Nico and The Shame of Cologne
As much as I love my hometown, I can also hate it viscerally: for its provinciality and nationalism culminating in the city’s mind-numbing and degenerate carnival festivities fueled by the home-brewn beer called Kölsch, or for the mismanaged and ugly build-up of the city after 95% of it was destroyed in the merciless bombings of the allied forces in WW2. The city’s highlight is the breathtaking cathedral, a world heritage site that is the world’s third tallest church. Leave it to the ever-clownish people of Cologne to decide that approximately 8 metres around it are enough free space to exhibit the gothic beauty appropriately, and after that point circle it with countless brutalist buildings. I call that monumental rape.
Let’s talk about a few more snapshots of the city’s twisted outlook: Kölsch beer from the Päffgen Brewery can be found all over the city in bars, restaurants, cafés and the localbrewing house of Päffgen, one of the traditional brewery families, an old-money institution that was established in 1883. Then, a statue of the colonial Kaiser-Wilhelm-II, under whom the genocide in Namibia was launched, where up to 100.000 Herero and Namaqua were killed in concentration camps between 1904 and 1908. And while none of the many “Joseph-Goebbels-Straße” or “Adolf-Hitler-Straße” can be found in Germany anymore, multiple street-names are glorifying Germany as the fourth-largest colonial power in the world: “Kamerunstraße”, “Togostraße“, and, right around the corner in my quarter, “Wißmannstraße” and “Gravenreuthstraße”. Named after Karl Freiherr von Gravenreuth and Hermann von Wissmann, who brutally beat down an uprising by the locals in what was then the colony of German East Africa. Gravenreuth’s troops also enslaved people from Cameroon, Wissmann’s troops are accused of executions, cleansing and looting in African villages. Painfully absent in these displays of hommage is the name of Cologne’s most famous daughter: Christa Päffgen, a rejected illegitimate descendant of the traditional brewing family, later gaining world fame as Nico.
How many artists, female or male, are there – not only in Cologne, Germany but in general- that grew up in the misery of an atrocious war, became international supermodels and then moved on to shoot films with the likes of Fellini, artists who became the muse of Andy Warhol and countless other heavyweights like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop and Jim Morrisson. Artists who have been in The Velvet Underground and recorded the band’s iconic and heavily influental first album, artists who then moved on to record the first goth album and a landmark in avantgarde music? “The Marble Index is the greatest piece of ‘avant-garde classical’, ‘serious’ music of the last half of the 20th century so far” is how Lester Bangs positioned Nico’s music. Her long-time producer John Cale is convinced that if Nico were a man, she would be hailed as an avantgarde legend, and puts her music in context “If you compare what she was doing then to other singer-songwriters like Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell or Carole King, Nico was like a European gargoyle. She really was unique. There was nobody doing that sort of gothic folk stuff. It was like something from another age, or another planet. And it wasn‘t a fashion or anything. she wasn’t following some trend. It came from her own determination to create something individual; it came entirely from inside, from resilience…“
Born as an illegitimate child , Nico and her mother Grete were rejected by the rich Catholic Päffgen family, and Nico went on to invent a Turkish father for the rest of her life, in a move that denies her undeniable Germanness and establishes a larger equation for her rejection as a child “I do not wish to have any familiarity with the German people. I do not identify with them in any way, except their endurance… Turks are the new Jews of Germany,” Nico once said.
Nico moved to Berlin as a little child and spent most of WW2 there. Born in 1938, she was a full war child and lived through most of her youth in post-war lawlessness. Nico was 7 years old after the end of the war, as old as my daughter is now. I cannot imagine my daughter’s condition if she had lived all these formative early years in between fascism, misery, bombings, ruins, and death. Nico was traumatized: “I had a terrible time. I was a miserable girl.” She often shared her clear memories of trains taking Jews, Roma, Gays and other outlawed people to Auschwitz, and she learned to dissociate in face of the cruelties surrounding her: “Yes, I remember the war years very well. But that was not me, that was another girl. I seem to myself to be a criminal who spends her entire life with faked documents… My life consists of shreds and short flashes, never the whole picture.” Nico called Berlin “a desert of bricks” and remembered as a 6-year-old , “seeing dead bodies lying in the rubble as I walked through a wilderness at the end of the street where we lived. That is the image that still comes in my dreams. It is something that I use in my lyrics, that hides behind my lyrics like scenery.”
Nico grew up in an environment where the starving excess of German women sold their bodies for the goods that American GI’s traded off in the black market: coffee, juice, chocolate bars, “Later I went to New York and I was shocked to see so many Hershey Bars in rows, like they were nothing,” Nico remembered of her time arriving in the USA after modeling and filming in European metropoles like Paris and Rome, where her trauma was somewhat shared by the war-struck Europeans. In America, Nico was striving to be deadly serious and aesthetic when everyone around her was acting “decadent and frivolous, like a party at the end of the world,” as she put it. She was so different- a circumstance that was picked up in Todd Haynes‘ documentary The Velvet Underground, where time witnesses talk about the unbridgeable American irritation about Nico’s serious ways and the experience of shortage and trauma of war-reality that she eluded “Berlin, an imperial city, snug in American hands; surely it was not the hell she had portrayed?”, or, as Andy Warhol star Viva said, “Nico should have been in Vietnam, then we would have made more sense of her.” The reality of past and present wars are something that Americans, and Germans, to this day want to keep away from their sheltered realities and cognitive processes.
Nico felt this estrangement and detachment all her life, all while doing her own thing with an admirable straight-forwardness and resilience, dropping uncomfortable views against the grain in a regular frequency and adding tot he overall irritation with her. Remembering her time with the beatniks and bohemians in Paris, “It was the time of imperialist war in Algeria, and my secret support was with the Arabs against the French Army, but I could not say this to my society friends, who were often the opposite, but I could say it in these clubs. I always dislike the invader and, of course, I am part Arab because of my father.” In America, she could not identify with the hippie movement and refused to wear flowers (“I like flowers… they remind me of graveyards”), and albeit being a heroin addict (“because I have too many thoughts”), she refused Timothy Leary’s school with its use of LSD. “Timothy Leary said ‘Drop Out’, and this was the solution in America. I didn’t like this alternative, because it doesn’t fight totalitarinism. It lets others fight for you while you are asleep”. With today’s knowledge of the CIA’s sponsoring and promotion of Leary and the LSD movement to break down vital anti-imperial movements, and imperial wealth and power being largely based on drug-money, it is a remarkably bright assessment by Nico, who seemed to perceive an ancient, ritualistic knowledge as displayed in many of her songs. John Cale tried to explain it without ever figuring it out: „Her songs are not tonal. They do not come from our key system. They are too old in their arrangement… There was something going on, which I’ve yet to explain”.
Nico’s talk was not taken serious, dismissed as ramblings of „that strange and miserable German lady“ and a rehabilitation has not taken place to this day. On one occasion, Nico was talking about Jean Seberg “Do you know her? She was a film actress who was very beautiful and intelligent with a very sad life… She and Jane Fonda supported the Black Panthers, which was to do with black power… So the FBI tried to kill her, and I knew this because she pointed for me to the agents who followed her around. Have you seen FBI men ever? They are exactly what you expect. Vulgar.” Nico was right about Jean Seberg and the FBI and the assessment of her times. In 1982, a Los Angeles FBI memorandum addressed to the FBI director, J.Edgar Hoover, was discovered and made public. An agent asked for the permission to ‘neutralise’ Jean Seberg because she supported the Black Panthers.
When Andy Warhol got shot in 1968, Nico was shook and later said that the shooting was the start of “society’s vertigo”, not without including Robert Kennedy’s murder following JFK’s into the equation: “Everything began to turn bad. It is like you are on a carousel and it starts to go round faster and faster until you are sick.” Her response was to jump off the carousel, but “not into the outside but into the centre, where it is most controlled. You could see it quite wrong and say ‘I must leave the city and live in the desert’. That is a mistake. They are the same place, that is one thing I know.” Furthermore, Nico endorsed the armed resistance: “Andreas Baader (Germany), the Red Brigade (Italy) and the Catholics in Ireland (IRA), and there are others. That is the alternative that fights, not the alternative that says ‘Drop Out’… If I were not Nico I would be a terrorist.”
“You must destroy what is wrong, not ignore it,” she contrasted her mind to that of most other people. It was with this mind that she sung and recorded the National Anthem of Germany on her album The End– all verses, no less- in what is the most chilling and appropriate interpretation of the anthem to date– it’s death-like. The recording was an absolute no-go in Germany, where the problematic verses were forbidden to be sung again in the process of the superficial cleansing and re-branding of the country. As ususal, the same hippocrats who swept the dirt under the rug are branding those who expose the dirt as being the offensive and evil ones (Hello Operation Paperclip, and hello to Julian Assange). Germans, elsewise never very interested in Nico, were outraged, although the core of that criticism was never clear. It was less that Nico was simply labeled a Nazi, but more that she kept up to her promise from the Velvet Underground times („I’ll be your mirror / Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know“) and embodied the country’s past and doom in a much too uncomfortable way.
Too much has been written about Nico and her drug abuse and horrible failings as a mother, all without holding male artists up to the same standards. Too much has been written about Nico’s complex personality and contradictions which were often bordering on lies, whilst ignoring these as symptoms of a PTSD caused by war. Too little has Nico been hailed as a survivor who literally rose from the ashes, too little has she been hailed as the remarkably independent woman and innovative avantgarde artist that she was. Time to take a break from the carnival and grow up, Cologne. Time to face the one mirror that is the messiest and most glamorous of them all, and grant Nico her well-deserved spot in the city’s history and legacy. Surely there must be a tiny place somewhere in between those large shadows of all the many colonial and supremacist heroes that adorn your streets, a tiny place for our Nico, and for what she is: our dark, twisted angel.
by Saliha Enzenauer