“Germany” by Felix Blume: The boss is now Germane

Felix Blume climbs a mountain. Germany needs him. The need is great. The piano begs quietly. Where does the wind of history blow? Of course to Germany. The black, red and gold flag flutters stably, as stably as Felix Blume stands there.

“Hello, Germany,” greets the rapper, who previously called himself Kollegah, from the snowy mountain heights, “I wanted to tell you something. It’s been a long time since the golden days (sic) / Politicians are lying and the people are sleeping.” Blume sees everything from up there, and what he sees, we also see, in superimposed clips. He sees warmongering, sees bottle collectors, sees stabbers and subway thugs, a people who have worked hard, but now everything is collapsing, “and the politicians are relaxing at home/ drinking champagne and grinning like a damn pig.” Short break. “Slowly is enough, slowly is enough.” Flower again. Looking directly into the camera. “If I were Chancellor, I would fight to the death for Germany.”

In the next shot he looks down from his mountain again, the camera drone whizzes towards him from behind and films his arched back. Above him the horizon, below him the valley, he stands there like Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer over the Nebelberg”, overheating, high romanticism. Oaks. Deer in the sunset. A steel blue mountain lake.

Protein shakes shaped this body, which now finally fits into the iconography of national resistance

It is the latest, logical aggregate state of the artist, who has always rapped about the change of the German man and the male body, his “boss transformation”. In the song that was called that, released in 2018, Kollegah powertalked: “If you carry on with passion/ And show that you are fit, you will reach heaven.” Rappers like to tell stories of their rise to fame. Kollegah, on the other hand, tells us which five unbeatable tricks others can use to become as strong as him. The “Boss”, as he calls himself, also did this at times in a dubious coaching program. This “alpha mentoring” was introduced in 2019 Vice-Reporter and then reported how the life coach rapper insulted his “Alphas” as “leeks” and as weaklings, how he spread conspiracy theories and apparently made good money from it. Experts warned against a guru movement, deception and brainwashing. Blume wanted to forge an “alpha army” out of the “alphas” who sought success in life and with women.

The national awakening has obviously just taken place in this body cosmos. Truck tractors and protein shakes shaped Blume’s body, which now fits into the iconographic repertoire of national resistance, somewhere between Leni Riefenstahl, the fracture rune of the new one East German General Newspaper from publisher Holger Friedrich, plus a pinch of Facebook from the AfD friends Beckum. Popular lust emerges healingly from the romantic gloom. “Germany,” Blume raps, is “a very healthy country. / With its oaks, its linden trees / I will always find it again.” Only on the second repetition of the hook do you realize that we are talking about “Linden” and not “Lenden”. You always think that a blonde beauty is about to serve the “boss” a mug of beer, which he will then lift with his mountain range from one arm to his jaw – just like right-wing AI amateur photo artists on the Internet imagine the future of Germany. Felix Blume has something to add to this sometimes limp, boomer fantasy world: muscles, a military posture, real young men who like to be humiliated and bossed around by a visionary, hardened boss.

As the band Rammstein sang about Germany in 2019, it was about the golem of the most poisoned German history, it was about the horror that reared its head again – to counter it: “My love / I can’t give it to you!” Colleague? Summons himself as the Supreme Germano Cyborg. What’s left to say except: I can’t give you my love.