I'm wondering right now why she was actually singing English, from the first album in 1991, which was only two years after the German wall came down.

Bobo (Christiane Hebold, born 1967) was from socialist east Germany, DDR, or "GDR" in English. I am not, I'm from West-Berlin, which was an island in the middle of DDR, but belonging to democratic west Germany, with the wall around it. (Yeah sorry, I thought I might have to explain. Sometimes I'm surprised what people do not know. Had some teenagers here one day, pointing to our old telephone -- with dialing wheel! -disk? -- asking me what kind of device this is…)

So I basically only know East German life from our rare visits to relatives, maybe once a year. We had to come, because they were not allowed to come to the west, living like in a giant prison. (They were allowed to visit other socialist countries, though, like Poland or Russia, in case they wanted.)

Visiting the east was always trouble and I hated it as a kid. I remember mum queuing with me days before to obtain visa, just to finally queue again at the border, usually several hours. They poked around in the tank of our car with rods to see if there was anything hidden, examined the underbody of the car with mirrors, Dad regularly had to remove the entire back seat to prove there was nothing underneath. I remember my mom once angrily dumped her handbag in front of the border policeman and shouted in Berlin dialect “Und dit sind meine Tampons, die könnse ooch noch ham". ("And these are my tampons, you can have them too”). They confiscated my children's magazine and of course the Abba cassettes we had forgotten in the car. A terror state.

Anyway, singing English was basically not allowed in DDR. And normally, I guess, you wouldn't learn the language at all. This makes old GDR rockmusic lyrics so special: Probably many of those rockers had hardly any idea what people where singing on the English or American records they got from wherever or heard on west radio. Some didn't even have that, living in the so called "Tal der Ahnungslosen" ("valley of the clueless"), which basically meant areas where the West German radio programmes were not receivable.

And there's this other aspect, that they couldn't even sing in German what they wanted, as any criticism was quickly not just censored, you also could get into a lot of trouble, like be banned from making music at all or even go to prison. So they often tried to write "between the lines", making their folks understand what was meant but hopefully not the secret service men.

In total, when I hear such lyrics today, I often think like "oh boy, how could you even sing that?" There's this regular touch of old-fashioned classic German poetry, like what you had to read in school, just normally not as good as Goethe, and, well, I would have tended to be embarrassed singing such uncool lyrics, honestly. Although we also tried to often sing German, but completely different, more like as you talk on the street. Not this pseudo-classic artsy stuff. However, today I think, there's this artsy approach maybe missing a bit in German rock lyrics.

In recent years, was that summer 2022?, I saw Bobo once again on stage. At one of these gatherings against the war(s), vaccination and covid terror and all that. Was that called freedom parade or what? I forgot.

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Picture of the guy when he met the CEO just before shooting