Till Lindemann as a Poet and with his Band (1)

Till Lindemann, lead singer of the Rammstein group, has also published some collections of poems. You should not forget: he is the son of Werner Lindemann, who used to be a prominent writer in the times of the socialist German Democratic Rebublic. 

As I am (together with Claudia Lisa Moeller) translating one of these books, "In stillen Nächten"/ "On Quiet Nights" (English translation by Ehren Fordyce,  Raw Dog Screaming Press, Bowie MD in 2025) into Italian, I took out my R Quanteda package in order to take a more distant view on the poems. 

The most frequent words ("stopwords" excluded) in Lindemann's poems are "Herz" ("heart"), which appears 33 times, and "Liebe" ("love") with 26 occurrences. This might seem similar to the frequencies in Rammstein songs, where we read the leading word "Liebe" 46 times, followed  by "Mann"/ man (45). 

We might assume that, since "Herz" is often taken as a synonym for love, the main topic in Lindemann's poems would be love  as well. But we should not overlook that, in his poems, Lindemann frequently uses "Herz", at least at a first sight,  in a  physical sense. In Knife someone is spreading scrambled eggs on this organ. In other contexts breath, veins, drogues and pubic hair appear near "Herz". Altogether, it would be hard to find a returning collocation. The usage of "heart" claims for longer interpretations. 

Details: The wordcloud of the "heart" contexts (Kwic, n=10), to make a beginning, looks rather insignificant. "Ross" is a horse, "hoch" means "high", "up in the air". Both words are repeated within only one poem (Where is your heart?). The context seems to be shifting.

Frequencies:      

ross  15      hoch  13     gefunden  9      liebe 6    brust 6 

Within the context of "liebe": 

Looks different. Frequencies: 

mag  6  weiß 6  gesicht 6  herz 6  bereuen (regret) 5 

Only six times "Herz" and "Liebe" occur within each others context. We might make a co-occurrence matrix ...  

In the meantime, we may have a look at the most frequent words including "stopwords", e.g. pronouns. In the poems, we get

ich  231     sie   101     mich  86      du   53      wenn 53

Now? This is Lindemann! Looks like this:

In the songs of Lindemann's famous band: 

Complete word frequency list in "Quiet Nights"

textstat_frequency(dfm_authors, n=20)

   feature frequency rank docfreq group

1      ich       231    1      64   all

2      die       150    2      61   all

3      und       127    3      60   all

4      das       106    4      49   all

5    nicht       101    5      48   all

6      sie        97    6      33   all

7      ist        95    7      44   all

8      der        89    8      48   all

9     mich        86    9      39   all

10      in        86    9      49   all

11      es        85   11      39   all

12     ein        83   12      51   all

13     mir        65   13      35   all

14      im        63   14      40   all

15     den        59   15      39   all

16      zu        55   16      29   all

17      du        53   17      21   all

> meist_df

     token frequency

1     herz        33

2    liebe        26

3      gut        19

4  gesicht        17

5    schon        16

6    licht        15

7    nacht        13

8     dass        13

9    leben        13

10     wer        12

11    blut        12

12   augen        11

13    geht        11

14   sonne        11

15    weiß        11

16    hund        11

17     gar        10

18  singen        10

19    zeit        10

20  allein        10