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Junge welt Messer review 23-Dec-02

23 December 2002

Cutting
Literature
by Frank Schäfer

Till Lindemann waxes lyrically about a pubic hair in the soup and other phenomena of unfashionable life.

“In the mirror I do not look/I bear the burning in the face/I am lonely though not alone/Acne and Rosazea will always be with me” The author hits the Metre as far as the third verse, hobbles to an alternating rhythm, and by the last verse finally stumbles over his own verse foot. But this formal disorder falls together just right for the ridiculous twaddle, what should be structured here, is not. This post expressionist grammar-schoolboy poetry comes from the Rammstein front man Till Lindemann, and he is as hopeless as a Lower Saxony field, but at least that is ploughed accurately. "Messer" is called a strange collection of photos and, yes poems, and it has been put together by the bands’ own lighting and pyro designer Gert Hof. He also admits responsibility for most of the pictures, which show a shaven-headed Lindemann, with bleach make up, in a Latex leotard, posing with different shop window dolls. On the whole, a little tasteless. Yes, sure!

“A meeting of an art figure with other art figures”, writes Hof, and that is just about the only suitably straight sentence in his annoying, presumptuous, frightfully ostentatious and over-blown preface, which again and again finds new absurd idioms for these poems and above all everything they can be: " tear through the reality", "verbal executions, poetic suicide", a " guillotine in the form of words”, "wounds from despair", "a foil against the average, against deception", "lyrical account", " an execution", a "flare", and sometimes these poems are even also warships, "a warship countering the flood of our broken heaven". As if that’s not enough to read, there are one and a half pages of this Dada-material. Children, children...

Lindemann’s poems are no better: infantile improvised-arrogance, which have all the skill of the upper grammar school level behaving as modern lyrics and afterwards seek to be attributed to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Benn et al, but surely they are not intelligent enough. Lindemann wades into blood, pus, snot, homemade joyfully low-brow ugliness and violent visions, without the rolled-R and militaristic chaining rattling of his band - heavily symbolic, which ultimately does not win over the US Americans with it’s pleasant horror show, not least because here once again is the stereo-typical German, the barbaric Hunn and Nazi respectively – its nothing more that laughable puerile doggerel, and therefore sheer pretension:

“Blow stale loving wind/the husband kisses the fat wife/the soul lies deep in the water/so the wife takes all that is her strife/you are young/and I am kind/I have a soft double bed/each ship needs a port/why do you not want to sleep with me". It’s not just more metaphorical but once again more botched metric rhythms. And here one gets to read the best selected out of "over thousand poems" according to Hof! Well then.

Lindemann’s problem is his thoroughly formal lack of intelligence, which seeks to camouflage itself with hardness and old-fashionable gestures of genius. When he proclaims with his suffering pathos and inflated ideas, the not always so penetrating lofty Art, verses such as "You are young/and I am kind/I have a soft double bed" they are so childish that one immediately thinks of parody. No, he means it all completely seriously – nevertheless one must laugh at: "I see a Shooting Star/thus I came from the multitude of the womb/a small black hair comes free/and lands in my soup".

That is how Lindemann’s lyrics are! Without the salt, its just one pubic hair in the strand of a German poetry hot-pot.

* Till Lindemann: Messer. Gedichte und Fotos. Selected by Gert Hof. Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2002, 176 pages, 29,90 Euro

© 2005 Sue Lindemann