Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will explore how the musical event of the popular Russendisko parties in Berlin function as a site for the exploration and reinterpretation of the collective memories of Germans and Russians and their shared past.

Paper long abstract:

Since its first emergence on the Berlin club scene in 1999, the hugely popular "Russendisko" parties at Kaffee Burger have mostly been treated by social scientist as a place where Germans come to escape modern life and wallow in vodka-drenched soviet-nostalgia. The particularities of the time and place where the phenomenon of the Russenpartyszene - Russian parties for Germans - sprung up, namely in post-Wende Berlin, has up until now largely been neglected.

This paper will focus on the particular social-historical context of the Russenpartyszene and one of the key places where this scene flourishes most. In Kaffee Burger, once a pub where East-German dissidents came together and famous for its still intact GDR-exterior, different groups that spent most of the 20th century separated from each other, come together to dance and party. Through musical imagined worlds, Germans and Russians de- and reconstruct ideas about each other and their shared past. On an empirical level, this paper will look at how German and Russian musicians use a variety of key-symbols in their musical performances that is generally recognized by their German audiences to be "authentically" Russian. The paper will explore how musicians both use and redefine this idea of Russianness, and how it is intrinsically connected to ideas of "Germanness". On a theoretical level, the paper will focus on how the secluded space of the musical events allows for the exploration of issues such as collective memory, identity, and implicit social knowledge of a problematic shared past.