Punks & Skins United: Identity, Class & the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture by Aimar Ventsel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Punks & Skins United: Identity, Class & the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture by Aimar Ventsel Anna Seidel Punks & Skins United: Identity, Class & the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture. By Aimar Ventsel. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Pp. xiv + 179. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1-78920-860-3. In his essay "Alles in Laufnähe. Vom Leben in mittelgroßen Städten," Martin Büsser, the by-now deceased German pop critic, stated that if one wants to experience something exciting in middle-sized cities, this "something" has got to be created by oneself: "Therefore there are islands in middle-sized cities, where togetherness is affirmed by familiarity, community spirit, and a DIY-ethos that one would not find in any metropolis of the world." (in Fur immer in Pop, 2018, p 18, my trans.) His thorough, if not necessarily uncritical, praise of German medium-sized cities might well have been the starting point for the most recent book by anthropologist Aimar Ventsel. With Punks & Skins United: Identity, Class & the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture he presents a unique study of the do-it-yourself punk scene in Halle. "Familiarity, community spirit, and a DIY-ethos" is exactly what Ventsel explores during his field study in this city located near Leipzig in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, with approximately 240,000 inhabitants. Within seven short chapters that might even work as individual readings, he describes the subculture, its main ideas, and concepts (e.g., "The Punk [End Page 386] Rock Moral Economy," "Unemployed and Proud!"), as well as surrounding contexts (e.g., "The Transformation of East Germany"). Since the 1990s, Ventsel has spent quite some time within German punk and skinhead scenes mainly in the cities of Berlin, Potsdam, and medium-sized Halle. The role Ventsel takes on in these scenes is a special one, a role that adjusts and transforms over the decades as we learn from autobiographical reflections that he tosses in here and there. As a foreign student from Estonia interested in alternative music, he had become a part of the Berlin punk scene in the 1990s quite naturally, and he enters the scene in Halle in a similar way. Ventsel does not need to "go native"; Ventsel has been an insider all along, going to concerts, collecting records, and participating in pub nights, but he also is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, which is why he moved to Halle in the first place. At some point, he is offered funding to perform research on the punk scene he already is part of—he is staying native, so to say. So, when he starts researching this scene, his own scene, his focus has to shift from friendly observations in day-to-day life to a more research-focused view requiring a far more distanced and self-reflective perspective. Anecdotic journaling gives way to more thorough field notes that then have to be transformed into a book. The decision to repeat some anecdotes and sentences almost word-for-word in different parts of the book is a little irritating, especially since the book itself is not very long. Within the process of studying and writing, however, friends have to become "informants," as Ventsel calls the main protagonists here. Snapshots of mutual adventure—some of which he kindly shares with us—become visual aids to explain the punk scene and his thoughts on it to unaware outsiders, who would probably never be able to gain insight to it without this study. Ventsel manages to write Punks & Skins United with obvious care about the Halle punk scene. In his study he is guided by internal scene communications in several languages—be it in person, in fanzines, relevant memoirs, and even song lyrics, which only underlines the author being in the know. However, his study is also informed by an academic framework shaped by ethnography, history, and the respective disciplines inspired by Birmingham-born cultural studies, both now and then. Ventsel mainly focuses on a venue called GiG, which is short for "Ganz im Gegenteil" and translates to "quite the opposite." Even though the alliteration gets lost in translation, the subcultural status of the...