Kitsch: When a longing for peace becomes hits

Cheers to the music chroniclers of the world! Praise be to those tireless people who, year in and year out, have meticulously put down hit lists on paper in order to make them accessible to the world public via the web today! They remind us, for example, of the “Schlagerrallye”, which went on air 50 years ago, one of the most unusual listener charts in German radio history, which ran until spring 1995 – first on WDR 2, then on WDR 1, in whose catchment area there were over 20 Millions of people live.

Even the name was misleading. The word “Schlager” was used in the same way that “Bravo” used it until the early 1970s: as a synonym for “Hit”. But that wasn’t exactly what was intended. A rotating jury of listeners, who met once a month to fight their way through dozens of singles, often chose pieces from the more upscale rock and pop corner as new introductions. These could even be B-sides or re-releases of oldies (Beatles or Doors).

So you were spared some of the horrors in the sales charts (Goombay Dance Band, Gottlieb Wendelhals, Modern Talking). Instead, West German bands like Flaming Bess (“Dance of the Gods”) and Streetmark (“Lovers”) became known beyond their hometown of Düsseldorf – their best placements were 2nd place each. And some Krautrock formations, which developed more pleasing sounds as they got older, like Wallenstein from Mönchengladbach (“Charline” and “Don’t let it be”, both number 1), thus experienced their second commercial spring.

But nothing prepared you for the creative meltdown that happened in 1981/82. While England celebrated pop and showed the world what synthesizers could achieve, German-speaking countries once again indulged in scenarios of doom, this time in the form of feared environmental and nuclear catastrophes: “When lightning divides the sky, thunder crashes on top, then you finally know what it means when nature awakens. When the tree then breaks and the water rises, the stream becomes a big river and the pasture becomes a lake where the cattle have to drown. The Cologne rock band Acapulco Gold made it into this kind of biblical forest-and-meadow kitsch the top 3 of the listener charts. The crucial question remained unanswered: Why is a song about the flood called “Sodom and Gomorrah”?

Grobschnitt, on the other hand, has read too much Eichendorff: “The day awakens and the night dies quietly. The first breath still tastes cold. We stand here and the power stands over there. The morning air still smells of the forest. We want to live.« The last line is repeated 15 times throughout the song. At some point children’s choirs start. No song was more successful in the hit rally in 1982.

While in Grobschnitt “10,000 people who don’t want it anymore” oppose the so-called power, the Austrian Georg Danzer doesn’t do it among “four billion people, four billion dreams that you laugh at.” This is followed by an appeal to those in power: “Finally give us peace! Finally give us peace! Finally give us peace! Peace for the world!” Later there is also talk of God. So much pathos was received by the listeners – Danzer was at number 1 for weeks.

This strange mixture of fear and desire for the apocalypse could also be found in the GDR. Karat also made it to the top of the hit rally with the following lines: »Will there only be dust and stone burned out on earth all the time? No God will help us to preserve our world.” This “Blue Planet” orbited the tumor.

In the midst of such linguistic quagmires, the Cologne rock band BAP was also able to thrive. With her, provinciality was made part of the program. The “Veedel” (district) had to serve as an alternative to the evil, cold world outside. And the audience, practiced in collective cuddling, moved even closer together during “Verdamp lang her” and “Kristallnaach”. The two songs stayed in the WDR 2 charts for a total of 49 weeks. The hit rally also helped BAP achieve a nationwide breakthrough.

So in the end the name of the show turned out to be true. The bands mentioned may claim to produce rock and pop, but in reality they only delivered hits – emotional poetry that is better not examined so thoroughly for its intellectual content.

At this point one could calmly close the music archives. Just a few years later, the spooky soundtrack that accompanied the peace and apocalypse activists in the early 80s seemed just as out of date as the activists themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the INF disarmament treaty between the USSR and the USA in 1987 , they also sealed the fate of the peace movement.

But not that of German sentimentality. Teutonic pacifism was just a gut feeling that the journalist Wolfgang Pohrt perceived as a reference to its opposite as early as 1984, “as a sure indication of growing belligerence,” because where political attitudes are purely a matter of feeling, it is easy to change camps. Which is what many did in the late 90s.

Feelings just change. People had feared war in their youth, but now they supported it. An emotional “Never again Auschwitz” (Joschka Fischer) had to suffice as a justification for German participation in NATO air strikes against Serbia in 1999. The false reports about Serbian actions in Kosovo were part of the federal government’s agenda. The mind remained switched off.

The Germanic sentimentality – that unpleasant mixture of sentimentality and complacency – also manifests itself in other fields. Anyone who follows the reports about the nationwide demonstrations against right-wing extremism made a irritating observation: behind the event, the reason disappears – as if one were only reporting on the fans and their banners after a Bundesliga game. The number of participants and their well-being seem to be more important than the question of what the fight against right-wing extremism should look like politically.

Unfortunately, the demonstrators themselves also contribute to this impression. At a major “Never again is now” event in Trier at the end of January, the former mayor and ex-state secretary Klaus Jensen (SPD) was inspired to shout into the crowd a suggestive “Do you want (…)?”, “Do you want (…)?” )?”, “Do you want to (…)?”, to which she replied with an enthusiastic “No!”, “No!”, “No!” Then you cringed and thought you were in different times. Only the people shouting along didn’t notice that they were delivering a lesson in mass psychology – that’s exactly what the right-wingers are accused of. It also fits that social networks are full of posters with demo photos whose only message is: “I was there!”

This narcissism, however, feels all too familiar. Even back then, in the early 80s, the reporting on the peace demonstrations amounted to impressive numbers and impressed demonstrators who proudly reported that they had been part of a mega event (of course they put it differently, more like Grobschnitt/Georg-Danzer- moderate). The rest of the story is known. The demonstrations had no consequences; The “retrofitting” began. But that’s just how it is when mental clarity falls by the wayside because of all the big feelings.

www.hessencharts.de/wdr/schlagerrallye.htm