Melanie Schiller has written a brilliant study...Melanie Schiller’s book is to be thoroughly recommended as a major achievement in the area of pop music and national identity formation. Unlike so many sociological studies on the same topic, she manages to tease out the decisive points in her meticulous contextualisations and in-depth interpretations of carefully selected pop songs. Combined with her theoretical contribution to the discussion, Soundtracking Germany is an indispensable work.

Popular Music

Melanie Schiller has made an important contribution to the discipline of popular music studies, and to our understanding of German Zeitgeschichte in her book, Soundtracking Germany. . . . Schiller’s readings are perceptive and well-made. . . Schiller’s book is an excellent study, and her finding that even the seemingly most affirmative of these (West) German songs contain different and sometimes countervailing aspects of national narration, and that they therefore possess ambiguity, is nuanced and valuable. Overall, her book contributes admirably to our understanding of the complicated ways in which questions of nation and identity played out in West German popular culture in the decades after World War II. In addition to its value as a work of scholarship, Soundtracking Germany would be suited for use in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching.

German History

Discussing national identity is very timely and much needed. Events such as Brexit or COVID-19 have further intensified a debate on the nation state and national identity through a renewed demarcation of particular groups and belongings. Melanie Schiller joins this discussion with her book on German national identity and popular music, just published in paperback. She does so by introducing national identity as a construct that is created through narration. . . . This book is a pleasure to read. . . the selection of songs and their discussion is illuminating. Schiller’s knowledge of German history is extremely helpful when contextualising the music and making the case for national identity as a permanently negotiated idea.

Leonardo

Melanie Schiller offers an intriguing analytical paradigm and instrument for delineating narrative positions in identity and memory discourses. ... Her method employs a refreshingly broad multimodal approach to analyses of sonic, visual, and textual components of identity and memory narratives that combine to mark different historically determined discursive positions. She points to the different ways in which popular music is constitutive of contradictory national identities while constructing these very same discourses. Schiller believes her paradigmatic approach is appropriate for further investigations of popular music, a task for popular music researchers in the coming years.

H-Soz-Kult

This is an extraordinary book: highly original, beautifully written and full of thought- and ear- opening insights. Schiller’s comparative close readings of carefully selected pop songs in various genres sheds valuable new light on the complex development of post-1945 German national identity formation. Her interpretations are at the same time rich, imaginative and lucidly convincing. This is an astonishing accomplishment!

Johan Fornäs, Södertörn University

Melanie Schiller's book, above all, offers a very innovative and relevant take on German popular music studies. Her point of view, in looking from the 'outside' at the 'insides' of this field, is inspiring and both theoretically and methodologically important. Schiller’s close readings of well-selected case studies, as well as her theoretical framework, especially as it concerns the melancholic mode, will be a great support for further analyses of German popular music and culture, nation-building, constructing/deconstructing collective identities, and sameness/otherness on the one hand, and in helping to understand the specificities of German popular music on the other. Soundtracking Germany is a very important work of German—and international and transnational—cultural, media and music research.

Christoph Jacke, Professor and Programme Director for Popular Music and Media at Paderborn University