In the preface to Till's reprint of Father Werner Lindemann's book, "Mike Oldfield in a Rocking Chair," he wrote: "Life does not bind father and son with a rope, They must swim along the river of time And often drown, As happened to the two royal children." This short poem refers to a German folk ballad in which the conflict between generations is the ideological key point.
The relationship between son and father was undoubtedly complex, especially since Till's period of growing up coincided with radical changes in social life, which further exacerbated certain contradictions between them.
In the afterword to the publication, Till writes: "He has a job, he even has a car, he has music, he has a girlfriend – and at his age I was lying in the trenches... It was always presented to me like that. He regularly made me feel guilty, at the very least, he put himself on a pedestal in relation to me: I shouldn't complain."
Disputes about the war, the premonition of the collapse of the socialist system, the new wave in culture, including music, created the ground for conflict, but after reading this book, you understand that the father values Till and deeply experiences the difficulties of their relationship.
Gitta Lindemann later said that if Werner had not died in 1993, a closer relationship would have developed between him and Till, and this is proven by the fact that Till nevertheless republished the book, which at first caused him outrage.
"I found this extremely unpleasant. I saw it as a close examination of my life. And he just laid it out without asking me. He could have at least shown it to me beforehand. He simply presented me with a fait accompli, of course, it was outrageous."
"I first read it properly in 1993, after my father's death. Even then, I found it all rather unfair. I still thought it was nothing but hidden malice directed at me. Only now, on the occasion of this reprint, have I truly read it consciously and intensively, with a desire to understand and open up to the book."
It is quite natural that in his collection of poems, “On a Quiet Night,” Till touchingly recalls his father.
Vatertag
Tag für Tag und Stund um Stunde
fließt dein Blut durch meine Venen
in Minuten und Sekunden
verdünnt mit Angst und kalten Tränen
Du treibst in deiner Einsamkeit
Allein auf hoher See
Und rufst mir Worte in den Wind
Die ich nicht versteh
Wo bist du
Hab deine Augen im Gesicht
ich kenne dich
kenn dich nicht
trag dein Blut mit mir umher
Ich kenne dich
kenn dich nicht mehr
Du treibst in deiner Einsamkeit
Allein auf tiefer See
nachts im Traum stehst du vor mir
du tust mir nicht mehr weh
Wo bist du.
FATHER'S DAY
Day after day and hour after hour
Your blood flows in my veins
In minutes, seconds of happiness
You dissolve the anxiety of the cold of tears
You drive away your loneliness with force
You go alone into the open sea
You shout to me the words you want to say something
But I don't hear them through the wind and rain
Where are you?.. My eyes are yours, my face is yours
I know youI don't know you
Your blood rushes into my ardent heart
I know you
I don't know you anymore
You drive away your loneliness with force
You go alone into the open sea
At night in my dreams you come to me again
You don't hurt me like you hurt me during the day...
This interview with Gitta Lindemann, Till’s mother, was conducted in 2020 for the book “BEICHTE: Ein Lebensbericht”, an autobiography of Werner Lindemann, Till’s father. I only translated the parts referring to Till as the interview is quite long.
Carsten Gansel : The first memory switched between the present to the year 1941. "An icy January day forty-one", it says. «A newspaper has offered an apprenticeship for a farm apprentice. “So the narrator - and in this case the narrator is the author Werner Lindemann - talks about his youth. In 1941 he was 15 years old. And later it is about the experience of war and post-war. These were important parts for him, which he now brought out at the beginning of the 1980s.
Gitta Lindemann : Yes, that was very important to him and the family did not always understand that. A family that had nothing to do with this past and also wanted nothing more to do with it. But for him, for Werner, that was important, which is understandable. Because he was 17/18 and he has seen terrible things. And he always had to get it off his chest or just write it down. And his son always said or thought, "The war stories again". But that also shaped him, the son, Till, of course, that is clear.
(…)
GL: We then moved to Rostock. I actually wanted to go to Berlin. I wanted to go to the Funkhaus Berlin and could have worked there too. But Werner said, "Berlin is out of the question at all". Dresden would be another variant. But in the end Rostock was closer, also because our son went to the children's and youth sports school in Rostock and went to boarding school there.
CG: Your son, Till, was a swimmer at the KJS, the children's and youth sports school, and he had a tough swim training there.
GL: Yes, « im Wasser verbrannt » (« burned in the water »), he wrote later. Another wrong decision that I deeply regret. Yes, so now we lived together in Rostock. At this point in time we already had the house in Drispeth. We went there every weekend and we spent our holidays there exclusively. But my husband stayed longer, longer, longer, longer, until he finally lived there entirely and we only visited him on weekends. I came, cleaned, we received guests, I cleaned again, and we drove home. Sometimes Werner came to Rostock. That was our life. Maybe that's why it lasted so long. We were together and apart. Our home was the house in Drispeth.
CG: But weekend marriages are a phenomenon in their own right. And there is also something else, with people who are creative, that they just need their freedom.
GL: Yes, you have to understand that. If an idea was bothering him, he didn't want to take part in our conversations, then he withdrew. That's something that his son accuses him to this day: "He didn't care about me, not at all," he says.
CG: Is he right? How do you see it today, decades later?
GL: Maybe it really was like that. I didn't feel that way back then. Werner was out and about a lot at that time, to meetings, to readings, and mostly he sat at his desk, only to lapse into wild activism. «Let's go into the forest, collect wood». We needed a lot of firewood for our many and beautiful campfires.
CG: And in the beautiful book from 1988, "Mike Oldfield in the rocking chair", it is also about his son, who is called Timm here and who is around 19, in the high phase of adolescence. It is well known that conflicts with parents, especially with fathers, can be very strong at this time. And that can also be found in the text. Very different views of life collide, and it can be assumed that this was also the case in reality at the time, i.e. at the beginning of the 1980s. That what is being told here is to a certain extent authentic, even autobiographical.
GL: Yes it is. He could seldom understand how the son was doing. That he always has to sleep late on the weekend and does stupid things and provokes and spits cherry stones in his grandfather's face, his beloved grandfather. He couldn't understand that. But Till was also a difficult child who refused to submit. And that's why there was such competition between the men. And, of course, Werner was also hurt when he saw no sign of Till having thoughts similar to his. But where was he supposed to get it from when he was 19? But he would have liked to talk to him so much, in harmony with his feelings. Still, he believed in his son. I have heard from him very often: he will write one day!
CG: The need is understandable, but it is actually based on the wrong assumptions. The boys have to settle down first, and if they don't, the risk of failure is much greater. Today we know much better how this can only be measured over long periods of time. The so-called elderly must first offer the young the opportunities to develop themselves, that means they have to give them freedom. And of course this also includes the contradiction, young and old do not have to have the same opinion. On the contrary, that would be fatal.
GL: Yes, but it was difficult for Werner, because there were conflicts.
CG: But the conflict was probably settled when the son Till or Timm finally moved out after nine months (note: actually 2 years and the conflict wasn’t settled).
GL: Yes, and then he moved here, to this village.
CG: So here too. So you are all in this place, so to speak. You, your son, your daughter.
GL: Yes. Everything is bundled here.
CG: And as I know, Timm from the text really likes to come to this area, that is to Mecklenburg.
GL: He loves it, because it grounds him, he says. Of course he doesn't say that, but he says, "I feel good here". Now I can't walk around the lake anymore, and he said, "I'll drive you". In the meadow, between the lakes, he stops and says: “When I'm here, that's my happiness. I don't need anything else. »
(...)
CG: But, as we have already spoken of, this is definitely something that occurs more often in families, especially when - let's say - two intellectuals or two creative spirits have something to do with each other and are a family. But there is certainly also the fact that men tend to take themselves too seriously. That was also the case for your husband, Werner Lindemann.
GL: Of course, that was definitely the case, of course. And that was something that naturally got on the nerves of 19-year-old Till.
CG: I think it is relatively easy to explain that in the 1950s and definitely also in the 1960s the channels of advancement for purely young people - today one would say from underprivileged classes - radically opened up. Most of the old elites were gone, and these places that society needed had to be filled again.
GL: Yes, exactly. And that was exactly what was great, great luck for Werner. And he has not forgotten that either, which is why he could never be so rigorous against this state. He saw and experienced the possibilities that were presented to him.
CG: Absolutely. This is also something to keep in mind when evaluating the GDR and its history. Biographies are tied to it. And, if you forget that, only simplifications and clichés come out.
GL: Exactly, and my son never realized that, so he couldn't understand it.
CG: Whereby young people or the generation we're talking about now, who were "born into" the GDR, as it was called in a volume of poetry by Uwe Kolbe, I think they couldn't see it that way. At least not back then, you will probably only recognize that after a while, that requires a certain amount of life experience. Can your son, Till, understand that now?
GL: No, he's standing on the same level as the defiant 19-year-old son, that hasn't changed, and the tragedy is that the two of them couldn't talk to each other anymore. Now I think they'd have a wonderful relationship. And Werner, he would admire his son very much because he just went further in what he did, because he is more courageous. He doesn't care how he's judged, and Werner never cared about it.
CG: Indeed, I think that is a very important point that you are making. That in the moment when man or woman, when young or old adjust to what they believe others will like, one's own ego withers, one becomes conformed, and one is lost for certain professional groups. I think that applies to writing in any case. You can't write when your main goal is to please others. And it's the same in music, you have to consistently see your way.
GL: And don't give a damn about everything that comes up.
CG: Exactly, that can of course lead to failure, but it can also be a reason or the starting point for ultimately being successful. « Her son pulled it off consistently. Adapted things - here and there - do not make any real art », to put it bluntly.
GL: Yes, although I wouldn't say that Werner wrote to please, so it didn't go that far, but of course he was affected if any of the texts were not liked and were not printed, that's normal. It was important for him to question critically and to hide signals between the lines.
CG: Right, I have to be more precise. I didn’t mean that your husband adjusted to please. I meant that in general.
GL: I see.
CG: The question is tied to that: Why did he have to write? He could also have been successful as a teacher or as a cultural house manager.
GL: He tried out a few things, director of the cultural center, for a time he worked on the student newspaper “Forum”, but none of that was for him. He had to be free, spatially and mentally, that sounds absurd in GDR times, but still ... For him, writing was life. Whether diary, poems, prose. He continued to write in hospital after his cancer operation until shortly before his death. His last poem was written four weeks before he died.
CG: You can tell from his “confession” that he came into contact with literature very late.
GL: yes, that's true. He himself kept telling that he actually didn't have a book in his hand until he was 19 and only then began to deal with literature.
CG: Exactly, he read the first book when he was 19, so he had a lot of catching up to do. If you think back, when and how did he work through what had to be done. Had he arrived at some point?
GL: Actually never, not until the end, because he was always aware of what he was missing, that he was missing so much. Then he read the French, the Philosophers, Francis of Assisi, Montaigne. He was always looking. But that is also an advantage if you always need something new to move on. And writing, that was really his life. Get imagination. To give food for thought, to learn to think, "to strengthen the wings of the imagination". For Till it was silly back then to “make a rubbish” - for a rhyme. For Werner it was hard work until, for example, he had the poem in a form that he could leave as it is. One of the obituaries reads: "His worldview was simple, clear and pleasantly naive and his words always had the sound of his own astonishment at what he saw, thought and felt".
CG: But meanwhile, you mentioned it yourself, does your son see it that way too? He knows how long it can take to get a satisfying result.
GL: Yes, of course, although, at least I think, he works differently. Quieter, more lonely, he writes, and then he shows the result. Werner often let many people participate in the process of creation.
CG: Because, I mean, Rammstein lives, not least, from the lyrics by Till Lindemann.
GL: Of course, and they are also very similar. I mean Till and Werner. In many of the texts I read by Till, I think Werner would have said that too. Not in all, but in some. There is this something naive and the attempt to build raised floors. And Werner tried very hard to do that, because of certain experiences and experiences cannot and should not be expressed so clearly.
CG: The simple is not the simple or the trivial, but the simple is precisely what is extremely difficult to do. The double bottom that you talk about, that you manage to pull in on a song, or a lyrical line that sounds very simple at first glance.
GL: And that's for the children, who read it one-to-one, and for adults, who read along with the message.
CG: One more sentence comes to mind in closing. It's about Timm again. The first-person narrator would like to convey his values to his son and let him understand that he cannot live the day like that. You have to do something, you have to have a goal in mind, and as a carpenter you don't earn so well. That doesn't mean a lot of money in the long run. And Timm answers his father with a question: “Do you have to have a savings account under socialism? “This is a beautiful episode where opinions clash. And the son, he was paying close attention!
Found on IG account rammadeus_sohart, something i didn't know:
Werner Lindemann (Till's dad) has a school named after him In Rostock
Here's a link to the school's website
"Werner Lindemann wurde als Sohn einer Landarbeiterfamilie am 7. Oktober 1926 geboren. Nach 1945 studierte er Naturwissenschaften in Halle und war ab 1949 landwirtschaftlicher Berufsschullehrer, danach Dozent und Oberreferent. Mehrfach hielt er Lesungen an Schulen, um Kindern die Poesie näher zu bringen. Durch seine Freundschaft mit der damaligen Schulleiterin Dr. Inge Lange war er sehr oft in der „Grundschule an der Elisabethwiese“ in Rostock zu Gast. Nach seinem Tod am 9. Februar 1993 wurde ihm zu Ehren die Schule am 7. Oktober 1994 in „Werner-Lindemann-Grundschule“ umbenannt.
Der Feier wohnte seine Witwe, die Journalistin Gitta Lindemann, bei.
Mit diesem Namen verbindet sich der Anspruch, den Kindern einen Bezug zur Kunst und Literatur zu eröffnen. Unser Schulleben wird bestimmt durch Buchlesungen, Lesefeste, Theaterbesuche und die Gestaltung des Lindemannbaumes mit eigenen Gedichten, Geschichten und Bildern."
in english
"Werner Lindemann was born into a family of farm workers on October 7, 1926. After 1945 he studied natural sciences in Halle and was an agricultural vocational school teacher from 1949, then lecturer and senior consultant. He held readings at schools several times to bring poetry closer to children. Through his friendship with the headmistress at the time, Dr. Inge Lange, he was very often a guest at the “Elementary School at the Elisabethwiese” in Rostock. After his death on February 9, 1993, the school was renamed "Werner-Lindemann-Grundschule" in his honor on October 7, 1994.
His widow, the journalist Gitta Lindemann, attended the celebration.
This name is associated with the claim to open up a connection to art and literature for the children. Our school life is determined by book readings, reading festivals, visits to the theater and the design of the Lindemann tree with our own poems, stories and pictures."
Hi K! Re-reading your translation of "Mike Oldfield im Schaukelstuhl", November chapter, where "Timm" invites three young friends to stay with him. Werner talks with a young man who smokes, has left home, and is staying with Timm for a while before moving to Berlin. Could that possibly be Sven Kruspe??? Also, for a man who knew every plant and animal in his area, he sure didn't know much about his son -- Werner describes Timm's eyes as grey! They're actually a bright blue-green.
Hey there! Thanks for reading this old, old translation, even though I have not updated it in years 😭 As for whether that is Sven, I lean towards no, because Sven probably couldn't have been independent at the time of Werner's book. Till was nineteen when the majority of the book's events happened, so Sven would've been fifteen; he certainly moved out young, but not quite so young! A lot of young people in the GDR went to Berlin to seek opportunities, so I think Till must've had many encounters like this with many other youths before he met Sven. His hospitality towards some of them made his fortune, after all 🥰
By the time the book came out, Sven and Till would definitely have known each other. I'm not sure if Werner Lindemann ever commented on Sven's existence. As for the eye colour, it may be that Werner was having a YMMV moment (eye colour can change from youth and/or look different under various lightings), or it was artistic license for what he was writing. In that sentence (original German: 'der hohe Schädel, die wulstige Nase, kantige Lippen, blanke, graue, etwas melancholische Augen — mein Junge') he's painting a wistful, incurious, and slightly depressive, image of his son - apt for the occasion, because at that part in the chapter, he's in the middle of dismissing 'Timm' as a cultural philistine! 😅 The facts seen and written by Werner we can trust, his interpretation less so, as is the case with all autobiographies.
Lindemann: I visited him. He was on morphium all the time, and you start to unfurl some things. I had a new girlfriend at the time, who I dragged by the hospital. And the way it goes, then he could be at home once again. You come out of the hospital, you’ve had surgery, had radio therapy, you feel great again and you think it goes uphill again, back and forth. That goes on for about one, two months and then within two or three weeks it’s all over. It was like that for him too. But the visits in Flensburg at the hospital, that was a good, peaceful and quiet time. We even laughed a lot. Then he came home. He started working again. I wanted to go to Venezuela to surf over Christmas with Nele, my friend Matti and another friend and asked him if that was ok. I feel great, he said. So we flew down there between christmas and new years, layover in New York, and then onwards down to Venezuela. There was a bit of a revolution going on down there, a little civil war, fantastic. [I can genuinely not tell if he is being sarcastic. I think he isn’t, the way it’s phrased implies he relishes in the chaos which ... I love him, but Till? Can someone please research what was going on in Venezuela in the early 90s?] Three weeks later the vacation was supposed to be over already, so we just extended it by another three weeks. On we went to Brasil. To keep my job at the time at the «Gallery at Lake Schwerin», I got a doctors note in Venezuela for 20 dollars. After we came back I even had to go to a puplic health official doctor, because they didn’t believe the illness and Imade up just dreadful lies there. Nele was three weeks late for school, it was a huge drama. In the evening we sat at our favourite pub, the «Chagall» at Schönehauser Tor. Paul’s, our guitarist later with Rammstein, girlfriend at the time, worked there. She said immediately: «Your sister called, your father is dying, they have been looking for you since 2 weeks. You have to go right now.» I left with Nele right away and two days later he died. He really waited for us. Less so for me, but he wanted to see his grandchild one more time. My mother was there too when he fell asleep.
Malchow: Were your parents still together at that point?
Lindemann: Yes, they couldn’t do without each other, even though they drifted apart. The stark thing is, my mother never had a man again. She can’t let him go until today.
Malchow: So back to the book, to his language, which deeply impressed me. I think there are a fee similarities too. He has a unique, expressionist style in this, for exemple when he describes nature, about weather, the animals he observes, the landscape.
Lindemann: Like me, he started with writing poetry and that was were his strength was. For him, like for me, it’s alot more difficult to tell a story, to write narrative literature. I admire those who can do that. I think that is the most difficult. If you have that foundation of poetry like him, that rhythm, if you think in comparisons and images and then start to marrate, you can feel it. The poetic remains. That’s why it gets a little «flowery» in the text sometimes. It has it’s very own unique style. Remarkable!
The End
———-
If you feel like it ends sudden - it does. I kinda felt that too.
This was bittersweet but was very rewarding too, and I’ll miss it. If anyone ever has any Rammstein related (or just interesting stuff in general) content that they need translated, please forward it to me :)
I think the thing that fucks me up most about Till's relationship with his father is that Werner always picked him apart and ran him into the dirt, and then turned around and wrote children's books.
Children's books for all the darling little boys and girls.
