Seen from our present crisis point, certain years stand out tellingly from German history: 1923, 1933, 1943, 1953. We understand this period, which spans almost half a human life, as a block of historical terrors – associated with huge uncertainty and the repeated dissolution of accepted values and norms. Our theory number one is that a previously neglected but perhaps primary form of coping is the desperate search for normality. ‘For the sake of reintegration’, according to the American historian Monica Black, the majority of the German population blanked out, suppressed or kept silent about their experiences of war and National Socialist rule instead of coming to terms with them and not passing them on to subsequent generations.
In the midst of terror, to which one was reconciled, in which one participated and which one upheld, an ‘orientation toward the unreal’, as formulated by the analyst Alexander Mitscherlich, took hold across society. What is meant by this is the willingness to accept irrational explanations, which seem bizarre decades later but nevertheless persist. Reality is simplified, coloured black and white, polarised; conflicts seem irresolvable by one’s own volition; one is a victim, striving only for a little piece of happiness. All this has a prolonged effect – even on apparently harmless schlager songs whose lyrics and melodies many people still know, while very few are aware of their origins. Our theory number two, therefore, is that popular music was closer to reality than we suppose. Entertainment suggests normality; it discerns the terror, but makes it bearable.
Entertainment was certainly one of the main functions of the new media of the period. It was conveyed both before and after 1945 by radio and sound film. Schlager songs were particularly able to comfort and suppress, exaggerate and downplay. Their mass impact was amply put to the test during the Nazi era. Media-disseminated sound and moving images greatly interfered with the aspirations and needs of large swathes of the population. They brought diversion; they sustained promises of miracles and the marvellous. This topos is present in the often invoked ‘miracle of love’, the ‘Führer’s wonder weapon’, and even the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s.
Today we generally hear this sort of thing in later revivals. Hildegard Knef, Nina Hagen and Georgette Dee sang to us instead of Zarah Leander. They all perform in the same way – beguilingly, seductively, making light of things – but none of them like the Nazi icon. So, our theory number three is that we need to listen to the old lyrics and melodies quite differently, to perform them entirely otherwise, in order to come upon their hidden truth, to encounter what is still outstanding, unfulfilled. And this also applies to songs of the post-war period, which seem comparatively thin and unerotic.
A difference of this kind was the starting point for the project you can hear on this disc. Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen call their arrangements ‘deconstructions’. What they do is examine songs of a particular era or political-aesthetic sphere as to their hidden or buried gist and deck them in new attire. In our case, they looked at hits from the 1930s to the 1950s and their makers.
The CD is a meeting of extremes. I mean, on the one hand, titles, reception histories and present-day arrangements – but on the other, the lives of the original composers and lyricists, which are there in the background and are invoked when we listen to their work in a new way today. So the Viennese Jew Hanns Eisler, emigrant, communist and victim of East German cultural politics, encounters the SS candidate Hans Baumann, who wrote songs for the Hitler Youth and continued after the war as a composer of songs for children and young people. We find Kurt Schwaen, initially in the resistance and imprisoned, later the initiator of a music theatre for children in East Germany. We also hear the National Socialist Franz Grothe, famous as the conductor in the popular West German television show Zum blauen Bock. And Theo Mackeben, who conducted The Threepenny Opera in 1928 and appeared on Hitler’s exemption list of artists in 1944, meets Czes?aw Niemen, the nationalist Polish 1970s synth-popper.
Augst & Daemgen have compiled – and indeed reinterpreted – an eclectic collection of songs. You might call their album a songbook of the Germans in the 20th century; after all, the titles range from the end of the legendary 1920s to post-war dual statehood. Admonition or instruction are far from the arrangers’ minds. Instead, they create space for the coming to grief and sense of abandonment, the disappointed hopes and illusions many of the songs convey. At any rate, this is no invitation to sing along but to listen anew. To this end, some of the titles have been considerably reduced and strongly defamiliarised; some have been supplemented with their missing reality. 1945 before/after is our seventh collaboration. Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen (and initially also Christoph Korn) and Deutschlandfunk have released seven records (over almost 25 years). This most recent one seems to me (as always) to be the most controversial.
Frank Kämpfer
Translation: Michael Turnbull
Titel
Booklettext (Frank Kämpfer)
Booklettext (ins Englische von Michael Turnbull)
Wie harmlos sind Schlager? (Hanno Ehrler)
How Innocuous Is Schlager? (ins Englische von Michael Turnbull)
Foto