What Die Ärzte understood about hatred in 1993

Die Ärzte wrote Schrei nach Liebe—"Scream for Love"—as a diagnosis, not a rallying cry. The 1993 track dissects the kind of guy who breaks windows and starts fights not out of conviction but out of interior blankness: deine Heimat ist ein Scheiß, your homeland is shit, and you know it, and you can’t stand knowing it. It was one of the funniest and most accurate pieces of social psychology in German punk. Then 2015 arrived, and suddenly the song needed to do political work again.

A campaign called Aktion Arschloch—Operation Asshole, roughly—organized a coordinated push to get the track to number one on the German iTunes charts, the idea being to flood radio playlists with it and deprive the current wave of "concerned citizens" burning refugee shelters of a moment’s peace. It worked. The song topped the charts. Die Ärzte, Germany’s most beloved punk trio, responded by announcing they’d donate every euro from sales to ProAsyl, the country’s main refugee aid organization. We don’t want to earn anything from this, they said.

The band was gracious about it—any anti-fascist song would’ve done, they noted, this one just happened to be theirs. But it matters that it’s theirs. The song isn’t a protest anthem, it’s a character study, and character studies age differently. The particular emptiness it describes—the violence that comes from not knowing what else to do with yourself—hasn’t gone anywhere in twenty-two years. If anything, the type has multiplied. Good. Let them hear it all day.