Fuckparade Fallout 2009: Dr. Motte Speaks

The yearly Fuckparade was taking place again in Berlin on August 22 (2009). The gathering point was Revaler Strasse, where the 17 trucks were warming up for the parade. A part of this warm up were also the obligatory speeches. For this, the Fuckparade organisers invited Hans Cousto and Dr. Motte. They deserve some attention, especially what Motte had to say.

Hans Cousto (who spoke first), is an author who published books on subjects such as “Cosmic Octave – Origin of Harmony” or “MDMA Tuning”. His angle is the same I criticised a couple of years ago in a praxis newsletter: The state is asked not to sell off its property to people who want to extract value out of “our” party culture, meaning “capitalists in other parts of the world”. He pleads that for a lively culture there is need for free spaces available to all. Fine, but to lobby the state to provide these spaces is pretty naive to say the least. In our opinion it’s politically objectionable – but all this is nothing new and would not be worth mentioning here if it wasn’t for Dr. Motte’s elaborations.

Dr. Motte is the founder of the Loveparade and a techno musician. Ironically the Fuckparade once upon a time set out to counter the commercialism and conformism of the Loveparade. When Motte himself lost control of the (now defunct) Loveparade, he started taking part of the Fuckparade.

He’s worth quoting:
After introducing himself he says: “I want to briefly sum up how I would like to define our electronic life culture. In a Nazi book about symbols I have read something great! You have to imagine – it was about runes!” He then not only describes the man rune, he also puts down the microphone and impersonates it stretching out his hands and then says “it means something very beautiful, unfortunately” the peace movement turned it upside down and made it into something “greedy”, because the original man rune means something like creative development in freedom, according to Dr. Motte (or his “Nazi book”), and “this is the expression of our electronic music, and our politicians should please preserve our freedom and not sell it to property funds who don’t care because this is our country, our country!!” After shouting the last words, and some applause by the Fuckparade audience, he continues: “It doesn’t belong to them but to us all, and I demand from all politicians also our mayor with his bad, gay politics that no one needs, to champion our ideals, our free spaces (…) for our free culture, not the culture of the empire from above”.

This tour de force took less than three minutes, but raises a number of questions. How can he link what he calls “our electronic life culture” to a “Nazi book” about runes? What does he mean with the “bad, gay politics that no one needs” of Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit (who is openly gay)?

The second point was picked up by the mainstream press (Der Tagesspiegel from August 27-08-09), and Motte “apologized” to the mayor saying that “as an Anarchist” he respects the freedom of everybody else, including sexual freedom. But what did he mean? “The neoliberal politics” of the mayor is the answer. Gay = neoliberal?

The use of the word “gay” as “something bad” should not be tolerated at a supposedly left wing event that the Fuckparade purports to be. At least this time the statement became controversial at all – because it was not the first time he made it: At an anti-gentrification demo (Megaspree) on July 11 of this year he also went on about the “gay politics” of the gay mayor – on his own blog he still quotes himself saying it. Only now that he’s “found out” he “apologizes” (how serious he is about it is illustrated by the fact that his statement from the July 11 demo is still on his own website which suggests that the “apology” is just a PR exercise in damage control).

But even worse – and not picked up by the mainstream press – is that he explicitly bases his definition of “our electronic life culture” on Nazi esotericism – and this was not challenged at the Fuckparade itself.
There has been many different kinds of research into the history and meaning of runes. This is not the place to go into it, but it is worth noting that the rune “research” of the Nazis is largely based on Guido von List, a charlatan who claimed to have received his rune wisdom in visions, and author of “Das Geheimnis der Runen” (Secrets of the Runes) from 1908. I am no expert in the field but it appears that List’s Runology is practically completely made up to fit his völkisch-nationalist ideology. Via other far right esotericists such as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and Karl Maria Wiligut this became the basis for the Nazi interpretation of runes. Although we don’t know which book exactly Dr. Motte is referring to, we have to assume (since it’s a “Nazi book”) that it reflects the völkisch-racist and anti-semitic ideology of the mentioned authors.

Other enthusiasts for the man rune include Death In June who use it in the header of their web site as well as on the cover of their album “The Wörld Thät Sümmer”.

At least the Fuckparade realized they had to distance themselves clearly from Dr. Motte and did so on their web site on Sept. 1.

(Please note: The original upload has since disappeared from YouTube. This is a different upload of the same footage, but without the Hans Cousto section. For this reason the article was very slightly adjusted, removing time-stamp information relating to the original video upload – July 2022)

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