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…
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