He can only say three words in English: “Yes, no and sex”, after all he learned Russian in the GDR. Christian “Flake” Lorenz said that in 2019, when he was appearing on the MDR program “Spass Zone”. The audience laughed.
Even if it’s not meant to be taken seriously, it’s a statement that sums up well what the Rammstein keyboard player, 56, keeps babbling about.
Sex for example. His statements are provocative, a stylistic device that he has appropriated: “I didn’t experience any sexual adventures sober.” Or: “When I was drunk, I didn’t care about the consequences of sex,” he told the “Märkische Allgemeine” in 2016.
Seven years later, given the current allegations against Rammstein singer Till Lindemann, these words seem at least disturbing. In the meantime, two other women have described alleged sexual assaults in the band’s environment. The name Flake is also mentioned.
The Rammstein keyboard player had the allegations rejected by his lawyers. Previously, he had given insights into the life of a rock star in two books and numerous interviews. His biography “The Key Fucker” has the subtitle: “What I can remember” and flirts with the topics of intoxication and loss of control. Alcohol helps him to stop being shy and uptight. “Ideal for people like me.”
Shy is an adjective that Lorenz likes to claim for himself. It was so bad as a child that he stuttered. It only got better when success came with the band. He likes to say that confirmation from outside healed him.
But inside, there are still numerous fears that gnaw at him. The fear of cancer. “All the time I’m thinking about having cancer, I might as well be doing something nice.” He is a hypochondriac, which takes away “a lot of quality of life”.
In his biography, too, he devotes numerous pages to his fears. On every S-Bahn ride, he used to wait for him to get sick and vomit. That never happened to him.
For six pages alone, he talks about his fear of flying. But you don’t really believe all of it. That his brother’s friend got him some debris from a crashed plane, which he always had with him in his hand luggage for a while, “because statistically it’s almost impossible for a piece of plane to crash twice.”
That he “wrapped the sharp edges of the debris in my spare panties” so they wouldn’t damage his other belongings. Really? Oh well.
Flake likes to condense his life into anecdotes, at least that’s how it seems. Sometimes the punchline seems to be more important to him than the truth content.
In his book he writes that he is afraid of “loud noises”, which doesn’t quite fit with his career as a Rammstein musician. He’s also very afraid of cars, but he doesn’t explain how that fits in with his passion for collecting vintage cars.
Because he gives a clear “Yes” to old VW buses. Emphatically edgy, he told the “world” that he camps at the Baltic Sea even when the outside temperature is three degrees and simply lights a candle inside the Bulli. Zack, cozy.
When he relaxes and just doesn’t want to think about anything, he goes hiking. For hours, he clears his head. That reminds him of his childhood, when he and his parents collected blueberries in the forest. He wants people to find him humble.
In foreign cities he prefers to go to the river. There he sat down. And read books. “I usually avoid places where there are so many people anyway.” He prefers places that are dilapidated and decaying.
To this day, when you hear him speak, you can tell he’s from Berlin. Sometimes the world sounds almost simple when he speaks.
The fact that he sometimes comes across as naïve with some statements seems to be part of his concept of self-portrayal. And he runs it. Reveal things about yourself that make you laugh: Yes! Be really approachable: No. “I like my naivety. If I wasn’t naive, I would be a lot less happy,” he told the “MAZ”. If he is asked about money, for example by “Standard”, he says: “The money that remains private to us can hardly do us any harm because it is kept within limits.”
His fans seem to like that about him. There are several fan pages about him on social media. Photos of his perhaps best-known stage outfit appear again and again. Golden pilot’s hat, glasses, tight pants, jacket with large sequins, of course everything in gold. Flake, who in contrast to Till Lindemann is quite slim built, is often celebrated for his eye-catching outfits. Flake, who is often pushed and provoked by Lindemann on stage, who is staged as the band’s “weak one”. Flake, who is sometimes pejoratively called “the stickman,” wants to draw attention to himself.
Not just visually. He also polarizes with political statements. He, who was born in East Berlin in 1966, older brother, father an engineer, mother a publicist. As a child, he often “squatted in the apartment” and played little with other children. He didn’t leave home until he was 23.
Flake doesn’t hide the fact that he still has a certain sympathy for the GDR, and that some even call him an “Ostalgic”. “We were set back so much that a resentment and disappointment built up that has persisted to this day. On the whole, the reunion in this form was a mess,” he said in an interview with the “Standard”. He would still not vote for the AfD.
It’s still surprising that he thinks this way about the GDR, which he once called a “toy country”. He toured the GDR with his punk band Feeling B back in the 80s, later he found out that he was being monitored by the Stasi at the time, that there were informal employees in his environment, not just one.
The reports filled a whole file. Like the “B.Z.” reported, the State Security determined against Flake because of “anti-socialist way of life” and “impairment of the activities of state organs”. This is how his teacher was interviewed, for whom Flake worked as a skilled worker for production equipment. He gave up his job in favor of his music and now earns the money with his former hobby.
Flake’s father was “still a bit disappointed that I didn’t pursue my toolmaking career,” Flake told the “Tagesspiegel”. In 2017 he wrote his second book, in “Heute hat die Weltetta” he tells about his time as a Rammstein member, although that’s not there. He only writes about “the band” and his rock star life à la: “I no longer have any idea what time it actually is. We flew out somewhere this morning and my cell phone changes the clock by itself.”
Flake also read from the book during his appearance in the “MDR Fun Zone”. He describes a scene, backstage, he wanted to rest on a sofa, he had just suffered two blisters during the show. But there were “women screaming excitedly” and Till was in the process of distributing “champagne and vodka”. “‘Hello, let’s fuck,’ I say as a greeting to lighten the mood a bit,” says Flake. But he is ignored, the women concentrate on Till. The audience in the “fun zone” laughs again and again during the reading.
At the beginning of his book, Flake writes that correspondences with real people and events are not intended. Another sentence that might leave today’s readers confused.
Sources: “MDR fun zone”, book “The key fucker”, “Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung”, “Die Welt”, “Der Standard”, “Der Tagesspiegel”, “B.Z.”, book “Today is the world’s birthday”
