Rammstein Mutter lyrics with English translation

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Die Tränen greiser kinderschaar The tears of senile childs
ich zieh sie auf ein weisses Haar i put them on a white hair
werf in die Luft die nasse Kette throw it in the air, the wet chain
und wünsch mir das ich eine Mutter hätte and wish i had a mother
 
keine Sonne die mir scheint no sun that shines to me
keine Brust hat Milch geweint no breast cries milk to me
in meiner Kehle steckt ein Schlauch in my throat there is a tube
hab keinen Nabel auf dem Bauch have no navel on my belly
 
Mutter … Mutter Mother … Mother
Mutter … Mutter Mother … Mother
 
Ich durfte keine Nippel lecken i could not lick the nipples
und keine falte zum verstecken and no fold to hide inside
niemand gab mir einen Namen no one gives me a name
gezeugt in Hass und ohne Samen made in hate and without sperm
 
der Mutter die mich nie geboren to the mother that never born me
hab ich heute Nacht geschworen i swear this night
ich werd dir eine Krankheit schenken i will give you a disease
und sie danach im Fluß versenken and after that i will sink it in the river
 
Mutter .. Mutter Mother … Mother
Mutter .. Mutter Mother … Mother
Mutter .. Mutter Mother … Mother
Mutter .. Mutter Mother … Mother
 
In ihren Lungen wohnt ein Aal in her lungs there lives an eel
auf meiner Stirn ein Muttermahl on my face there is a birthmark
entferne es mit Messers Kuß remove it with the kiss of the knife
auch wenn ich daran sterben muß also if i die of it
 
Mutter … Mutter … Mutter … Mutter !! Mother … Mother … Mother .. Mother !!
 
In ihren Lungen wohnt ein Aal in her lungs there lives an eel
auf meiner Stirn ein Muttermahl on my face there is a birthmark
entferne es mit Messers Kuß remove it with the kiss of the knife
auch wenn ich verbluten muß also if i bleed out
 
Mutter Mother
 
Ohh … gib mir Kraft Ohh … give me strength
 
Mutter Mother
 
Ohh … gib mir Kraft Ohh … give me strength
 
Mutter … Mutter Mother … Mother
 
Ohh … gib mir Kraft Ohh … give me strength
 
Mutter … Mutter Mother … Mother

This song is about a man who never had a mother because he was born from an experiment. The man in the song seeks revenge against the mother that never gave birth to him, while at the same time expressing love for the same mother, exposing the duality in some mother-son relationships in which hate and love exist in parallel to each other.

73 COMMENTS

  1. Funny, always thought this song referenced Frankenstein… No mother, Victor Frankenstein used electric eels in a jar to revive the monster, the birthmark to be removed with a knife…

  2. Mijn moeder houd van de Here Jezus
    Het vervloekte kind dat de sekte niet wil belijden dat ben ik
    De kerk vind dat je jouw kinderen moet manipuleren, hypnotiseren, bestelen, treiteren, bestelen zodat hij in zal zien dat hij zonder de kerk niets is.
    Halleluja

  3. Like “Tochter” I have spent a lot of time recently crying to this song. I was not sexually abused by my mother, but I was emotionally neglected and abused. From an early age I really felt regretted, and sometimes hated, by my mother. I did not see her as a safe person, I did not see her as a source of comfort; I had no other source of comfort to make up for this loss. I felt like a disease and a curse in her life and eventually I turned those feelings back onto her.

    I basically share “Tochter”‘s interpretation of the first verses: an abused or neglected child is always old. “Mature for their age”. They do not get to be young. They do not get to be what a child should be. They have to be able to take care of themselves in some way that goes beyond the abilities of a child. They prematurely throw away the idea that this is a just world, that they are safe from evil – hence the tears collected on a white hair and thrown away.

    I was born of a difficult birth (C-section) that would cause my mother long-term injuries, and my mother got an infection in the hospital; she was not able to breastfeed; I have heard she was depressed in the early days of my life and others had to step in to give me nurturing. Growing up, I heard a lot about how torturous my birth was, about the deadly rupture which occurred during the later (attempted natural) birth of my sister because of the scar my birth left. No, I don’t think that having a C-section or not being able to breastfeed makes someone a “bad mother” – but in the broader context of the failed bond between me and my mother, both seem significant, like the first disappointments which snowballed into the broader disappointment I became in my mother’s eyes. As I would later learn when studying anthropology, the most “traditional” human (and, more generally, primate) parenting style is one of constant contact between the mother and child, of breastfeeding on-demand… against that standard, I really do feel like a child raised with a tube in my throat, a child with no bond of birth (navel).

    “Ich durfte keine Nippel lecken
    und keine falte zum verstecken
    niemand gab mir einen Namen
    gezeugt in Hass und ohne Samen”

    Since I never came to see my mother as a “safe person”, as the ultimate source of comfort I could always come to, I had “no fold to hide in”. Obviously I was given a name (and my name was chosen by my mother), but as a child I felt like nobody and nothing. I could tell that there was something ingenuine and artificial about the “love” between my parents, and my mother made it pretty explicit that she chose my father as her partner for utilitarian reasons, because he seemed like a good father. Hence my conception feels artificial – “fathered in haste and without sperm”. I did end up developing a better bond with my father than my mother, but there were many many years when I resented and rejected him all the same.

    “der Mutter die mich nie geboren
    hab ich heute Nacht geschworen
    ich werd dir eine Krankheit schenken
    und sie danach im Fluß versenken”

    This is how I felt by the time I was about nine years old. A few years before my parents finally separated. I could not deny the hatred and resentment in my mother’s actions toward me, in the vicious words she hissed at me when I did something wrong – condemning not only my actions but my very being. I had nowhere to go when I felt this pain. I had no acknowledgement – if I tried to express my feelings to ANYBODY, not just my mother, I was treated like a stupid “spoiled brat” who wanted more than I deserved from my poor suffering mother. The idea that my mother was anything less than loving to me was just dismissed straight off the bat by virtually anybody I talked to. The only thing I could do to cope with the pain was turn it back on my mother and finally reject her the way she had rejected me. I wanted to make her feel my sickness. I wanted to devalue her life the way she had devalued mine. I felt like my mother would be relieved if I died (just to be clear: although she said she should never have had kids, she never said she wished I was dead, which unfortunately makes her better than a lot of other resentful and regretful mothers… the feeling that my mother wouldn’t care if I died was something I came up with myself. I know she would.). So at that age I began to think things like “if my mother died, I wouldn’t go to her funeral”.

    I began to wish I could make my mother cry with something I said, just as she had made me cry so many times – but I never did. I’ve still never “accomplished” that (although I don’t really want to anymore). But as an older kid I wasted a lot of energy “throwing rocks” at her with my words and actions, trying to strike a hit, thinking it would make me feel free (like the narrator supposes he will be free of his love/hate for mother once he drowns her in the river). I started to reject love from EVERYBODY – when my mother did show me love (usually in less emotionally challenging situations), I treated it as if it were all a lie, but I extended that same assumption to everybody else’s love and empathy for me.

    In ihren Lungen wohnt ein Aal
    auf meiner Stirn ein Muttermahl
    entferne es mit Messers Kuß
    auch wenn ich daran sterben muß

    I acted as if I didn’t care whether my mother loved me, like her love didn’t matter to me. That’s me “cutting the birthmark from my forehead, even if I bleed to death” – but, like the narrator, it didn’t kill me. Instead I was left hollow and suicidal, having burned so many bridges between me and my mother, begging for the strength to “go all the way” and just destroy my life, which (I felt) had been such a curse on my mother, my whole family, everyone I knew, and myself. I was pining for the love I rejected, but I never really let myself realize that until I was an adult. As a kid, I didn’t acknowledge that need for her love. I didn’t put it into words, even for my own sake. As soon as I had the legal right to stop visiting her (my father was given full custody, but with the condition of us regularly visiting our mother til we were legally old enough to decide whether or not we wanted to), I stopped. My mother had singled me out as the problem to avoid feeling like she was a “bad mother” – now that I was gone and my life & behaviour was improving she couldn’t keep that up. Then my sister started to become estranged from her too, on her own time (previously my sister had been “the favourite”, “the good child” to my mother, the one who received the love I didn’t). My mother became lonely and depressed. In terms of these lyrics, I see that as “my mother lying at the bottom of the river with an eel in her lung”.

    So the wound left when I cut that last bond with my mother didn’t kill me – it just hurt and festered, as I’m sure it did for the narrator of this song. I wasn’t any happier than I had been before I “cut out the birthmark”. Inside I was still crying out for my mother. I started to want her again, in late adolescence, but it’s been “too little, too late” – whatever sort of relationship we can build now is no substitute for the relationship with my mother I needed then. I want to try. She wants to try now. She is more willing to talk and acknowledge than she has ever been. But I am scared. I am scared it will be the same as always when I try to talk about the pain – “I don’t remember that”.

    When I listen to this song, when this song comes into my head, when I think of my mother, I regress to 9 years old. My emotional reactions are the same as I would have at that age. I shrink away and cry quietly. A sort of creaky whiny cry is trapped in the back of my throat but I don’t let it out. I imagine vivid scenarios of what I would say to her, what I would ask her if she was across from me in that moment, what I would say if I could go back in time to when those horrible things happened… hoping my mother would give me strength, heal me, make me whole again. But the bond between us is fundamentally, irreparably broken in some way – whatever kind of bond we could build now is something different, no substitute for the bond we could have had as mother and daughter.

    Maybe it could have been healed if I had “been the bigger person” when I was a preteen or young teenager … but at least I know that’s not something you can reasonably expect of a child, especially one that has not had enough emotional nurturing to even know how to take on that role. So I feel like the protagonist who has cut the last bond of birth with his mother from his forehead, bleeding but not to death, begging for his mother back, feeling no better than he did before he killed her (in my case I “killed” the hope of a loving mother).

    I needed my mother … I still need my mother. I loved my mother, I love my mother … every time I said something bad to her as a kid, she knew it was just talk, she knew I loved her, she told me as much in the moment once, but just like I tried to “fight fire with fire” (fight my mother’s rejection by rejecting her), she attempted to fight THAT fire “with fire” (reacting to my apparent rejection with MORE rejection and anger). It’s too late now to undo the damage. I can’t go back in time, yet I find myself again and again regressing into the mindset of me as a child, just thinking over and over again “I wish I had a mother”, powerless to change anything. That possibility – of me being a child feeling loved by my mother – is dead and buried. I killed it. But I am still crying out for Mother. I am still crying out for Mother to give me strength.

    If you read this, thank you. I don’t want you to think that my mother is a horrible person. My mother is a broken person. She has done and said horrible things. But please rest assured that I have thought about the reasons for her actions. I have empathized with her. I have thought for years and years and years about “what I did wrong as a child to make her act that way”. Since I was a child, many people have tried to make me think about these things when I (foolishly) expressed my hurt about my mother, as if I hadn’t already thought about them, and it always bothered me. For my own sake, I just need to express my deepest feelings of hurt. So if you read this and you empathize with me, thank you.

    • Dear another mutter’s tochter, my god I wept reading your experience of your mother. I hope that you can turn inwards and ‘mother’ yourself. It’s never the same as having had the mothering you deserved. My own mother struggled as a mother, too. I empathise with your pain, brother. Sending love.

    • You story moved me to tears. I hope you find solace in your heart. I’m sure you are/will be a wonderful mother. God bless you!

    • Hallo Tochter,

      I’m not sure if you’ll see this or not considering it’s been quite some time since you’ve posted this, but I wanted to say I see you. I had similar issues with my mother. The difficult birth (she almost died having me, and my brother almost died during his birth), being the “lesser” nurtured child (my brother was diagnosed with severe autism at 3 years old so the family pretty much turned all of their attention to catering to him). She often told me she wished she never gave birth to me, that I was the cause of all of her problems in life, that she hated me (and at the time she said that she had been trying to get me to stop saying the word “hate” because it was the equivalent of wishing someone dead, and that deeply impacted me mentally). She actively tried to “steal” my friends when I finally began to make friends in high school. I was sexually abused as a child, as was she, which I’ll never know if she knew and just didn’t do anything because she was desensitized to sexual abuse and thought nothing of it, or if she just didn’t know. Growing up, between her and my father, i started having suicidal thoughts before my teenage years even came. I found an escape in a new but different toxic relationship which i rushed into to get out of my parents house, and while it seemed better because I was away from them, I slowly sunk into a new low with my cheating partner who constantly belittled me and essentially broke me down over the next 5 years to the point where I became a passive and hollow shell of a person who had no identity. I stopped everything I enjoyed, from watching tv shows to listening to music to even wearing clothes i liked because he drilled into my head how embarrassed and ashamed of me he was and i had nowhere to go and no friends left at the time to turn to. We eventually had a very ugly break up, in which i had to turn to my dad for housing. I hated them both, but for some reason he was better at manipulating people into not seeing how horrible he was on the surface so I felt more comfortable reaching out to him. I moved in with him and his girlfriend at the time for a few months, until she finally had enough of him cheating on her and kicked him out. At this time he didn’t think of me at all on his way out, he just left so I stayed with his then ex-girlfriend because my seasonal job had ended and i was struggling to find work. A few more months of putting up with her closing the bars around town almost nightly and bringing home random guys to sleep with and doing drugs with her kids in the other room (to the point the neighbor would come over and pick the kids up because she would be unconscious and this was a regular occurrence). Eventually she started getting paranoid out of nowhere and making accusations that i was stealing her belongings, to the point where she called the cops on me for grabbing a roll of toilet paper from her unlocked bedroom while she wasn’t home because there was none in the bathroom. On new year’s eve i stayed at a friend’s house for the night and my father called in the morning urging me to come back to the house because he and his ex had to talk to me about something. When i arrived he was there with her parents to kick me out. Evidently she had told him whatever paranoia driven stories she had come up with and instead of talking to me about it or trusting my character, he just believed her so he could sleep with her again. He said i did it to myself and told me I had 20 minutes to pack my things and leave, and when I asked where I was supposed to go he just shrugged. He didn’t care if I went to the streets. Mind you, it was winter but we were in the Mohave desert where it easily reaches over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. The coldest it usually gets is about 35 degrees Fahrenheit in winter but that lasts maybe two weeks in the coldest point of the mornings. I had no car, i had no job, i only had some clothes and my art supplies and a few CDs. So after not speaking to my mother for 3 years and some months, i showed up on her doorstep needing shelter. At first she was so happy to see me, she was surprisingly pleasant. At this time she was bound to a motorized wheelchair for mobility due to having many toes and half of one foot removed from poor diabetes maintenance. She was the main caretaker for my brother, who over the years of dealing with both parents’ terrible examples of behavior and mistreatment had developed serious aggression and anger management issues. She shouldn’t have been his caretaker when she could hardly care for herself anymore but my father never tried to get custody. He didn’t want my brother. He didn’t want to be a father. The first week of living there was bearable, but every day after that progressively dissolved into her acting out the damsel in distress role, trying to fill her need to feel as if someone cares. She would throw herself out of her wheelchair into the rocks in the front yard and cry for help in the middle of the night. She took over a dozen different prescription medications, and one night she chased me around the house begging for me to reach the bottle of rum on the top shelf in the kitchen, and when i wouldn’t grab it for her she tried to stand up out of her chair and didn’t care if she risked falling just to get me to do it for her. So i ended up grabbing the bottle and locking myself in the bedroom with it, where she banged on the door for an hour and called and texted my phone begging and begging for the bottle. I just sat there with the lights off and the door locked in silence hoping she would give up and go to bed. Eventually she did. Things got so bad i had a seizure which i never shared with her, and began hallucinating screams in the night, to which i would run outside thinking it was that she fell again, but she would be in bed. I was slowly losing my mind with everything building up. I tried to overdose on my antidepressants but it wasn’t enough to kill me, it just made me feel horrible for a couple days and I slept a lot. I only lived with her for two months but it was just the tipping point of my mental health after all i had been through in the prior 6 months. A friend i had lived about an hour away and she offered me the spare room in her apartment to get on my feet so I finally left my mother’s house. I kept in touch with her for a few months but it became unbearable and eventually i cut ties with her and my father all together until she passed a year later. My mother passed away 5 years ago now, so I’ll never have a chance to empathize with her as I couldn’t get out of my own survival mindset enough to begin to understand any of the reasoning behind her actions until it was much too late to attempt any reconciliation. Although her death, i think, has made it easier for me to get where i am now in understanding her troubled mind. I’m not sure i would be able to have a functional relationship with her if she was still alive because of how mentally damaged she was. If I could go back and understand that she was acting as the little girl who was abused when she behaved so terribly and try to console her inner child, i feel like maybe we could have moved forward. But at the time i was a child who needed a role model, and my role model was someone who was still a hurting child and I couldn’t understand that back then. It doesn’t rectify her behavior towards me at all, nor does it make the pain lessen, but the power of understanding that i have now would have been greatly beneficial at least to my reaction to her if i had the chance to giver her one more chance. My father used her death and how it affected my brother to force his way back into my life. Since then, I’ve been chasing stability and cycling through toxic relationships with friends, family, and partners. Two years ago i finally cut ties with my father permanently and I’m still trying to recover mentally from the damage done by both him and my mother, my ex, and have definitely dug myself into a new trench of other issues with my current partner, but in the time I’ve not had contact with my father I’ve had more space to heal some parts of myself. My situation is still not ideal but I’m starting to find myself again. That’s actually how i ended up seeing your comment, because I recently started getting back into the music I used to listen to. Rammstein has been one of my favorite bands for about 14 years now and I’ve been getting back into them recently. It’s amazing how music can connect people of all walks of life who would never have met or spoken to one another otherwise. I hope me sharing my experience helps you to not feel alone in your own experience. We are different and have different experiences but there are big similarities that connect us in understanding. I see you, i feel you, and i support your journey in healing, friend. If ever you want to express yourself further, or just talk about life or anything in general, just let me know.
      Also fun fact, you posted this comment on my birthday that year. So many connections, it’s kind of crazy!

      Wishing you well!

    • Dear another mutter’s tochter, I’ve also grown up “without a mother” even though she was there… my father was also literally absent. I was born a senior man and now I’m trying to be the child I never was (as much as it gets considering that I’m 48!)

      I have passed all the steps that you describe. Thank god, one day, when I was 26 I had an epiphany and started taking over my life. It was really a miracle! After that day l was observing and accepting all the oportunities that life has to give, something that never before had I done. I did a lot of alternative healing to myself, energy and angel healing, reiki and family constellation (among other things) for many years.

      I’m a professional healer and coach now and I facilitate others in walking their own path in life and forgive themselves and their parents.

      Coming back to me, It took me 10 years of continuous study, meditation, energy healing and inner work to get finally in that state where not only I have forgiven both my parents and restablished our connection, but I also prepare them for the “long trip” – they are over ’90 y.o.

      What really helped me a lot during this course of healing my family inside me, is the following technique that I also tell my clients to do: see the parent not as a parent but as a sister soul that had to deal with his/her own stuff in this life. This way you get detouched from the human role parent-child, which although needs be respected, is nothing else but a theatrical role. We are divine souls having human experiences we all play in the theater called life. Never identify yourself again as a child, because you are not that anymore. You are a free soul, and so are the “parents”, “friends”, “companions in life” etc…

    • I couldn’t stop reading your comment once I started. Now that I have to type my own reply, I’m crying and shaking. I had a similar relationship with my mother In my life. She was a deeply broken individual
      I can’t remember her hugging me at any time in my life. My childhood was like the army. Bunch of rules to follow without much explanation on why to do it. I feel your pain. Stay strong and find love for yourself in your daily accomplishments. Thank you for sharing. I’m a new Rammstein fan and am learning German through their lyrics.

    • I feel you. I started sobbing when reading your comment. I too grew up with a narcissistic mother who willingly adopted me and then neglected me. It ruined my life.

  4. My heart goes out to all of you who do not have a mother, or have been deeply hurt by your mother. May the Universe bring good people into your life who will show you much kindness and unconditional love, a way a mother would. Please don’t allow the past hurt and pain to push good people away, you are deserving of love and a happy life, what they did, was on them, not you. REM said it best. “Everybody hurts”. Please, break the Cycle! Forgive them! You deserve your best life! I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You made it! Take care! Mahalo!

  5. I have a little bit correction. As I can hear Till sings “gezeugt in Hast und ohne Samen” that means “in a hurry” not “in hate”. The meaning becomes some different!

  6. The child said that he didn’t have a mother, but there’s still the face that can show his mother’s form, and no one can escape. I think it’s what the word “muttermal” actually means. Scar…Track…All of us human being will definitely find our mother somewhere on face.
    What’s more interesting, compare to die Mutter, is der Vater that haven’t been mentioned at all in the song!

  7. “In any case I am always so grateful toward metal bands like these pushing these levels of darkness into the public eye, making it’s expression more acceptable and less feared. We all know some kind of darkness, Rammstein recreates it so we can just shout, scream, enjoy, cry, release or whatever anyone needs.”
    @Ryuaka23
    Hear hear!

  8. Nice one Artemis. Grendel would defnitely fit the lyrics (and thanks for making me think of Marillion)

  9. As I have been sexually abused by my mother from age 4(?) onwards, this song carries a deeply personal meaning with me. Also, I tend to listen to this song a lot. And singing along. And crying.
    So I also have my own interpretation of the lyrics I’d like to share with you:

    Die Tränen greiser Kinderschaar/ The tears of ancient childs (I like ancient better than senile, maybe because it sounds like the german word senil, which would imply Altzheimer’s or something similar – being „greis“ just means being very old)

    Abused children never have the chance to be young; thus they’re ancient despite (physically) being still young. And as adults, there’s is still the hurt little child inside. They also tend to cry a lot.

    Ich zieh sie auf ein weißes Haar/I put them on a white hair
    werf in die Luft die nasse Kette/throw it in the air; the wet chain

    An ancient child would also have white hair, but it could also imply that the child is old when it finally finds the resolve to act. More important in my opinion is the throwing away of the chain, symbolizing the childs refusal to be a victim any longer. With it it also throws away the metaphorical chains binding it to its miserable existence.

    Und wünsch mir das ich eine Mutter hätte/ And wish, I had a mother

    A mother has so much more responsibility than just giving birth. And so many chances to f*** up. Also there’s a theme in the song of mutual disowning.
    The second stanza is more in line with the „clone story“, but there are still some things I can relate to:
    – A mother should be the sun to her child
    – Breastfeeding and the umbilical chord are symbols for the bond between mother and child, when the child sings of not having a navel, it’s not so much literal: The bond between mother and child never existed, therefore the child has no navel.

    Und keine Falte zum verstecken/and no fold to hide inside

    Children hide themselves in the folds of their mothers skirt. But where do you hide from your own mother?

    Der Mutter die mich nie geboren/To the mother that never gave birth to me

    In my interpretation this is another example of the mutual disowning of mother and child: The mother says, she could never have birthed such a child. The child responds by disowning the mother itself, by saying she could never have birthed such a child. So both despise each other.
    The rest of the stanza is about the child wanting to kill its tormentor…

    In ihren Lungen wohnt ein Aal/In her lungs there lives an eel

    One of the stranger lines Till has written… I think it’s mostly about something disgusting inside the mother, and „Aal“ was the only word that rhymed with „Muttermal“. On the other hand „Laichzeit“, with its Metaphors about fish, is also a song about incest and an eel happens to be a fish. But that seems maybe a bit far-fetched?

    Auf meiner Stirn ein Muttermal/On my forehead is a birthmark (is there no word with „mother“in it?)
    entferne es mit Messers Kuss/remove it with the kiss of the knife
    auch wenn ich daran sterben muss/even if I have to die of it

    This is about disowning the mother symbolically, despite the high price of it. For what is a child without a mother?
    Also, mothers often kiss their children on the forehead. So the knife replaces the motherly love. But the child doesn’t possess the strength needed to carry out its plan and it pleads to its mother to give it the strength. It realizes that it still needs and loves its mother, despite everything. And so the screams of „Mutter“ fade away, the child so full of hatred that it wants to kill its mother (at least metaphorically) and still so full of love it can’t…
    Such a sad song, and yet so beautiful.

    • Vielen Dank für İhre İnterpretation. Sie hat mir sehr gefallen. Ich wünsche Ihnen ein sehr gutes Leben, sehr helle Zukunft trotz alter und so tiefer Wunden.

    • Dear “Tochter” I am not sure if you will see my answer but I want to say that you have a deep understanding and a lovely heart. Even though I don’t know you personally, I really felt the existence of a strong bond between you and me. I will think about you while listening this song- though probably you will never know it.

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