Marcel Winatschek

Rostock Stays With Him

Still half in love with the video for Kids (2 Finger an den Kopf), still watching those Lila Wolken—purple clouds—drift over Berlin in my memory, and Marteria has already moved somewhere else entirely. He’s made a love letter to Rostock, the northern port city where he grew up, and it lands exactly the way a hometown tribute should.

The track is specific, affectionate, and faintly defiant. Rostock isn’t Berlin. It doesn’t have to be. The song sounds like someone who genuinely believes that—not as consolation but as conviction. Marteria, rapper and passionate footballer, has always carried something particular about where he came from, and here he lets it show plainly.

He entered the song in the Bundesvision Song Contest, a German TV competition in which artists represent different cities and states. He represented Rostock. That feels right. The city is lucky to have him as its ambassador, and the song is good enough that you don’t need to know any of that context to feel it.