Sound-Tracks

German Popular Music & Society in the Course of Time

In film, the soundtrack is a digital or analogue film track on which the film sound is recorded in the form of sound waves, converted into electrical signals and then stored on a film strip or as a digital medium. Components of the soundtrack therefore include the dialogue, music, sound effects and all other sounds, such as background noises or narrator voices. 

Based on the essay series presented by music journalist Mario Lasar in the Gegenüber magazine, which uses eight German-language songs from eight decades to highlight important cultural and social phenomena in (West) German post-war history, we have selected films that either deal with (pop) musical phenomena or whose soundtrack acts as a kind of mirror of the socio-political circumstances of the time. 

The Legend of Paul and Paula by Heiner Carow is one such film. The GDR's most successful production to date narrowly escaped a screening ban when it was released in cinemas in 1973 and was an instant box office hit. It tells not only a tragic love story, but also of a phase of renewal in the GDR: right at the beginning of the film we see old buildings collapsing - the old, grey Berlin apartment blocks have to make way for the prefabricated buildings that are so typical of the district of Friedrichshain in Berlin today - accompanied by the unique soundtrack of the Puhdys, one of the most famous GDR rock bands, which the film helped to achieve their final breakthrough. In the early 1960s, so-called guest workers from Anatolia and other parts of Turkey were recruited by the Federal Republic of Germany. A good 60 years later, Cem Kaya's rhythmic and vividly narrated documentary Love, Deutschmarks and Death is dedicated to these early immigrants and their music - their piece of home in a foreign country, which has developed over the years into an independent musical genre in Germany that is unique in its  form and yet still completely unknown to a large part of the majority German society, although its influences can be felt even in contemporary German rap and pop culture. In a multi-layered way, Kaya not only documents – with the help of archival material from German television - the Germans' contempt for foreigners and their prejudices towards their new neighbors at the time, he also illustrates, in an entertaining way, a sub-history of the proletarian Federal Republic, seen from the perspective of the immigrants.

The film series is not only dedicated to (pop) cultural phenomena and their social resonance but also invites you to embark on a metaphorical or literal search for (sound-) tracks in the snow. Specifically, to Wacken, a small town in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, the venue of one of the most popular heavy metal music festivals in the world. In her award-winning documentary Full Metal Village, filmmaker Sung Hyung Cho examines how the Wacken Open Air (W:O:A for short) quite literally leaves its mark on the farmland of this small town, documenting the everyday lives of the largely rural villagers, their sometimes very conservative attitudes, the annual exceptional state during festival and the more or less peaceful, beer-fuelled encounter of different generations, ways of thinking and ways of life during the event.

We embark on a metaphorical search for sound with Rebecca Zehr's A Sound of My Own, an essayistic portrait of multi-instrumentalist Marja Burchard, bandleader of Embryo, a Krautrock band, founded by her father, musician Christian Burchard. The director skillfully interweaves archive material with every day and concert footage as well as animated sound and image collages. The result is a sensitive portrait that is not only about dealing with the legacy of the famous father and finding one's own voice in it and with it, but also about making traces of sound visible and tangible. 

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Text & curation: Tatiana Braun (Goethe-Institut Montreal)