#young till

[mysterypineapple]

And some of that Young Till awesomeness coming your way in 3, 2, 1.... 🔥❤

(From Bizarre Festival 1997)

[endlich-allein]

In Florence, Till didn't just run away to visit the city, get caught and interrogated by the Stasi. He was there to participate in the European Junior Swimming Championships.

He participated in the following races : the 400m freestyle, in which he finished 7th with a time of 4 minutes 17 seconds. And the 1500m freestyle, where he finished 11th with a time of 16 minutes and 48 seconds.

"I was in talks for the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980 and theoretically I could have qualified for it at the East German championships. But since I did poorly at the European Youth Championships in Florence and also managed to escape this night, I was set back. That took away my biggest motivation." — Till for Metal Hammer, December 2009

!!! Don't steal this scan please !!!

[notafraidofredyellowandblue]

Flake's knees 💜

[wilder-ramm]

Young Till, rocking the 80s formal wear.

[thecultoftill]

Till’s sass started young.

“Summer in the park of  Markkleeberg. I have picked the little guy up from Kindergarten. He dives into the sandbox. I sit down on the bench. Nearby is a woman, she paints her toenails. Timm(Till) unceremoniously demands ‘What is this?’‘ 

“This is varnish says the woman, embarrassed. The boy studies them for a moment. Then says to her, ‘‘My mother washes her feet!’‘ 

From Till’s father’s book Mike Oldfield im Schaukelstuhl: Notzien eines Vaters. 

[tills-suspenders]

Jünge

[endlich-allein]

Till portrait

🎨 art by @wangjojofaux

[endlich-allein]

Anfang der Achtziger lebte der Schriftsteller Werner Lindemann eine Weile mit seinem Sohn Till zusammen, der später die Band "Rammstein" gründete. Seine Aufzeichnungen zeigen, dass es keine einfache Beziehung gewesen ist.

“Werner Lindemann: Mike Oldfield in the rocking chair.

Vater und Sohn

The father does not understand the son's love life. There is the loyal girl M. from R. who takes the arduous trip to the countryside almost every weekend to see the son and spend the night with him in the attic. But after her departure, it rages vigorously elsewhere every time. For example, in the "Dorfbums", as the son calls it, after which another girl foolishly fears that she is pregnant.

But the father also doesn't understand many other things about his son, for example the taste in music. "Why," he wonders, "doesn't the guy even hear classical works?" And the hairstyle, terrible: "You should go to the hairdresser." The boorish behavior, unbearable: The boy "belches like a sheep when ruminating".

Long before he became world famous with his band Rammstein, the 19-year-old Till Lindemann lived with his father in the countryside in Mecklenburg for some time in the early 1980s, where he began an apprenticeship as a wheelwright in an agricultural production cooperative. The father, Werner Lindemann, was a well-known author of children's and youth books in the GDR and lived in a farmhouse in the Zickhusen municipality. He recorded the complicated life together with his son in irregular diary form, the book first appeared in the GDR shortly before the fall of the wall. Now, supplemented by a detailed interview with the now 57-year-old Till Lindemann, it has been reissued under the title "Mike Oldfield in a rocking chair".

Till means in the book Timm, which was a rather listless and useless pseudonym even back then, as Lindemann junior thinks. The portrait of his youth was made without his consent: "I didn't like it at all that my father just published it without asking me. Everyone knew that I was the Timm in the book. That was too much insight into my life." , says Till in the afterword. At the time, he knew that his father kept a diary about their male community, but not that he intended to publish it. Till Lindemann explains the six years that elapsed between the events described in 1982 and the first appearance in 1988 by explaining that the text was too risky for his father's publishing house. It contains "a number of critical thoughts on the GDR", both from the father and the son. For example, the two philosophize about the meaning and nonsense of making over. A publisher was only found shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is why it "almost became a turning book".

In retrospect, however, the delicate regime criticisms of the GDR leadership and their utilities for socialism are much less exciting than a father's observations about the relationship with his son. Werner Lindemann prefixed the book with the sentence: "Young trees have trouble getting up in the shadow of the old ones."

The life situation of the Lindemann family in the early 1980s was such that Till's parents were still a couple, but lived separately. The shy man Werner had fled to the country with his three cats Mulle, Billi, Puschi, worked on his poems and the dilapidated house and marinated herring.

The mother Gitta, a cultural journalist, lived with Till and his younger sister in Rostock. Till, on the other hand, was already exceptionally experienced for a young person, especially in the GDR, because he had spent a lot of time in various European swimming pools as a competitive swimmer in his youth.

When he finally moved in with his father to start the apprenticeship as a wheelwright, where he was supposed to learn how to produce agricultural equipment from wood, he and his father were strangers because they had hardly seen each other for years. Werner Lindemann suffered from this and made his cautious, awkward approaches to the son on the subject of the book: "My thoughts circle around one point: How do I make my son a friend?"

He, who describes himself as a "loneliness worker", tries desperately to understand the life of the 19-year-old and comes into an inevitable conflict between the generations because the child, who has long been a young adult, does not readily adapt to the familiarization game lets in. That's why the first few weeks look like this from the father's point of view: "I'm talking about my parents, estate workers full of humility. My son listens for a while, gets up, yawns and goes out of the room. Insulted, I walk to the wild pear tree and back."

Werner Lindemann suffers from the typical intellectual illness that, although he anticipates the problems of relationships and reflects them in theory, he cannot avoid them himself in practice. He does his part in the disputes. On the one hand, he understands that "like many young people" his boy suffers from "that we adults expect what we expect from them". On the other hand, he can't help rubbing his son's nose constantly, how good he is, and that he, the father, has a much more difficult childhood under his belt. That is why he also wants the son to pay him 150 marks "maintenance contribution" per month. "I don't need this 'fare', but the boy has to understand that money is necessary for life, that it is not given to him."

Pointed and touching, Werner Lindemann describes the old dilemma of all relationships, that you feel particularly close to your fellow human beings, especially in their absence, while you are being screwed up in their presence. When the son is at work, the father climbs into his room: "It doesn't mean a happy fart comes out of an annoying ass. I climb into the attic, select a record from the stack: Mike Oldfield. Never heard of it. I listen the music. Nice! Very nice indeed! But why does it have to be heard out loud? "

The father is surprised that the major incidents - the son drives his Trabant to scrap, 2000 marks damage - hardly upset him, but the small ones do. When Till alias Timm trudges carelessly through the freshly cleaned house one day with mud boots, there is a scuffle between father and son: "Where there are no arguments, you use your fists - I take a swing, strike. Timm defends himself. I stumble , fall on the steps of the house entrance. "

This struggle is at the end of the book, and even if the father suggests reconciliation, a little happy ending, it led to the break between the two. The struggle, according to the son in the epilogue, "was actually the trigger for me to leave".

He only read his father's notes and his view of the conflict much later. Why a kind of counter-representation of the father-son years would be a nice addition to this text from his point of view - Till Lindemann's autobiography is still pending anyway. The father did not live to see the son's success, he died of cancer in 1993. A year later, Till Lindemann founded Rammstein.

Werner Lindemann: Mike Oldfield in the rocking chair. Father's Notes. With an afterword by Till Lindemann. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2020. 213 pages, 12 euros.”

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