Nachdenkliche Wehrpflichtige

Emerging briefly from the restless Hamburg and West Berlin underground around 1980, Nachdenkliche Wehrpflichtige brought together musicians, artists and writers from overlapping circles around the magazine Sounds and the wider experimental Neue Deutsche Welle scene. At the centre was Diedrich Diederichsen, then a Sounds editor, while the loose line-up included F.M. Einheit, Frieder Butzmann, Albert Oehlen, Bettina Köster, Nicola and Isabell. Rather than functioning as a conventional band, the project was essentially a short-lived collaboration between people coming from punk, experimental music, visual art and music journalism. 

The group’s best-known release was the 7-inch 'Politik Für Junge Leute', issued by Alfred Hilsberg’s ZickZack label as catalogue number ZZ 8. The record appeared in 1980, although Diederichsen’s own discography dates the EP to 1981. The material works more like a deliberately fractured collage than a conventional punk record. Football references, fragments of German popular culture, political slogans, literary quotations and snippets of familiar songs are thrown together in rapid succession. Contemporary descriptions of the EP emphasised precisely this hectic combination of current affairs, Hebbel quotations, football chants, Schlager and personal fragments, making the record difficult to fit neatly into any single genre.

 
The personnel also connects Nachdenkliche Wehrpflichtige with several important strands of the early-1980s German underground. F.M. Einheit would become a central figure in Abwärts and later Einstürzende Neubauten, Bettina Köster was a member of Mania D and subsequently Malaria!, while Frieder Butzmann was already developing his own experimental electronic and tape-based work. Albert Oehlen came from the visual-art world, and Diedrichsen continued his work as a writer, critic and cultural theorist. 

The project resurfaced on the 1983 ZickZack double LP 'Kirche der Ununterschiedlichkeit', which collected material from several related projects. Among the contributions was “Svengali Joe”, a piece later described by Hans Nieswandt as an early example of German-language rap. The recording came from the same Hamburg underground context and was made at Hafenklang Studio, linking Nachdenkliche Wehrpflichtige with the experimental recording culture surrounding ZickZack at the time, alongside records by Abwärts, Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, Die Zimmermänner, Inzucht & Ordnung, The Wirtschaftswunder and Die Radierer, giving 'Politik Für Junge Leute' a clear place within the label’s early run of deliberately unconventional German underground releases.