"Cooking is culture," Bove says. "All over the world. Every nation, every region, has its own food cultures. Food and farming define people. We cannot let it all go, to be replaced with hamburgers." 35 I"d readily agree that the global caliphate of the hamburger would be a terrible thing, fiercely to be resisted, but I have to say it is not a particularly realistic fear. I have lived in New York-the city that defines globalization, if anything does-and I have lived in Paris. As anyone who has lived in both cities will tell you, the cuisine available in New York is vastly more diverse. It is also generally much better and much cheaper. There are only a handful of restaurants in Paris with first-rate j.a.panese, Chinese, Thai, Indian, or Ethiopian food, and these restaurants are prohibitively expensive. Most of what purports to be Thai or Indian food has been h.o.m.ogenized into something quite bland and recognizably French. There are not even very many good Vietnamese restaurants in Paris. There is-literally-not one single good Mexican restaurant in Paris, and trust me, I have looked. In New York, you can find excellent examples of each of these cuisines more or less on every block.
So what do they really want? Again, look at their own rhetoric. Donella Meadows, who was an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College and author of a column, "The Global Citizen," admiringly interpreted Bove as an enemy of the "narrow, heartless economics that would have us fill our lives with things produced wherever they can be made most "efficiently.""36 This woman could not seriously have objected to efficiency; I am sure she did not go out of her way, when driving her Volvo to her Dartmouth office in the morning, to take the route with the most traffic. So her words make no sense. But she did not really mean what she seems to be saying. This is a case, ironically enough, of false consciousness. No, the key words are these: narrow and heartless. Cold. Unfeeling. Indifferent. Bove, on the other hand, cares. Bove has a heart. He has a soul. He brings meaning into a meaningless and indifferent universe. That is why they love him.
THE SEVENTH LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.
Until the advent of Catharism, heresy had been a sporadic affair, and if the charismatic messiahs who cropped up here and there were a nuisance to the Church, they were never a serious threat to its existence. The efflorescence of Catharism, however, posed for the first time the prospect that the garden of the Church would be overrun by a particularly hardy heretical weed. The dreamy, gentle, and lunatic Cathars flourished-where else?-in Languedoc, now southwestern France, in the late twelfth century. Pacifists, vegetarians, celibates, believers in the equality of women, the Cathars rather resembled the weird but harmless New Age spiritualists who are often found at the fringes of the antiglobalization movement.
Like the Manicheans, the Cathars were dualists who believed in two G.o.ds, a sublime G.o.d of the spiritual world and a malign G.o.d of the material one. All worldly creation could be ascribed to the malign G.o.d and was therefore to be disdained. Worldly authority-the Church, particularly-was a fraud; the sacraments, a farce. Jesus was not a gross material being but an apparition; he had come to Earth as a prophet of dualism; his death was incidental, not the central salvific event of history. The cross was an instrument of torture, its glorification perverse. Men and women were one. Reincarnation was a fact. The Crusades were shameful, as was all violence.
The seductive Cathar heresy swiftly overtook the towns of Albi, Toulouse, and Carca.s.sonne. By the reports that remain (most evidence was destroyed by the Inquisitors), the Cathars lived peaceably among the Jews and Catholics. But ideas like these were for obvious reasons unbearable to the papacy. Innocent III resolved to eradicate the Cathar stain and recruited in his cause the military powers of France, eager to annex the independent Languedoc. Thus began the so-called Albigensian Crusade, named for the town of Albi, from which the heresy had sprung.29 Between 1209 and 1229, papal henchmen and French armies systematically exterminated the Cathars and many others besides, for they were unconcerned to distinguish Catholic from heretic. In Beziers, the pope"s legate, Arnoud Amaury, issued the orders that have now pa.s.sed into infamy: "Kill them all. G.o.d will know his own." Some 20,000 men, women, and children-loyal and subversive- were slaughtered and the town was burned to the ground. This was the first but not the last ma.s.sacre; the crusade continued with undiminished cruelty for years. When subsequently the Inquisition was convened, it was with the purpose of eradicating all remaining traces of the heresy. In the end, as many as a million perished.
The extermination of the peaceable, dopey, endearing Cathars is one of the sorriest and most shameful events in European history, and this is a history in no way short of sorry and shameful events. If the people of southwest France still feel a suspicion of authority and orthodoxy, who can blame them?
The mention of the Cathar genocide-the word sounds queerly anachronistic, but it is exactly the right one-still prompts the residents of the region to defensiveness. Recently I found myself in the great Romanesque cathedral of Toulouse. I asked a guide at the door whether it might be possible for me to inspect the church"s archival records about the Albigensians. Absolutely not, she said, her face instantly souring. There were none. The Church had nothing to do with it.
It is not possible to say who among the Cathars was the seventh Bove, precisely, but he was surely there, and his spirit lives on.
THE EIGHTH LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.
And now another Bove is born, this one quite unlike the others, for by this time Christianity itself was dying. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Bove was born in Geneva in 1712. His early life was undistinguished. Moving from Savoy to Turin to Chambery, he was by turns a notary, a footman, a coppersmith, a dilettante, a composer of music, and a student of the arts and sciences. Biographers have noted that like most Boves, Rousseau was narcissistic and self-seeking; also like most Boves, he was unusually attractive to women.
In 1750, having returned to Paris, he achieved celebrity with his prizewinning essay, "A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences," in which he declared the superiority of the primitive life of savage man in the so-called State of Nature and deplored the pernicious effect on the human soul of technology, science, and urbanization. The advancement of the arts and sciences, he held, far from being beneficial to mankind, had in fact served only to crush and alienate the individual spirit.
In this he was both the inheritor and the progenitor of a European tradition of revolutionaries, men who idealized a utopian, irenic past- a pastoral arcadia-and despaired of soulless modernism. German Romantic thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were particularly enamored of these ideas; the poet and essayist Gottfried von Herder, for example, condemned the cold sterility of European modernity and found much to admire in the simple, child-like primitives of the tropical zones. The incompatibility of technology and soulfulness has since Rousseau been a standard trope of Continental philosophy.30 Not incidentally, that machine-driven soulless-ness is typically a.s.sociated with America. Heidegger bore a fierce enmity toward industrial, soul-sapping Amerikanismus; Arthur Moeller van den Bruck-father of the phrase "Third Reich"-denounced Amerikanismus as something to be "not geographically but spiritually understood," for this was "the decisive step by which we make our way from dependence on the earth to the use of the earth, the step that mechanizes and electrifies inanimate material."37 The current Bove espouses precisely these views. We have become embroiled, he says, in "excessive industrialization," turning our backs on the natural rhythms of the land in favor of "the engineer, the technician and the builder." "Technology," he adds, is "stripping meaning from all of life"s activities." 38 In a chapter of his manifesto t.i.tled "Subversion in a State of Nature," we learn how Bove cherished the years he spent in the Larzac as a squatter in a primitive shack without a telephone, water, or electricity. Bove is nostalgic for the imaginary epoch of "birds, nature, people on the farm." By contrast, he imagines, cardiac problems and hypertension plague contemporary farmers because they are "no longer in touch with their roots." Although farmers" material living conditions, he concedes, have improved, he believes their family lives have deteriorated. 39 (His own family life has certainly deteriorated. Just ask his ex-wife.) From Rousseau through the Romantics to the present Bove, we see another current of important thought, the disdain for rationality itself. Bove disparages the "rationalization and segmentation of work" and the "scientific organization of work." As Eric Hoffer has noted, the devout are always asked to seek the truth with their hearts and not their minds: "When a movement begins to rationalize its doctrines and make them intelligible," he reflects, it is a sign that its dynamic span is over."40 Bove"s day, it would seem, is not over yet.
No Bove can refrain from outraging the French authorities. Rousseau"s views on Christianity should by now be familiar to us: He admired the Gospel for its egalitarianism while vigorously condemning the Church, which, he held, promoted slavery and tyranny. In this regard, it is odd that Rousseau is so often labeled an original thinker. In 1762, the patience of the French parliament was exhausted. Condemning Rousseau"s works as antistate and anti-Church, its members called for his arrest and burned his books. He fled to Neuchatel, in Prussia, where he wrote his Letters Written from the Mountain, advocating freedom of religion. He died of apoplexy in 1778. In 1789 came the French Revolution and the frenzied, b.l.o.o.d.y orgies of the Commune. The revolutionaries clutched Rousseau"s works in hand.
I do realize it is a stretch to describe the unquestionably brilliant and subtle Rousseau, one of the great thinkers of modern Europe, as a Bove. To those who would quibble, fine, I cede the point. He was not just another Bove. But his influence on the current Bove is clear. And besides, I needed nine.
THE ENDURING LEGACY OF MEDIEVAL MILLENARIANISM.
It is odd, it is spooky, even, how much of the current Bove"s rhetoric descends from medieval millenarianism. Bove"s species of crop worship is in essence a neoteric Christian heresy. It is no accident that he was born in Cathar country. His elevation of nature to the status of a surrogate religion recalls the Romantic movement, which itself descends from the same medieval millenarianism. These movements, like Bove"s, strived to enact some kind of earthly utopia by restoring some kind of idealized past. Bove"s project, like theirs, is essentially spiritual and transcendental. Like all of the leaders of these movements, Bove is intensely hostile toward and suspicious of authority, and also like them, he counters that authority on the street. These movements, it should be stressed, have historically always ended in blood.
Both n.a.z.ism and Communism have their origins in the same movements. The frenzy of Europe"s incessant manifs derives directly from the tradition of the revolutionary millenarians; there are Blut und Boden roots below Bove"s ecological agenda.41 Bove"s crop worship draws, unconsciously perhaps, on the mysticism of the Vichy Fascists and their call for the "return to earth, to roots." Among Bove"s followers, the connection between the literal roots of crops and the metaphorical roots of community are repeatedly stressed: Francois Dufour, for example, remarks that "you don"t have to be a farmer or live in the country to feel rooted in the land. Such roots connect all parts of the country in a unifying whole. . . . People don"t want to be uprooted."42 The Russian anarchists, too, Mikhail Bakunin in particular, took their inspiration from the same movements; Bove explicitly recognizes his inheritance in this regard, describing himself as an anarchosyndicalist. (Anarcho-syndicalism, in France, gave rise to one of its oldest trade unions, the Confederation Generale du Travail, historically closely linked to the French Communist Party.) The pa.s.sionate terror of malbouffe-well founded or not-is also no accident; it recalls the fanatic religious and ritualistic search for purity of the Middle Ages, ethnic purity included. The fear of poisoning was widespread among the millenarians, particularly during the Black Death, when it was concluded that some cla.s.s of people-most likely the Jews-had introduced into the water supply a deadly concoction of spiders, frogs, and lizards. The Jews were thereupon ma.s.sacred. (Of course it has also long been a common religious practice among Jews, as well as Muslims, to distinguish themselves from heathens by rejecting unclean food.) The apocalyptic predictions of environmental catastrophe date directly from this era as well, when millenarians confidently foretold the famine, pestilence, and plague that would wipe out sinners and renew the earth for its inheritance by the faithful.
It is all there, and it is all very, very old.
THE CLa.s.sIC TROPE OF THE MILLENNIAL CULTS.
Nor is it any accident that Bove"s agenda includes the cla.s.sic trope of the Christian millennial cults: the demonization of the Jew. This is the real meaning of his activism on behalf of the Palestinians, a cla.s.sic example of the new European anti-Semitism, one characterized by the irrational and hysterical demonization of Israel.
Now wait a moment, Bove"s apologists will surely interject. One can criticize Israel without being an anti-Semite. Yes, you can. But usually you won"t bother. Bove"s views on Israel are spelled out completely in an April 24, 2002, interview with Oumma, a popular franco-phone website devoted to issues of concern to Muslims.43 The Israeli conflict with the Palestinians, he says, is "a war of a criminal and colonial army against a defenseless civilian population. That exactly sums up the tragedy unfolding in the Palestinian territories." He advocates a complete boycott of Israeli products and the severance of all cooperative ties between the European Union and Israel. "It is at once confusing and unbearable to see this country quietly violating international law, occupying, killing and destroying as long as it can, in all impunity!" He is no great fan of French Jews either: Their att.i.tude is "deplorable," their behavior, "dishonest." For example, he notes, in Rodez, in Aveyron, the Christians mobilize themselves to denounce the ma.s.sacres against the Palestinian population, they fast in the cathedral to denounce this injustice. The Muslim community also arrives in large numbers to express their support. Thus the communities join to denounce the evil. The representatives of the Jewish community who oppose the spirit of our activism work against this message of peace. But it is hardly astonishing, because their speech actually camouflages a disguised support for [Ariel] Sharon, a solidarity which, in view of the crimes of that government, seems intolerable to me.
But if he does not find equally intolerable the support-disguised or otherwise-that French Muslims offer to Islamic governments, this surely is not because those regimes commit no crimes.
Nowhere in the interview does he mention-even once- Palestinian suicide bombings. He frequently expressed admiration for Ya.s.ser Arafat, "a democratically elected leader," as the hero of a legitimate national liberation movement, but nowhere in public has he mentioned the Israeli army"s discovery of doc.u.ments, signed by Arafat, authorizing cash payments to the families of suicide bombers, or the money systematically funneled from the Palestinian Authority to groups such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs" Brigades, which plans and executes these attacks. He has never commented on Arafat"s regular encomiums to the suicide bombers-"Oh G.o.d, give me martyrdom like this!"
For a man who so deplores the brutal military occupation of faraway lands, Bove has missed a few easy calls. He has never appealed for a boycott of Chinese goods to protest China"s occupation and cultural genocide in Tibet, nor has he lobbied to sever European ties to India in protest of the occupation of Kashmir. (Given his preoccupation with international law and UN resolutions, this oversight is particularly curious.) Nor has he pet.i.tioned to rupture the EU"s ties to Russia to protest the occupation of Chechnya, even as the rubble that once was Grozny continues to bounce.
That Bove singles out Israel, alone among these nations, suggests his suppressed premises. First, Israel is the world"s foremost pariah state and the most deserving object of any right-thinking activist"s opprobrium. Second, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is manifestly illegal and unjust, and the cause of Arab animus toward Israel, rather than its consequence. Third, no censure or blame for the Palestinians " misery is to be accorded the Palestinian Authority, or any other confrontation state in the Middle East. Fourth, when considering the occupation, there is no need to discuss, no less deplore, the unrelenting and indiscriminate Palestinian terror campaign, on Israeli soil, against Israeli civilians, that began directly after Ya.s.ser Arafat rejected an unprecedented Israeli offer for territorial compromise-one that, had it been implemented, would have brought an end to the occupation. These lead to suppressed premise five: It is right and proper for Israelis to be punished collectively for decisions made by their government-but the collective punishment of Palestinians is an abomination. Finally, six, Bove, who was neither elected nor appointed to the task of making foreign policy by an elected government, is doing the world a favor by inserting himself into the globe"s most volatile regional conflict. These unspoken premises range from the dubious to the false to the ludicrous.
What can we call this selective and disproportionate animus toward Israel, the state of the Jews, but anti-Semitism? Let"s just cut to the chase: Bove, like all the great Christian heretics, simply finds Jews rather distasteful. All things considered, this is not much of a surprise.
MON DIEU.
It is early September 2004, and I am in Perpignan, a small medieval town in the Pyrenees-Orientales. This is the heart of Bove country. I am there for the annual Visa pour l"image photojournalism festival. Every night, a slide show of the past year"s most newsworthy images is presented in the huge outdoor amphitheater. The photographs are unrelentingly depressing. We see pictures from Darfur of starving mothers with their children, sacks of bones, dying in their arms; refugees who have been raped, tortured, blinded, their last sight on earth that of Janjaweed militias killing their families. We see photographs from Beslan of parents wailing as they discover the bodies of their children. We see a teenage barbarian in Sierra Leone, triumphantly holding up the bloodied, severed head of his rival. The audience-hardened, streetwise photojournalists-watches without comment, applauding only photographs that display unusual technical achievement.
Then we see a photo essay about the Wall-the barrier Israel is building between itself and the Palestinians. A few pictures of a concrete wall flash across the screen. That"s it, a wall, a big concrete wall like any other concrete wall. Ugly, sure. But compared with the images that preceded it, hardly shocking. Immediately, though, there is a low hissing in the audience, a collective sucking in of breath. "Mon Dieu," says the Frenchman next to me in a grave, indignant voice. This wall, evidently, is the worst thing on the planet, the worst thing one can imagine seeing. The director of the festival narrates: Everyone, except the Americans, has condemned this wall. But the Israelis persist in their madness. He does not mention that since construction of the wall began, suicide bombings have declined by 90 percent.
The previous day, sixteen Israelis had perished in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Beersheba-one of the few cities not yet protected by the wall. He does not mention this.
UTOPIA.
They have all been much the same, the Boves. They have all drawn their followers not from the lowest strata of society but from the insecure lower middle cla.s.ses-urban artisans, journeymen, casual laborers. Particularly, they have drawn their following from the lower tier of the agricultural middle cla.s.s, who, as a consequence of the growth of towns, had been rapidly losing social stature and wealth. They have all linked the economic anxieties of their followers with their spiritual ones. Their followers have always included society"s misfits, criminals, and troublemakers-the current Bove notes that his adherents come "from the extreme right to the extreme left, nationalists, anti-Americans, opportunists of all sorts." 44 They have all been concerned with crops, they have all sought the redistribution of wealth, and they have all hated Jews. They have always appealed to the character described by Eric Hoffer as the true believer: "discontented yet not dest.i.tute," electrified by "the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power." 45 The goals of these movements were never modest: There was always a utopia in sight.
There have been many other Boves, of course: The pseudo-Baldwin of Flanders, the pseudo-Frederick, the pseudo-Dionysus, Erigena, John Hus, Konrad Schmid, Eudo, Henry of Lausanne, Arnold of Brescia. There were Swabian preachers and Perugian hermits; there were Boves among the revolutionary flagellants, the Heretics of the Free Spirit, the Taborites, the Hussites, the Utraquists, the Lollards, and the Waldensians. "Ask the rector," as H. L. Mencken counseled, "to lend you any good book on comparative religion; you will find them all listed. They were G.o.ds of the highest dignity-G.o.ds of civilized peoples- worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal."46 And all are dead-but Bove lives.
CHAPTER 8.
BLACK-MARKET NATIONALISM: I HATE.
Denk" ich an Deutschland in der Nacht.
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht . . .
-HEINRICH HEINE.
LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, EUROPEANS long to feel that they are among their own people-and that indeed their people are a splendid people, a grand and n.o.ble people unique unto the world. But nowhere is this entirely human impulse viewed with more suspicion now than in Europe, and nowhere is it viewed with suspicion for better reason.
Profound instincts, when repressed, become sublimated. Like the religious instinct, the instinct to nationalism, when formally denied, will re-emerge in curious black-market forms. Nowhere in Europe has nationalism led to greater catastrophe than Germany, and nowhere has it been more ruthlessly suppressed, thank G.o.d. But it has not been eradicated: it cannot be.
In the case of Rammstein-purveyors of fine black-market nationalism to the German public-it has returned this time as farce rather than tragedy, but it has nonetheless returned, and this is a warning: It is still there, it has never died, and we may expect to hear more from it in the future, particularly as the social and economic pressures on Europe mount.
Rammstein-the name is a made-up word meaning, more or less, "ramming stone"-is a popular German band. Very popular. Rammstein released its first alb.u.m, Herzeleid, in 1995. Within days, it topped the German charts. It stayed in the number one position for five weeks, then remained in the top ten for two years, an unrivaled achievement in Germany"s notoriously fickle pop music market. Their next alb.u.m, Sehnsucht, was more successful still: the best-selling alb.u.m in Germany from the day of its release, it immediately went double-platinum. In 1998, their video Engel was awarded an Echo, the German equivalent of a Grammy. In the same year, VIVA, a mainstream German television station more or less like MTV, awarded Rammstein its prize trophy, the Comet, effectively declaring the band the preeminent amba.s.sadors of German popular music. The year 1999 brought Rammstein another Echo for Sehnsucht. Their alb.u.m Mutter, released in March 2001, immediately sold a million copies, bringing their total alb.u.m sales over the 4-million mark. Their alb.u.m Reise, Reise, released in November 2004, surpa.s.sed all of their previous sales records. With Reise, Reise, Rammstein became the best-selling German-language band in history. Rammstein, in other words, is not a fringe phenomenon.
Let"s read Rammstein"s lyrics.32 ** Rammstein"s name, and this song, allude to the U.S. Air Force base Ramstein, in West Germany, where 69 people were killed and some 500 more injured (most of them burned), when three jets collided above the crowd at an air show on August 28, 1988.
Here are few more lyrics, from which I have deleted only repet.i.tive pa.s.sages: The lyrics of "Der Meister" are particularly suggestive. Paul Celan"s biographer, John Felstiner, notes that the word Meister in German "can designate G.o.d, Christ, rabbi, teacher, champion, captain, owner, guildsman, master of arts or theology, labor-camp overseer, musical maestro, "master" race, not to mention Goethe"s Wilhelm Meister and Wagner"s Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which carries overtones of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws."1 We see in Celan the same a.s.sociation, through this word, of German masters, music, and mercilessness. Consider this pa.s.sage from Celan"s "Death Fugue": Rammstein"s lyrics are not comparable in brilliance and mastery to the poetry of Celan, of course, but their preoccupations are strikingly similar. Celan, a Romanian Jew, was raised in a German-speaking household. In 1942, his parents were deported to labor camps in the Ukraine. The Germans declared his mother unfit for work and shot her in the neck. His father swiftly perished of typhus. Celan himself was interned for eighteen months in a n.a.z.i labor camp. He drowned himself in the Seine in 1970. It is certainly remarkable that the most popular band in contemporary Germany finds itself drawn to the same themes and imagery as Celan. Of course, there is a difference: Celan speaks with the voice of the master"s quarry, whereas Rammstein speaks with the voice of his emissaries. Celan, moreover, laments these a.s.sociations. Rammstein celebrates them.
Here"s one more Rammstein song for good measure: In both form and imagery, Rammstein"s lyrics have a distinct history in German poetry. The source is the Neue Sachlichkeit-new concreteness, or New Realism-of the 1920s, of which Georg Trakl is the best-known exponent. These poets aimed to represent reality in concrete images, and their reality, as it happened, revolved around a preoccupation with blood and smashed faces. Trakl"s influence is particularly obvious in the band"s preoccupation with gore and despair. Consider these lines from Trakl"s "De Profundis": There are odd parallels between Trakl"s life and that of Rammstein"s lead singer and lyricist, Till Lindemann. Trakl was a full-blown drug addict, as Lindemann is said to be. Rumors that Trakl had carried on an incestuous affair with his sister pursued him throughout his life, and Lindemann is also quite intrigued by incest. Photographs of Trakl, taken just before his death in 1914, and Lindemann show a spooky similarity.
Rammstein"s lyrics also have something in common with the notorious Morgue cycle of Gottfried Benn, the Berlin venereal disease specialist who pledged his allegiance to the n.a.z.i Party until it expelled him for perversion. See, for example, Verse IV, "n.i.g.g.e.r Bride": But while Benn is the pa.s.sive observer of his early poems, the members of Rammstein clearly envision themselves doing the bashing, defiling, and knifing.
Their imagery is suggestive as well of postwar German Expressionist paintings-those of Otto Dix, in particular, who having spent four years in the trenches had a fine pictorial feel for what things looked like after an exchange of artillery. Songs by Rammstein with sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic s.e.xual themes, such as "Mein Teil"-an homage to the German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who in 2002 shared a final meal with his willing victim of the man"s severed, flambeed p.e.n.i.s-would not have been out of place in Julius Streicher"s Der Sturmer, a newspaper even many n.a.z.is found excessive in its p.o.r.nographic obsessions and sensationalism.
At roughly the time "The Master" was topping the German charts, this song, by the Spice Girls, was the number one song on the British charts: WANNABE.
Yo, I"ll tell you what I want, what I really really want
So tell me what you want, what you really really want
I"ll tell you what I want, what I really really want
So tell me what you want, what you really really want
I wanna (huh), I wanna (huh), I wanna (huh), I wanna (huh)
I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ah.
These cheerful imbeciles, clearly, are quite unlike Rammstein in their existential preoccupations.33 I won"t bother you with examples of the French and Italian chart toppers of the late 1990s. Trust me, they"re nothing like Rammstein. (They"re nothing like music either.)
INHERITORS OF THE GERMAN MUSICAL TRADITION.
Next, let"s listen to Rammstein. Much of it can be downloaded from the Internet. Initiates should begin with the song "Reise, Reise," played at top volume. Push your subwoofers to the limit. That is the way it is meant to be appreciated.
Formed in 1993, Rammstein comprises six working-cla.s.s musicians, all born and raised behind the Berlin Wall: vocalist Lindemann, keyboardist Flake Lorenz, drummer Christoph Schneider, ba.s.sist Oliver Riedel, and guitarists Paul Landers and Richard Kruspe-Bernstein.34 Their music is extremely sophisticated and superbly orchestrated. They blend metal, industrial, techno, and cla.s.sical musical techniques, employing a vast range of sound effects-studio-distorted guitars, sampled ghostly wailing, Arabic choirs, melodic whistling, string arrangements, chanting crowds of thousands, the sound of marching jackboots, and a full symphony orchestra. The orchestra is one of Germany"s best, led by a completely professional conductor.
This point must be made perfectly clear, for it is as important as the observation that Rammstein represents a particularly German and apparently ineradicable strain of utter nihilism: Rammstein is also the inheritor of the German tradition of musical genius. Their rhythmic craftsmanship-unerring and precise-is unmistakably German, as is their intuitive command of musical tension and release. Their bombast, particularly, is reminiscent of Wagner, and so is the music"s eerie hypnotic quality. Carl Orff"s influence can be heard in Rammstein"s use of orchestral arrangements. String pa.s.sages explode into skull-crushing onslaughts; low, synthesized chords follow and then recede, the effect eerie and thrilling. By comparison, American heavy metal bands seem clumsy, childish, and anemic. In keeping with a long German musical tradition, Rammstein"s vocal lines are, like Schubert"s, entirely integrated into the musical texture; they are not merely arias with accompaniment. The German language functions almost as an instrument in its own right. With its sibilants, harsh fricatives, unique phonotactics, and stress rules, German lends itself particularly well to powerful, rhythmic song, as it does, of course, to powerful, rhythmic rhetoric.
Themes from Nordic and German mythology appear throughout their videos: "Sonne," for example, features a c.o.ke-sniffing, sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic Snow White.35 "Dalai Lama" originates in Goethe"s Erlkonig. "Reise, Reise" is based on a German sea chantey; it represents the master"s call to sleeping sailors. Although the words are translated by the band as "Voyage, Voyage," they are also a reference to the Middle High German Risen, Risen, meaning "Wake up." The phrase recalls Deutschland Erwache-Germany, Wake Up-a n.a.z.i brownshirt slogan. I have seen Rammstein perform this song in concert, in Berlin. It is quite clear that the audience takes the chorus as a verb.
"Reise, Reise" begins with the sound of lonely waves and gulls, an ominous warlike pounding, and the primitive chanting of sailors in a galley. Suddenly the listener is steamrollered by smashing drums, violent ba.s.s, and a full choir, amplified to unspeakable levels. A written account is a pale simulacrum. The song is powerful, stirring, and unbelievably effective-the effect, the intended effect, being to engorge the listener with thrilling aggression. If you"re in doubt, download the song and play it through your headphones when you next lift weights. Turn the volume up to eleven. Bench-press. You"ll be impressed by your athletic achievement.
Most compelling is vocalist Lindemann, a ma.s.sive former swimming champion from the town of Schwerin. He commands a sinister, low ba.s.s rarely utilized in contemporary pop music. His voice is untrained but electrifying. His rolled Rs are familiar. The members of the band grew up under the Deutsche Demokratische Republik"s cheerless tutelage-"We were not even allowed to say Hitler"s name," keyboardist Lorenz told me-but somehow Lindemann managed to acquaint himself with that orator"s distinctive style nonetheless. He ripples with muscles. He is a man, not a boy, with a voice so powerful and erotic that even women who understand Rammstein"s lyrics-or perhaps especially women who understand those lyrics-find themselves mesmerized by that voice, by its beauty and masculinity. The first time I heard him sing, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.
For some of us, that experience is disturbing, to say the least.
SPEAKING TO THE HEART.
Now let"s watch Rammstein perform, in concert.