Jens Balzer: “High Energy: The Eighties – The Pulsating Decade” – Culture

If a book is called “High Energy” with the subtitle “The Eighties – the pulsating decade”, it could raise false expectations. So first of all, what we are not dealing with here: The book is not one of those lively, but moderately informative memoirs by former greats about the wildest times of all times. No directory of the worst hits from Modern talking. Nor is there a performance show by a pop nerd who even knows the nickname of the mother of the producer of the most mole underground band. No, Jens Balzer, one of the most prominent pop journalists in German-speaking countries, actually wrote the cultural history of a decade. For the second time, because his last, much praised book “The Unleashed Decade” was about the seventies.

Although Balzer focuses on popular culture, he paints a portrait of Western society up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. A portrait that can help us overwhelmed people of the twenties to see our present a little more calmly and sharply. Because around 1980, many of the shifts and debates began, which are only now showing their full transformative power. From gender theory, which regards gender as a social construction, to the constantly optimizing and reconfiguring individual. The defining feeling of the era should also sound familiar to us: fear. Even back then, before the ecological catastrophe, but above all before the impending nuclear war.

The eighties are the time when youth culture is tribalizing

This premise allows Balzer to provide the disparate phenomena of the decade with a common thread. Applied dialectics of storytelling, one could say, because the eighties are characterized by differentiation, that is, confusion. While there was a more or less uniform youth culture before, everyone is now looking for their own subculture, forming a “tribe” with like-minded people (Goths, punks etc.), whose staging in the form of clothing, music and habitus primarily serves to encourage themselves to be distinguished from other tribes. With Diedrich Diederichsen and Andreas Reckwitz (“The Society of Singularities”) Balzer states: “In this respect, the eighties are not only a time of individualization, but also a time of tribalization”.

But before someone is put off by too much abstraction: In “High Energy” one does not interpret without being down-to-earth, rather all knowledge is based on concrete observations. This often has its own joke: “The long hair often falls in greasy strands on the forehead if it is not tied into a ponytail – until then mainly reserved for women – or, depending on the elasticity and hair type, as a voluminous curl the head is floating “, it is said about the staff of the ecological movement, which is organized in the new party, the Greens. The party has long since left the “fluffy beards” and “baggy sweaters”. Today she is running for the Bundestag election with a candidate for Chancellor, and “Muesli”, which was used as a nickname at the time, is now available in a thousand variations for the hard-working creative middle class in the generously designed organic supermarket.

Even those who remain skeptical of the thesis that the eighties are the prototype of our time must admit that many connections are obvious. Some have only emerged in the past few weeks: Who would have thought that the historians’ dispute over the singularity of the Holocaust would return under postcolonial auspices? Rather a wink of history, however, as the top candidate of the Greens for the House of Representatives elections in Berlin recently sparked outrage among new progressives with her heartfelt confession that she wanted to be an “Indian chief” as a child. In “High Energy” you can find out why Germans in general and “Mueslis” in particular like to imagine themselves as “Indians”. And what that has to do with anti-Semitism and pedophilia.

Balzer does not moralize, but names serious errors and political failures where necessary. Be it the hysterical law-and-order policy of the CSU as a reaction to the AIDS pandemic – Horst Seehofer thought seriously about internment homes for infected people at the time. Or the musty anti-modernism of parts of the left.

Far more space is taken up by the way Germans deal with the pop-cultural trends that are mostly – how could it be otherwise – and the media-technical innovations such as the video recorder or the PC. In the descriptive passages there is a hint of irony that has nothing to do with cheap smiles at the past, but rather with the human tendency to inflate the respective present a little too much and therefore often misunderstand it.

And then there were also wonderful films like “A zombie hung on the bell rope”

A few falling stars of humanity flash up, for example in a ZDF documentary from the time about the zombie films that were emerging at the time, which were of course highly harmful to young people. The poor parents, who are virginal when it comes to splatter horror, have to watch the groundbreaking work “A zombie hung on the bell rope”: “A mother declares that she can no longer fall asleep after this film; a father still has the hope that it will be him after one or two bottles of beer you will succeed. “

At least while reading “High Energy” you won’t fall asleep even after one or two bottles of beer, because the frequency of clever insights remains as high as the energy level of the eponymous music genre, a condensation of the disco style of the seventies. Every page of the book is made up of thought, not just collected material. A network of cross-connections emerges between seemingly unrelated developments.

Aren’t the yuppies panting for power and money a hyper-capitalist, abstract version of the aerobic dancers who in turn liberate forty-year-old women from invisibility? Don’t the meta-financial products traded on the booming stock exchanges correspond with the free play of (distinctive) signs, as cultivated by the subcultures? Or are the yuppies already acting like zombies who return as radiation sick in disaster films about the nuclear war?

On the other hand, how short the path from the indexed C-movie to a show for the whole family is, you immediately understand when you watch Michael Jackson’s video for “Thriller”. Prince, on the other hand – next to Jackson and Madonna the superstar of the decade – performs a sexuality that is virile and feminine at the same time, encoding it anew with every dance step, every gesture. In fact, it looks like the popular illustration of Michel Foucault’s theory of sexuality. Foucault was unable to finish his ideas; in 1984 he died of AIDS. The pandemic is causing a boom in sex education – with long-term consequences. But is it really true that even back then, heteronormativity was relativized for young people and “every couple who is serious about a monogamous relationship for the time being” went to an AIDS test together to confirm this commitment?

Sometimes the author seems to overestimate the acute emancipatory effects a little, which then could be collateral damage to the concept of telling the past as a mirror of the present. But this objection concerns details, and Balzer’s interpretations also broaden the horizon where they are doubted. That mirror, he writes at the end, is perhaps the clearest when looking at the completely unexpected fall of the wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc: The eighties “end as a decade in which much that seems natural is suddenly swept away by an event, that transcends all imaginations and premonitions “. Is Covid-19 such a turning point?