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

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

The Onkelz, along with Skrewdriver, also became a point of articulation at the level of genre, marking a shift toward a distinctive style of skinhead rock that had little to do with ska and Oi! Whereas the original Oi! music was punk rock at its most basic, incorporating shouted refrains reminiscent of the old cockney pub sing-a-long, the "Nazi rock" pioneered by bands like Skrewdriver and the Bohse Onkelz came closer to heavy metal. (38) Metal was a perfect vehicle for this right-wing "message rock," as Klaus Farin observes: "The metal sound was more clearly structured, contained more bombastic elements and more opportunities to integrate mid-tempo pieces and even ballads (unthinkable in Oi! punk) in order to make it easier to understand the lyrics." This change in style, argues Farin, mirrored the "change in mentality" represented by right-wing rock music. (39)

Once set firmly in a nationalist German mode, the skinhead rock pioneered in West Germany by the Onkelz became a site on which increasingly-radical themes of ethnic identity could be developed. The decisive phase of this development came in the wake of German reunification, a period in which socioeconomic stresses and latent ethnic tensions created an atmosphere conducive to right-wing violence. These tensions were fueled on the one hand by the influx of asylum seekers from war-torn, post-Communist eastern Europe, and on the other by the latent problem of immigrant labor in German society. (40) Like England, both East and West Germany turned to immigrant labor in the period after WWII. But unlike England, which could draw on former colonial subjects with full rights of citizenship, the two Germanies turned to (ostensibly temporary) non-citizen labor. In West Germany the Gastarbeiter ("guest workers") who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s came largely from Germany's historic ally, Turkey. (41) In East Germany, the government turned to labor from the socialist Third World countries, above all Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, and Mozambique. (42) In neither Germany was there any question of granting citizenship to these migrant laborers; citizenship was based not on length of residence, but on blood. In the wake of reunification, with areas of the former East Germany hard-hit by unemployment and shaken by social dislocation, the official fiction that migrant laborers were not permanent residents but temporary "guests" began to become increasingly frayed. (43)

It was against this background that a new wave of bands arose from the end of the 1980s to express the outlook of a generation of young German men drawn to the radical right and the skinhead scene. The content of the songs expressed a world-view that revolved around fetish items of skinhead identity (shaved heads, boots, bomber jackets, tattoos), the celebration of allegedly "proletarian" behaviors--drinking, shouting, having casual sex, fighting, etc.--and a sort of politics organized around a mythic German nationalism and ethnic-racist notions of "blood and soil." The fusion of subcultural style and political radicalism is encapsulated in a lyric from the band Endstufe: "Dr. Martins, short hair, that's Aryan, no doubt about it! Down with mixed-blood, because that doesn't do the fatherland any good!" The resulting identity--expressed in terms at once threatening and pathetic, full of bravado yet highly pessimistic--was organized in opposition to a list of enemies. The skinhead Feinbild (44) included foreigners (above all asylum seeking refugees), the "left" (defined as punks, anarchists, and hippies), and homosexuals. (45) Turks and other "non-Aryans" were depicted as the source of criminality in Germany society, responsible, above all, for drug offenses and sex crimes. This "law and order" outlook, as Klaus Farin has pointed out, had little in common with the anarchic and anti-authoritarian attitude of early British Oi! punk, but instead expressed the fears and prejudices of the petit bourgeoisie. "Law and order" became a code for racist and anti-foreigner attitudes. (46)