We Don’t Live Here Anymore: Die Einstürzenden Neubauten in Cologne
Picking up on postponed concerts which are now finally taking place, you can be up to a few surprises. After being postponed for two years because of the Corona pandemic, and with the tour now being called Year of the Rat Year of the Ox Year of the Tiger, the Einstürzende Neubauten concert in Cologne became a bizzarely aclimatic matter and took place during the years’ hottest day so far. The legendary German group which is associated with industrial cold and screeching noise, took the stage during a most humid summer day at 39°C (102°F).
While Cologne’s streets and cafe’s are soaked in a relaxed sun downer atmosphere with crowds enjoying their drinks and meals outside, my friend and I make our way to the rather claustrophobic E-Werk venue, downing instantly evaporating beers in the metro, and wondering what to expect from an Einstürzende Neubauten concert on such a bright and humid day. I remember looking down my feet and thinking „I’m wearing sandals – not heavy black boots- to a fucking Neubauten concert“. The crowd awaiting us at the oversold venue does not disappoint as they are apparently less pragmatic and more hardcore in their approach: not only is every single person dressed in all black, but most of them relentlessly wear heavy black boots and full goth gear despite the heat: after two years of most unusual, and at the same most banal, under-aesthetic and under-intellectual times, it is the most beautiful sight to see such a committed and serious crowd.
I won’t lie, no more than four songs do I experience in full from inside the venue, since it is so hot and sweaty that we decide to listen to the concert from the bar, at close range to cold drinks. The Neubauten use an unhealthy, post-nuclear mint-green backdrop to a stage propped with industrial gear: music machines and saws from pre-AI times, brutally nostalgic and comforting. In the center of it all: Blixa. Blixa Bargeld, Blixa Cash, beautiful Blixa, the one and only, my angel.
***
It is 2005, month unclear, 5.15am. I am riding to my morning shift at Café Central, a famous artist’s hotel in Cologne where I job as a waitress. These are my hedonistic, nocturnal years, so the breakfast shift starting at 5:30 am is brutal and something that I try to avoid. I step out of the metro at Rudolfplatz into the yellowish dark of the twilight, and walk down Lindenstrasse. Just another 400 metres to go, a five minute walk and I’ll be there. I am alone in the streets of the sleeping city, almost, a man is walking down the street with me on the opposite sidewalk. Things disintegrate quickly after I notice him and turn my head around for a quick glance, as the man then accelerates. I start to walk faster when the man crosses the street and is now behind me. For some reason I still do not want to run but to remain my composure, what a silly thought when by now I mainly function on an animalistic level, alarmed by the presence of a predator. Everything is scents and smells by now, and I am a creature reigned by an oddly rational fear. I see the door of the café and walk even faster to approach it. I feel the man behind me is running by now and curiosity is killing me, but looking behind me will cost me precious moments. This glitch in normalcy is happening in less than 5 minutes, when finally, finally I can rush through the swing door, head and shoulder first. The man is a hair’s length away from me and I can feel the wind of his movement as he abruptly changes his direction and walks down the street again in the same bored and lethargic manner as lions do after having missed their prey.
Once inside, I am lucky to be occupied with a work routine. I prepare the café and set up the tables for the first hotel guests while my heart beat won’t calm down, and when I switch the espresso machine on, I lean against the counter for a moment – my gaze is still that of a creature: hyper-realizing the black and white chequered tiled floor, the sulfur-yellow lighting, and other details in the guest room. Thinking that the scene must look peaceful like some Edward Hopper painting from the outside, and that nobody would notice the terror in it. And then the small connecting door to the hotel opens and a man walks into this painting, an early guest already immaculately dressed in a gray three piece suit and with a room-filling presence. It is Blixa Bargeld. In a deep voice and most gentle manner he says „Guten Morgen“, orders breakfast and a coffee, and for a precious ten minutes before his meal arrives we drink a cup of coffee together in consensual silence, close but separated by the counter. Dawn had been a journey from gray realism to terror and now great peace in the presence of an angelic appearance that seemed to come straight out of a Wenders movie. Blixa saved me that morning, and I coudn’t tell you how.
***
Our paths would cross again 17 years later, 17 years in which dystopia has cloaked us tighter hence civilization is approaching reaping season. Gently bridged by a plague for good acclimatization, the world has become a mind-numbingly apocalyptic yet still crudely interesting place- it has changed it colors but you still look at them in wonder. And for this one evening in June, the stage of the Einstürzende Neubauten becomes the nutshell that houses this wondrous and increasingly unpalatable world.
Blixa looks more angelic than ever with his long gray hair and tragic silver glitter eyeshadow. The crowd is under his spell, the concert a triumph of silence, of concentration, and poetry. Fragments of truth rife with narrative suggestion echo through the hall; inventories that fish deeper and wound harder than they should in their scarcity. “We don’t live here anymore / For a long time, for a long time / Not since a long time / Not for a long, long, long, long time / We live here No longer” is the apocalyptic mantra of “Zivilisatorisches Missgeschick (Civilizational Misadventure)“, a brilliantly distanced title bearing the admission of failure and relocating the disaster that is our civilization: down from the throne of exceptionalism to an exceptionally banal, fatal rank within the ancient line: „There are still things from us here /…/ Taken together, not few / Too much of some / Most of it has expired”. It is a haunting recitation during which you could hear a pin drop on the floor despite the band’s noisy outbreaks throughout the song.
Apocalypse is a recurring theme throughout the evening. In the New Testament, the seven seals on a scroll are successively opened by the lamb, triggering the apocalypse; a concept tragically pursued by the evangelical Empire. With the Einstürzende Neubauten, the seven seals have become ”Seven Screws”, tapping into transhuman fields in an enigmatic Cronenbergian manner “Seven screws hold me together / The strong man now wears a dress / It burns itself deep into his skin / Seven screws / Seven screws / One day I’ll take them out / I reassemble all the parts / I rearrange the alphabet / And out of the sea of possibilities / I draw myself a new / Non-binary / I: forever new“. As for the lamb: this bestows a fate typical of the greedy civilization: ”I steal the whole herd / I walk backwards / In my own footsteps”
But not that you assume that the Neubauten are now exercising in religion or ideology here besides showing the close proximity of both. “For heaven’s sake, no god!” laments Blixa when during “Möbliertes Lied” he dreams up a partial refugee that serves as a pure utopia: “I freshly renovated our song / … / Tried a new tone / …/ I disposed of the used metaphors in the toxic waste / Sufficiently provided new unused ones / … / In between I scraped back and forth and cursed out all lies” It is the biggest promise of the evening. The audience is moved, tears glisten in the eyes of the black crowd.
I have to check out after the first encore of the evening, the painful, string-driven “Taschen” (“Bags”) which pushes the listener close to an emotional breakdown. “What we are searching for in your dreams? / We search for nothing / We wait” is how “Taschen” starts, a song about the thousands of ferociously disregarded refugees that are drowning in the Mediterranean for over a decade now, with the song’s title referring to the oversized plastic bags in which refugees carry their entire belongings throughout their dangerous journeys, bags that the Neubauten used sonically while recording the song. The lyrics reference Palestinian-Syrian Poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s collection of poems A Predator Called the Mediterranean (2018) when Blixa sings “Between us and you / Roll the waves monstrously / A voracious predator”. Ghostly realism and resignation echo through the song, cursed moods that again pick up Almadhoun’s words (“Massacre is a dead metaphor that comes out of the television and eats my friends without a single pinch of salt”) and provide a commentary on the current state of humanity, one that is rare in its physicality and intersectionality in between art, politics, and poetry. I am gut-wrenched as the song fades away, yet painfully awake with every fiber of my body. A glance around the hall and it feels like all those motionless bodies with nerves stretched to the breaking point are an army of the dead from the Mediterranean Sea. One word: touched. I didn’t expect anything great from art anymore, and then along came Blixa, and touched us. Like angels do.
***
Was wir in deinen Träumen suchen?
Wir suchen nichts
Wir warten
by Saliha Enzenauer