As historians of popular music, we have long relied on journalistic publications to substantiate our often theoretical insights into the reality of musical phenomena. In electronic dance music, journalists such as Simon Reynolds (Reference Reynolds1998) or Matthew Collin (Reference Collin1997) have provided insightful histories of the genre from their perspectives as participant observers. Ulrich Gutmair, a journalist and cultural editor for the German national newspaper taz, could be seen as continuing this tradition of journalistic projects to narrate history through a personal lens. His book, originally published in 2013 in German, is now available in English. It tells the story of Berlin in the 1990s. One would think that this particular story has been told already (see Rapp Reference Rapp2009; Denk and von Thülen Reference Denk and von Thülen2012; Henkel and Wolff Reference Henkel and Wolff1996), but this book is different in that the music is not centre stage. Gutmair focuses on communities of creative people exploring, appropriating and creating physical and sonic spaces. The empty houses that characterised East Berlin after the fall of the wall are the starting point of this narrative. For many of the buildings in East Berlin legal ownership was uncertain, and they provided temporarily available spaces right in the centre of the unified city. Based on squatting initiatives defined through Bey's (Reference Bey1991) concept of a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), Gutmair documents the anarchic aspect of the city. With over 130 buildings in East Berlin being squatted by summer 1990 (p. 39), this TAZ was of considerable size. The author focuses on a select few buildings, their histories and the way in which they were appropriated and became hubs of creativity. The selection might appear random, and it probably is. Yet the ephemeral character of the electronic music nights in squatted buildings that have had such a huge influence on the aesthetics of Berlin's music and art requires us to put into writing existing oral histories. They convey a sense of what it felt like to live in East Berlin at the time and might help to explain current attitudes, approaches or practices.
Gutmair is the first to acknowledge that Berlin has made this particular radical aesthetic its unique selling point, most notably in club culture with Berlin's techno sound and spirit (and yes, the infamous bouncers and door policies of the city's clubs are part of it). The atmosphere of deceleration that is conveyed in the book as symptomatic of Berlin is what attracted artists from all over the world, and is most notable in the city's music. Berlin techno is known to be relatively slow, and the sense of endless space and time can be experienced by everybody who is used to curfews and realises that, in Berlin, there is always another venue to go to and that days morph into one another if you surrender to the beat of the city. Slowness as both an aesthetic and an antidote to the increasing velocity of markets is the subtle argument that the reader might find. However, there is more to it, and it is perhaps the weakness of the book that it does not show the continued effect that this radical aesthetic has on Berlin. For example, Berghain's landmark court case (2016), in which the eponymous nightclub won the argument that it creates art rather than mere entertainment, could be seen as evidence that Gutmair's brilliantly described aesthetic has been officially acknowledged. Telling some of the city's popular music history through buildings and spaces makes the book relevant for scholars in a number of fields, including history, sociology, architecture, popular music and human geography. At a time when economists receive the Nobel Prize for developing models that are not solely driven by profit but, instead, consider aspects of community and sustainability, Berlin in the 1990s might be worth revisiting.
A final note on the translation of the title. The German subtitle (‘der Klang der Wende’) refers to a specific sound in a specific time period. What the Germans commonly refer to as ‘die Wende’ is something so loaded with emotions, uncertainty, anxiety, opportunity, notions of freedom and historical awareness that the generalisation expressed in ‘the sound of change’ does not do it justice. Perhaps this is the reason why it has disappeared from the book's cover in the English edition. But then, it might be good to not see Gutmair's account as the only version of sound history in Berlin at the time. We also had David Hasselhoff singing in front of the Brandenburg Gate. And Paul van Dyk entertained the masses with his ever-so popular trance tracks at the same time. Yet it is the history of the 1990s electronic music culture in Berlin that has become so mythical and that, in pre-pandemic times attracted more than 15,000 visitors every weekend (Richter Reference Richter2010). I am sure this book will help to get the numbers of clubbers back up.
