Sound-tracking Germany: 70 years of imagining the nation from Schlager to Techno

In the mid-seventies, Kraftwerk asked, "What is the sound of the German Bundesrepublik?" and answered with their international über-hit "Autobahn". In the eighties, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft [DAF] ordered the dance-obsessed New German Wave youth to "shake your ass and do the Adolf Hitler!" - and caused a national scandal. Twenty years later, Trance superstar DJ Paul van Dyk and Synth Pop singer Peter Heppner celebrated German pride in their anthem "Wir sind Wir", and today—seventy years after the end of World War II and twenty-five years after the German reunification—resident Teutons Rammstein successfully promote sales by having confidently entitled their greatest hits collection Made in Germany. Clearly, the nation has been a central theme in the history of German pop music. But popular music - as commodity and social practice - also plays an important role in the imagination of the nation. By tracking different national narratives throughout seventy years of German pop and across diverse genres like Schlager, Beat, Krautrock, Neue Deutsche Welle, Techno and Heavy Metal, this thesis shows how pop is constituted in and constitutive of discourses of Germanness.