"Bir, iki, üç, dört": At the beginning of the eighties, the young band Rotzkotz counted their music in Turkish. Until then, German songs usually got their beat through "Zwo, drei, vier" – or only a few decades earlier through the clacking of marching boots. Rotzkotz are German boys from the provinces (Hanover) and sing things like "Deutsche Land, Wunderland, Arbeitsland, Gefühlskrankland". Singing "Muslims creep through the night", and there are already many millions of those Muslims (as they were called that at the time) in the Federal Republic.
As guest workers (which was also called that at the time) you can find them on construction sites, underground or at Ford on the assembly line. On the other hand, hardly: in talk shows, TV scripts or song lyrics on the radio. The author and "taz" journalist Ulrich Gutmair now writes in his book "Wir sind die Türken von morgen" (We are the Turks of tomorrow) about how this tentatively began to change – and bands like Rotzkotz, The Wirtschaftswunder or DAF became cultural vehicles of the immigration society. So how punk and the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) behaved to discourses of representation of the immigrants (that's what they call it today).
Aging hippies in the recording studios
At that time, however, there was no question of an immigration society – "no Turk can cross the border anymore" (Helmut Schmidt) – officially speaking. Ulrich Gutmair recalls how strongly the seventies presented themselves to the young people of the time as a Heimatfilm. What one often forgets in retrospect, also thanks to the stories of how much the Federal Republic is said to have modernized in the years after 1968 – incidentally, the year of birth of the book author. And yes, there is no doubt that, for example, the one who was caught during sex with sex mates was threatened with prison.
In any case, there is a "grey veil of West German boredom" over the seventies, especially the late ones, as the publicist Karl Heinz Bohrer put it. Across almost all political camps, a conservatism prevails that stifles new impulses. In youth centers and recording studios, it is aging hippies who do not yet know that they no longer exist. Former intellectuals such as Martin Walser, who had read Marx ten years earlier, now call for a commitment to customs: "Our national and social helplessness is a consequence of our alienation from our history," he wrote in 1978.
What Ivan is to the right, is Yankee to some leftists; in deliberate contrast to the "Ami sound", demonstrators suddenly sing old folk songs such as "Hejo, spann den Wagen an", rewritten into battle songs against nuclear power plants. Anyone who perforates their ears with safety pins, perforates their jeans and stirs up their hair during this time will receive the relevant hint from passers-by with a twelve-year gap in their CV in the pedestrian zones from Hamburg to Munich: You socks would have been made into soap at that time.
German becomes a cool pop language
This sock, they are 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, rarely adults. Gutmair describes how they dance in whitewashed sheds with hyperactive neon lighting – the Düsseldorfer Ratinger Hof or the Kreuzberg SO36 – to songs like Fehlfarben, who gives his book its title. "Kebab dreams in the walled city / Germany, Germany, everything is over / We are the Turks of tomorrow". Gutmair quotes in detail old "Spiegel" lines such as "The Turks are coming: Save themselves who can". From the mouths of German sex pistol derivatives, however, this scenario suddenly sounds like a promise: "This Germany is over. A new Germany has long been in the process of emerging."