Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk ed. by Mirko M. Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus Shahan (review)

This wide-ranging yet focused collection makes good use of its multivalent title. Anyone even casually familiar with punk music will likely know the Sex Pistols’ 1977 song “God Save the Queen” and its howling coda proclaiming “no future.” The authors here lay out ways that German punk’s primordial urge to destroy evoked the Sex Pistols’ mantra to reject the future. At the same time, several contributions highlight the ways that German punks drew from certain aspects of the past and present and sometimes did envision a better future, at least a different one than most Germans imagined. Perhaps fittingly, as one essay describes, it was fellow French and American punks who identified Germany as inspiration for the future.

Mirko Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus Shahan, who themselves boast an impressive body of work on punk and related aesthetics, have assembled a thoughtful collection of scholars representing well the interdisciplinary nature of punk studies, sound studies, and German studies. Most hail from German or German studies departments, but there is also here a historian, musicologist, and American studies scholar. They draw from various cultural studies theories that help us understand the ways in which punks made meaningful real and symbolic actions. As is common in punk scholarship, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) serves as touchstone. While the editors provide a succinct introduction to German punk, they rightly emphasize in their subtitle that they are studying multiple punk cultures in Germany. Their introduction nevertheless notes two common themes that flow through the eight topical essays. First, most authors address “the radical transnationality of punk’s history” (7), showing how German punks were often doing the same things punks were doing elsewhere: using détournement to challenge existing social and consumption regimes, opting out of society (if briefly) through DIY (do it yourself) action, imagining potential political options that did not fit with conservative or leftist visions, getting into trouble with authorities, and making lots of noise. Second, many of these pieces illustrate “how paradigmatically German punk traced the global fissures effaced by the construction of two Germanies in the postwar period” (4). So, acting as good local studies, these pieces are uniquely representative of punk and other political-cultural pressures, mainly during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The book’s three sections—“Punk Spaces,” “Performative Politics,” and “Against Fascism”—serve more as recurring themes than concrete organizational structure. For example, Dennis Borghardt’s study of punk lyrics in the first section deftly uses spatial analysis to describe Berlin punks’ relationship with their city, sometimes in ways that challenged fascist politics. Mirko Hall’s study of French postpunk visions of Berlin in the third section also reveals the ways that French musicians particularly imagined Berlin as punk space and source of inspiration. And Cyrus Shahan’s analysis of the group DAF’s mixture of sex and technology could also be described as a study of performative politics. I hasten to add that this observation is a testament to the effective synthesis of this collection, not a critique of its organization!

The individual essays raise fascinating points about German punk, often via some unique comparisons. Matthew Saikarskie, for instance, shows convincingly that turn of the twentieth-century “Wandervögel” groups and punks both sought action, on their own terms, to fight the boredom of capitalism. Melanie Eis and Fabian Eckert draw from Andreas Huyssen’s work on the 1979 TV miniseries Holocaust to demonstrate ways that punk engaged in West German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Karen Fournier offers one of the most provocative arguments in the book, maintaining that British punks’ use of the swastika served, above all, as a boundary between “insiders” and “outsiders,” the latter being “members of the dominant class, whose position obscures any other possible reading” of the swastika’s significance (106). She argues that the swastika became...