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(https://antifascistneofolk.com/category/martial-industrial/)

What is this blog section about?

Sometime in the early 2000s.
I don’t remember exactly when anymore, but one evening everything just changed.

Back then I was already spending a lot of time in chat rooms. Mainly Soulseek, a file-sharing platform where you could also trade music. There were some really wild chat rooms there. You can’t even imagine that kind of thing today.

At the time I was still deep into the leftist punk scene. Somewhere between goth and punk. I’d had a rough and chaotic time, had an even rougher and more chaotic time behind me, and was just trying not to go under.

Musically I listened to a lot of German punk, some thrash metal like Sepultura and stuff, and goth. I liked the dark and harder stuff.

And that evening I got into an argument with some neofolk guy.

I didn’t actually know neofolk. I knew the aesthetic and thought it was right-wing. All the runes, the uniforms, and so on. I’d never actually listened to anything in that genre. I just had prejudices and wanted nothing to do with that kind of crap. And that’s probably what the argument was about too.

I should mention that this whole left-right thing affected me strongly in general, because I never really belonged anywhere myself. I had no home. No real family. No friends. Back then, no job either. I couldn’t even stand myself.

And anyone who knows the feeling of not belonging anywhere knows how much that hurts.

I think Germany shares the same fate.

It lost its roots through the Third Reich and the decades that followed. Our parents‘ generation had a fierce confrontation with our grandparents‘ generation, who lived through and enabled the Third Reich. That confrontation ended with a cutting-off of cultural roots.

What they didn’t do was plant new roots. Or draw on better, older ones.

So we became a people without roots, but one that beats itself up daily with self-blame and self-devaluation. And that pretty much mirrored what was going on inside me.

One of my grandfathers guarded Carinhall. He was a Nazi till the end.

My parents were both leftists and left-wing radicals. As parents they were assholes, and politically they radically settled the score with their parents‘ past — but without offering any positive, resource-oriented, culturally and identity-building impulses in its place.

At school we had to sit through frontal instruction on how we were supposed to feel about the Third Reich, how we were supposed to think about it, what we were allowed to say and what not.

Nobody thinks gas chambers are cool. I believe that. At least I don’t.

But it’s a different thing whether I arrive at that realization myself, or whether someone dictates to me that I have to have that realization. I like to think for myself.

So politics and the political situation were always an important topic for me, and I felt like an inferior person in an inferior country, sitting there in the evening in front of my computer, arguing with this guy.

I still remember the young man telling me: I’ll send you two songs. At least listen to them. And then form your own judgment. Just these two songs.

He sent me the songs. I insulted him and we parted ways.

Then I checked out what he’d sent.

Death in June – „But What Ends, When the Symbols Shatter?“
Dernière Volonté – „Soldat“

With the Death in June song I was puzzled at first. It sounded soft, gentle, emotional. I didn’t hear any „Sieg Heil“ or any slogans. On the contrary: I had an immediate emotional response and found the song much more goth than Nazi-ish.

That already tore hard at my prejudice, because for me, fascist music meant electric guitars and slogans. But this was a song I could relate to very well, both emotionally and musically.

Dernière Volonté, though, was a punch in the face.

A drone tone… then the march drums.
An incantatory spoken chant that I couldn’t understand because it was in French… I only recognized one word: „Soldat!“ And the singer addressed soldiers directly with his lyrics.

The song transitioned into a weighty but very clear and bright melody, one that gave you enough space and time to sink into it with your thoughts and mental images.

And then the brightness broke apart into a threatening scenario of battle noise, march drums, bomb whistles, gunshots, and Stuka sounds… before it ended in a drone tone…

And I just sat there, completely blown away.

That was a completely new musical experience for me. Something I’d never heard before.

And it was in a field that was, to me, ideological enemy territory.

That song rolled in like a tsunami and swept everything inside me away, and over the following years it would trigger a lasting change in me.

I think I had „Soldat“ on repeat for several months, and even today, more than 25 years later, when it comes on I still listen to it several times in a row.

If you ask me for my top 3 most perfect songs: Dernière Volonté – „Soldat“ is definitely one of them.

This blog is meant to deal with the broader area of music, aesthetics, and the ideological engagement with them.

So, have fun reading.

I look forward to your comments.