As is well known, academic publishing is in a (home-made) crisis. Saving at the wrong end is a part and parcel of this crisis. One should never judge a book by its cover but the bland, boring cover design of Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity detracts from the fact that Melanie Schiller has written a brilliant study, certainly deserving of a more eye-catching design. The aim of her book, which developed out of Schiller's PhD thesis submitted in 2016 at the University of Amsterdam, is to examine how German national identity as well as the notion of Germanness is negotiated by German pop music. To this end, she traces the development of her topic from the immediate post-war period to the reunification era of the 1990s.
As required by academic convention, the book starts with a theoretical section which uses (among others) writings by Simon Frith, Benedict Anderson and – in particular – Homi Bhabha to constitute a suitable framework for the later discussion. While these theoretical preliminaries are in many cases, and particularly so in PhD theses, a pain to read, Schiller has to be commended. She keeps this section of her book concise yet explores the pertinent theoretical issues in depth. More importantly, she also adapts the theories for her purpose and critiques them for their limitations.
In her analysis, Schiller proposes a ternary model for understanding how German national identity is construed. Firstly, there is the metaphoric mode, ‘with a focus on national past as a source of identity (con)formation, always aiming at totalizing and fixing national identity (based on an imagined past […])’ (p. 23). Secondly, there is a metonymic mode, which ‘is the nation's everyday performative (re)production of cultural identity, based on the present experiences of its citizens, which is always an ongoing process that consistently challenges any notion of fixed identity’ (p. 23). And, most importantly, thirdly, there is the melancholic mode which ‘hallmarks the nation's endless self-repetition, and, moreover, its uncanny (re)appearances and alienating moments when the suppressed past and current anxiety become visible in the present’ (p. 23).
The usefulness of this model to interrogate pop music is demonstrated in the introduction by applying it to a brief analysis of Rammstein's video Mein Land, and I dare say that even if I don't fully agree with Schiller's analysis, she provides a convincing hermeneutic reading that has revised my previously held views of this song. Proceeding to the main part of her study, Schiller then tests her ternary model on five case studies, namely post-war Schlager, the beat song Poor Boy by The Lords, Kraftwerk's epochal Autobahn, Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft and their scandalised Der Mussolini and concluding with the terrible trance pop Wir sind wir by Paul van Dyk and Peter Heppner.
The chosen case studies are pertinent and Schiller's interpretations repeatedly offer new and often surprising insights. This holds especially true for her analysis of the, at first sight, trivial song by The Lords in which she reveals a number of hidden issues being buried. Similarly, Schiller has to be commended for ‘close reading’ of Autobahn, the most detailed analysis of this pivotal song yet. One doesn't have to agree with the ramifications of her argument but in any case the interpretation she offers is always substantiated and objectively based.
As goes without saying, every such selection of case studies can be criticised for what is omitted and in my experience it is a particular fallacy of reviewers in the area of popular music studies to bemoan in reviews the absence of artists or genres that they themselves focus on in their research. Schiller wisely pre-empts such criticism by pointing out that, for example, she is only concerned with West Germany national identity (even though she does also refer to developments in the GDR where appropriate).
Another aspect useful in her study is her excellent conclusion. Those readers who are familiar already with the music she discusses will find it worth reading even without prior study of the details presented in her cases studies. In a concise yet detailed manner the results of Schiller's application of her ternary theoretic model are summarised. Wir sind wir by Dyk/Heppner is shown to be a prime example of the metaphoric mode which ‘focusses on shared experiences of the past and emphasizes sameness’ (p. 223). DAF's Mussolini, with which the duo, as it were, stage a queered version of fascism by inviting their audience to ‘dance the Adolf Hitler’, illustrates the metonymic mode which ‘renarrates the nation from a contemporary perspective and entails an alteration of the national discourse, […] generally indicating cracks or raptures in the “metaphoric rhetoric”’ (p. 223).
Finally, in the third melancholic mode, which is Schiller's important contribution to the theoretical discussion, we encounter a type of narrative in which ‘the very distinction of past and present coincide. […] The melancholic dimension marks the impossibility of remembering/forgetting the past […]. As the melancholic cannot leave behind the traumatic experiences as belonging to the past, they continually reappear as uncanny repetitions or haunting ghosts in the present’ (p. 224).
Indeed, this is a perfect way to describe the unresolved tensions or hidden contradictions that are the hallmark of many songs relating to questions of German national identity. For example, the ‘destroyed Reichstag haunts the images of the modern patriotic nation’ in the video to Wir sind wir while ‘Kraftwerk's Germanness, however disjunctive, unravels on the “Führer's roads” which remain the central infrastructural backbone of the Federal Republic’ (p. 224).
In sum, Melanie Schiller's book is to be thoroughly recommended as a major achievement in the area of pop music and national identity formation. Unlike so many sociological studies on the same topic, she manages to tease out the decisive points in her meticulous contextualisations and in-depth interpretations of carefully selected pop songs. Combined with her theoretical contribution to the discussion, Soundtracking Germany is an indispensable work.
