Indie-Pop: Hamburg School: Please don’t be stupid!

The text is my party,” sang Kristof Schreuf, then 26 years old, in 1989 with his band Kolossale Jugend. The songs of this quartet were something completely new at the time, in the truest sense of the word unheard of: not only that the band wrote lyrics in German – this was no longer done on principle after the NDW was sold out, with exceptions in the area of ​​German punk – but also how she texted in German. Their first single was released in 1988. It was called “No Pat on the Shoulder” and was the first official single from the new label “L’Age D’Or”, which Chris Rautenkranz and Pascal Fuhlbrügge had founded. They had previously organized a series of parties under this name with new bands from Hamburg and the surrounding area. Fuhlbrügge also played guitar with Kolossale Jugend.

This gave Hamburg new music and a second indie label, after Alfred Hilsberg had readjusted German underground music almost ten years earlier with “ZickZack”. Another was created with “Buback Tonträger”, founded by members of the Golden Lemons. Even before Kolossale Jugend, Hilsberg released “Stand rotes Madrid” in 1986, Cpt.’s debut album. Kirk &. with expressionist texts in German-English. Schreuf’s texts with the Kolossale Jugend were enigmatic, restless, surprisingly rhythmic despite their angularity, but at the same time ambiguous, rousing and political.

What was an exception in Hamburg in 1989 became the rule five years later: The reason for this was the so-called Hamburg School, to which no one really wanted to be part of – especially not unironically. In addition to the Kolossale Jugend, bands such as Tocotronic, Die Sternen, Goldene Lemons, Blumfeld and Die Braut haut aufs Augen were considered the spearhead of the scene. The term, which suggests a proximity to the Marxist Frankfurt School of Horkheimer and Adorno, was first used in a Bielefeld fanzine and then popularized by Thomas Groß, the pop editor of Taz at the time. “Pop music can’t be stupid!” was an advertising slogan from “L’Age D’or”. However, by the beginning of the 2000s at the latest, the hype surrounding the movement had already dissipated. Nevertheless, she left her mark – for better or for worse.

This is shown by a book by the literary scholar and publisher Jonas Engelmann that was recently published by Ventil Verlag in Mainz and is entitled “The text is my party”. In it, the author links his own and others’ biographical memories with historical classifications and theoretical considerations. The original tones of the protagonists at the time such as Jochen Distelmeyer (Blumfeld), Bernd Begemann, Bernadette La Hengst (Die Braut haut ins Augen), Christiane Rösinger (Lassie Singers), Carol von Rautenkranz, Jan Müller (Tocotronic.) are particularly exciting to read ) and many more. Engelmann drew the material used from a wealth of sources and brought it together in the style of an oral history. The result is less a stringent chronicle of the Hamburg School than a diverse, sometimes contradictory mosaic.

In a total of 15 sub-chapters, Engelmann examines various historical paths of the Hamburg School: About German punk he comes to the Fast Worldwide label from Frank Werner from Bad Salzuflen (near Bielefeld) to talk about its founder Frank Werner, which – similar to the colossals Youth – In the mid-1980s with bands like Now!, Die Bienenjäger (predecessor band to Blumfeld) and Der Fremde, they were already publishing Hamburg School music before the Hamburg School even existed. In the course of the book, Engelmann also discusses aspects such as the role of the media, which contributed significantly to the creation of myths surrounding the scene, Hamburg as the culmination of the scene and the political demands of its protagonists.

The blatant underrepresentation of women within the scene is also discussed – which rightly raises the question of whether there were actually so few women in the scene, or whether they simply received less attention. In this case, neither speaks for the scene, which, with male protagonists like Dirk von Lowtzow (Tocotronic), Jochen Distelmeyer or Frank Spilker ( Sternen), had actually implicitly taken up the cause of counteracting old gender stereotypes and the chauvinistic-patriarchal ones To break through the structures of your own parents’ generation.

Engelmann knowledgeably guides you through the various chapters of the book and once again proves himself to be an expert on absurdities. The book emphasizes: The Hamburg School may be dead as a social context – its music, the questions it raises and, last but not least, the interest in it are far from being dead.

Jonas Engelmann: The text is my party. A history of the Hamburg School. Valve, 246 pages, €25.

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