Nina Hagen

Nina Hagen is a singer, songwriter and actress and was born Catharina Hagen in East Berlin on March 11, 1955. She had a significant influence on the New Wave scene in Germany in the 1980s and is considered the "Godmother of Punk". From the 1970s, she appeared as an actress on GDR television and in DEFA film productions and completed a one-year training course to become a state-certified pop singer in 1974. With her band Automobil, she enjoyed great success in the GDR in 1974 with the song "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen". In 1976, she had had enough of the GDR and emigrated to Great Britain, where she became part of the punk scene. In 1977, she founded the Nina Hagen Band in West Germany and released her debut album of the same name a year later, which attracted international attention. This was followed in 1979 by the successful single "African Reggae" from the second album Unbehagen. She lived alternately in London, the Netherlands and the USA, where she also toured, including at Rock in Rio in 1985 in front of 300,000 spectators. She released albums such as In Ekstase (1985), Nina Hagen (1989) and Street (1991) on which she sang in German and English and established herself as a punk rock diva. In 1998, she moved to Berlin on the occasion of Bertolt Brecht's 100th birthday, where she sang in his Threepenny Opera together with Max Raabe in 1999. On the album Personal Jesus , released in 2009, she covers American gospel classics and lends her new-found Christian faith a sound that lifted the album to number 16 in the charts. The "Godmother of Punk" is also present in the media far beyond her music, supporting the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and Die Linke parties and repeatedly causing controversy in talk shows and public appearances. In April 2026, Nina Hagen will release a new studio album, Highway to Heaven. It includes joint songs with Gitte Haennig and Nana Mouskouri, among others.

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