5 Music Video Clips from the GDR – Part 1: Officially-Supported Acts

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The music video is generally perceived as a phenomenon originated by capitalist, «Western» music industries. However, song or track-based short films, music clips avant la lettre, were also commonplace in socialist media ecosystems. Parallel to the West, state-run labels like Supraphon in Czechoslovakia and Amiga in the GDR commissioned musical shorts that were broadcast on television. These works used the full potential of the TV studio to enhance performances with elaborate sets, visual effects, and complex editing.

Other proto-pop promos in the GDR were produced by the documentary unit of the DEFA film studio, such as the Disco-Film series of the 1970s and 1980s. Disco-Films were generally devoted to a single act, interspersing the performance or concept video format with interviews, backstage footage, and vox pops from fans. They were screened as short subjects in cinemas as well as in discotheques.

Due to their country’s proximity to the Federal Republic of Germany, most GDR citizens received TV signals from the West (except in the region around Dresden, nicknamed «The Valley of the Clueless»). Thus, a significant part of the GDR population tuned into shows on West German public TV, including popular music programs, which broadcast clip-like presentations of hits of the day. Starting in the early 1980s, actual music videos became staples on shows like Ronny’s Pop Show and Formel Eins, West Germany’s own Top of the Pops, which was that country’s main outlet for music videos until MTV Europe became available on cable television in 1987.

Although the GDR authorities actively discouraged its citizens from watching «West-Television», even destroying antennae and jamming signals, TV executives were also acutely aware that they weren’t operating in a vacuum. (The theory that watching West German TV was covertly tolerated, as an escapist space to prevent the population’s dissatisfaction from reaching critical mass, is a topic for more in-depth research.) Thus, the influence of MTV-friendly music videos became stronger on GDR pop programming throughout the 1980s. Song-based shorts produced for popular state-supported acts lost the distinct Disco-Film style and became more formulaic. Music videos by homegrown acts (and even the occasional clip from the West) were regularly broadcast on shows like Bong, Rund and Klik. Starting in late 1989, Elf 99, the GDR’s last youth-oriented TV program, showed clips and imaginative «live studio performances» with now popular semi-underground acts, along with reports on controversial issues and frank coverage of the protests leading to the dissolution of the socialist state.

Outside the official media ecosystem, there was a close-knit underground film scene, working largely with Super 8 cameras (and the rare 16mm stock cribbed from film school or documentary shoots). Like other art scenes around the world in the late 1970s and 1980s, many filmmakers had strong ties to punk, blues (an oppositional subculture in the GDR), post-punk or experimental musicians, or themselves dabbled in several art forms simultaneously, creating multidisciplinary, intermedia works. As this artistic practice greatly influenced the development of music video in general, it’s worth taking a closer look at experimental music-based films from the GDR.

Many signature works from both officially-supported and underground contexts are not available on YouTube or Vimeo. These films are held in archives – of the DEFA studio, of AMIGA records, an archive devoted to the Super 8 underground, or those of individual filmmakers or musicians – which make their respective collections available mainly for research and carefully-curated DVD or VOD releases, of which not that much has found its way to the usual video platforms.

The following five videos were produced and disseminated within official media channels of the GDR: the documentary unit of the state-run DEFA film studio, public TV shows, or the recording label Amiga, and span the 1970s to shortly after the Fall of the Wall.

Music: Omega
Track: «Die Omegas» (GDR, 1976)
Dirs: Dieter Raue, Jürgen Rümmel (DEFA Documentary Film Studio)

An early Disco-film devoted to Hungarian hard rock/prog band Omega, hugely popular in the GDR and heavily promoted, as many acts from other socialist countries were. Omega also had significant fan bases in West Germany and the U.K. This film offers the typical Disco-Film mixture of oh-so funny vox pops, band interviews (in German, like some of the song lyrics), and performance.

Artist: City
Track: «Am Fenster» (GDR, 1978)
Dir: Otto Sacher (DEFA Animation Film Studio)

An animated short accompanying City’s worldwide hit, which earned the band gold records in West Germany and Greece. City masterfully dog-whistled their lyric leitmotifs of yearning and wanderlust (i.e. outside the GDR) and thus enjoyed state support and subcultural cred in equal measure – front man Toni Krahl was arrested for distributing leaflets protesting the Soviet-bloc occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and continued to speak out, spearheading a resolution of rock musicians in support of the Neues Forum civil rights group in the autumn of 1989. This short film’s circular structure and symbolic imagery evoke a dead-end situation and the desire to escape.

Artist: Silly
Track: «Tanzt keiner Boogie» (GDR, 1981)
Dir: Christian Klemke (DEFA Documentary Film Studio)

One of the last Disco-Films, featuring the pop-rockers Silly. Front woman Tamara Danz, ready to rock in a ballet school, laments why no one else wants to boogie, intercut with found-footage of ballroom dancing through the ages. Later, Silly became the voice of the GDR’s «lost generation», thanks to moody, metaphor-laden lyrics by Danz and rock bard Gerhard Gundermann (whose young adulthood collaboration with the Stasi and unflinching analysis of betrayed socialist ideals were somehow two sides of the same coin).

Artist: Rockhaus
Track: «Mich zu lieben» (GDR, 1988)

Rockhaus began life in the early 1980s as a funky new wave outfit (credited with one of the first German-language rap songs, «Disco in der U-Bahn»), then went supernova later in the decade with a harder rocking style. This video for the chart-topping song (determined by listener requests and airplay), is a latter-day plea of understanding for the «wayward» East Berlin punks – the song’s lyrics decry unloving parenting as the root cause of a youth subculture that by then was no longer as persecuted as it was five years earlier.

Artist: Petra Ziegler
Track: «Das Eis taut» (GDR, 1989)

Popular pop-rocker Ziegler documents in this clip the opening of the Berlin Wall and the sense of relief and hope on its Eastern side; the song title means «the ice is thawing».

Biography

Natalie Gravenor is a Berlin-based festival organizer (Soundwatch Music Film Festival), curator, and cultural worker. Her focus topics are music and audiovisual media, urban development, and underground and experimental film in Central and Eastern Europe. Follow her on LinkedIn.

Links

Sophie Grobler: «Our Homeland» (Norient)

Natalie Gravenor: « 5 Music Video Clips from the GDR – Part 2: Underground Bands » (Norient)

Published on July 29, 2021

Last updated on August 18, 2021

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5 Music Video Clips from the GDR – Part 2: Underground Bands

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by Natalie Gravenor

With the GDR’s almost year-long demise in 1989/90, the official mediascape became open to music videos by bands which, a few years prior, would have enjoyed only limited visibility, or rather audibility (primarily via the GDR radio’s indie music show and illegal or semi-legal gigs). These five music-based shorts explore the possibilities of marrying sound and vision and are artefacts of the transition period.

Artist: AG. Geige
Track: «Zeychen & Wunder» (GDR, 1989)
Dir: AG. Geige

A leading light of the electronic tape music scene in Karl-Marx-Stadt (the 1953–1990 name of Saxonian city Chemnitz), AG. Geige took pages from the gesamtkunstwerk playbooks of Western counterparts such as The Residents and Der Plan by integrating absurdly humorous costumes and visuals (on 8mm and 16mm) into their performances. The band cultivated a respectable audience, despite eschewing application for a public performance permit – unusually lenient local cultural authorities allowed them to play anyway, and the punk/new wave show Parocktikum on state youth radio DT-64 featured AG. Geige regularly. In «Zeychen & Wunder» (translatable as «signs and wonders»), various communist, capitalist, and religious symbols flash, intercut with performance footage.

Artist: Electric B
Track: «In My Neighborhood» (GDR, 1990)
Dir: Gabor Steisinger

This short’s director, Gabor Steisinger, worked at the DEFA Studio’s animation unit in Dresden and was part of that citys hip hop scene. «In My Neighborhood», featuring hip hop by Electric B, combines reportage about life in the hood with graffiti-inspired animation.

Artist: Herbst in Peking
Track: «Movie Stops Tomorrow» (GDR 1990)
Dir: Petra Tschörtner

The indie rock (later more dub, psychedelic, and electronic) Herbst in Peking was originally named after a Boris Vian novel (Autumn in Peking), but fell afoul with authorities in the aftermath of the June 1989 crackdown against Chinese pro-democracy protesters, when at a concert, singer Rex Joswig called for a moment of silence to honor the victims. HiP (the band’s ironic acronym) dropped the anthemic «Bakschischrepublik» in mid-1989, decrying the GDR’s decrepit gerontocracy. However, that song’s most widely available music video-like rendition is an April 1990 performance on Elf 99, with haphazardly hung portraits of Erich Honecker, who by then was long gone, as was the Socialist Unity Party (the first free elections in March brought the conservative Christian Democrats into power, forming the last GDR government before accession to West Germany).

More interesting is this vignette in Berlin: Prenzlauer Berg, Petra Tschörtner’s definitive documentary about East Berlin alternative culture in the temporary autonomous zone between the Fall of the Wall and the introduction of West German currency. The music video-like segment sees the band performing a rare English-language song (a comment about conforming to a newly privatized, globalized music market?) near the former border strip. The sequence ends with footage of protests against rampant capitalism and neo-fascism, which many progressives feared reunification would yield.

Artist: Sandow
Track: «Invasion» (GDR, 1989)
Dir: Monika Groth

Sandow from Cottbus, southeast of Berlin, were barely out of their teens when they dropped «Born in the GDR», for which the 1988 East Berlin concert of you-know-who was less the inspiration than the perceived hypocrisy of the authorities who had invited the Boss to curry favor with East German youth. Too little, too late – members of Sandow and many contemporaries had already mentally (and physically) checked out.

Made in the transition year 1989, «Invasion» is likely the band’s first «proper» music video. While it sometimes falls prey to MTV-style excesses of surrealism for its own sake, «Invasion» manages to create moments of genuine dread, not to mention the appearance of masks two decades before the Anonymous and Occupy movements.

Artist: Feeling B
Track: «Langeweile» (GDR, 1980s/2007)

Feeling B were pillars of the East Berlin underground. Singer Aljoscha Rompe also milked the privileges of a Swiss passport (from his biological father) and his mother’s and stepfather’s party connections. Feeling B and Rompe in particular supported the 1980s East Berlin punk and post punk scenes, which he found more creative than what he was able to witness on the other side of the Wall. The anarchic, cheerfully hedonistic and prankishly non-conformist band was eventually granted an amateur public performance permit. In 1988 they released tracks on state label Amiga and in 1990 a debut album followed, after a year of red tape. Rompe revved up his political activism in 1989/90, championing a more democratic GDR as well as squatting, pirate radio, and communal living. Feeling B split in 1993, with Rompe exploring «medieval» indie rock and remaining politically active (until his death in 2000), while other members formed Rammstein.

This music video (song title means «boredom»), featuring solely lo-fi 1980s and 1990s footage of the band, accompanied the 2007 CD Grün & Blau with previously unreleased 1980s recordings alongside well-known songs.