explicitly German; and Reluctantly German.

Part I

Historical Spotlights

Just as Rammstein’s video “Deutschland” shows different episodes from Germany’s history, the first part of this volume gathers four perspectives on German popular music history: chronologically ordered, the chapters deal with different aspects of German popular music. As the reader progresses through this section, it becomes evident not only that the notion of Germanness has its complexities, but that the German history spotlighted through these four chapters is also a history of different German nation-states.

Starting in the aftermath of World War I Carolin Stahrenberg’s chapter centers around one of the most influential German popular music groups during the time of the Weimar Republic: The Comedian Harmonists. Stahrenberg traces the transnational trajectories of the Harmonists while situating them in the context of Berlin of the 1920s that she portrays as a cosmopolitan city. This paves the way for a German popular culture that from its very beginning was a product of transnational networks and transcultural processes of migration, mediation and exchange.

Jumping forward to 1933, when the National Socialist German Workers’ Party NSDAP came to power, Jens Gerrit Papenburg’s chapter explores sound technologies and the use of public address systems in Nazi Germany. Especially the sound of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin provides an entry point for Papenburg’s analysis of the entangled co-development of ever more powerful sound technologies and the culture of masses cultivated by the Nazi regime. Papenburg’s chapter uncovers the counter-intuitive dominance of soft and quiet sounds during the Nazi period. He consequently shows how these soft sounds amplified through new sound technologies were employed to produce a sense of normality in Nazi Germany.

Michael Rauhut gives an overview of the emergence of rock and blues in the GDR. Following the Russian occupation and the subsequent installation of a one-party socialist system, he discusses an America-derived cultural expression in a nation from the opposite block of the cold war. Along the way, Rauhut’s detailed historical narrative offers insights into the inner workings of the GDR’s cultural policies and its regulatory machinery that not only impacted on rock and blues musicians but on all aspects of musical production.

Finally, Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer offers a personal and first-hand account of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent German reunification. Her chapter explores what was probably the most significant moment in recent German history and how it impacted on music and musicians in this revolutionary time. Focusing on her own experiences as a musician, her account adds a personal dimension to the history of popular musical in the GDR.

Together, the chapters cover over 70 years of German history, spotlighting popular music from the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, Post-War East Germany and Reunified Germany.

1

Transnational Networks and Intermedial Interfaces in German Popular Music, 1900–1939

Carolin Stahrenberg

As early as 1900, popular music in Germany was tightly interwoven with transnational networks, linking European capital cities like Paris, Vienna and London. It even crossed the ocean to New York or Buenos Aires. The rapid growth of industrial production and music distribution meant that the latest sounds from abroad crossed the borders of the national state and were translated for a German speaking public, and popular German tunes were transferred to other countries and reached an international audience (see Lange 2014, Frey 2014, Scott 2014, Becker 2013, Clarke 2004 and Lotz 2007). Songs were popularized via different media channels, first mainly through sheet music, military and dance band performances and popular musical theatre. Later gramophone records captured the market. In the late 1920s, an elaborated intermedial network had been established, synthesizing marketing strategies, performance cultures, record production and public perception (Stahrenberg and Grosch 2014).

Not only western models were important for German popular culture in the 1920s. Besides the cross-cultural network of entertainment capitals, people from eastern Europe had an enormous influence on early German popular music production: In great numbers talented and proficient musicians emigrated from Russia, Poland and other East European states, rapidly adopting the latest musical styles and – many of them being conservatory trained –, merging it with their musical background. Dance band leaders like Dajos Béla,¹ Edith Lorand, Paul Godwin² and many more, all proficient violin virtuosos, made names for themselves during the Weimar republic and forged the sound of popular Schlager music. Schlager was rediscovered in the 1990s, notably by singer Max Raabe and his Palastorchester, and was marketed as a typical “German” music phenomenon, for example by the Goethe Institut in its series “Deutsche handverlesen” (Hand-picked Germans) (Goethe-Institut e.V. 2009). “The Germans love it. Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester are a German pop-phenomenon – but, different from Kraftwerk or Rammstein, looking back into history.” (Ibid.)

But how “German” has this “German pop-phenomenon” (ibid.) of the Weimar republic really been? Through focusing on transnational connections, I will show German (and especially Berlin) culture of the Weimar period (and forerunners from 1900) as a transcultural phenomenon, presenting the beginning of a German popular music framework beyond national ideologies. First, I will concentrate on the beginning of the twentieth century and trace the way of one popular song, Victor Hollaenders “Schaukellied” (Swing song), from a Berlin revue through different places to the Ziegfeld follies in New York. The term Schlager will also be discussed. Then, I will depict the Prussian capital in the 1920s as a place of international cultural exchange and a melting pot. Finally, I will take a closer look at transnational and intermedial aspects of the popular music group Comedian Harmonists, reaching out to the 1930s and the end of the Weimar period.

Swinging Round the World in 1905 – Victor Hollaender’s “Schaukellied” in an International Perspective

In 1905 a Jahresrevue (annual revue) with the title Auf ins Metropol (Let’s go to the Metropol) was staged at the Berlin Metropoltheater. The genre of the revue de fin d’année (year-end revue), linking songs, dance numbers, comic scenes, and tableaux vivantes (living pictures), which addressed events from the year before, derived from Paris, where it had been produced since the second half of the nineteenth century (see Völmecke 1997). Like many French concepts, it came to Berlin after it had been successfully established in Parisian cultural life. In Berlin, this genre started in the 1890s, with revues, extravaganzas, and local operettas by composers like Paul Lincke (who had performed at the Parisian Folies Bergère before staging operettas at the Berlin Apollotheater), Walter Kollo, and Victor Hollaender. The latter was the main composer of the Metropoltheater and, with lyricist Julius Freund, he authored the year-end revues at this theatre. He also scored some hit songs (Schlager) out of its musical material.

The German term Schlager has different meanings relating to the historical context of its use. Often it is attributed only to popular songs after 1950, but the word was used long before then: thought to have originated in Austria in the nineteenth century, it was said to have been named for a well-selling product and was transferred to a musical sphere to indicate popular tunes, such as those of the Viennese Strauß family, as early as 1867 (see Linke 1987, 204). But already before, in 1845, it was labeled as a term from theater jargon, from the “Coulissen- und Statistensprache” (Schindler 1845, 2), as a reviewer noted in the review of a play. The first reference of the term Schlager in a musical context that I have been able to trace can be found in a review of a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in Vienna, 1843, when the unnamed reviewer complained about the loss of Schlager-effects in the performance, because of the translation from Italian to German (Sfd. 1843, 3).³ Since 1860, then, the term was used more broadly to name a popular song or Couplet (Anonymous 1860, 1).⁴ But only in the 1890s had Schlager finally been established as a generic term and found its way into the (sub)title of compositions (Hofmeister 1894, 59).⁵ Thus, at the turn of the century, Schlager meant a hit song, well-known and fast-selling, and the dramaturgy of popular musical theater was attuned accordingly to place those hit numbers (Grosch 2009). It became the main goal of theater composers and authors to score a hit song, which would sell beyond the limits of the theater performance.

In 1905, Hollaender and Freund had been lucky to score such a Schlager with a slow waltz named “Schaukellied,” which had been part of the Revue Auf ins Metropol. Within the revue, it underscored a number in which ballet girls sat on oversized swings and flew towards the audience during the performance. Friedrich Hollaender, Victor’s son and a composer and lyricist himself, described in his memoirs the erotic consequence of this staging idea: “One sees under the swinging skirts of the ballet girls.” (Hollaender 2001, 66). Julius Freund’s lyrics played with this stage idea, mentioning the pink-colored garters of the girls revealed by the swing – also a popular icon of erotic postcards at the turn of the century (see Becker 2013, 18).

The song was published in sheet music form the same year (Hollaender 1905a; Hofmeister 1905, 647, 650, 651), and other recordings were also made. Singer Max Steidl recorded the song in 1905 with composer Victor Hollaender himself conducting the orchestra of the Metropoltheater (Hollaender 1905c). Tenor Oscar Braun recorded it for Odeon (Braun 1905),⁶ and a military band conducted by Anton Kutschera recorded the song in Vienna in 1906 (K.u.k. Infanterie-Regiment 51 1906)⁷ – just after the former Berlin revue was transferred to the Austrian capital, where it was staged with a “localized” (Anonymous 1905a, 3) libretto in Danzer’s Orpheum, a well-known entertainment venue in Vienna. Of course, the show had a new title here, in keeping with the changed situation: Auf ins Orpheum! (Anonymous 1905a, 7).⁸ Even the then famous art whistler Guido Gialdini,⁹ who performed in variety shows, recorded the song in 1905, indicating the transfer from the revue format to other theatrical productions (Gialdini (1905)). This fact is further supported by sources locating the song as an entr’acte in other revues, operettas or farces (Anonymous 1906, 10; Anonymous 1907a, 4) or as one number in anniversary performances (Anonymous 1907b, 6).

The “Schaukellied” was not only transferred to Vienna, it was quite popular in Britain, too: Chappell London published it as sheet music in the same year, 1905, under the title “Swing song” (Hollaender 1905b). It also was adopted in the USA by Florenz Ziegfeld in his Follies 1910. According to a sheet music cover (Hollaender and Macdonald 1905) and a review in The New York Times, the stage design was similar to the Berlin production: “The swings with their human freight flew to and fro over the auditorium and the heads of star-gazers, while the girls by a series of cords manipulated a chime of melodious silver bells.” (New York Times, 21 June 1910, cit. Ommen van der Merwe 2009, 45). Not only the song, but the whole revue staging was acquired by the theater managers and transferred to the US market.

Thus, an international dimension of popular music enterprise had already unfolded before the Great War, comprising sheet music, artists, and complete theater numbers. Popular music in Germany was adapting, influencing, and competing with international forms of popular song on an aesthetic level, and was part of an international management system. As tunes that first appeared in Germany were transferred to international markets, songs from abroad were sung, translated, arranged, and adapted in Germany – it was a truly transnational phenomenon from the beginning.

Meeting Place or Melting Pot? Berlin as a Center and Crossing

“Live in Berlin. People from all over the world meet here” (Anonymous 2010) – that’s how the German capital characterized itself on its official homepage in the year 2010. Indeed, even before the rapid growth of the city in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Berlin had been a magnet for foreigners. The immigration of Lutherans and Calvinists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was followed by the admission of the French-speaking Huguenots who had a significant influence on Berlin’s cultural life. Their acculturation-process changed the everyday life of the Prussian capital already during the eighteenth century: The first public garden bars were opened by Réfugiés around 1750 close to the Brandenburg Gate, leading to Café concert-like entertainment venues, the Sommergärten (summer gardens). French crafts such as the silk industry, goldsmithing, and watchmaking moved into the city, and the inhabitants of Berlin learned to appreciate French food and culture (Escher 1987). In the twentieth century Berlin still was, at least in the elitist Berlin West, considered to be Francophile, and the cultural life found itself in a contradictory relationship of exchange and demarcation to the competing metropolis of Paris (Metken 1979). Kurt Tucholsky reported news from the French capital in Berlin newspapers, and magazines observed the developments in Paris fashion. The French chanteuse and revue star Mistinguett toured Berlin (Bertaux 1987). But it was not only the theatrical revue that formed popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century; the novel French art form of cabaret had already reached Berlin at the turn of the century, and still after the Great War cabaret was based on the tradition of Montmartre. A lot of popular songs were created on the theatrical stage, some after French models, either in operetta, revue, varieté, or cabaret performances (see Stahrenberg ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: DEUTSCHLAND! – Echt jetzt?: German Popular Music’s Complicated Relationship with German Identity
• Rocking the Academy? Two Cold-War Careers and the Emergence of Popular Music Studies and Higher Popular Music Education in Germany: An Interview with Peter Wicke and Udo Dahmen
• Part I Historical Spotlights
• Part II Globally German
• Part III Also “Made in Germany”
• Part IV Explicitly German
• Part V Reluctantly German
• Standing up against Discrimination and Exclusion: An Interview with Kutlu Yurtseven (Microphone Mafia)
• Further Reading
• Index