Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

“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 massively 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 shit 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 Nazis. A lot of it used language like, You son-of-a-whore. I got that a hundred times, son-of-a-whore. Nigger was used a lot. Jew-fucker 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 institute, 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 Nazis.” I had seen the same poll.41 I looked around the café 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 documentary 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 café 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-Nazis—”

  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 reassured 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 on
ce 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 ass, 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.

  I’m not sure if anything she said was true. It had the ring of truth—there are lots of women who live that kind of life and believe those kinds of things. While we were chatting, she suddenly reached for her phone. She exclaimed with delight that Till had just sent her a text message. “What does it say?” I asked.

  She looked at the display. Her face saddened. “He told me to piss off.”

  A NATION AT WAR WITH ITS FORBIDDEN IMPULSES

  Guitarist Landers, who was holding court in a small office backstage, was more forthcoming than Lindemann. I asked him whether it was true, as rumor had it, that the lead singer was so addled by cocaine addiction that he had been forbidden by the band’s management to give interviews. “It’s not true,” he said peevishly. He wasn’t yet in his costume or makeup, and he looked less frightening than he does in his videos—in fact, he looked fussy and middle-aged. His assistant had warned me that I had fifteen minutes to speak to him, and not one minute more. “We have our politics,” Landers said, “and our politics are that Till doesn’t do interviews and no exceptions. It’s been a very good policy so far. And you have just wasted five minutes.”

  Well then, Paul, tell me about the song “Amerika.” What’s that all about?

  “The song ‘Amerika’ is ambivalent, like everything we do. There’s no good and bad, there are always two sides to every issue. But it’s a fact that America has made itself disliked through its foreign policy over the past few years, and it’s very easy living in Europe, being in Europe, to not like America. In general we’re not political, as a band, but when America started bombing Iraq we had to say what we thought. For us in Europe, we still don’t understand why that happened. The song is about how willingly the world adopts everything that is American, and takes on the American view of life, things, products—buying them and making them their own—and that’s why we sing this song. No one is forcing people to consume American things, or to watch Hollywood films. So the song is about how the world willingly adopts American culture and how this occurs. A journalist once asked me if I’m afraid of America, and I said no, not directly of America—I’m more afraid of countries that bow to American power.”

  And how did he understand Rammstein’s role in all of this? “The Germans,” he said, “definitely have a problem. Before, it was Deutschland über alles—Germany above everything. And now Germany is below everything. Rock bottom. Our problem is that we actually think Germany is pretty good. But almost nobody thinks that. Everybody’s very embarrassed to be German, and there’s no German identity. Our aim is to help Germany not to be overly patriotic like the Americans, but to be patriotic, and not be ashamed. Every country has its strengths and weaknesses. Some of them have more character, some of them have less character. In my opinion there’s a certain type of character that Germans have . . . there’s something that Germans have, that no other nationality has. It’s hard to describe. It would be a shame if that disappeared.” When I asked him what that was, precisely, he told me that Germans made good cars.

  “I’m a German too, and like all Germans, we haven’t a completely clear conscience. Other people don’t do what we do, don’t use the images we do, because they’re too cowardly. A rock band has to provoke—it’s their task, their duty. We love doing it, we love provoking people. It’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. We love getting attention. We love getting people upset, shocking people—but we think that’s good. But it’s just fun to do, that’s the most important thing. It’s the way things have turned out. It’s just the way things have happened.

  “At first, we thought it was our duty to provoke Germany, to get Germany going in a certain direction. That was at first. But then we realized, it doesn’t work that way. It takes time. What we can do is set a certain example. We can show the way. Blaze a trail. But it will take a long time—it will take at least sixty years until things go in that direction. You can’t change history, it just doesn’t work that way. You see it in Iraq: When you go in, you get into trouble. It just takes time. History takes time. A hundred years.”

  Or perhaps a thousand.

  He wanted to make sure I didn’t think his attitude toward America was unbalanced. “There are some good things about America,” he stressed. “We’re always happy about the naïveté of Americans.”

  The strict assistant interrupted us. He hustled me off to meet Kruspe-Bernstein, who was waiting in another anteroom. He was already in his makeup, and wearing a costume with a high bat-wing collar. He looked a bit like an escapee from the set of Dracula. Kruspe-Bernstein now lives in New York. Unlike Landers, he was warm and friendly—charming, in fact. His English had improved markedly since the last time we met, and we no longer needed a translator.

  “You know,” he said, “it’s funny, I was reading yesterday about fifty reviews of the last shows, in Germany—and not one of them was any good. Not one. And it’s so interesting, I just wonder, because we toured through all of Europe, for the last two months, I guess. And everyone really liked us, they thought we were really good, but coming back to Germany not one person, not one writer, not one journalist likes the show? I mean, come on. There’s something weird there. I don’t know. . . . I think Germany still has a big problem with us. I can’t really figure it out. You know, it’s almost like a man who would never admit he likes to go to a bordello or something—but he still goes. It’s kind of the same with Rammstein, you know? It’s a guilty pleasure. It’s weird.”

  So how did he account for this?

  “The biggest problem about Germany is that they have either too much respect for themselves or too less respect for themselves. They never have a balance between, you know? They’re still carrying . . . They still suffer from the last war. I kind of represent like, myself, just to friends, you know, like being . . . living in New York City, and getting involved in discussion, like, don’t be afraid, no, ja, kind of afraid to say that you are German, you know, and try to have a balance, you know, and try to use the German as kind of humor, you know? That’s what we actually do, with Rammstein. But to go back to humor . . . everyone knows that humor’s not the biggest strength Germany has. I asked why, what is it that brings humor out? And I came to the conclusion that you have to be confident about yourself to laugh about yourself. And that, coming back to Germany—I think Germans aren’t confident about themselves. And Rammstein is something, we can use humor right now, in a way. In quiet confidence.

  “I’m not scared of America. I’m not scared at all. I think the most important thing for everyone—whether a human being or a c
ountry— is balance. You have to reach balance. And I think America is stepping out of balance. Obviously, we know that it wasn’t about Saddam Hussein. It was never about him.”

  I didn’t have time to debate this point, given that the strict assistant was coming back momentarily. “It must be such a pleasure for you,” I said, “after being viewed by the world as the most evil nation in history, for so long, to find that the United States has taken over that role.”

  He didn’t notice my tone. “Oh, yeah,” he agreed happily. “Especially the coming-from-the-East part. I mean, that makes it even more special.” It’s a tough thing, growing up behind that Irony Curtain.

  Two things come through very clearly in my conversations with the band: the never-ending guilt of anyone born German, and the growing, peevish disgruntlement that guilt provokes. Rammstein perfectly captures the sentiments of a nation at war with its forbidden impulses, and indeed, when Kruspe-Bernstein surprised himself with his desire to wrestle his own image in the video for “Mein Teil,” he happened upon an excellent metaphor for this.

  Perhaps the song that best characterizes this attitude is “Los,” in which the band taunts its critics:

  For men who are basically quite stupid, they do come up with some clever puns. The suffix -los means “-less” in English but, when used as an adjective, means “off” or “loose.” As a command, Los! means “go.” When Lindemann sings “Sie sind gottlos,” he pauses dramatically between gott and los. For a moment, it sounds as if he is singing, “You are God.” The song conveys an eerie combination of self-pity and menace. You do hear it—just what you think you hear.

  You’ll never get rid of us, indeed.

  This is an ancient theme in German history, this resentment, this sense that the German nation does not occupy its proper place, that the German people have been unjustly oppressed. Historically, it is nothing new to see these sentiments coupled with outrage that those goofy Americans should by contrast be so powerful. We see this resentment in the Wilhelminian Germany’s obsession with its encirclement prior to the First World War. Hitler skillfully exploited the same resentment in his rise to power.