"I've been shooting for hours, here's my rounds / The engines are drumming, it's roaring in my ears," sang Herbert Grönemeyer in 1984 in "Mambo". It was the last, casually thrown song on "4630 Bochum", the first success album of the singer from Göttingen, who moved as a child in the Ruhr. 34 years later Grönemeyer still turns his rounds. What is roaring in his ears, however, has long ceased to be the traffic that prevented him at that time from reaching "you, my darling". It is the background noise of this country, the soul tone of the Germans, whom he tries to meet with his songs.

With his 15th studio album he succeeded again. "Tumult" will be released on November 9, the Fateful Day of the Germans. Coincidence, says Grönemeyer, but the symbolic power is liable. The record company advertises it as "highly political". But who follows Grönemeyer's work, and that is an audience of millions in Germany, who knows that so far each record of the singer contained songs that left the room of the private in order to track the social zeitgeist. In 1993, with the reunification hangover and the neo-Nazi hate of Rostock-Lichtenhagen still in the bone, he wrote a spot anthem against rights like "The Hardness" ("Hart in the brain, soft in the pear") and strangled, in the song " Greenland ", with its threatening homeland:" Frustration and violence set fires / I want to go home ".

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Herbert Grönemeyer: Soul Sound of the Nation

From "chaos" to "turmoil", this is not a big leap, although for Grönemeyer a longer period of life in London as well as private strokes of fate intervene, which he processed in 2002, among others on his most successful album "Mensch". Ever since then, the nation has embraced him as their conscience. One likes to make fun of oneself when he dumplings and throats, one finds his dance steps cute on stage (he too) - but one also knows what one has about him: a unpretentious brooder, an uncomfortable admonisher, a eloquent comforter.

And because he knows us, himself, and with it the inertial laws of the all-too-human, he knows that he has to shake his mind for a while before it gets down to business. "Tumult" begins quite familiarly, quite harmless with gentle chirping, the spring feelings and overflowing heart of "seconds happiness", after which he turns the Bochum "Mambo" into the cheerful Berlin zydeco groove of "Taufrisch". "Wait until the day breaks / And the sun stirs / Resuscitates us / Just now," he bleats in the chorus, a "brothers to the sun, to freedom," setting the tone for the rest of the album. For it is in this new, leaden time of anxiety and right-hand, the solidarity of the good. "Together we are cheeky," he sings - and of course means "strong". He calls for "morality" by AfD and other populists to civil courage.

Usa Wassmann / DER SPIEGELHerbert Grönemeyer in the SPIEGEL conversation "Roused and nervous, we Germans are light food"

This self-animation and folk animation will be musically diversified and lyrically deepened after this upswing. The music, again composed with longtime partner Alex Silva, rarely leaves the usual Grönemeyer terrain of synth and piano pop, sometimes ("Are you there") also pork rock and chanson ("La Bonifica"). But there are more intense and engaging moments than most recently on "Ship Traffic" (2011) and "Lasting Now" (2014). Especially when Grönemeyer sings verses and choruses in Turkish in the urban-oriental swirling single "Doppelherz / Iki Gönlüm", thus passionately promoting open (heart) borders and cultural diversity.

Emotional agitation

He sees the tense discourse of society - between nationalist ignorance and cosmopolitan tolerance - above all as a "mental war", he says in the SPIEGEL conversation: "stirred up and nervous, we are easy food" for the agitation and propaganda of the right agitators. "Everything is dangerous / Hasardeure just have a run," he sings in "carelessness and love" about fatalistic electro-pulse. "Quiet," he keeps shouting between the refrains of "Fall of the Falls." Even unsure, he listens deeply to himself in this song, whether he himself has already been poisoned. He "stalks the thoughts / that their soul does not fall ill" and finds in the end with cheeky choir accompaniment to the clear attitude: "understanding is never bad, but not a millimeter to the right".

When politicians fail or despair, each individual is asked to position themselves and leave the "waiting room of the world" where he sits and waits for it to get better, as the song of the same name says, "It takes a long time even nothing is done / you strongly accept who know what they are doing ". It's about getting ready to leave the comfy room: "At some point we'll get up / even though no-one ever called us out".

How this departure from the lethargy, the uprising of the garden gnomes, if you will, can look like, experienced Grönemeyer, when he appeared a few weeks ago at the conclusion of the # indivisible demonstration in Berlin. 240,000 people took to the streets on the Diversity and Tolerance Day. Grönemeyer made a small speech between "Mensch" and "Doppelherz": "We are a very, very young, fragile country and we have carefully worked our freedom for years together, it is not self-evident or carved in stone Test bench and there is a lot to defend, "he said, not even so state-bearing, as it reads here, but moved and emotional, worried from the right direction.

"Tumult", which ends with the contemplative Christmas ballad "courage", is a thoughtful, soulfully agitating soundtrack for this Grönemeyer-TÜV of the booming, unruly German gearbox in 2018.