If you want to uncover genuinely new insights about the long-lived, global phenomenon of punk through a book project today, you have to dig pretty damn deep. The two volumes Angriff aufs Schlaraffenland (Attack on the Land of Plenty) and Bored Teenagers do exactly that. A conversation with Jonas Engelmann about two expansive punk anthologies
Jonas Engelmann is not only the publisher behind Mainz-based Ventil Verlag but also works there as an editor. For the “50 Years of Punk” anniversary (assuming the movement kicked off in London in 1976), he definitely didn’t take the easy route. More than 400 essays by almost as many contributors had to be commissioned, coordinated, and ultimately edited. The result is practically biblical in scale: two fascinating publications that create a remarkably sharp portrait of punk precisely because of their multitude of perspectives. Eagle-eye swag.Linus Volkmann spoke with Jonas Engelmann about the project.
What can readers expect to learn from these two anthologies about punk songs?
The first big takeaway is that an astonishing number of people who write, make music, or used to make music, or engage with pop culture have a deep connection to punk. Even if punk might seem like old news, it’s still important to many people to write about it because it remains part of their everyday lives. The second realization is that this whole 50th birthday thing is pretty much nonsense, because punk is clearly much older than that. Just look at Germany, where bands like Ton Steine Scherben or Checkpoint Charlie existed before 1976, and both are discussed in the books. In different ways, those acts anticipated many of the things punk would later stand for. The same goes internationally—bands like The Fugs in the U.S. were already doing something very similar.
So punk isn’t really turning 50 this year?
No, but of course we still have to pretend it is, because the cultural world runs on anniversaries. And there’s a third takeaway for me: punk means very different things to different people. Some contributors chose songs that, from a strict musicological perspective, probably wouldn’t qualify as punk at all. But for the writers, they absolutely belong in the punk canon - and they make a compelling case for it. In other words, even songs that aren’t technically punk can become punk.
You edited 400 essays about punk songs for this project. Even as an expert, did you learn anything new about punk?
Absolutely. I came across things I’d never really thought about before, probably because they hadn’t been part of my own biography. One thing that really struck me was how differently punk played out in different parts of the world. It’s well known that punk had a very different political meaning in East Germany than it did in West Germany. But there were also bands in the late ’70s and early ’80s in places like South Africa that embraced punk and interpreted its openness as something capable of transcending the apartheid system. A band made up of both Black and white members at that time faced social repression simply for existing, they were banned and persecuted. Discovering stories like that was incredibly rewarding. I got to explore punk from all over the world—Japanese punk, South African punk, South American punk—mostly by bands I hadn’t known before. It really drives home just how diverse the whole phenomenon is. Yet despite all those differences, there’s one common thread: punk always carried political weight. It was always more than just another music genre.
One of the best-known songs by arguably Germany’s biggest political punk band includes the line, “Flatten the cops like sandwiches.” Punk slogans weren’t exactly known for their subtlety, were they?
No, they weren’t. That instinct to just lash out, to be against everything, was usually the stronger force. Grappling with the complexity of political issues often came a distant second. That kind of rigid black-and-white thinking doesn’t always hold up when it comes to today’s challenges. But that’s only a minor theme in the books. Punk certainly had its political blind spots and dead ends. Our project is first and foremost a tribute, offering fresh perspectives on songs that still have political relevance in the best sense of the word.
The project consists of one volume on German-language bands and songs and another focusing on the international scene. Do they differ only in terms of “sound,” or also in the perspectives of the contributors?
My impression is that the international volume places much more emphasis on punk’s openness—the sense of freedom it represents. Punk as a space where people create their own world. That freedom extends from making fanzines and playing in bands to booking tours and even building careers that grew out of punk. Here, punk is above all about possibility. By contrast, the essays on early German punk often focus on how narrow and claustrophobic West Germany felt at the time. They’re full of people trying to break out of a stifling world. Those texts are much more rooted in the writers’ immediate social reality. A second difference is that German punk was, in many ways, a process of translation. And as with any translation, things got lost—or misunderstood. Take the use of swastika imagery as provocation, for example. That was borrowed from British and American punk more or less wholesale. But in Germany, the country of the perpetrators, those symbols carry a completely different historical weight. They mean something entirely different there and they simply don’t work in the same way.
You contributed an essay about exactly that kind of band.
I wrote about the band Cotzbrocken. I’d pushed them out of my mind for a long time, but it finally felt like the right moment to take a closer look. Very early on, you can already see an openness toward the far right, even in their lyrics. At the time, that seems to have been treated as a secondary contradiction; at least nobody really addressed it. Some members of the band are still involved in neo-Nazi circles today. That’s absolutely not representative of German punk. But it does show that punk was always a process of translation, and translations can go wrong. In fact, they often did. At the same time, though, German-language punk developed a very distinctive aesthetic and identity of its own.
The anthologies "Bored Teenagers" and "Angriff aufs Schlaraffenland" (Attack on the Land of Plenty) are published by Ventil Verlag. The label Tapete Records is accompanying the project with a compilation album.