Rammstein and neo-Nazis
example · other ·
retold in 6 talks
Empirically, neo-Nazis do not listen to Rammstein (they prefer soft romantic ballads), confirming that Rammstein's over-identification with brutality genuinely functions as subversion.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 6
“there are no neo-Nazis who like or who really refer to Rammstein as their own. Neo-Nazis like... tender nice ballads, romantic music”
“They are radical left. One of their big hits is Links which means left, left, left.”
“They bring it outside their ideological context and I think the effect of alienation in the Freudian sense of Extranation-Verfremdung is even stronger.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
over-identification
×2
inherent transgression
×1
false non-authentic freedom
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Bob Fosse3John Frankenheimer3Lindsay Anderson2Nikos Kazantzakis2Miloš Forman2Michelangelo Antonioni2Abimael Guzmán2Martin Scorsese2
alongside works
Every retelling 6
Empirically, neo-Nazis do not listen to Rammstein (they prefer soft romantic ballads), confirming that Rammstein's over-identification with brutality genuinely functions as subversion., illustrating over-identification,inherent transgression
Žižek defends the German band Rammstein against neo-Nazi accusations, noting their hit song 'Links' (Left) and claiming they are radical leftists, using this to assert his own conservative stance on modern music., illustrating cinema-art-culture
Rammstein perform fascist aesthetics in a context stripped of ideological scaffolding, producing an alienation-effect more powerful than liberal moral critique, just as Chaplin and the Austrian left's parody of Haider's slogan worked through mimicry, not condemnation., illustrating Verfremdung / defamiliarization of ideology,false permissivity
Rammstein is accused of flirting with Nazi iconography but actually liberates minimal libidinal elements (pure condensed enjoyment) from their Nazi ideological articulation, allowing enjoyment of them in a free ideological state, undermining Nazism from within., illustrating obscene supplement,ideology as enjoyment,strategy against fascist ideology
The German hard rock band Rammstein is accused of flirting with Nazi militaristic iconography, but Žižek argues they liberate pre-ideological libidinal elements from their Nazi articulation, allowing enjoyment of these gestures while suspending the Nazi horizon of meaning., illustrating pre-ideological libidinal elements,overidentification as critique,ideology and enjoyment
Rammstein directly confronts audiences with the obscenity of totalitarian nationalist rituals through over-identification rather than ironic distance, making it impossible to take those rituals seriously afterward, analogous to Chaplin's Great Dictator reducing Hitler to nonsense syllables., illustrating over-identification,cultural subversion