Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity [Paperback]

This book argues for the importance of popular music in negotiations of national identity, and Germanness in particular. By discussing diverse musical genres and commercially and critically successful songs at the heights of their cultural relevance throughout seventy years of post-war German history, Soundtracking Germany describes how popular music can function as a language for writing national narratives. Running chronologically, all chapters historically contextualize and critically discuss the cultural relevance of the respective genre before moving into a close reading of one particularly relevant and appellative case study that reveals specific interrelations between popular music and constructions of Germanness. Close readings of these sonic national narratives in different moments of national transformations reveal changes in the narrative rhetoric as this book explores how Germanness is performatively constructed, challenged, and reaffirmed throughout the course of seventy years.Melanie Schiller is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Popular Music at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Melanie Schiller has written a brilliant study...Melanie Schillers book is to be thoroughly recommended as a major achievement in the area of pop music and national identity formation. Unlike so many sociological studies on the same topic, she manages to tease out the decisive points in her meticulous contextualisations and in-depth interpretations of carefully selected pop songs. Combined with her theoretical contribution to the discussion, Soundtracking Germany is an indispensable work. Popular Music

Melanie Schiller has made an important contribution to the discipline of popular music studies, and to our understanding of German Zeitgeschichte in her book, Soundtracking Germany. . . . Schillers readings are perceptive and well-made. . . Schillers book is an excellent study, and her finding that even the seemingly most affirmative ofl£8