Hamburg School: “L’Etat Et Moi” by Blumfeld: The State and Me

Nobody would describe the band Blumfeld as punk. Formally, they do not meet any of the criteria of amateurism, immediacy of anger and aggression. The compositions trained in the pop schema, lyrical to openly kitsch lyrics, the intellectuality and subtlety of their frontman and the bourgeois self-centeredness – all of this seems infinitely far removed from the fast, scrappy underground. And yet Blumfeld wrote punk history 30 years ago, or more precisely: the end of history.

In 1994, the album “L’Etat Et Moi” was released with the telling allusion to the famous sentence of the French Sun King, who is said to have said: “L’etat, c’est moi.” For him, the state and his person merged into one. In Blumfeld this became the artistic definition of the relationship between the individual and society, about “the state and me”. As a contrast, this was the highest expression of punk. He articulated this forced relationship as a shitty fact, resisted performatively or overcompensated nihilistically. Blumfeld, however, sang about the insight that the state is no longer a counterpart to be attacked, but rather a relationship to itself.

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»L’Etat Et Moi« was released almost exactly 30 years ago, at the end of August 1994. It was a time of musical self-discovery. Like the bipolar world order in 1989/90, familiar genres and expressions had collapsed. In their disorientation, an entire generation of musicians actually only had intellectualization as a refuge. What later became famous as the “Hamburg School” is largely nothing other than a new composition of “simple rock music,” as Tocotronic sang about, on a higher and not immediate level of reflection. Formally, the whole scene was unapologetically based on the musical awakening experience of Sonic Youth’s noise rock. In terms of content, however, the expression of social criticism at the height of the times was actually new territory.

“Authentic” punk only existed at the price of becoming a nostalgic relic. “Bullenschweine” and “Fuck the System” only appeared as reminiscences, such as in the EP of the same name by Die Sternen from 1992. The tendency was towards introspection: In 1995, the Aeronauts provided the swansong for political existence and Instead, they were “preferably looking for a girlfriend”; in the same year, Tocotronic wanted to be “part of a youth movement,” but in doing so they were more likely to express the suffering from their own indeterminacy, which became the core of their brand. Others like Huah! immediately oriented themselves towards Dadaism. Blumfeld, one of the formative bands of that early “Hamburg School”, obviously chose the path of poetry, which led their later works to hit songs.

But with “L’Etat Et Moi” they delivered an absolutely exceptional album in 1994. Two years after their debut “I-Machine” they presented a form of social reflection on the record that even surpassed the heights of the debates in left-wing social theory. The emergence of the New Left in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by Michel Foucault’s theoretical insight that power was not simply a state relationship of domination, but rather named the productive relationships that turned individuals into subjects. In doing so, he formulated a kind of new hope for political resistance among the 1968ers: Because if power is no longer central, but virtually everywhere, then there is no need for a revolution or conquest of the state, then resistance is inherent in the subject itself. We can make our own story.

The discovery of this productive power caused the state to “disappear” from theory and reality: subjectivization instead of ideological appeal, government of the self and governmentality instead of domination, discourse instead of ideology. What remained was an isolated individual harassed by unknown forces. Blumfeld were on the ground of this development. But before singer Jochen Distelmeyer later gave in to the kitsch of depression, unfulfilled love and empowerment, he sang angrily and with an almost cracking voice in the album-defining song “A Story of His Own”: “The state is not a dream, it is even in my kisses Condition that shapes me (…) and governs the world, more space than position. And so he organizes his disappearance by moving through me: through thoughts of stone, a wall of light, a sun of iron and a language of sorrow.

The state disappears into “a dispersion of innumerable particles which, like the splinters of a mirror, preserve the whole picture” and leaves the subject as “a state within a state in the first person.” Distelmeyer’s poetry initially indulges in the fantasy that disappearance could mean the freedom of the perfect individual: in the song “I – as it really was,” he as a subject wants to be one with the power, with the creating language – “and settled down, where I control myself, in the songs and in the sentences.” But revolving around yourself has its limits. In “A Story of His Own,” the singer articulates his anger against the social powerlessness that has “knocked out his dream” of being able to exist independently of society. He wants one own have history, but this “own history, from pure presence, collects and piles itself up around me.”

“Suddenly you feel claustrophobic,” it says in “Sing Sing,” which Distelmeyer doesn’t sing to the music, but speaks. The hope of liberated individuality turns back into bondage. Poetically and materialistically, Distelmeyer dissolves this connection, because “the fear you feel is the money you are missing, for the price you pay, for something that counts for you and makes you sure that you are there (where you belong)”. This is the sober conclusion of the hopes of those little cultural revolutionaries of the ’68, of whom 20 years later all that was left was the ideology that you could achieve anything if you invested yourself passionately enough. Distelmeyer sings darkly about this inherited promise of freedom from the non-conformist: “I wanted to give myself a name, not live in states, not in prisons. And built a tower instead of a state. Son of my parents and against it, something went wrong. Imposter’s career in wait, the tower fell over and became a wall.”

In the song “Superstarfighter” – for which the entire “Hamburg School” celebrities gathered as a choir for the common refrain line “And that’s what we’re about” – Distelmeyer then tells the episode of a separation: “When the storm was gone, you came to me and you said, come on, explain to me: there is less and less of yourself in the songs you play. That’s exactly right, I say, they’re just like I am.”

Blumfeld’s “L’Etat Et Moi” is not a concept album of great theoretical insight. Here not all suffering is simply projected onto the government, which leads the subject like a puppet. There are the pains of separation that make you feel like you’re out on bail; there’s bourgeois world-weariness, friendship, joy and sadness. Blumfeld reflect subjective experiences as the expression of the mediation of individual existence and state rule. And they defend themselves against the coercive relationship with their only means: with poetry, with games of words and meanings, countless references from Kristof Schreuf’s slogan “Everything is the enemy” to Hildegard Knef – and with increasing sadness.

30 years later, it’s hard to recognize Blumfeld’s album for the sensational record that it is. To us, the specific rebellion of “L’Etat Et Moi” seems just as irrelevant as the anachronistic protest songs and punk numbers, because the development of “power” has long since moved on. In the 1990s, the unease once again culminated in criticism of consumption and alienation. People watched “The Matrix” and “Fight Club,” but at the same time had to save themselves as an ego group from the dismantling of the welfare state. And for some time now they have been caught in a seemingly endless loop of eternal nostalgic recurrence of the same thing, which has erased all specificity of artistic expression in the equivalence of mere forms. It has perhaps become impossible to strive for artistic expression with the same radicalism as Blumfeld did back then.

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