»Where I come from – speechlessness and utopia within music« (De)

Masha Qrella is from East Berlin, but that’s not a good-enough explanation. Based on her Pop-Kultur commissioned work »Wie soll ich dir das beschreiben?« (»How should I describe this to you?«), in which the songwriter examines the writing of author and filmmaker Thomas Brasch, she talks to the dissidence researcher Elske Rosenfeld and moderator Kito Nedo about identity, speechlessness and utopia within music – then and now. »At 14 we were revolutionaries and already at 16 were silenced,« says Qrella. »We played in bands without a political vision, as ours was just taken from us ad absurdum. We had other problems that we couldn’t find words for. We had no identity but we had a future in a country with rules we had yet to learn. We tried to read the codes of pop and questioned them very carefully while only few people were listening. The years went by. The codes are deciphered, and we suffocate in the utopialessness of our generation.«