It starts with: “Come on, let’s be sad together”. And ends with: “Adieu, you have to go the last way alone.” ZEIT, the new Rammstein album, is a record like a concert, and a Rammstein concert is a kind of exorcism. Is a performance of German rudeness. In uniform and illuminated by anti-aircraft searchlights, the rudeness is so exaggerated, often even to the point of being ridiculous, that one can march it out of one’s body. The grotesque of this country. The violence in his language, in his beliefs, the particles that cling to us from our history, the wars, Rammstein drive us out, the black pedagogy, the trauma. They restore power to beaten children with bass and technoid drums. Let them sing what once hurt them.
Rammstein’s codes and lyrics, their contextual frame of reference, is – be careful, problematic expression follows – purely german. That’s what it sounds like when you sing German without cultural appropriation. Don’t you hold out? Good this way. But look, listen to what they do with it. The bricks are bad. But what do you build from it?
Basically, Rammstein have pushed their pioneer Franz Josef Degenhardt to the extreme. He went into songs like “German Sunday” still descriptive, and seemed almost cute with his churchgoers and their “little hats, sticks, bags“. With their role prose, Rammstein have thrown themselves completely at the “evil eye”, at the fear and hatred of the country. Show him again and again in impressively ugly pictures, like in the video for “Ausländer” (2019). There they are, the colonial notions of black people that are still – of course, where are you thinking – rooting in us. Rammstein boldly grabs us by the shame. On ZEIT, Till Lindemann sings about how in “Fear”. “uneducated children” was threatened with the “black man.” He’ll come for you. “And we still believe that to this day. Something bad is coming, something bad is coming”. German instilled fear shoots up in Hanau, sets refugee homes on fire and makes a difference between refugees from Ukraine and Syria. And since the Russian war of aggression, fear has once again been dreaming of new military power, of order and obedience – that is, of everything that its protection promises. For years, appearances in military uniforms seemed like tasteless theater groups. At the latest, however, when, according to the CDU opposition leader Friedrich Merz, no more money should be put into “feminist foreign policy”, when humanistic progress – Killefitz! – should stand behind the male seriousness of driving a tank, one has to admit at the latest: what Rammstein has been breaking out of Germany for years to blow it into the crowd with a rolling R and machine gun bass, that was never overcome, that is – of course – still there.
No more gender asterisks and all that pill-and-pill sensitivity
Songs like “Armee der Tristen”, in which sad people only find a home in the army, vibrate differently in the chest these days. There are the memories of the many freshly typed tweets and posts about the reintroduction of conscription. “A little more discipline and order would do us all good,” it said in some comment columns. Then there will be an end to gender asterisks and all this whole pill-palle sensitivity. The German will to obedience and surrender in step was there again. How could he be gone? Industrial mass murder? Our grandparents were there. And who to have who brought up? Johanna Haarer’s NS educational guide was sold in Germany well into the 1980s. It had been toned down, but nonetheless in Germany it was further stated that babies shouldn’t be spoiled. Does it scream something for no reason? “Then, dear mother, get hard,” but screaming strengthens the lungs! Ideally, children should not have a will of their own. Gamecomrades should they be each other
Many Rammstein lyrics use precisely these traces that two world wars and National Socialism have left in our language. This is how the Botox satire single “Zick Zack” is deliberately not called “Schnipp, Schnapp”, although it’s about cutting away skin and fat. Zackig is a tightly military salute. “Zackig is a gathered, a disciplined expenditure of energy,” writes the philologist Victor Klemperer about the Lingua Tertii Imeperii – the language of the Third Reich. And in German sport, i.e. in football, there is also this pleasant, antigypsy language chorus. How did he go? Oh yes: zig, zag, z*pack. Even references to authoritarian upbringing are not spared in “Zick, Zack”: “Messer, Gabel, Schere, Licht” comes from Heinrich Hoffmann’s classic children’s book “Struwwelpeter” from 1845, in which children are given drastic lessons, like little Konrad, the the tailor cut off his thumb because he couldn’t stop sucking it. A scene that you can imagine one to one in a Rammstein video.
The sun sets twice on ZEIT
One of Rammstein’s favorite words seems to be the sun. Who also liked them? Oh yes, the Germans. And thus also the National Socialists. They wanted to be pagans and adopted the Germanic sun cult. Worshiped the sun wheel, signed letters with “sunny greetings” and in martial arts reports they wrote of the “death of a radiant (of course German) Boys”.
In the video for the Rammstein hit “Sonne” Dwarves appear as miners. The sun is Snow White, who, when she comes home, first puts the dwarves over her knee to give them a spanking. Which of course brings us back to black pedagogy. The sun sets twice on ZEIT. “Even the sun will burn up” says “Adieu”. And “The death of the sun is my pleasure” it says in “Schwarz”, it is the “Left, two three four” of the album. It’s these lines and codes that some people don’t hear, which is why – presumably – Rammstein deactivated the comment section under their YouTube videos.
In fact, you can no longer misunderstand the band on ZEIT. In “My Tears,” Lindemann sings of a mother who hits both her son and her husband, only to end in parenting mantras: “The wiser give in / You should be ashamed / Never show your tears”. It’s always the same story: feelings are suppressed, turn into anger and “fear”. And fear sometimes turns into violence. If you can’t fall into anyone’s arms, just add an “e” to it. Or becomes suspicious “of those up there”. They don’t even want what’s best for us. Look for your own “those up there”, i.e. whose names are then highlighted in light blue at the top – in the Telegram group.
In the most silly way, Rammstein put the soul of the German civil servant over his knee in “OK”. A slab of metal from a song adorned with almost every office chair phrase, draped so prettily they all seem to be phallic codes. In the chorus, the abbreviation OK becomes something like “Without a condom“. It’s a chorus that the humorless German is allowed to laugh at. Well, in the basement of course. ZEIT works best artistically where you can get involved. Every song has slogans that call for crowds that want to be roared from thousands of throats. Like “Big Tits” a song underlaid with a “Lebt denn der alten Holzmichl” sample, which on the one hand seems to say that it’s incredibly hollow to only value big tits, but sung from 1000 throats, it should be every politically correct cis-hetero feminist at least one of the 1000 voices inside him sings: Yes, yes, “a woman only has to be rich in fatty tissue in the middle”. There it is – and now it gets even more uncomfortable – like with the colonial images in us. One in 1000 votes will remember which pictures we, or our parents, or grandparents grew up with. “Lügen” is the name of another song on the record, which tells of our country as a brutally banal folk song of fear and pain. If only you could turn it up so loud on Sundays that it would soon be gone. How good that would be.
Rammstein’s new album ZEIT will be released on April 29, 2022.