“The text is my party”: almost everything from the big Hamburg indie rock band. Mainz carnival in 1952, the war has been over for seven years, the destroyed city is being bravely rebuilt. The carnivalist Ernst Neger (sic!) sings the old will-be-alright-again song “Heile Heile Gänsje”, with two new verses that talk about Mainz also being healed one day: “I’ll build you up quickly ! Yes, it wasn’t your fault at all.” So Meenz is “not to blame”.
But maybe the people there do. The mood in the young Federal Republic of Germany as a mixture of urgently needed but totally uncomfortable denazification and the “we weren’t to blame” cult promoted this West German “Heile Heile” culture in the early 1950s – everything will be fine again. And, no, you don’t have to look to the right and left. What do the people in Metz say about this, 200 kilometers southwest of Mainz? In 1944, the city experienced “la Bataille de Metz”: SS troops and Wehrmacht training divisions barricaded themselves in a fortress, the slaughter lasted almost half a year, and there were thousands of victims on both sides.
And then the Germans launch a senseless Battle of the Bulge. 40,000 dead. “Heile Heile…” “Boches” is what you say to the Germans in France when you speak of them in a less than favorable way, derived from wooden heads. HEILE HEILE BOCHES is the name Kolossale Jugend calls their debut album from 1989. It is the theoretical-poetic attempt by the Hamburg band around Kristof Schreuf to counter the “Heile Heile” nonsense with a form of rock music in the German language – the language that is also used in the Fortress of Metz was spoken.
A high standard, but the fun is not neglected
That’s a high standard, but the fun isn’t neglected: “The text is my party” is the motto in the piece “Party”, along with “Better times sounds good” which is one of the slogans used by Schreuf, Pascal Fuhlbrügge, Klaus Meinhardt and Christoph Leich will decorate shirts, house walls, mixtapes or compilations – and soon a book too: “The Text is My Party: A History of the Hamburg School” will be published by Ventil-Verlag on March 1st.
This history is also present, because dealing with Germany in 2023 is just as complex as it was between 1988 and 1991, the corridor in which the Colossal Youth works. The wallpaper label is now packing almost all of the band’s recordings into a vinyl box: HEILE HEILE BOCHES as well as the hardly less furious second record LEOPARD II (current reference, baby!), as well as FOUND ITEMS such as the tracks from the first single “Kein Pats on the Shoulder” from 1988 as well as a live recording from the central club of the Hamburg scene away from the Hanseatic city, the “Forum” in Enger, East Westphalia. The reissue is dedicated to Kristof, who died on November 9, 2022 and is missing, as a discourse partner, musician, person.