No Beauty Without Danger, Ch. 4: “Say Goodbye”

No Beauty Without Danger

Authors: Max Dax, Robert Defcon (2005)
Genre: History/Biography
Format: Interviews/quotes/extracts
English Translation: Marianne

Chapter 4: “Say Goodbye”

Blixa: My musical background before 1977 oscillated between Can, Kraftwerk, Neu and TonSteineScherben. People usually refer to TonSteineScherben mainly as a political band. That’s narrowing too much. Of course they were a political band, but in the first place, they were a band and they made music. That’s also the way I want the Neubauten to be regarded as.

Andrew: I can’t name any love song by TonSteineScherben. A long time ago, Alex used to sing “Jenseits von Eden”. We’d listen to it with pleasure. Blixa’s voice resembles in a way Rio’s voice. Also the accent is similar. I see it as a legacy that will be carried forward. But Blixa and Rio were contemporaries and they both have the gift of self expression.

Alex: TonSteineScherben were of a huge importance. They were always a big influence. Blixa, Andrew and Rio Reiser knew each other already. They met after the Scherben performed in the Tali-Kino, with some other guys. It was a vaudeville called “Transplantis”.

Andrew: TonSteineScherben affected my socialization, due to their very straightforward and comprehensible language.

Blixa: It’s dangerous to pass off as a political band. You always end up holding the wrong end of the stick, or in the wrong department. Obviously, all the truisms you say will boil down to “Everything is political”. A similar slogan emerged in the track “Gestohlenes Band” (Stolen Reel), in one of our records. Once, during an interview, I stole a tape from the shelves of ORF (Austrian public service broadcaster), in Austria. I just took it. Later, I eventually re-winded it, by accident, to a certain spot and used that for this song. It was an Italian fellow – unidentified until now – who was being interviewed and said “One can say football is politics; basically, everything is politics”. In the liner notes of the record, we wrote that the only musical element of that track was the fact that I had stolen the tape. So, maybe everything is politics, but I wouldn’t refer to the Neubauten as political.

Mufti: The West Berlin scene of the squats never interested me. But West Berlin was obviously more international than Hamburg. Deifinitely, more New Yorkers moved to West Berlin for some months, than to Hamburg. Hamburg is more earthy. More rock’n'roll than avant garde. I found living in both cities very pleasant. I got something from both scenes and that was very good.

Andrew: The squat scene in West Berlin was neat. In the prime of life, there were at least 141 good houses. Berlin was just full of people, but nobody invested there, because the East-West location was too risky. A lot of houses deteriorated, they were not rented. The vacancy was an opportunity for the squatters. It was called “Repair Occupation”.

Alex: In 1980, I moved to Andrew’s, in a squat, in the tiller corner in Reuterstrasse, where he lived with muesli-over eater hippies.

Andrew: Right. At that time, Hacke moved in to the same squat I was in.

Alex: I slept in a sort of passage room, with fractioned walls. That rocked. I used to drum repeatedly with Andrew in the basement.

Andrew: Below the house there was a practice room, where we could make music. That was in Berlin-Neukölln. The house was demolished in the meantime. We had fun there. A lot of joy and songs.

Alex: When I had no more strength and fell off the chair, the guy would start to sweat. I flew quickly out of the house when the hippies traced a bucket full of paint, a mixture of olive, green and brown to a swastika I had painted on the ceiling of my room. Raw provocation. But it worked pretty good in the squat scene.

Blixa: Yes, right. Alex lived in the squats. He left pretty quickly. Andrew, who lived in the same squat, dealt with it in a considerably cleverer way. In the building, everything was covered with political graffiti. Slogans like “Peace, Happiness, Pancakes”, from the late hippie times, everything cute and good. Andrew started to write on top of it. He would paint over other slogans and wrote “Say Goodbye”. None of the squatters understood it. It was not clear. They had nothing against him, actually, but he gave them the creeps. Alex’s swastika was easy to understand, but “Say Goodbye” was difficult for them to interpret.

Alex: There was a plenary in the courtyard’s bonfire, where my leaving was decided.

Andrew: Squatters come mainly from the radical left. The fact that Alex painted a huge swastika on the ceiling was a tough challenge. Especially for the plenary. Referring to Alex in a conversation was very viscous.

Alex: During the plenum, I sat with some friends on the roof. Maybe also because we threw empty beer bottles in the courtyard… My moving out ended as soon as it had started.

Mufti: A plenary in a squat is the most narrow minded meeting you could imagine. You don’t want to be a part of such a petty club.

Andrew: We flirted and provoked with Nazi symbols, to exaggerate the state of things, to call for a fascist state, or to propagate the memory of the Third Reich. It came about a fascist ideology, anyway. My moustache was more of a Charlie Chaplin moustache rather than an Adolf Hitler one.

Alex: The way we faced the world was surely a way of protection, to conceal incertitude. This posture was obviously an attempt to create a legend.

Andrew: That was practically an exceptional temporary fashion.

Alex: Outsiders often regarded that as inconcievable arrogance. It was a game. You were either in or out. There were no misunderstandings.

Jochen: It was a separate business, with its own unspoken moral and fashion. There were also many riders and onlookers. We didn’t think of ourselves as a gang. It was a closed circle and we didn’t have much contact with others. With Hamburgers, maybe. But not with people from Dusseldorf, for instance.

Andrew: The Neubauten never let themselves be tagged as political. The only direct cooperation with the squat movement was when we took part in a festival at the Metropol, in Nollendorffplatz, called “Winter Service”. Part of the revenue went directly to the squatters. Besides that, we never let anyone use us in that way. Where I lived, they would confront us. They would say “You are a famous band, you attract people. You could pay for a house façade”. That was in 1981. It’s unbelievable the way people interpreted us. In the name of the band and maybe also in the name of our vocalist. I thought those expectations were very obscure.

Alfred Hilsberg: In the beginning, the Neubauten were wrongly, mistakenly pushed along a political corner. They were pushed into the squatters corner. They saw them as the successors of TonSteineScherben. A lot of people saw in Blixa, whose voice was similar to Rio Reiser’s, a messiah of the left faction. Those were interpretations which clearly went too far. I don’t believe Blixa Bargeld would let himself be used as a signboard for the left faction.

Blixa: Of course we had our political background. We were a conscious and sensible band. There were a lot of attempts to interpret our intentions. We were all squatters and were involved with the squatters. We played once in a squatters festival for free. And the “Greens” used ‘Kollaps’ in the TV spots for their election campaign.

Mufti: Our political statement was: Einstürzende Neubauten. That was an attitude towards life.

Andrew: The pieces “U-Haft” and “Warten auf die Räumung” could be placed into a political context. In “Warten auf die Räumung”, we tried to summarize music-wise the feeling that everything can come to an end, when you’re a squatter. But that was not advertised.

Blixa: That came from the fact that the police began to take drastic measures and every month there would be I don’t know how many evictions. And you sat in a house and didn’t know: will I still be here tomorrow? Or will they come during the night and pull me out? I put together that track in my room, in my squat. It developed a similar political tension, but due to the poor recording, it couldn’t be used. I did it on a tape recorder which was terrible. We didn’t succeed in doing it again.

Andrew: Amongst the most radical, it was announced that any eviction should cause, in return, a damage of several hundred thousand marks. So, everytime there was an eviction, the adequate damage should be done in someone’s private house. That was a show stopper. It was a method to call attention to the necessity of political action, regarding the formula “vacancy = possible house”. In the adventure land of West Berlin, there was a lot of back and forth. That was, so to speak, polite. The confrontation with the squatters was fully implemented in the city. In the corner of Postdamer and Bülowstrasse, there was a demonstrator who was killed by a bus. The whole situation turned into a pogrom atmosphere. The press boiled up the feelings. It was apostrophized “There are many people who run with stones through the area and ignite everything”. And there were actually lots of people who stimulated an organization of some sort. Whether it was useful or not, the Berlin senate legalized the squatters and offered rental agreements, but at the same time, prevented new squats. Less than 10 years later, everything happened from scratch. Only this time, in East Berlin. Again, massive vacancies and dilapidated buildings…

Mufti: We didn’t want to be a band affiliated to any political party. Politics had nothing to do with me. I was not a part of the squatters scene.

Blixa: When you sing in German and you sing about your personal orientation, sensitivities and the transcendental pangs of love, you automatically become a political band.

Alfred Hilsberg: Like no other person, Blixa understood and documented how fucked up the social system really was. For me, that was the proof that he dealt with how Germany really was.

Blixa: Of course we positioned ourselves, from the very beginning. Insofar I called myself Blixa Bargeld and we had a band logo. That brought along a self invention, which naturally went hand in hand with a public stance. And I obviously sought for the public aspect of it. That’s my nature. That’s how I am. But in the beginning, I didn’t control this tool particularly well. That is: I will probably never control it, but I play the game with a bit more virtuosity. And I no longer need to position myself. Now I have either to correct, or support legends.

Jochen: When I talk about honesty and fair mindedness, I’m not talking about a peculiar morality, because we were always against any morality. But there was obviously some sort of code, which clearly defined that certain things were OK, and others were not. There was no arbitrariness.

Thank you to Einstürzende Neubauten and all of the speakers whose quotes are translated here. Our continued gratitude goes out to authors Max Dax and Robert Defcon.

The above content is translated from Marianne’s personal copy of Nur was nicht ist ist möglich – Die Geschichte der Einstürzenden Neubauten (2006). All rights reserved by the translator and by Seele Brennt. No part of this text may be published elsewhere.