WWe begin with two treasure stories. One: Siegfried wins the gold of King Nibelung in Burgundy by fighting hundreds of opponents, including twelve giants. The treasure is so big that – according to legend – twelve carts have to drive back and forth three times over four days to get all the gold away.
Two: Xatar ambushed a gold transporter near Ludwigsburg. Because he has uniformed himself as a tax investigator, there is no fight. The treasure is so heavy that he can’t pack everything into his getaway car. He doesn’t dare to drive back and forth a few times.
Story one is the plot of Richard Wagner’s opera “Rheingold”, story two of Fatih Akin’s new film “Rheingold”. Both are German mythologies. Both are about a variety of crimes. A lawyer once listed the crimes in the “Ring des Nibelungen” and discovered kidnapping, fratricide, incest, robbery, arson and theft – just to name the more serious ones.
In Akin’s “Rheingold”, a film biography of the German-Kurdish rapper Xatar, a whole series of criminal offenses come together. After his parents fled the Middle East (first Iran before Khomeini, then Iraq before Saddam) and found asylum in Germany, the teenager Xatar begins dealing drugs (violating the Narcotics Act) and rivals in Bonn am Rhein beating up (serious bodily harm). In Holland, he gets involved with the cocaine mafia and is there when the head of the Kurdish clan shoots down an upstart (abetting murder? failure to provide assistance?).
At the Clan Chief’s table: Xatar
Quelle: Warner Brothers/Gordon Timpen, SMPSP
When Xatar loses a shipment of cocaine, he is forced to rob the gold to pay off his debts to the clan (aggravated robbery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, but still no weapons). After his conviction, he had a mobile phone smuggled into the Rheinbach prison and used it to record his second rap album under the covers (violation of the prison rules, but Akin didn’t always want to make a film about the director Yilmaz Güney, who escaped from a Turkish prison directed the Cannes-winning Yol?).
None of this is made up, it’s all in Xatar’s autobiography, All or Nothing. Fatih Akin read it and found himself in it, up to a point. The book is about everyday racist experiences – the “Kanaken raus” on the wall, not being invited to a classmate’s birthday party – and the hardship of the mother who has to make ends meet by cleaning her family when her father abandons her. Akin is eight years older than Xatar, and when he thinks back to his youth in a Hamburg ghetto, he thinks of his buddies from back then, “who all became criminals”. So why not Akin? He has no definitive answer to that himself.
“If necessary, you have to cheat in life”
His Xatar in “Rheingold” is in a sense the Fatih that never hatched. That’s how he stages it. There is a terror when Xatar beats people to a pulp far beyond incapacitation. There is a bit of admiration in view of this unconditional desire for advancement: you have to make an effort, you have to be tough on yourself and others, you have to use tricks if necessary. Seven songs from Xatar’s debut album were put on the index by the federal testing agency, they appeared “brutalizing” and represented a “violent assertion of one’s own interests as an alternative action concept”.
All true, but this is the concept of advancement for immigrants in a society that actually doesn’t want them at all, be it Latinos in the USA or Muslims in France or guest workers in Germany. Xatar is the hero for the kids in the German social hotspots (to avoid the ugly word ghetto), who run around with street rap on their ears: “He showed it to these Almans, he took their gold and without any weapons . How cool is that! Wasn’t it disreputable anyway to take tooth gold from the dead without the permission of the relatives?”
Almost all of history’s great empires, from the British Empire to Rockefeller oil to Microsoft, are built on breaches of law and morality. Whom should immigrants be held up as positive examples? Cem Ozdemir? Maybe Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin from Biontech, that would be an idea.
Akin does not immerse Xatar’s criminal phase in the glamorous appearance of a Hollywood mafia film – although “Rheingold” is more of a genre than Akin has ever been before. He started with very personal stories, but at some point they were all told, and so he increasingly focused on the craft, on the genre. “Tschick” was an adolescent film, “Out of Nowhere” was a thriller and “The Golden Glove” was a horror story.
“Rheingold” is a lot at once, a film about escaping, about growing up, about dealing, about making music, about a big coup. That’s ultimately what’s unsatisfactory about Akin’s film, that he’s too enamored with its action elements to explain the musician; neither his supposed rap awakening experience nor his post-prison career carry any real weight in the film.
Piano lessons as a child: Xatar
Quelle: Warner Brothers/Gordon Timpen, SMPSP
And somehow “Rheingold” is also a Heimatfilm. For migrants it is also about conquering a homeland. Yes, conquer. Going back to Iran or Iraq is not an option. Part of conquering is being able to recognize oneself in the mirrors of mainstream society. The story of the German rap crime rise film began with Bernd Eichinger’s “Times Change You” (in which the young Bushido was played by Emilio Sakraya, who now embodies the adult Xatar), then came the underworld series “4 Blocks” and ” Dogs of Berlin” and finally “Skylines” (with the rapper arrest warrant as a model) – all products of mainstream society. “Rheingold” is the film that comes closest to self-representation.
To put it bluntly, this is a film that begins in prison (in Iraq, where his mother and her young son were imprisoned for a year) and ends in prison (in Rheinbach, where he spent four years for the gold robbery). But that would not be entirely correct. “Rheingold” ends in the swanky Bonn living room of the rapper, who has meanwhile become legally prosperous with his label, his shisha bar, his Kofte snack bar and his jewelry designs and has married the sweetheart of his youth, who initially wanted nothing to do with him.
Even that is not the end. Throughout the film, as he constructs this new German mythology, Akin constantly reverts to the old one. Xatar’s father finds a job at the Bonn Opera House on the German Rhine. Wagner wafts in the soundtrack. And at the end the camera rises above the villa, flies to the Rhine – and meets Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde, the Rhine maidens who are guarding the pot of gold (the question is: which one?). It’s just crazy. Or maybe just as bold as Xatar’s rise strategy.