Something changed back then, but one can no longer say exactly when it happened and how. One of those moments when the change became palpable was on the evening of November 9, 2002, in the Düsseldorf exhibition hall. Herbert Grönemeyer sat at the piano and played the song "Der Weg". When he was finished, the audience of "Wetten, dass ...?" rose in applause representing the television nation. It just wouldn't stop clapping. And before Thomas Gottschalk could ruin this moment with words, Herbert Grönemeyer left the stage. Wordlessly.
In the song "Der Weg," the I-narrator speaks about a lost love, and yet he expresses new courage in the end, in the last verses, even if it is that of despair. The audience in the exhibition hall was sure about who the song was about: Herbert Grönemeyer himself, saying goodbye to his wife Anna Henkel, who had passed away in 1998, and yet not quite, because: "I carry you with me / Until the curtain falls." The audience was just as certain a few months earlier when the pre-single of Herbert Grönemeyer’s first album after a four-and-a-half-year break was released in August 2002. It's named just like the album itself, "Mensch": "And the human is called human / Because he forgets / Because he represses / And because he dreams and satisfies / Because he warms when he tells / And because he laughs / Because he lives / I miss you."
Here, too, Grönemeyer had to sing about his deceased wife, but more so, he seemed to sing from the heart of an entire country: everyone wants to be human and not to be forgotten once they are gone. The single "Mensch" was, one can hardly believe it, Herbert Grönemeyer’s first number one in the German single charts after almost 25 years of a music career. About four million copies of the eponymous album were sold. Just for comparison: Robbie Williams, the greatest imaginable European superstar of our time, only sold about 700,000 copies of his album "Intensive Care."
But what is Herbert Grönemeyer then, please? Just not a superstar. Rather, the Germans’ favorite folk singer. The only and perhaps even the last one that there will be for the foreseeable future. But superlatives do not express what happened with and through "Mensch." “Folk singer,” which he prefers, Herbert Grönemeyer said in an interview shortly before the release of "Mensch." And indeed, one must not misunderstand this: Grönemeyer is not down-to-earth. He never was.
Herbert Arthur Wiglev Clamor Grönemeyer was not born in Bochum but in Göttingen, as the son of a Calvinist engineer. A son of a citizen, raised in the Ruhr area. "Bochum, I come from you / Bochum, I hang on to you / Oho, good luck – Bochum ...": That was the confession of someone who was almost a little desperate and unheard of in love, who nonetheless did not want to wait for his old rusty love. Who wanted to leave the place where he had played as a boy in the late 50s, early 60s in house ruins that still remained from the war. Who moved on, to Cologne for example, and much later to London. And who may have loved his first love Bochum for different reasons than those boys do who sit in the stands at VfL on Saturdays. For example, because Peter Zadek brought him to the Schauspielhaus as a young man, in the function as musical director. Thus, the world of the stage was opened to him, as an actor, which he has long since ceased to be.
Grönemeyer’s later personal tragedy, however, the loss of his wife and one of his two brothers within a few days in 1998, and how Grönemeyer artistically coped with that on "Mensch" – that ultimately made the transformation of a beloved one into a deeply revered one possible. Grönemeyer is today elevated above all doubts like no other singer in Germany. The reason is an extreme risk: seemingly he let all scruples go, gave up all distance, and publicly expressed, in an artistic way, what he as a public figure would never have allowed to be spread about him – the innermost feelings of a survivor. The risk was all the greater since it had not always been the case that Grönemeyer was necessarily loved by all Germans.
There was the imperfect, stiff, unfunny, didactic, emotional, politically correct, even missionary quality that was said of him. However, Grönemeyer never let on what the mockery did to him. Instead, he much more quietly ensured that the private individual Grönemeyer could never become the target of reporting. To this day, he doesn't understand humor when it comes to the public representation of his person.
Even in his lyrics, Herbert Grönemeyer maintains distance from himself. As far as songs are about oneself, one always stylizes oneself in the lyrics, he once said. One makes oneself better than one truly is. Grönemeyer wants to be sincere, not authentic. He creates art and does not compromise himself. From his not-so-secure distance, he perhaps recognizes more easily than anyone else what is currently occupying this nation. This nation could not have chosen a better, more dignified, more interesting, more suitable person for the job than their favorite singer.
For all those who want to indulge in memories with Herbert once again, there is the album box for 40 years "4630 Bochum". With a remix in 2024 of the original album and interpretations from a new generation of musicians, it takes a look back to the future.
