Workers’ songs: “Things are often closer than they seem”

Singing workers’ songs has been part of the intangible world cultural heritage for almost ten years. Is that good or bad?

In any case, it shows that workers’ songs are now apparently viewed as being in danger of extinction and are not exactly feared as a cultural “weapon in the class struggle.”

You wrote a book about the workers’ song: “Whose tomorrow is the morning.” Have you had the plan to carry out a situation check of the workers’ song for a long time?

Yes, I’ve had that in my mind for a while. As a left-wing songwriter you are often invited by trade unions, including to May Day. And workers’ songs are often heard and demanded. I used to always be a bit confused about that.

Why?

That never corresponded to my own listening habits; I was only marginally socialized with it. As a teenager I also heard Floh de Cologne, but for me at the time it wasn’t a workers’ song in the true sense. And there was this record from the Plans label “Listen to red…”, the 1970 workers’ songs festival in Essen. When I was a child it was sometimes on at our house.

Not only did you write a book about the workers’ song, you also recorded a record with examples. There are some of these classic songs on it that were also on “Listen to Red,” but which you arrange and interpret differently. “The first shot was fired in Hamburg” is sung with emphasis, whereas the old agitprop hit “The Red Wedding” is performed very carefully, almost shyly.

I find it difficult to perform the old songs in a completely traditional way. In classical music, I think this is called historical performance practice. Incidentally, I didn’t do that with “The First Shot was Fired in Hamburg.” I played a distorted electric guitar and didn’t use any shawms or drums. When I heard “Red Wedding,” the optimistic certainty of victory in this song, knowing what happened historically afterwards, didn’t come across my lips or fingers so easily. I had to find a way of presenting it that also conveyed the brokenness, the defeat I had suffered.

In contrast, you performed “Tonio Schiavo” in a classical way, and I don’t see any difference at all.

I would be the wrong person to create a new interpretation. I was on tour with my father, who wrote the song, for almost 20 years and we played it together hundreds of times in this style.

The penultimate song on the album was written by you, “Nachtlied vom Strike”. It’s about a retired worker in front of the television who finds social resistance to global catastrophes weak because he knows: “Without a strike, nothing will work.”

The song also describes the fragmented composition of the working class. There are services at the checkout, in the care area, on the assembly line and at the rubble chute and, of course, internationally when steel production takes place in Southeast Asia. And the many migrant workers who try to get to better-paid parts of the world. Nevertheless, the following applies: “All wheels stand still when your strong arm wants it,” as Georg Herwegh wrote in 1863 for one of the first German workers’ songs, “Bet’ und arbeit’!”.

Workers’ songs actually only emerge through collective practice, through becoming conscious through debate – that is the quintessence of your book. If this action is not there, the old songs seem museum-like.

That’s what the record was about for me. Because I often experienced the pathos and triumphalism of the performances from earlier as a kind of folklore evening to encourage those who remained. What bothers me is less the outdated sound than the fact that it’s intended to provide false comfort. But I don’t presume to offer the contemporary version as state of the art. My approach is to be understood as a request that younger people have to do this so that it suits them when they are in the fight.

They exist – also as strikes, at Amazon or in care. But I don’t know what’s being sung there.

Me neither. During the demos I often only hear the whistles. There used to be regular singing in front of the factory gates, for example by Hannes Wader, Frank Baier, Hülse or Fasia.

In the Federal Republic, workers’ songs were mostly sung by people who were not that far away from the DKP.

I would say from artists around the Plans publishing house, which is always close to the party. But of course there were also various union choirs, also workers’ songs from the Spontis around the Trikont label and one or two party songs from the Maoists. However, nothing comparable has emerged from the official social democratic workers’ movement since the 1970s.

Looking back, the agitprop groups of the KPD before 1933 seem the most attractive: a mixture of mobile revue and songs, produced by the circles of Piscator, Brecht and Eisler.

That’s where the Volksbühne movement met the popular music of the 1920s. That was a quantum leap for the workers’ song. But Eisler and others came from the Neutonians, who wanted to bring the European avant-garde into the workers’ choirs alongside the red ensembles. They also composed some pretty crazy, polyphonic, dissonant things for it, which normal amateur choirs could hardly sing.

The workers’ song no longer developed in the GDR. You write about a regression, about going back to what was already there. Is this because the working class was at least officially in power?

The ownership structure was different on paper, but the distribution of the surplus product was decided by the party, not the workers, to put it bluntly. But later there was the singing movement and the songwriter scene that developed from it under the keyword “DDR concrete”, which Reinhold Andert coined, from which a song theater scene emerged with people like Gundermann, Wenzel and Mensching, who did not make classic workers’ songs, but which critically illuminated everyday life in the GDR – alongside the workers’ songs, which were continued as state cultural heritage, which unfortunately often seemed very pompous and pompous.

Did you also feel frustration while working on the book because a politically confrontational workers’ movement was once much stronger socially and with it the workers’ song?

This was clear to me from the start, but it became even clearer to me how fundamental the defeat of the entire left was after 1989/90. The end of coal and steel, the disappearance of the classic industrial proletariat and the weakening of the unions. The decline continues. There is a fragmented class with strong hierarchy and at the same time a powerful nationalism with fascist tendencies. And a complete marginalization of revolutionary articulation in the media. There’s a lot of bad conditions there.

How important is May 1st under these conditions? Is this just a reminder or also a call?

Both. It is an opportunity for the labor movement to reassure itself. What I find difficult, however, is that people now often find themselves standing together and side by side with their political opponents. I sometimes ask myself whether I’m still in the right place here. Because the majority of the social democrats now seem to have completely defected – to class opponents.

On the other hand, the last sentence in your book is: “Things are often closer than they seem.”

We saw this last year in England and France: Once a strike movement like this breaks out, it takes on its own dynamic and experiences solidarity. Then a celebration on May 1st would look different in this country and the moderate DGB positions would be pushed back. It doesn’t look like it at the moment, but sometimes things can happen quickly.

Kai Degenhardt: Whose tomorrow is tomorrow: workers’ song and workers’ struggles in Germany. Papyrossa, 215 pages, br., €16.90.
Kai Degenhardt: “Workers’ Songs” (Plattenbau)