"Babo – The Haftbefehl Story" | Haftbefehl: Everyone talks about coke, but not us.

Since the documentary "Babo" was released on Netflix, everyone's been talking about Haftbefehl's excessive drug use. But why is no one talking about the Offenbach rapper's once highly praised lyrics anymore? The nd-Feuilleton invites you to analyze his poetry and search for the literary talent within the gangster.

Ring-ring goes the phone: »069« from the mixtape »Uncensored« (2015)

Hafti was lavishly praised – everyone from the open-minded German studies student to the highbrow cultural critics of the mainstream media were among the claqueurs – for his "coded" texts. Highly condensed, indeed. A literary-minded audience with a high tolerance for sound thus ventured into the palimpsests from the Offenbach plateau and found them to be good.

When I listen to "069," this unofficial anthem of the provincial Main metropolitan region, I do so with a focus on these codes, on the ciphers and symbols in the mumbled, forced lyrics. Just as some verses by Hölderlin remain hidden from me in their full meaning, so too does much remain unclear in this listening experience. What Azzlacks are, I don't know.

When Hafti raps about scratching his "Yarak," at least you don't have to learn Turkish to feel the urge for him to at least wash his hands afterward. The fact that the song uses the area code for Frankfurt and Offenbach also makes it relatively easy for the listener to decipher.

Less coded, more openly misanthropic, the musician asks if anyone is "disabled" and advises the listener: "Fuck their mothers, scar them!" And, in a more prosaic and direct manner, he announces: "Rothschild theory, now they're being murdered." One suspects that this little bit of cocaine is perhaps the least of this man's problems. But some half-educated idiot will surely come along and mistake this for socially engaged poetry. Erik Zielke

Autogenic training: »Yesterday Gallus – today Charts« from the album »Azzlack Stereotyp« (2010)

Albert Mangelsdorff, Jürgen Grabowski , Sven Väth, and Aykut Anhan as Haftbefehl – ​​the great artists from Frankfurt am Main? Hmm, Grabowski comes from Wiesbaden, and Väth and Haftbefehl come from the neighboring city of Offenbach. It's much smaller and poorer, and consistently ugly, connected by a motorway interchange. Only Frankfurt counts. Just as Haftbefehl put it in his intertextual Chabo-Babo signature song from 2012: "Pussy, don't you dare make a fuss here, you Rudi/ Nothing to do with Hollywood, Frankfurt, bro."

On his debut album in 2010, he made a programmatic statement: "Yesterday in Gallus/ today in the charts/ even if my album doesn't go gold, bro/ German rap is screwed." And a "real disgrace," because the rest of the rap scene "is Fiat and mine is Porsche," like comparing Offenbach and Frankfurt.

The Galluswarte in Frankfurt is a pseudo-picturesque little tower, a placeholder for drinkers, layabouts, and other drug addicts. For Haftbefehl, this restless spirit, there's far too little going on. "I don't talk much / believe me, brother, I shoot / Drive-by from the Hayabusa machine." There's shooting, fucking, and cocaine—the top themes in German rap, which Haftbefehl also ritually exploits. Does he think you wouldn't recognize the genre otherwise? "Look, I'm getting rich and still playing big / and fucking all the sluts from here to Rome." There's also "George Bush's daughter" and "Rihanna on a pedal boat." Totally over the top. It's like autogenic training: his clichés are so heavy, they get heavier and heavier, until they become melancholic. The "FAZ" saw T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Christian Morgenstern in him. Do you believe it? "That's celebrity style, a vacation in Barbados," raps Haftbefehl. Where on earth is he? Yesterday the charts, today Dubai. Christof Meueler

Roping around in a detached house: »Conan x Xenia« from the »White Album« (2020)

There's one scene in the "Babo" story (no, no, no, not the one in the hotel) that's enough to understand the spirit of German gangsta rap. All the talk about penises wanting to be put somewhere, guns, and cars is (surprise, surprise!) more like stand-up comedy, something between a fever dream and a wet dream, than biographical work. Aykut Anhan is essentially saying: Anyone who thinks there are always 20 naked women sitting next to me is just being unreasonable.

Songs like "Conan x Xenia" illustrate this quite nicely. First, the typical beat, which sounds like the bells of the apocalypse, hits you like a ton of bricks. Then there's Haftbefehl's unique scream: "I'll beat you to a pulp, for no reason, without morals / I'm young, I'm wild, I'm antisocial." It's basically the same as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," only with fewer adjectives. You can see why it's so popular. It sounds compelling, it hits you right in the gut.

The strong start then abruptly collapses with a diss track that, to put it bluntly, completely falls flat. Hafti finds a rival's new album "so-so," and it continues: "Your music makes me sick, it's catastrophic." Even Bushido can do better. Not to mention Nas, 2Pac, or early Eminem. Whoever once wrote that Haftbefehl has raised German rap to American standards hasn't heard these lines.

Then comes the usual rant about women, all of whom are sex workers and are only called "whores" here because the long word would otherwise disrupt the flow. "Screw Rolex, whore, give me the Chopard." This, in turn, is a rather clever analogy that contrasts artistic talent with status consciousness, but it only really works if you're familiar with the boring, nouveau-riche hobby of watches. Afterwards, the YouTuber Shirin David gets to rap briefly about the Brazilian butt lift, which she does quite well.

The most interesting part, however, is the hook referencing the film "Conan the Barbarian" with Arnold Schwarzenegger (1982): "Screw Arnold, I'm Conan the Barbarian." Knowing what Haftbefehl looks like—who, unlike many of his colleagues in the business, has certainly never set foot in a gym—this can only be interpreted as very successful self-irony. At the same time, and this is prototypical of German gangsta rap, a few pathetic losers emotionally embolden themselves by glorifying tough bodies and even tougher souls, repeatedly working through their absent father figure, mixed with some brutal experiences from their youth 20 years ago. At least all this posturing pays off the house with a garden in some suburb of Stuttgart. Christin Odoj

Gryphius reigns: »Mann im Spiegel« from the album »Blockplatin« (2013)

It's the ultimate macho situation: You're sitting all alone somewhere, everyone's betrayed you, women are no good anyway, everything feels so dead, except for the urge to communicate. Ever since Goethe's "Werther," this has been a popular literary predicament for men who are, at their core, incurable mama's boys. Hafti's lyrical persona, of course, is left with only the eagerly aroused super-final pose: Pull out the big gun, destroy the entire known world with a big bang—namely, his own ego. ("I scream 'fuck you all' and shoot myself in the head with a pump-action shotgun"). Boom!

The song has an impact, but despite the rapper's timbre and music, it doesn't reach the glittering richness of the great original sufferer Andreas Gryphius, who definitively defined the self-pity genre as early as 1640 with his poem "Threnen in schwere Kranckheit" (Tears in Severe Illness). Here, too, a man who believes himself to be at his end surveys himself, spouting golden lines such as "I am no longer found within myself," and Gryphius also ends with the narrator's death, which is, from a narrative perspective, difficult to justify. But anyone who reads the old master will also sense the echo of a slight smile, a self-irony that Hafti lacks here. Klaus Ungerer