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Post by pieter on Dec 5, 2021 16:25:04 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 5, 2021 16:34:05 GMT -7
When I hear her songs I feel the Central Europe of the eighties, the Cold War, West Germany and East Germany, a certain atmosphere in which elements of Hamburg, Berlin and the DDR are present. She was an East-German girl and woman who moved to West Germany.
Nina Hagen was born in what was then East Berlin, East Germany, the daughter of Hans Hagen (also known as Hans Oliva-Hagen), a scriptwriter, and Eva-Maria Hagen (née Buchholz), an actress and singer. Her father Hans survived the Holocaust, being held as a prisoner at a prison in Moabit between 1941 to 1945 until the liberation by the Soviets. Her paternal grandfather Hermann Carl Hagen, who was Jewish, was murdered at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on May 28th, 1942, at the age of 56. Hedwig Elise Caroline Staadt, Nina's paternal grandmother, was also murdered at Sachsenhausen. Nina's maternal grandfather Fritz Buchholz died during World War II. Her parents divorced when she was two years old, and growing up, she saw her father infrequently. At age four, she began to study ballet, and was considered an opera prodigy by the time she was nine.
When Hagen was 11, her mother married Wolf Biermann, an anti-establishment singer-songwriter. Biermann's political views later influenced young Hagen. Hagen left school at age sixteen and went to Poland, where she began her career. She later returned to Germany and joined the cover band, Fritzens Dampferband (Fritz's Steamboat Band), together with Achim Mentzel and others. She added songs by Janis Joplin and Tina Turner to the "allowable" set lists during shows. From 1972 to 1973, Hagen enrolled in the crash-course performance program at The Central Studio for Light Music in East Berlin. Upon graduating, she joined the band Automobil.
In East Germany, she performed with the band Automobil, becoming one of the country's best-known young stars. Her most famous song from the early part of her career was "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (You Forgot the Colour Film)", with words by Kurt Demmler to music by Michael Heubach, a subtle dig mocking the sterile, gray, Communist state, in 1974. Hagen performed comic songs like "Hatschi-Waldera" and "Was denn" in Karel Gott´s Czech TV show in Slaný. and "Wir tanzen Tango" in 1976. Her musical career in the DDR was cut short, when she and her mother left the country in 1976, following the expulsion of her stepfather.
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Post by pieter on Dec 5, 2021 16:42:26 GMT -7
1976–1979: Migration to West Germany and Nina Hagen Band
The circumstances surrounding the family's emigration were exceptional: Biermann was granted permission by East German authorities to perform a televised concert in Cologne, but denied permission to re-cross the border to his adopted home country. Hagen submitted an application to leave the country. In it, she claimed to be Biermann's biological daughter, and threatened to become "the next" Wolf Biermann if not allowed to rejoin her father. Just four days later her request was granted, and she settled in Hamburg, where she was signed to a CBS-affiliated record label. Her label advised her to acclimatise herself to Western culture through travel, and she arrived in London during the height of the punk rock movement. Hagen was quickly taken up by a circle that included The Slits.
Back in Germany by mid-1977, Hagen formed the Nina Hagen Band in West Berlin's Kreuzberg district. In 1978 they released their self-titled debut album, Nina Hagen Band, which included the single "TV-Glotzer" (a cover of "White Punks on Dope" by The Tubes, though with entirely different German lyrics), and "Auf'm Bahnhof Zoo", about West Berlin's then-notorious Berlin Zoologischer Garten station. The album also included a version of "Rangehn" ("Go for It"), a song she had previously recorded in East Germany, but with different music.
In the late 1970s the rear of the Berlin Zoologischer Garten station facing Jebensstraße was a meeting point for rent-boys, teen runaways, and drug addicts.
The debut album gained significant attention throughout Germany and abroad, both for its hard rock sound and for Hagen's theatrical vocals which drew heavily from her operatic training, far different from the straightforward singing of her East German recordings. However, relations between Hagen and the other band members deteriorated over the course of the subsequent European tour, and Hagen decided to leave the band in 1979, though she was still under contract to produce a second album. This LP, Unbehagen (which in German also means "discomfort" or "unease"), was eventually produced with the band recording their tracks in Berlin and Hagen recording the vocals in Los Angeles. It included the single "African Reggae" and "Wir Leben Immer... Noch", a German language cover of Lene Lovich's "Lucky Number". The other band members, sans Hagen, soon developed a successful independent musical career as Spliff.
Meanwhile, Hagen's public persona was steadily creating media uproar. She became infamous for an appearance on an Austrian evening talk show called Club 2, on 9 August 1979, on the topic of youth culture, when she demonstrated (while clothed, but explicitly) various female masturbation positions and became embroiled in a heated argument with other panelists, in particular, writer and journalist Humbert Fink. The talk show host, Dieter Seefranz, had to step down following this controversy.
She also acted with Dutch rocker Herman Brood and singer Lene Lovich in the 1979 film Cha Cha. Brood and Hagen would have a long romantic relationship that would end when Hagen could no longer tolerate Brood's drug abuse. She would refer to Brood as her "soulmate" long after Brood committed suicide in 2001.
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Post by pieter on Dec 5, 2021 16:48:59 GMT -7
Her Dutch link was Herman Brood
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Post by pieter on Dec 5, 2021 16:58:42 GMT -7
My favorite Nina Hagen songs are;
- "Auf'm Bahnhof Zoo" - "Naturträne" - "Auf'm Friedhof"
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Post by karl on Dec 6, 2021 10:25:06 GMT -7
Pieter
It is most enlighten of your research and presentation of the history of Nina Hagen. I was for some reason, did not know she was of the former DDR and certainly would not hold that against her, for non of us was ever given the choice of place of birth.
Karl
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