Originating from the avant-gardist part of Berlin´s new wave of the late 1970s and early 1980s,
Einstürzende Neubauten have been playing a significant role in Western popular culture for more than 40 years. Started as an experimental sound project in 1980, the band has been part of the so called ‘ingenious dilletants’ and together with DAF and the earlier bands of Krautrock like Kraftwerk and Can, represent one of the most influential German outcomes of popular music in the 20th century – regularly transgressing the frontiers between DIY and the arts, dadaism and epic as well as sound and noise.
Basing on existing work on German Punk and New Wave (Neue Deutsche Welle) (Longerich 1989; Horberger 2011 a.o.) and available studies about the work of Einstürzende Neubauten (Carpenter 2017; Bettencourt 2015; Shryane 2011; Ryszka 2012), this article focusses on how the legacy of ‘Ingenious Dilletants' was built and in which way the cultural memory and meaning of Einstürzende Neubauten have inscribed into the history and the culture of popular music and rock – and for instance how could this be explained from a contemporary perspective. Therefore, the reception and legacy building process will be reconstructed by using ethnographic tools and document analysis and will focus the dimensions of musical traditions and innovations within the German New Wave movement, the artistic and philosophic approach of the ‘dilletants’ as well as the social and local context of Berlin during the times of Cold War