“White Brothers with No Soul”: UnTuning the Historiography of Berlin Techno

The localization qua making white—a reracination rather than a deracination—of techno in Berlin and many other places in Europe consisted of numerous active processes, rather than a sleight of hand, in the early 1990s, and it went hand in hand with the extreme violence Black and other nonwhite communities experienced after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification a year later. These public forms of violence against Black and other nonwhite people in the years around reunification are now vigorously expunged from the celebratory historiographies of techno in Berlin and the founding of the “Berliner Republik.” Both the violence and the presence of Black music in Berlin disrupt the celebratory narrative that techno music offered the common musical ground for the frictionless coming together of young (cishet white male) Germans in East and West after reunification.