ABSTRACT

East to West Teenagers listening to the Nina Hagen Band in 1978 were not likely to ever forget the experience, and quite a few lines from the lyrics went straight into the thesaurus of colloquial German (just google ‘alles so schön bunt hier’ [everything is so beautifully coloured here]). Nina Hagen, born in 1955, had already been a successful schlager-starlet in the GDR when she was exiled to the FRG in 1976 in the wake of the expulsion of her stepfather, political singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. When she came to the West, Biermann negotiated a record contract for her with CBS, but before making a record, Hagen spent some time in London, where she witnessed the birth of British punk and dated fourteen-year-old (and Germanborn) Ari Up, precocious leader of The Slits. Back in Germany, she formed a band with members of the former political rock band Lokomotive Kreuzberg to produce the eponymous album ‘Nina Hagen Band’.