Bye Bye Deutschland! Eine Lebensmelodie

Wagner and de Búrca focus on schlager, a particular style of German pop music, and examine the historical and structural principles of this genre by means of music videos produced on location. The Elephant Lounge discotheque, open since 1974 in Münster’s historic old town, is the starting point for the investigation. Following the schlager boom of the 1950s, Germany’s Tin Pan Alley spent decades leading a successful niche existence. After its first renaissance in the 1990s, German pop music is currently experiencing another wave of new, more electronically tinged German-language music whose lyrics and aesthetic tastes are closely associated with the schlager model. Their external perspective enables the artist duo, who live in Brazil, to view this development and its overall sociocultural context.