Dalai LamaLyrics

This song is a dark retelling of Goethe's famous poem "Der Erlkönig," modernized and transplanted onto an airplane instead of a horse ride through the night. In the original Goethe poem, a father rides desperately through a storm while the Erlking, a supernatural figure, whispers seductively to his child and ultimately claims the child's life. Rammstein keeps the same bones of that story but swaps the forest and horse for a commercial flight, a man and his child heading to a family birthday, comfortable and warm, drifting toward sleep. The supernatural voices from the clouds, the child hearing something the father cannot fully grasp, and the storm closing in all mirror Goethe's framework almost beat for beat.

The chorus where the voices call out "come here, stay here, we are good to you, we are brothers to you" is the Erlking's seduction translated directly into the song's voice, whispered out of the clouds into the child's ear. The child even echoes the original poem by telling the father that the King of Winds wants him as his own child, while the father tries to rationalize or calm things down. The tone is fatalistic throughout, underlined by the repeated line "we must live until we die," which has that classic Rammstein bluntness, almost shrugging at death as simply the destination everyone is already heading toward.

The ending is where it gets genuinely devastating. The father, terrified during the turbulence, grabs the child and holds on so tightly out of panic and love that he unknowingly suffocates the child himself. The soul slips free and joins the wind, singing the same seductive chorus. So the tragedy is not really the storm or the supernatural, it is the father's own desperate grip that causes the death he was trying to prevent. Just like in Goethe, the child dies, but Rammstein adds this layer of terrible irony where parental love becomes the instrument of loss.