Now it's time to spit on your hands again...! The little flashlights are on and we let 99 balloons fly: Neue Deutsche Welle floods us with a touch of protest and a lot of nostalgia.
Big names like Nena, Hubert Kah, Annette Humpe, Falco or Markus shaped this time in the early 80s and created songs that everyone can still sing along to today.
But where does the flood of new German artists, mostly labeled as fun music, come from, which suddenly sounds so different from their Schlager predecessors and folk music fathers?
For the first time, singing German is hip. Young people hear this mixture of punk and electro with lyrics in their own language and no longer have to look to England or America to find cool music.
With Nena and Markus, the NDW has a model couple, at least in the film. Artists like Hubert Kah and Falco cause scandals. And the protest against war, against traditional structures and for the environment is given space in songs like "Karl der Käfer", "99 Luftballons" or "Scandal im Sperrgebiet".
Anyone who dismisses all this as just pop music for fun has never really listened to "I want fun" either, because the fuel now costs almost 3 Mark 10. But you can also celebrate with the Neue Deutsche Welle on protest songs.
The 90-minute documentary "Pop Giganten - Neue Deutsche Welle" takes you back to the early days of German pop, when everything seemed possible and yet a lot was still forbidden. Experts and artists such as Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen (including keyboardist "Nena"), Markus ("I want fun"), Janine Kunze, Sonja Kraus, Nilz Bokelberg, Xenia von Sachsen, Marco Schreyl, as well as Danny Liedtke and Celebrity Big Brother winner Janine Pink takes us back to the birth of German-language music beyond Schlager and folk music. "Give me your hand, I'll build you a sand castle, somehow, somewhere, someday..."
