The outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel had selected three music titles for her tattoo last year – quite late, as the Bundeswehr Staff Music Corps noted.

Because some of the pieces didn't even have the right notes.

"You forgot the color film" was a choice that suited Merkel.

Not so subversive that it would antagonize certain groups.

But the sympathy for the early GDR work of the singer Nina Hagen with a text by Kurt Demmler could also be understood as a cautious political statement.

Phillip Krohn

Editor in business, responsible for "People and Business".

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From the mid-1970s onwards, popular music was an essential part of East-West rapprochement.

Some even believe that the exchange of musicians and what happened on Berlin's concert stages made a decisive contribution to the fall of the Wall in 1989.

This development is reflected in Nina Hagen.

"Perhaps this was the most amazing turn in German-speaking pop music of the 1970s - that the culture of the GDR, shaped by censorship and oppression, produced an artist who, after moving to the West, surpassed all forms of sexual rebellion that were common there," writes music journalist Jens Balzer in his book Schmalz und Rebellion.

German pop and its language”.

Machine futurism and hits

As the daughter of actress and singer Eva-Maria Hagen and stepdaughter of political bard Wolf Biermann, Nina Hagen was born into East German dissidence.

She supported and followed Biermann after his expatriation to the West and, under the influence of English punk, became an icon of the New Wave movement and one of the most weird German pop musicians ever.

Finally, Biermann had some influence in permanently severing her two-record-bearing association with her band, previously known as Lokomotiv Kreuzberg, later known as Spliff.

The color film song is a link between Jens Balzer's book and a second successful new release on German-German pop: With "Then we are heroes" the music journalist Joachim Hentschel presents a comprehensive history of the time in which the East German audience saw West German musicians - or partly didn't get to see it.

And in which West German supporters helped capture East German punk on records.

So far untold stories are told

Balzer, on the other hand, provides a discourse analysis of the themes in German Schlager and pop songs since the end of the Second World War.

Curiosities like the color film song meet the wanderlust of hits by Vico Torriani, Caterina Valente and Freddy Quinn.

The machine futurism of power plant on provocations of DAF and the Einfallenden Neubauten.

Tocotronic's irony collides with the contempt for women in contemporary German rap.

Both books tell in different ways what has not yet been told: Hentschel has written a music history book with a wealth of sources, which allows contemporary witnesses such as Udo Lindenberg and Veronika Fischer, Dirk Zöllner and Wolfgang Niedecken, Cornelia Schlemme and Oskar Lafontaine to have their say about rapprochement under fluctuating cultural control in the GDR.

Balzer, on the other hand, picks out exemplary songs, interprets stanzas and refrains and reflects on the dominant themes of the respective epochs.