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Schwerin Online – Messer Review02-Jan-03

“Poetry with no going back”
Rammstein singer Till Lindemann publishes a volume of lyrical poetry and so for the first time gives what was private to the public.

Fog rolls, the weather changes. The moon meets the clouds in a circle. The ice on the lake has fissures and cracks. Come across the lake - This poem is called “Anziehung” (Attraction) and is by Sarah Kirsch.

Indeed one can hardly extract oneself from the dark request of this message, even if one knows that this siren call leads to destruction. It’s a similar state of affairs with the poems of Till Lindemann, singer and song lyric writer of the Band Rammstein. The comparison is not casual. Some poems of his first volume of poetry “Messer” refer to the melancholy influences of the landscape, which came to him long before Sarah Kirsch sang of them. It is also no secret that the 39-year old is the son of the children’s book author and poet Werner Lindemann – and it is to him that his son has dedicated his first published poems. This reference to his own roots comes as a surprise. Growing up in Rostock and near Schwerin, Lindemann during his Rammstein-career, in contrast to the other band members, gave very little or no expression of himself at all in his texts. The assumption of such personal modesty, as indifference in relation to the endless criticisms, being that the Rammstein lyrics were shoddy or sexist.

For the most part the common press found special joy in pulling to pieces the musicians from Berlin and Schwerin. The talk was of Nazi-fervour, of Teutonic Rockers and Paedophiles, and came out with a “PDS of the east”,: bad always comes from the east. Perhaps the criticism of the Band Rammstein and particularly of their song lyrics would have been more moderate had Lindemann explained them. But whoever plays with taboos, is still the Bogeyman, and the explanation of an artistic intention equals a guilty plea - in this country.

The criticisms grew silent, since Rammstein and Lindemann's lyrics are heard all over the world. Perhaps also, because one got accustomed to the tautology that the Band had, and this idea of “pure and simple”, which also came through in the album titles with the expressions: Herzeleid, Sehnsucht, Mutter.

The effect of the poems of “Messer” Lindemann summarised recently in a radio interview with one word: Romance. Gert Hof – long time friend of the singer and successful pyro-technician of many Rammstein Shows – calls these poems, written between 1995 and 2002 “a lyrical account”, “Poetic suicide”, - “Poetry with no going back.” Lindemanns lyrics are disconcerting because he is relentlessly outspoken. The poems are supplemented by a photo performance, in which the art figure Lindemann, surrounded by shop window dolls, transforms into a doll himself. The photos of Jens Rötzsch are reminiscent of the project “Body Art” by the photographer Holger Trülzsch with the Model Vera von Lehndorff. VE-ruschka was transformed into a mossy statue or into a stone - Transformations, on which Susan Sontag wrote, it will be pictures of the melancholy which sublimate the desire of disappearance, the unity of becoming one with the object. Lindemann sits down in the pictures of melancholia, which makes up many of his texts, and this way places the grotesque, the tragic-humour, the absurd and provocation into the foreground.

© 2005 Sue Lindemann