Firm and Fresh

The label "new Helene Fischer" gets applied to any blonde German woman who can hold a note. Helene Fischer is Germany’s reigning Schlager queen—a pop phenomenon built on sequined stadium spectacle and songs that are technically inoffensive but somehow inescapable. Linda Hesse had been circling that orbit for a while, doing the rounds on regional public television with songs called things like "Hey Du" and "Nein," and apparently that was enough for the comparison to stick. Probably because she’s blonde. And also sings.

For the June 2018 Playboy she stripped down and got in a pool. Her reasoning: the new album is called Mach ma laut—roughly "turn it up"—and it’s about courage, about breaking out of your shell. Sometimes you just have to jump into the cold water, she said. And I don’t just mean the pool. Besides, I’m turning 31 now, and as they say: dirty thirty.

The pool, as it turned out, was genuinely arctic. I shower cold every morning, I’m not fragile, she explained, but I couldn’t last five seconds in that pool. I don’t know if Playboy secretly added ice cubes to make everything look firm and fresh. Shot by Christoph Köstlin, the photos settle the question one way or another.

There’s something specific about Schlager as a genre—its relentless cheerfulness, the whole architecture of it built around studied inoffensiveness—that makes a Playboy spread feel like an act of rebellion against a form that was never oppressive in the first place. A small defiance with nowhere to land. But she looks good, and the ice cube explanation is funnier than anything she’s recorded.