Satan fordert die totale Zerstörung des Betriebes! Die Heavy Metal-Subkultur in der DDR

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Abstract

East German heavy metal fans constituted one of the GDR’s largest subcultures in the mid and late 1980s. Using sources from the Stasi record agency BStU, as well as documents from the German radio archive Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, and studies from GDR’s central institute for youth research Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung, this paper describes the emergence of the subculture and the blue collar background of its members. Furthermore, it explores how the regime tried to handle these deviant adolescents. Since the subcultural practices helped heavy metal fans to cope with the situation behind the ›iron curtain‹, these practices were
closely linked to the party-state. After the state had collapsed, they became useless in this respect and so the subcultures vanished around 1989/1990.