Nina Hagen: “I hate being put in a box. It’s always so cramped there”

Nina Hagen: From a very early age on. As a child, I loved Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music records in my mother’s record collection. In the early 80s, I wrote my first cosmic gospel songs and also performed them live. However, my record companies preferred a more secular Nina Hagen, which, for the most part, they got. But not always, and over time, less and less. I’ve always been impressed by what the gospel singers of this world have created. Like the “Godmother of Rock ‘N’ Roll,” the African-American singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. On my new album, I perform three of her songs. Male artists like Elvis and Chuck Berry all copied rock ‘n’ roll from her. Everyone should check out that name. Who invented rock ‘n’ roll? It was a woman!

Oh, yes! My love for gospel music and my search for God’s essence are one and the same. It all began in my childhood. As a child, I had a few very devout aunts, my grandmother, and many deeply religious people in my inner circle who influenced me. They all shaped my love for God, for creation, and for Jesus Christ. He came down to us from his eternal home to defeat death here on earth. He went through all of this without making a scene!

Several. I had a particularly intense, miraculous key experience in 1972. I was 17 years old and had a near-death experience during an LSD trip. It was my first trip; a unique experience that I later tried to recreate. But it could never be repeated. It was like a baptism of fire in spirit. I found myself stuck in a muddy, dreadful place from which there was no escape. It felt as if I were trapped in a wormhole I would never get out of again. There was neither life nor death; only pain. In the Bible, this place is described as somewhere infinitely far from God. And that is exactly how I felt. I was a suicidal teenager. I had gone through many terrible experiences and often thought about ending my life. From the age of 14, I had one or two abortions every year up until then, and I also suffered a miscarriage at a time when I desperately wanted to keep the child. I was a very, very sad young person. I cried out to God for help. And He answered immediately.

He said, “You must die.” Although I often thought about suicide, I didn’t really want to go yet. At some point, I realized that He meant baptism. A kind of symbolic death in order to be reborn into God’s world. So I lay down on my bed and ‘died’ for God. That was the beginning of my love story with Jesus Christ.

When you accept Jesus’ invitation to be his friend and begin a relationship with Him, you are given a freedom that you cannot give yourself. A freedom that is carried by an incomprehensible joy of being that nothing and no one can ever take away from you. I have not allowed that freedom to be taken from me to this day, nor my thirst for knowledge or my joy in life and in the performing arts.

I wouldn’t describe myself as anarchic. I have only one identity: to be an unconditionally loved child of God. I would even go so far as to say that every person who has ever lived in this world is the same as me. The Creator is not just one person or one God, but a team. In the Bible, this is referred to as Elohim: a kind of family, a gang, a band, a clan. We were created in His image. How cool is that?

No. When you are given freedom and unconditional love by God, and you can accept it with gratitude, then such condemnation is not annoying at all. You belong to Jesus just as his disciples belonged to him. Jesus was also treated like the lowest scum. They did not listen to him and did not recognize what he said and accomplished in God’s name. Many people who claim to be Christians are not at all. You can’t just slap a label on yourself and bang, you’re a Christian. A Christian is recognized by their love. In the GDR, we gathered in churches. We sang forbidden songs and said forbidden prayers. We expressed forbidden wishes at the Monday demonstrations. We saw ourselves as citizens of the world. As free children of a free Creator. We wanted freedom and to travel the world. Out of the conviction that we were free people in a free world, with a Creator who is love personified. Just look at the Pampers commercials. The cutest babies in the whole world doing the funniest and most adorable things. I fall head over heels in love every time I see them in their nappies on the tv screen.

I’ve been able to observe this cuteness myself with my grandchild. It’s just wonderful to see what a great Creator we have. He gave us such great advice on gentleness and forgiveness. Gentleness, by the way, is the new sport yoga.

Sometimes. We first lived in the back courtyard on Stargarder Strasse. Then we moved to Zelter Strasse, and when I was 12, we moved to Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse, on the corner of Friedrichstrasse.  Right across from Wolf Biermann, who lived on Chausseestrasse. When I visit the neighborhood today, I often retrace my old route to school and visit the Neue Apostolische Kirche. As a child, I would regularly sneak away on Sunday mornings because the tourists there always had Western chocolate. It was absolute paradise for a little girl with a chocolate-smeared mouth.

I left the GDR in 1976 at the age of 21. The guys from Stern-Combo Meissen accompanied me to the Tränenpalast at the end of December. I had applied for an exit visa, which was quickly approved, and shortly afterwards I went to the West with my stepfather Wolf Biermann, where we stayed at his mother’s place in Hamburg. After I was signed by Wolf’s record company, my friend Juliana, whom I knew from the GDR, called me shortly afterwards. She had since studied film at the London Film School and had chosen me for the lead role in her graduation film, The Go-Blue Girl, where I worked with Ari Up, the singer of the Slits, whom I was allowed to accompany to her live shows in punk clubs. I also got to know the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Billy Idol, Chrissie Hynde, Adam Ant, Siouxsie and the Banshees. Back then, people called us punks, but I never saw myself that way. Even later, when I founded the Nina Hagen Band in Germany, there was only one song called “Pank.” I was not a punk. I was still Nina Hagen. Even the label “Godmother of Punk” is, in my eyes, completely inaccurate. I hate being put in a box. It’s always so cramped there.

Of course. I spent a lot of time in London and got to know fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Pam Hogg while filming The Go-Blue Girl. In 1980, Frank Zappa’s manager invited me to Los Angeles at his request. Zappa was a great supporter and encouraged me to sing in English and record my first English-language album. In 1981, NunSexMonkRock was released. A very avant-garde record, interspersed with references to Bertolt Brecht and quotations from the Bible. It also includes the song “Cosma Shiva,” which I dedicated to my little daughter and which serves as a thanksgiving to God. A lullaby for my baby.

You can’t verbalize music. You have to hear it to feel the vibrations. My first album with the Nina Hagen Band is an interesting mix. Take the song “Naturträne” (Tear of Nature), for example, a very romantic and sentimental, almost cheesy piece in which I sing in a dramatic operatic voice. The track “Auf dem Friedhof” (At the Graveyard) shows that the young lyricist has philosophical thoughts about death, vampires, Jesus and the devil. The devil constantly whispers to us: God is dead, the Lord is gone. But that is a lie. The devil is the father of all lies. God is not dead, but has conquered death. We must chase this nasty, mean liar off our holy ground!

My character cannot be diagnosed based on a pop song. I express a snapshot in time. A zeitgeist feeling. I was suddenly honored by a lady named Alice Schwarzer, who even put me on the cover of her magazine Emma. As a result, everyone thought I was a feminist. But no one realized that I was actually a secret agent of Jesus Christ. No one expected that. I would rather describe myself as a femichrist. “Unbeschreiblich weiblich” does not primarily describe myself, but rather the attitude towards life at that time. Who has the right to prevent a woman from terminating her pregnancy for valid reasons? We are no longer in the Middle Ages, when women were denounced and burned at the stake. Back then in the GDR, I was pressured into having an abortion. Something that made me very, very unhappy and from which I only slowly recovered. It was only my near-death experience with Jesus in 1972 that ended this grief.

A wonderful song by Woody Guthrie. My father was a young anti-fascist during the Second World War who suffered from extreme hunger and was very ill. He was arrested by the Nazis and tortured in a Berlin prison until the Allies liberated the city and ended this terrible war. Thank God he survived and became a great screenwriter. I am very proud of my dad today. His father, my grandfather Herman Hagen, was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp; I was aware from childhood what my grandparents and parents had gone through under Hitler’s fascism. That’s why I was a little anti-fascist even as a child, and to this day, I try to include freedom songs in my set list when I perform. Whether they’re by Woody Guthrie or from the era of Dr. Martin Luther King. Back then, racial segregation was the disgusting face of American fascism. Unfortunately, people still haven’t learned to treat each other with mutual respect. Dr. Martin Luther King’s beautiful wife, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, said throughout her life that every new generation must fight for freedom and equality all over again. It simply never ends.

He’s been an enlightenment and a teacher. His plays were inspired by human history. They were like history lessons in theatrical form. I watched plays such as Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Schweyk in the Second World War), or Die Tage der Commune (The Days of the Commune) with amazement and my jaw dropped. From the age of 11, I regularly sat in the Berliner Ensemble and absorbed all of Brecht’s plays. At first with my best friend. We regularly put on make-up to look older so we could get in. For 55 Ost-Pfennig, we saw the world’s best actors in plays such as Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), and many others. I saw them all. I was the biggest Brecht fan you could imagine. The interesting thing about Brecht is that he wrote his first play at the age of 15: The Bible. Just like me, Brecht was completely immersed in the Bible. It was a source that awakened my curiosity and my love for God’s Word. I owe a lot to Brecht.

His first play dealt with the age-old conflict between Catholics and Protestants murdering each other. Terrible conditions. Also, the fact that the Catholic Church called on people to denounce each other. As later in fascism. Basically, fascism was created by a Catholic institution that called itself Christian and tortured women and burned them at the stake. For me, these crimes of the Catholic Church have nothing to do with Christianity. For me, faith in God is my church. God lives in me, so my body is my church. And Jesus Christ lives in my heart. He has set up a villa for us in there: Villa Villekulla No. 37. With a front yard and a pool. But of course I am also a member of a church community that I love very much.

I dedicated a verse to him in this song. I’m not afraid of death, but I feel the same as every other mortal. I enjoy living. Death was defeated by Jesus. We humans still have to get past it. What comes after will be much, much better than we can imagine with our limited powers of imagination. And we don’t have to do much to achieve it. Just try to be good people, love one another, and don’t give hatred any space in this world. That way, we’re covered.