Hamburger Schule: the school nobody wanted to be enrolled in

In Altona, towards the end of the eighties, the brothers Carol and Chris von Rautenkranz start putting on concerts with Pascal Fuhlbrügge, who plays guitar in Kolossale Jugend.

It is a place to play in a Hamburg neighbourhood and nothing more industrial than that, at a moment when singing in German still meant one fairly embarrassing thing.

The series turns into a label in 1988. It’s called L’Age d’Or, and Carol von Rautenkranz has never dressed up the ambition behind it. Out of the underground and into the charts, from the very start.

The Wall comes down the following year.

German, taken apart

Play those records now and the surprise is how little they resemble the Neue Deutsche Welle of a few years earlier.

Where the NDW was light and sometimes naive, this is brusque, distant, aggressive, in the words as much as in the playing, and it lands like somebody shutting a door in the next room.

“Der Text ist meine Party und mein Bild ist kein Messer,” sing Kolossale Jugend. Cpt. Kirk &. get as far as “whoever lives here fights in rhythm, whoever uses muscles invents money.”

A review of the Kolossale Jugend debut found one word for that language, Stümmeldeutsch. Stump German. Truncated.

It isn’t sloppiness, it’s the whole point. Seventies political rock had a “we” it wanted to build.

There’s no “we” in these songs, only an “I” cracked by the conditions it lives in, and the language cracks along with it.

Jochen Distelmeyer of Blumfeld puts it almost as a theorem. His lyrics aren’t “German” lyrics, he says, because they’re not there to fix an identity of one’s own but to dissolve it.

Listen while you read

Everyone in the same bar

Ask why this happened in Hamburg and not somewhere else and nobody answers with music. They all answer with geography.

Charlotte Goltermann, who worked at L’Age d’Or, gives the version that reads like a map. What you didn’t get in other cities was this. The musicians from Die Sterne, Tocotronic, Milch, Die Regierung, Huah! and Blumfeld all spent their evenings in the same bar, and so did the journalists they’d then argue with.

The names of the places still get repeated. The Sorgenbrecher. Caspers Ballroom. Heinz Karmers Tanzcafé.

It took us a while to work out that this German doesn’t land on a first listen even if you have the language. We put the records back on with the lyrics in front of us, and everything changed.

Frank Spilker had founded Die Sterne in Bad Salzuflen in 1987, so he came to Hamburg from outside. He describes arriving as an enormous relief, a “wow”. There were so many people like him, a whole generation making things, and the music they made had almost nothing in common.

Fuhlbrügge supplies the other half of the story. Talking about the noise that gathered around the phrase Hamburger Schule and around the records by Die Sterne and Tocotronic, he says, a little ruefully, that his band had been too early. Nothing more came their way.

One detail for the catalogue nerds has survived intact. On the 2004 reissue of Heile Heile Boches the copyright line still carries the label, L’age d’or, Lado Musik GmbH.

A school with no pupils

The name came from the press rather than the bands, and the bands hated it almost without exception.

There is no band that belongs to the Hamburger Schule and says of itself that it belongs to the Hamburger Schule.

Ebba Durstewitz of JaKönigJa adds the detail that makes it believable. Everybody was annoyed about the drawer they’d been filed in, including the ones the drawer actually fitted.

Knarf Rellöm of Huah! just asks the obvious questions. What’s it supposed to mean? Who’s meant to be in it? And why would it stretch from minimal rock built on hip hop and techno all the way to indie guitar pop?

Musically the school doesn’t exist, and that’s not a provocation. Between the funk of Die Sterne, the scraped guitars of Tocotronic and the post rock of Kante there’s no shared sound to find.

What does exist, everyone agrees, is a political position. These were the years of racist attacks and arson in Germany, and the songs are an attempt to answer in a language that is not the language of the rally.

Then the drawer starts selling. Digital ist besser by Tocotronic arrives in 1995; a year later Die Sterne’s “Was hat dich bloß so ruiniert” is in heavy rotation on Viva, the music television channel.

A decade after the Neue Deutsche Welle burned out, singing in German is fashionable again, and profitable. Which is where the story finds its scene.

Cologne, the trade fair and the prize

Popkomm is the record industry’s trade fair, and Viva hands out its Comet awards there. Tocotronic are up for one in the category “young, German and on the way up”.

They go on stage. They thank the organisers politely for the invitation. Then they refuse the prize.

The room boos, and Jan Müller answers with a sentence the taz reporter writes down exactly as it fell. We are not proud of being young. Then he adds the second half. We are not proud of being German either.

The taz report, on the newsstands on 22 August, starts with the faces of the Viva staff. A moment of silence, then one red blotch per cheek.

Somewhere in the room, people are threatening colleagues with the sack and sulking about changes to the schedule.

The paper doesn’t cheer, though. It notes that the refusal reads as slightly odd as well as rebellious, because when a discussion leads you to decide against doing a thing, you don’t normally expect to find yourself, quite so soon, in a position where the thing is actually on offer.

Eight years earlier, when the concerts in Altona were being organised, nobody was expecting to be in that position at all.