ABSTRACT

Introduction The German ‘schlager’ is often pejoratively depicted as conservative music ‘for grannies’. Indeed, seniors are a very important segment of the schlager consumer community. In order to counteract the aging of the schlager market, the German music industry has time and again tried to modernize schlager music, promoting novel artists who try to combine schlager with new trends from the international music market. But until recently, such trends have never been successfully introduced in a way that has significantly changed schlager music in a long-lasting way, and the innovators have typically been swiftly domesticated by the style’s conservatism. However, despite the dogged resistance of schlager to change, in recent years certain new schlager performers, including Andreas Gabalier and Helene Fischer, have apparently radically revolutionised the schlager landscape, re-orientating it towards other (diverse) musical genres such as rock, pop and musicals. In this article I try to explain how performers like Gabalier and Fischer are redefining schlager music at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to situate this innovation historically, I begin with a characterisation of schlager music and show its close relationship to a conservative image of the German nation strongly influenced by the idea of ‘Heimat’ (the homeland or an idyllic world).1