Beyond No Future

Reviews / Votes

Mirko Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus Shahan, who themselves boast an impressive body of work on punk and related aesthetics, have assembled a thoughtful collection of scholars representing well the interdisciplinary nature of punk studies, sound studies, and German studies. * German Studies Review * Beyond No Future does much to affirm the importance of the punk to 20th century German history and its rightful place within a longer narrative of avant-garde aesthetics and autonomous cultural production in modern Germany. The four chapters on punk and fascism in Part Three would all provide excellent stand-alone readings for introducing German punk into undergraduate courses on modern Germany and post-war German culture. * EuropeNow * This book does a wonderful job of both contextualizing punk's place within German history and showing how punk musicians worldwide have engaged with German history and politics. * Priscilla D. Layne, Assistant Professor of German, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA * At a time when scholarly and popular interest in the German punk and post-punk genres is steadily increasing, Beyond No Future is a very welcome collection. The contributors admirably redress the skew in much anglophone punk historiography. They demonstrate how punk was not merely a one-way street leading from the Anglo-American world, but how German cultural history--and not just the detourned swastikas--breathed into a larger transnational phenomenon. In particular, the book shows how punk resonated and became imbued with specifically German concerns, Western and Eastern, relating to memory, boredom, pleasure and more besides. Importantly, the authors do not seal off Deutschpunk into a particular era, but reveal its affective power in more recent times, and well beyond German borders too. Beyond No Future is a landmark collection that will be of interest to cultural historians and popular music scholars, as well as to music enthusiasts, more generally. * Andrew W. Hurley, Associate Professor, The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * Ranging from the production of new cultural spaces to the notion of cultural memory as living process, this unique Anglophone collection in German punk studies fills a long-standing void. Offering multiple insights into punk's aesthetic and political responses to a divided and transnationally embedded Cold War Germany, the essays ultimately reach out beyond this music scene's historical moment of formation. * Hillegonda C Rietveld, Professor of Sonic Culture, London South Bank University, UK * Although difficult to achieve, the book balances the complex melange of the cultural, political and historical. * Punk & Post-Punk *