Rammstein – Angst
2022 · Directed by Robert Gwisdek
878K Likes
The story
Angst is the German word for fear, and Rammstein built a whole song around how it spreads. It starts small, with a father scaring a misbehaving kid with the bogeyman. Oxford professor Karen Leeder traced the idea to an 18th-century German playground game called Black Man, tied to folklore and plague history, with a nod to Goethe's Erlkönig. Then it widens out to whole countries arming themselves against whatever they don't understand.
Robert Gwisdek, who also made the Zeit video, directed and edited this one at Black Box Music in Berlin, mostly in black and white. The six members start as friendly neighbors on equal plots of land arranged in a circle, all dressed as the same suburban dad with slicked-back hair. Till Lindemann gets delivered to a lectern by cheerleaders, strapped in a straitjacket and hooked up to hoses, and addresses a crowd we never see. The neighbors stop trusting each other. Walls go up. Then cameras, barbed wire, and assault rifles handed out by the cheerleaders. Everybody stares at screens, then points the guns at them. A black hole swallows the whole cul-de-sac.
Fans count it among the band's most political videos: leaders using media to turn people on their neighbors and on dark-skinned strangers, made plain by a mother and child wrapped in blankets behind barbed wire. It premiered in cinemas the night before Zeit came out in April 2022, and the single went to number five in Germany. Stay for the credits, where Lindemann kills a television with a lawnmower while the band snacks on marshmallow treats.
