Mann gegen MannLyrics

This song is pretty straightforwardly about being a gay man, which was actually a bold and rare thing for a hard rock band to put out there so directly. The narrator describes fate as a gift, landing him on a warm star that is close to the skin but distant from the eye, which is a poetic way of describing desire and identity that feels deeply personal but is invisible to the outside world. He carries the little prince in mind and calls himself a king without a queen, which signals early on that his romantic world is entirely male. The repeated phrase "Gleich und Gleich gesellt sich gern" is a German idiom similar to "birds of a feather flock together," and here it doubles as a statement of same-sex attraction.

The song owns its identity with a kind of defiant pride. He calls himself the nightmare of all fathers and a traitor to his gender, not because he believes those things about himself, but because he is naming the way society and family project shame onto gay men. He is the servant of two masters, meaning he belongs to the world of men in both a social and erotic sense. The imagery of pleasure pulling from behind is explicit and unapologetic, very much in the Rammstein tradition of putting the body right at the center of the text.

But the song does not let it stay triumphant the whole way through. The line about his heart freezing on some days, and cold tongues that strike, brings in the reality of homophobia and social rejection. The word "Schwulah" repeated at the end is a play on the German word for gay, Schwul, stretched and distorted into something that sounds like a slur being hurled, which captures that tension between self-acceptance and the cruelty that still comes from the outside world. The emotional tone lands somewhere between pride and honesty about how much that cruelty still stings.