WESTERN EUROPE GERMANY

This week we're going to Germany...hurrah! So, Germany had what one could only most generously describe as "a complicated 20th century," but this season we've chosen to focus more on the genres of music from each of our Western European countries than on each nation's history. Let's celebrate the many positive elements of German society by learning about its music...which, as we'll see, is complicated enough.

In the wake of World WII many German musicians looked for inspiration outside of their devastated land. While East Germany fell behind the Soviet "Iron Curtain," making the performing of "American" music there into a subversive, often dangerous, act, West Germans embraced genres and artists from the Allied nations, especially from the U.S. and Great Britain. A tension developed in the German music world between "German" and "non-German" music, with some artists singing in English (like German metal hitmakers Scorpions, whose career spanned four decades), some in German, some performing in German while in Germany but in English while abroad. Even though Germans have embraced and in many cases advanced genres like punk, metal and techno, German artists are well aware that these popular German genres originated in the English-speaking world.