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In this Guide to Kulchur, John Morgan and Fróði Midjord discuss the widely-viewed and controversial video, Deutschland, that was recently released by the famous German metal band Rammstein. The duo discuss the background of the video’s panoramic view of German history, and suggest ways of understanding its complex symbolism in a manner that runs contrary to the assumption that it celebrates multiculturalism. They also discuss the controversy surrounding the video’s use of Holocaust imagery. The episode is available on both YouTube and Spreaker (see below).
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Black Germania could also refer to something dark in the germanic people. At its core, the german people seem to tend towards (self)destruction, despite their greatness as symbolised by Germania itself.
I don’t know just what Schwarze Germania means, but I think Rammstein aims, as an overall project act of healthy restoration, to aesthetically embrace essential opposites, the sacred and the profane, the beautiful and the grotesque. Not unlike what Jonathan Bowden wrote about Savitri Devi:
(Apologies as I don’t have the hang of the formatting here, nor how to include images, and had no chance to edit.) What I meant to cite from Jonathan Bowden is:
“But I think also cardinal for the type of radicalism/extremism she would develop later in her life and ideological course. Now, in many forms of mathematics, of course, you’re looking for X; you’re looking for what the sort of alternative middle-rank thinker Colin Wilson called Faculty X. You’ve got an equation, and you have to find X and maybe balance a particular equation, a particular quantity on either side of the equals sign. And in a sense mathematical truth is pushing prognosticated truths to the absolute limit of their efficacy. It’s the truth within the truth, beyond the truth, and at the edge of a particular dispensation of thinking.
Her idea, which may or may not have been drawn from her mathematical studies when she was a young student at the University of Lyons, was the idea that if you take various forms of equation and you make a graphic form, the idea is that the line which penetrates the circle furthest away from the arc of a circle is the point of truth, is where X is, is one way of looking at it. And the idea, that the truth lies at the most extreme part of the axis, the idea that rather than the safe middle, or the comfortable middle ground, truth is radical extremity, is something that she would essentially live through for most of her life.”
The video for ‘Amerika’ focuses on the pivotal moment of the moon landing (made possible by German engineering). Besides the long piano riff of the song, the shot of the glass coffin in space in ‘Deutschland’ also recalls the Snow White fairy-tale motif of their video of ‘Sonne’, which in turn recalls the old Disney animated film from the 1930’s that AH admired so much. Whatever else the imagery may suggest, remember that while the US used chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, the USSR’s space program also used dogs.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/85671bb10664b644f7a16ed9c8213cf93f92e64078e4a47df0dfa0e838ec8e78.jpg
The most important aspect of the Moon landing shown in “Amerika,” however, is that it’s being faked, not the contribution of the German engineers.
The actual historical event, to which German engineering contributed mightily, is considered the apotheosis of Western or at least American civilisation. Rammstein isn’t saying the moon landing was faked, but rather that the commercialisation of culture, in order to export it abroad globally, renders such achievements almost meaningless.
To wit, Schwarze Germania is no Schneeweißchen.
I can’t know what was on Rammstein’s mind with this video, but WRT the black woman these things stand out to me:
First, she’s the first person in Germania that the Roman soldiers at the beginning see, and she’s doing something dark and obviously pagan. Then she’s in medieval knight’s armor, fighting for the church. Then she’s a Nazi guard. In each instance, she’s fighting for nation in some way or another, never defying it.