ABSTRACT

Introduction On October 3, 2005 Germany celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the nation’s reunification. The festivities took place in Potsdam, where Berlin’s trance starDJ Paul van Dyk and singer Peter Heppner were the very first popular music artists invited to perform their song ‘Wir sind Wir – Ein Deutschlandlied’ (We Are We or We Are Who We Are) during the official ceremony. The version performed in the context of the official ceremonial act was a classical interpretation in collaboration with the Deutsche Filmorchester Babelsberg, which eventually granted the song an additional aura of authenticity and state approved high culture. The original version of the song, which was released a year prior to the performance, is a trance-pop celebration of ‘Germanness’ with a particular focus on post-war national achievements. The official video as well as the lyrics tell a (selective) history of the German people, which made the song widely successful but also controversial. In this chapter I underscore how ‘Wir sind Wir’ (re-)narrates ‘Germanness’ as an attempt to fix national identity and assert national pride based upon the performance of a collective past. By briefly tracing the generic ‘routes’ (as opposed to ‘roots’, cf. Gilroy, 1993) of this sonic national narrative as a trance-anthem, and by analysing its sonic, visual, and textual articulation, I aim to unravel the underlying notion of a unitary ‘Germanness’ as opposed to the excluded ‘Other’ of the nation’s traumatic history. Through a close hermeneutic reading of this video, I argue the inherent impossibility of overcoming the ‘forgotten’ past even in the most celebratory accounts of the nation as this officially sanctioned audiovisually mediated performative act.