Nothing new from the monster

It began on May 23, 2023 at 3:54 a.m. and 50 seconds. A post by Shelby Lynn appeared on Reddit with the title "Fuck Rammstein", containing pictures of bruises and descriptions of memory lapses and a sexual advance by Till Lindemann at the Rammstein concert in Vilnius. (Image 1)


The accusation: Shelby Lynn had been drugged and fed to Till Lindemann so that he could sleep with her under the stage during a concert break. Shelby posts an angry, indignant text in the Rammstein forum on the social media site, responds to comments and interacts with other users. The thread explodes: within a few hours, there are hundreds of comments, with quite a few calling on Shelby to contact the authorities immediately. She wrote at the time that she didn't want to go to the police until later: She wanted to wait until her mother woke up the next morning before pressing charges. She was worried that no one at the authorities spoke English. However, she is very active on Reddit. The Rammstein concert in Vilnius has been over for about five hours at this point.

However, viewers of the new documentary "Rammstein - Die Reihe Null" do not learn anything about this actual big bang of the Rammstein scandal. Here, Shelby's first public statement on the subject is a Twitter post three days after the concert. The fact that Shelby made a detailed online statement about the alleged crime hours after the alleged crime is not mentioned at all, although this would certainly be important for understanding the case. The makers of the documentary were also well informed about this fact: Daniel Drepper, one of the reporters involved, was in exchange via chat with one of the administrators of the Rammstein forum on Reddit in relation to Shelby's Reddit posts.

What is also not mentioned is a report in a local Lithuanian newspaper (Link 1), in which a spokeswoman for the Vilnius police is quoted: the police had been called on May 23, but Shelby had told the officers that she had no information to give. No charges were filed at the time. By then, Shelby had already posted numerous comments on Reddit, stating that she had "documented everything" (image 2), but had not even considered going to the hospital (image 3). So: On the one hand, Shelby wants to collect as much evidence as possible, but on the other hand she doesn't go to the police or the hospital first, doesn't even think of it, but turns to the Internet first. She was by no means anonymous there: her face and name were visible to all viewers on her accounts. The often-heard argument that victims of sexual assault are afraid of contacting the authorities because it would make them recognizable can therefore only be applied to a limited extent here. This fact is at least remarkable, but it simply does not appear in the documentary.

In any case, the widely publicized half-hour special broadcast by the investigative magazine Panorama does not provide any new insights. Larger blocks of the program consist of an interview with Shelby Lynn. However, this interview is over half a year old: it was published by the BBC on June 8, 2023. (Link 2) There is no reference to the original broadcast date or to the actual source, namely the British broadcaster. The only reference can be found in the first sentence of the documentary: "Northern Ireland's Shelby Lynn, two weeks after the Rammstein concert that changed her life." For the average viewer of the documentary, however, this conversation with the main culprit must inevitably seem much more contemporary, as large parts of this new documentary are based on it. In order to realize that they are being served cold coffee, the average viewer will have to pay particular attention to the protagonist's hair color: Still black in the interview with the red streak in her bangs, completely red in recent pictures.

I remember well the first days of this scandal, which I followed as closely as Shelby's posting frequency allowed via the Internet. On May 24, before Shelby's first Twitter post, I wrote her an Instagram message in which I also urged her to contact the police as soon as possible (image 4). I was deeply shocked by the apparent cruelty with which this was allegedly being carried out.


The so-called "Row Zero" has been no secret since February 2020 at the latest: At the time, Till Lindemann went on tour in Europe with his side project, the band LINDEMANN, which he had founded together with Swedish metal musician Peter Tägtgren. At the end of the concerts, he again showed a backstage video of a Rammstein show, which shows him having sex with two women, presumably groupies, during the now infamous concert break in what is now known as the "Suckbox". The instrumental DJ set, during which Lindemann is under the stage, lasts five minutes. During this time, he lets the women satisfy him orally, penetrates them, pulls his pants up again and returns to the stage to sing the song "Deutschland". The procedure is filmed in the style of a silent movie, the playback speed is increased, film grain and black-and-white effects are superimposed on the shots, which appear ridiculous due to the acceleration, and silly piano music plays. The live audience at the Lindemann concert claps along to the beat while marveling at the oversized penis of the singer, who was already approaching 60 at the time, on the screen.

Even then, the reaction within the fan community was very divided. Discussions about the so-called "groupie system", the Row Zero, were a regular occurrence from this point on at the latest. That Till Lindemann, with the help of specially hired casting directors, invited young women of a certain type to after-show parties to have sex with them. Was this video, which was shown live during a concert, just provocative or already tasteless? And isn't it rather pathetic when an ageing rock star fervently throws himself into the musty, macho cliché of "sex, drugs, rock'n'roll" and apparently boasts about it to his fans? The idea that a sixty year old man employs his own staff to regularly lay women in their early twenties in front of him is ridiculous and sad. This absurd behavior does not make the Rammstein singer likeable. But is it illegal?

It is the comeback of a well-known problem bear that has been the subject of public debate only half-heartedly and with reservations and prejudices: the sexual dynamic between star and fan, the groupie culture that has been an integral part of the music industry in particular for over fifty years. In 1996, Iggy Pop sang the lines "I slept with Sable when she was 13 / Her parents were too rich to do anything", referring to Sable Starr, who became famous in the 1970s as an underage groupie of musicians such as David Bowie and Rod Stewart. In the 1970s, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler gained guardianship of the then sixteen-year-old Julia Holcomb with parental permission so that he could take her on tour across US state borders. In contrast, the accusations against Rammstein, which are addressed in the documentary, seem almost toothless.

What is described here? NDR interviews Anna Yakina, who is introduced as a Russian music manager who, among other things, accompanied the side project "Lindemann" on tour. She describes how fans were led into the dressing room of Till Lindemann, who then locked the door behind him. This seemed strange to her. What the NDR does not report: Anna Yakina is not just some random eyewitness, but was on the Lindemann tour 2020 for a very specific reason. She is the partner of Peter Tägtgren, who spearheaded the project together with Till Lindemann. (Image 5) The two artists ended their collaboration in 2020. So here the partner of the former band colleague, who has apparently fallen out with the protagonist, is interviewed without any reference to this relationship.


Regardless of this, however, what she describes is perhaps unsympathetic, but in no way legally relevant. Shelby Lynn was never able to substantiate the allegation that she had been drugged, but repeatedly stated that Lindemann never touched her when she refused to have sex with him. Other women described the sexual experience with Lindemann as unpleasant in retrospect, but also stated that the sex had been consensual.

One interviewee said, "It wasn't a situation in which I could have said no". This sentence remains uncommented, but it is questionable how this is meant. Was it a feeling or a fact? What did she base her inability to say no on? Shelby Lynn was allegedly able to do so despite the suspected influence of drugs, and nothing happened to her. Kayla Shyx described how she left the after-show party early without any problems when the situation seemed strange to her.

There is also an account of the 2020 Lindemann tour by singer Jadu Laciny, who is not suspected of leading anti-feminist campaigns: Jadu accompanied the tour for a month and a half as a support act. What she describes is diametrically opposed to the statement made by the wife of the former creative partner: the doors were always open, Lindemann and his entourage were "respectful, polite and careful with people". Please note: Jadu Laciny and Anna Yanika both describe the same concert tour. (Picture 6 & 7)


Again, not a word about this in the NDR documentary, although the Panorama editors who produced the half-hour documentary were undoubtedly well informed about these statements and connections. Wouldn't it be the job of an investigative research team to communicate such contradictions openly? Why was this not done? Wouldn't there have been time to tell this in the documentary? If time constraints were the reason for omitting such relevant comments, I would have a suggestion to make to NDR: one or two pieces of original sound material from Rammstein fans could have been omitted.

Here the feeling arises that the selection of fans who are allowed to speak in the documentary is based on a specific, clichéd image of the common Rammstein fan. Largely disinterested to dismissive men, at least one of whom is obviously mentally impaired, are allowed to speak as representatives of an already coarse, primitive, German-minded community of listeners of the evil Teutonic band.

The recordings of fan interviews took place before the concerts in Berlin's Olympiastadion. I also accompanied a reporter from the RBB to a shoot at the Olympic Stadium. (picture 8)


The picture I got of the visitors there differs from what I see in the documentary. On site, I mainly encountered very thoughtful men who credibly expressed their moral struggles. Among them were younger people, including many queer people. One guest who had dressed up as Till Lindemann stuck in my mind. When asked about the demonstration that was taking place a few hundred meters away, he expressed his understanding and even his support for the protesters there. He understood that his favorite band was becoming a symbol of a very relevant debate. In fact, I experienced more dismissive, trivializing comments about the Lindemann case from the female concertgoers.

Of course, this is anecdotal evidence, the NDR may simply have encountered other people, and I don't want to claim that there weren't a lot of defiant, potentially reactionary machos among the tens of thousands of visitors who thought it was all a conspiracy against their favorite band. Because I don't believe in such a conspiracy either, on the contrary, I would consider it completely illusory to assume that.

The public perception of Rammstein has changed significantly over the last ten years. The German media has finally forgiven the band for becoming the most successful cultural export of the millennium. Culture editors up and down the country had to learn from the artificially generated scandal surrounding the music video for "Deutschland" at the latest, when the domestic media public willfully ran into the trap that the band had dug for them. There was a state of emergency in the German feuilleton: certain protagonists were forced to openly admit that they had made a mistake. Rammstein were less the unpopular, the uncomfortable, the truth-tellers in the sense of the AfD's Robin Hood romanticism. On the contrary, they were much more like everybody's darling. Endowed with prestigious music prizes, viewed with benevolence by cultural journalists, part of the mainstream with film premieres at the Volksbühne, their own programs on public radio and popular book publications by renowned publishing houses. After actions such as waving the rainbow flag during a concert in Poland, the band could even be said to have a progressive image.

My guess is that it is about completely different impulses: the tearing down of icons in a cultural battle of "old against young". In principle, this is not a new phenomenon. The fact that old monuments are smashed in order to create new role models and figureheads has always been part of socio-cultural development. The difference, however, is the methodology, which has been radicalized by technological progress. By offering the individual the potential to gain enormous power, the inviolability of the icon is gradually being undermined. Today, it is no longer unthinkable that works of their time are altered to adapt to a new zeitgeist. So far, these debates have been conducted almost exclusively on children's books, from which outdated vocabulary is to be eradicated. This courage to be revisionist degrades these books to the status of commodity literature that has to submit to the public. The new should no longer just replace the old, but substitute it or even swallow it up. It is the desire to overthrow the king, the same impulse that fascinates royalists about the turmoil of relations in the British royal family. It is gossip and gloating, schadenfreude by more extreme means.

But something else is not entirely irrelevant either. Let's ask ourselves the question: why is the story about Till Lindemann being rehashed when the legal facts have long been known and practically no new findings have emerged since the fall of 2023? It can't be the duration of the research, as all the information that has been uncovered has been publicly available for a long time. Rather, it seems as if the aim is to recall the case. But why should we do that? The upcoming Rammstein concert tour can't be the reason for this; after all, it doesn't help the NDR if fewer tickets are sold for these concerts. So why else should we remember Till Lindemann right now?

I don't want to imply anything, I don't know the people involved and only have a very superficial insight into the processes behind the handling of this scandal. But it is remarkable that Daniel Drepper, who has been in charge of this research since the beginning and was also significantly involved in the new NDR documentary, is publishing a book in a few weeks' time: "Row Zero - Violence and Abuse of Power in the Music Industry" is due to be published at the end of May. And of course this could be a happy coincidence, but Daniel Drepper will certainly not be unhappy that his own documentary on the subject of his book was shown in a prominent slot on public television shortly before his book was published.

27.03.24
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB