At her concerts, Judith told Holofernes stories.

Anyone who grew up in the provinces knew bands like Tomte and Kettkar on stage, men in leather jackets, silent men with guitars.

The fact that there was a woman standing there, legs apart, playing instruments that she, all punk, only mastered moderately, that she calmly talked about girlfriends who had fallen in love with her, because the line between friendship and love is not a mystery , was euphoric.

So much for the early 2000s.

Ten years later, Judith Holofernes was in her mid-thirties and her band Wir sind Helden broke up, themselves still young and very successful.

She had two children to tour with and full blown depression.

Page fifty of Other People's Dreams, and be done with the heroes.

From here it's about

how a woman's pop career changes over the years.

With children.

With age.

A deepening of her blog posts, held together by the question: How do you get out of it with dignity?

Elena Witzeck

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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It is well known that the pop business is not a comfortable one.

Few artists talk about it, at least not in a way that people outside would understand.

Sometimes it sounds larmoyant, sometimes dishonest.

In Germany, this is shockingly unglamorous.

Everyone thinks they know her

Judith Holofernes has the right words, it's been clear since heroic times, since the lyrical, weary lyrics on her album Take Me Home.

There's just one problem with the Holofernes thing.

Everyone thinks they know her as a friend, approachable even in her willingness to rebel, the "most harmless punk in Berlin".

What else does she want to reveal?

Do you need to know, do you want it?

When Judith Holofernes returned to the stage after her first goodbye, she did it with glossy pictures, flower arrangements and blonde hair.

Her fans felt cheated.

But every comeback has its own dynamic.

You can now read about the fact that the record company spontaneously decided to release the album eight weeks earlier and how it came about that there were suddenly more and more inquiries from parenting and women's magazines.

How she was encouraged to accept the conversations about motherhood with gratitude, feeling that she was doing a service to humanity.

Until it was suddenly said that she had moved out of her target group.

Why, she is then asked by her own team, aren't your concerts getting full anymore?

"I had cheated my glorious ass-cool comeback," writes Holofernes.

Commercially a flop

And at the same time, Holofernes was smart enough to see through everything: "Such a deal is a clean transaction.

The record company invests a lot of money and work to make the artist visible in the furthest corners of the republic.

In return, the artist undertakes to be worth the effort.

(...) To be a product that is worth marketing.” Except that in the end the product sits in the dungeon.

Once her manager forwarded her a study on her notoriety.

It turned out that the fans couldn't relate to any of their alienations.

They naturally liked Judith Holofernes.

Anything that looked new was a commercial flop.

To break out of this, it took an American feminist who had a lot of experience in subverting expectations, see Instagram, and who, for once, Holofernes was able to fall in love with: Amanda Palmer.

The early Holofernes saw herself as a boy among boys, and so she performed with her band.

And now this woman writes about ideals of beauty, writes about how she began to agree with her cameramen on which side she should be filmed from, writes about the fear of humiliation, exposure, destruction.

And finally, what rock star do you want to be when you get older.

Patti Smith, moody Joni Mitchell?

Marianne Faithfull getting her weight tied on her nose 24/7?

"Did I say I was afraid of cruelty?" And she didn't seem to be the only artist.

"Plus, most of them seemed to be doing yoga about six hours a day as an excuse for the audacity to still be there."

But for Holofernes, the biggest betrayal of her career was the critique of consumerism, the practices of denial, the anti-performance ethic that she sang about in her early songs and that so many celebrated.

She was everywhere: "You just have to want to", "The competition", "Hello", "So and so".

It was she, writes Holofernes, "that ironically sealed our success and twelve years of uninterrupted activity."

So why a book like this other than for self-exploration?

Because it doesn't always deliver what a Holofernes product promises, but often enough.

Lyrical, cryptic phrases: "I listened and stretched the muscle in my heart until the first cracks appeared." And entertainment, fortunately.

A fine mockery when it comes to the Dadaist conversations of the manager.

The industry almost crushed them

Otherwise, “Other People's Dreams” isn't easy stuff, not even and especially for journalists, because of course you're constantly asking yourself how much you're doing wrong when projecting themes, when transferring art to artists.

Because a character who carries so many contradictions within him, fear and courage, ups and downs, stubbornness and modesty and productivity, was almost crushed by the German pop industry, the industry that nominated Helge Schneider along with Placebo at an award ceremony and the border blurred between pop and hits with a stupid grin.

The very kind that a friendly singer next door satisfactorily deconstructs in her book.

Judith Holofernes: "Other People's Dreams".

Kiepenheuer and Witsch Verlag, Cologne 2022. 416 p., hard copy, €24.