Month: January 2007

An Anti-German’s Guide to Germany II

I don’t know whether I’ll manage to keep up the rhythm of good things about Germany – bad things about Germany as there is so much more in the second category. But so far it works.

This time I’ll introduce a musical subculture which – while also harboring a majority of extreme sexists and thorough fascists – is one of the few scenes that features Anti-Germans. (Something about Anti-German Hip Hop coming up in another posting.) I’m talking about Breakcore and its huge variety of subgenres.

It’s pretty safe to say that the Anti-German contributions to the scene are among the most creative ones, that is, the ones with the most ecclecticistic approach to styles and samples as well as the ones most enjoyable for dancing (if you want to free the epileptic within you…)

Let’s begin with Lfo Demon who can be found on myspace and last.fm with dancefloor anthems like “Classwar Dynamite” or “The Skinhead broke my telephone”, culture clashs like “California unter alles”, as well as programmatic Hip Hop remixes like 5 3 9’s “Antideutsche Welle” (= “Anti-German wave” as a reaction the “Neue Deutsche Welle” recently proclaimed for the second time by nationalist rapper Fler). He’s also written a couple of texts about politics (“Fuck Old Europe”), the culture industry and the German beer tents.

Even more explicitly Anti-German already by name is Krautkillah Soundsystem who organized benefit gigs for the Anti-German weekly Jungle World. Though most of their stuff is quite incomprehensible for a Non-German as it’s using German vocal samples I can tell you it works as a giant relief for me. Unfortunately I can only link to the myspace-page of one of their DJs, Monty Cantsin who’s featuring the song “Krautkillah” loosely based on the track “Killah” by The Bug.

More outstanding Breakcore artists can be seen not as precisely Anti-German but as in several ways like-minded. I’ll just mention Istari Lasterfahrer of Sozalistischer Plattenbau who recorded Raggacore tracks against homophobia (“Me the faggot they are shot”, “To the battyman massive”) and the first breakcore track to positively feature GWB (“Angela Merkel 220 bpm”), the almighty Karl Marx Stadt and his Society Suckers of Resonance FM fame (listen to what he did to Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and the sheer mind-boggling ecstasy on “All I wanna do”), finally Cologne based band Bam Bam Babylon Bajasch who parody ragga clone style, f. e. in “One Love” where they sing about religious belief in general and about christian and rastafarian belief especially: “One Love, One Heap of Shit, sugarcoatin’ your hatred”.

(first posted at the Trots’)

An Anti-German’s Guide to Germany I

Among the many devastating ideologies that originated in Germany one has only recently been identified, isolated and traced back to its source. Conspirationism, the ideological escalation of conspiracy theories took the major steps to its modern form among German aristocrats and nationalists.

Step one: In the 1780s, German bureaucrats and religious censors started attributing all the evils of “Frenchism”, that is, of the eruptions of absolutist and feudal order to a secret society called the Illuminati which had existed for a short period of time mostly among teachers and noblemen in Bavaria and Northern Germany. Soon after the French Revolution, a whole movement of counter-revolutionaries devoted themselves to the proof that there was a direct historical line from Satan to the Illuminati. They gained some influence with their “Wiener Zeitschrift” which became one of the major inspirations for the first modern conspirationism classic by the French cleric Auguste Barruel.

Step two: As a reaction to the more substantial threat German aristocracy faced in the revolution of 1848, noble stateservants of Prussia painted an even bigger picture than that of the bourgeois Illuminati trying to shake Absolutism. This time, they expanded the plot geographically and socially by accusing the British trading bourgeoisie of organizing a European workers’ revolt in order to destroy the entire social fabric of the continent, thus rendering it a cheap and easy to control market for Britain. Prussia actually sent agents to London to gather information about the democratic exilants there and put a couple their comrades to prison in 1850’s “Kommunistenprozeß” (Trial against Communists) in Cologne. Prussian arictocracy succeeded in convincing the King and most Germans of the sinister threat to their and every society against which only the incorruptible nobles could form any resistance. The military stayed in the hands of the reactionary aristocracy imprinting romantic nationalism, strict obedience and conspirationism into several generations of army recruits. German military became “the school of the nation”, as a popular proverb said. As both bourgeoisie and working class had been successfully accused of fraternazation with the enemy, both classes were from that time on seen as divided – consisting of a loyal and an illoyal fraction.

Step three: After 1871’s triumph over France which gave such a bad example to the world – especially to Japan – war time and post-war accumulation resulted in a short, but significant economical crisis which could hardly be blamed on foreign powers, even by conspirationists. This became not only the “Gründerzeit”, the founding epoch of Germany as a nation, but also of modern antisemitism as we unfortunaltely still know it today. Into the already established concept of a world-wide sinister plot using all the modern social classes against traditional society, German conspirationists introduced the Jews as the driving force behind the global conspiracy. The illoyal parts of the classes were now simply the Jewish workers and bourgeois, inciting revolts and spreading cultural decadence. Modern antisemitism couldn’t have developed its form without the previous establishment of a conspirationist concept.

As most readers of this blog probably know, the “International Jewish Conspiracy” became the core issue of the Nazis – and it’s safe to say it had been a core issue of many Germans already before. As antisemitism was outlawed after WWII and could only be expressed in less obvious forms as anti-zionism, we can’t properly tell how heavily German society is still influenced by conspirationism. But many modern day popular issues indicate a strong tradition. Whenever it’s about Israel, about foreign economic power (referred to in mass media and by leading politicians as “locusts”), about threats to “social peace” (the obedience of the loyal classes) you see conspirationism shining through.

I’ll give you some examples in upcoming postings as I’m coming across them all the time. I’m going to start translating my current book on the issue into English and have a separate blog for that purpose. If anybody can offer assistance I’d be glad about it.

(first posted at the Trots’)