Counter-Currents
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Even on the waves there is fighting
Where fish and flesh are woven into sea
One stabs the lance while in the army
Another throws it into the ocean
— “Reise Reise” (2004)
I have to confess to having very mixed feelings about Rammstein. This may originate from being first introduced to them by a friend who sent me their debut album Herzeleid (1995) through the post for my birthday. The mélange of photo imagery, some of which were mistakenly described by their early detractors as depicting Strength Through Joy nostalgia, included a cover depicting the band members with oiled and naked chests, looking more like a Jean Genet gay fantasy than anything the Deutsche Arbeitsfront may have come up with.
This notion somewhat unsettled me, until I became familiar with their Hakenkreuz-style logo, their use of Nuremberg-like pyrotechnics, and excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia during stadium concerts, and the martial sound of much of their music.
These positives, which building on their obvious originality and their demographic appeal that seemed mainly focused on well-educated young white Europeans, gratified me at first. But this was soon undercut by the fact that their lead singer Till Lindemann claimed, in response to persistent accusations that the band had National Socialist sympathies, that they “come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths. We hate Nazis!” He points to the Brecht-inspired lyrics of Links 2-3-4 in the band’s defense:
They want my heart at the right spot
Yet I look over then below, away
There it strikes to the left
You can buy Fenek Solère’s novel Rising here
Then, of course, there is the small matter of Lindemann’s own puerile attempts at poetry in collections like Messer, published in 2002. This was followed by In stillen Nachten (In Silent Nights) in 2013, and the rather pathetic spectacle of seeing him turn up to the book signing of a Russian translation in Moscow back in 2018 with a leather-clad gimp on a chain, an example of crass attention-seeking that mirrored the band’s drummer holding aloft a rainbow flag at a concert in Chorzow and both the band’s guitarists, Kruspe and Landers, flaunting their LGBT credentials by kissing on stage during a performance in St. Petersburg in defiance of Putin’s supposedly anti-gay agenda.
This predictable virtue-signaling and passé edginess like their hints at sadomasochism, incest, and intersexuality culminated in the song “Amerika,” their asinine critique of the United States and its cultural and political imperialism:
We’re all living in America
America is wunderbar
We’re all living in America
Amerika, Amerika
We’re all living in America
Coca-Cola, Wonderbra
We’re all living in America
Amerika, Amerika
We’re all living in America
Coca-Cola, sometimes war
We’re all living in America
Amerika, Amerika
An all too easy target they lazily revisited in “Mein Land” (2011):
You’re here in my country
My Country, My country
You’re here in my Country
My waves and my beach
Jaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!
“Mein Land” is an unambiguous reference to the American military bases in places like Ansbach and Boeblingen, and an allusion to the Left and Greens’ resentful opposition to their presence. Back in the early 1970s, this led to bomb attacks by the rampaging Baader-Meinhof Group on the V. Corps base in Frankfurt and the Rhein-Main airbase; acts that killed and maimed many innocent people.
Their naïve political commentary continues with their official video to the song “Auslander” (2019) in support of Third World immigration to The Fatherland with lyrics like:
I am at home everywhere
My language: international…
I am a foreigner — take a chance on me
So, the fact they have sold over 45,000,000 records world-wide, perform before frenzied sell-out audiences, and utilize the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Heinrich Hoffman to inform their own lyrics jars with me. Perhaps this is because I sense they copied Led Zeppelin’s methodology to source their name by highlighting the infamous Ramstein air show disaster back in 1988. Or, could it be because they plagiarized John Lydon’s “This is Not a Love Song” in one verse of “Amerika?” Or maybe, just maybe, it is because I feel anger that musicians that can come up with the malevolent magnificence of “Engel,” “Du Hast,” and “Ich Will” and the desperate longing of tracks like “Sonne,” “Mutter,” “Ohne Dich” and “Wo Bist Du” are on the wrong side of the eternal struggle between the forces of dark and light that we are now wholeheartedly engaged with; a fight to the bitter end that can only have one irreversible outcome.
I search you behind the light
Where are you?
I don’t want to be so alone
Where are you?
Where are you?
— “Wo Bist Du”
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15 comments
What’s so politically naïve about wanting American (Zionist) imperialist bases off German soil?
Dear Vauquelin,
The Red Army Faction group only became aware of the ‘Jewish element’ after their initial base bombings – the second and third generations of the terrorists recognized the true enemy – there are several books – academic and generally historical that highlight this. They set out on their campaign trail with copies of Mao, Marx and Trotsky in their back pockets.
That changed dramatically later on – Munich/ Black September/ et al
Best FS
Any chance of this post being turned into a full-fledged article?
Dear Wanred,
Yes certainly ! I am working on something along these lines
Best
FS
Some can be right for the wrong reasons. I’d expect once we reach a proud European utopia of sovereign nationalist nation states, America can stop exercising its unnatural role of being world police, and Germany and America will have no military occupation of one anothers territories.
Otherwise I fully agree with your other assessments concerning Rammstein. They have always struck me as highly subversive, promoting degeneracy veiled in masculinity, a sort of Laibach light for for the progressive mainstream. While Laibach also has the tendency of being tongue-in-cheek, Rammstein tends more towards tongue-in-asscheek. Despite its displays of grit, explosive energy and fanfare, Rammstein is more John Waters than Leni Riefenstahl, making them a bad fit for the movement.
Regardless of whether or not homosexuals have a place in the movement (even the NSDAP had men like Röhm and women like Violette Morris), I think a hard line should be drawn against pornographic indecency.
Where the black souls live, there’s no light on the horizon.
Ah, ahoy!
I’ve never been impressed at all by them and what little I’ve seen of them I would never have considered them on the right.
A band like Primordial are more worthy of attention and scrutiny from our side of things even though politically they don’t seem to come down on any side overtly.
Dear John,
I suggest you watch the opening sequence of their live concert in Nimes 2005 – it sets the pulses racing! However, I, like the article suggests, dropped my instantaneous enthusiasm as the evidence ‘came in’, so to speak !
Best
FS
Never trust a man who bears a flaming dildo.
Dear Adrian,
Well said !
Best
FS
Heinrich Hoffman? He was Hitler’s photographer. I guess you mean either Heinrich Heine or E. T. A. Hoffmann…
“Amerika” was a great anti-imperialist song, comparing Germans to an occupied Indian tribe.
Dear Petronius,
Good point on Hoffmann – I meant the literary one and not the photographer.
Regarding anti-imperialist songs – I’m all for them when they are aimed at Israel (a colonial power through the financial globalist system under which all white nations suffer)
Best
FS
They are (or were, fading a bit these days) brilliant musicians and showmen whose most powerful songs make you think there must be substance or weight there, but there is just not. Still a great band to crank up loud.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make with the article…
Rammstein make good, provocative music. Most people don’t even care about lyrics that much, they’re only interested in the beat (I’m not one of those, but I see it all the time around me).
“Ausländer” felt to me like opposing imigration, so it’s not a given they are leftists, it’s your own personal world view that makes you feel a certain way about their music.
Dear R. ang,
I suggest you look at the videos, listen to what they say in interviews and observe how they behave – I think you’ll see it my way!
Best
FS
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