No, of course, that’s fine. I live in the area, but I won’t be home for New Year’s anyway. In this respect, it’s not so bad if Rammstein gives a concert a few hundred meters away on the Theresienwiese. The band is particularly good at pyrotechnics, and before the youth gangs from the West End fight each other with rockets and firecrackers, like every year on New Year’s Eve, it might even be better that way.
Moreover, Rammstein would almost return to the place of origin of her work in Munich. Because they gave their first concert in the city almost 27 years ago, on December 9, 1995, in the Stromlinien Club on the corner of Lindwurmstrasse and Poccistrasse, almost at the southern end of Theresienwiese. It was the night that Axel Schulz boxed against the South African Francois Botha for the world title in the Schleyerhalle in Stuttgart. But I was in the stream to write a review of the concert.
The coincidence of events at least helped me to the admittedly somewhat flat opening sentence: “So that was it, the night of the half-naked Ossis.” Because five of the six Rammstein band members came onto the stage shirtless and behaved pretty much as if they were standing on a monster stage in front of almost 150,000 people on, let’s say: Theresienwiese. There were maybe just 50 Hansel in front of the stage in the not very big Stromlinienclub to do the strange guys from East Berlin and Schwerin.
The gap between the greatest possible metal bombast, ostentatious chav posturing and pathetic reality is particularly noticeable in a small club. Anyway, I couldn’t help but find the show grotesquely ridiculous. I happily mocked the band members as underwear models, attested to singer Till Lindemann “a martial roaring in the extent of maybe four semitones”, criticized the unimaginative, “stomping pathos” of the heavy metal guitar and the “primitive macho nonsense” of the lyrics. Nothing could come of such a cucumber troupe. It then quickly became the most internationally successful German band of the following 20 years. But my ability to predict in this regard has never been good.
Maybe all the fuss and fuss really is art
I remember finding it particularly repulsive that Lindemann was waving a real, fire-breathing flamethrower around the small club. Playing with fire, of all things in the piece with the refrain “Rammstein”, was part of the concept of calculated taboo breaking and was reminiscent of the accident at the Ramstein air show near Kaiserslautern, in which 70 people died in a real flaming hell. I still think that’s pretty wrong today. Should be art and probably refer to the secret fascination of evil. Just like the flirts with fascist aesthetics and excerpts from Riefenstahl films a few years later in the band’s videos.
I’ve tried at times to replicate that at other concerts, which quickly grew a lot bigger (mainly because pretty Katja from the concert agency thought the band was so great, frankly), but regularly failed. Maybe I’m too simple. Some people say today that Riefenstahl was a fascinating artist who unfortunately served herself to the devil. I think she’s been a terrible Nazi chick all her life. Even her late photos of the African Nuba convey a flawless fascist image of humanity. It’s certainly not art, and it’s not something you play with.
No, Rammstein is certainly anything but right-wing, and maybe all the fuss and fuss really is art. I just can’t see it, I still think the music is pretty silly and the lyrics aren’t poetry, they might just be good as newspaper headlines. So if Rammstein returns 27 years later to the place of their first appearance in Munich (almost anyway), then that’s how it should be from my point of view. As I said, I won’t be at home on New Year’s anyway.