Rio Reiser
The voice of German protest rock was practically the country’s first openly gay rock musician – at a time when Paragraph 175 was still in force.
Rio Reiser was born Ralph Christian Möbius in Berlin and grew up in several West German cities. He left school, taught himself guitar, piano and cello, and at 17 followed his brothers to West Berlin. He took his stage name from the hero of Karl Philipp Moritz’s novel “Anton Reiser”.
In 1970 he co-founded the band Ton Steine Scherben, of which he was the singer and main songwriter. Songs such as “Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht” (Destroy what destroys you) and “Keine Macht für Niemand” (No power for nobody) became anthems of the squatters’ and protest movement. In 1975 the band moved to a farm in Fresenhagen in North Frisia.
Reiser came out to family and friends in 1970, at a time when sex between men was still a crime in West Germany under Paragraph 175. On the farm he could live openly; from the mid-1980s he also spoke about his relationships with men in interviews. He was no activist in the narrower sense, but his androgynous, vulnerable stage presence stood against the macho image of rock.
After the band split up, he began a successful solo career in 1985 with songs such as “König von Deutschland”, “Junimond” and “Für immer und dich”. He used the income to pay off the band’s debts. Reiser died in Fresenhagen in 1996, aged 46. In 2022 a square in Berlin-Kreuzberg was renamed Rio-Reiser-Platz.