Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity

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Description

This book argues for the importance of popular music in negotiations of national identity, and Germanness in particular. By discussing diverse musical genres and commercially and critically successful songs at the heights of their cultural relevance throughout seventy years of post-war German history, Soundtracking Germany describes how popular music can function as a language for "writing" national narratives. Running chronologically, all chapters historically contextualize and critically discuss the cultural relevance of the respective genre before moving into a close reading of one particularly relevant and appellative case study that reveals specific interrelations between popular music and constructions of Germanness. Close readings of these sonic national narratives in different moments of national transformations reveal changes in the narrative rhetoric as this book explores how Germanness is performatively constructed, challenged, and reaffirmed throughout the course of seventy years.

Reviews

Melanie Schiller has written a brilliant study...Melanie Schillers 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. * Popular Music *
Melanie Schiller has made an important contribution to the discipline of popular music studies, and to our understanding of German Zeitgeschichte in her book, Soundtracking Germany. . . . Schillers readings are perceptive and well-made. . . Schillers book is an excellent study, and her finding that even the seemingly most affirmative of these (West) German songs contain different and sometimes countervailing aspects of national narration, and that they therefore possess ambiguity, is nuanced and valuable. Overall, her book contributes admirably to our understanding of the complicated ways in which questions of nation and identity played out in West German popular culture in the decades after World War II. In addition to its value as a work of scholarship, Soundtracking Germany would be suited for use in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. * German History *
This is an extraordinary book: highly original, beautifully written and full of thought- and ear- opening insights. Schillers comparative close readings of carefully selected pop songs in various genres sheds valuable new light on the complex development of post-1945 German national identity formation. Her interpretations are at the same time rich, imaginative and lucidly convincing. This is an astonishing accomplishment! -- Johan Forns, Sdertrn University
Melanie Schiller's book, above all, offers a very innovative and relevant take on German popular music studies. Her point of view, in looking from the 'outside' at the 'insides' of this field, is inspiring and both theoretically and methodologically important. Schillers close readings of well-selected case studies, as well as her theoretical framework, especially as it concerns the melancholic mode, will be a great support for further analyses of German popular music and culture, nation-building, constructing/deconstructing collective identities, and sameness/otherness on the one hand, and in helping to understand the specificities of German popular music on the other. Soundtracking Germany is a very important work of Germanand international and transnationalcultural, media and music research. -- Christoph Jacke, Professor and Programme Director for Popular Music and Media at Paderborn University

Author Bio

Melanie Schiller is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Popular Music at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.