Today a year ago, the new video "Deutschland" by Rammstein came out. (From the Rammstein Belgium page)
The video is a mini-film spanning about Germany history.
It was directed by Specter Berlin and a 36 second teaser was released two days prior before the video release and had already caused a lot of controversy.
The storyline is explained below:
- Introducing Germania
‘Germania Magna’ (meaning "Greater Germania") refers not just to a place, somewhere partly defined by where it isn’t (Rome), but also to a national figurehead, traditionally representing the German people.
Germania is a strong woman, usually armour-clad and battle-ready. Various symbols appear with her, among them a breastplate with an eagle, a black, red, and gold flag, and a crown.
Look out for these symbols in the video – they come up again and again – and the colours of the contemporary flag are there in every scene.
We get our first glimpse of Germania (played by Ruby Commey) when the video opens in AD 16, on the ‘barbarian’ side of the limes, the border of the Roman Empire.
Roman soldiers (Richard, Schneider, Flake, Paul and Olli) creep through the woods in the aftermath of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
The Romans were ambushed by an alliance of Germanic Tribes, led by a chieftain called Arminius (the original Hermann the German).
We see Germania who stands up holding Till Lindemann’s severed head.
Next, astronauts appear carrying a metal and glass box shaped like a coffin.
In the background we see a U-boat – a German submarine, used in World Wars I and II.
Then we move to a scene set at a boxing match which takes us to Weimar Germany (1918-1933), a period known for its political instability but also greater cultural liberalism.
Here, Germania appears in the cabaret costume of a flapper girl, and the boxers (Till and Richard) fight with knuckle-dusters as a crowd cheers them on.
- Marx, Lenin and the GDR
We see the former East Germany, complete with busts of Marx and Lenin, the national emblem of East Germany, and a lookalike of the long-serving, insular, and repressive GDR leader Erich Honecker (that is portrayed by Till Lindemann)
There’s another astronaut, or rather a cosmonaut: Sigmund Jähn (played by Oliver Riedel) who was the first German in space, and he flew with the USSR’s space program.
Medieval monks feast grotesquely on the supine Germania, tearing sauerkraut and sausage from Ruby Commey’s body.
Rats scuttle across the floor when the monks first appear - And did you notice the 4 vampires in this scene? - Suggesting the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a legend with origins in the 13th century.
Oliver, Paul, Flake and Till are prison inmates that are beaten by guards Richard and Schneider who are dressed in police and military uniforms from different historical periods.
Germania walks towards the camera in a leather jacket, gold jewellery and a string of bullets across her chest, resembling the chariot drawn by four horses (the ‘Quadriga’) that is on top of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
In the prison, hundreds of banknotes fall from above, suggesting the devastating hyperinflation Germany suffered
in the 1920s.
The most obviously shocking scene references the Holocaust and the Nazi period. Flake, Till, Paul and Oliver are wearing the striped uniforms of camp inmates, waiting at the gallows, about to be hanged.
They wear the cloth emblems used to identify their ‘crimes’:
a pink triangle for homosexual prisoners, a yellow star for Jewish prisoners, a red and yellow star for Jewish political prisoners.
Other scenes include the band walking away from a flaming airship, referring to the 1937 Hindenburg Disaster, in which 36 people died.
The band members’ heads are shown as white marble busts, taking us to the 19th century Walhalla memorial in Bavaria, built as German Hall of Fame, its sculpted heads of German worthies on display to this day.
Nazis burn books, intercut with religious fanatics burning witches.
We recognise members of the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof group), a militant organisation active in the 1970s in West Germany.
The Red Army Faction (R.A.F.) kidnap Germania and Till Lindemann is dressed as a woman - look at the nail polish on his fingers that has the 3 colors of the German flag - with reference to Ulrike Meinhof, a West German far-left militant.
She co-founded the Red Army Faction.
And in a blink-or-you-miss-it exchange, we are reminded of the much-criticised relationship between the churches and the state during the Third Reich.
(And did you see the Star Wars Sith Lords holding their lightsabers?)
- The finale:
Each scene captures in a moment the icons of an era, and the video cuts between them more and more frenetically as it goes on.
Events bleed into each other, linked by the presence of the band members and the red laser beam that appears throughout the video, a ‘roter Faden’ (red thread or central theme), connecting each event.
Germany engages with its history in a very particular way. Try to imagine the video about Britain, with Britannia is played by Ruby Commey. What would the equivalent events be? Quite a few of the tableaux might be similar – Romans, Crusaders, monks, 18th-century soldiers, collarless shirts and bareknuckle boxing – but would it have the same impact?
There’s no affection, and perhaps not much hope: its pessimistic tone seems to be quite an off-brand message for post-1989 Germany, which wants to acknowledge its past critically, while also looking to its future as a state at the heart of Europe.
And actually, while we get a lot of medieval and twentieth-century history, the video’s tour through the past seems to stop in the late 1980s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of East and West Germany.
Instead, we jump into the future, where the space-suited band take Germania into the unknown, travelling in that coffin-shaped glass box.
There’s an echo of the video for Sonne, where Snow White is trapped in a glass coffin. In fact, a piano version of Sonne plays over the end credits of Deutschland. This is a useful link for understanding something of what Rammstein is doing here.
In Sonne, where the band’s characters free themselves of Snow White (naturally, they’ve been her sex-slaves), only to realise that they have made a mistake and long for her return, the overwhelming feeling of Deutschland seems to be that when it comes to Germania (or Germany): you can’t love her, and you can’t live without her.
Meanwhile the video has reached over 104 million views after it's been released.
Another interesting video about Deutschland is "In Depth History Review & Explanation Of The Video" explained by VlogDave ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YNEJUN7Xyk
Text source ► https://www.loudersound.com/…/we-got-an-oxford-university-p…
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It's a great video. The song is good and catchy, but I'm not too thrilled either. They're surely holding better stuff back yet
The track list is a good, educated guess, but no certainty. Many other words could be made still, and with Rammstein you do not know. And moreover, people seem to forget the Umlauts a lot.
I'm excited about the special edition as well. I guess for old time's sake, I will wait until the album is in a record store and go buy it.Leave a comment:
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I just heard this song on ice hockey game Hifk-Pelicans in Finland.... I dont know how the play rights go but i think thats fast if they have permission to do that.
Its good song but little bit diiferent.Leave a comment:
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I love the song and the video. Oi Rammstein, it's about fucking time!Leave a comment:
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^If I still were the Snake you know so well, I would be outraged by the fact that this songs sounds like Till Lindemann colaborating with another inferior band. Instead I am just ok that the song doesn't suck.Leave a comment:
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