Wave Gotik Treffen

Cyber-goths, attending Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig in 2009-06-01. Photo: Danny Sotzny

With World Goth Day #15 occupied by Bob Metcalfe and the Ethernet, this year’s annual post has been moved to 2023-05-27 to coincide with an even older Goth event, Wave Gotik Treffen (WGT) = Wave Gothic Meet, a music festival that started life in Potsdam in 1987, an illegal event in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) = Democratic Republic of Germany aka Ostdeutschland = East Germany.

At WGT, there are two types of goths: purists, who regard 1987 as the starting date of WGT; and resurrectionists, who prefer 1992, when the event was revived in Leipzig in 1992. It has been held in Leipzig ever since.

In my career as a prison teacher, one becomes acutely aware that outsiders, those who live outside of acceptable social norms in a thousand or more different ways, find comfort in something excessive. One of the major appeals of Goth music, and its kindred variants, such as glam metal, is its immaturity. It is an attitude reminiscent of 14-year old girls experimenting with makeup: If a little is good, a lot is better. Why not? It is an experiment. In fact, life is an experiment.

Justin Quirk states that: Glam metal kind of drags rock back to where it’s supposed to be, which is the mental and hormonal concerns of 15-year-olds. He redundantly adds that at its best, Glam metal is profoundly juvenile.

An introduction to a large number of immature musicians is found an Alexis Pedridis’ article in the Guardian about Bound for Hell: On the Sunset Strip (2022), a box set from Numero Group that documents the nascent glam metal scene.

I do not read much fiction, but the latest novel I read (finished yesterday, 2023-05-26) is Stasi Child (2016) written by David Young (1958 – ) who has his crime fiction set in the DDR, in 1974. In a Telegraph newspaper interview 2016-, Young says the inspiration for the book series came after his indie pop band The Candy Twins toured Germany in 2007 and he read Anna Funder’s (1966 – ) non-fiction book Stasiland (2003) between gigs. Some of Stasi Child is set at Prora, a former National Socialist resort, on Rügen, an island in the Baltic Sea. Another major location in the book is Brocken, a 1 143 m high mountain, in Harz National Park, in northern Germany. The mountain is the traditional home of witches.

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