Christian Lorenz was born on November 16, 1966, in East Berlin. Known as Flake, he became Rammstein’s keyboardist and one of its songwriters. His synthesizers are a conspicuous part of “Du hast,” a recording that brings his contribution into focus alongside the band’s guitars.
His father introduced him to rock music, and in 1983 Lorenz joined Feeling B as its keyboardist. The band also provided an early connection with future Rammstein guitarist Paul Landers and drummer Christoph Schneider. Looking back in a 2019 interview with Metal Hammer, Lorenz described an East Berlin scene in which players moved between groups and helped one another out. If someone needed a guitarist, a musician from another band could step in.
Rammstein’s early sessions gave those musicians somewhere to try ideas outside their established bands. Lorenz remembered meeting for a couple of hours without a fixed goal; the group’s identity emerged through playing together. He joined in 1994, and for a time Rammstein and Feeling B overlapped. Money earned with Feeling B helped support the new project. For Lorenz, the change happened gradually as the musicians became increasingly absorbed in what they were making.
On Rammstein’s second studio album, 1997’s Sehnsucht, “Du hast” put guitars and electronics together in a particularly direct arrangement. Lorenz’s synthesizer parts run through the track, and he shares its songwriting credit with the other five members. The keyboards give listeners another musical thread to follow alongside the repeated riff and vocal phrases. That interplay is a useful way into his work: pay attention to the space around the guitar, and the arrangement opens up. Lorenz explained his priorities in a 2016 interview with Kaaoszine. He said Rammstein’s songs weren’t especially demanding for him to play and that he knew them well enough to perform them immediately after being woken up. “It is more about the idea and sound,” he said. For practice, he enjoyed classical piano pieces, while recognizing that the pleasure and challenge they offered served a different purpose from his work in the band.
His writing gave that individual perspective another outlet. Lorenz published Der Tastenficker in 2015, drawing on memories of his life before Rammstein. He told Kaaoszine that he wrote recollections in the order they occurred to him, allowing childhood memories to arrive later in the manuscript instead of forcing everything into chronology. In a separate 2015 interview with GALORE, he explained that playing in Rammstein didn’t oblige him to make every creative project about the band or its fans’ expectations.
He returned to Rammstein’s story in his second book, Heute hat die Welt Geburtstag, published in 2017. Lorenz wrote it during breaks on tour, using the pauses on the bus and around concerts. Its structure follows a musician through the waiting, performance and aftermath of a show, with memories of the band interrupting that day’s routine. Those recollections reach back to the end of Feeling B, Rammstein’s early basement rehearsals and the shows they played before small audiences.
