DIE TÖDLICHE DORIS IN NEW YORK:
A NAN GOLDIN PHOTO ALBUM.
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Is that what you were doing with Die Tödliche Doris? Creating music that was different, that wasn't ‘masculine?’ I wanted to check out all the borders, stereotypes and clichés, because rock music or pop music is always connected to the youth culture and it's always the image of the rebel: against the establishment, against the bourgeoisie. But I found a lot of bourgeois and not at all radical things in this industry, a lot of conventions. And so I liked to break these convention.
Sometimes it was very simple, we had a tattooed Go-Go Boy who was very sexy-looking on stage in just a slip, this was 1986, very early, before the Iron Curtain fell and people couldn't believe it. I didn't see it as some gay thing, but in Budapest after a show we had a press conference and one journalist said “in Hungary we have no gay bars.” And so we opened it a bit to possibilities.
Where does the name Die Tödliche Doris come from? It means The Deadly Doris in German, which sounds very funny. But if you say Die Tödliche Doris, because of how it’s pronounced people think you’re saying “die tödliche dosis,” which means “the fatal dose” or “the overdose.” Everybody thinks Einstürzende Neubauten is a very serious name, “collapsing new buildings.” Very concrete and clear, you know they collapse and then they are gone, but Die Tödliche Doris is a process, because people think at first it’s a misspelling.
Alongside music, performance and video were both a big part of Die Tödliche Doris’s output. How integral was this to what you were doing? We didn’t separate the music and the performance. We never did what the people expected; we always changed extremely. We did a show where we changed outfits after each piece, we were a bit like onions. In this time you could find things on the flea market, old wigs from dead ladies... West Berlin was so trashy and you could buy things you couldn’t believe, old used underwear – the same style my mother pressed me to wear when I was a young boy, horrible with squares on it or something but not very sexy. We washed them then used them for stage costumes.
How did the city itself, West Berlin, influence what you were able to do? There were no commercial businesses, there were no managers. Still today very few people are able to work and make money like this in Berlin. You can live very cheap. We had this club SO36 in Kreuzberg, it’s like CBGB in New York. It was open in 1977 and it still exists. Dead Kennedys, Throbbing Gristle played there, Kippenberger was performing there and we played. I’m sure if this place would exist in Köln, in Hamburg, there would already be a big book about its history but there is nothing existing, there are no business people in Berlin who have a feeling for what has quality.
Do you miss that time in Berlin? Back then West Berlin was a meeting place of all the losers, all the freaks, all the people who couldn’t survive in West Germany. I mean it was really bizarre, like a friend of mine, he walked naked along the street just with a transparent long dress, so you could see through everything. This was his private performance.
It was a city where there was a luxury of: “I don’t do.” People had talent, creativity or experience but refused to use it. They say “oh I don’t want to become a famous star. Why should everyone have to be a star or a performance artist?”
Now, it’s difficult. This guy I talk about, I think he’s 51 and he was always a bit sick, and so then you get problems. I have a lot of things I can watch and write about from that time but it’s much nicer now. It was a very interesting time, a special atmosphere you can’t get back, but I’m not sentimental at all.
People now are much more open-minded than in the eighties, they have more influence from abroad. It’s very healthy, very good to get an open mind. If you only know the behaviour and conditions of your own country then you are in danger of getting this kind of stupid thinking that you represent the truth.
A lot of people now feel the art and music of the late 70s/early 80s had more integrity, was more experimental. They are right that the art scene was not so occupied by stupid business people. I think it changed in the 90s. It used to be that for the right wing people art was something negative, it was an enemy. Communism was the enemy and modern art was the enemy, women’s liberation and green ideas were the enemy. Now these right wing people integrate everything, they occupy everything. At this moment it’s difficult because they have a lot of power. Back then right wing people were not making money out of this stuff so there was more idealism. I think you have to look now for idealistic things somewhere else, but I still see them.
Why did you end Die Tödliche Doris in 1987? The things I wanted to say in a music sense were said with our last project, the invisible record. In 1984 Neubaten and other people became commercial because the industry suddenly discovered and picked out some elements of this new, open scene. I found this not a good development so I thought we should make two records in the studio, one record that sounds like an underground band who wants to become commercial, to please and attract people, and another that was the total opposite, very independent and abstract, not touching you. So one was a bit too much pop, the other was a bit too much avant-garde: both extreme things.
If you play both records on Side A at the same time, they come together to make a third, invisible record but you can also listen to both records on their own. The first was released and got very bad reviews, like “now after many years of experimentalism they want to get successful but the result is slimy and horrible.” Only a Canadian and someone in Belgium wrote that this is a parody of commercialism. The second record got very few reviews but very positive: “such pure art, beautiful, you can’t compare it with anything.” But nobody noticed you can play the two records together.
So, I thought, what can you do after you’ve made an invisible record? It’s over. Now it’s very normal that a lot of things are just on the internet, they do not exist as material things. In a way it was like a vision to make an invisible record.
You ended Die Tödliche Doris by dissolving the group into a bottle of white wine... I thought because of the band’s name, the only thing you can eat or drink that could stand this name is wine because in Germany you have strange, shocking names for wine like Naked Ass or Woman’s Milk. We sold about 1000-2000 bottles of Die Tödliche Doris wine in a museum and in normal wine shops. Very cheap also: ten marks. I always like it if things are cheap at first.
Humour runs through all your work. On one level Die Tödliche Doris’s videos are very experimental and on another level, they’re really ridiculous. Of course. It’s to destroy stereotypes in the avant-garde. If you can make something of a really good quality then you have the luxury to also have humour, but bad avant-garde has no humour, it needs humourlessness because nobody’s allowed to laugh. Everybody remembers watching somebody making noise on a piano and you are all standing there like you’re in a church and clapping afterwards, but everybody thinks, “oh it was ok, it was not really inspiring.,” You need to show respect of course, I don’t want to throw beer bottles, but you can say it was not interesting.
You’ve put all of Die Tödliche Doris’s music online for free. Yes you can hear all the music on the internet. You only have to write to me asking for it as a personal request and then I send people links to seven hours of music.
What are you working on now? I will publish a book about Valeska Gert, a performer in Germany who died in 1978. I think her work is of the same importance as John Cage or Kazimir Malevich, but she’s nearly unknown.
In 1900 she developed a modernist, expressionistic dance. It was something new, an individual dance. She was dancing car crashes. Imagine, in 1920 she was dancing a prostitute—including orgasm—on stage.
She played with Bertolt Brecht, Greta Garbo, she was a friend of Eisenstein. Nina Hagen stole everything from her: the mouth movements, the black lips, the short hair. There is a photo of Valeska, who was a German Jewish woman, wearing leather with spikes in 1949. She got fan mail from punks in the 70s. She was supposed to play in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu but died at the age of 87.
I found someone who had made a video of her performing in 69 that he had never shown. She’s performing a baby and if you see this you will never forget it. A 75 year old woman crying like a baby and making googly noises; it’s so touching.
Wolfgang Müller online
Get Die Tödliche Doris’s music for free
Wolfgang’s recently published book about Valeska Gert
