Literature – magazine “Drecksack”: Said and felt

Since November 2010, despite all the gentrification, the “Drecksack” has been published every three months in newspaper format in Berlin-Friedrichshain, with the subtitle “Readable Journal for Literature”. That alone is an editorial masterpiece; Literary magazines have been dying faster than barflies since time immemorial. How editor Florian Günther manages this remains his secret. The 58th edition of “Drecksacks” is now available. It is the fourth special issue or themed issue, this time it is about music. The previous ones dealt with the legendary poets and writers Jörg Fauser and Charles Bukowski as well as with prison.

The “dirtbag” is said to have been helped by none other than the godfather of the cerebral Prenzelbergosaurus, Sir Bert Papenfuß, who died in 2023. But he and Günther couldn’t agree on a title or content, and so there was a double edition with a reversible cover: at the front the magazine was called “Drecksack” and at the back it was called the pretty worker-friendly “Konnektör” (or vice versa). “Someone once called it gutter stuff that we print,” Günther was quoted as saying. Yes, excellent! When I was once asked by Deutschlandfunk about the publication of a volume of my short stories, I replied that it was about “gutter philosophy.” Yes, I said it and felt it. Because it is not only in subcultural movements that it is crucial to the war that you write down and define your own history.

Nevertheless, Günther’s magazine is printed and folded in exquisite quality, not stapled – and right in the middle of life. This is not exactly the television world of the others, who are consumed by fears and find everything “foreign” and “un-German”. Such prejudices usually arise from an overused, masochistically freely chosen amount of perseverance. Can the new “scumbag” heal such deep-seated mental and self-inflicted wounds?

Everything should be better with music. And music, as this issue makes clear, is also noise and silence. The longest text is the first, it comes from Christian “Flake” Lorenz, keyboardist for Rammstein and is called “My better half”. The paragraphs start with words like “my,” “none,” “anyway,” “me,” and “but,” and then there are no more paragraphs for pages.

This text is entertaining, but towards the end it becomes a bit too technical. The fact that the author notices and admits this is a trick, but it doesn’t make reading any easier. He looks at the strange relationship between musicians and their instruments. Footballers also kiss trophies and nibble on medals: “Musicians are sometimes not easy people. Maybe they were like that before and that’s why they became musicians. It’s like the egg and the hen,” speculates Lorenz. His band continues to be successful with its deafeningly pompous peasant theater, which parodies operas and operettas and juggles with German romanticism as well as bloodthirsty fairy tales. Her fans don’t seem to care about the allegations that hit the press against their singer Till Lindemann in 2023.

The new »Drecksack« brings together other East German musicians such as Max Baum (A Thousand Tons of Fruit), Alexander Krohn (Britannia Theater) and Olaf Tost (The Others). “The GDR is not like you describe it,” Günther never heard again after 1989. In keeping with this, you will find valuable contributions from GDR underground music luminaries Ronald Galenza and Henryk Gericke. Key Pankonin (I function) and a text about Kiev Stingl also made it into the magazine. Both performed 30 years ago at the nationwide “Social Beat Festivals” in East Berlin, which I helped organize.

Stingl’s performance at Chocolate was the best of his life. On the Pfefferberg site, where an underground book fair full of toxic waste was taking place for days, Stingl clashed with the Braunschweig local poet Sir Jan Off. Stingl, who hovered over the area with a joint as voluminous as a stovepipe, had indecently hit on Off’s girlfriend and was threatened with a beating. Months later, Stingl said on Hesse television: “Social beat is like going to a woman you don’t desire.”

Only a tiny poem by a woman made it into the “dirtbag.” There is a need for explanation. Women have always led the way in music history. The focus of the issue is clearly on the GDR and (East) Berlin. There were more women there in pop and hits. Women had a much harder time in the East underground than in the West underground.

The West itself only appears marginally in the current “dirtbag”. Stingl is there, a surf poet from the Palatinate (best text in the magazine), and laudably the Krautrock legend Guru Guru is honored. What’s also interesting is what doesn’t exist: the most important illegal GDR festival in Steinbrücken (Nordhausen/Thuringia) is not mentioned at all.

»Drecksack«, special edition music, 5 euros, available in bookstores (ISSN 2195-4410) or at: https://www.edition-luekk-noesens.de