Too Much Is Better Than Too Little: Alfred Hilsberg, ZickZack & the Invention of the German Underground

Curated by Sukhdev Sandhu

Presented in collaboration with Goethe-Institut NY

The late 1970s and early 1980s was a period of imaginative intensity, wild recklessness and magnificent mutation in Germany. Not just in Berlin, but in cities and regions across the country, teenagers who had caught the punk virus unlearned their instruments, made strange synthetic sounds that the radio stations and major labels regarded as anti-music, and created a fierce, fractured poetry out of the German language. Äbwarts, DAF, Der Plan, Einstürzende Neubaten, Malaria!, Palais Schaumberg, Xmal Deutschland: at the peak of the Cold War, a time of No Wave and No Future, these bands—and hundreds like them—radiated an energy, dark wit and a spirit of experimentation that is still arresting, and in some cases waiting to be discovered still in 2026.

At the start and at the heart of this movement was Alfred Hilsberg (1947-2025). Born in Wolfsburg, he was a Hamburg-based journalist, filmmaker and concert promoter who saw punk as a form of social emancipation. In a series of articles for the best-selling music magazine Sounds, he talked of German punk as an exercise in democracy: it encouraged, he believed, a do-it-yourself attitude; incited culture from below; and produced “small daily revolutions”. Even to sing in German was, he argued, a blow against the imperialism of Anglo-American pop. Hilsberg organized landmark music festivals in Hamburg, wrote a column "neustes Deutschlands" that chronicled the emergent noises, new sounds, and popularized the concept of a Neue Deutsche Welle.

With his knowledge of historical counterculturalism, his fondness for bold proclamations, and his irrepressible enthusiasm, Hilsberg can be seen as the German counterpart of Tony Wilson, the celebrated founder of Manchester’s Factory Records. His own label, ZickZack, began in 1980 and released, in short succession and spanning post-punk, art rock, minimal synth and proto-industrial sounds, more than a hundred records. Some of these were by now-revered artists such as Einstürzende Neubaten, FSK, Andreas Dorau, Die Tödliche Doris, and Die Krupps, while others were dismissed as pretentious and unlistenable. Hilsberg didn’t care: his motto was “Lieber zu viel als zu wenig,"—"Too much is better than too little." By 1982, before its sudden demise, ZickZack had become the most successful German independent label.

Too Much Is Better Than Too Little is the first exhibition devoted to Alfred Hilsberg and ZickZack ever to be mounted outside Germany. In collaboration with Various/Artists, the exhibition will feature rare and unseen records, badges, flyers, and posters from the collection of Christian Iffland; photography and heady documentation by Sabine Schwabroh (Hilsberg’s life partner and the foremost chronicler of the Hamburg underground); and early Super-8 films of Klaus Maeck (filmmaker and founder, in 1979, of Hamburg’s first punk store, Rip Off Records).

In parallel with the show, there will be a discussion between Gudrun Gut (Malaria!/Mania D) and J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus); Deutsche Kassettentäter/German Tape Delinquents, an artist's talk by musician/curator Felix Kubin (who, barely 14, was one half of the band Die Egozentrischen 2 that Hilsberg signed to ZickZack); a talk by cultural historian Seth Howes on East German punk activism; a DJ event by artist/filmmaker Maya Hardinge focusing on female German musicians. There will also be limited-edition publications on Hilsberg and on East German fanzines.