Author - © Matija Jaksekovic
I believe that, industrial-metal band Rammstein from Berlin needs no introduction. Known by explicit and brutally honest artistic expression, they become popular all over the world. Their alternative approach to music and general artistic expression has become their trademark. Their social critique is often relentless and original, but above all impartial. this impartiality is largely responsible for their worldwide popularity. Today, when music trends like punk, or Rock lost its original philosophy and become the mainstream of today's generation of safe spaces - Millennials, Rammstein remained on his course, and his audience recognize and appreciate that.
On the March 28. 2019. Rammstein has released a video with their new single - Deutschland which is almost immediately sparked the fury of socio-cultural mainstream critics across the Europe and beyond. Today's postmodern, so-called historians, sociologists and others who have been relativizing history for decades, who are cherry picking a partial historical element which becomes relevant without any historical context, in order to impose a utopian and a relativistic image of society in 21. century, might feel humiliated. Rammstein in his new video take us on a journey through German history, from the aftermath of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest where an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and destroyed Roman legions in 16 A.D. known as Varian Disaster, through the medieval rule of church order and witch hunt, to many brutal social experiments in the 20th century like fascism, Nazism, and Communism as a consequence of the opposition to the ideas of the Enlightenment, until today. The story overlaps in historical periods hinting that the brutality of all social systems that are trying to control people is ruthless. In the center of everything stands Germania the personification of the German nation from whose corpse is feasting in the medieval style by everybody. Germania which is guiding, but it is guided at the same time.
And what exactly is the problem?! The Holocaust and the Nazi period shown in the video, for some it is unacceptable. some say that Rammstein using the Holocaust for self promotion, others say that the display of Holocaust in the video is a "tasteless exploitation of artistic freedom". Well, artistic freedom is a two-way street, sometimes it is tasteless, but that depends on the eye of the observer. The exploitation of artistic freedom is something else, we are witnessing it at all levels of art today. Some who are very important today exploiting art for ideological purposes, and they've been doing that for a very long time, I doubt that Rammstein is responsible. Those who think how the Holocaust should not be shown as part of German history have a problem with the context in which it is shown. We can agree with that context or not, but it is not for us to limit someone's artistic freedom because of injured ego.
The history of civilization, among other things is a nasty, violent, brutal, full of tragedy, and ordinary people are the victims every time, but also the victim, at one point will become an executioner. The moment when we will be able to accept that history as our own, then we will be able to prevent its recurrence. Let's not fool ourselves, a story of Germany is a story of Europe.
And Rammstein... excellent come back after ten years, that's all.
