Recommendations of the Editorial team
Within a few days, Nadja Abd El Farrag’s death has developed into an explanatory machine of the German pop mainstream of earlier decades. For the “taz”, “press and patriarchy to blame” are on their crash with too much alcohol and later cirrhosis. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” speaks of a “public distortion”.
The spirals of memory pull their circles. Thomas Anders, who on his official Instagram account A snapshot from Abd el Farrag and his second wife Claudia Hess posted. After a “rest in Peace”, and Emoji, it says: “We very much regret her, much too early death. (..) A rare photo of us three from past times”.
It becomes clearer in the comment lines: “A publicly mocked woman who only had to suffer mockery and further humiliation instead of compassion. Her fate says more about her environment than about herself!”
Thomas Anders: “She was a dear person”
In an interview with “Bild”, on the other hand, the social relationships are not responsible for the drama solely. “Naddel’s death is infinitely sorry. I very much appreciated her as a person,” he said. Anders had got to know Abd El Farrag at the end of the 1990s when there was a rapprochement after the bitter argument with modern-talking bandmate Dieter Bohlen.
The musician sings the high song of personal responsibility: “She could have been much more confident than she trusted. She was a dear person, but unfortunately too weak.” And like a mental coach of old school: “Unfortunately, she had no assertiveness and no opinion. That was her weakness.”
Thomas Anders himself learned a lot of media beating in the 1980s and 1990s. This began with the constant mockery about the emblematic “Nora” chain, which he explained in his 2011 book “100 percent different” as a self-ironic action with his first wife. This continued to the song of the Golden Lemons “On the day when Thomas Starb” (1986, on the melody of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”). And it culminated in the chancellor of the music critic Martin Brem as “lap dog” and “high -height -toned swing”.
It is different, who has come back to the stage again and again since 2000 and put various career moves, is probably a follower of archaic wisdom “what does not kill us, makes us strong”. A remark that Nadja Abd el Farrag could not fall back on. She lived with Dieter Bohlen in the legendary villa in Tötensen as a kind of Landlady.
She once said about the relationship that was finally broken in 2001: “I threw the whole household. The full program with everything, including the animals.” In later (career) life, the moderator and singer flutes the orientation. A revenge of the table and stove.