Schlager: Feelings without confidentiality | nd-aktuell.de

A social worker friend once told me that one of her clients was convinced that Freddy Quinn lived above her. At night he irradiates her with electromagnetic rays in order to manipulate her so that he can rob her of all her money. “Is the woman’s name perhaps Adorno?” I asked, but unfortunately no.

Schlager has a very bad reputation, although (or probably because) it is still the third most popular genre in Germany. Almost 50 percent of everyone living in this country say that they like listening to hits. Nevertheless, there are hardly any statements that take the side of the hit. But what there are a lot of are total misunderstandings of the genre.

The criticism of the hit began well before Adorno, but with him it has acquired the specific flavor since then. In his “Introduction to the Sociology of Music” it says: “The hits not only appeal to a lonely crowd, to atomized people. They count on minors; those who are unable to express their emotions and experiences; be it that they lack the ability to express themselves at all, or that they are crippled by civilizational taboos. They provide those caught between operations and the reproduction of labor power with substitutes for feelings in general, which their contemporary revised ego ideal tells them they must have.

Intellectually, Adorno has killed the hit here. From now on, the publication history of the hit song consists almost exclusively of pamphlets and polemics, and researchers who approach the topic scientifically rarely manage without a cautiously defending foreword.

nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter nd.DailyWords look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.

Peter Rühmkorf called the hit “criminal dumbing down of the people.” And Elfriede Jelinek talked about Udo Jürgens: “the middle-class Udo Jürgens message recipient who cannot and does not want to accept his interchangeability and whose fungibility also frees him from any personal responsibility and covers him with the anonymity of an administrative office. Don’t change, just come to terms with yourself, pandering and opportunism, that’s what udo jürgens says. Even if the petty-bourgeois dreams don’t come true when ‘love comes to an end’, when ‘hope’ is destroyed or when the all-powerful ‘fate’ strikes those who are neither willing nor able to take it into their own hands: Udo says Then just – ‘Trust the time!’ it will sort it out.”

Friedrich Kienecker became a little more moderate in tone, but more devastating in content: “It is not just primitive selfishness and unworthy hedonism that characterize the Schlager’s worldview, but behind it there is a hidden knowledge that this world is not as it should be, the suffering of the people Banishment from paradise, the longing for eternal fulfillment. The Schlager’s worldview is not only a danger, but also an indictment. It seems as if the Western intelligentsia (if this summary expression is permitted) has withdrawn so much into itself over the centuries that the connection between its world and the world of everyman has been lost.

Immaturity, crippled, stupidity, primitive, unworthy: With the exception of Jelinek, all quotes fall back on ableist tropes, and all of the critics quoted at this point say at least between the lines that the hit is somehow disabled and also makes disabled. The joke about this type of exaggerated polemic is that it reinforces and continues what it seems to warn against: the eloquent stigmatization of the hit, which comes in the guise of an intellectual residual defense and which only knows how to counter the barbarism of the hit by the inferiority of this cultural product was castigated with words and punchlines in the hope that there might be a return to thought. When it comes to hits, leftists and progressives often sound like conservative priests.

Above all, the hit is and was so successful that it is difficult to put a concrete finger on it. Elfriede Jelinek did the right thing and took him so seriously that she only wrote about Udo Jürgens, who left behind a clearly distinguishable body of work. I will repeat the mistake of the male critics and try to talk about the hit as a whole, although no one can exactly draw the line between it and art song, chanson, pop, folk music. What is a hit and what isn’t is always decided afterwards; and someone like Rio Reiser also had to deal with the accusation that after Ton Steine ​​Scherben he had gone too far into this dark alley of the German folk soul.

A metadata analysis has shown that the following words and associated concepts appear most frequently in the hit song (interestingly, this applies equally to East and West): I – you – not – we – go. The hit is about intimacy, about dreams of being together, about apolitical privacy. It’s actually all about, to paraphrase Jelinek in a somewhat defused way, about little happiness, about a kind of escapism in love or in the distance. They are innocent dreams of a guilty people; of a people who one must assume, as so often in their history, learns to march by swaying.

But Udo Jürgens’ music is not something to march to. The offer of daydreaming that he entices is not aimed exclusively at the lower middle class, as Jelinek believed; In my ten years as a carer for people with so-called intellectual disabilities, I have met almost no one in this context who finds Udo Jürgens bad or lying. Schlager is often enough consolation, and Udo Jürgens provides it.

It is of course true that this music, which attempts to express the needs and dreams of the audience in words and clapping rhythms, is a lie. There is no ego here, it is a kind of collective dream. But contrary to what the criticism suggests, this kind of dreaming is definitely meant seriously: at least so seriously that when you go to villages, there are only concerts with pop singers (or cover bands). The criticism of the Janus-faced nature of the cultural sector, which can be found in Adorno and others, is already obsolete: it has already covered all areas. The hatred of the hit has now become a hatred of the lower classes, but thanks to Adorno it was given higher status and has therefore remained unreflected.

The hit seems like a honey pot to me. The anger at the hit could come from the fact that, in its private stickiness, it prevents uprisings that, if it hadn’t existed, would never have happened anyway. Kurt Tucholsky summed it up quite well when he said: “Everything about the hit song is real because it is so beautifully fake.”