45 years of German punk: DAF, “kebab dreams” and the Turks of tomorrow

2023-04-29 14:33:06

literature 45 years of German punk

We were the Turks of tomorrow

As of 2:33 p.m | Reading time: 3 minutes

It was all over: Gabi Delgado-López and Robert Görl from DAF

Quelle: Sheila Rock/ Shutterstock

In the summer of 1978, German punks celebrated their first festival in Berlin-Kreuzberg. From this came the anthem of an entire generation: it conjured up kebab dreams in the walled city, Turkish agents in the GDR – and everyone roared “Germany, Germany”. What was it all about?

ZOn the anniversary of the construction of the Wall, it was the 17th in the summer of 1978, the Düsseldorf punk band went to Berlin for their lunch break. One of the two singers was Gabi Delgado-López. He wore a tank driver suit from the Soviet Army, which caused some trouble at the state border with the GDR and gave the Spaniard from the Ruhr area an idea: If there was a mass organization like the DSF, the German-Soviet Friendship, in the East, the West should confess to America in his own way. A punk band called DAF would form Gabi Delgado-López. German-American friendship, DAF instead of RAF.

Ulrich Gutmair talks about the founding myths of a new, third Federal Republic. “‘We are the Turks of tomorrow’ – Neue Welle, Neues Deutschland” is a different book to all the heroic sagas about punk in western Germany, in which the 1978s replaced the 68s as a revolutionary force by destroying “progressive” rock music, cut their hair and aestheticize everything that provokes the elderly. The pride in sin is also a leitmotif in Gutmair, but not the strongest. The history of subculture becomes a history of culture.

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The Berlin trip from the lunch break leads to the first German festival of new bands at SO36, a former cinema in Kreuzberg. SYPH, Male, DIN A Testbild, Stuka Pilots, PVC and Ffurs are invited. Iggy Pop and David Bowie are stopping by. Gabi Delgado-López eats doner kebabs on stage with his bandmates and, because this time he’s wearing overalls with a BRD sign on his breast pocket, is attacked as a Nazi by the Berlin punks. A wall cake is cut on the night of August 13th. Thereupon a protest march is formed at the concrete border – although six decades later it is still not entirely clear where the sincere anger against the stigmatization ends and the irony begins: Without the Wall, as the veterans usually say, West Berlin would not be that wonderful been the sociotope in which such subcultures could thrive.

Gutmair looks over the wall to the east and at the same time deeper into his own country in the west and the enclosed city. At the time, Delgado-López wrote the accompanying song: “Kebab dreams in the walled city/ Türk culture behind barbed wire/ New Izmir is in the GDR/ Atatürk is the new master/ Miliyet for the Soviet Union/ A spy in every snack bar/ In the Central Committee agent from Turkey / Germany, Germany, everything is over / We are the Turks of tomorrow”. “Kebab Dreams” is still a sung riddle today. Did the construction of the wall in the GDR shut down the flow of East German low-wage workers and thus turned the Federal Republic into a multicultural country? Who is the we, who are the Turks of tomorrow? And who is shouting “Germany, Germany” here?

Ulrich Gutmair: “We are the Turks of tomorrow – new wave, new Germany” (Tropen, 304 p., 22 €)

Source: Klett-Cotta

With a single anthem, which was released as a single in 1980 and in the guitar version on “Monarchie und everyday” by the Fehlfarben, DAF transformed the immigration culture with typical German fears and conspiracy narratives into a work that is even more irritating than DAF lines like “Tanz the Mussolini, dance the Adolf Hitler, dance the Jesus Christ”. Punk as exorcism. In the then flourishing migrant milieus in the West and in the East, where the youth is really walled in. “Both over here and there there are good reasons to rebel against social reality,” writes Gutmair.

His punk isn’t a late ’70s fad, it’s a modern attitude: “Punk is an anti-identitarian movement that welcomes all those who are either unable or simply unwilling to accept the existing offers of identity.” Whatever applies to ideologies. Welcome.

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