No, my friends and I really didn’t like the band Silly in the 80s. These teased blondes with their sparkling synth sounds and their lyrics, as blurry as dry ice, meant little to nothing to us. It was definitely too GDR – they were even on TV! We listened to punk and even more so post-punk: as atonal, evil and mysterious as possible. Or we made strange music ourselves. Silly was mainstream for us, period.
After a number of years, our view and hearing have become somewhat milder, perhaps more differentiated. Looking back also has the advantage of contextualization: connections become visible that were not so obvious before. The 1988 DEFA documentary “whispering and screaming” by Dieter Schumann had already shown that Silly could literally “awaken” young people who would otherwise have simply withered away in their gray provincial nests.
Apart from that, the band had a few decisive advantages over their amateur underground colleagues: They mastered their instruments, were able to create catchy tunes and understood something about advertising. This combination resulted in a concise trademark that could have mass appeal in the not particularly diverse sky of East German “dance and entertainment music”.
In this way, Silly created quite smooth music with slightly ambiguous lyrics that did not pose a threat to the officials. Despite their growing popularity, they demonstrated political backbone towards the end of GDR socialism. In September 1989, Tamara Danz and her band were among the first signatories of the so-called “Rocker Resolution”.
In view of the ever-widening gap between those in power and their “working population,” a diverse group of musicians – from free jazz legend Conny Bauer to pop singer Frank Schöbel to songwriters like Wenzel & Mensching – expressed their displeasure at the increasingly dire situation. They called for an open approach “to minorities who think differently, especially when they are perhaps not a minority at all.”
“Tamara” tells the story of an artist who was aware of her contradictions
Despite immediate attempts to intimidate the authors and signatories of the resolution, its message spread extremely quickly. Internally, the Ministry for State Security had to admit with regret that within a short period of time at least 30,000 GDR citizens heard about the initiative at concerts and that this attitude “was met with overwhelming approval by the public.”
Without a doubt, the SED regime would have collapsed a few weeks later even without this late rebellion by the professional entertainment music scene. Nevertheless, the initiative was important. It made it clear to the public that an irreversible process had been set in motion. As part of its cyclical “Soundwatch” series, the Lichtblick cinema is commemorating the resolution published exactly 35 years ago. The extremely rarely shown film “Tamara” is also being shown alongside it.
When the documentary premiered at the Berlinale in 2007, the title heroine had already been dead for more than ten years. For his carefully researched and surprisingly intimate film about the Silly front woman, director Peter Kahane (“The Architects”) interviewed her closest colleagues and recovered a lot of unknown material from archives. The result is a complex picture of a woman and artist who was aware of her privileges and contradictions, but did not let her view of reality be obscured. She stayed awake, even after the end of the GDR. She continued to work, even after she had already lost the battle against cancer. Chapeau!
Tamara will only be shown on Thursday, September 26th, at 8 p.m. in the Lichtblick cinema, in the presence of director Peter Kahane and former companions of Tamara Danz.
