As is well known, many things were better in hindsight. The nineties, for example, frowned upon as a hodgepodge of stylistic errors: from today’s perspective of hellish crises, a heavenly decade. And our penchant for nostalgia even transfigured the Cold War into an epoch of peace, despite the SS-20 in the acid rain – the monotonous pounding that underscores, or even better: undermines, the time before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall doesn’t change that much. techno.
Viewed soberly, a repetitive four-four time, the electronic staccato marched almost 40 years ago from Detroit and Chicago via Frankfurt and Berlin through the divided country on the way to unification as loudly as if it were the soundtrack of the fall of the Wall. FRG and GDR before and after 1989 therefore sounded less like David Hasselhoff than Sven Väth – once the most visionary DJ at the mixing desk of a subculture that actually no longer needs any explanation. She delivers the first one anyway. Luckily!
In their documentary, Wero Jägersberg and Mariska Lief embark on a journey through time to the last musical revolution apart from hip-hop. Unlike similar youth culture studies of their time, the authors do not freeze in awe of the unleashed power of a new era; they dig through to the turning points and their staff with passionate meticulousness.
With what Jägersberg
With companions of those pioneering days in pop culture, he tells of the time when techno was able to grow. How the nucleus of electronic music migrated eastwards from the Frankfurt nucleus after the end of his legendary car park club “Omen”. How she was granted asylum by the similarly legendary “Tresor” in the basement of an abandoned department store in Mitte, which the operator describes as a late consequence of the division of Germany.
After the old frontline city had more or less doubled in size overnight, Dimitri Hegemann said with his bedtime story voice, “that stuff banged out to Berlin”, and there it wasn’t just black music that became white music; she also conquered trust fallow. And because the future cosmopolitan city was soon gilded in concrete in the outbidding competition of global investors, techno moved on. To Jena, Chemnitz, Leipzig.
“Techno House Germany” tells all this with such devotion as if Jägersberg were
But good – all the contemporary witnesses do the swarming away from journalistic distance. It’s so beautiful to see how club owners and record spinners live their dream of freedom, equality, fraternity on the dance floor to the point of self-abandonment, or as the Berlin DJ institution Monika Kruse calls it: “Techno is the most positive youth culture that has ever existed.” That alone is worth 240 minutes of nostalgia in the repetitive four-four time staccato.
