Today we celebrate the 59th birthday of that great German singer Nina Hagen. Her cartoon-punkette-channeling-Marlene-Dietrich persona and the sort of high-bombast singing at which Germans seem to excel made her known in the English-speaking world for 1980s albums like the excellent NunSexMonkRock, Fearless and In Ekstase, but she was already known in her home of East Germany for tamer stuff. I can do no better at describing her early years—and the amazing story of how she got out of the GDR—than this DM post from 2011.

Since her ‘80s flirtation with English-language LPs, Hagen has made music primarily for European audiences. Here she is in a rare duet with that other incontestably Teutonic entertainer, Heino, performing a send-up of “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” from the 1953 Leslie Caron film Lili
 

 
WHY haven’t those two made albums together? I could listen to that. All. Day. Long.

Hagen remains 100% active, and it might surprise some readers to know that her last two albums have been gospel-tinged. She underwent a Protestant baptism in 2009, which informed Personal Jesus (yes, it includes a cover of the Depeche Mode song) and 2011s Volksbeat. Both are available for streaming.

We’ll end this birthday tribute to an admirably durable artist with an interesting A/B of her early and later years, via these two Rockpalast appearances, shot 21 years apart.
 

Nina Hagen Band, Rockpalast, 1978

Nina Hagen, Rockpalast, 1999