Till Lindemann and his fanboys: The Rammstein singer has been courted by the culture industry for too long

When the Lindemann system is currently being discussed, this means above all people in the Rammstein singer’s environment who are said to have brought young women to him.

But even away from Row Zero and the backstage rooms, there has long been a system that has favored the space for possible attacks: some well-known voices in the cultural industry, who have repeatedly glorified the singer and poet as a dark romantic with a tortured soul, which ennobles him so much and ignored his misogyny.

For example Alexander Gorkow, head of the arts section of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, whose research has just decisively advanced the case. Gorkow has published two volumes of poems by Lindemann.

In his forewords, he emphasizes his fine, sensitive side: “Till is a very precise conteur, even when he sits across from you; it flows quietly, richly in detail, as if casually, while being strikingly rhythmic. He is reminiscent of a narrator in clearly pre-electric, old, old times, say 400 years ago: bowls of fermented fruit and hunted pheasants, the flies above them, life is finite, it should be lived better now.”

Comparison with Gottfried Benn

That’s a very high pitched note in honor of a man whose lyrics include “fleshgun blitzkrieg” or fantasizing about introducing rodents to a woman.

People in the cultural sector preferred not to talk about such passages and Lindemann’s archaic staging of masculinity, that was part of the provocative dark man image. Moritz von Uslar, who walked through Berlin with the singer in 2013 on the occasion of the collection of poems “In still Nights”, was not interested in the misogynistic elements in his art, but even felt reminded of Gottfried Benn under the heading “A poet?”.

Sure: Till Lindemann’s lyrical self is sometimes a lonely, pathetic worm, but this part of his art is ultimately always drowned out and trumped by the hypervirile character who uses flamethrowers and confetti cannons for self-aggrandizement.

And which obviously exerts such a great attraction on a publisher like Helge Malchow from KiWi that, among other things, he defended the much-quoted poem “When you sleep” after it was published. It may be covered a hundred times over by artistic freedom, but defending a rape fantasy also casts a shadow over the defender.

Other fanboys included the successful Swiss writer Martin Suter, who was photographed on Lindemann’s lap in 2019, and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, who describes the two as his favorite poets in the accompanying caption of his Instagram post. A gesture of fraternization that ranges from high culture to pop culture and which should have further pumped up the Rammstein superstar’s ego. It’s good that at least that’s over now.