| As the Cold War's borderlines solidified, critical debates on culture in divided Germany and throughout Europe centered around questions of aesthetic engagement: the artistic taking of sides in the context of bloc-against-bloc antagonism. In the late 1970s, in both East and West, punk rock developed disengaged representational strategies which ran counter to the transnational debates about engagement that defined Cold War culture, and to the artistic norms they produced. Studying the specific form this disengaged aesthetic took in the state socialist society of the German Democratic Republic, this dissertation examines how East German punks remobilized representational tactics like detournement, ambiguity, inversion, and vulgarity. These aesthetic strategies had been employed by the historical European avant-gardes before the Second World War, but were largely suppressed from the orthodox East German aesthetic for which the SED claimed an avant-garde lineage. By revitalizing them, East German punks intervened in a national conversation about the relationship between art and life, at the same time as they took part in shaping a transnational culture of the Cold War.;Picking up where other scholars of German division and the Cold War leave off, this dissertation juxtaposes analyses of landmark works of critical and cultural theory with readings of cultural texts by Heiner Muller, Sascha Anderson, and the Erfurt punk band SchleimKeim. Furthermore, the dissertation offers analyses of the Stasi's files on punk, police surveillance photographs of punks in East Germany, and the theoretical memoranda of the East German Ministry for Culture. Examining East German punk in all its complex multimediality, the dissertation reveals the gaps in the SED state's knowledge about culture within which punk developed. Furthermore, by studying the East German state's responses to punk, we can come to understand how punk was received in a context radically different from the Anglo-American one with which punk scholarship is presently most familiar. "Punk Avant-Gardes" theorizes the postwar life of the German and European avant-gardes, and studies the nature and meaning of a transnational Cold War Culture whose influence reached from Los Angeles to Moscow. |
