Confessions from the Life of the Rammstein keyboard player: Christian Lorenz alias Flake has presented an existentially goofy gem of a book with his “It's the Worlds Birthday Today” („Heute hat die Welt Geburtstag“)

By Lars Weisbrod 27. September 2017

“Like I said, the things that look like a pushover are often the hardest of all. On the other hand, the things that look difficult are not easy, they’re also difficult.“ What beautiful sentences, what beautiful thoughts, straightaway one would like to write like that, one would immediately like to imitate the tone in which the musician Christian „Flake“ Lorenz has written his fabulous memoirs, “It's the Worlds Birthday Today”. But the sentences are not just beautiful, they’re also true, and that’s why it’s not at all easy to write the way he does.

But that’s not the only reason why “It's the Worlds Birthday Today” is a strange book, its content difficult to convey, even if formally it’s as stringently structured as a song by the world-famous German band, Rammstein, in which Flake is the keyboard player. It alternates between humorous passages, in which Flake looks back on the band’s early and middle years (when the record company wanted 46,000 marks from them, because on their first tour the ever-thirsty Rammstein members thought the minibar drinks in the hotels were free; or when they spent a night in prison in a US provincial town after a gig; or all the stuff the singer Till Lindemann stole from gas stations); as well as an extravagant conversation that Flake conducts with himself before, during and after a Rammstein concert in Budapest, one of those internationally notorious, for police and firemen troublingly crazy spectacles for which Rammstein are revered by millions of fans.