80,000,000 HOOLIGANS

^†Title of a song by the Hamburg-based punk band Die Golden Zitronen in collaboration with Easy Business & IQ (1992).

Abstract

The late eighties and early nineties in Germany were not only marked by the fall of the Wall and German unification, but also by the dramatisation of the political issue of asylum, resulting in outbreaks of xenophobic violence. In the context of the asylum debate of the early nineties, a number of punk bands produced songs between 1991 and 1994 which criticise the xenophobic climate created by the asylum debate and undermine an exculpatory official discourse about the violent attacks. The lyrics of these songs will be analysed as instances of counter-discourse emerging from a subcultural sphere that nurtures a critical distance from hegemonic public and political discourse, arguing that Critical Discourse Analysis should pay more attention to defiance of hegemonic discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• critical discourse analysis
• subculture
• racism
• defiance
• punk
• critical language awareness

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Sylvia Jaworska who read an earlier version of this manuscript and provided me with helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^† Title of a song by the Hamburg-based punk band Die Golden Zitronen in collaboration with Easy Business & IQ (1992).

1. Documentations list many more occurrences and victims of Neo-Nazi violence in the early nineties: ‘Todesopfer rechter Gewalt seit 1990’, http://www2.opfer-rechter-gewalt.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/opferinfo.pdf (last access 17/5/2013). See also Erb & Kürthen (1997).

2. There may be more material that the author is unaware of: material which is less well documented, such as song lyrics by smaller bands who were influential more locally and whose song lyrics are not entered by a fan into a user-fed online song lyrics forum.

3. Note, though, what is described as ‘positive punk’ (straight edge, most influential in the USA) by (Moore 2004, p. 320f).

4. All translations are mine, MS. The original texts of quotes from German are provided in the appendix. The original quotes in the appendix are enumerated with Roman numbers which are indicated following the translation in the body text.

5. The author herself came across the text when in 1992 her mother found a copy of it in her pigeonhole at work (a big steel company) and brought it home – apparently a colleague at work had made copies and distributed them. A similar incident regarding this text is mentioned in Der Spiegel (49/1992), and two court trials in 1993 dealt, under the charge of incitement, with individuals who copied and distributed the same text, cf. http://www.luebeck-kunterbunt.de/Justizelend/Volksverhetzung2.htm (website includes citation of the full text, last access 8/7/2014 – the author does not share the opinion about the sentences issued by the courts which is stated here).

Additional information

Melani Schröter is Associate Professor in German Linguistics at the University of Reading. Her research interests include: Political discourse analysis as well as silence and absence in discourse and communication (see: Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse, John Benjamins 2013); discourses of resistance (cf. a 2014 book chapter on discourses of normality and denormalisation in German punk lyrics, volume ed. by The Subcultures Network, Manchester University Press); contrastive analysis of discourse keywords across different languages.