Rammstein Is Germany’s Scary New Normal

It’s hard to overlook the way that the tumult and horror prompted by recent charges of sexual misconduct against German band Rammstein reflects the wild scenes that play out at its live performances. For nearly 30 years, the six-man industrial group hailing from East Germany has growled dark and ribald lyrics during stage shows of extravagant pyrotechnics, violent play-acting, and ear-splitting instrumentals. In light of the accusations, the giant dildos that launch fireballs and standards of its repertoire such as “Pussy” are finally being examined in a much more exacting light.

Over the past month, several women spoke up about the band’s practiced system of coercing young women into post-show sex with frontman Till Lindemann. The routine, apparently as well-rehearsed as the group’s finely choreographed shows, included plenty of booze at pre- and post-gig parties, and drugs, too—maybe even in the form of a knock-out drug—and then coerced sex with Lindemann. Apparently, the hookups were orchestrated by Lindemann’s underlings in the road crew, not unlike the way that, on stage, the other five band members play-act dispassionately cruel foot soldiers under Lindemann’s command.

Images of the 60-year-old Lindemann in concert regalia—at times black-leather S&M combat vests, at others blood-red sci-fi uniforms—have been splashed all over the media, a sign that the German public is finally taking the band to task for the assaults that have been happening for years—and are all but bragged about in their oeuvre.

But Rammstein’s offensiveness extends beyond its aggressive misogyny to something that—surprisingly, given Germans’ sensitivity to such matters—has garnered even less scrutiny. The band’s toxic masculinity is part of a right-wing chauvinism that finds ample political expression today in Germany in far-right populism—and it is currently on the rise. Rammstein’s schtick—all supposedly a spoof—is a take on/spins off of Teutonic misdeeds, insidious evil, and despotism. Germany’s most successful contemporary cultural export is an act that flaunts Germanic symbolism, jack-booted goose-stepping, and Leni Riefenstahl aesthetics—to the adulation of sold-out stadiums worldwide. It is the best-selling German-language band in history, with more than 20 million in album sales. Although this Deutschtümelei (excessive display of Germanness) flies in the face of a liberal, modern Germany, the band has largely been given a free ride on it.

German nationalism today isn’t that of Rammstein’s performances, but Rammstein speaks to right-wingers who deeply resent Germany’s cultural boundaries and pursue their own violent strategies for expanding them. Since Rammstein is ramming through these same postwar impediments—although it is, the band assures us, as ironic critique—it lands itself on the same side as the rightists at a precarious time: when the fortunes of far-right parties and number of hate crimes are spiking across the country. A far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), sits in Germany’s legislature, the Bundestag, and currently polls at an all-time high of over 18 percent. Last year, the number of right-wing hate crimes also hit an all-time high. A new poll shows that a third of men under 35 years of age think it’s OK if men slap their female partners.

The group’s 2019 music video “Deutschland” (Germany), for example, entails a nine-minute, bombastic maelstrom of sinister, blood-splattered, extraordinarily creepy snippets straight from German history, from murderous encounters between Roman legionnaires and Germanic pagans, through the Holocaust, to Soviet communism. The entire horror show plays out over Rammstein’s musical fare: Lindemann’s rumbling, deep-as-a-mass-grave vocals, hypnotic synthesizers, and intermittent bursts of distorted, down-tuned guitar riffs. By far the most troubling scene was released first as a trailer: four band members dressed as Jewish concentration camp prisoners, standing at a Nazi gallows amid SS officers, nooses around their necks.

Rammstein’s schtick is definitely tasteless and sophomoric, but then there’s nothing verboten about that, is there? It’s not the first music act or artiste to subvert fascist iconography for purposes of provocation. And, after all, surely the testosterone-fueled bloodlust portrayed in the “Deutschland” video is called out by the character of Germania, an African woman, who accompanies the bloody history lesson. One of the German-language lyrics reads: “Germany, I can’t give you my love anymore.” Moreover, just think about Sid Vicious’s swastika T-shirt or the Slovenian band Laibach’s attire of Nazi and communist uniforms: legitimate forms of provocation. Critics hailed the avant-garde Laibach’s dark, high-camp rendering of totalitarian aesthetics as ludicrous and scathing.

When Rammstein broke onto the German metal scene in 1994, critics were puzzled: Was it another neo-Nazi band like Böhse Onkelz (Nasty Uncles), or satire like Laibach? In fact, it is neither.

The name Rammstein (consciously misspelled) hailed from one of their first songs about the 1988 air show disaster at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base near Kaiserslautern in western Germany. Three aircraft collided during an open-air display, killing the pilots and 67 spectators. At the time, it was the deadliest air show accident in history. The song includes the lyrics, which are spoken like a chant by the hulky Lindemann in gravelly, low tones: “Rammstein—a man is burning. Rammstein—there’s the smell of burning flesh in the air.” The fascination with gore and violent death dates back to the group’s very first songs—and never lets up.

Lindemann and his five band members all trace their roots back to East Germany’s underground post-punk scene, which operated illegally in the subcultural niches chiseled out by discontents. From Rammstein’s first days, the band relied on ear-shattering volume; martial uniforms and poses; ominous, reverberating bass lines; and orgies of fireballs, explosions, smoke, flames, and fireworks. The groups Kiss and West Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten come immediately to mind as influences, but Rammstein took its showmanship to other heights. The industrial metal group Throbbing Gristle, like Laibach, also invokes comparisons, but when these groups play with the icons of authoritarian politics, they locate them clearly in critical contexts. Laibach’s group members, for example, wear a mixed assortment of costumes: Yugoslav socialist, German Nazi, Red Army, and a hunting outfit. Its critique is clearly of totalitarian ideology as such—and the band doesn’t attract neo-Nazi fans like a magnet because they do not feel addressed.

The stage shows and lyrics of Rammstein—the progenitor of the Neue Deutsche Härte (New German Hardness) genre—are meant, say its denizens, to challenge fans to identify with the over-the-top reprehensible in order to become able to overcome it, as a group. The shock effect is supposed to jar listeners from their comfort zone, which, apparently, is cocooned in nationalism. “A large part of Rammstein’s provocation stems from the artificially exaggerated portrayal of Germanness in their personas, imagery, and music,” as one music journalist explained it. In interview after interview, the band members defend their oeuvre as critical, and none of them express right-wing sentiments. In fact, they call themselves leftists.

Moreover, despite all the signposts, most of the German culture industry hasn’t objected to its wunderkind. On Rammstein’s 20th anniversary, the metalhead magazine Metal Hammer lavished praise on the band: “Rammstein are among the most style-defining, innovative, and successful bands Germany has ever produced.” The German music industry awards that have been shoveled onto Rammstein have effectively declared it the preeminent ambassador of German popular music. Most of Germany seems to buy this as a legitimate artistic undertaking—as it would be in the United States.

But Germany isn’t the United States. Because of its Nazi past, it recognizes rules—like accepting a muted nationalism and the outlawing of Nazi symbols—that other countries don’t have to play by (although some certainly should). In the decades following reunification, these norms have become gradually ever more diluted as the Nazi period fades further into the distance. Ultimately, this ethic had been a cornerstone of the identity of a people engaging constructively with its forefathers’ responsibility for the Nazis’ rise to power, the war, and the Holocaust.

Most Germans have long felt that their sensitivity to history and the affinities that bolstered the Nazis has helped serve as a firewall between the democratic majority and the far right. The more porous this firewall is, the greater the leeway for the far right.

Unfortunately, the free pass that the German public is now revoking for Rammstein’s alleged sexual misdeeds—and perhaps, too, the songs that extol gangbangs, sex without condoms, and drugged assaults—seems still to be valid for the exultation of violence per se and hyperbolic nationalism. It’s a sign of the ever more right-wing zeitgeist in postwar Germany that Rammstein can get away with violating so many of Germany’s cultural norms—and still attract followers who desire exactly that.

Indeed, Germany is at an uncertain moment: Its democracy is now more than 70 years old (30 for the easterners) and a respected member of the free world. Germany’s “normalization,” namely the fact that it now plays by much the same rules as other countries, is, according to many, now deserved. This means that Germans don’t have to be any more cautious than anyone else about, for example, criticizing Israel’s actions in Palestine or accommodating refugees.

“The Germans are a bit ashamed of their nationality,” Rammstein’s lead guitarist, Richard Kruspe, explained. “They’ve had a disturbed relationship to it since World War II. We’re trying to establish a natural relationship to our identity.” According to Kruspe: “We’re the only ones who do it the way Germans should. The others try to imitate the English and the Americans. We’re almost too German for Germany.”

Along the same lines, Paul Landers, the rhythm guitarist, added: “Our goal is for people who are as uptight as we are to shout out ‘Deutschland’ without feeling bad. It is very important that you can shout out ‘Deutschland’ once a year, at least at the Rammstein concert. The next day you can go back to work properly and be ashamed.”

This normalization is something that the far right has fought for doggedly: Germans should finally be able to boast about their nation in public, wave Germans flags to their hearts’ content, and criticize the presence of foreign nationals in their country, just as other peoples can—without triggering an international scandal. Rammstein has performed whole sets beneath an XXL, glowing-red rune very much resembling the Iron Cross, a military decoration in Prussia and later in the German Empire and Nazi Germany. The rightists understand that Rammstein is signaling that this taboo—the shunning of the Iron Cross as emblematic of Germany—is now no longer so forbidden.

Likewise, in its 1998 video for the song “Stripped,” Rammstein chose footage from Riefenstahl’s racist, hyper-nationalistic Olympia films, which portrayed the 1936 Olympics under the Nazis as a great accomplishment of the German volk. No wonder young men sporting swastikas and Böhse Onkelz T-shirts can be found in their audiences. Rammstein embraxces its tramples on Germany’s politically correct sensibility. “They’re a prime example of the ‘one really should be able to say that’ school that speaks to people who constantly think they are not allowed to say the things they want to say,” Mark Swatek, an aficionado of the German music scene, told Foreign Policy. “It’s a similar story as with Böhse Onkelz, only that Rammstein are internationally successful and have an East German background, whereas Onkelz had been Nazis.”

One Süddeutsche Zeitung editor, Ulf Poschardt, hit the nail on the head in 1999, with words equally valid today. “Rammstein’s feedback loops to the völkisch swamp of the New Right,” Poschardt argued, deprives their music of the radical, critical potential of true art.