The Making of A Filling Station for Losers.
The Process of Translating and Recording the Songs of Gundermann
This essay will deal with issues of translation and musical adaptation encountered in the making of a CD in English of the songs of East German protest singer Gerhard Gundermann (1955-98). In February 2022 I began work on a project to translate and record eight of his songs. A Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of GB gave me the time to translate the songs and the funding to record them with a professional band. The overall intention was to expose English speaking music fans to the work of Gundermann, an artist whom non-German speakers would seldom, if ever, come across or hear. Having already translated two songs for a CD by various international artists entitled Gundermanns Lieder in Europa (2019), I was convinced that Gundermann’s songs worked well in English and that his music could speak to a broad audience outside of East Germany. With his ear for melody, his modern rock sound, and lyrics with themes such as deindustrialisation, social conflict, emigration, and the threat to the environment, I felt he was as relevant today as he was in the 1990s up until his premature death in 1998.
While wishing to retain the essence of Gundermann’s music, lyrics and philosophy, I was, at the same time, excited by the prospect of bringing my own musical experience to bear in creating something new. I had already been involved in the radio broadcast ‘Songs beyond Borders’ (RTE 2019) and was fascinated by the idea of songs in translation that have different lives (often acquiring new significances) outside of their country of origin.1 I was intrigued by the challenge of producing version of the original songs that could achieve impact in the English-speaking world. In this essay therefore, I will meditate on the creative practice of this process, on the linguistic and musical dialogue I had with Gundermann that resulted in the new adaptations of his work that appear on my album Filling Station for Losers. Songs of Gundermann (2024).
My first task was to determine which songs to choose. I must admit it was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me. It brought me back to the exciting years I had spent in Berlin in the early to mid-1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when I first came across Gundermann. I had gone there in 1992 to begin research for my PhD on East German political song and ‘Liedertheater’ (song theatre). As a musician, I was also regularly performing live in Berlin and became closely acquainted with the musicians and fans from the political song scene that Gundermann was part of. I attended several of his gigs in Berlin in the 1992-93 period. These included an anti-Nazi solidarity concert featuring many top artists and bands including Silly, Rio Reiser, Pankow, and Gundermann together with his band Seilschaft. On another occasion, I remember being in a packed house somewhere in East Berlin, where Gundermann brought out a guitar and played ‘Pferd aus Holz’ (Wooden Horse), a song about unfulfilled dreams and political promises. This was one of the songs I definitely intended to translate.
It wasn’t just nostalgia, however, which caused me to choose songs from the early 1990s. At that point Gundermann was still in the early stages of his solo career. After having left his musical theatre group Brigade Feuerstein in 1988, he had amassed a lot of high- quality songs by 1992. Such was his forward momentum at the time there had been talk about a deal with a major West German record label. But when this didn’t materialise, local entrepreneur Klaus Koch persuaded Gundermann to release a CD with his Berlin independent label BuschFunk. 2 The result was the albums Einsame Spitze (Out of this World) from 1992 and Der siebente Samurai (The seventh Samurai) from 1993. With high-end production by Uwe Hassbecker and Rüdiger Barton of the celebrated rock group Silly, these set the tone for Gundermann’s subsequent releases later in the 1990s. Lyrically, too, they placed him at the forefront of political songwriters dealing with emerging themes such as deindustrialisation as well as the threat to the environment. If, up until this point, Gundermann’s artistic identity was summed up by his media nickname ‘der singende Baggerfahrer’ (the singing excavator driver), songs such as ‘Grass’ and ‘Shall Be’ from Einsame Spitze, showed the musician refashioning his narrative persona as an eco-warrior. I chose both these songs to translate for my album.
The title track of Der siebente Samurai was another favourite of mine. Via the imagery of the traditional Japanese warrior, it discussed society’s preoccupation with winners and losers. This was a sensitive theme of the early German unification period, Gundermann clearly siding with the so-called ‘losers’: ‘I’m pulling on my fighting boots again / Outside my last day’s howling loud / How I love to come back home to you / ’cause you don’t care if I’m not a winner.’ In the context of the dismantling of swathes of East German factories, deemed out-of-date and unfit for purpose, many workers had lost their livelihoods. Faced with the rapid changes of the time, they were perceived to have been left behind. This is where the idea for the album title ‘Filling Station for Losers’ derived. In interview Gundermann once stated: ‘I’d like to be something like a filling station for losers. I’d be happy if people said they needed bread, water and songs by Gundermann. Songs as sustenance.’3
Another song I chose was ‘Kämpfen wie Männer’ (Square up like men do). In the form of a dialogue between father and son, it dealt with the re-emergence of Nazis – for the first time in eastern Germany since the end of the Third Reich. This was a significant subject at that time in the context of the attacks on the homes of asylum applicants in East Germany. The remaining songs I translated came mostly from Gundermann’s final two albums before his death, Frühstück für immer (Breakfast for Ever, 1995) and Engel über dem Revier (Angel above the Colliery, 1997). These two were not so uplifting and life-affirming as the previous two. Both reflected how his personal situation had changed in a short period of time. In the mid-1990s, the controversial revelations of Gundermann’s involvement with the Stasi as a young man clearly halted the momentum of his flourishing career. 4 At the same time, he was directly affected by the mass redundancies taking place in the collieries of South-East Germany – he himself finally being laid off in 1996. Nonetheless these more introspective albums contained some of his classic songs: from Frühstück für immer I chose ‘Krieg’ (War) and ‘Keine Zeit Mehr’ (No Time Left). The first was a response to the issue of the unresolved class conflict, which, as will be discussed later, continued to preoccupy Gundermann in the post-unification period. ‘Keine Zeit Mehr’ on the other hand, dealt philosophically with the subject of time, a favourite theme throughout his career. Here, as will also be expanded upon in this essay, he observes the waste of time spent on unworthy pursuits in life, an allusion to his collaboration with the GDR state. 5
From his final album Engel über dem Revier I chose ‘Und mußt du weinen’ (And if it makes you cry), an upbeat, melodic Gundermann classic in the folk-rock style of Bruce Springsteen. I also chose the title track ‘Angel above the Colliery’, an epic tale of abandonment and uprooting, relating to Gundermann and his pit colleagues’ redundancies and the looming necessity of looking for new horizons. A final choice of song from this period was ‘Kommen und Gehen’ (Coming and Going), a song from 1998 referencing the plight of refugees.
Initial Considerations of Translation
Some of my favourite Gundermann songs ruled themselves out for inclusion simply due to the difficulties of achieving a successful translation that worked musically. A case in point was ‘Einsame Spitze’ (Out of this World) 6 , a tongue-in-cheek song about a lonely astronaut lost in space. The problems that arose here previewed potential pitfalls that lay ahead in my project. Firstly, I could not find translations of ‘Einsame Spitze’ (e.g. ‘Out of this world’) that fitted its musical phrasing. Secondly, this hook phrase functioned in German as a clever pun on different levels. In slang the phrase means ‘brilliant’ or ‘exceptional’, but here it additionally encompasses the idea of being ‘out of this world’ in a literal sense. At the same time, it incorporates the image of the astronaut sitting ‘einsam’ (lonely) in the ‘Spitze’ (cockpit) of his shuttle. Thus, neither able to match my new lyrics to the musical phrase, nor to find an English translation to do justice to the complex wordplay, I reluctantly jettisoned the attempt.
As I proceeded, I discovered I could not separate the musical from the lyrical aspect of translation because the two are so closely intertwined. In a song every lyrical solution must simultaneously be a musical one. While the translation should be as close as possible to the original, the translated lines of a song must also be singable. They also had to do justice to Gundermann’s unique rhythmical phrasing. This inevitably resulted in compromise where a meaning had to be slightly altered to create a good, singable line. Mindful of the medium in which I was working (i.e. popular song as opposed to poetry), my concerns as a musician ultimately took precedence over my concerns as a Germanist. I therefore sometimes found myself prioritising a successful musical solution over a perfect reproduction of the original wording and sense. For example, in the song ‘Soll Sein’ (Shall Be), I made some alterations for a verse in which Gundermann talks about the reversing of actions that destroy the environment. To make one phrase scan smoothly, I specified the ‘atom’ bomb that the original only implies. And in the final line I took the liberty of inserting the phrase ‘acid rain’, which was not part of the original, in order to achieve the necessary rhyme.
Die Pilze sollen wieder in die Bomben kriechen
Und die Bomben wieder in den Flugzeugbauch
Das Loch im Himmel soll sich wieder schließen
Und die Löcher in der Erde, die auch
The mushrooms shall crawl back into the atom bomb
The bombs back in the belly of the plane
The big hole in the sky shall close over
And the ground holes that fill with acid rain.
In finalising my translations, I took up the offer of David Shirreff, a writer, playwright, and journalist, to look over my work and suggest improvements. This was a rewarding experience. Shirreff had recently completed a book on Gundermann’s life, Gundermann: East Germany’s Coal Miner Rock Poet (2023) and had already made his own translations of Gundermann’s song lyrics. He generously read my translations and contributed ideas, suggesting tweaks and new solutions particularly on the songs ‘Grass’ and ‘Coming and Going’. Shirreff also instilled in me a more disciplined approach to rhyming, which proved beneficial since, alongside Gundermann’s highly rhythmic phrasing, his songs are distinguished by their regular rhyming scheme. This approach entailed a revamping of ‘Wooden Horse’, a song I had already translated for the ‘Gundermanns Lieder in Europa’ project (2019). It often took a painstaking juggling of possible expressions to finally land with a rhyming solution. But ultimately, I was glad for Shirreff’s promptings as the result was a marked improvement.
One of the other considerations was how these songs could be interpreted for an English-speaking audience, twenty-five years after the death of Gundermann. Thematically many of the songs had a universal significance, just as valid now as in the 1990s, for example, the expression of the need for a balance between humans and nature in songs like ‘Grass’ and ‘Shall Be’. The brutal depiction of the ‘have-nots’ in society in ‘And if it makes you cry’ and the effects of deindustrialisation in ‘Angel above the Colliery’ are similarly universal images that are not distinct to East Germany. In his writing Gundermann always links into a wider world that transcends the limitations of the local and invites identification from further afield. In ‘Wooden Horse’, for example, the theme of the broken promises of socialism and capitalism felt very current after the fallout from Brexit. This song was reinterpreted musically to express the anger of the present political times, whereas Gundermann’s much softer original version had merely expressed wistful disappointment.
‘Coming and Going’, with its imagery of the plight of refugees, is another song with a clear current-day relevance. Indeed, one of the best-known Gundermann tribute bands, Die Randgruppencombo, performed this song at the time of Germany’s acceptance of Syrian refugees in 2015. In their rendition they emphasised the line ‘All those who want to come, we should let them come, at which point the audience cheered. 7 Some commentators at my album launch concert in Hoyerswerda disputed this interpretation, asserting that it was a song about death, referring to the image of the ferry man taking people across the river. 8 This reading is arguably influenced by the fact that Gundermann died shortly after this song was written in 1998. It is also supported by his interview with Schütt in which he talks about the inevitability of death, mentioning ‘the rhythm of coming and going, in and out, ebb and flow,morning and evening, summer and winter’ 9 that life consists of. I, however, understood the phrase ‘coming and going’ as also relating to the migratory flow of people: the imagery of the first verse and chorus in the song conveys the plight of refugees fleeing war, persecution and poverty:
The ferryman docks on the shore
On the wooden landing stage
The washed-out souls who stand before
The ferryman takes them all away
Far from hunger, far from thirst
Far from land and far off course
Far from money, from support
Far from starboard, far from port
Fled their friends and enemies
Fled from their communities
Fled from heat, fled from crime
Fled from pain and fled from time
All those who want to go, we should let them go
All those who want to stay, we should let them stay
All those who want to come, we should let them come
All those who want to go, we should let them go
The second verse, however, becomes ambiguous, inviting a possible interpretation of people crossing over from life to death: those who have had enough and wish to move on:
They stand in line, sick of life
All they want is peace and quiet
They’ve handed over everything
They look, but don’t see anything
Don’t force them to linger here,
They don't want to re-appear,
Send them off, don’t make them stay
If they’d best be on their way.
Let them see their latest brood
One last time the neighbourhood
And pour their cup of happiness
Back into the universe
As such, the song, in typical Gundermann fashion, can be understood on both these levels. In my adaptation of this song, however, in the current climate of widespread vilification of refugees in the media, I, like the Randgruppencombo, chose to emphasise the aspect of a country being welcoming to migrants.
Musical Considerations of the Epic Dimension of Gundermann’s Songs
There is an epic dimension to many of Gundermann’s songs. This is apparent in songs whose story is set within a wider historical narrative. One could say that, as an East German singer whose life spanned the Cold War, the rise and fall of socialism in the GDR, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the birth of a new, unified Germany in the 1990s, he had an epic tale to tell. This dimension is apparent in several of the songs I translated. ‘Krieg’ (War), for example, spans the period of Gundermann’s experience as a young trainee military officer in the GDR in the early 1970s up until his experience of rapprochement with the West after 1989. It is a reassessment of the enmity he felt towards the West German capitalist enemy in his youth (‘I was full of hate / If you asked me, I couldn’t say why’). At the same time this is mixed with the realisation that the socialist experiment failed: ‘You shook my hand / as I surrendered my gun’. There is an element of sadness and regret that he devoted himself to an ideal that in the end brought very little return. As he sees it, nothing has changed: he is still the social underdog while the capitalists hold the levers of power.
It’s come so far the two of us now
Have cleared the deck once again
At long last I have a work of my own
But for you someone else takes the strain
When the ship rolls, you click your fingers
I crick my back in reply
You take the helm, I tackle the sails
If you ask me now I know why
The historical dimension of such songs (as was the case in Gundermann’s group Brigade Feuerstein) 10 is emphasised by the music. Sung in the style of a ballad in ¾ waltz time, it has three compositionally distinct musical sections. The middle-eight lines, printed above, functions as a bridge. This mediates the narrator’s present-day perspective before returning to the final chorus. In this he delivers his conclusion that there will always be class war until the power imbalance between above and below is redressed:
That’s why, brother, there will be war
We dumped it at our front door
Still I sing and won’t kill any guy
But if you asked me now I’d know why
To emphasise the epic historical dimension in our recording of ‘War’ we created the effect of a Soviet choir. 11 This was to create an atmosphere similar to that of War and Peace or Dr. Zhivago, both novels describing large scale military mobilisations that impacted the course of world history.
‘No Time Left’ similarly invited an epic musical arrangement. This song, written in 1995, was the culmination of Gundermann’s preoccupation with the lack of time, a subject that goes back to his productions with Brigade Feuerstein in the early 1980s. 12 Now in 1995, the year when the revelations of Gundermann’s collaboration with the Stasi came to light, he is in self-reflective mode: there is simply no time to waste making the mistakes that cost him dear in his life. When he sings ‘Black leaves of rage are falling’ this is a reference to his personal anger at how he compromised himself with the GDR regime: ‘And I haven’t any time left to form a guard honour/ Or sing along a little in the choir’. In a direct reference to his Stasi background, he sings ‘And I haven’t any time left to play cops and robbers / or pledge allegiance to authority’. In the chorus he laments how he allowed himself to be used by the regime in this way. ‘And I haven’t any time left: I won’t get in line/ to queue up, sell myself or be taken for a ride’. But he already anticipates the criticism that is coming his way in the media: ‘And I haven’t any time left / I’ll face up to the strife / I’m running just to save my soul/ from the course of life’. The breaking news of his Stasi background was indeed to cost him dearly. It became a media scandal and scuppered the signing of an exclusive contract with a renowned management agency in West Germany. 13
This epic tale of Gundermann’s life is conveyed by the three separate musical sections composed by Gundermann, Michael Nass and Werner Schickor. The culminating extended section with the ‘La la la’ harmony chorus intensifies the emotional aspect. In our production we bolstered this by creating different layers, adding organ, synthesiser, rhythmic vocal effects and handclapping.
In the context of Gundermann’s shortened life – he was to die within three years of writing this song – ‘No Time Left’ retrospectively takes on a more pronounced epic quality than it already had. An English-speaking audience lacking knowledge of Gundermann and GDR history would hardly be expected to make such connections to the singer’s collaboration with the state. However, one doesn’t need to know this for the song to work. The politics are never mentioned directly, a trait that Gundermann and many other Liedermacher refined in the GDR to evade censorship. 14 This song about the time wasted pursuing unworthy causes in life is so universal that everyone can relate to it.
Both ‘Angel above the Colliery’ and ‘And if it makes you cry’, too, can be understood in the wider historical context. Both are symbolic of the end of an epoch in which the idea of the worker and the social collective was held as sacrosanct. Both convey Gundermann’s disappointment in the failure of socialism. At the same time, they are critical of the GDR. Contrasting with the GDR’s traditional glorification of the worker, ‘And if it makes you cry’ portrays the bleak harshness of working lives and the characters whose lives inevitably end in failure: ‘For they have hardened hands and a hardened heart / They never tire of fighting and die before their time.’ The only hope lies in the new children who will be born: ‘You won’t feel wealthy/ Until you’ve loved a child / So raise it gentle / As soft and gentle as your people never were’.
‘Angel above the colliery’ also reflects the end of an era. The song depicts the effects of the rampant deindustrialisation of the 1990s and the necessity of emigration to search for new horizons. In the song, the subject is deserted by his guardian angel who watched over him in the mine, while other colleagues perished in industrial accidents. The song arguably represents the final nail in the coffin of the socialist ideal in which Gundermann had ardently believed, symbolic of the faith which has now abandoned him. As in ‘No Time Left’, the evolving musical soundscape conveys the epic dimension of a story that had spanned Gundermann’s whole adult life across two political systems. At the same time the message is universal, applicable to all those who have to uproot their lives in search of work. At the song’s conclusion the unemployed angels are portrayed as jostling in the sky above the colliery: ‘They’re leaving for another world, a new location / Just like so many here / Just like you and me’. In our musical adaptation we emphasised this point in the chorus-like repetition of the final phrase ‘Just like you and me’.
Further Considerations of Musical Adaptation
This section will talk about the various different musical styles I used in the reinterpretation of the Gundermann songs. Firstly, it is important to mention my bouzouki, which was the central instrument around which the other musical parts were built. I believe the identifiable characteristics of many of the new musical arrangements stem from this. The Irish bouzouki is distinctive, due to the drone effect that comes from the semi-open tuning of GDAD, in that it allows the playing of musical figures at the same time as rhythmical strumming. In some cases, this effect was enhanced by the mandolin accompaniment. Together with the production of Dónal O’Connor, a celebrated Irish traditional musician, my bouzouki contributed to a Celtic folk rock style that created a new musical setting for Gundermann’s songs. I should say at the outset that neither Dónal nor the other musicians had ever heard the music of Gundermann. All were committed to producing a new adaptation, and if anything, were keen not to hear the original recordings to avoid being influenced by them.
One of my initial considerations when musically adapting the Gundermann material for the present day was to give the songs a more modern bass and drum rhythm. In particular I thought about the dance groove drum rhythm style that has tended to dominate pop, rock and even contemporary folk music since the 1990s. Although Gundermann was still recording in the 1990s, he was not influenced by new developments in dance music. This included the ‘Madchester’ drumbeat, a syncopated, almost military rhythmic style that originated with the Manchester bands Stone Roses and Happy Mondays around 1990 and later was used by Oasis. While this dance groove significantly changed mainstream pop music in the 1990s — U2 famously adopted it on their 1993 album Achtung Baby — it had no influence on Gundermann and his band Seilschaft, who operated in a different musical sphere from mainstream pop and tended to play in a straightforward 1980s rock style. I thought that Gundermann’s catchy songs would suit this more modern approach. Moreover, I did not think that Gundermann would have disapproved: particularly in his early career, in the music theatre productions of his group Brigade Feuerstein in East Germany, he had shown a consistent awareness of the most current developments and styles of western pop and rock. Throughout the 1970s and 80s this was evident in his use of ‘contrafactum’ (taking well- known melodies to set one’s own new lyrics to) where he took tunes and arrangements from a variety of current genres such as West Coast rock (e.g. Neil Young), Glam (e.g. T. Rex), or New Wave (e.g. Eurythmics). The musical compositions for his solo songs from the late-1980s up to his death in 1998, however, reflected more standard rock, folk and singer/songwriter approaches, reflecting the epithets he received in the press such as ‘Dylan des Tagebaus’ (Dylan of the coal mine) or ‘Springsteen des Ostens’ (Springsteen of the East).
However, while several of the songs seemed ideally suited for a 1990s dance treatment, I did not wish to overdo this, particularly when it wasn’t called for. In the end, we used the Madchester groove only in the songs: ‘Coming and Going’, ‘Wooden Horse’ and ‘Angel above the Colliery’, and to a certain degree in ‘No Time Left’. ‘Shall Be’, on the other hand, was interpreted in a Cajun folk style which complemented the song’s theme of humankind rooted in nature. ‘Grass’ and ‘War’ were both kept in their original 3/4 waltz time.
In both these cases, however, I had originally intended to make them sound more contemporary Irish. With ‘Grass’, I had been keen to try out a contemporary jazz folk groove in 3/4 time that I had heard used for the song ‘The Raven’ by the folk singer Niamh Dunne. This also reminded me of the jazz-influenced arrangements of Astral Weeks by the Northern Irish legend, Van Morrison. I thought the more our arrangements reflected the home-grown roots of the band the better. However, when we began jamming with ‘Grass’, the drummer and bassist, Stephen and Nick, did not latch onto my intended Celtic groove but, on the contrary, instinctively plumped for the same European continental waltzing style as used in Gundermann’s baroque pop original. This was clearly the way it was meant to be played!
In the case of ‘War’, the new drum loop was performed in a more aggressive military tattoo style than Gundermann’s original. This was intended to underline the thematic associations of the song. The lyrics deal with the theme of war in a broad sense: the legacy of the historical class conflict which resulted in the East-West ideological confrontation that had shaped the greater part of Gundermann’s life. In a general sense, it can be interpreted as a song about conflict between the haves and the have-nots, between oppressor and oppressed.
While we were recording it in the studio it conjured up contemporary images of the war in Ukraine, which was constantly in the news. We underlined this Eastern European association by emulating a Soviet 4-part male choir. This harmonises over Gundermann’s minor chord progression in the introduction and chorus, which itself is Eastern European sounding.
The two songs ‘And if it makes you cry’ and ‘No Time Left’ are both played in a straight, non-syncopated, 4/4 rhythm, not dissimilar to the original. This was distinctly reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen with its big folk-rock sound and proclamatory lyrics about the harsh life of workers with ‘hardened hands and a hardened heart’. However, in our adaptation the drum accent and bass pattern are slightly adjusted to sound more pop/punk in the style of ‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones. The reference to the latter is our nod to the legendary Derry band that has become part of Northern Ireland’s pop history. Our adaptation is an example of how we, as a group, had great fun in creating our own relationship to the music of Gundermann by utilising our own musical influences. It was moreover perhaps no accident that we adopted this particularly affirmative bass and drum pulse: the Undertones are commonly associated with the joys of youth. Although Gundermann’s songs are more socially critical, his upbeat music and witty, poetic turn of phrase exude a joy of life that momentarily resolves the conflicts presented and reaffirms hope: ‘You won’t feel wealthy / Until you’ve loved a child / So raise it gentle / So soft and gentle / As gentle as your people never were’.
The musical adaptation of ‘Coming and Going’ and ‘Angel above the Colliery’ presented different issues. Though I experimented with rhythmical approaches in the previous songs, I always kept the original melody and chord structure intact since I had no ambition to change these – they were after all aspects of Gundermann I admired greatly. With ‘Coming and Going’, however, I possibly felt a greater degree of freedom in creating my own version of this song since there are no existing recordings of Gundermann playing it with a band, only a solo performance on the CD Torero…Werkstücke III. He plays the song on an acoustic guitar in a slow country rock tempo and style not far removed from Neil Young in his Harvest era. I kept the original melody but considerably sped up the tempo and gave it the 1990s dance groove. Breaking with my usual practice, I also altered the chord progression of the chorus. Instead of going to the major third (A) at the end of each line – on the words ‘let them go’, ‘let them stay’ etc – I chose the minor third (Am) immediately followed by the sub- dominant C. While this is a highly conventional rock chord progression (e.g. ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’), I found this worked better for me on the bouzouki. The increased tempo and new chord change allowed me to impart the song with a greater directness and confidence. I also inserted an instrumental hook, a bridging guitar riff between the lines of the chorus. This was inspired by a chord sequence used in a similar way on Mott the Hoople’s ‘All the Young Dudes’. By playing freely with Gundermann’s original chord sequence and inventing a new hook riff I found a musical structure that I thought better conveyed my English translation in the folk-rock musical format.
The only other song on which I slightly tweaked the chord structure – albeit only in the middle eight bridge section – was ‘Angel above the Colliery’. A middle eight conventionally marks a brief, temporary shift into a new musical space towards the end of a song before resolving back into the main motif for the final chorus. In this brief section I departed from both the original chord structure and the melody. The reason for this change lies in the following: ‘Angel above the Colliery’ documents Gundermann’s traumatic experience of being laid off from the job he had held for almost twenty years as an excavator driver in the mine. There is sadness, emptiness, and brokenness. One is confronted with an image of a scarred, deindustrialised landscape from which people are departing. In Gundermann’s original version the soft, almost plaintiff mood of the verses and choruses abruptly changes in the middle eight to one of anger. The lines become strikingly less melodious, as the narrator furiously laments the fate of his former colleagues ‘Helmut’ and ‘Wyschek’ who had both died in mining accidents. Unlike himself, there were no guardian angels watching over them. But now, the angels have been set free, just like the workers. The former are now ‘jostling in the heavens’ looking for a purpose. The angels are arguably an allusion to the paternal hand of the state that protected him back then, but also symbolic of an ideology that held his own universe together, which has now deserted him.
The musical contrast of Gundermann’s middle eight section is, however, quite jarring in a pop or folk milieu. It comes over as a Brechtian alienation (‘Verfremdung’) device to shake the audience out of a passive consumption of art. Gundermann was highly familiar with Brechtian technique, having used it frequently in his musical theatre days with Brigade Feuerstein. For me, however, translated into the context of Celtic folk rock, such a drastic break did not work. I could not justify such a deviation from the main melody line of the verse and chorus. I therefore settled for a middle eight with a more moderate shift, composing a new melody and harmonic progression which I felt suited my adaptation better.
‘Wooden Horse’ was another song which we had a lot of fun re-interpreting musically in the studio. Here again I stayed true to Gundermann’s melody line and the underlying chords. But we gave the song a much harsher, rockier treatment than Gundermann’s original folk version of 1993. Back then, the song had a clear relevance to the broken promises of socialism as well as those of Chancellor Kohl in newly united Germany. Every promise of utopia turns out to be a wooden horse. While Gundermann had sung the original with yearning and sadness, I chose an angrier approach, the lyrics reminding me directly of the claims of Brexit which inevitably turned out to be falsehoods. The song reflects how the people didn’t like what they had voted for: ‘Take this one back / I don’t want a horse like that/ […] / This one’s no good/ I don’t want a horse of wood’. To emphasis the aggression, we used electric guitar, distorted bass and drums, and more vehement, anguished vocals.
This essay has documented the process of translating and musically adapting selected songs of Gerhard Gundermann. It has outlined particular issues and challenges of translation while also reflecting on the creative agency involved in reworking the songs musically in the Celtic rock medium for a new non-German speaking audience. Public responses to concerts both in Northern Ireland15 and in East Germany 16 have been overwhelmingly positive.
Evaluations of the Belfast performances point to new insights gained into a subject and musical phenomenon one knew nothing about before. Feedback on the German concerts – promoted by the association Gundermanns Seilschaft e. V. and played in front of audiences highly familiar with Gundermann’s work – generally expressed delight at the new renditions in English with the Celtic folk rock musical adaptations which presented the singer’s songs in a new cultural context.
1 In this case I looked at the German translation of Eric Bogle’s song ‘No man’s Land’, otherwise known as ‘The Green Fields of France’. I have also published on the history of the German translations of Robert Burns’ ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that’. See David Robb and Eckhard John, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that and “Trotz alledem”: Robert Burns, Ferdinand Freiligrath and their reception in the German Folksong Movement’, Modern Language Review, 156/1, 2011, pp. 17-46.
2 Gerhard Gundermann, in Hans-Dieter Schütt, Tankstelle für Verlierer. Gespräche mit Gerhard Gundermann. Eine Erinnerung (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2011), p. 88
3 Gunderman in interview with Hans-Dieter Schütt, Tankstelle für Verlierer. Gespräche mit Gerhard Gundermann. Eine Erinnerung (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2011), pp. 39-40.
4 For more detail on this see Robb, ‘A Heroism for the New Times in the Protest Songs of Gerhard Gundermann’, Popular Music (2024), forthcoming.
5 For more in-depth analyses of these two songs see David Robb ‘The Krabat Motif in the Songs and Musicals of ‘Liedermacher’ Gerhard Gundermann’, Music & Politics (2024, forthcoming) and David Robb, ‘The Influence of Brigitte Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand on the Political Songs of Gerhard Gundermann’, German Life & Letters (2024, forthcoming).
6 This song was written by Gundermann’s colleague Jörg Wilkendorf with whom he played in the group Die Wilderer (1989-90).
7 Randgruppencombo, ‘Kommen und Gehen’, 200th ‘Jubiläumskonzert’ 29 December 2015, Berlin Postbahnhof, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqRzMgq3tK8
8 This was the observation of several audience members after I performed my translations at a concert in the Kulturfabrik in Hoyerswerda on 24 February 2024.
9 Schütt, Tankstelle für Verlierer, p. 132.
10 See David Robb, ‘The Krabat Motif’.
11 This was inspired by an idea of fellow collaborator Gary Gates.
12 See Robb, ‘The Krabat Motif’.
13 See David Robb, ‘A Heroism for the New Times’. See also Meinhardt, ‘Conny Gundermann im Gespräch’. mit Birk Meinhardt,’ in Gundermann. Von jedem Tag will ich was haben, was ich nicht vergesse.... ed. A. Leusink (Berlin, 2018), pp. 11-22
14 See David Robb, ‘Political Song in the GDR: The Cat- and-Mouse Game with Censorship and Institutions’, in Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s, ed. D. Robb (Rochester/NY), pp. 227- 254.
15 The studio band has performed concerts in the Duncairn Arts Centre, Belfast (8 September 2023), the Harty Room, Queen’s University Belfast (5 October 2023) and will perform in the Oh Yeah Centre, Belfast (13 June 2024).
16 The trio of Dave Robb, Paul Webster and Andreas Albrecht performed concerts in the Kulturfabrik, Hoyerswerda (24 February 2024) and Die Wabe, Berlin (25 February 2025).
