East German Rock After the Wall: Three Bands and Their Evolving Narratives
In 1996, journalist Wiglaf Droste penned a scathing review of the “First East Music Exhibition,” held in Berlin from February 23 to 25. Published in the German edition of Rolling Stone (April issue), the piece, titled “Rock & Roll Identitätärä,” poured ridicule on what he called a “festival of the undead.” Among the performers were vocalists Frank Schöbel and Dina Straat, along with the Puhdys and Karat, two of the most prominent East German bands from before unification. Droste dismissed the event as an exercise in self-flagellation that “confirmed every potential prejudice” about eastern German music. His contempt targeted groups like Karat — which he described as a “bombastic poetic rock band” — and the “feared Puhdys.” For Droste, the lyrics of what he termed “Zone-Zombies” all told the same story: “Sob, boohoo, no one likes us, everyone from the West is ignorant, illustrated by the fact that they don’t like our music.” In his view, the “Ostmensch” character sways “autistically, protected in his own musty air” while swinging “between social jealousy and self-pity.”
Two years later, the German-language Spex magazine (issue 476, September 1998) took a different approach. Its special edition featured not only the “Old Guard” of East German rock — such as the Puhdys, Karat, City, and Silly — but also profiles of “newer” acts like Pankow, Keimzeit, Rockhaus, Gundermann, and die Zöllner, along with a “next generation” that included the Inchtabokatables, Bobo in White Wooden Houses, Das Auge Gottes, and Blind Passengers, most of whom emerged just before or after unification. Unlike Droste’s dismissive polemic, this issue — produced by both eastern and western German journalists — explored why such a stylistically diverse range of bands still attracted devoted audiences. The sound of the Puhdys, for example, was described as “freshly deep-fried: shiny, oily, sweet.” While their post-unification album “Wie ein Engel” was praised for pairing “classical song material with contemporary lyrics,” the follow-up in 1994 (selling 19,000 copies) drew criticism for its “embarrassingly slogan-like formulae of past recipes for success.” City’s music, the feature noted, played with “people’s fascination with nostalgic memories” while also offering “the idea of beautiful melodies and philosophically-spiced lyrics.” East German music was also featured in the 12-part television series Pop2000, a history of postwar German popular music broadcast in late 1999 and early 2000.
Where Droste ignored a broad swath of post-unification East German pop and rock, the Spex special edition conspicuously sidestepped two of the most commercially successful bands from the East: Rammstein (Berlin) and Die Prinzen (Leipzig). This analysis focuses on their releases “Mutter” and “D” (for Deutschland), as well as City’s “Am Fenster2” — the band whose Eastern identity remains strongest outside of the Puhdys and Karat. The central question is whether these groups have managed to move past “Ostalgie,” the nostalgia that western observers often attribute to eastern Germans and their music, and whether they continue to occupy a “victimhood” narrative. An examination of three songs — “Dünnes Eis” by City, “Deutschland” by Die Prinzen, and “Mutter” by Rammstein — indicates whether new narratives have emerged in the course of unification.
City’s CD “Am Fenster2” directly references their earlier 1978 hit “Am Fenster,” a song noted for its violin improvisation based on Bulgarian folk harmonies by bassist Georgi Gogow. The band had built a reputation for using state-produced recordings (through VEB Deutsche Schallplatten) to release music that was banned from the airwaves, particularly their concept LP “Casablanca” (1987). After unification, City put out “Keine Angst” (1990) and “Rauchzeichen” (1997), both using lyrics by Alfred Roesler and Scarlett Kleint — the same writing team behind the pseudonyms “Titti Flanell” and “Friedrich Hayn” on “Casablanca.” Today, band members Fritz Puppel and Tony Krahl run their own label, K+P Records, distributed through BMG.
In contrast, neither Rammstein nor Die Prinzen identify specifically as “East German” bands. Both work with western producers and labels — Rammstein records with Motor Music in Hamburg, with management based in Berlin. The 2001 album “Mutter” followed their earlier “Herzeleid” (1995) and “Sehnsucht” (1997). Rammstein’s video “Live in Berlin” (1998) documented their famously theatrical stage show full of pyrotechnics.
The band’s video “Stripped” embroiled them in controversy by using images from Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Olympia” for a cover of Depeche Mode. Their ambiguous use of Nazi aesthetics, their mechanical stage show, and misogynist lyrics led critics to place them at the forefront of Neue Deutsche Härte (NDH or “New German Hardness”). Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann described NDH as a recruiting tool for neo-Nazis — a “large national genre-receptacle” that enjoyed broad consumer acceptance without making distinct political statements, instead concealing itself “in a fog of ambiguous or empty metaphors.” He noted that many lyrics can be misinterpreted, especially by young consumers, and that the genre represents a “made-to-order trend” for the political right that could hardly be more attractive to Nazis. Rammstein has repeatedly distanced itself from right-wing rock, telling Der Spiegel in 2001 that “the whole discussion around our allegedly right-wing image is unnecessary and gets on our nerves.”
Die Prinzen’s 2001 CD “D” (for Deutschland) was produced with Anette Humpe, a former West German New Wave artist, who also worked on their earlier hits. Before unification, the band was an a cappella group called Herzbuben. After the Berlin Wall fell, they changed their name to Die Prinzen and built a reputation for “nice guys” with sweet harmonies and ironic social criticism reflecting concerns in a unified Germany. Aesthetically they are nearly the opposite of Rammstein, and they frequently join demonstrations against neo-Nazi activities in their hometown of Leipzig.
City — “Dünnes Eis”: Personal Partnership as Refuge
“Dünnes Eis” (Thin Ice) features lyrics by Alfred Roesler, though other tracks on the CD include contributions from West German singer-songwriter Heinz Rudolf Kunze and Werner Karma, one of East Germany’s most prolific pre-unification lyricists. The song, like most on the album, responds to an abstract sense of physical and psychological danger by clinging tightly to intimacy. This represents a shift from City’s two previous post-unification releases, which tackled concrete issues facing the unified country — suicide in “Laura” from “Keine Angst,” abortion in “Marie Marie,” and contrasts between life before and after unification in songs like “Steinzeit” and the title track.
“Rauchzeichen” (1997) depicts a lonely person shut in “a bunker without a target and ammunition,” trying to communicate with larger groups through smoke signals. Other tracks call on listeners to take action (“Mach was”) or talk about escaping “beyond the horizon.” Even partnerships were depicted as stifling, as in relationships that fall apart or satires about partners departing. Among the three bands, City is the most explicitly “Eastern.” Earlier productions declared matter-of-factly that “the East is the area where I live.” On “Am Fenster2,” Eastern identity appears only through abstract references, such as the album title borrowed from a GDR-era hit, or through quotes from previous City songs like “Meister aller Klassen” and “Gläserner Traum.” A similar self-quotation appeared in the title song of “Rauchzeichen,” which referenced “Casablanca” but replaced the US film line with an East German film “Spur der Steine,” suggesting eastern Germans were reconnecting with their own history.
Where previous CDs illustrated both attractions and detractions of partnerships, the newest one consistently portrays long-term relationships as offering stability, security, and protection against unsatisfactory reality. Songs describe falling in love, intimacy with a child, explaining infidelity to a partner, and celebrating commitment.
“Thin Ice” describes people who follow daily routines without recognizing catastrophic dangers lurking just outside their awareness. Sunrise, sunset, love, growing trees, eating well — these daily assumptions are built on “paper-thin ice.” Routines can “belong to the past,” reason as a motivating way of thinking may become invalid, and an entire way of thinking can be shattered by a “collapse of the heaven.” Responding to that awareness leads individuals back to the one reliable accomplishment: intimate human partnership.
Rammstein — “Mutter”: Psychotic Retribution Against an Inhuman Future?
“Mutter” presents an artificial being created without a mother. The protagonist complains of having “no sun to shine, and no breast cried milk” — that is, no human warmth. He was “not allowed to lick a breast,” offered “no fold for hiding,” “no navel on the belly,” and had a “tube stuck in my throat.” The description continues with “no one gave me a name” and no natural love or conception took place. His reaction is to swear he “will present her with a disease” and “sink her in a river.” He laments a “Muttermal” (birthmark) that visibly marks him as different and seeks to remove it “with the kiss of a knife,” even accepting that he may die from it. Overall, the song paints a dystopian world, over-technologized and inhuman, incapable of reproduction.
The self-mutilation, psychological deformation, and morbidity continue Rammstein’s tradition of exploring taboo topics in a dark, foreboding techno-heavy sound. Rolling Stone (August 1997) ironized their debut “Herzeleid” as a “calculated mixture of novelty-gag and marketing flotsam: wild men from the German East as descendants of Clawfinger, Prong, Nine Inch Nails, and Popeye, along with foreboding romanticism, Gothicism, Black Mass, gleaming muscle and burning dementia, a little sado-masochism, paramilitary sport club, and steel storm.” Their second CD “Sehnsucht” added incest, homosexuality, masochism, and explicit sexual themes. Derogatory comments from journalists have continued, accusing the band of perpetuating stereotypes and promoting inhuman instincts.
A closer look reveals skeptical themes across Rammstein’s discography. “Rein raus” treats sexual intercourse, “adios” portrays mainlining drugs, “Zwitter” describes a being with both sexes, and “Ich will” addresses politicians’ inability to hear the people. While Hammer (April 2001) called the “Mutter” CD “pure pathos, steely bombasticism, children’s choruses and battlefield chants, blood orgies and purgatory,” and Die Zeit (March 2001) complained the songs “always remind you of something, but always turn the…” the music exposes a subversive tension that resists easy labels.
The comparison between Rammstein, the Prinzen, and City reveals much about how each group processes and performs German identity. Each band navigates the post-unification landscape with distinct aesthetic strategies and political postures, yet all three engage with narratives that speak to broader cultural divides.
The Prinzen’s “Deutschland” song serves as a contemporary agit-pop piece. Like several of their earlier works, it irony-inflected comments on the political mood and disagreeable behaviors present in German society. Their 1995 hit “Du musst ein Schwein sein” declared “you have to be a pig in this world/you have to be mean/if you go through life truthfully/you will get a kick in the ass in gratitude/[which can be] dangerous.” An earlier 1992 track, “Mein bester Freund,” stated “my best friend is Robin Hood [and Sherlock Holmes and Winnetou]/because (t)he(y) fight(s) against injustice in the world/but unfortunately these friends are all dead/and that is difficult for me…/that is why I fight against the injustice in the world.” Another song on that same CD critiques a factory director for polluting air and water. On the “Küssen Verboten” album, “Suleimann” satirizes the naiveté of East Germans during unification who eagerly accepted Western consumer goods — “filter cigarettes,” “used cars,” “jeans,” and “video films” — regardless of quality. The East Germans appear allegorized as “astonished,” “wise,” and “always in a good mood” South Pacific islanders visited by wealthy Western tourists. The song “Bombe” voices anger when “slogans are painted on the wall,” when “someone is called ‘Kanacke’” because “their language is not understood,” or when someone wants to “punch someone in the mouth” or “shav[e] their skull” while “marching in step” — an explicit reference to skinhead activities.
The “Deutschland” song begins with an exaggeratedly ironic, masculine martial chorus, rhythmically chanting “deutsch, deutsch, deutsch…etc.” after a short, brassy, anthem-like musical introduction. This ironized introduction bears structural similarities to the opening of Rammstein’s “Links2,3,4” from the “Mutter” CD, which starts with marching feet before a heavy metal riff. The lyrical content directly responds to critics accusing the band of right-wing sympathies. The refrain states “they want to see my heart on the Right/but then I look downward toward the left/there it beats Left.” While the Prinzen-song declares the band’s heart “on the Left,” the music retains its militaristic flavor, prompting journalists to reject the band’s declared political credibility. The Prinzen-song remains abstract, using the biological image of “the heart” as the locus of decisive attitudes, implicitly arguing that the music itself is not the crucial indicator. Thomas Ahlbreckt’s kritik, weiss, the article kritiziert sie musikalisch—that sentiment may carry further.
The song lists both positive and negative German traits using irony for self and social criticism: a German invented the TV show “Wetten, dass,” Germans are “the friendliest customers in the world,” they are “modest” and “have money,” are the “best in every kind of sport,” and pay “world record taxes.” With ironic critical tone, they assert Germans eagerly await and welcome travelers — especially those who stay in the country, a veiled reference to actually unwanted immigrants from South Asia and beyond Europe. Yet the lyrics ironically insist Germans are “the most friendly people in the world.”
The second and third verses directly critique negative behavior: those who imagine Germany is the best, those who think “it is cool to be an asshole,” those who complain about “Kanaken” but then travel to Thailand “every year for a fuck.” Germans love their cars more than their women and show exceptional kindness to dogs and cats, implicitly critiquing an inability to form mutual, trusting personal relationships. The final strophe asserts Germans are “good at punching in the face,” referencing skinhead violence against immigrants, alongside the ability to “set fires” — further signs of anti-foreigner violence seen in the mob burning of a Turkish family in Mölln and the attack on an asylum-seeker dormitory in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in the 1990s. Germans adhere to “Order and Cleanliness,” two code words for anti-foreigner Skinhead ideology, while the lyrics claim Germans are “always prepared for war.” To counter the right-wing/skinhead slogan “we can be proud of Germany,” the Prinzen exclaim “Schwein!” The band thus explicitly rejects the behaviors it has ironized.
The “Deutschland” lyrics mark a subtle shift: earlier songs rejected racist, chauvinist, and anti-social behavior from a moral pedestal, but here the refrain and some verses use the inclusive “we,” showing the band identifying with the majority of Germans while morally rejecting objectionable behavior. This ambiguous stance reduces the distance between the increasingly a slightly toned something: “All of that is Germany/all of that is us/You can’t find that anywhere else/only here, only here./ All of that is Germany/All of that is us/We live and will die here.” This statement implicitly calls on listeners to take responsibility for both positive and negative behaviors in contemporary German society. The refrain feels only partly ironic; the irony submerges at the end under the seriousness of the message.
A variety of tensions pervade the interpretation of these songs. The pop genre’s ability to transmit a humorously ironic stance is questioned — the Prinzen are not expected to take substantive stances given pop’s subordination to commercial success. It is therefore significant that the band engages in anti-Nazi activism in Leipzig apart from music. Rammstein, by contrast, uses the “serious” genre of metal/techno to depict personal relationships as psycho-charged, rendering its message less arbitrary. This is part of why the band feels misunderstood: critics perceive its role-playing and song topics as typical pop/rock extension, yet the dismay at being taken seriously when employing brutal, misogynist, and Nazi-aesthetic iconographies reveals a perception gap.
Both Rammstein and City present personal relationships as deformed or fragile, but Rammstein, unlike the Prinzen, remains aloof from practical politics. In reply to critics who see its use of Nazi-derived aesthetics as an implicitly political commercial strategy, the band presents itself as non-political. City, continually reinforced on its CD by iconographic references to an “East” band identity, depicts domestic relationships in the post-unification, post-9/11 world as fragile refuges worth defending for those marginalized or discriminated against. Rammstein may show what happens when domestic partnerships’ neurotic deformations, rooted in socio-economic conditions, become psychotic obsessions. The aesthetics oppose “feel good” techno raves and boy bands, drawing on heavy metal. While the Prinzen mobilize pop’s humorous irony, this option does not seem available to Rammstein — at least not with media critics.
City’s retreat into the shelter of a domestic relationship, along with its complex web of self-referential quotes from earlier songs on the CD, creates an insider space for an East German community. Only those with the appropriate East German background, experience, and knowledge can decode the invisible gates and demarcators. Yet the abstraction from concrete contemporary social reality makes the song and lyrics particularly accessible to those for whom private relationships have gained importance after September 11. The collective “we” embraces both audiences among those affected by unforeseeable dangers.
Seeing the City song as an allegorical national narrative, as suggested by Frederick Jameson in analysis of Chinese lyric poetry, the collective “we” would refer to the national territorial community. The singer-protagonist questions unreflective daily habits, customs, and rituals — the “daily nationalism” Billig mentioned. The protagonist rhetorically asks about the functioning of nature (“sunrise,” “trees growing,” “children”) and the social and economic spheres (“paying cash,” “things that taste good,” “what love feels like”). This questioning of society and nation supposedly governed by reason and science can also signify life-constraining events like unemployment, natural disasters, or unexpected deaths. It may also mark the disruption of East German taken-for-granted habits and thinking after unification.
Rather than serving as a demarcation device from West Germans, City universalized the dangers to include them all. The “me” in “don’t let go” of the refrain could refer to a concrete person — a domestic partner — or to a government or politicians whose policies risk abandoning the most vulnerable: the unemployed, underemployed, welfare recipients, and those marginalized.
Rammstein’s “Mutter” protagonist appears as an acutely self-alienated, isolated individual — a destructively psychotic cyborg created artificially, by machine, in a non-natural manner. Central emotions are resentment, anger, and vengefulness, with no reconciliation, intimacy, or forgiveness. Viewing “mother” as nation/society — the carrier of the protagonist’s history — she is neither individualized nor naturalized, matching the abstraction Benedict Anderson or Anthony Smith described. In German, words for community — die Nation, die Gemeinschaft, die Gesellschaft — are feminine nouns.
Thus “mother” becomes a disembodied industrial breeding station, possibly representing the industrial production of male, self-destructive cyborg subjectivities in a nation where technological yet androgynous femininity reigns supreme. Redemption comes through suicidal sacrifice or self-mutilating removal of a “birthmark,” not forgiveness or negotiation. The protagonist delegates blame to the “mother,” being unable to take responsibility for positive behavior despite shortcomings — a parallel to the paternalistic GDR citizen-government relationship. Whereas usually “Vater Staat” and “Vaterland” prevail, here state domination, extending into intimate reaches of nation, is feminized as an anonymously treacherous “mother,” a recurring trope in Rammstein’s misogynist repertoire. Femininity becomes a mechanized, anonymous birthing machine constructing a non-individual subject. The call to “give a disease” and “sink in the river” the “mother who never bore me” differs from the Prinzen’s call to fight prejudice and intolerance.
This dystopic view disrupts idealized representations of the mother-child relationship and opposes City’s domestic retreat by depicting natural intimacy as artificial, inhuman industrial product.
The Prinzen’s song ironically magnifies negative aspects of everyday German social life but shifts to more disagreeable qualities in later verses. Allegorical interpretation is remote — the lyrics decode at the surface narrative level. The primary emotional register is indignation at discriminatory, uncivil, right-wing behavior toward others. Yet humour is supplemented by serious appeal to act against these social wrongs and take personal responsibility for the community.
No direct references to an East German identity appear in the Prinzen’s song itself, but band members freely mention their GDR experiences in interviews. Few journalists have related the band’s East German background to their aesthetics or performances, though some have drawn parallels to socialist realism and Nazi aesthetics. In a world with contradictory fundamentalisms unleashed by Western reluctance to redistribute wealth equally, Rammstein might be reminding Western “civilization” that it is not winning the “clash” Samuel Huntington posits, thereby undermining Western triumphalist narratives.
having contrived, to varying degrees of duty or pragmatism toward Western discourses, East Germans, in response to arrogant, condescending, and demeaning actions and views from West Germany,
“used their GDR background to create methods of discursive independence and resistance, striving to recover self-respect.”
Therefore, in analyzing the tracks of the three bands under discussion, we notice that each band, to different extents, reinforces an East German perspective without wholly dismissing West German experiences, practices, or attitudes.
City maintains this position within a story promoting escapism into private life, so it is not specifically labeled as an Eastern German narrative. In contrast, distinctly coded markers define the narrative subjects as East German, thereby helping to affirm and validate an East German identity, experiences, and life-story continuity within the framework of German unification.
The Prinzen, on the other hand, because they are situated both discursively and geographically in a specifically East German setting, leverage this subaltern perspective to call all Germans to political action. They urge rejection of actions from their shared German past—namely the Nazi period—that led to today’s relationships between eastern and western parts of unified Germany. The Prinzen appeal for moral and ethical behavior, rejecting racial bias, discrimination, and violence toward foreigners, while emphasizing shared responsibility with a national audience. The call to action in the Prinzen’s “Deutschland”, which I term Agit-Pop due to its activist thrust, is rooted in a highly contested tradition of political activist songs from both pre-unification German states. In West Germany, the political pop movement was a student-based subculture grounded in pop and rock music, a tradition that generated the Neue Deutsche Welle, where Annette Humpe—producer of The Prinzen—was a leading figure with her band Ideal. In the GDR, however, the political song movement owed its existence largely to the official youth organization Freie Deutsche Jugend, compromising its credibility and authenticity. After unification, this politically motivated pop has become one means of resistance against skinhead aggression, serving as the soundtrack for demonstrations in The Prinzen’s hometown.
“Mutter” presents neither an explicitly eastern nor western German narrative, though it might be interpreted as expressing East German distress over the “trauma” of unification. Lacking direct references to German social realities,
the dystopian vision of psychotic revenge against an unnamed, feminized figure called “mother” tends to psychologize rather than politicize a stance toward social and political matters.
Stefan Lindke argues that Rammstein is a primary determinant of the Neue Deutsche Härte, which he describes as music tailored to an era where Germany is “reconstructing itself as a great power” and society is reshaping along nationalist lines. Lindke defines the NDH as a musically varied style that (1) renounces obvious use of Nazi symbols, thereby decontextualizing fascist aesthetics and habituating listeners to their use—unconsciously anchoring those ideals and images of people; (2) abandons ‘political correctness’—even to the point of its vehement rejection; and (3) exhibits a distinctly sexist character that posits a negatively defined sexual difference favoring male dominance. Additionally, Rammstein and other NDH acts incorporate elements of fascist aesthetics reminiscent of punk and new wave, yet without discernible ironic decomposition or distancing devaluation. NDH shares archaic, romantic, and mystical traits with other segments of German pop music—such as Gothic and Dark Wave groups currently popular among some German audiences—in which “blood, fire, struggle, death, and virility” hold prominent places. With Roger Behrends, Lindke argues these “heroic” tendencies reflect a “secret desire of the postmodern person” to formulate “a romantic idea of some kind of national cultural identity” amid “cultural globalization” and “German-language hip hop.”
Lindke contends that the NDH does not qualify as a subculture because it lacks dedicated communicative codes, an infrastructure, or distinct behavioral patterns; he thus agrees with Mühlmann that the NDH can be seen as a purely commercially motivated labeling strategy of the pop music industry.
Nonetheless, Lindke considers the broad acceptance of the music by audiences ranging from the far right to mainstream consumers as an indication that people seek an authentic German identity in music. He concurs with pop critic Martin Büsser that unlike earlier pop subcultures, the NDH does not offer identification with victims but rather with the victor’s mentality. For Lindke, the danger lies not only in the promotion of values like “elite thinking, struggle, hardness, and virility” through the music, but also in that such values are constantly propagated in the “bourgeois-conservative society.” Moreover, the protagonists aim to “liberate” Nazi aesthetics and stylistic elements “from their negative connotations” and to “depoliticize” them. With Ulf Poschardt, Lindke believes NDH bands form part of a new political mainstream “Zeitgeist” that includes the growing political self-assurance of dominant circles in Germany, who dream of a self-aware nation—one willing to shed historical inhibitions, where Auschwitz stigmatized the nation, and where German society is “renationalized,” rejecting criticism from “outside.”