The Pull of War

In everyday German usage, “making your three crosses” (drei Kreuze machen) is what you say when you have come through a time of hardship or a challenge unscathed. In the final verse the widowed and now childless mother does indeed make “her three crosses” – but these are “three crosses for Germany”. Nothing is left to her but these three crosses. It is a bitter unmasking of the military cult of the patriot, with its medals and hangers-on.

Apart from the final verse, Prinz Pi largely refrains from judgements throughout the track. He describes the soldiers’ lives and deaths and leaves it to the listener to draw their own conclusions. He thus also says not a word about the illegal character of the Bundeswehr’s missions. The track is meant to prompt the listener to expose the absurdity of war and its consequences for themselves. For in the end the question stands: what were these military missions supposed to be good for? What did the Bundeswehr supposedly stand up for?

In the chorus, the family’s original – but only outwardly apparent – idyll is sketched out, an idyll that gradually falls apart.

And with the destruction of the family idyll, all that remains beside the three cross-medals is absolute nothingness. Neither the father in the Persian Gulf nor the sons in Afghanistan contributed in any way to a better world – and yet they gave their lives.

And the Germany described here, too – the one supposedly meant to bring freedom and democracy to other parts of the world – has problems on its own doorstep. In the end the youngest son dies while trying to protect a dark-skinned fellow citizen from neo-Nazi attacks. Is this the Germany for which the mother receives the crosses?

Peace songs falling silent

Ten years after the release of “Drei Kreuze für Deutschland”, the question of the point of the “mission” was more topical than ever when the West beat a hasty retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. In long Instagram stories Pi commented at length on 20 years of the Afghanistan deployment. The largely worthwhile Insta story does not, however, lack extremely bizarre remarks on Corona and climate change – which brings us to Prinz Pi’s creeping ingratiation with the mainstream and the self-denial that goes with it.

Whereas a not insignificant part of his music used to consist of what would today be decried and cancelled as “conspiracy ideology” and “crackpottery”, Pi has by now become predictable and has for years been moving in radio-friendly waters. Admittedly, Prinz Pi / Porno’s earlier critique of the system was wildly exaggerated, but it was precisely through this exaggeration that he managed to expose real grievances and entanglements of power politics. By now, however, the rapper, whose civil name is Friedrich Kautz, has become a toothless tiger when it comes to the critique of ideology. And with this ingratiation he unfortunately also abandoned his pacifist, or at least war-critical, positions.

When the eight-year civil war in Ukraine turned into the Ukraine-Russia war in February 2022, he posted a somewhat disturbing video on Instagram, in which he called on his community to donate to aid organisations for Ukraine – nothing speaks against that, of course – or to draw attention, through social-media posts, to the fact that a war is raging in that country. But what comes out when people without geopolitical and historical background knowledge add their two cents on the current situation, we can marvel at on Twitter. Beyond that, he got worked up that in Germany, over the past two years, people had taken to the streets only for some “confused conspiracy theories” – which is apparently what the Prince understands by fundamental rights – and that, unlike protesters in Russia, they were not beaten up and arrested. Sheer mockery of all the people of the democracy movement to whom exactly that happened in Germany.

A few weeks later Pi took the biscuit with a series of hair-raising Insta stories. Unfortunately these were not saved as a “highlight”; they cannot be linked here and can only be reproduced from memory. The occasion was the open letter by several intellectuals to Chancellor Scholz, in which they praise his hesitancy over arms deliveries to Ukraine and, beyond that, appeal for no heavy weaponry to continue to be sent into the war zone.

Faced with this demand – a logical one for any pacifist – Prinz Pi was beside himself. In downright infantile chains of argument, of a kind one would not have known or expected from him as a long-time listener to his music, Pi compared Ukraine to a boy in the schoolyard being bullied by the big, strong schoolyard thug Russia.

A failure to deliver weapons would, accordingly, mean abandoning weak, innocent Ukraine. Moreover, Putin would feel prompted, if Ukraine could not defend itself, to invade further countries in Europe. The danger of a nuclear war was, for the Prince, no reason to refuse the arms deliveries. Geopolitical and historical background he, unusually, either left out entirely or trivialised. The monstrousness of NATO’s eastward expansion he belittlingly described as “not so cool”.

In the light of this Instagram outpouring, old, war-critical Friedensnoten such as Teufel im Schafspelz, Die Bomben schlafen, Krieg @Home or Schornsteine seem forgotten, as if they came from another pen.

Prinz Pi is unfortunately no isolated case here. In June, for instance, “Die Toten Hosen” punk singer Campino caused dismay with a statement that under today’s circumstances he would not refuse military service. Numerous other artists, too, were not above playing at “peace demos” at which arms deliveries were being demanded.

How can it be explained that formerly honourable artists seem to forget their values, deny their pacifism at the very moment the war drums grow loud? What decouples them from their earlier brilliance and, in particular, from their authenticity, from their loyalty to themselves and their values?

A possible answer might be provided by an essay by José Ortega y Gasset on Goethe. In “Um einen Goethe von innen bittend” (“In Search of Goethe from Within”), Ortega y Gasset advances the thesis that every human being is called to a task, to a particular way of being. And throughout his existence the human being finds himself in a constant struggle with the world around him, which – with its material wants and hardships, its norms and its notions of how one ought to be – keeps him from pursuing his calling in the face of resistance. It is precisely this struggle through which the human being matures, if he stays true to himself and accepts for it the privations of the outer world. Goethe, by contrast – so the Spanish philosopher concludes – was in his early years, through his retreat into the prosperous court of Karl August in Weimar, shut off from exactly this struggle with his environment, at the price of self-betrayal and self-abandonment:

Here we can, in places, draw parallels to Prinz Pi. What Weimar represented for Goethe is, in a sense, Pi’s having-arrived in the mainstream. Chart successes, sold-out tours and awards such as the 1 Live Krone brought a change with them, so that Pi grew tamer in his lyrics with every album. At the same time, this development saw a rise in the snobbery of the rapper, who originally came from less affluent circumstances. Thus he now lives in a chic designer flat, drives expensive sports cars and is otherwise not exactly sparing in putting his decadence on display on Instagram.

In fairness, it must be said that Pi earned his prosperity himself and was not, like Goethe, invited into a wealthy court. Yet the common denominator lies in the shielding from the storms of life, at least as far as material hardships are concerned. And from the absence of this hardship there arises, in turn, a prosperity-induced fear of falling. The newly gained prosperity, which is also able to numb the inner doubts, is of course clung to convulsively. At some point it then becomes less easy to ruffle feathers in this milieu and to swim against the current.

This explains how musicians whom we once admired for their stance or their authenticity today blow the mainstream’s horn and let themselves be harnessed to the cart of every agenda – whether Corona or the Ukraine war.

When it comes to war and peace, the snake here bites its own tail. For a war, self-evidently, devours this very prosperity – the prosperity that numbs the pains of the artist’s soul – once the fighting spreads geographically.

So, while we despair at the present conduct and the caving-in of numerous artists, we can hold on to the old works, keep alive the memory of their earlier output, and thus always keep a door open for the artists, should they one day reflect and turn back.