I made several long trips to the FRG in the early 1980s, including through the collapse of the SPD/FDP coalition, the rise of the Greens, and the public protests over the stationing of the Pershing II and cruise missiles. 99 Luft Ballon was all over the radio at the time, but the band that seemed to capture the sense of the times was BAP…
I made several long trips to the FRG in the early 1980s, including through the collapse of the SPD/FDP coalition, the rise of the Greens, and the public protests over the stationing of the Pershing II and cruise missiles. 99 Luft Ballon was all over the radio at the time, but the band that seemed to capture the sense of the times was BAP, who made lots of references to the political and military situation in their songs. "Zehnter Juni" was a pretty explicit complaint about what was going on, as was of course one of their greatest hits, "Kristallnaach," albeit a more indirect statement. BAP never got much traction outside Germany, perhaps because they wrote, and sang, in the Cologne dialect, but they were HUGH in Germany.
By the by, one of my favorite stories of the time was about a tv ad put out by the Greens. It showed a truck driving down the street, dropping off aluminum foil missiles in front of each house. The Greens at the time were just getting started, so they didn't have the money for the sort of slick and sophisticated ads common from the mainstream parties, but man was that an effective ad. Also, lots of street-level anti-Americanism, and general ignorance in the population--I had more than one conversation where my German colleague did not know, and could not believe, that it was German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who first asked for a NATO response to the upgrading of Soviet SS-20 IRBMs. He later claimed that he did not mean Pershing IIs.
I made several long trips to the FRG in the early 1980s, including through the collapse of the SPD/FDP coalition, the rise of the Greens, and the public protests over the stationing of the Pershing II and cruise missiles. 99 Luft Ballon was all over the radio at the time, but the band that seemed to capture the sense of the times was BAP, who made lots of references to the political and military situation in their songs. "Zehnter Juni" was a pretty explicit complaint about what was going on, as was of course one of their greatest hits, "Kristallnaach," albeit a more indirect statement. BAP never got much traction outside Germany, perhaps because they wrote, and sang, in the Cologne dialect, but they were HUGH in Germany.
By the by, one of my favorite stories of the time was about a tv ad put out by the Greens. It showed a truck driving down the street, dropping off aluminum foil missiles in front of each house. The Greens at the time were just getting started, so they didn't have the money for the sort of slick and sophisticated ads common from the mainstream parties, but man was that an effective ad. Also, lots of street-level anti-Americanism, and general ignorance in the population--I had more than one conversation where my German colleague did not know, and could not believe, that it was German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who first asked for a NATO response to the upgrading of Soviet SS-20 IRBMs. He later claimed that he did not mean Pershing IIs.