Charlie Bertsch / 23 Mar 2023

All About the Heimat

Music as Politics in 1980s Germany

Teenagers were milling about. Bright colours shot off the portable mirror ball. The DJ stepped up to his console to cue the first track.(...)

John Foster / 27 Jan 2023

The End of Franco

Agitated: Grupos Autónomos and Armed Anticapitalism in Spain, by Joni D.

The 1970s was a decade of broken dreams. The end of the postwar boom brought to a close the era of middle-class liberalism in Europe and North America.(...)

Charlie Bertsch / 14 Sep 2022

Details Are Everything

Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend

The first thing that came to mind, when I learned that Jean-Luc Godard had passed away, was a sequence from his 1967 film Weekend. Not one involving one of its many fiery car crashes or the guerrilla outfit that tramps around in the woods near the end, but something more subtle.(...)

Charlie Bertsch / 01 Jun 2022

Germany’s Long 1960s

Punkt, by Faust

For the first twenty seconds, the opening track of Faust’s “new” album Punkt conjures a soft, roomy soundscape, like most of the material they have released since their partial reunion in the 1990s.(...)