Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen

In 1974 the rock band Automobil hired a 19-year-old Nina Hagen as lead singer. Their keyboard player, Michael Heubach, came up with the tune while improvising at the piano, and Kurt Demmler wrote the words. The band thought a different rock song was their likely hit, but East German radio chose this one, and it came out in 1974 on the state label Amiga. It became Hagen's biggest hit in the GDR. The song is a cheerful tune wrapped around a furious lyric. The singer is back from a holiday on the Baltic island of Hiddensee with her boyfriend Micha and is fuming because he forgot the colour film, so every photo is in black and white, and she threatens to leave him if it happens again. Heubach later said the Micha was probably him, since he and Hagen were involved at the time, but that the rest was invented: they had never been to Hiddensee. In her 2010 autobiography Hagen described a subtext about the shortage economy, where a forgotten colour film could not simply be replaced. The song found an unexpected encore in December 2021, when Angela Merkel chose it for the military tattoo marking her farewell as chancellor. Hagen was surprised and pointed out that Demmler was later charged with the sexual abuse of children, while saying she did not mean to criticise Merkel or distance herself from the song. It climbed to sixth place in the German trend charts, still one of the best-known songs from East Germany.