Menace In Europe Part 9

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 n.a.z.i 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 ident.i.ty. 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 always 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 n.a.z.is 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 ident.i.ty. What he did not explain-and could not explain-is why Germany would want to rediscover that ident.i.ty, 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 Inst.i.tute'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 t.i.tle 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 inst.i.tutions and indoctrination. And we know that democracy is inst.i.tutions. 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 a.s.sert ourselves that way and we can't.' I've heard a journalist say that. 'Because we would like to a.s.sert 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.'

"This is a country craving independence from the United States. It wants to make its own mark. It's a sensitive country right now. I wrote a column in the Financial Times a few weeks ago about Germany's bid to get a UN Security Council seat. And I said a few things that just ma.s.sively offended people, so much that an official in the government called the chairman of my board and demanded that I be fired. The first thing I had said was that Germany's quest for a UN seat is partly about exerting its national interest. I thought that was pretty clear and inarguable. But they thought, No! This is for World Peace! This is our contribution to the UN! So they were very offended by that.

"But there was another thing I said, and friends were offended. Friends whom I know and trust. I said, and it's true, 'When Americans say that they really like Germans, what they really mean is that they like West Germans-those Germans they got to know during the Cold War. But this bid to get a UN Security Council seat is in part about the Germans becoming Germans again.' I didn't mean, 'They're marching into a Fourth Reich,' I just meant, This is no longer West Germany."

And Rammstein, I asked? "These taboos have been getting broken for some time. Someone told me it was a fashion, several years ago in Berlin, in certain groups, young people's groups . . . if a disco, or a party, or a concert was really full, young people would say, 'It's packed like a gas chamber in here!' It's pretty bizarre.

"Yeah, something is happening here. During the Iraq War, I did a fair amount of writing and a fair amount of television. I supported the war. I expected to get lots of criticism. I got a very heavy amount of very violent hate mail. Beyond, you know, 'You're an idiot.' Threatening. Mail that we had to give to the police. I will find you one day and beat the s.h.i.t out of you and pour napalm on your face. A lot of it was anti-Semitic. I'm not Jewish, I'm Catholic. Nevertheless, a lot of it used that sort of language. By the way, a lot of it came in e-mail, suggesting that these weren't seventy-year-old n.a.z.is. A lot of it used language like, You son-of-a-wh.o.r.e. I got that a hundred times, son-of-a-wh.o.r.e. n.i.g.g.e.r was used a lot. Jew-f.u.c.ker was used a lot. It wasn't ten or twenty letters. It was a couple of hundred. Of course every society has its racists, and every society has its bigots. This is a country of 82 million people. I didn't get 82 million letters. But I got a lot. And these were letters that were beyond I disagree vehemently. I think that's reckless and irresponsible. This was really the kind of stuff where you felt you had to give it to the police. We found red paint one day on the door of the inst.i.tute, which I guess is supposed to represent blood. Again, that could happen elsewhere, people get out of hand, there are radicals.

"I guess the biggest thing I would say is that Germany is finding itself. There's a reaction against taboos, anything that they feel was imposed from the outside, and there's this reflex to go in the opposite direction."

It certainly does seem so.

POWER, PATHOLOGY, AND PAYBACK.

"Here's another anecdote," Gedmin said. "I had this young student say to me once, 'For the first time in my life, I feel proud to be German.' And I said, 'Great. Why is that?' And she said, 'Because we had the nerve to stand up to the United States.' And she thought that was so obvious. And I said, 'Well, I hope that's not the only basis for your patriotism,' and she didn't get my point. This was spontaneous on her part, she was a very lovely person, and she was feeling very good. She smiled. She could drink a beer: We're saying no to America. And that had nothing to do with Iraq, by the way. It was about them and us."

Was there no sense, I asked, that authentic pacifism, or at least an authentic stand against fascism and genocide, would dictate a more vigorous opposition to Saddam Hussein's regime than to ours?

"No."

"Why didn't they connect that logical circuit?"

"Mostly, it wasn't about Saddam Hussein-it was about us. Here's a big power, a hegemon, throwing its weight around without consulting us. This is not the world order we're trying to create. I think they were afraid of us failing in Iraq, but they were also afraid of us succeeding in Iraq. Seriously. Now, you know, we've had problems in Iraq. But if we hadn't had problems, that would have cost us great German resentment, too. Because we would have removed him, the Iraqis would have liked us-and that was not what they wanted either. A lot of it is about power, and pathology, and payback.

"By the way, it's the same with Israel. I just saw a new poll-more than 60 percent of Germans believe that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is worse than the German treatment of the Jews under the n.a.z.is." I had seen the same poll.41 I looked around the cafe and wondered whether more than half of the pleasant, well-mannered people around me, sipping their eggnog lattes and reading their newspapers, really believed that.

"Look, the Germans have a chip on their shoulder. They have a chip on their shoulder because, as this journalist friend of mine said, Americans did them the ultimate injustice. We liberated them. We protected x them for forty years. When unification came, and Europe was against them, we stood up and supported them, and . . . they've had enough of that! And with Israel, one could say, they just will not forgive the Jews for putting them in the black box of history. Now, you might argue that they were guilty of the Holocaust, but somehow, weirdly enough, it gets contorted to, If Germans have a bad reputation, it's because of those friggin' . . ." He didn't need to finish his sentence.

"And this other thing-it was on prime-time television, last year, prime-time German television, Friday night, nine o'clock. Public television showed a doc.u.mentary about conspiracy theories about 9/11. It wasn't about the theories, it gave credence to the theories . . . how they're absolutely sure it wasn't a commercial aircraft that hit the Pentagon, and all these things. . . . You put this on in prime time, you're actually suggesting that it's a credible piece of journalistic work. And it was silly. One other poll: Twenty percent, one out of five Germans, think that the CIA, or Mossad, was behind September 11. That seems kind of high-that's not three percent, two, six. One out of five people in this cafe think the CIA or the Israelis did it? That's too high, isn't it, for a modern, liberal democratic Germany?"

I looked around again. It looked like America.

"I know TV journalists," Gedmin said, "who told me that after September 11, in their editorial rooms, at the television stations, German public television, there was agreement that it was a terrible thing that happened, but there was a big argument, with a good number of their colleagues saying that Americans deserved it. You know, these are educated people, these are international people, these are not neo-n.a.z.is-"

If being for peace means threatening to pour napalm on American faces and arguing that Americans deserved September 11, then perhaps, I thought, I should not be rea.s.sured by Rammstein's pacifism. Not, of course, that they've threatened to pour napalm on anyone's face. It's not even napalm they use in their concerts, it's a stunt inflammable called lycopodium. It only looks like napalm.

SO HARD, SO DARK, SO EVIL.

I met the members of Rammstein for the second time, again in Berlin, in December 2004. They were back on tour in Europe for the first time in two and a half years and once again packing stadiums. Hours before they played the Velodrome, thousands of fans crowded the entrance. "We find it funny how Germany talks about the band," a woman from Berlin in her late thirties, staking out her place at the front of the line, explained to me. "In Germany they're in a lot of trouble. But that's because Rammstein is misunderstood. People think they're evil and racist. They don't get the irony."

Their fans were of a wide demographic. Some had arrived in jeans and anoraks; others had come in leather, and one had shown up on a dog leash. There were children in the crowd, and a lone elderly man in a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Many fans were wearing T-shirts with the legend "You are what you eat," a reference to the cannibalism song. Despite the long wait, the crowd only once burst into the traditional skinhead anthem-"Oi! Oi! Oi!"-and this only halfheartedly. They then returned to drinking their beer, eating their bratwurst, and rubbing their hands together against the bitter cold.

"We love Rammstein because they make it so hard, so dark, so evil, and that makes it so interesting for us," said a woman in her late thirties with a hard, lined face. "Rammstein wants to be provocative, they want Germany to open its eyes. Every song has a deeper sense. Germans don't want to open their eyes-they don't want to talk about these things."

"And the men . . . the men are great," said her friend. "If you see Till, tell him I have his face tattooed on my a.s.s, so I can sleep with him every night."

I would have told him, but when I ran into him several minutes later, in the corridor backstage, he scowled. "I don't speak. Nein, " he said, and stomped off. He looked bloated and unwell. He had deep circles under his eyes, and his dark stage makeup was smeared.

Minutes before I had met a very pretty young woman who was loitering around the backstage entrance. She told me she was one of Lindemann's girlfriends. She proudly showed me his name on her mobile phone and Polaroid pictures of his apartment. He was really stressed, she said, from the pressure of the tour. But he had a loving side, she wanted me to know. At times he would hold her tightly all night. They could be happy if only he would stop sleeping with other women, or at least if he would only stop lying to her about it.