Homage: Kiev Stingl – “Death is just a trick”

Anyone who actually does “their thing” as an artist and doesn’t care about becoming a state-recognized cultural promoter during their lifetime, or doesn’t strive for visibility, runs the risk of being quickly forgotten posthumously. The aim of an event last Friday about Kiev Stingl was to ensure that someone who was an exception and a self-confident outsider stayed in people’s memory longer. Kiev? Who?

Kiev Stingl, born Gerd Stingl in 1943 in what was then the Sudetenland, made five albums, including the masterpiece “Hard like Mozart,” published poetry and art prose in publishers that no longer exist, anticipated the New German Wave, and was seen by some as the German answer on Lou Reed, wrote texts between beat, surreal exaggeration of his personality, the most German romanticism with such a natural seriousness and un-German coolness that most of the criticism of it only seemed petty. “I couldn’t just write something that didn’t delight me.” He arranged for the temporary dismissal of journalists who brought him live to the studio; fought against the “rule of mediocrity”; his only tour in 1980 was a disaster; For the past 30 years it has more or less disappeared. »Who complains about those present? “Who praises the dead?” he wrote.

Last Friday, an evening in memory of Kiev Stingl took place in the Laidak pub in Berlin-Neukölln: it would have been his 81st birthday. He died on February 20th of this year. Maximilian Schäffer, who also writes for this newspaper, has looked after Stingl with a few other people over the last few years, collected material for the anniversary and brought together former companions. It was intergenerational and packed in the Laidak. Mark Chung was there, former bassist of Einstreiche Neuhäusern; The German-Canadian sculptor Zoyt, Stingl’s friend for 50 years, played the accordion for the dead man. Rex Joßwig, ​​singer of Herbst in Peking, had to cancel at short notice, so Schäffer had to perform more (very well) than planned. For example from the autobiography of Achim Reichel, the successful Hamburg producer who discovered Stingl but did not tame it. FX Schröder, Hamburg’s most important mandolin player, came by and reminded us that in the 70s there was simply no such “staccato music” as in Kiev. The Hamburg underground poet Daniel Dubbe had sent novels that were about Kiev Stingl under a different name.

Stingl grew up in Hamburg and moved to Berlin in 1985. In the capital he was dry and rarely went out. Hamburg, Hamburg, Hamburg. The old, brash Federal Republic of Germany was the society he couldn’t stand; but in which both voluntary and involuntary outsiders recognized each other and got along with each other, for example in the “Ballhaus Barmbek”, the landing stage for lonely hearts in the film of the same name by Christel Buschmann, in which Kiev Stingl appears with Nico, among others. A few minutes were shown. Alexandra Beilharz from Flur-Verlag read “My necklace around your arm” from his very last texts, which were approved during his lifetime. Niklas David from the group Audiac was sitting in a corner – he had produced Stingl’s last album “XRI NUIT”. The director Kolja Nixdorf was there. He published Stingl’s book “The Drunken Brawl” 40 years ago. In the second half of the evening, the documentary “No Explanations” was shown, which the directing duo MA Littler and DH Ottn made about Stingl and in which he himself explains in a long interview how he freed himself from all ideologies. It was a beautiful, lively remembrance and conversation about someone who preferred to punish the pushy public with silence.

An encounter perhaps in the hope that a quote from Stingl will come true: “Death is just a trick.”

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