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

by Claire Berlinski

  The video was controversial in Germany, although not for the reasons one might expect. Critics focused on the grotesque treatment of cannibalism, completely overlooking the far more astonishing images spliced into the film. Shot in black-and-white, they are portraits of Riedel, Rammstein’s bass player. He is skeletal and naked but for a filthy rag wrapped around his waist. He is writhing on the ground and screaming in agony. His ribs are protruding, his eye sockets are sunken, and his skull appears hollowed-out. His head is shaved. He appears more dead than alive. When told to “really do something that he felt,” Riedel’s first impulse was to reenact a nightmare of Auschwitz.

  It is hard to say which possibility is scarier—that the makers of this video realized this consciously, or that they didn’t.

  “WHAT’S NATURALLY IN THE MUSIC IS WHAT MAKES IT SO GERMAN”

  I met the members of Rammstein for the first time, in Berlin, on the day American military action commenced in Iraq. Looking for my hotel, I saw graffiti on the street:

  Out, America, occupiers!

  Out, America, terrorists!

  Out, America, inventors of the atomic bomb!

  Out, America, inventors of anthrax!

  I saw antiwar demonstrators carrying signs likening President Bush to Hitler. The massive protests had shut down the center of the city.

  When I’d called Rammstein’s managers to ask whether I might meet them, they were initially enthusiastic. Then Donald Rumsfeld said Germany was part of “Old Europe.” Rammstein staged a diplomatic counteroffensive. “Maybe we are all a little over-hysterical these days,” their press secretary wrote to me, “but the situation really is bad and going worse. . . . After I learned last week that ‘French fries’ are no longer ‘French fries’ but ‘freedom fries’ I would not be surprised to see German bands banned in the US or whatever. . . . All seems to be possible right now.”

  I reassured her that as far as I knew, Rammstein had nothing to fear from an enraged American street. Feelings were soothed. Feathers unruffled. I could meet the band as scheduled.

  I met the band in a discreet office above a gloomy, anonymous warehouse in east Berlin. This is the neighborhood where Rammstein met and played before the fall of the Wall. To deter fans, there was no sign on their door. In person, they were bland and pleasant, clean-shaven, tall and handsome, dressed in neatly pressed chinos and cotton polo shirts. I had heard that journalists who asked about Rammstein’s politics were apt to find themselves ejected from the interview, but after a bit of small talk, they held forth marvelously.

  Why, I asked, did they think Rammstein’s music inspired such controversy?

  “People take the lyrics out of context,” Kruspe-Bernstein offered. “The romantic, lyric quality gets a bit lost in translation.”

  A good translation, then, should clear up any confusion? I read out loud, in English:

  My black blood and your white flesh

  I will always become hornier from your screams

  The cold sweat on your white forehead

  Hails into my sick brain

  Your white flesh excites me so

  I am just a gigolo

  My father was exactly like me

  Your white flesh enlightens me

  Well yes, said Kruspe-Bernstein, there is that. But he held that this sounded much more romantic in German. Landers, the second guitarist, wasn’t sure. “The lyrics are scarier in German,” Landers insisted. The two musicians debated the proper translation of the word geil. My translator believed it to be correctly rendered as “horny.”

  “Our music,” said Kruspe-Bernstein, “is German, and that’s what comes through. What’s naturally in the music is what makes it so German. We are simply trying to make the music that we are able to make. The classical music, the music of our ancestors, is passed down in a certain way. We have a feeling for it. American music, black music, we don’t know how to do that—”

  “We have no soul,” interjected keyboardist Lorenz.

  “And we know how to play on the beat,” added Kruspe-Bernstein. “We know how to make it straight, how to make it even.”

  “Angular and straight,” echoed Lorenz with satisfaction.

  “We like it heavy, bombastic, romantic. Like the direction that Wagner takes,” said Kruspe-Bernstein. “No other Germans do it the way we do it. We’re the only ones who do it the way Germans should. The others try to imitate the English and the Americans. We’re almost too German for Germany.” The thought seemed to pain him. “The Germans are a bit ashamed of their nationality. They’ve had a disturbed relationship to it since the Second World War. We’re trying to establish a natural relationship to our identity.”

  Would this anthem, I asked, be an example of a natural relationship to German identity?

  The fire purifies the soul

  And remaining is a mouthful of

  Ashes

  I will return

  In ten days

  As your shadow

  And I will hunt you down

  “Well,” replied Kruspe-Bernstein, “one cannot prevent people from interpreting something negatively.”

  Landers agreed. “It’s time to stop being ashamed about what comes out of Germany and to establish a normal way of dealing with being German.”

  Secretly I will rise from the dead

  And you will plead for mercy

  Then I will kneel in your face

  And stick my finger in the ashes

  The abnormal way of being German must be mind-boggling. Come to think of it, it was.

  Kruspe-Bernstein informed me that the band’s essential good nature had been misunderstood. “If people don’t understand the lyrics, their interpretations can be more gruesome than is actually the case. Fantasy can be at work. It can make things more intense, worse than things actually are.”

  Again, I read out loud, in translation:

  You can, you want and will never forgive

  And you condemn his life

  You drift in the insanity from

  Rage, destruction and revenge

  You were born to hate

  My rage does not want to die

  My rage will never die

  You ram your hatred like a stone

  Into him Ramming stone—

  You have pursued, hunted, and cursed him

  And he has taken to his heels, crawling

  After reading these lyrics, I asked, why might listeners remain concerned? The negative reactions, Kruspe-Bernstein told me firmly, “have to do with the hard sound of the music and the short haircuts.”

  Lorenz reported himself devastated by the persistent intimations that Rammstein’s aesthetic was reminiscent of the Nazi era. “We overestimated the public. The people don’t understand it. We thought it was so obvious that we weren’t right-wingers that no would see these right-wing elements in what we do.”

  The members of the band were tired of national self-reproach, they said. “The Americans aren’t ashamed about the fact that they killed the Indians,” said Kruspe-Bernstein. “If the Germans had eradicated the Indians, we would have had a bad conscience. We would have had to be ashamed.”

  “The Americans aren’t ashamed of what they did,” Landers agreed. “Ja. Our music is about the revival of a healthy German self-esteem. When people come to our concerts, they can experience something which they can perhaps otherwise not experience.”

  “Ja, like soccer,” said Kruspe-Bernstein. “Soccer is popular because that’s the only place in Germany where one can call out Germany.”

  “It’s like a Terminator movie,” Landers said. “Everyone likes him because he’s so strong.” I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to Lindemann or the Terminator. “At our concerts people can feel anger. We feel that Germany is longing for some identity. We had an evil history and everybody is ashamed. ‘Our parents or grandparents did this and they did that.’ We just inherited this history. Now we have to live with it and we don’t want to. We want to do what we feel. Without alwa
ys feeling responsible for history.”

  I asked them about the song “Links,” and about the way it does seem awfully reminiscent of the old this and the old that. They appeared profoundly frustrated by my willful determination to misunderstand their intentions. In fact, they said, the suggestion that these lyrics—Left, two, three, four! Left, two, three, four!—might evoke a darker moment in German history was frankly defamatory. You see, they explained to me, the song had precisely the opposite meaning. It was all about being on the Left.

  The Left? Yes, agreed Lorenz firmly, the Left. He held that life was better under communism. In what way? “In all ways. I could live without worries about life. No one wanted to do evil to anyone. There was nothing to win or gain.”

  What about the Stasi, I asked?

  “The secret police? Every country has that.”

  “Links,” said Lorenz, was written to clear up all this misunderstanding about Rammstein. “We intentionally show that one can be evil and be on the Left. People say that right-wing music is hard, and we’re saying, ‘We too can be hard.’”

  I’d had no doubt that one could be evil and on the Left. At their extremes, actually, the Left and the Right look very much alike. I was intrigued by his use of the word hard, though. The Nazis conceived of hardness as the hallmark of the new Nietzschean superhuman. Members of the band used this word often, I noticed, as do their fans.

  “We made this song for Germany,” said Lorenz.

  I asked Lorenz whether the allusion to the Nuremberg Rally was intentional. Pique played over his odd, pointy features. “There is no reference to the Nuremberg Rally. This is the first time I’ve ever even heard of that. It never would have dawned on me. We purposely did a video without people and symbols. I think it’s a very nice video. It’s almost my favorite video. The ants are so cute.”

  Look, I said to Lorenz, come on: If Rammstein is a left-wing band, why use all this right-wing imagery?

  “We wonder about this ourselves,” he replied, as if the answer were somehow unknowable. “We never thought that people could see it is as right-wing. We can’t see things from the audience’s perspective. We just use blood and these symbols because the songs are about violence and aggression.” My translator winced.

  “We use them to enthrall the audience,” he added. Lorenz is the runt, the only member of Rammstein who isn’t huge and handsome. He’s the one who wears the ball gag in his mouth while Lindemann pretends to sodomize him on the stage.

  “It’s a difficult question, because everyone has the right to listen to the music they want to listen to,” he offered in response to a question no one asked.

  Kruspe-Bernstein reflected. “We are interested in lyrics that reach and move people and trigger something in people. We try not to refer to things by name, or to name them directly, but to refer to things obliquely, between the lines.”

  Why, then, does it distress them so that some of us have read between the lines?

  Returning to my hotel, I saw protesters swarming over Berlin’s bridges. They were hanging gigantic peace signs, printed on white bed-sheets, above the freeways. Rammstein too opposes the war. “I wonder how anyone can be for the war,” Lorenz said to me. “Everyone I know is against America. We find it dangerous what the American government is doing. This is a war the Americans started.”

  When I visited Berlin again recently, I spent some time chatting with the owner of a restaurant near my hotel. He was a thirty-six-year-old Berliner from the former East, and close to the members of the band. He had known them for many years. They often ate at his restaurant. “Yes,” he told me, “if you didn’t understand them, you could look at them and be very frightened, because yes, maybe they sound just exactly like Goebbels or something. But they don’t mean it. They’re playing.”

  The proof? Rammstein, he said, like most of Germany, had opposed the war in Iraq. “Everyone here, even children too young to understand, opposed the war. We are against war now. That united us like nothing else has done since the Second World War. For the first time we were proud again to be German.” The restaurateur was gentle and sweet-natured, with soft, pleading eyes. While we spoke, he insisted the kitchen bring out bratwurst and beer and sweet elderberry chasers. He wouldn’t accept payment. I don’t think he had any agenda behind his generosity: He was just a very sweet man, eager to set the record straight about his friends.

  By his logic, Germans had through their pacifism earned the right to enjoy Rammstein without fretting overmuch about how the band looked. “Rammstein made it possible for artists to play with these themes from our history, to bring them out in the open,” he said. He likened the members of the band to the contemporary German painter Neo Rauch, who also grew up behind the Wall, and whose paintings are filled with sardonic tributes to the propaganda of the East German regime.

  Rammstein, he added, was helping Germany to rediscover its identity. What he did not explain—and could not explain—is why Germany would want to rediscover that identity, even in jest.

  “THESE THINGS START BUBBLING UP”

  As for Germany’s pacifism, how can we disapprove? Who, after listening to Rammstein, can be anything but grateful that the Germans have renounced war?

  But some people think that pacifism requires some scrutiny. For Rammstein, pacifism is linked, as it so often is in Europe, to deep suspicion about America. Rammstein’s recent single, “Amerika,” “is not a love song” as the lyrics explicitly tell us.

  The song continues in English, presumably to make sure we get the point:

  This is not a love song

  This is not a love song

  I don’t sing my mother tongue

  No, This is not a love song

  We’re all living in Amerika

  Coca-Cola, sometimes war

  We’re all living in Amerika

  Amerika, Amerika

  When I was last in Berlin, I spoke to Jeffrey Gedmin, an American scholar of European Studies who directs the Aspen Institute’s Berlin campus. He is perhaps the most prominent defender in Germany of American foreign policy these days.

  We met at a Starbucks in the now entirely reconstructed and Westernized section of east Berlin. It was easy to see from the Starbucks why some Germans might think they were living in America. The place was a perfect replica of any Starbucks in the United States, down to the piped-in Christmas carols, in English. Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum. I’d taken a taxi there through a less fashionable east Berlin neighborhood. We drove through street after street of bleak Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks, featureless and colored only by angry smears of graffiti. Little in Berlin looks German, since the original architecture was reduced to smoking rubble by Allied bombing raids. What doesn’t now look like America looks like Moscow, and in fact, “Moskau” is the title of another Rammstein song:

  Here Rammstein sings in Russian, to make sure they get the point. The old antagonism toward the East is still, evidently, very much alive.

  I asked Gedmin what he made of German pacifism and anti-Americanism. “I do think,” he said, “that we underestimated how hard it was for a country with a grand tradition of history, literature, culture and music—one that committed an act of insanity that lasted for thirteen years—to end up divided, lacking sovereignty, and so heavily, heavily dependent on the United States. A young editor for one of the papers here put it this way to me. He said, ‘Imagine this: You’re from the grand nation of Germany, and you’re responsible for fascism and the Holocaust. You can’t liberate yourselves, and you’re liberated by gum-chewing Negroes from America.’ That sat rather deep with some people. Part of it is understandable. No one wants to be divided, lacking sovereignty, and so heavily dependent. But part of it was that their sense of cultural superiority took a big blow for those forty years. Then comes the fall of the Wall, and these things start bubbling up.

  “It’s not malign. They’re not invading countries. It’s a democracy. They have a free press. They have all these things, don’t get me wrong:
I’m not of the school that says, Beware, democracy is crumbling in Germany. But what happened is this: On the East German side, a lot of people figured, I guess, Bring the wall down, pump in subsidies, give them elections, and they’ll be liberal, democratic, and Western. But they went from one dictatorship to another. They had sixty years of continuous dictatorship, with its institutions and indoctrination. And we know that democracy is institutions. But it’s also learned habits and values and behaviors. Much of the country wasn’t exposed to those habits and values for over a half a century. You pump in subsidies and give them free elections, but that doesn’t mean the virus doesn’t keep going around. Not that some East Germans aren’t absolutely loyal, brilliant democrats, but some are . . . not. They’re just not. They’re consuming Western goods and they’re voting, but . . . Look, this city is an example. Fifteen years after the fall of the Wall, one out of four East Berliners votes for the post-Communist party. Twenty-five percent, fifteen years later? It’s a little bit high, and a little bit strange, don’t you think?”

  Yes, I did think it was strange.

  How, I asked, did he understand German anti-Americanism? “It’s envy, resentment. Some of it’s because of the imbalance of power, some of it’s residual because of their dependence on us during the Cold War. But all that bubbles up.”

  And German pacifism? “Pacifism. They wear that as a badge of honor, but people say funny things, you know. I’ve asked people, ‘Why are you so agitated about certain aspects of American foreign policy?’ And they’ll say, ‘Because we would like to assert ourselves that way and we can’t.’ I’ve heard a journalist say that. ‘Because we would like to assert ourselves that way and we’re not allowed to. We have to be quiet. We have to be meek. We have to be reticent. We have to be pacifists.’