Einstürzende Neubauten

“War Does Not Break Out—It Waits”

A Conversation with Blixa Bargeld

In 2011, the Region of Flanders and the City of Diksmuide asked you to write a piece to be performed in 2014, commemorating the outbreak of World War I one hundred years before. What interested you about this idea?

Nothing, I didn’t want to do it at all, but the rest of the band outvoted me. I had no relationship with World War I, nor any other war. The prospect of immersing myself in the subject of war for several years seemed very unpleasant to me. After all, nobody within the band does that work for me. And so it was. After we started, my first impulse was to drop the project immediately.

Instead, you asked a historian and a literary scholar to find material…

I gave them clear instructions what they were to search for, aspects that were not so well-known and overdone—I didn’t just want to repeat familiar things, such as the trenches, mud and mire. Working with all those many sources and the academics made it clear to me that the issue was no longer World War I, it is war in general.

Among your most extraordinary finds are audio recordings of prisoners from a German prisoner-of-war camp. Tell us about those.

We found them in the sound archive of Humboldt University here in Berlin: German linguists had made prisoners of war from all over the world read texts, certain passages from the Bible, usually the parable of the prodigal son, in order to analyze those recordings. Apparently this Bible text existed in many different translations. Their voices were preserved on wax cylinders and records and are available today as digital files—an absolute treasure trove. Incidentally, the sound archive’s guest book showed that only a day before me, the BBC had been visiting. So we were in good company.

On stage, you hold very small loudspeakers from which these voices emanate. You have said that these recordings must be treated with kid gloves. What do you mean by that?

The recordings were made by prisoners of war, persons in a position of in voluntary confinement and coercion. We could not just have used them like any sample, that would have felt like a lack of respect. Holding the loudspeaker cubes in our hands, we set the voices free within the space, and that seems an appropriate way to treat them.

You let the voices resound to a piece of music that is also about the parable of the prodigal son.

Yes, that was an incredible coincidence: Diksmuide, of all places, is the burial place of a Renaissance composer named Jacobus Clemens non Papa, and he wrote this motet about the prodigal son. That opened a door in a nice way. I slowed the piece down considerably and transformed it from a vocal octet to a string quartet. This is accompanied by the old recordings of the voices.

There was another astonishing rediscovery, the Harlem Hellfighters. Who were they?

They were the music band of the 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment, in which only African-Americans served and which was “lent” to the French because racial segregation in the U.S. meant that white American officers were not supposed to take command. The Germans reverently called them the Harlem Hellfighters.

In LAMENT, you use two of the band’s pieces, On Patrol in No Man’s Land and All of No Man’s Land Is Ours.

Those were all we could find. There aren’t any old records, I got these recordings online. The original record with both songs was released in 1919, right after the war, even before Louis Armstrong had made his first record. That is truly proto-jazz, probably before the term “jazz” was ever marketed.

The text deals immediately with war experiences. One line is: “Bang, there’s a German Minenwerfer coming…”

I suspect these lines were written practically in the trenches. In All of No Man’s Land Is Ours, on the other hand, they return home victorious; it’s almost cynical, for their homeland was still segregated, but there they were, painting a utopian, optimistic image of marriage, bungalows, and flower garlands.

And where did you find that crazy Joseph Plaut, who recreated the beginning of World War I using animal voices?

In the radio archives of the ARD. What was interesting to me was that there are no actual recordings from World War I. All the noises we know from old battlefield footage were added later, for at the time it was impossible to record directly in the field. This means that we believe things are documentary which really aren’t. After the war, there were lots of recordings that in hindsight glorified daily life during the war, but there was also Joseph Plaut, who imitated animal voices, and who ended his performance with Hitler as early as 1926, when Hitler was still small fry. Incredible. I could not pass this up.

The most personal piece in LAMENT is How Did I Die, the only number that is not based on historical events—and that still does not end with death. How did this piece develop?

There is a nice poem by Tucholsky, Die rote Melodie (“The Red Melody”). It describes how the dead of World War I return to attack those responsible for the great dying. I liked that idea, I wanted to turn around the atmosphere of my song, in exactly that manner, so that it would not end with death.

There are songs in various languages, including Flemish, for example the piece In De Loopgraaf (“In the Trenches”), which is accompanied by a harp made of barbed wire. It was written by one Paul van den Broeck, a volunteer soldier, or so they say. Did he actually exist?

A poet like him might have existed…

What about those absurd telegrams that were exchanged between the German Emperor Wilhelm and the Russian Tsar Nikolaus, the two cousins who supposedly called each other “Willy” and “Nicky”? You recite them on stage with your band colleague Alexander Hacke.

Those are real telegrams. Both of them were directly related, they had the same grandmother, Queen Victoria. And until the outbreak of war, the two of them wrote each other these overblown, well-meaning telegrams, despite the fact that everything was pointing toward war already, both on the Russian and the German side. And yes, they actually called each other “Willy” and “Nicky”!

The second part of the performance features the song Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind, known in English as Where Have All the Flowers Gone. The German version was made famous by Marlene Dietrich, but the song was written by an American, Pete Seeger, in 1955...

Who died the same day we first recorded the piece. The German version has an additional verse, and Seeger, who also spoke German, felt that it was the better one. Incidentally, the additional verse was commissioned by Marlene Dietrich from an Austrian who was a scriptwriter for Billy Wilder.

But that has nothing to do with World War I.

As I said, to me this project soon turned into a project about war in general, not just World War I. One of the impressions I formed during my research is that World War I and II belong together; one is unthinkable without the other, and to me, in a way they are one and the same war.

Early in the piece, there is a line: “War does not break out. It waits.” What do you mean by this?

I always find it very strange when you hear on the news that a war broke out here or there. What does that mean? Was it locked up before? Does it break out like the plague breaks out? It is a strange choice of words. I think that war is always there, always present, but sometimes it is resting.

What did you learn about World War I in the course of working on this piece?

Nobody can tell me anything new about that war. I have accumulated knowledge, that is all I can say. But when everything was done, an incredible burden was taken from my shoulders. I love playing the piece, performing it on stage is absolutely wonderful, but researching it and dealing with the subject was simply very painful.

What is the ideal effect the piece could have?

I am one of that strange species called avant-garde entertainers: I never want to bore people. I don’t think about it didactically. Except that perhaps after the percussion performance, the audience has an idea how long this war was.

In this “percussion version” of World War I, the length of the war for various nations is indicated by beating on tubes representing the different countries.

Exactly. Meaning 120 beats per minute, in 4/4 time. Every beat represents a day of war involvement for the country in question or the alliance. They are all symbolized by plastic tubes of different lengths.

Those 120 beats per minute are a Techno frequency that might seem like an invitation to dance, which seems a bit odd, given the occasion. Was that your intention?

I conceived this at my desk—the implementation of the sound is in the hands of my three colleagues and is somewhat coincidental. In the first performances, though, I did find it strange that some people suddenly started clapping along at another juncture of the piece, where we have created a collage of various old hymns. I thought to myself: are you serious? But that is also the result of a certain ambiguity that runs through the entire piece.

Which you obviously enjoy? Yes, we also enjoy it.

Did you worry that LAMENT might be too “beautiful”, too “aesthetic”?

Is a performance about war permitted to be this entertaining?

What I absolutely did not want was the sound of war, battle noises, all those big bangs. During the preparatory phase, when I didn’t know how to go on, I dreamed of Tom Waits, whom I met twice in my life. In my dream I asked him whether he would help me. The next morning, an American artist friend came to see me, and I told him about my difficulties with this commissioned work. Of all people, he quoted Tom Waits: “You have to make the horrible look beautiful.” I don’t believe it, I thought, that’s how dreams work. And I stuck to this piece of advice: to make the horrible look beautiful.

Are these performances at the Pierre Boulez Saal truly going to be the last three performances of LAMENT?

The piece was written for this commemorative cycle that began in 2014 and now ends naturally in 2018, exactly 100 years after the end of the war. But it’s a stage work—theoretically it can be performed again and again.