Mensch

About the song

«Mensch» is the title track of the album Herbert Grönemeyer released on 30 August 2002, and it is the song that made him, at forty-six, the artist with the largest record sales in Germany. The single had come out a few weeks earlier, on 5 August 2002, on his own label Grönland Records. He wrote both the words and the music himself, as he has done for most of his career. The German word «Mensch» means a human being, a person of either sex, as opposed to an animal or a god; it is also what Germans say out loud when something surprises them, the way an English speaker might say «good grief». The song uses the word in the first sense and builds everything else around it.

Grönemeyer was not a new arrival. Born in Göttingen in 1956 and raised in Bochum, he had started out as a pianist and house composer at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, acted in Wolfgang Petersen’s «Das Boot» in 1981, and then built a recording career whose fifth album, «4630 Bochum» from 1984, remains one of the best-selling records ever released in Germany. By the late nineties he was an established figure rather than a rising one, and «Mensch» followed four years of silence.

Those four years are documented and they are the reason the record sounds the way it does. In early 1998 Grönemeyer moved to London with his family. In November of that year his older brother Wilhelm died, on 1 November, aged forty-four, and his wife, the actress Anna Henkel-Grönemeyer, died in London on 5 November, aged forty-five. Both deaths were from cancer. The couple had been together since 1978 and married in 1993, and they had two children. According to his own account, reported in the German press and summarised in the standard reference works, he needed more than a year before he could work as a musician again. The album that came out of that period is described by its author as having helped him deal with the loss, and most of its eleven songs deal with grief in one form or another. Other tracks from the same record, «Der Weg» and «Unbewohnt», are more directly about his wife and about the depression that followed; «Mensch» is the one that turns outward.

What the song actually does is define its own title. Over a long chain of subordinate clauses it lists what a person does — forgets, represses, enthuses, warns, tells stories, errs, struggles, hopes, loves, sympathises, forgives, laughs, lives — and states that this is what the word means. Each time the list has run its course, the chorus closes with a two-word sentence addressed to someone who is not there. The song never says who that person is, never explains, and never raises its voice. The verses set the scene with images rather than statements: tides that go out and come back, a beach, dreams built on sand, a sky that has cleared, household bills left unpaid because none of that matters any more, and a request addressed to the absent person for a share of peace and for a word rather than for love. The distance between the celebratory list and the closing line is the whole song, and Grönemeyer leaves the reader to cover it.