Outside of Germany, the virtues of ‘Schlager music’ are barely known and appreciated. Admittedly, the label ‘virtues’ is contestable. This style of German music, whose roots go back as far as the late 19th century, is characterised by catchy instrumentals with easygoing and usually sentimental lyrics. It serves as the country’s musical equivalent of Marmite: Germans seem to either love it or hate it.
I fell in love with Schlager after encountering it at German beer festivals and dive bars during a long-range Camino pilgrimage that took me through Germany, France and Spain. The Pet Shop Boys are fans too (see their 2024 hit, ‘The Schlager Hit Parade’).
The music is cheesy but, set against the cynical blandness of modern pop music, it’s a welcome tonic. So much of the Anglo-US musical scene – which is what most people in the UK are exposed to these days – is depressing, not to mention awful for the messaging it sends, especially to younger demographics. Schlager sticks to putting a positive spin on love and romance. It’s hard to see how we don’t need more of that at the moment.
Then again, for a country that gave us Johann Sebastian Bach, Schlager and its modern musical derivatives (Schlager peaked in popularity in the 1960s before its revival this century) might seem a bit of a setback:
If I were a piece of furniture, I would be a lamp from the 1970s
I like to preheat, I like to go out, my fuses are blown
If I were a piece of furniture, I would be a lamp from the 1970s
I suck the nuclear power plants dry, I run on 8,000 amps…’
So go the translated opening lyrics to ‘Wackelkontakt’ (‘Loose connection’) by Oimara, the anthem that dominated the German charts last year and was number one for seven weeks. Blending traditional Bavarian dialect and acoustics with high-speed techno-esque beats, the song is classified as ‘Partyschlager’ – and, boy, are those party beats relentless:
‘I’ve got a loose-loose-loose-loose-loose-loose-loose contact,’ goes the chorus.
Then a female backing voice chimes in with a question that is answered by a chorus of children:
‘What does he have?
A loose contact!’
Yes, I know, deep stuff. I still can’t fathom what it means, but when I first heard its absurd melody during Oktoberfest in the city of Erfurt, all was lost. Without a crew to bind me to the ship’s mast, Schlager’s siren call took me in its grasp.
As has Helene Fischer, who is known as the ‘Queen of Schlager’. I had never heard of her until last year, but now I fully appreciate why her song ‘Atemlos durch die Nacht’ (‘Breathless Through the Night’) continues to entrance millions of fans since becoming Germany’s biggest hit of 2014.
The song narrates a rapturous night between a loving couple – one full of abandon and seemingly eternal. While its lyrics are a long way from the musings of the greats of 18th-century German Romanticism such as Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fisher undeniably has a beautiful singing voice and performs as if she really means it.
The music is cheesy but, set against the cynical blandness of modern pop music, it’s a welcome tonic
As a result, she’s had Germany’s best-selling album of the year five times and is still going strong: this month she completed a tour marking her 20-year career with concerts across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
The significance of Schlager’s invisibility to Brits, I would argue, is its illustrating how much we have become hemmed in by that Anglo-US-centric output of music. It means we miss out on so much good music from other countries, especially those closest to us – geographically but oftentimes culturally too – such as Germany, France and Spain.
Many will be familiar with Nena’s 1983 hit ‘99 Luftballons’, later adapted into an English version titled ‘99 Red Balloons’. I knew the song, but not that it was part of the German New Wave – Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) – a genre of West German music from the late 1970s and early 1980s characterised by a ‘fusion of post-punk and new wave with electronic influences, minimalist arrangements and synth-pop sonics’, as that fountain of all knowledge Wikipedia explains it.
Similarly, many will know ‘Voyage, voyage’, the 1989 pop hit by French singer Desireless that became a surprise international success, despite being sung entirely in French. Obviously there’s an enormous number of brilliant pop songs sung entirely in French – but which most Brits are entirely unfamiliar with, spoon-fed as we are by the gatekeepers of the Anglo-US music scene.
The ramifications of this were brought home to me during a pitstop on the Camino trail in Spain, where the cafe’s loudspeakers were churning out hits from the 1980s – including ‘Voyage, voyage’ coming on.
As I tapped my foot along, I spotted two female pilgrims, who turned out to be Welsh, similarly enjoying it. We got chatting and I remarked something along the lines of, ‘They don’t make them like this any more’. To which one of the ladies replied in strident Welsh tones: ‘Modern music is demonic, that’s what it is,’ she said. ‘I won’t have anything to do with it.’
All the more reason to give the cheesy, wholesome likes of Schlager a go.
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