Why can't we stay young?

So many songs we forgot to play

A while ago – like, a while, maybe two decades back – I found myself at the wedding of an acquaintance from grad school, hand in hand with some other classmates in a circle around him and his now-wife, while “Forever Young” by the German band Alphaville played. The wedding was in the evening at a large, mostly empty room of an art gallery in a small city. Traffic out of Toronto had been bad, meaning that me and the two friends I drove with were agitated on the way there, worried we’d miss the ceremony. (Possibly we did miss the ceremony.) I was wearing a dress I had bought to wear to a wedding a few years earlier, but had since incorporated into my office wardrobe, and shoes that were heeled but so sensible that someone asked whether I’d come straight from work. A few thoughts passed through my mind as, in darkening twilight, we circled the couple: 1. This is kind of amazing; 2. This is super cheesy; 3. I actually kind of love this song. The couple is still married.

I just finished a book I’d been looking forward to reading for a while, Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990, by Kat Hoyer. It’s a popular history, covering the formation and dissolution of the former German Democratic Republic. The book brings in personal stories of people who grew up in or lived through East Germany at various points, as well as a summary of the interesting political dynamics and economic initiatives, such as when the coffee supply to East Germany was drying up and they planted seeds, never to be realized by the GDR before it was dissolved, for a steady supply from socialist brother Vietnam.

I can’t explain my particular interest in East Germany, except that one of my entrées into understanding the world is through trying to understand things that have changed in my lifetime. And any place that was once, or still, off limits for visitors naturally makes me curious. The decades of East and West Germany, as well, represent two different paths out of the post-war era, one of which was later quickly dispatched of and near-forgotten.

A section of the book is dedicated to East German pop and rock and zeroes in on two artists, one familiar to me, and who left for West Germany – Nina Hagen – and one I’d never heard of, the rock band The Puhdys, who didn’t. In 1970 when The Puhdys were banned from playing Karl-Marx-Stadt due to their non-alignment with the GDR’s “socialist cultural policy”, they worked with local government to find a way to stay on stage, which meant moving from covers of English-language rock to writing their own songs, in German. Their subsequent catalogue was so popular they played in West Germany and, at home, had sold 20 million albums by 1989.

This video performance of The Puhdys hit “Wenn ein Mensch lebt” is from Berlin, 1979. The outfits could be early Abba. The stacks are Marshall. The audience is mostly seated, but the lead singer goes around the front of the stage at the end and… shakes their hands, until one woman, presumably overcome by non-socialist rock-and-roll urges, rushes the stage.

The lyrics focus on the measure of a life, and seem like a bookend to “Forever Young”:

Wenn ein Mensch kurze Zeit lebt Sagt die Welt,  dass er zu früh geht.

If someone lives a short time, the world says that he’s leaving too soon.

Wenn ein Mensch lange Zeit lebt Sagt die Welt, es is Zeit

If someone lives a long time, the world says, it’s time.*

Just a few years later, on the other side of the still-extant wall, in Münster, and we are in the eighties and singing in English. The opening lyrics reference “the bomb”, not in its appreciative adjectival form, but referring to the nuclear preoccupation of the era that later disappeared for a few decades before, unfortunately, returning, albeit in a more confusing way. There’s an article that gives some interesting context to the seemingly cliché-ridden lyrics at American Songwriter.

The band’s lead singer sports big, Ian McCullough-like hair in a video of moody filtered light cinematography, jumpsuits, and eyeliner. Also… a bunch of historical figures come to life? Who knows. They walk through a portal like on the new Time Bandits series, and then disappear. The video is very much of its time, and you’ll be able to continue appreciating the song more if you quickly put it back out of your mind. If you still need some video accompaniment, apparently “Forever Young” is currently a big hit on TikTok.

Maybe I’m intrigued by East Germany because it represents, in nation format, what is true for all of us. We can’t return to the world we grew up in; it doesn’t exist anymore. We’re always in the present, moving forward, and always trying to hold on, in various ways, to parts of the past. To our youth. Like the late Cold War-era German new wave synth pop of Alphaville.

*On that last phrase: they do? This must be cultural.