It must have been around the year 2000 that I was walking in my neighbourhood and met a guy I knew from about five years before. We stopped for a chat, and he voiced his surprise to see me like that. Like what I said? Well, you’re all gothic! I was at that time walking around in black, with all kinds of straps and rings attached to my clothing. Both of us didn’t know about each other that we liked the style. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
He told me he left the scene some years earlier, because he had seen all he wanted to. I told him I didn’t recognise his story of dark, gloomy and industrial aggressiveness. I found a world of punk, cyber, but also romantic looking for the past. Where he always found himself in a grim and gloomy vibe of protesting and non-consumerist counterculture, I found a world filled with people that just liked to dress up and dance to music I never heard, but sounded awesome. We were talking about the same scene, but both of us had seen it in a different way.
Goethes Erben signifies both the end of his Gothic world, and the start of mine. The German music and theatre project around Oswald Henke started in 1989. This was the time when Goth-rock was still in its infancy, but for it’s founders it already lost its allure.
Henke chose a mix between new-wave and post-punk. Siouxsie and the Banshees versus Depeche Mode, to put some names there. Add to that a bit of neo romanticism and some literary intellectualism and you can find him. It was called Neue Deutsche Todeskunst (New German Death Art / Art of dying). The band must have been disbanded a dozen times, only to pop up on a stage at a festival somewhere in Germany.
Henke’s personal issue with streaming audio stops the band from having much in the way of a catalogue on Spotify. So I’m always happy with whatever album I can find. When I saw them at a festival in Leipzig I took home their early catalogue on CD, but when I saw them this year in Utrecht I bought their records as well. Signed by the man himself.
I’m curious what you make of it, there are not many bands around like this.