At the end of May, the NDR documentary “Hamburg School – Over the neighborhood into the charts” by Natascha Geier was released. And anyone who thought that Blumfeld and the discourse rock was old hat has been proven wrong.
On Facebook, of all places, there was a lively discussion about the documentary, which Christian Ihle edited into a drama in his taz blog and which Jan Böhmermann and Olli Schulz even set to music as a radio play. The trigger for the entire discussion was a post by Bernd Begemann, with his band Die Answer and solo, on the Hamburg stages and at the Hamburg counters of influential participating and critical observers of the scene.
He didn’t appear in the documentary. He vented his frustration about this and about historical inaccuracies and superficial representation in a Facebook post, which met with a lot of approval, but also earned him criticism for its harsh tone as further evidence of the misogyny within the Hamburg School alleged in the documentary.
He said he did all of this reluctantly, sitting on the sofa in his Hamburg apartment in his bathrobe. “And looking back, I also think that I hadn’t sorted out my arguments at all because I’m too much of an esthete and cultural person for such debates. So my first post was just like, ‘Oh, feel my pain!’, which was so incredibly stupid of me. I didn’t even put forward my best arguments.”
Then do it now.
A lot of people like movies like Gladiator, but historians get sick to their stomachs when they watch it because they’re talking about real emperors whose lives are actually documented and who did completely different things than what’s portrayed there. But for us who don’t know much about Roman history, “Gladiator” is an entertaining and exciting film. And Natascha Geier definitely has a knack for, well, a lively first-person documentary drama. If she had called her film “My boozy nights in the nineties” – okay. But the film is called “The Hamburg School,” and she talks primarily to people who didn’t live in the city or who came here after it was already over. The actual history of the Hamburg School is not told. That it was an open field of experimentation for four to six wonderful years until the Golden Lemons came and ideologically sorted things out. The Hamburg school was also criticized in the documentary as being purely a group of men. An absurd falsification of history. The director denies the involvement of many women who were part of the scene, who performed, who wrote songs, who published, who I drank and talked to. She doesn’t mention Sandra Zettpunkt, Ebba Durstewitz, Elena Lange, Julia Lubcke… These were all women who founded bands and wrote songs. She keeps it quiet and says: “Oh, there were no women in the Hamburg scene.” Yes – because you just deleted them.
What remains of the Hamburg School?
What we did in this city was a kind of roots music for what is now called German pop music. Words, themes, even a kind of attitude that you hear in today’s pop music in a 20-fold broken and weakened form – fuck, we invented that! And I know because I was there and because I saw the change
from day to day, from the night in Heinz Kramer’s dance café, where people discussed for four or five hours, and the next day they recorded things in the studio that they wouldn’t have dared to do without the previous evening. Only when it was almost over did it suddenly become known as the “Hamburg School”. Before it was just like, “Oh, wow, let’s go out tonight and listen to music we’ve never heard before, and let’s hear a demo tape from a guy who just came from the Black Forest and join in here.” would like to be in our great city!”
Could this only happen in Hamburg?
Yes, we in Hamburg simply have the best taste. If you’re standing at the traffic lights in Hamburg in the summer, with a convertible next to you with the top down, you’ll hear Beach Boys, but not “Surfn’ USA”, but something from the “Holland” album. That means some guy really knows something and has made really smart choices for his playlist. In any other city, a convertible guy like this would have owned a scooter. Nothing against a scooter. Everyone has a right to do what they do. But me and you, we music snobs, don’t we have the right to think we’re better than that?