Subcultures, pop music and politics: skinheads and "Nazi rock" in England and Germany

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2004 by Timothy S. Brown

The symbols of this right-wing-extremist identity were drawn from the past, not of the neighborhood pub and football match, but of German chauvinism, militarism, and National Socialism. Right-wing bands--bands with names like Freikorps, Stuka, Sturmwehr, and Landser--expressed a nostalgia for the days of the Third Reich, a longing after the bittersweet "romance" of lost campaigns, a celebration of the "glorious deeds" of the grandfather generation. Only a handful of the right-wing bands were explicitly National Socialist--in the sense of praising Hitler and the Third Reich--but all looked to some Germanic past as a mythic site of heroic identity. This goes as well for bands--like Asgard, Nordwind, and Schlachtruf--that adopted fantasy themes from Norse mythology, substituting "Odinism" for "Hitlerism," and turning "Vikings" into "defenders of the white race." The songs of these bands express a "politics of the lost cause," a pathetic cry against the fate of a Volk overrun--just as the grandfathers or tribal ancestors had been--by an "Asiatic horde." (47) The dangers of the modern "horde"--made up above all of asylum seekers--is expressed in countless songs: "Say the magic word: Asylum, No one can save us, we're going under, the boat is beginning to sink ..." (Commando Pernod/"Asyl"); "Soon the asylum seekers will be our masters, Parasites, that's what they are, work, that's what they don't want" (Stuka/"Parasiten"); "What was built up over forty years they destroy in a couple of days" (Radikahl/"Flut"). (48) These expressions of a "rightwing victim mentality" (49) are wedded to a "masculine hero complex," (50) in which the misunderstood proletarian loser is transformed into a savior of the fatherland. Drawn from the same social strata as their fans, the right-wing skinhead bands supply a soundtrack by and for adolescent males living, as Peter Merkl puts it, "in a world of fantasized raids, imagined glorious deeds, and nostalgic machismo that could hardly be farther from the real threats to them or to anyone else." (51)

This fantasy world was linked with the all-too-real wave of terror anti-foreigner violence with gripped Germany from the late 1980s, reaching a peak in 1992-3 with the arson murders in Moln and Solingen and continuing at a steady but less-dramatic pace up to the present. (52) As the recent trial of three youths accused of murdering a Mozambiquian immigrant demonstrates, "Nazi rock" supplied the soundtrack for this violence. (53) The trial established that the attackers had shouted out the lyrics to the song "Sturmfuhrer" by the skinhead band Landser immediately before the attack. The members of Landser are themselves currently on trial, charged with forming a criminal conspiracy, inciting hatred, and violating laws against distributing National Socialist propaganda. (54) Yet if an earlier wave of measures aimed at Nazi rock bands is any indication, the prosecution of Landser may not have the hoped-for result. The publicity generated by state measures against the band Storkraft in the early 1990s only widened the field in which anti-foreigner ideas could circulate. (55) The media, notes Klaus Farin, vaulted Storkraft, "a third-class amateur rock band," into the public eye "to the extent that practically every 14-year old in the country had to get an album by this 'ultra-hard' band if he didn't want to be totally uncool." (56)