Popular Pagans 41 I to establish Viking metal as a metal subgenre in its own right. However, this does not mean that Vikings or the gods and heroes of the Norse pantheon have disappeared from other subgenres. Rather, they have remained one popular set of motifs amongst many, e.g. in power metal, the various flavours of which range from carnivalisation through to extreme politicisation. No explicit political content can be found in the metal bands and genres discussed so far. A link between Viking/Germanic culture and a political agenda is first identifiable in the case of the Norwegian band Burzum and echoed in terms of its ideological alignment by the German band Absurd. Both tackled the twin ideas of Germanic heritage and Viking culture with more seriousness. The two are rarely distinguished and the imagery used often blends one with the other – Germanic appears as the “general” entity while Vikings refer to a specific representation. Thus, this amplification is less about self-portrayal with historical costumes and weapons than it is about being inscribed in specific lines of tradition, which aims to create deeper connections than the superficial phenomena of the masquerade. While Burzum’s Varg Vikernes has described himself as an agent of Wotan and his philosophy as “Wodanism”, which combines heathen imagery and National Socialist thought under the emblem of Wotan/Odin, Absurd came up with the “Asgardsrei” as a mythical association of spirit-driven warriors. The CD booklet accompanying their album Asgardsrei14 draws a genealogical line from Norse warriors of the Middle Ages through to the SS of Nazi Germany and beyond to the black metal musicians of the 21st century. They call for a cultural war and are certain of victory. “Der Sieg ist unser”15 (“Victory is ours”), says one of their song titles. There is also a close connection here with the völkisch movement, whose neo-Romantic Germanism paved the way for various racist and antisemitic movements at the turn of the 20th century that also bundled National Socialism in with them in order to achieve maximum impact. The affirmation of National Socialism and the Holocaust can also be explained by the völkisch element that Burzum and Absurd have emphasised.16 Against the background of metal themes and such implied ideals as masculinity, warriorship, bravery and sincerity that are widespread in metal in general, the radical formulation of a völkisch-fuelled antisemitism, especially in black metal of the 1990s, can be seen as a possible logical consequence. There is no attempt to find new images, either musically or in terms of the overall aesthetic. Instead, much of what was there before is amalgamated into a new and harsher concept in which certain moments are radically thought through to the end and combined with a martial seriousness that goes beyond the aesthetic and wants to have a real impact on culture and politics. What makes these approaches fundamentally different from the many others out there is the unconditional seriousness and – something that is often exhibited and attested to by prominent statements (such as murder, arson – both Vikernes/ Burzum and the Absurd musicians went to jail for murder) – the will to act against everything deemed to be “false”. As previous studies have shown,17 the notion of “falseness” is closely linked to Judaism as the polar opposite of Germanic/Viking Paganism and people. The “true” and its “other” The question of why radical antisemitic statements frequently occur in metal contexts in particular can be answered by looking at the connections between some of metal’s constitutive ideologemes. Antisemitism is presented in emphatic references to what is “real”, “true” and “authentic” as opposed to what is “false” and “treacherous”, which by contrast is associated with a widespread unease with capitalist modernity in order to have the responsibility for a global system converge in an image of the “Jew” as enemy, against whom the anti- modern “corrective measures” are directed.18 One of the key lines of thought is the idea of “Germanomania”.19 This pathological overemphasis of the “Germanic” precursors of modern Germanness has developed a particularly radical and aggressive variety of the “German Teutonic myth”.20 It begins with the “rediscovery” of Tacitus’s Germania by Humanist scholars in the 15th century, meaning that the images of what constitutes their “own”, i.e. the Germanic and mythical, are always accompanied by ideas of an “other” with negative connotations that is (sometimes clearly, sometimes not) marked as “Jewish”. Vikernes in particular, as well as other proponents of the National Socialist black metal (NSBM) subgenre – a form of extreme metal that is mainly defined by its positive references to National Socialism – in general may represent extreme cases but are not isolated phenomena. Rather, they appear in comparison to other references to “Germanicness” and similar conceptual self-designs only as the most radical and
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