(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
In one particular scene during The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Cesare emerges from the shadows, robotic in his ghostlike demeanour, approaching his victim as she sleeps soundly in her bed. Almost sleep paralysis demon-like in presence and obstinate in appearance, this haunting figure reflects unconscious fears in the typically German Expressionist gothic dreamlike fashion. In many ways, this is exactly how listening to Nico feels.
Of course, Nico lived and died after the German Expressionist movement in film, but being born post-World War II in Cologne and moving closer to Berlin to escape the air raids exposed her to the darkness of existence early on. These experiences deeply influenced her music and aesthetic, not just in the subjects she wrote about but in the atmospheres she wrapped around universal feelings of love, loss, belonging, and disillusionment.
Nico eventually left Germany, but cultural alienation permeated her worldview and, by extension, her creativity, not just giving her a musical edge but earning her a rightful place in the 1960s countercultural movement. During this time, many celebrated the unconventional, favouring those with a certain indescribable quality because their very existence refused to reflect the status quo. For Nico, this manifested in her mysterious demeanour that endeared her almost immediately to the New York avant-garde scene.
Everything about her presence drew others in—her otherworldly look, accent, and attitude came with a signature cynicism in the form of a consistent metaphorical dark cloud or the kind of claustrophobic darkness Robert Wiene would maximise to reflect broader notions of somnambulism. Her hypnotic aura bred a sense of the uncanny, except this time, it emerged from post-World War II fascinations with death and melancholy rather than contortionist anxieties manifested post-World War I.
Everything about Nico exuded the “depressing scary German chick” to borrow a quote from Lane Kim, not just to those with a window into her life through the music and newspaper articles, but to her peers. The way she viewed the world and transformed any space into her own brooding temple of reflection made anyone simultaneously reject and embrace her inexplicably charming manifesto, her remarkable ability to monopolise with magnetic beauty and cold detachment enchanting anyone in her path.
“Even if it was for one night only at a Holiday Inn, [Nico] would convert the most anonymous accommodation into Nico World,” John Cooper Clarke reflected in the pages of his memoir, I Wanna Be Yours. Part of her self-assuredness also came in conducting herself with messy and self-destructive tendencies, which became a common thread within her music, appearing just as bleak, gothic, and infused with a sense of existential despair.
Nico might not have spoken openly about her personal experiences with post-war trauma, but her work with The Velvet Underground and her solo albums The Marble Index, Desertshore, and The End… incorporate a certain nihilism that only someone who is near cultural devastation would be able to execute. Perhaps expressionism is too deterministic a view, at least when applied to the viscera of Nico’s aura, but this can also be viewed as an exploration or extension of other German intellectuals or more of a conceptualisation or response to German Romanticism and existentialism.
As a result, Nico’s presence became synonymous with fascination with death and war because of the darkness she both exuded and invited in. Nico had such a fixation engrained in her, but she also lived and fulfilled the prophecy that many musicians follow. She allowed decay and collapse to seep into her soul, like a fork piercing an apple, embracing destruction with a kind of tragic grace. She waltzed through the cigarette smoke she had just lit as if hoping never to emerge from the other side, surrendering to the inevitable disintegration of body and spirit.
Nico was mythological from the start, not just in death. This role was embodied by those who already emerged as if plagued by the afterlife, and Nico had no victims to seduce because she already was one. In a way, this meant that any chipping away at her heart would be worthless, if only because she kept it at arm’s length as if in a cage, locked away in the hostage cell from which she emerged all those years ago.
While much of the 1960s counterculture embraced a sense of idealism and hope for change, Nico was an exception and an exceptional one, but one who stood as a perfect reflection of German identity, shaped by the perils of totalitarianism and presented as a kind of “European otherness,” at least through the eyes of the domineering American rock scene.
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