Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity by Melanie Schiller (review)

The subfield of German popular music studies continues to evolve in intriguing directions. Melanie Schiller's Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity provides an excellent addition to this field, as it places questions of national identity at the center of analyses of German popular music. In her monograph, Schiller argues effectively for an account of Germanness and national identity as the "missing middle ground" (5) between pop music research that focuses excessively on either local or transnational/global themes. Providing a historical sweep from the late 1940s to the 2000s, the book is one of the few academic studies on German popular music to bridge multiple decades and periods. Soundtracking Germany will thus be of interest to scholars of both the Cold War and post-1989 eras. Two edited collections, German Pop Music: A Companion and Perspectives on German Popular Music, are comparable examples of topics and research in this direction. Appropriately, Schiller contributed an abridged version of her fifth chapter to the latter volume.

Despite this broad scope, a compelling narrative thread is maintained across Soundtracking Germany. The introduction and five chapters are similarly structured around close readings of individual songs that address national identity in original ways, while including accounts of the respective cultural, political, and musical contexts. The introduction provides the theoretical frame for these interpretations. Schiller presents a revised account primarily of Homi Bhabha's theory of the nation and narration, proposing three temporal modes in the exploration of German popular music. These include the metaphoric and metonymic modes, as well as Schiller's original theory of a melancholic mode of national identity. A perpetual postwar condition, the melancholic mode results from, as effectively summarized in the book, "the impossibility of remembering/forgetting the past, which is always already constitutive to the national present" (224). In the introduction, Schiller first applies these ideas to the Teutonic rock band Rammstein, as the most commercially successful representation of "Germanness" abroad. Although Rammstein has become one of the usual suspects encountered in German popular music studies, Schiller provides an innovative interpretation of the band through a close reading of their 2011 song "Mein Land."

Following the introduction, the song selections in the main chapters represent five rearticulations of (West) German identity, beginning with a popular 1948 Schlager tune about the "natives of Trizonesia," performed by Karl Berbuer, and closing with the 2004 trance-pop "Wir sind Wir" by singer Peter Heppner and DJ-star Paul van Dyk. In the selection of songs, each chapter revolves around a prominent musical genre and relevant media from the era. The five chapters thus cover Schlager, beat, Krautrock, Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), and techno/trance. In chapter 1, Berbuer's Schlager and Carnival (Fasching) in postwar Cologne represent the coalescing of the three occupation zones (Trizonesia) in a new West German identity. Schiller then pairs beat music and 1960s television in chapter 2, analyzing the indirect silencing of German identity in the live performance of "Poor Boy" by the Lords on the show Beat Club. In the third chapter, Kraftwerk's Autobahn becomes the key example, with particular attention given to the album's visual art and car culture in the context of 1970s Krautrock. In chapter 4, Schiller then turns to DAF's "Der Mussolini" (1981), considering postpunk and queer aesthetics as challenging multiple national taboos, while in the final chapter, the music video for "Wir sind Wir" allows for a close reading of German history from the perspective of 2004. The music video features multiple scenes and historical moments from across the Cold War, including the 1954 World Cup and the reunification of 1989, with Peter Heppner inserted into the scenes as a time-traveling reporter.

Across the chapters of Soundtracking Germany, Schiller consistently provides careful historical analysis and thoughtful interpretations of these representative songs. While analyzing just one song per chapter across such an extended history may seem challenging, Schiller very successfully relates the details of each song to...