How Innocuous Is Schlager?
In the book Aftermath, the literary scholar and journalist Harald Jähner writes that, in the early 1950s, the defeated society was turning into the hedonistic society. We’re still living in the latter. Our consumer world promises fun and good spirits, and schlager music is a factor that embodies these desires and yearnings. What hit could illustrate this better than ‘So ein Tag, so wunderschön wie heute’ [A day as wonderful as today], written in 1952 by Lotar Olias for carnival TV shows; it has been interpreted by Freddy Quinn, Heino, James Last, Roy Black and others. Once again, we encounter an ambivalent biography here. Lotar Olias had been a member of the National Socialist Party since 1932. Like Michael Jary and Bruno Balz, he composed morale-boosting songs and even ones with specifically Nazi content. But after the war, as if nothing had happened, he successfully continued his career as a schlager composer.
‘The effect of hit songs […] might be defined as that of patterns of identification’, noted the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Objects of identification, in our context, are the stars and their glittering stage performances: recall Zarah Leander and Hildegard Knef, who sang Leander’s songs after the war. Today, Roland Kaiser, Andrea Berg or Helene Fischer are idolised by schlager fans. Identification is even more firmly anchored by the lyrics, which mostly occupy the innocuous terrain of petit-bourgeois wishes and dreams. Disregarding the historical context, ‘Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’ [I know that a miracle’s coming my way] can readily be heard as an innocuous love song. And the following lines seem merely to describe a nature idyll: ‘Und der Bach, der hört das Singen, wild und polternd muss er springen. Es geht eine helle Flöte, der Frühling ist über dem Land’ [And the stream hears the singing, wildly crashing, loudly springing. A clear flute sounds. Spring is on the land]. They come from the song ‘Es geht eine helle Flöte’ [A clear flute sounds], which Hans Baumann wrote for the Hitler Youth in 1938. On the eve of the Second World War, this can certainly be read as encouraging a political movement or even military aggression.
Hans Baumann left no doubt about his enthusiasm for Nazi ideology. He joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, was a candidate for the SS, and composed many songs for the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, ‘Es geht eine helle Flöte’ among them. Another one – ‘Es zittern die morschen Knochen’ [The frail bones tremble] – is still seen in the Federal Republic as an ‘indicator of unconstitutional organisations’, and as such its use is indictable under section 86a of the German Criminal Code. It scarcely seems possible that such a thing could be forgotten. Yet Baumann’s Hitler Youth text appears in Die Liederbüchermaus, a book of children’s folk songs published by the musician Rolf Zuckowski in 1969. Baumann, by the way, was able to work unchallenged as a well-known and admired children’s author and non-fiction writer until his death in 1988.
Back to the pre- and post-war schlager lyrics. They promise an ideal world, refuge from adverse fortune, and that everything will be fine in the end. At the same time, their subtle wording transports the guiding principles and aims of political ideology. The morale-boosting songs of National Socialism are a striking example. In the post-war period, wealth and property became the insignia of the good and above all right life. The promises of capitalist consumer society form the subtext of Paul Kuhn’s ‘Auf meinem Konto steht das Komma zu weit links’ [In my bank account, the decimal point is too far to the left]. Having more and more money to spend was the objective of the so-called economic miracle then in progress. Present-day schlager is aimed at diversion, relaxation and recuperation from everyday life, and blanks out what is, in all probability, an unpleasant reality. Nothing demonstrates this more effectively than the cult around the Eurovision Song Contest. While, into the 1960s, schlager titles reached a mass public through films, today they do so through numerous TV shows and the Contest, which is watched by wide sections of society. When the opportunity arises, this media event can politicise, albeit to a lesser degree than it might have in Zarah Leander’s time. Schlager is barely able to make as broad an impact today as it did under National Socialism – that is social media’s remit, nowadays.
De-composition, or ways of singing it today
One of the great tasks of art, particularly of music, is to maintain the desire to forget, says the composer Rolf Riehm, born in 1937. We encounter this forgetting when schlager titles from the pre-war period are sung, as in the cases mentioned above, despite their political entanglements. Riehm urges musicians to guard against forgetting and to set up stumbling blocks. This is exactly what Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen have in mind with their interpretations, and they incorporate their specific personal experiences as two artists born in the 1960s. ‘Work on the songs is based on a fundamental mistrust of my German parents/grandparents’ generation,’ says Oliver Augst, deploring an attempt to rewrite events as legends under the cover of a small-minded bid for understanding. Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen wish to expose and question these legends. They call their method de-composition.
The varied meanings of the term ‘decompose’ vividly express what the two musicians mean. They analyse and dismantle the songs’ structure. They break down the music, often beyond recognition. They separate out the layers so that their meanings can no longer be disguised. And they subvert the questionable content. In the end something new emerges, something that is perhaps an entirely different song. One example: ‘Nach den neuesten Meldungen sind die Russen 30 Kilometer vorgestoßen. In den gestrigen Kämpfen fielen 3000 Deutsche’ [According to recent reports, the Russians have advanced 30 kilometres. 3000 Germans fell in yesterday’s fighting] was the message transmitted by a production smuggled onto German radio during the Second World War by the Soviet propaganda broadcaster Sender Freies Deutschland. Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen have built this sample into their version of ‘Davon geht die Welt nicht unter’ [It’s not the end of the world], just at the point where Oliver Augst sings the title line. Thanks to this acoustic objet trouvé, the reality of war collides with the narrative of the regime as expressed in the lyrics. The propagandist intent of this pop song is made almost blatantly obvious.
Augst and Daemgen make such gestures only occasionally. Mostly, they anatomise the different levels of text and music with sensitivity and a sharp scalpel. They penetrate the structures and make something new out of them, as with ‘Ein Lied geht um die Welt’ [A song goes round the world], composed in 1933 by Hans May to lyrics by Hans Neubach. The musicians skeletonised the song until only the melody remained, and then not at full strength. Oliver Augst doesn’t blare it out in the familiar manner of tenors like Fritz Wunderlich. Such a gesture, if made at all, flickers only briefly and allusively, as a kind of quotation. For long periods, Augst sings the melody quietly and thoughtfully to himself, sometimes reducing it even to a kind of sprechgesang. Dimming the melody’s sparkle opens up its essence. A completely new song emerges, also because the piano accompaniment, played by Sophie Angel, is now entirely unlike the original.
Sophie Angel improvises to Oliver Augst’s vocals. She does this not on the piano’s keyboard, but inside the instrument. Plucking and stroking the strings, she creates an airy field of sound. Like Oliver Augst’s performance,
it isn’t aimed at outer brilliance. The quiet and gentle tones have something thoughtful about them. The pianist seems to have immersed herself in musical contemplation. Similarly worked, but its vocals abstracted even further from the original, is Augst and Angel’s interpretation of ‘Wenn Mutti früh zur Arbeit geht’ [When momma goes early to work], written in 1951 by Kurt Schwaen. In these two numbers everything is played live. Others are preproduced using various collage-like electronic techniques that Augst and Daemgen developed for previous projects. A look at the next tracks shows how these techniques expose the songs’ levels of meaning. The arrangement of the Hitler Youth song ‘Es geht eine helle Flöte’ retains the vocal gesture of the melody. The accompaniment consists of electronic samples – mainly tones and sonorities, not the noises more prominent in other arrangements. Then marching soldiers are suddenly heard in the background. Augst and Daemgen end the song with this sample, so that its propagandist subtext comes directly to the surface. They hardly change anything in ‘Auf meinem Konto steht das Komma zu weit links’ – until the music abruptly collapses, that is, and with it the veneer of the consumer world. ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’ [Risen from ruins], by contrast, is interpreted in a wholly new way: the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic is stripped of East German pomp and militarism and sounds like Hanns Eisler’s little piano song, which the composer originally wrote as a simplified utopia for all Germans.
Hanno Ehrler
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