Lyrics
Our own annotated translation. Rammstein's German, explained.
Our own annotated translations of Rammstein's songs: wordplay, historical context and meaning. There is at least one song per record; the library grows song by song.
Herzeleid · 1995 · 11 songs
- 01Wollt ihr das Bett in Flammen sehen?The first song on the first record opens with a question thrown at the audience. And it hides sound effects lifted from the video game Doom.
- 02Der MeisterThe second track on Herzeleid, never released as a single: an unidentified voice announces that something is about to end, and thirty years later nobody agrees on exactly what.
- 03Weißes FleischOne of the first songs the band ever wrote, and one of the hardest to listen to: it narrates an assault from the attacker's point of view, with no judgment offered by the lyric itself.
- 04Asche zu AscheThe burial formula turned into a threat. For years it was the song played live with the microphone stands set on fire.
- 05SeemannThe ballad from the first record, and the only Rammstein song Nina Hagen took for herself.
- 06Du riechst so gutThe band's first single, written from inside the head of a predator following a scent. The title comes from a novel.
- 07Das alte LeidA working title born from a sound check, an improvised shout the band voted on and split three to three, and the first time Rammstein was ever played on the radio.
- 08Heirate michA folk-horror ballad: the groom who will not accept that the wedding is not going to happen. It was played live a year before the record existed.
- 09HerzeleidThe song that gives the album its name carries a medieval word in its title, the same one that, eight hundred years ago, gave Parzival's mother her name.
- 10LaichzeitSeventy-five shows between 1994 and 2001, and an unusually deliberate exit from the setlist: Till Lindemann said goodbye to it live, from the stage, the last time it was played.
- 11RammsteinThe first song the band ever wrote, about the air disaster that gave them their name. And the extra M they never planned.
Sehnsucht · 1997 · 11 songs
- 01SehnsuchtThe word that names the album has no English equivalent. It is longing for something you cannot name.
- 02EngelIt opens with a catechism rhyme about being good and ends up refuting it: angels live alone and afraid.
- 03TierAbout child sexual abuse, and Till explained why himself. It was born in 1994, cut from the first album, and came back unrecognisable.
- 04Bestrafe michOne of the longest-lived songs in the band's live catalogue: twenty-seven years on the setlist, built on a theological doubt Till Lindemann explained himself.
- 05Du hastRammstein's most famous anthem hides in its title an untranslatable pun between 'to have' and 'to hate'.
- 06Bück dichThe song that landed two members of Rammstein in a Massachusetts jail.
- 07Spiel mit mirTwo brothers sharing a bed, told by the younger one. The band released a new mix of it twenty-six years later.
- 08KlavierIt began as a love poem to a piano teacher and ended up inside a murderer's head. Till worked on the lyrics for two years.
- 09Alter MannTill Lindemann told the exact origin of this lyric: an old man on a beach in the Maldives, sweeping the sand while people kept walking over it again.
- 10EifersuchtOne of the least-played songs in the whole catalogue: performed live exactly once, and its starting point was a film, not a personal experience.
- 11Küss mich (Fellfrosch)Sehnsucht closes with an impossible image — a furry frog — and two sound samples lifted from a 1942 Bugs Bunny short.
Mutter · 2001 · 11 songs
- 01Mein Herz brenntThe voice from German children's bedtime television, returned to the bedroom as a threat.
- 02Links 2 3 4The band's answer to years of Nazi-sympathy accusations, built on a pun between "right" and "correct".
- 03SonneA count in German and a dark retelling of Snow White: the first single from Mutter.
- 04Ich willAbout the fame the media grants to those who do harm: in the video, the band robs a bank and walks out with an award.
- 05Feuer frei!A military order turned into a chorus, and the song that took Rammstein into a Hollywood film.
- 06MutterA creature born of an experiment, with no father or mother, confronts whoever made it. The song that names the album.
- 07SpieluhrA child plays dead to be left alone, is buried with its music box, and starts singing from below.
- 08ZwitterA narrator split into two halves who becomes obsessed with himself, until that same division turns into a strange kind of wholeness.
- 09Rein rausThe most directly sexual song on Mutter: it turns the act into a horse ride, with Till Lindemann as the rider, and doesn't leave much to the imagination.
- 10AdiosA Spanish title for a lyric about the needle, music, and what's left over once someone dies — with lines that reappear in a Till Lindemann poem.
- 11NebelThe closing track of *Mutter*: a farewell on the shore, where the sea ends. Read backwards, "Nebel" says "Leben".
Reise, Reise · 2004 · 11 songs
- 01Reise, ReiseThe title does not mean "journey, journey". It is the call used to wake a ship's crew, and it comes from old German.
- 02Mein TeilWritten from a real case of consensual cannibalism that turned up in the newspaper. Grammy-nominated.
- 03Dalai LamaGoethe's "Erlkönig" moved into an aeroplane: the same father, the same son, the same voice calling from outside.
- 04Keine LustThe song about not feeling like anything, with the video where the band dressed up as itself, fat and finished.
- 05LosA whole song built on a suffix. In German, "-los" is English "-less" — and on its own it means "go!".
- 06AmerikaA song about Americanization sung half in German and half in English, so that the form says what the lyrics say.
- 07MoskauMoscow portrayed as a woman who charges: old, gilded and splendid. The band first wanted t.A.T.u. for the Russian vocals.
- 08MorgensternA woman everyone calls ugly prays to the morning star to make her beautiful. The man who loves her asks for something else.
- 09Stein um SteinA man builds a house for the person he loves. No windows, no door, and with her inside it.
- 10Ohne dichRammstein's most beloved ballad: absence told as a landscape going dark.
- 11AmourLove as a hunting animal: it breathes you, it looks for you, it nests in broken hearts. It closes *Reise, Reise* and was played live five times.
Rosenrot · 2005 · 11 songs
- 01BenzinFirefighters who cause more damage than the fire. And an invented word in the chorus.
- 02Mann gegen MannAbout homosexuality, with an ambiguity the band defended outright: "we definitely didn't intend to write a gay anthem".
- 03RosenrotRammstein rewrites a Goethe poem from 1771 by changing one key word — and flips its entire meaning.
- 04SpringA man climbs onto a bridge out of curiosity and a crowd gathers below, starting to urge him to jump. It came out of two discarded songs.
- 05Wo bist duA song that arrived two years late to its own record: it was recorded during the same sessions as Reise, Reise and was even played to journalists before being left off that album.
- 06Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)The catalogue's only true duet: Till Lindemann and Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri, in two languages that never quite meet. It began as an Emigrate song.
- 07ZerstörenPaul Landers explained exactly what it's about: a president who runs around the world destroying everything, like a little kid. Eleven years later, the live staging made it even clearer.
- 08Hilf mirThe tale of the girl who plays with fire in *Struwwelpeter*, sung from inside the flames and stripped of its moral.
- 09Te quiero puta!The only Rammstein song sung entirely in Spanish, with mariachi trumpets and a title that cannot be translated without insult.
- 10Feuer und WasserTill Lindemann said he wrote it while swimming: a song about two forces that, by definition, cannot coexist.
- 11Ein LiedIt was written in ten minutes in the rehearsal room and kept exactly as it was — unusual for a band that tends to polish every detail. Two years later, Nena covered it on her own record.
Liebe ist für alle da · 2009 · 11 songs
- 01RammliedThe band opens its sixth record by introducing itself, with a choir and a marching step. Its remix was made by the singer of Machine Head.
- 02Ich tu dir wehBecause of this song, and a booklet photo, the German state restricted the album's sale. A court suspended the measure seven months later.
- 03Waidmanns HeilThe traditional German hunters' greeting, applied to sexual pursuit. The lyrics rework a poem from Till Lindemann's book.
- 04HaifischThey change one word in Brecht and Weill's most famous song: the shark stops having teeth and starts having tears.
- 05BückstabüThe title that's almost never spelled out in full: on most platforms and track listings it shows up as "B********," not because of legal censorship but because the word itself has no clean way of being spelled.
- 06Frühling in ParisA man remembers his first time with a woman whose language he did not understand. The chorus is borrowed from Édith Piaf.
- 07Wiener BlutA Strauss waltz lends its title to the most uncomfortable song on the record: it is built on the Fritzl case, which broke a year before the album came out.
- 08PussyRammstein's first number one in Germany, with the video that could not be broadcast on television.
- 09Liebe ist für alle daUnlike Sehnsucht, Mutter, or Zeit, each titled with a single word, here the album's full name comes from a song tucked away in the ninth slot.
- 10MehrA narrator who already has everything and keeps wanting more. The band published a video of Schneider recording drums over a beta version.
- 11Roter SandA duel over a woman, told by the man who loses it. It began as a different song, written by three of them over a bottle of red wine.
RAMMSTEIN (untitled album) · 2019 · 11 songs
- 01DeutschlandTen years without a studio album, and they return with the most uncomfortable song possible: loving Germany and damning it in the same line.
- 02RadioGrowing up in East Germany, secretly tuning in to stations from the other side. The only way to hear what was forbidden was at night and quietly.
- 03Zeig dichA Latin choir and one repeated demand: that whoever is hiding show their face. It has a music video that was never released.
- 04AusländerA satire of sex tourism and colonial legacy. The criticism it drew is not that it was misunderstood, but that it reads two ways at once.
- 05SexOne of the shortest-lived songs in the band's live repertoire: it debuted on the 2019 stadium tour and disappeared five shows later, simply because the setlist was already running too long.
- 06PuppeA child plays with their doll while their sister is prostituted in the next room. One of the harshest songs in the catalogue.
- 07Was ich liebeA song with two lives: it existed eleven years earlier, in 2008, as a demo with a different title and different music — and its riff got reused in Pussy before this version even existed.
- 08DiamantOne of the shortest songs on the record: it uses the image of a diamond as a metaphor for a beauty that's captivating and harmful at once.
- 09Weit wegA man presses his face to someone else's window. The lyrics rework a poem from Till Lindemann's book.
- 10TattooAn archival curiosity: the lyric registered with Germany's copyright collection society doesn't fully match the one printed in the physical album's booklet.
- 11HallomannThe 2019 album closes, once again, by reworking one of Till Lindemann's own poems — the same procedure already used elsewhere on this record and the one before it.
Zeit · 2022 · 11 songs
- 01Armee der TristenZeit opens by inviting anyone who's sad to join a collective march — not toward happiness, but in formation against it.
- 02ZeitThe impossible request: that the good moment hold still. Rammstein in their fifties, with no pyrotechnics in the lyrics.
- 03SchwarzAn unusual take on darkness within the band's catalogue: night not as a threat, but as the one time certain marginal figures get to exist in peace.
- 04GiftigVenomous-animal imagery for a relationship that's captivating even though it's known to hurt — the same tension Diamant, from the previous album, had already explored with a different metaphor.
- 05Zick ZackA satire of cosmetic surgery performed by six men past fifty who dressed up as operated versions of themselves.
- 06OkThe title isn't the English word "ok": it's short for "Ohne Kondom," without a condom. And there are signs the song is older than it looks — a leftover from a different recording session, three years earlier.
- 07Meine TränenThe relationship between a grown son and his mother: emotional dependency, presence without affection, and a pain that repeats from one generation to the next.
- 08AngstThe "black man" of an eighteenth-century children's game, used to talk about walls, cameras and borders.
- 09Dicke TittenA lonely man lists everything he does not care about in a woman. The band gave it an Alpine brass band and dressed up in lederhosen.
- 10LügenA confession with no apology attached: the narrator admits, flatly, to lying and cheating out of habit. The instrumental version got a second life as the outro tape at 2023 and 2024 shows.
- 11AdieuThe closing track of *Zeit* is a goodbye: the band wrote its own elegy and filmed it at the Paris opera house.