Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

This point must be made perfectly clear, for it is as important as the observation that Rammstein represents a particularly German and apparently ineradicable strain of utter nihilism: Rammstein is also the inheritor of the German tradition of musical genius. Their rhythmic craftsmanship—unerring and precise—is unmistakably German, as is their intuitive command of musical tension and release. Their bombast, particularly, is reminiscent of Wagner, and so is the music’s eerie hypnotic quality. Carl Orff’s influence can be heard in Rammstein’s use of orchestral arrangements. String passages explode into skull-crushing onslaughts; low, synthesized chords follow and then recede, the effect eerie and thrilling. By comparison, American heavy metal bands seem clumsy, childish, and anemic. In keeping with a long German musical tradition, Rammstein’s vocal lines are, like Schubert’s, entirely integrated into the musical texture; they are not merely arias with accompaniment. The German language functions almost as an instrument in its own right. With its sibilants, harsh fricatives, unique phonotactics, and stress rules, German lends itself particularly well to powerful, rhythmic song, as it does, of course, to powerful, rhythmic rhetoric.

  Themes from Nordic and German mythology appear throughout their videos: “Sonne,” for example, features a coke-sniffing, sadomasochistic Snow White.35 “Dalai Lama” originates in Goethe’s Erlkönig. “Reise, Reise” is based on a German sea chantey; it represents the master’s call to sleeping sailors. Although the words are translated by the band as “Voyage, Voyage,” they are also a reference to the Middle High German Risen, Risen, meaning “Wake up.” The phrase recalls Deutschland Erwache—Germany, Wake Up—a Nazi brownshirt slogan. I have seen Rammstein perform this song in concert, in Berlin. It is quite clear that the audience takes the chorus as a verb.

  “Reise, Reise” begins with the sound of lonely waves and gulls, an ominous warlike pounding, and the primitive chanting of sailors in a galley. Suddenly the listener is steamrollered by smashing drums, violent bass, and a full choir, amplified to unspeakable levels. A written account is a pale simulacrum. The song is powerful, stirring, and unbelievably effective—the effect, the intended effect, being to engorge the listener with thrilling aggression. If you’re in doubt, download the song and play it through your headphones when you next lift weights. Turn the volume up to eleven. Bench-press. You’ll be impressed by your athletic achievement.

  Most compelling is vocalist Lindemann, a massive former swimming champion from the town of Schwerin. He commands a sinister, low bass rarely utilized in contemporary pop music. His voice is untrained but electrifying. His rolled Rs are familiar. The members of the band grew up under the Deutsche Demokratische Republik’s cheerless tutelage—“We were not even allowed to say Hitler’s name,” keyboardist Lorenz told me—but somehow Lindemann managed to acquaint himself with that orator’s distinctive style nonetheless. He ripples with muscles. He is a man, not a boy, with a voice so powerful and erotic that even women who understand Rammstein’s lyrics—or perhaps especially women who understand those lyrics—find themselves mesmerized by that voice, by its beauty and masculinity. The first time I heard him sing, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.

  For some of us, that experience is disturbing, to say the least.

  SPEAKING TO THE HEART

  Now let’s watch Rammstein perform, in concert.

  The performance begins when Lindemann sets himself on fire— literally, not figuratively—then sprays flames into the air with handheld rocket launchers. Soon the entire stage is ablaze. In the band’s early days, if fans were insufficiently attentive, Rammstein doused the dance floor with kerosene and set that alight as well. It got them hopping every time. An unfortunate accident put an end to that practice, and now the band’s pyrotechnics are coordinated by professionals.

  When Lindemann sings “Bestrafe Mich”—“Punish Me”—he flagellates himself with a whip. He punctuates “Du Hast”—“You Hate”—by firing a gun in the air to a jackhammer rhythm.36 During a rendition of “Ich Will Ficken”—“I Want to Fuck”—he sports a monstrous black dildo that shoots something viscous over the audience (what precisely it shoots is a matter of controversy among Rammstein scholars, with hypotheses ranging from yogurt to yak semen), and follows this drollery with a performance of “Bück Dich”—“Bend Over”—in which he simulates the anal violation of his keyboardist, Flake Lorenz, who prostrates himself on the floor with a mask on his face, a prisoner’s chain round his neck, and a ball gag in his mouth. Lorenz then smashes a fluorescent light tube against Lindemann’s chest. All the while the auditory assault is relentless, machinelike, a musical moving Panzer division. In 1998, Rammstein was invited to the United States to open an event billed as the Family Values Tour. Authorities in Worcester, Massachusetts, watched the show, then threw the two men directly into prison on obscenity charges.37

  This is martial music. Without the music, the lyrics might be misinterpreted as expressions of adolescent angst. But these are grown men performing: they are in their late thirties and early forties. Separated from the music, the power of the lyrics is severely diluted. Try reading them again, this time nurturing a vivid image of Stuka dive bombers swiftly obliterating the Polish Air Force while eight motorized and six Panzer divisions slice through Poland. Imagine the Wehrmacht marching toward Warsaw as German tanks steamroller Brest-Litovsk and Storm Troopers slam shut the escape routes across the Vistula. Envision women and children streaming terrified into the roads, attempting to flee the unrelenting, indiscriminate German bombing. Then you can skip the music. You’ll already have something of a feel for it.

  Rammstein’s performance of “Ich Will” is particularly evocative. When the insane pounding and relentless march of the drums and the orchestra cease, there is nothing but a hypnotic melody from an acoustic guitar and a warbling, unnerving whistle from the synthesizer. Lindemann hisses:

  Then the hypnotic lull is over, and the musical tanks roar back into action. Lindemann’s voice swells to a massive imperative, dominating the thrashing guitars and the booming bass. He thunders to the audience:

  The enormous crowd roars back, in frenzied but perfect unison, a stadium of synchronous German voices:

  It hardly needs be pointed out what this scene resembles. Joseph Goebbels would have found much to admire in it. “Propaganda,” he advised, addressing the Nuremberg Rally in 1934, “must be creative. It is by no means a matter for the bureaucracy or official administration, rather it is a matter of productive fantasy. The genuine propagandist must be a true artist. He must be a master of the popular soul, using it as an instrument to express the majesty of a genuine political will.” 4 The most effective performance and propagandist techniques displayed in the Nazis’ mass rallies embodied this appeal to artistry, this aesthetic sensibility—from the grand, theatrical displays of power to the relentless marching rhythms, from the repetitive, emotional sloganeering to the idolatrous celebration of masculinity. Hitler also began his speeches softly and slowly, his voice growing louder, then booming, the masses aroused to an intoxicated frenzy.

  Lindemann proclaims himself to be baffled, hurt even, by the way certain fans are inspired to respond to these capers with Nazi salutes. “Our tour manager,” he has said, “is required to come up on stage as soon as the fascists start using the Hitler greeting.” 5 There is not much the tour manager can do about the fans on the Internet, I suppose:

  hi ,, im a big rammstein fan ,,, my name is kersten , and is great to share our own feeling about the band ,,,because when u are sad or angry R+ is like my drug ,,,, rammstein means power ,,proud,,nasionalism,,connect my soul to a different world,,,and th e meaning of rammstein is the old germany ,, das reich,, what will happen if rammstein where not germans ,, all that respect will be trash,,, so be proud of rammstein ,of germany ,and our leader adolf hitler¡¡¡

  ein volk ein reich ein fuhrer¡¡¡38

  Keyboardist Lorenz shares Lindemann’s bewilderment about the persistent charges that in Rammstein’s performances there is a hint
of the old Volk, Reich, and Führer. “How silly can they get,” he complains. 6

  Lorenz holds—with a straight face, I’ve seen this—that only silly, joyless martinets would read bloodlust between those lines, or find nihilism in words like this:

  In fact, Rammstein’s members proclaim themselves to be incensed by the persistent intimations that their music and performances have any political resonance at all, no less a disturbing one. Their publicist has set the matter straight: “There is no political content whatsoever to their music. Their songs are about love.”7

  This rejoinder, the band feels, should have been the end of the matter. Yet some critics seem determined to perceive something sinister in the spectacle of Rammstein performing “Weisses Fleisch” before 10,000 drunken Germans, each with his fist raised. “There is a perfect explanation for this,” Lindemann has remarked of the critics’ animadversions. “Narrow-mindedness.”8 Guitarist Paul Landers shares his indignation. “Absurd,” he has exclaimed.9 But, he has added helplessly, “if some of the journalists want to stick us in the Nazi corner, we can’t help it.”10

  Well, actually, Paul, you probably could help it, if you really tried. Here’s my first suggestion: Don’t use Leni Riefenstahl footage in your promotional clips. Narrow-minded though it may be, when your videos feature scenes from Olympische Spiele—Olympics Games, a documentary commissioned by the Nazis in 1936 as “a song of praise to the ideals of National Socialism”—journalists will be apt to stick you right in that Nazi corner. “We are not Nazis,” they protested again in an official statement, adding that they simply chose the film because it was a “visionary work of art.”11 There are a lot of visionary works of art in the world, Paul. But that one has a particular meaning. If you’re looking for visionary works of arts without those connotations, I commend to your attention Henri Cartier-Bresson’s dignified portraits of the elderly Gandhi. If you need any more advice, just give me a call.

  Given the musicians’ propensity to feel saddened by these hurtful accusations, quite a number of their aesthetic choices seem hard to fathom. For example, the cover art of their debut album, Herzeleid, resembles to no small degree a Nazi propaganda poster, the six shirt-less band members—enormous, muscular, iron-jawed—looming into the camera lens in what appears to be an archetypal celebration of the Master Race.12 For the portraits in Sehnsucht, the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein photographed the musicians in facial bandages, their lips and eyes stretched wide apart by hideous medical instruments. There is an echo of Trakl, again, in these “cold metal straps.” But it is unreasonable, the musicians protest, to think that images such as this might evoke obscene historical memories. “It’s just reverse discrimination because we are German,” says Lorenz. “If we were Spanish or Dutch, there would be no problem.”13

  Then again, it is hard to conceive of a Spaniard or a Dutchman composing “Links-Zwo-Drei-Vier,” meaning “Left-Two-Three-Four,” and performed, exactly as the title suggests, to the rhythm of a vigorous goose step. A crooning verse is followed by a furious, even apocalyptic chorus, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of metrically precise marching jackboots. A crowd—in perfect synchronicity— screams “Hi!” after each refrain. It’s quite close to the sound “Heil.” It’s close enough, in fact, that critics on Internet chat sites devoted to restoring pride in the Aryan race find the similarity quite pleasing.39

  Then, in a growling bass whisper, Lindemann urges the audience: “Mit dem Herzen denken!”

  Think with your heart!

  The National-Socialist Speaker’s Corps was instructed to use those words exactly when addressing its audiences. Hugo Ringler, for example, an official of the Munich Reichspropagandaleitung, recalls Hitler’s rise to power in this essay, published in 1937 for the edification of the Nazi Party’s propagandists:

  [He] spoke not to the understanding but to the heart. He spoke out of his heart into the heart of his listener. And the better he understood how to execute this appeal to the heart, the more willingly he exploited it and the more receptive was the audience to his message. One could not at all at that time persuade the German people by rational argument; things worked out badly for parties that tried that approach. The people were won by the man who struck the chord that others had ignored—the feelings, the sentiment or, as one wants to call it, the heart.14

  Lorenz has declared that he has no idea how Rammstein has acquired its neo-Nazi reputation. “Just because we play hard German and martial music doesn’t make us Nazis. We are definitely not Nazis and the song ‘Links’ should help to end this stupid gabbing.”15

  Why he believes this is unclear.

  A FAMILIAR SCENE

  Now let’s watch a Rammstein video. In fact, let’s watch the video that accompanies the song “Links.” Shot in black, white, and brown, the animated video depicts ants. To the sound of the jackboots, a giant ant pumps his right feeler in the air. We see the giant ant on stage, before thousands of ants, all identical, all returning the salute, like pistons. Ants swarm out of tunnels. The colony surges. For an instant we glimpse something in the background that resembles a storm trooper’s helmet. We see a series of insinuated swastikas, although we never see the real thing: What we are seeing are permutations on Rammstein’s insignia, which itself is a variant on a Nordic rune, and very much like an Iron Cross.40 A pseudoswastika mutates into a headless stick figure. Performer and leader, it conducts the audience, pumping its arm into the air. A massive ant-audience pumps its feelers in unison to the sound of the jackboots. We see two shots—impossibly brief—of white pseudoswastikas mutating against a grainy black background. The effect is like a wartime propaganda film.

  We cut to the band members. Swastika-ant becomes Lindemann, his massive swimmer’s physique looming. The footage is grainy and stuttering, as if shot in the 1930s. His eyes are full of madman’s ecstasy, his body thrashes in time with the music. Flash now to the ants, so closely packed that we see only the tops of their carapaces, like helmets. Flash back to Lindemann—an expression of glee on his face, now for just one second sporting a short black mustache, so briefly it could be a trick of the lighting.

  The ants organize themselves into columns, pulsing in time to the jackboots. They pour out of tunnels by the thousands, throbbing. We see an image from the sky: The ants converge before a massive tower. They form a giant, pulsating pseudoswastika. They part in columns again. Row after row of ants pump their fists in the air, and the chorus says, “Hi! Hi!” Anyone who has seen Triumph of the Will will recognize this scene. It is the Nuremberg Rally.

  Like Riefenstahl’s film, this video is a masterpiece: It is intended to arouse very particular emotions in the viewer, and it does.

  JUST DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY

  Another video. The single “Mein Teil,” which may be chastely translated as “My Part,” treats the true saga of the cannibal Armin Meiwes, who recently slaughtered and ate a forty-two-year-old Siemens engineer from Berlin. Meiwes videotaped the entire event. The advertisement Meiwes placed on the Internet, searching for a victim, forms the song’s epigram:

  „Suche gut gebauten 18-30jährigen zum Schlachten ”

  —Der Metzgermeister

  “Looking for a well-built 18-to-30-year-old for slaughtering”

  —The Master Butcher

  The song begins with the sound of a knife being sharpened.

  The video was directed by the brilliant Zoran Bihac, who also directed the video for “Links.” Originally, the band had hoped to use Meiwes’s own footage of the event, but to their disappointment, the police would not release it from their custody. Several other treatments were proposed and rejected. Here is one rejected concept, according to keyboardist Lorenz:

  We also had an idea involving war weapons, some kind of World War I scenario, with a battle going on and people dying and bombs exploding; all that would be happening in the background, whilst up close you’d see these generals bent over a map, dividing up territory, saying “that’s my part,” “that�
��s my part,” “that’s my part”... 16

  In the end, the band decided upon another approach. Guitarist Kruspe-Bernstein, who founded the band, explained the creative process to me when I spoke to him in Berlin:

  The interesting part was, like, people were, you know, how can we do this video? Someone came and said, you know, you know what we do—you guys are getting in there, everyone by himself, and perform, for two hours, whatever you want to do from listening to the song. That was really interesting. We wouldn’t know what the other ones were doing, you know? I don’t know, for me, it was like . . . well, this is the song, like obviously I could kind of do a dance thing, but I wasn’t in the mood to dance, so I thought of masturbation, then you know. . . . I feel like fighting against myself. That’s what I did. I was wrestling with myself. That’s what I did for two hours. Like a double. Like a wrestler. I was wrestling. And everyone did something else. It was really interesting. It was the first time to perform, to act, to do something that we felt. Normally what we do is act. We play-act, in a role. But this time we were really doing something that we felt. It was weird. That was different.

  What, then, did the members of the band spontaneously think to do when given this chance to do what they really felt? Lindemann, eyes wild with rage and lust, teeth rotting out of his head, sodomizes an angel, then dons a fanged mouthpiece and rips the feathered creature apart with his teeth and bare hands. Lorenz dances in ballet shoes. Schneider dresses as Meiwes’s mother and, clutching a handbag, takes the rest of the snarling, snapping, nearly naked men for a walk on leashes. There are brief shots of each of the men howling, their faces contorted with pain and terror. Kruspe-Bernstein shovels the angel’s feathers into his mouth and, as he said, wrestles with himself.