Nina Hagen

Origins and early life

Nina Hagen was born in East Berlin on 11 March 1955, and her Jewish descent comes through her paternal grandfather Hermann Carl Hagen, a German Jewish banker and economist who was arrested and murdered at Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 28-29 May 1942, among five hundred German Jews seized at random in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich; her paternal grandmother Hedwig Elise Caroline Staadt, a German Christian, was murdered at Sachsenhausen too.

Work and career

Her father, the East German screenwriter Hans Oliva-Hagen, survived the war as a young man of patrilineal Jewish descent, and Nina Hagen has spoken publicly and repeatedly about that grandfather. This fiche states plainly that she was not raised Jewish and has followed her own religious path since the 1980s, and that the descent stands at the level of a named grandparent. Her mother was the actress Eva-Maria Hagen, and her stepfather the dissident singer Wolf Biermann, whose expulsion from East Germany in 1976 brought Nina Hagen west after she demanded to leave with him.

In the East she had already recorded Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen, a song about a boyfriend who forgot the colour film that became an unofficial anthem of the grey republic. In West Berlin she formed the Nina Hagen Band, and the 1978 album, with TV-Glotzer and Unbeschreiblich weiblich, invented something no one had heard: a trained coloratura voice used for screaming, growling and yodelling over punk guitars, in German.

It broke the German rock scene open, launched the Neue Deutsche Welle, and made her, for a generation of European women, proof that the front of a band was theirs to take. She has released some fifteen albums, acted, and campaigned for animal rights and against nuclear power.