,,Das ist unsere Party“. HipHop in der DDR by Leonard Schmieding (review)

Now a book, Leonard Schmieding’s award-winning dissertation ,,Das ist unsere Party“. HipHop in der DDR makes valuable contributions to hip hop studies, to East German cultural studies, and to the study of cultural globalization as well. Drawing upon original archival research and interviews with cultural practitioners, and performing close readings of selected primary texts, Schmieding shows just how complicated the politics of hip hop’s arrival in the GDR, its reception by cultural gate-keepers, and its appropriation by young people really were. At stake is not just what GDR hip hop’s practitioners, interlocutors, censors, and audiences did, but how and why hip hop came to mean anything to anybody in East Germany in the first place.

Referring to Rose, Hebdige, Hall, Gilroy, and others, Schmieding’s introduction assesses the state of hip hop studies and places his own work within the broader historiography of Cold War German culture. Here he advances three principal claims: first, that both young and old East Germans’ view of hip hop as specifically African-American aided its arrival in the GDR; second, that in state officials’ diverse assessments of its political possibilities, hip hop did not retain a self-identical, unitary character; and third, that culture politicians’ attempts to manage hip hop failed so badly that GDR hip hop is better thought of as a “Phänomen des Zerfalls im Staatssozialismus” (24) than as a cultural import seamlessly assimilated, and then politically neutralized, by an omnipotent and univocal SED State.

Schmieding explores the effect of East Germans’ essentializing views of African-American culture on hip hop’s reception most carefully in his book’s first section, which deals primarily with the American feature film Beat Street (1984) and its reception in the GDR. He focuses on textual and contextual elements that will be familiar to hip hop scholars and fans, but shows how this film was a visual and sonic archive that East German youths (among others) drew upon to shape their own hip hop practices. In this sense, Beat Street “erklärt[e] die Hip Hop Kultur” (40). But the film also had a political function; as Schmieding writes, Beat Street was the perfect mixture of “Unterhaltungsfilm” and “Problemfilm” and that meant that the Hauptverwaltung Film, charged with overseeing the production and distribution of films, might achieve two main goals by screening it: entertaining audiences and reinforcing a socialist critique of (American, capitalist) society. His analysis of SED referees’ assessments shows that Beat Street was fast-tracked for release and tendentiously interpreted by professional critics and party officials alike through a “problematische Verknüpfung von schwarzer Kultur und Authentizität” (65) that, as Timothy S. Brown, Michael Rauhut, Kira Thurman, and Schmieding himself have observed, had long defined African-Americans in the East German public sphere. Official approval hardly dampened young audiences’ interest in seeing the film. Attendance was excellent into 1986 and beyond, as Beat Street became a mainstay for programmers.

As young people inspired by the film organized their own dance competitions, culture politicians, educators, and critics had to decide how homegrown hip hop would be interpreted, and whether it would be incorporated into or excluded—like punk—from cultural programming. Could breakdancing, for instance, be a form of “Selbstverwirklichung” entirely commensurate with life in a socialist society? To access state responses to hip hop, Schmieding first examines the sophisticated theoretical perspective developed by theater scholar Erhard Ertel, who drew upon Lenin’s concept of a “second culture” to take hip hop’s measure against an assessment of U. S. economic decline bordering on the apocalyptic, while eliding much of American hip hop’s thematic content (85). Accounts like Ertel’s fed into larger-order initiatives toward what Schmieding calls cultural “Disziplinierung”: efforts by DVP police officers, FDJ authorities, Ministry for Culture deputies, and even Stasi officers to get East Germany’s nascent hip hop performances (and especially breakdancing) “off the street” and into officially...