Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk

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The first book of its kind in English, Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk explores the texts and contexts of German punk cultures. Notwithstanding its "no future" sloganeering, punk has had a rich and complex life in German art and letters, in German urban landscapes, and in German youth culture. Beyond No Future collects innovative, methodologically diverse scholarly contributions on the life and legacy of these cultures. Focusing on punk politics and aesthetics in order to ask broader questions about German nationhood(s) in a period of rapid transition, this text offers a unique view of the decade bookended by the German Autumn and German unification. Consulting sources both published and unpublished, aesthetic and archival, Beyond No Futures contributors examine German punks representational strategies, anti-historical consciousness, and refusal of programmatic intervention into contemporary political debates. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the importance of punk culture to historical, political, economic, and cultural developments taking place both in Germany and on a broader transnational scale.

Reviews

Mirko Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus Shahan, who themselves boast an impressive body of work on punk and related aesthetics, have assembled a thoughtful collection of scholars representing well the interdisciplinary nature of punk studies, sound studies, and German studies. * German Studies Review *
Beyond No Future does much to affirm the importance of the punk to 20th century German history and its rightful place within a longer narrative of avant-garde aesthetics and autonomous cultural production in modern Germany. The four chapters on punk and fascism in Part Three would all provide excellent stand-alone readings for introducing German punk into undergraduate courses on modern Germany and post-war German culture. * EuropeNow *
This book does a wonderful job of both contextualizing punks place within German history and showing how punk musicians worldwide have engaged with German history and politics. * Priscilla D. Layne, Assistant Professor of German, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA *
At a time when scholarly and popular interest in the German punk and post-punk genres is steadily increasing, Beyond No Future is a very welcome collection. The contributors admirably redress the skew in much anglophone punk historiography. They demonstrate how punk was not merely a one-way street leading from the Anglo-American world, but how German cultural history--and not just the detourned swastikas--breathed into a larger transnational phenomenon. In particular, the book shows how punk resonated and became imbued with specifically German concerns, Western and Eastern, relating to memory, boredom, pleasure and more besides. Importantly, the authors do not seal off Deutschpunk into a particular era, but reveal its affective power in more recent times, and well beyond German borders too. Beyond No Future is a landmark collection that will be of interest to cultural historians and popular music scholars, as well as to music enthusiasts, more generally. * Andrew W. Hurley, Associate Professor, The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia *
Ranging from the production of new cultural spaces to the notion of cultural memory as living process, this unique Anglophone collection in German punk studies fills a long-standing void. Offering multiple insights into punk's aesthetic and political responses to a divided and transnationally embedded Cold War Germany, the essays ultimately reach out beyond this music scenes historical moment of formation. * Hillegonda C Rietveld, Professor of Sonic Culture, London South Bank University, UK *
Although difficult to achieve, the book balances the complex mlange of the cultural, political and historical. * Punk & Post-Punk *

Author Bio

Cyrus M. Shahan is Assistant Professor of German at Colby College, USA. Seth Howes is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Missouri, USA. Mirko M. Hall is Associate Professor of German Studies and Chair of the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures at Converse College, USA.