Einstürzende Neubauten: Die Befindlichkeit des Landes (2000)
click for video - song starts at 0:55
The electro-acoustic noise band "Einstürzende Neubauten" wrote this lament as a response to Berlin´s urban renewal projects initiated after the fall of the Berlin wall to heal or cover over the rift in the fabric of a divided city.
Alles nur künftige Ruinen
Material für die nächste Schicht
Die neuen Tempel haben schon Risse
Einst wächst Gras auch über diese Stadt
über ihren letzten Schicht.
(english translation)
Across the scarfaced terrain, slowly disappearing, only phantom pain remains scarcely audible foul laughter seeps out of the red Info Box. In the graves there is quiet turning. Nothing but future ruins, material for the next layer, Melancholia, mon cher, floating over the new city and over the land. Over the control centres, over the stubbly fields of concrete, over the secret net of bunkers, that refuses to be wiped out. Marlene go home! Over the Marlene-Dietrich-Platz. The new temples are already cracked, future ruins, one day grass will also grow over the city, over its last layer. Melancholia, mon cher, floats over the new city over the land. In the lacerated skies, ploughed to bits by the jets` manoeuvers, she hangs with wide spread wings, sleep less and with frozen gaze, pointing at rubble, behind her the future piling up. Slowly rising higher and higher, at last she surveys the entire land. What is the lay of the land?
