After two years and for the first time since its singer Till Lindemann was acquitted by the police of alleged sexual harassment, the German band Rammstein will return to the Czech Republic. He will perform on May 11, 2024 at Prague’s Letňany Airport. Almost to the day, exactly two years later, she will present herself at the same place, where approximately 60,000 people watched her the last two evenings in a row.
Tickets priced from 1,990 crowns will be on sale from next Wednesday, October 18, said the Live Nation agency, which organizes the event. All tickets will be personalized, that is, tied to the name printed on the ticket. One customer will be able to purchase a maximum of six.
According to the organizers, Rammstein will “again load their impressive stage set and stunning pyrotechnics into the trucks” on the occasion of their 30th anniversary.
Musicians from the eastern part of Germany founded Rammstein in 1994. The band’s name commemorates the city where an accident occurred during an air show in the late 1980s, killing dozens of people. The term rammstein itself means battering ram in German.
The band gained fans already in 1995 with their debut album Herzeleid. Singles come from her You smell so good, Ashes to Ashes or Rammstein, which are still part of the concert repertoire. After the American director David Lynch included their compositions on the soundtrack of the film Lost Highway, the formation began to have a response in the USA as well.
“Rammstein are like a forest fire. It’s not inherently pretty either, but once you witness it, you look at it with fascination because it has an irresistible appeal,” said guitarist Paul Landers. Today, the band is regarded as the biggest star of the neue deutsche Härte genre, which can be translated as “new German hardness”.
“We are attracted to topics from the fringes of society, from the thin line between permitted and forbidden,” Landers comments on the group’s lyrics, which deal with sadomasochism, homosexuality, necrophilia, sex and violence.
Rammstein have released eight studio albums since 1995, the last one called Zeit was presented last year in Prague’s Letňany. Again, they put on a theater show full of fireworks, fires, cannons and lights.
“There is no need to talk about the timing of the effects in connection with the music: the ensemble even used the black smoke from the fires that floated over Letňany and projected light effects into it. It was perfect,” Aktuálně.cz wrote about the concert.
Since then, however, the lineup has gone through one of the biggest crises since its foundation. Only the month before last, the Berlin public prosecutor’s office stopped the investigation of the singer Till Lindemann, who had been facing accusations of possible sexual offenses since the spring. The frontman denied the accusation. Prosecutors also failed to gather evidence that Lindemann had involuntary sexual intercourse with women, DPA wrote.
The media had previously printed the testimonies of several young women. They claimed they were invited backstage, front row or to a party after the concert with the expectation of having sex with Lindemann. One expressed suspicion that she had been drugged without her permission, and that when she refused to have sex with the singer, he reacted angrily. Another claimed that the frontman apparently abused her in this way in the 1990s.
Investigators denied that rape had occurred in any case. “The evaluation of the available evidence and the questioning of the witnesses did not allow to determine that the accused had sexual relations with the women without their consent,” the AFP agency quoted the decision of the Berlin prosecutor’s office.
Last year’s concert in Prague’s Letňany was opened by Rammstein with the concert premiere of Armee der Tristen. Photo: Lukáš Bíba | Video: Martin Dybala
However, because of the accusations against Lindemann, Rammstein faced protests in several countries. Before the performance in Vienna in July, hundreds of people demonstrated against them, and even almost two tens of thousands of them signed a petition labeling the formation as a “platform for a rapist”.
Around 300 protesters gathered before the concert in Berlin, before the show in Switzerland, organizations called Swiss Socialist Youth and Swiss Socialist Women held a rally against Rammstein.
Music label Universal Music temporarily due to the case interrupted collaboration with the band. She then canceled her parties after the concerts.
From Lindemann at the same time cut off the German publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch, which published the frontman’s two collections of poetry. One of them includes Lindemann’s poem written from the point of view of a woman who was put in a drink of rohypnol before sex.
