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Nina Hagen's 50 things.
1. Catharina "Nina" Hagen is a German singer and actress.
2. Born in East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, Hagen first pursued her career in the mid 1970s.
3. In 1974, she joined the band Automobil. During that time she appeared in a number of German movies.
4. After moving to West Berlin in 1976, she formed the Nina Hagen Band and signed with CBS Records.
5. The band released two albums before Hagen decided to pursue her career as a solo artist.
6. In 1982, she signed with CBS Records and released her first solo album.
7. She released two more records on the label--the Giorgio Moroder-produced Fearless (1983) and Nina Hagen in Ekstasy (1985).
8. Her contract with the label expired in 1986 and was not renewed.
9. Nina Hagen remained popular making tours and appearances on TV shows.
10. In 1987, the single "Punk Wedding" was released and in 1988 Hagen wrote her autobiography Ich bin ein Berliner.
11. Mercury Records offered Hagen a contract in 1989 and she released Nina Hagen, an album with a more soulful theme than her previous work.
12. Nina Hagen continued to release more albums and tour during the 1990s and 2000s.
13. Nina Hagen is often referred to as the "Godmother of Punk".
14. Nina Hagen is also noted for her human and animal rights activism.
15. Nina Hagen was born in the former East Berlin, East Germany, the daughter of Hans Hagen (also known as Hans Oliva-Hagen), a scriptwriter, and Eva-Maria Hagen (née Buchholz), an actress and singer.
16. Her paternal grandfather died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (her father was Jewish).
17. Her parents divorced when she was two years old, and growing up she saw her father infrequently.
18. At age four, she began to study ballet, and was considered an opera prodigy by the time she was nine.
19. When Hagen was 11, her mother married Wolf Biermann, an anti-establishment singer-songwriter.
20. Biermann's political views later influenced young Hagen.
21. Nina Hagen left school at age sixteen, and went to Poland, where she began her career.
22. After that, she returned to Germany and joined the cover band Fritzens Dampferband (Fritzen's Steamboat Band), together with Achim Mentzel and others.
23. Nina Hagen added songs by Janis Joplin and Tina Turner to the "allowable" set lists during shows.
24. From 1972 to 1973, Hagen enrolled in the crash-course performance program at The Central Studio for Light Music in East Berlin.
25. Upon graduation, she formed the band Automobil.
26. In East Germany, she performed with the band Automobil, becoming one of the country's best-known young stars. Her most famous song from the early part of her career was "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen" (You forgot the colour film), "a subtle dig mocking the sterile, gray, Communist state," in 1974.
27. Her musical career in the GDR was cut short, however, when she and her mother left the country in 1976, following the expulsion of her stepfather.
28. The circumstances surrounding the family's emigration were exceptional: Biermann was granted permission to perform a televised concert in Cologne, but denied permission to re-cross the border to his adopted home country.
29. Hagen submitted an application to leave the country. In it, she claimed to be Biermann's biological daughter, and threatened to become the next Wolf Biermann if not allowed to rejoin her father.
30. Just four days later her request was granted, and she settled in Hamburg, where she was signed to a CBS-affiliated record label.
31. Her label advised her to acclimatise herself to Western culture through travel, and she arrived in London during the height of the punk rock movement.
32. Nina Hagen was quickly taken up by a circle that included The Slits and Sex Pistols.
33. Back in Germany by mid-1977, Hagen formed the Nina Hagen Band in West Berlin's Kreuzberg district.
34. In 1978 they released their self-titled debut album,Nina Hagen Band, which included the single "TV-Glotzer" (a cover of "White Punks on Dope" by The Tubes, though with entirely different German lyrics), and "Auf'm Bahnhof Zoo", about West Berlin's then-notorious Berlin Zoologischer Garten station.
35. The debut album gained significant attention throughout Germany and abroad, both for its hard rock sound and for Hagen's theatrical vocals, far different from the straightforward singing of her East German recordings.
36. However, relations between Hagen and the other band members deteriorated over the course of the subsequent European tour, and Hagen decided to leave the band in 1979, though she was still under contract to produce a second album.
37. Nina Hagen acted with Dutch rocker Herman Brood and singer Lene Lovich in the 1979 film Cha Cha.
38. A European tour with a new band in 1980 was cancelled, and Hagen turned to the United States.
39. A limited-edition 10-inch EP was released on vinyl that summer in the U.S. Two songs from her first album Nina Hagen Band were on the A side, and two songs from her second album Unbehagen were on the B-side. All four songs were sung in German, although two had English titles and the other two were covers of English-language songs with new German lyrics.
40. In late 1980, Hagen discovered she was pregnant, broke up with the father-to-be Ferdinand Karmelk, and moved to Los Angeles.
41. Her daughter, Cosma Shiva Hagen, was born in Santa Monica on 17 May 1981.
42. In 1983, she released the album Angstlos and a minor European tour.
43. By this time, Hagen's public appearances were becoming stranger and frequently included discussions of God, UFOs, her social and political beliefs, animal rights and vivisection, and claims of alien sightings.
44. During 1984 Hagen spent a lot of time in London and UK based MusicSzene magazine chief-editor Wilfried Rimensberger, in conjunction with Spree Film, produced a first TV feature on her and what was remaining from London's 70 Punk movement induced by artist and model Frankie Stein.
45. In 1989 she had a relationship with Frank Chevallier from France, with whom she has a son, Otis Chevallier-Hagen. In the 1990s, Hagen lived in Paris with her daughter Cosma Shiva and son Otis.
46. In 1991 she toured Europe in support of her new album Street.
47. In 1992 Hagen became the host of a TV show on RTLplus.
48. In 1999, she played the role of Celia Peachum in The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, alongside Max Raabe.
49. In 2000, her song "Schön ist die Welt" became the official song of Expo 2000.
50. She is a vegetarian. In August 2009 she was baptized in the Protestant Reformed church of Schüttorf.
Source: Wikipedia.org
