Pleasures and Powers of Affective Disorientation: Iconoclastic Ambivalence and Polyvalence in the NDW

This dissertation analyzes the rich affective dynamics characterizing the music of the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) and its ambivalent critical reception, with a particular focus on gender representation. It argues that NDW music expresses the conflicted structures of feeling (Williams) that characterize the era, so that the works and praxes considered embody both empathic community-centeredness and a tragic adoption of market-based commodification. The NDW was a cultural phenomenon that developed between 1978 and 1983 from an intimate network of local, subcultural scenes into the defining national pop-musical genre in the Federal Republic of Germany. The dissertation focuses on the initial recordings of three key women-led bands, whose successes indicate the arc of the larger movement: Hans-A-Plast, Ideal and Nena. Through a series of historically situated and theoretically inflected close readings, the project reveals how these bands’ songs incorporate ambiguity in a novel way, specifically as a reparative, representational scheme. Reparative (Sedgwick) suggests a communal approach to healing psychic wounds caused by stresses inherent in post-fascist, post-1968 German society. And the songs deploy ambiguities representationally in strategic acknowledgement of the complexity of life as experienced by the musicians and their communities. That the NDW was home to an increased number of women and other underrepresented groups in pop music, and that these artists’ work was explicitly collaborative, lends both the new aesthetic and the hostile critical reception additional significance. Mapping these diverse affective relationships enables the dissertation to articulate the structures of feeling captured by the NDW and to demonstrate the deeply political heart of this music, especially the frank descriptions of gendered experience therein. Hence, the project refutes critics’ accusations of the music’s narcissistic superficiality or meaningless frivolity. Instead, the project shows, the NDW precisely eschews didactic sloganeering in favor of semantic abundance. Simultaneously however, the artists adopted market-based models of commodification that undermined their egalitarian intentions. This also demonstrates a structure of feeling of the era, and the concluding chapter explores this fundamental contradiction.