Nina Hagen died in the early 1970s. She remembers being somewhere in between life and death, before meeting the Almighty. “I had a near-death experience in East Germany as a young teenager in a very difficult time in my life,” recalls Hagen, on call from her home in Berlin. “I died. I was stuck in the middle.”
The near-death experience, triggered by a bad trip, marked the beginning of Hagen’s journey with her faith. Years before joining her first band in East Berlin, Automobil, in 1974, Hagen sneaked into Poland at 16 and played in a blues band covering Tina Turner and Janis Joplin. “I went to Poland secretly,” she says. “It was an adventure trip for me. I met musicians there. I sang in a band. I wanted to escape to West Berlin through Poland, but it didn’t work out, so I had to go back.”
On her 16th birthday, Hagen’s friends from Poland visited and brought her some LSD to celebrate. “During that LSD trip, I had a near-death-slash-baptism experience with Jesus Christ, and it was so sweet and so cool,” remembers Hagen. “And I met God.”
A lifelong connection to God, the spiritual and feminine touches of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and earlier days spent at the theater in Berlin, penetrate Hagen’s new album, Highway to Heaven.
From her opening, rockabilly, take on her take on Lee Roy Abernathy’s 1947 song, “Everybody’s Gonna Have A Wonderful Time Up There” (also known as “Gospel Boogie”), made famous by Pat Boone and later covered by Tharpe and Johnny Cash, Hagen is in heaven, embracing her many sounds, dipping into the avant-garde, reggae “Dust on the Bible,” punk on “Somebody Prayed for Me,” originally a gospel song written by Dorothy Norwood and Alvin Darling, and a lightly dubbed take on “The Skeleton Dance Song” on “Dry Bones.”
Greek singer and friend Nana Mouskouri helps Hagen interpret the Johnny Cash cover of James C. Moore’s 1914 gospel hymnal, “Never Grow Old,” which was also covered by Aretha Franklin and George Jones. Mouskouri and Hagen first met in 1989 in Paris and later performed Marlena Dietrich’s WWII anthem, “Lili Marleen,” together on the French Sunday morning TV show, Champs-Elysées, in 1990.
“That was the song soldiers heard on the radio stations on the battlefields during the Second World War,” says Hagen of the song, written by German composer Norbert Schultze in 1938, using words from a 1915 poem penned by a German soldier, Hans Leip. “We were not shy,” Hagen says about her first performance with Mouskouri. Their Dietrich-lookalike costumes, dressed in black tuxedos and topped with cylinder hats, were inspired by the actress’s 1930 film Morocco.
Another old friend, Danish singer and actress Gitte Hænning, joins Hagen on the title track “There’s a Highway to Heaven,” a gospel song Tharpe released, as a duet with Marie Knight, in 1947. Hænning inspired Hagen since she first saw her on East German television, singing the Old Testament gospel song, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”
Now, 71, Hagen jokes that she, Hænning, 79, and Mouskouri, 91, are the “Golden Girls.” She jokes that Mouskouri is faster than her on the stairs and reflects on being a heavy smoker all her life and how God also saved her from her addictions.
“Cleanliness is my new high,” says Hagen. “God’s timing is good. It’s a perfect schedule.”
The third duet on the album features German blues rocker Daniel Welbat on the hymnal, “Hand It Over,” with more blues tapped into “Walk With My Jesus.”
“Since my childhood, I’ve been studying the deepest attributes of God,” she says. “I was a very curious child, and I wanted to know, ‘How is God like? What does he feel like? What does he feel about us?’ And in the Bible, it’s written, ‘God is love,’ and who loves knows God, and who doesn’t love doesn’t know God. I was always totally mesmerized by that thought.”
All of this made sense to Hagen after her out-of-body experience as a teen. “During that trip, I discovered the love of God in person, and he looked at me like he already knew me, so that’s where my deep connection with Jesus comes from, that night when I truly met him, when I was saved by Him from a very painful pit of hell.”
The experience, she says, felt like she was stuck in “a big black worm loophole,” while she kept “calling out to God” to help her. “God let me understand that I had to die first to keep on communicating with him,” she says. “And that reminded me of the Bible and that a person has to be baptized to understand that one fine day, we leave our mortal shells behind.”
Being a “big lover of God” is also why, Hagen says, she was always drawn to gospel and black American spirituals since early childhood. Before the wall went up in 1961, Hagen remembers her mother bringing home vinyl records from West Berlin, including ones by Mahalia Jackson or Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”
During those years, Hagen also remembers the impact of seeing Jackson sing “Trouble of the World” to a white audience in the 1959 film Imitation of Life. She first covered Jackson’s “Hold Me” on her 1989 self-titled album and revisits “Trouble of the World” on Highway to Heaven, singing I’m going home to live with God, another stamp of her faith, and mortality on the album.
“I’m a huge lover of Southern gospel and bluegrass gospel music, and we just threw everything in the pot,” says Hagen. “It’s a potluck.”
Inspired by the gospel music of The Dixie Hummingbirds and bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, Baptist pastor Cleavant Derricks, and others, Hagen released her first gospel album, Personal Jesus, in 2010, then delved deeper on Volksbeat in 2011, a collection of original songs and German interpretations of some more spiritual releases by Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Larry Normal, Sonseed, and Solomon Burke.
Hagen says she felt connected to the spirit of Black America from childhood, and often thinks about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his messages around the civil rights movement. “He had such a constructively beautiful and always positive mindset with his people in the ‘60s,” she says. “When I was a little child, I was always impressed by those beautiful people in America marching down the streets fighting for their rights to be equal people in an equal world. That music goes together with protest songs or freedom songs and social justice songs.”
Another early influence that guided Hagen, spirituality and creativity, was German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, whom she’s covered throughout her career, including a rendition of “Aus dem Gefängnis zu singen (Song to Sing from Prison)” and later on Volksbeat, with the opening “Die Bitten der Kinder” (“The Children’s Prayers”). Brecht also made his way into Highway to Heaven with an added verse dedicated to him on the penultimate, “Alle Wollen in Den Himmel,” the German version of “Everybody Wanna Go to Heaven.”
Long considered the godmother of German punk, Hagen says she’s more “Brecht-tian.”
A follower of Brecht’s work since her “eleventh year on earth,” in her youth, Hagen spent time at the Berliner Ensemble theater, which was founded by the playwright in 1949 with his wife, actress Helene Weigel, and has performed many of his works since the 1980s. Between 2013 and 2017, Hagen also celebrated Brecht’s legacy of music with Brecht-Lieder-zur-Klampfe-Abend (Brecht song evenings with guitar), and other performances at the Berliner Ensemble.
During her earlier years at the theater, Hagen says she studied Brecht’s works, including The Threepenny Opera and Schweyk in the Second World War. “That was my study ground,” said Hagen. “That’s where I learned to dare to be the Nina Hagen the stage person that I became then shortly after. And I was not a punk in my youth. I was rather a hippie, but more likely a Brecht [Kurt] Weill-ian.”
When Hagen left East Germany at 21 and went to London in 1977, she was immersed in the “punk revolution,” she says, and became friends with Ari Up and the Slits. A few years later, an invitation from Frank Zappa and his management brought Hagen to the U.S., where she started working on English-language albums. In 1982, NunSexMonkRock was her first album after leaving the Nina Hagen Band and her first release in English.
From Brecht to punk and coming to America, Hagen always remained connected to her faith. She remembers swinging a giant cross above her head during Rock in Rio in 1985, singing Prepare yourself, you know it’s a must / Gonna have a friend in Jesus from her song “Spirit in the Sky.”
“I don’t regret not being recognized as a Christian artist back in the day,” says Hagen. “I was still showing everybody that I’m a child of God, and that God gave me this freedom to express myself so wondrously, and joyously.”
Ahead of a biopic in the works, and her 2010 autobiography, Bekenntnisse (Confessions), rereleased in English, Hagen says she has more gospel songs to release. She’d even like to bring more of Brecht’s works to an English-speaking audience.
Jumping back and forth between influences, Hagen reflects on Tharpe, whom she first discovered around the time she was working on Personal Jesus.
“I discovered her quite late in my life, the godmother of rock and roll,” says Hagen. “She invented the electric guitar licks, and people like Elvis, and for all the other gentlemen and gentle women who entered the rock and roll music halls of fame, it all comes from Sister Rosetta. She was the first one who came up with those hooks.”
She adds, “She’s such a great example and such a great teacher of what it’s like to really follow God’s wishes for all his creation, a joyous life. He wishes us a life to the fullest.”
Photo: Andjani Autumn Gatzweiler
This story also appears on Americansongwriter.com.
Tina Eves 