Peace is war continued by more devious means, the field of battle relocated to the negotiating table where the victors impose a succession of draconian treaties and crippling demands for reparations designed to control and punish the vanquished for years to come. While working on LAMENT, a new performance piece commissioned by the Flemish city of Diksmuide to mark the centenary of the start of the First World War in 1914, “I noticed that the Second World War is nothing but the elongation of the first one”, remarks Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld. “It is a necessary ending of the First World War. It is grounded completely in the First World War. Therefore as a child of the post Second World War era, and the resulting division of Germany and Berlin, etc, I’m of course hugely influenced in my upbringing about the results of that.”

Talking on the Danish TV culture show Det Chokerende Nye, he continued, “But I had the great luck of growing up and living so far in a time without war that directly inflicts on me. But I also learnt, and that is probably quite important right now, that war is not something that appears and disappears. War is something that is always there. It sometimes moves and it sometimes doesn’t move. And it is also not something that breaks out, the way people often say, ‘There’s a war breaking outside’. It doesn’t break out like the plague. It’s there. It sometimes moves.”

Having arrived at the notion of war without beginning nor end, the 100 years separating Einstürzende Neubauten from the 1914 events they’d been commissioned to mark quickly fell away, overcoming the group’s initial ambivalence towards the project they’d agreed to undertake. That the issues fought over by the world’s imperial powers a century ago, and then again with even greater ferocity 21 years later during the Second World War, remain unresolved made the project that much more vivid to Einstürzende Neubauten, a group that has been manically dancing along the unstable fault lines of 20th century history ever since they formed in the Western sector of the then divided city of Berlin back in 1980. “It was never something dear to my heart to write something about the First World War,” Bargeld. “But having been commissioned to do so. I put my everything into it. It’s not that I said, ‘Wow, now I have to write ten songs about the first world war’.”

Instead, all they had to do was to seek out those voices telling First World War stories that hadn’t already been told a thousand times, most of them in the act of being regurgitated yet again during 2014’s centenary commemorations. With the invaluable aid of two historical specialist researchers they combed the net, libraries and archives, official and otherwise, for those lesser known or undersung figures whose participation in the conflict, or ways of writing about the horrors they witnessed, gave the group the fresh perspectives and materials they needed to weld and bolt together a massive war leviathan that’s distinctly Neubauten while remaining true to the spirit of their sources.

People should not treat LAMENT as a straight Einstürzende Neubauten album, Bargeld states emphatically. It’s a documentation of the performance and installation commissioned by the city of Diksmuide, where it will be premiered by the group in November 2014, before they take it on tour. Indeed LAMENT is constructed from various pre-existing parts, including two pre-jazz age war songs from a marching band nicknamed The Harlem Hellfighters, which led the US’s first ever African American regiment into battle; two settings for texts by the mysterious Belgian writer Paul van den Broeck; Bargeld’s reenactment of an early 1920s cabaret style piece by the even lesser known German writer and performer Joseph Plaut, which tells the history of World War One through the medium of an music hall animal mimic; and, finally, Bargeld interpreting the German version of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone”, as sung by Marlene Dietrich. The group also recomposes a bastard version of an national anthem once partly shared by many participants of the war, including Germany, the UK, and Canada. Finally, the three part title piece, Lament, incorporates a mass of historic wax cylinder recordings made by linguists in German prison camps of prisoners reciting the biblical parable of the prodigal son in their own languages, some now extinct, over a drastically slowed down recording of a motet telling the same story by the 16th century Flemish composer Jacob Clemens non Papa, who lived and died in Diksmuide. Bricolaging pre-existing sound elements has always been a signature working method of Neubauten. On LAMENT their bricolages and reenactments remain more selfconsciously true to the spirit of their sources, be it through the juxtaposition of covers of Seeger/Dietrich and The Harlem Hellfighters songs with sonic constructions made on selfbuilt instruments, noise generators and domestic tools, and string section-driven compositions. More a byproduct of their compositional requirements for the commission than conscious design perhaps, but LAMENT’s use of van den Broeck texts, a writer with trans-european dada interests and connections, evokes how the First World War ran parallel with the advance of modernism and aggressively anti-state art tendencies like dada and futurism. Indeed the early 20th century avant garde first scarred itself into the world’s public consciousness through quasi fascist futurist manifestos, dada silliness and German Expressionist responses to the horrors they witnessed during the conflict. Bargeld clearly acknowledges the impact of said nay-saying art movements on young Neubauten, but this time any such elements are parts of the period weave rather than a shaping force.

“First of all,” Bargeld told Danish TV viewers, “I have a problem with the avant garde. Because it’s a military term. It means the garde that runs before the rest of the soldiers and if I want to see myself represented in military terms, I don’t want to be part of that. I want to be one of the deserters.” |“Break the rules, yes,” he added elsewhere. “Break also the rules of the avant garde because the avant garde is already established. The avant garde can’t be avant garde once it’s established. The avant garde is way back. I am happier being a partisan, hanging out in the woods and then at the right time, I come and attack.”

texts by Chris Bohn