Exactly 30 years ago, on October 3, 1990, after the wall between the East and West had been brought down by the people of the land in November the previous year, Germany became one nation. At Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, a symbol of both division and then unification, The Scorpions, a rock band from Hanover, sang ‘Wind of Change’ against a backdrop of fireworks and people reunited. The event was telecast live across Germany.
A peace anthem
Walter J Lindner, then a diplomat at the start of his career, watched it from his home in Bonn, wishing he had been in Berlin, but enthralled because, “We thought in Germany this [the Cold War] would never end. Many people gave up hope after 40 years of separation,” he says. So the bringing down of the wall “was something of a miracle”, especially because “it came peacefully — it was very Gandhian”, even though the East Germans were “risking quite something”, he says, talking of Death Strip, a zone so heavily guarded and barricaded it was almost impossible to escape without being killed.
To commemorate the event during the pandemic, when the “diplomatic toolbox” of informal meetings and parties were suddenly rendered useless, he did not want to do another webinar, though the team knew it would have to be digital.
Lindner turned to music. This is not a surprise, because in his one-and-a-half years in India, he often hosts musical evenings at his residence, and collaborates with Indian musicians on both informal jam sessions and live performances. “That’s one of the first things I do in a country – I contact the musicians,” he says, of his tenures in South Africa, Venezuela, Turkey.
Thinking back to 1989-90, he felt ‘Wind of Change’ was the song that represented the era. In fact, Rolling Stone magazine once called it “a soundtrack of sorts to a political and cultural revolution”.
Reinventing a song
After speaking to Klaus Meine, the composer and lead singer, he got the rights to perform the song, and asked four Indian musicians he had played with before, if they would like to be a part of the project. “I wanted to have Indian ingredients like Indian spices to a German rock song, and to take the message to Germany also,” he says, acknowledging that fusion can be tricky.
Rakesh Chaurasia on the bansuri, Pandit Vikash Maharaj on the sarod, Prabhash Maharaj on tabla, and Abhishek Maharaj on the sitar, all consented. The 15th-generation musician, Prabhash says it is special for their Varanasi-based family because his father, Pandit Vikash, who has been going to Germany to play every year since 1978, except this year, witnessed history with the wall coming down. Prabhash knew the song, but did not know of its history.
Lindner, who has a studio at this Delhi home, played the guitar, keyboard, synthesizer, bass, percussion, and strings, and coordinated with Peter Retzlaff, a drummer he had worked with before in New York.
Four background voices — Vrnda Dhar, Renie Mathew, Akash Gadamsetty, Shambhavi Mishra — recorded their parts one at a time in a studio, and the musicians recorded theirs at home, all within 10 days between July and August.
He sent the musicians the master indicating where their parts came in, and integrated these into the master. Mumbai-based Chaurasia, who first met Lindner in South Africa at a concert, says while chord changes can be challenging for musicians schooled in classical music here, he found it easy to make the transition, because of his own experience playing with musicians who play different instruments. What appealed to him was that “the song has a soul” though he had not heard it before.
Then there was a singer to choose: “I needed someone who was soft but not too soft, still rocky.” He asked Gurugram-based singer-songwriter Chetan Dominic Awasthi (Chezin). Chetan, who was supposed to perform the song last year with The Revisit Project, at an event to celebrate German Unity Day, says it could not happen because it got washed out by the rain. “Mr Lindner was supposed to come up on stage and jam with us.”
The message today
The song itself, with words like, “The world is closing in/Did you ever think/That we could be so close/Like brothers?” was inspired by the 1989 Moscow Music Peace, where The Scorpions and several other metal acts performed. It was the first time that bands from beyond the Iron Curtain performed in then USSR, where terms like perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) were being explored.
Meanwhile in America this year, a podcast that describes the song as the “Anthem of progress, and freedom, and hope” at the time, claims that it was planted by the CIA. Linder dismisses it as a conspiracy theory: “Without (Mikhail) Gorbachev (the last president of the Soviet Union) this wouldn’t have been possible,” he says adding that there was no shooting order from Moscow. “It made this uprising a success. It was an uprising of people who said, ‘Enough is enough; we want freedom’. It was civil disobedience.”
Today, with the world not quite “closing in”, Lindner, whose bright red Ambassador waits for him in the drive, says what we need are charismatic politicians, a common consciousness around the globe that things have to change, more peace movements and a realisation that we don’t need conflicts.
For about six minutes though, there’s the song. The main message, says Prabhash, is to live “with love, peace, and music”.
Wind of change: Day of German Unity 2020 has been released today on YouTube with an introductory address by Klaus Meine
