Till Lindemann and the system Rammstein — Why exactly is everybody acting surprised?
by A
Rammstein is one of the — if not THE— most successful music exports that Germany has to offer. Some would go so far as to say, the band is the most important cultural export, Germany has to offer. No matter where on earth you go: everybody knows Oktoberfest, Schnitzel and Rammstein.
I’m not a Rammstein fan. I’ve never been a Rammstein fan.
There’s one main reason for that: I’m a child of the late 90ies and my subculture was Punk. My older brothers were the ones who shaped my music taste and they were into Grunge and Punk. In the rural hills of Austria where I grew up and went through the turmoils of puberty, you were faced with deep rooted racist and nationalist believes day in day out — there’s no avoiding the brown muck, literally and figuratively. So you either went with it and parroted the same phrases your fathers and their fathers before them blurted out on a regular basis, or you fought it. And fight it we did: with dyed Mohawks, tons of safety pins and loud music that had to have “Fuck Nazis” in at least every other line.
In my later teens I became aware of a German band called Rammstein. It was what the kids who considered themselves apolitical would listen to.
I found the sound too gross, the lyrics to misogynistic (and remember: those were the early 2000s — we weren’t nearly as woke then as we are now) and the Third Reich aesthetic off-putting.
Whenever I answered the question if I liked Rammstein with “nah, they’re too rightwing for my taste”, I would be corrected with something like “No, you don’t understand — it’s all a meta thing. They’re actually Punk.” Sure. If you say so, Kevin.
The only thing nobody could ever explain to me is this: why do most cars that have a Rammstein sticker on the rear also sport a Böhse Onkelz sticker and a Frei.Wild sticker (two bands that have always been very friendly with the Neonazi scene)? Could it be because most people aren’t highly intellectual culture connoisseurs who indulge in the (alleged) meta-thinking of the great lyrical geniuses called Rammstein? Maybe.
Speaking of poetry — let’s get to the point of this article and excuse my late teenage self’s little rant.
It’s 2023 now and multiple women have come forward to accuse Rammstein’s frontman Till Lindemann of sexual misconduct.
And I have to admit: I’m not shocked at all. The art and the artist usually aren’t so damn far apart and we should have known that (at the latest) since 2020, when Lindemann published this poem called “Wenn du schläfst” (when you’re asleep) in his book “100 Gedichte” (100 poems). I give you the English translation:
“I like to sleep with you you when you are asleep. When you don’t move at all. Mouth is open, eyes closed. The whole body is at rest. Can touch you everywhere. Like to sleep with you when you’re dreaming. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be (that’s the way it’s supposed to be, that’s the way it’s fun.) A little Rohypnol in the wine (a little Rohypnol in the glass). You can’t move at all. And you sleep, it’s a blessing.”
To quote an article in the Berliner Zeitung of the time: “It doesn’t really matter much if the author himself or his “lyrical I” is speaking here. This is sexist trash. And it remains sexist trash, even if it rhymes.”
Obviously the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch saw it differently and praised Lindemann as some sort of literary genius when they published his poetry books. It wasn’t until now and after multiple women came forward with matching stories of sexual harassment and non-consensual sexual acts after allegedly being drugged or under the heavy influence of alcohol, that the publishing house has started to worry. And it wasn’t until now (they say) that they’ve become aware of the existence of a porno video featuring one of Lindemann’s books called “In stillen Nächten”, which had been published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch — as a prop.
The porno, titled “Till the End” (actually it’s supposed to be a music video for a single of one of his side projects) can only be watched on the erotic streaming platform “Visit-X” and shows the whole bandwidth of misogynistic treatment of women from deep throating a scared looking woman to penetration accompanied by obvious pain sounds. Well and the book I mentioned is being used as some sort of weird cockring.
This video has been around since 2020 — when there was a whole discussion about Lindemann’s mediocre misogynistic poetry. People wrote articles about this video back then, so I find it quite hard to believe that the publishers only now found out about it. A few days ago they announced the end of their collaborations with Lindemann: after the allegations of multiple women and after they “found out” about the video.
Right, it’s not like he actually described what he did in the porno and what these women accuse him of doing, in the very same books that Kiepenheuer & Witsch published. But who could have known? It was only the lyrical I speaking.
Rammstein had a whole system in place for their row zero — complete with a female casting director, who recruited young women for Lindemann to have sex with. Everybody knew.
Hell, even I knew and remember I’m not even a fan! But I recall to this day talking to a friend of mine — it must have been about 8 years ago — about Lindemann and his then girlfriend, a d-list celebrity, who I had briefly been working with on a filmset. I remember saying something like “It seems, they are quite in love” and seeing my friend smirk awkwardly. She then proceeded to tell me about her own backstage experience around that time and how she “politely declined” Till’s request for sex after he dropped his pants and revealed a “disgusting, std-ridden penis”. Now, can I say that this happened for a fact? No, luckily I wasn’t there. Do I find the anecdote credible? Yes, unfortunately. Was I surprised when I read the headlines about him a few days ago? No, not at all.
Maybe it’s time that we start paying attention to misogynistic content, rather than filtering it out with a shrug and an “it’s just boy talk” attitude. Maybe it’s time to call men out when they publish sexist trash, rather than applaud them for their “provocative art”.
