Einstürzende Neubauten
Haus der Lüge

Important notice to navigators: considering the length of my review (which I intended to shorten, but then decided to leave as is), if you want to read only about music, skip the Prolog entirely, and dive directly into the reading of the Epilog.

If, however, you find my ramblings somehow perversely interesting, and want to kill time (people are strange…), I introduce you without further delay to my

PROLOG:

Wir könnten, aber…. (We could, but….)

“Live in such a way that you can wish to relive this same life in eternal repetition." (F. Nietzsche)

They never left.

They have been up there from time immemorial and have witnessed the unfolding of History.

Their presence in the changing sky comes as an intuition; after all, on this side of existence, certainties are abolished.

Sometimes they stop to greet you with a nod and a smile, perched up high on the golden Siegessäule, which with wings spread dominates hieratic and detached the Groβer Stern, the pulsating crossroads of the Tiergarten, or accompany you, silent and bewildered like yourself, to Potsdamer Platz, where now lofty buildings of daring architectures rise, but until just yesterday a stretch of gray mud reigned, the No Man's Land, littered with anti-personnel mines.

Thirty years are yesterday, for an angel.

Here I am a stranger, and yet everything is so familiar. In any case, you can't get lost: you always end up at the Wall.

Although the Wall, in its tangible matter, has fallen.

Because the Wall goes beyond physical tangibility: it marked the history and geography of the city, it shaped every single square centimeter, and it remained deeply engraved in the hearts and collective consciousness.

Berlin is destined not to leave anyone indifferent, it invades you and conquers you.

It holds within itself the miserable fragments of two opposing ideologies that, colliding and imploding, have erased references, moved cardinal points, instilling the strong doubt that freedom does not find a home within any ideology. Do not confuse ideal and ideology, streng verboten!

Every day it stages, parallel to the Great History, the negligible and incidental story of many faceless men and women, telling of the fragmentation of the Self, the despair necessary for resurrection, in the most abstruse and suggestive ways, bordering on madness: themes dear to much contemporary and modern German literature, and not only (see “Steppenwolf” by Hesse or the unsettling stories of Dürrenmatt, just to cite the first ones that come to mind), intuited and developed by the theories of Freud and Jung, pointed out and refined by the thoughts of Nietzsche and Adorno, expressed by the deconstructed music of Schönberg.

It manages to melt and be reborn continuously, harmonizing its contradictions and maintaining until now unchanged and intact the spirit that makes it, rightly, the thinking heart of Central Europe, reaching towards the future.

While I am immersed in these thoughts, accompanied only by my steps along the avenues, I am distracted and brought back to the present by the noise coming from one of the many construction sites, the Baustellen, literally “construction (de)sites,” always open in this city.

EPILOG:

Destroy harmony, and you will destroy the social structure.

“Untergeschoss: die ist die Keller, hier lebe ich. Der Keller ist dunkel, feucht und angenehm. Hier lebe ich. Dies hier ist dunkel, die ist ein Schoβ.” (Basement: this is the cellar, it is here that I live. Here it is dark, damp, and pleasant, it is a womb.)

This reminds me that noise is the main reason I am here.

After the tribute that does not duly honor one of the cities I love most, and after having set you in the necessary background context, it is high time to bring on stage the elegant and composed Herr Christian Emmerich, from Friedenau, West Berlin, enclave of the Federal Republic of Germany before Reunification - known to most under the pseudonym of Blixa Bargeld – along with his adventurous companions der Chung, die Unruh, die Einheit, and die Hacke. I think there is no need to say more.

He and his creation Einstürzende Neubauten, the famous cult experimental industrial-noise band born at the beginning of the eighties. Techno-bunker, one might say. Almost deafening, with a side of pneumatic drills, grinders, and strange self-produced instruments assembled with imagination. But this you already know.

I will just say that Einstürzende perfectly embody the idea of Berlin: avant-garde, movement, creativity, fluidity, eclecticism, and I will try to tell you, with all my limitations, about one of the episodes of their old discography that I prefer: “Haus der Lüge”, the House of Lies, released in the very distant 1989, pre-fall of the Wall.

The album opens with a powerful “Prolog”, with Blixa declaiming, in his clean and piercing Hochdeutsch, a mad monologue, interspersed with explosions of white noise, of criticism and rejection of capitalism that permeates everything, including the music industry, and tends to pass any thing or idea through a big shredder, to return it pre-digested to us, in a bland and insipid mash: “Meint ihr nicht: wir könnten unterschreiben, auf dass uns ein bis zwei Prozent gehören, und Tausende uns hörig sind. Wir könnten, aber….” (“Don’t you think we could sign, for us to own one to two percent, and thousands to be our slaves? We could, but….”).

The prologue drops us directly into the second post-nuclear disaster track, “Feurio!”. A solipsistic dance in the mirror, reflecting back an automaton, a deprived and disconnected being, victim of a broken idyll with Time, which slips from our hands and no longer belongs to us, and a complaisant and complicit orphan of Nature's comfort. The wicked König Feurio, a king of fire, a monstrous being made of pure energy, born from the melting of the core, always reminded me closely of another very famous character (for those who frequent German literature), the Erlkönig, the Elf King. A true old-fashioned vilain, who goes around kidnapping children and losing men, villainous protagonist of a ballad by Goethe, set to music among others also by Schubert, in his “Lied D 328”: in my opinion, is not entirely unrelated to this neubautian affair, but it's just my supposition…. I don't know who Marinus is, but he looms throughout the song, despite his proven innocence (“Marinus, Marinus, hörst du mich? Marinus, Marinus, du warst es nicht. Es war König Feurio!” – “Marinus, Marinus, can you hear me? Marinus, Marinus, it was not you. It was King Feurio!”).

It continues with the malevolent chant “Ein Stuhl in der Hölle” (“A Chair in Hell”), disturbing, hypnotic, punctuated by what at first seems almost like hand-clapping, but turns out to be a tap dance! Never take anything for granted, with Bargeld around; he's always been a sly old fox, even from a young age.

More technical noise and industrial-wave-dark atmospheres, which will later be plundered extensively by many bands - not least in my opinion the early Depeche Mode, - in the title track “Haus der Lüge”, the House of Lies, in which each floor is a subsequent and more serious stage of falsehood, in a parallel with the circles of Dante's Inferno. And, as a Charon in notes, this song has the task of closing the first part of the record, made of noise (if we want even dancey), to ferry us into the long Epilog of the album.

After the very brief “Epilog, the discourse immediately becomes very different from the beginning: “Fiat Lux” is suspended, dilated, it reminds me of the atmospheres of “Ummagumma” by the Floyd in an urban-industrial sauce.

“Hirnlego” and “Schwindel” are separate, alienated and alienating episodes, obsessive, repetitive, that estrange the listener as much as the alarm clock ringing on Monday morning… “Hirnlegohirnlegohirnlegohirnlego”… the brain built with Lego bricks.

The record ideally closes with “Der Kuss”, the farewell kiss, which suggests significantly, rightly, the influence exerted by Blixa in the compositional process of his mad friend Nick Cave, another cultured genius, already beatified and in the smell of dark sanctity. Here a slide guitar, interspersed with many noises, evokes the fragility of this ephemeral moment, the kiss, long as a wing flutter, the dissolution of the self to merge into someone else.

Finally, we return to the scene with two different remix versions of “Feurio!”, enjoyable, and we close the door behind us, delighted, of the House of Lies, at least until the next listen.

I really told you everything. Now I can return to immerse myself in my thoughts and walk along the streets of my beloved city, following in the footsteps of Damiel and Cassiel, who always keeps a bit aside. Heading to Alexanderplatz, with the Fehrnsehturm towering high in the Berlin skyline as a reference.

Aufwiedersehen!

THE END:

“How should I live? Maybe this is not the problem at all. How should I think. I know so little, maybe because I'm always curious. Sometimes I think wrongly, because I think as if I were talking to someone else at the same time”.