The German Talking Heads
It is only now, when they sound as they should have done, that we realise that the Hesselbach Family were the Talking Heads in this completely unlikely constellation. Now their music can be heard as the manifesto it was kind of meant to be, with its self-mocking refrain: stop making common sense!

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“Where else but in Tübingen would you find the mecca for a bunch of people with non- conformist, hippie, eco, alternative, political leanings? Where else are these horrible creatures so untouched by the reforms of the New Wave? Where else but here, with the perpetual tearing down of boundaries, are the conditions so good for the development of really imaginative creative processes?” wrote Hank Ewalds in an article about Tübingen’s post-punk scene in September 1982.
That was really late! In other places, the New German Wave was already over by that point. Some bands and labels had broken up. Others prepared for the break up, either moving towards music without vocals (electronic dance music), or styles unsuited to German lyrics (like sixties revival or garage rock). Those were the watermarks of the New German Wave, defined by pop theorist Diedrich Diederichsen as a specifically West German form, which was only interesting as long as the hippies didn’t understand it, because that imbued it with meaning and a sense of empowerment.
In autumn 1982, this hegemony only existed as a caricature, which the experience-oriented youth refused to even touch. Over time, punk survived by becoming anarcho-punk. The hopeless struggle against the state and police promised something akin to eternal life. The rest just moved on.
But in the countryside they were always a bit behind. Particularly in the south-west of Germany, where the quiet university town of Tübingen sits like a Disney version of a German province. Life there is shaped by students. In part due to influential professors of philosophy (Ernst Bloch!) and sociology, the late 1970s were synonymous with a left-leaning alternative scene. Particularly in the town centre, where the relevant parts of life took place. The so- called ‘New Social Movements’ were happening everywhere, with change underway in all institutions.
It was in this climate that a bunch of renegades met in 1979. Two things united them: antipathy towards their fellow students and a desire for musical renewal. They realised that for a brief moment in history, the culture war had made (post) punk the best idea since the Velvet Underground. And they had to take it immediately into their student cafeteria. The myth that working class kids had been robbed of their future and needed an outlet for their frustrations was laughable to them. Punk was the struggle for interpretive sovereignty over pop culture.
To give it meaningful direction and to present to the public the already nostalgic (perhaps only retroactively constructed) idea of pop as an agent of permanent cultural revolution, they needed bands whose confrontational performances could stir up and split student gatherings. That’s what Attraktiv & Preiswert did, fronted by Ralf van Daale (theology). The Hesselbach Family was founded by Gottfried, Axel, Claude, Frank and Klaus Hesselbach, with Handke Hesselbach (political sciences) joining later. The name, taken from a TV series about a Hessian family business, placed them somewhere between wishful thinking (Ramones) and reality (the provincial backwaters).
Compared to most projects, where everyone was involved in three (one group and two side projects), the Hesselbachs were a band in the old-fashioned sense. Their playing was tight, which was unusual for the New German Wave. Their co-conspirators had brilliant ideas (like Autofick and Zimt), but the Hesselbach Family really had the new possibilities at their fingertips. They had the groove of A Certain Ratio and Medium Medium, as well as the ‘broken jazz’ of James Chance groups, and they shamelessly adopted the manifesto pop of British DIY bands and the Scottish ‘Postcard sound’. They were even quicker than others to integrate ‘Zitatpop’, the further development of the revolution that was underway and still largely not understood in Germany.
The cassette ‘Froh zu sein’ (‘To be happy’) appeared in early 1982 and quickly became a bestseller. So it seemed a good idea to re-record the material and release a record that brings together the key aesthetic achievements of the post-punk era, to provide a ‘library music’ type overview of the music that, for the last three years, had shaken the walls of Tübingen.
It was a good idea, but realising it took a while unfortunately. By the time they were in shops in late 1982, it was already much too late. Privately-pressed and with various versions of spray-painted sleeves, it conveyed a sense of obscurity which already looked a bit passé. But it didn’t command the authority for it to be really noticed and taken seriously. Amidst the flood of hastily cobbled together records released in a rush by the record industry since the summer, with dwindling public interest in strident German language music, the album would have failed anyway, especially since the bland production typical of recording studios in the German provinces blended the particular qualities of Hesselbach music into the background. That’s why, for a long time, no one realised that it was the legacy of a scene that was small, but highly motivated in terms of content. It represents those who, between 1979 and 1983, wanted to recreate the big and exciting pop world in the sleepy regions around Stuttgart, for fun but with the necessary seriousness. They even documented this process in their own magazine Lautt, which treated southern German bands as equal to the newest bands from around the world.
Lautt provided a platform for Ralf van Daale and Handke Hesselbach (who wrote and swaggered under the pseudonym Hank Ewalds) to develop their ideas into a kind of pop theory with reference to Deleuze and other hot shit. German post-punk was traditionally averse to theory (the old hippie ideology that puts feelings above thought had mostly continued to fester), so this was otherwise only attempted in Hamburg (by Sounds), Cologne (by Spex) and Munich (by Mode und Verzweiflung).
It is only now, when they sound as they should have done, that we realise that the Hesselbach Family were the Talking Heads in this completely unlikely constellation. Now their music can be heard as the manifesto it was kind of meant to be, with its self-mocking refrain: stop making common sense!
(Text: Frank Apunkt Schneider)
(Translation: Helen Ferguson)