Red Metal: Die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur der DDR

Abstract

When thinking of East Germany, leather vests, long hair and loud guitars don’t typically spring to mind. Yet Nikolai Okunew, in his book Red Metal: Die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur der DDR, makes a strong case that they should. Exploring the heavy metal subculture in the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s, Okunew argues that the music scene provides an important lens for examining state socialism in the last decade of its existence. Indeed, over five thematic chapters, Okunew contends that the ‘red metal’ scene was a specific phenomenon of late socialism, whose behaviours and practices helped expand the boundaries of socialist norms, even as the subculture embodied and hastened those developments leading to the demise of the East German state. Red Metal opens with an exploration of metal fashion and how the leather vests, steel rivets and long hair which characterized the subculture were a form of ‘aesthetic disobedience’ to socialist norms (p.17). Copying their looks from Western images, youths used fashion to mark themselves off from mainstream society and competing youth subcultures, spending significant resources and energy—traveling to Budapest, negotiating the black market—to put together their outfits. These sartorial innovations were a means of expressing individuality and building community, and were accepted by everyday East German society by the late 1980s.