Celebrate Your Humanity
In one of their songs the band Green Day celebrated the life and the love that would be possible if people did not let themselves be harnessed again and again for murderous wars.
Some songs imprint themselves on our memory so indelibly that they remain part of our inner life for decades. Especially when we came to know them as young people and have interpreted them anew ever since. For the author of this article it was „Wake Me Up When September Ends“ by the group Green Day. The rock ballad, as powerful as it is vulnerable, is about the loss of a loved one, yet only the music video moves this feeling to the center of a terrible war. They are scenes such as must have occurred a millionfold in the long history of wars. The preciousness of life becomes as clear in the lines of the song as the madness of violence commanded „from above“. Another of the band’s songs shows how this madness can be overcome.
Wake Me Up When September Ends was my first favorite song. It was performed on television when I was not even 10 years old. At that time I listened to all sorts of things, but the musical storm that follows the calm in this piece, over and over again – that enchanted me at once. Over the years, as I discovered other bands and their songs, I always held this one close to my heart. Until, in a film, the sequel to „Transformers“, I heard 21 Guns for the first time. It fascinated me so much that my father later stopped the closing credits to identify the band behind it. Without noticing it, I had stumbled upon a wonder. Both pieces come from the pen of the band Green Day and are representative of their two best albums. I only realized this once the band had long since become my favorite group and I suddenly rediscovered my old favorite on one of their albums. Only years later would I find out what the songs stand for symbolically – and since then I love them even more.
Wake Me Up When the War Is Over
Loving glances, the twittering of birds, a grassy landscape in blazing sunlight: The music video for Wake Me Up When September Ends seemingly begins on cloud nine. Two young lovers pledge each other eternal faithfulness, kiss tenderly, dwell on the perfect summer moment. The boy says:
I just want this moment right now, this day.
And my feelings for you and the way you look right now.
The way I look at you, I just want this to last forever.
Perhaps to some the words sound that way, yet it is not kitsch that runs through these scenes. Rather, it is the awareness of how fragile the moment is. A dark foreboding lurks beneath the promise of the two.
The acoustic guitar comes in, a delicate bell sets the accents, and Billy Joe Armstrong raises his voice. The band’s frontman had written this song for his father, who died when the singer was 10 years old. Only a little older than I was on first hearing it. After the funeral, little Billy locked himself in his room. When his mother knocked on the door to look in on her boy, he cried out: Wake me up when September ends.
The name of the song was born out of the deep feeling of loss.
A loss that still bursts forth from Armstrong’s voice many years after that incident:
Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Just as the summer in the music video, too, belongs to the past when the young man decides to fight for the US Army in the Iraq War. Back then the military was running advertisements on TV at full throttle. It is the hubris of those commercials that speaks through him when he reproaches his girlfriend, insisting that she of all people ought to understand his decision: I did this for us. This is supposed to make it easier. I thought you’d be proud of me.
His promise is gone; he leaves her for the war. To kill enemies
, really strangers. Because the advertising drove him to it. It began in March 2003: without a declaration of war or a UN resolution, US troops invaded Iraq on the 20th of the month. Their official aim, under the aegis of George W. Bush, was to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the country of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, as well as his support for al-Qaeda. But neither the one nor the other was proven. Already in the year of the invasion it was obvious to observers that this war was really about oil. The album of this song, by the way, is called American Idiot.
For the sake of the black gold, a sword of Damocles hangs from then on over the head of the boy from the video. The second line announces it. Like the cancer to which Armstrong’s father succumbed, the war devours the innocent.
How much all of this goes against man himself, Armstrong expresses metaphorically. From the boy’s green eyes, sparkling like the stars, the tears must have sprung like rain when, in his quiet little chamber, he mourned the death of a loved one.
Here comes the rain again
Falling from the stars
Drenched in my pain again
Becoming who we are
That is how blows of fate make us into what we are. While the young soldier in Iraq, cornered with his company, watches one comrade after another fall, he remembers the words of his beloved, who at the same time sits lost in thought in the grass: Just know, no matter what. You always have somebody here for you.
How the love of the two turns out is uncertain. The video ends at the climax of the confrontation: home and love against strangers and war.
The actual victims of the Iraq War number in the hundreds of thousands. It is impossible to make oneself truly aware of this suffering. Whoever has lost even a single person knows the uncanny pain this can trigger. It is important to live through this pain, but also to keep it in memory. The years afterward make it easier; yet they do not immunize us against slipping once again into a wholly personal September. Then we remember how we can overcome it, how we have already overcome it once before. Armstrong knows this too, and in his lines lies an appeal to us not to forget:
As my memory rests
But never forgets what I lost
Wake me up when September ends
Lay Down Your Arms
Armed force, even when the media likes to stylize, indeed heroize it, is never a solution to conflicts. As a teenager I was, like so many others, of course nonetheless highly interested in explosive spectacles such as the Transformers films, which the US military sponsored with vast sums. It is almost ironic that of all places here I came upon another staunch anti-war anthem. As the first notes of 21 Guns ring out, Megan Fox – the teenage crush of everyone born in the late 1990s – is just then lounging in hot pants on an oily motorcycle. Typical Michael Bay, the director who had once made his name in the advertising industry. No wonder he knew how to stage war.
The song comes from the concept album „21st Century Breakdown“, a rock opera. Its title is ambiguous and can be translated as follows: A brief breakdown of the 21st century
– in both the summarizing and the destructive sense of the word „breakdown“. It is a disintegration that we are experiencing right now at first hand.
For war is raging even now, while I write these lines. Not only in Ukraine. In Yemen, in Syria, in Libya, in Mali – the list is agonizingly long. The West is busily involved, has started plenty of wars itself. In the end, every war produces above all one thing: losers. And so even the opening lines can be understood as a call for diplomacy:
Do you know what’s worth fighting for?
When it’s not worth dying for?
For Armstrong vividly describes the alternative too, when in the song’s middle section he wanders through the inner world of a person plagued by war: where the road of life nears its end, where the loss of control sets in, where the worst thoughts exact their toll, where reason bends the heart, where faith walks on broken glass and the feeling of being hungover from head to toe never stops – there one is oneself a ruin.
What can bring people to bring about this condition willingly? One wants to hurl this question into the face of every self-appointed warlord – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Wladimir Putin, but also Olaf Scholz and Annalena Baerbock, who for their part want to wage a war down to the last Ukrainian, who by their own admission do not care about their voters and who with unprecedented sanctions put at stake the prosperity of their own population:
„Does the pain weigh out the pride?“ – When does the pain outweigh the pride?
Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State during the Clinton administration, has in any case found her own answer to this question. The cabinet to which she belonged had imposed sanctions on Iraq in the course of the Gulf Wars of the early 1990s, so severe that, according to the United Nations (UN), they had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Whether it was worth this price, the politician was asked in an interview in 1996. She said yes.
An irony of fate that President Bush, in a speech about the Ukraine war this very year, made a similarly cynical slip of the tongue that probably comes closest to a confession:
The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq – I mean, of the Ukraine … Iraq, too. Anyway …
A fine nod to Freud.
Toward Humanity
Meanwhile 21 Guns strikes up again. I have the song running on an endless loop. And the refrain, as strong in content as in music, gives me strength. It refers to the custom of firing 21 rifle shots at a soldier’s funeral ceremony:
One, twenty-one guns
One man gives up his life, but the 21 shots do not bring him back. What a strange custom it is to bid farewell to someone who most likely died by gunfire with more of the same. And with a flag over the coffin. In uniform. In my eyes this is more kitschy than any love scene that could ever make it into a music video. Yet the refrain contains, as it were, the recipe for turning my thoughts away from this image. It is the song’s central message:
Lay down your arms and give up the fight
Throw up your arms into the sky
You and I
One would like to call it out to all the soldiers of this world, those in Yemen, in Ukraine, in Nagorno-Karabakh and everywhere else: