Sideways nostalgia, adopted republicanism and the performance of Irish rebel songs in the GDR

Abstract

In the 1970s and ‘80s, several East German folk revival artists started playing Irish traditional music, long before reconnecting with German folk-song material that had been put into the service of extreme nationalist and racist propaganda during the Nazi era (1933–45). Drawing upon ethnographic research among former GDR folk musicians, this article proposes that many of these post-war artists aligned with the anti-colonial messages of Irish rebel songs, performing a veritable sense of ‘Irish’ Republicanism, a form of national pride that was considered more socially acceptable than indigenous patriotic German leanings. Adapting Boym’s (2001) concept of ‘sideways nostalgia’, and illustrating crucial distinctions between historical registers of German and Irish musical exceptionalism, the article purports to unravel trajectories through which this narrative of political alignment is fashioned and sustained, ultimately illustrating music’s capacity to sound nationalism’s polyphonic trajectories.