Man Against Man

 
 

Mann gegen Mann (Man against Man) is a song from the German band Rammstein. This song was released in March of 2006, and was the third and final single from Rammstein’s album, Rosenrot. The song portrays a man with strong, repressed homosexual desires, and it is the first Rammstein music video to have nudity since the music video for their cover of Depeche Mode‘s Stripped, and it is the second track on Rosenrot. Mecano‘s Mujer contra mujer (Woman against woman) was a source of inspiration for Rammstein.

 
 

Destiny smiled on me
and gave me a present
Threw me on a warm star [1]
So close to the skin, so far from the eye
I take my destiny in my own hands
My desire is manned

Where the fresh water dies
because it taints itself in salt
I keep the Little Prince in mind
A king without a queen
When a woman is mistaken about me
then the bright world is confused

Man against man
My skin belongs to the gentlemen
Man against man
Birds of a feather flock together
Man against man
I am the servant of two masters
Man against man
Birds of a feather flock together

I am the corner of all rooms
I am the shadow of all trees
No link is missing in my chain [2]
when lust pulls from behind
My family calls me a traitor [3]
I am the nightmare of all fathers

Man against man
My skin belongs to the gentlemen
Man against man
Birds of a feather flock together

Man against man
But my heart freezes on some days
Man against man
Cold tongues that beat there

Gay-ah [4]

I’m not interested in balance
The sun shines in my face
But my heart freezes on some days
Cold tongues that beat there

Gay-ah
Man gayfor man [5]

 
 

[1] “Warm” means the same as the English word “warm”, but also is slang for “homosexual”. Thus, the star is either warm or gay, or both.

[2] “Glied” can mean both “link” (of a chain) and “member” – that is, “penis”.

[3] “Geschlecht” can mean many things: “sex”, “gender”, “family”, “house”, “generation”, etc. It can also be short for “Geschlechtsteil” which means “genitals”.

[4] The screaming (“Ah”) has been combined with “Schwuler” to make “Schwulah”. That, or it’s similar to “playa” as opposed to “player”, just changing the ending to sound “hip”.

[5] Gegen and “gay gen” sound the same. The former means “against”, the latter “gay for”.

 
 

To watch the music video, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

Creative Optic

Illustration by Jiří Slíva

 
 

First row: А. П. Че́хов (Anton Chekhov); J.R.R. Tolkien; Franz Kafka; Betty MacDonald (misspelled McDonald)

Second row: Jack Kerouac; Marcel Proust; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; R. Kipling

Third row: Marcel Duchamp; Stendhal; Karl May; Karl Marx

Fourth row: Magritte; S. Freud; Louis Pasteur; Günter Grass

Fifth row: Salvador Dalí; E.M. Remarque; Jaroslav Hašek; Isaac B. Singer

A Proud Flower

Early illustrations for The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery

 
 

“I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds. On the morning of his departure he put his planet in perfect order. He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.

On our earth we are obviously much too small to clean out our volcanoes. That is why they bring no end of trouble upon us.

The little prince also pulled up, with a certain sense of dejection, the last little shoots of the baobabs. He believed that he would never want to return. But on this last morning all these familiar tasks seemed very precious to him. And when he watered the flower for the last time, and prepared to place her under the shelter of her glass globe, he realized that he was very close to tears.

“Goodbye,” he said to the flower.

But she made no answer.

“Goodbye,” he said again.

The flower coughed. But it was not because she had a cold.

“I have been silly,” she said to him, at last. “I ask your forgiveness. Try to be happy . . .”

He was surprised by this absence of reproaches. He stood there all bewildered, the glass globe held arrested in mid-air. He did not understand this quiet sweetness.

“Of course I love you,” the flower said to him. “It is my fault that you have not known it all the while. That is of no importance. But you–you have been just as foolish as I. Try to be happy . . . Let the glass globe be. I don’t want it any more.”

“But the wind–”

“My cold is not so bad as all that . . . The cool night air will do me good. I am a flower.”

“But the animals–”

“Well, I must endure the presence of two or three caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful. And if not the butterflies–and the caterpillars–who will call upon me? You will be far away . . . As for the large animals–I am not at all afraid of any of them. I have my claws.”

And, naïvely, she showed her four thorns. Then she added:

“Don’t linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!”

For she did not want him to see her crying. She was such a proud flower . . .”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Little Prince

Out of Reach

“…Now you trail away,…
…Now you mount like an air-ball’s string, higher and higher through the layers of the leaves, out of reach…”

The Waves

Virginia Woolf

 
 

Illustration by Arthur Rackham

 
 

The Little Prince as illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry