"The band has gone overboard with this video," said Charlotte Knobloch, former president of the Central Council of Jews and prominent figure of the Jewish community in Germany.
"Bad taste", "abject": the German industrial metal band Rammstein, used to provocations, has garnered a volley of criticism after the broadcast of a video where its members appear as prisoners of concentration camp.
"The group has exceeded the limits". "The staging of Rammstein musicians in death row inmates of a concentration camp represents the crossing of a red line," said the head of anti-Semitism affairs to the German government, Felix Klein, quoted in the popular newspaper Bild Zeitung on Thursday. "If this was only to promote the sales of the new album, then I think it would be a use of bad taste of artistic freedom," he adds.
"The group has gone overboard with this video," said Charlotte Knobloch, former president of the Central Council of Jews, and prominent figure of the Jewish community in Germany, "the way Rammstein diverts the suffering and murder of millions of people for entertainment purposes is frivolous and abject.
Musicians have a rope around their necks. The beginning of the video of the last title of the group titled "Deutschland", shown on his website, shows his musicians dressed in an outfit reminiscent of the one worn by prisoners of the Nazi camps, a rope around his neck, apparently waiting to be hanged. The charismatic singer Till Lindemann has his cheek streaked with blood from a wound in his right eye. A guitarist wears the yellow star on his jacket.
"The Holocaust should not be used for advertising purposes," one of the leaders of the Liberal Party (FDP) Alexander Graf Lambsdorff annoyed.
Previous polemics. Founded in 1994 by musicians from the former communist GDR, Rammstein - whose name refers to the air disaster on the American base of the city of the same name in 1988 - is the most famous German-speaking group in the world with more than 20 million albums sold.
He is known for his spectacular performance on stage with great pyrotechnics and for his taste for provocation, which have already earned him accusations of proximity to Nazi ideology, which the musicians have always firmly denied. The group was particularly scandalized by using in a video in 1998 images of a film of Nazi propaganda "Olympia" actress and director Leni Riefenstahl.