We meet Berlin-based metal musician Yvonne Ducksworth and have SO. MUCH. FUN. learning the most elemental moves of headbanging. Yvonne headbangs to “Terracide” by her band, Treedeon (treedeon.bandcamp.com).

In the wake of World War II, many German musicians looked for inspiration outside of their devastated land. While East Germany fell behind the Soviet "Iron Curtain," making the performing of "American" music there into a subversive, often dangerous, act, West Germans embraced genres and artists from the Allied nations, especially from the U.S. and Great Britain. A give and take developed in the German music world between "German" and "non-German" music, with some artists singing in English (like German metal hit-makers Scorpions, whose career spanned four decades), some in German, some performing in German while in Germany but in English while abroad. In the '80s German bands Destruction, Kreator and Sodom developed metal's first homegrown German sub-genres. Today, hundreds of thousands of international metal fans flock to Germany every year to attend Wacken Open Air, a festival that celebrates the entire spectrum of global sub-genres of heavy metal and hard rock.

In class we celebrate German musicians' full-throated embrace of this hard-driving music, and the distinct “German-ness” (whatever that may mean) of the way German metal musicians and fans have transformed this global genre of music into to something that is wholeheartedly their own.