Last year. I wrote a series of pen portraits about where radical activists and artists are buried in Berlin. One artist did not make the final cut. Nico’s life was too complicated and contradictory that I could not do her justice in 300 words. Moreover, I wondered, whether she was really of the Left. A longer article never got written – until now.
Upbringing and rise to fame
Nico (née Christa Päffgen) was born in Cologne in 1938. When her father was sent to fight in the Second World War, she moved with her mother to Lübbenau. After the war, they moved to the centre of Berlin, she remembers “a desert of bricks… seeing dead bodies lying in the rubble as I walked through a wilderness at the end of the street where we lived.”
Her father meanwhile was variously – shot by his fellow soldiers, or died in a Concentration Camp, or maybe after a brain injury he was institutionalised. All versions told by Nico herself, having a flexible relationship with the truth.
Stories about her early childhood are equally vague. A friend, Jane Goldstraw recounts: “She told me that, when she was three years old during the war, she lived on a farm near a death camp, and she remembered treading over bodies. But there are conflicting stories.”
As a young woman, she gained jobs as a model for Elle, Esquire, and Vogue. She also got acting work. At 20, she was in a film with Mario Lanza, and in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In 1960, she joined Lee Strasberg’s Method School in New York, with Marilyn Monroe as a classmate.
Nico’s biography is peppered with references to famous men. She had an affair with Bob Dylan in 1964, who wrote Visions of Johanna about her. Then, she had a child with Alain Delon – or was it Brian Jones? The New Yorker claims that Leonard Cohen “began writing songs in hopes of seducing her.” Film maker John Waters asked her to play at his funeral.
Dylan led her to Pop Artist Andy Warhol who recruited her to the band the Velvet Underground. She sang lead vocals on 3 songs on The Velvet Underground and Nico, the 1967 album. Of it Brian Eno said: “only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”
Jim Morrison encouraged her to write her own songs. But at first, she sang songs exclusively by male writers like Lou Reed, Jackson Browne and Jim Morrison, saying “I thought men write songs and women sing them.”
In the 1970s she released a number of haunting albums, on which she sang and played harmonium. She then went out of fashion. She died in 1988 in the most un-rock star manner of having a brain aneurysm and falling off her bicycle.
Nico’s politics
Nico grew up in post-Nazi Germany, with all the implied shame. She invented a Turkish father, saying: “I do not wish to have any familiarity with the German people. I do not identify with them in any way, except their endurance… Turks are the new Jews of Germany.”
Later she claimed: “It was the time of imperialist war in Algeria, and my secret support was with the Arabs against the French Army, but I could not say this to my society friends, who were often the opposite, but I could say it in these clubs. I always dislike the invader and, of course, I am part Arab because of my father.” This story is slightly compromised by the fact that Nico’s actual father was a wealthy German brewer.
She became a heroin addict, but in the 1960s she rejected LSD, saying “Timothy Leary said ‘Drop Out’, and this was the solution in America. I didn’t like this alternative, because it doesn’t fight totalitarianism. It lets others fight for you while you are asleep”
She supported: “Andreas Baader, the Red Brigade (Italy) and the Catholics in Ireland (IRA), and there are others. That is the alternative that fights, not the alternative that says ‘Drop Out’… If I were not Nico I would be a terrorist.”
Most of these statements come from the same article and are difficult to corroborate. SInce Nico’s biographers were more interested in her famous lovers than in her politics (or her music), this does not mean that she did not say these things. But such comments do not sit easily with her later behaviour.
Internalized Misogyny
Obviously much press coverage patronised Nico and dismissed her talents because of her gender. Jennifer Otter Bickerdicke says: “While her fellow Velvets, Lou Reed and John Cale, are called ‘American masters’, ‘poets’ and ‘legends’, Nico has been cast as a racist junkie who slept with myriad famous men.”
Did Nico internalise some of this misogyny? She is reported as saying: “Women are poison. If I wasn’t so special, I could hate myself,” and “Women are inferior,” adding that her only regret was being born a woman.”
Nico’s keyboard player Una Baines said: “I don’t think she’d have labelled herself a feminist because she hated any form of ideology. She did say her only regret was not being born a man. I think she wanted the same privileges and power that men have.”
As Baines makes clear, Nico’s statements do not necessarily confirm that she disliked women. Perhaps she was merely arguing that she, and we, lived in a society, where women are treated as second class citizens. Or, as Maxine Peake argued: “She said a few times that she wished she was a man, which came from the fact that as an artist she would have been more recognised.”
Nationalism
Another charge levelled against Nico is that she was a nationalist, possibly a Nazi. An NTS radio programme reported: “She had a definite Nordic Aryan streak, [the belief] that she was physically, spiritually and creatively superior, a view she appears to have continued to maintain throughout her later years. During a performance in Berlin, the audience rioted after Nico performed the German national anthem “Deutschlandlied”, including a verse omitted since 1945 for its nationalist associations.”
But as the NTS report notes, after singing the Deutschlandlied, “Nico dedicated this performance to militant Andreas Baader, leader of the anti-fascist Red Army Faction.” In another report, her manager, Nigel Bagley noted: “at one gig, she introduced Deutschland über Alles, saying: ‘My father was a homosexual and died in a concentration camp.’”
None of this excuses Nico’s behaviour which is, at best erratic and fuelled by drugs. But at worst she was behaving like punks like Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux, who provocatively wore swastika t-shirts and arm bands. At a time when Nazis were growing in the UK, this was an incredibly stupid act, but it didn’t make them Nazis themselves.
Racism
But the charge which refuses to go away is the one of racism. This depends on some well-documented incidents. The first is her ongoing antisemitism towards her friend – record executive Danny Fields. Fields later recalled: “Every once in a while, there’d be something about Jews and I’d be, ‘But Nico, I’m Jewish,’ and she was like ‘Yes, yes, I don’t mean you.’ She had a definite Nordic Aryan streak, [the belief] that she was physically, spiritually and creatively superior.”
Rock journalist Lester Bangs reported that Nico “was just naive enough to explain to Mary Harron, in a recent interview in New Wave Rock, why she was dropped by Island Records: “I made a mistake. I said in Melody Maker to some interviewer that I didn’t like negroes. That’s all. They took it so personally . . . although it’s a whole different race. I mean, Bob Marley doesn’t resemble a negro, does he? … He’s an archetype of Jamaican … but with the features like white people. I don’t like the features. They’re so much like animals…. it’s cannibals, no?”
And then there is the incident at a party, recounted by Fields via Simon Reynolds: “Nico was, I dunno, feeling neglected, or drunk, but suddenly she said ‘I hate black people,’ and smashed a wineglass on the table and stuck it in the girl’s eye. There was lots of blood and screaming. Fortunately she just twisted it around her eye socket, so the glass never reached [the eye] but it’s not like she was being cautious.””
Nico’s explanation for this incident, for which, she claims, the Black Panthers put out a hit on her is “I was high on angel dust… then I had to leave the country.” This non-apology-apology is so often used by rock stars to excuse their excesses. It is no more defensible than David Bowie saying: “I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader.” Unlike Bowie, Nico is not known to have ever apologised.
Instead, she attributed her bigotry to having been raped at the age of 13 (or sometimes 15) by a black US American soldier. Brian Dillon reported in the New Yorker: “When Nico was thirteen, she said, she was raped by a U.S. Army sergeant who was hanged for the crime. She also said he was Black, a claim that has been cited by many, Nico included, to explain conduct, on her part, that can only be called racist.”
Her biographers disagree about the authenticity of the crime. Richard Witts claims that Nico was probably lying, as he couldn’t locate any record of the crime, trial, or execution. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, argues that the need to avoid the “Soviet and American heroes who had defeated fascism” meant that such cases were routinely covered up.
But surely this argument misses the point. Whether or not the rape happened, using it to justify a hatred of all black people is hardly proof that Nico was not a racist.
What does this have to do with Nico’s music?
Actually, very little. Good politics can inspire good music, but there is no direct relationship between the two. Wagner was a great composer and an antisemite, Ezra Pound a great poet and an antisemite. David Bowie produced some of his greatest works when he was calling for a new Hitler and raping under age girls. When he apologized for his Hitler statement, and called MTV out for racism, his music was much less spectacular.
Nico left an astounding body of work. On top of the music, the films, and the modelling, she inspired a number of other artistic works – from the films Nico-Icon and Nico, 1988 to The Nico Project, a theatrical performance created by, and starring Maxine Peake.
After Nico died, many obituaries concentrated on the men in her life – not her undoubted talent. She is buried in one of Berlin’s most beautifully located cemeteries – Friedhof Grunewald-Forst near the Havel. Fans and admirers ensure that her grave is covered with photos and flowers.
