Rammsteins "Deutschland": Pop – Politik – Provokation

Rammstein repeatedly cause scandals by cultivating a specific approach to German cultural memory: For the music video of ‘Stripped’, they use scenes from films by Leni Riefenstahl and, in this way, place an aesthetic connoted with Nazi propaganda in a pop context. Such transformations of the archive can be understood as a political aesthetic insofar as they point to the constitution of political discourse, expose and touch the boundaries of the sayable and the visible. Their album ‘Deutschland’ (2019) has also led to national and international public debates on the relationship between German history, aesthetics, provocation, pop and politics. ‘Deutschland’ provides an overabundance of references that ultimately counteracts any referentiality, but at the same time, Rammstein re-constellate popular images in such a way that they bring them to a political punchline. This complex oscillation between reference and ‘spectacular self-reference’ functions in Rammstein on various (media) levels through strategies of co- and contextualisation, whereby sedimented contexts of order are broken up and transformed. This book examines various aspects of this complex process as a political aesthetic from different disciplinary perspectives (especially literary studies, cultural studies and popular music studies), taking ‘Deutschland’ as an example. The focus is on categories central to popular music studies such as style, form, intertextuality, ambiguity, affect, archive, narrative and the question of the political nature of pop.