Off’nes Fenster präsentiert
Spatzenwolken himmelflattern
Wind bläst, meine Nase friert
Und paar Auspuffrohre knattern
Ach, da geht die Sonne unter
Rot, mit Gold, so muss das sein
Seh ich auf die Strasse runter
Fällt mir mein Bekannter ein
Prompt wird mir’s jetzt schwer ums Herz
Ich brauch’ nur Vögel flattern sehen
Und fliegt mein Blick dann himmelwärts
Tut auch die Seele weh, wie schön
Natur am Abend, stille Stadt
Verknacksen Seele, Tränen rennen
Das alles macht einen mächtig matt
Und ich tu’ einfach weiterflennen
Opened wide my window shows
Sparrow-clouds sky-aflutter
Freezing nose, the wind blows
Scattered exhaust pipes rattle ’n sputter
Oh, the sun is going down
Red, with gold, it is foretold
I look down upon a ghost town
An old acquaintance I behold
Abrupt! Of a sudden my heart feels heavy
The sight of twilight birds on the wing
Sends my gaze soaring heavenwards
My soul is sore, and how beautiful it is
Evening still-life, silent city
Soul a-swelling, tears a-running
And so all conspires to make me weary
And I just cannot keep from sobbing
What a delicious surprise! Transposed to string quartet, ‘Naturträne’ is magical. Listen! Holding irony and innocence in tension, the soprano embodies the spirit of the song. Look! She takes me back to London, 1979. I was working on a screenplay on a gloomy Sunday when Jane came by with two tickets to see a German band. ‘I heard Nina Hagen sings Schubert to Johnny Rotten’, she said, ‘let’s go and see her, she’s playing at the Lyceum’. A few hours later we were floored by the virtuosity that came from Nina’s malleable mouth; the songs were excellent and the band kick-ass. ‘She’s an original’, Jane said, ‘she’s the real thing’. Yes, ‘punk from East Berlin’ was a pigeon-hole that couldn’t confine her: Possessed of the sacred fire, she could fly. Now here she is being sung by a red-haired soprano in Reykjavik, a metempsychosis that testifies to the shamanic power of art. Is it not here where I belong, rather than in the throes of love? Marietta, go, if you must, but know that when you’re gone, I’ll love you through my powers as a shaman!
Listen! The singer now begins the ravishing vocalise. The beauty of her voice against the strings is overwhelming: If you’ve got to go, Marietta, go now, before the music’s over: Enfolded in this voice, I can bear your leaving. Listen! The exclamation that interrupts the coloratura blows me away just like it did in London; the guttural snarl that reclaims rock from opera moves me now just as it did then: If music renews itself in each performance, have I renewed myself? The viola drones under the violin harmony; the cello plays a heavy bass line. Well, have I renewed myself? Listen! The singer is in the flow of her vocalise; she is at once aware and unselfconscious, focused and at ease.
From Ken McLeod, ‘Bohemian Rhapsodies: Operatic Influences on Rock Music’ in Popular Music, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 2001) pp. 195-196
Nina Hagen was born in East Berlin in 1955 and from an early age studied opera at the theatre in Dessau, receiving her first national East German exposure in a televised opera version of Bocaccio’s Decameron. She later became interested in rock music and honed her vocal talents singing with various Berlin rock bands, supplemented by a one-year course of vocal studies at the Central Studio for Light Music. In 1967 the revolutionary people’s singer-songwriter Wolf Bierman became her unofficial stepfather, and thus from an early age Hagen was exposed to strong political influences. She subsequently joined Bierman’s protest against the participation of East German troops in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1976 Bierman, after crossing the West Berlin border, was refused re-entry and expatriated from East Germany. Hagen, whose lyrics and music were also under intense government scrutiny, seized this opportunity to cross over to the West herself. Renouncing her citizenship in 1976, she successfully petitioned the Exit Application Board to leave the country by threatening to continue Bierman’s ‘crusade’ if she wasn’t let go.
In 1977, Hagen took up residence in London during the height of the punk explosion and befriended such influential bands as the Slits and the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten, evidently, was especially taken with her classical vocal technique. As Hagen recalled, ‘he always wanted me to sing Schubert’s Sah ein Knab ein Roslen Stehn’. Hagen formed her own band in 1978, beginning an extremely successful career which included such worldwide dance hits as her classic cover version of The Tubes’ ‘White Punks on Dope’ (1978), ‘Smack Jack’ (1982) and ‘New York, New York’ (1983), in addition to a plethora of other hit singles. Hagen has remained extremely popular in Europe and continues to record, releasing Beehappy in 1996.
Hagen is one of the most innovative artists to emerge from the punk scene. Her music is an unpredictable mix of aggressive punk, lyrical pop and futuristic techno-disco. Her transgressive music and vocal style are matched by her outrageous appearance and eccentric and overtly sexual antics. Her stage act is legendary for its unconventional theatrical approach, which at times included performances dressed as a man and masturbation. Critics have generally been at a loss to categorise her musical style and image. Arthur Levy perhaps comes close to the mark when he characterises her as ‘Marlene Dietrich meets Emma Goldman on stage at the Ritz’.
Her vocal style is an even more schizophrenic mix of guttural snarls, ear-piercing screams, saccharin pop-chanteuse styling, all mixed with prolonged passages of florid coloratura. To a certain extent, Hagen’s style appears to owe much to the expressionist operatic style of sprechtstimme as used in Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire, and, to a lesser extent, in Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, among other works. The often gutteral approximation of pitches serves to aid her central message of alienation from society.
Hagen abrasively mixes operatic vocality with spoken word, lyrical pop-rock melodies and futuristic techno-disco. In so doing, Hagen is one of the premiere exponents of the post-punk trend to avoid vocal conformity. While punk rock popularised an aggressive rejection of the gentle vocal delivery of white women rock singers (often carrying the connotations of submissiveness), the post-punk alternative offered room for Hagen to incorporate cries, screams, laughter and operatic vocality into the discourse of popular dance music. Long popular in the gay community, Hagen’s mixing of opera and rock-disco, combined with her cross-dressing and overtly sexual image, reflected her desire to transgress musical as well as sexual boundaries in her work.
From M.I. Franklin, Change the Record: Punk Women Music Politics (Beilefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2024) pp. 62
‘I had no idea what to make of the term “punk”. But I liked the look of these chaotic figures. Their mangled hairstyles, ripped-up clothes, fishnet stockings and suspenders were a ‘fuck you’ to the cold commercialism of metropolitan London. Punks posing as creative scumbags in order to survive. Divine!’ This passage is from Nina Hagen’s memoir, Bekenntnisse (Confessions), recalling her first sight of punks on the streets of London in the mid-seventies. Published in 2010 in German and for a predominantly European readership, Hagen’s memoir is not, as yet, available in English. In this passage she goes on to recall getting to know the Slits, becoming a close friend of Ari Up/Ariane Forster (1962-2010), the Slits lead vocalist, along with other prominents in the punk scene at the time; for instance the Sex Pistols or music journalist and punk historian, Jon Savage.
Nina Hagen is a formative representative of the transnational contours of some authors’ musico-cultural genealogies; e.g. those of the Slits’ founding members such as Ari Up (whose mother was German) and Viv Albertine (whose father was French), or Cosey Fanni Tutti and Throbbing Gristle’s time spent with the underground European/German scenes. Hagen’s memoir is, thereby, a particular contribution to a burgeoning public archive that, to date, has been the preserve of Anglo-American artists. Moreover, her observations of the emerging punk scene in London, arriving there after she defected (or, perhaps, was kicked out of East Germany) to West Germany—in light of her own view of what punk stands for on a global level—provide an interesting counterweight to melancholy recollections from British male counterparts. And as a European exponent of the Dadaist theatricality and counter-hegemonic impulse that underpins any (self)designation of punk as anti-establishment, Hagen contributes her own, idiosyncratic iconography to punkness as a sustained transborder and multicultural impulse, propelling successive generations of musicians to sound their defiance of cultural authority and commercialism through their respective DIY politics and creative practices.
From PaperMag, 4 October 2002
‘I never said I am doing punk music. I never said I am a punk. They said that. I wanted to do rock music since I was 12 years old. It touched my heart to hear Tina Turner, the Beatles. And they were all my singing teachers because I made cassettes. And I sang along. And I wanted to make music like that.’ Born and raised in Berlin, East Germany, CBS Records signed Hagen in 1976 when she was 21. They knew she could sing ‘like a walking volcano,’ as she says, but they wanted her to learn live performance. So they gave her a lot of time and some money to go to London. ‘I saw all the punk bands and when I came back to Berlin I cut my hair short and made black lipstick’, Hagen says, running a finger across her lips. ‘And then they said I’m a punk. I am an entertainer. I sing political cabaret and spiritual cabaret and I write songs about anything concerning life. So it’s just maybe one aspect of my art, punk art.’
Henze
Rihm
Ligeti
Reimann
Hartmann
Kurtág
Nina Hagen