Malaria! – The Germs of Neue Deutsche Welle

Once upon a time there was Neue Deutsche Welle, the new wave that took root in Germany, where electronic couriers had opened the doors to the Cosmos and the kraut revolution had carved new autobahns for rock.
Starting in 1976, Germany's new wave released all its germs contaminated by punk and by US-UK-style new wave, letting them take root in the underground basements of leaden industrial metropolises such as West Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Hannover. The term was coined in 1977 by a student, Jürgen Kramer, in a highly niche fanzine, Die 80er Jahre. The expression Neue Deutsche Welle then appeared for the first time in an advertisement for the Berlin record label Der Zensor, in the music magazine Sounds, in August 1979. In the ad, it was associated with the debut album by Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, who would indeed go on to be among the movement's key protagonists. Two months later, the term was dusted off by music journalist Alfred Hilsberg for the title of a three-part series of articles for Sounds ("Neue Deutsche Welle – Aus grauen Städtmauern"). The NDW label didn't refer to a uniform musical style, but to a vast array of groups and artists with wildly different attitudes, held together by the use of the German language, the freshness of their sound, and relatively short careers. A German-style live fast, die young, in other words, applied to an experience like new wave, which was born from the ruins of the by-then dying punk movement but which itself seemed doomed to burn out in little more than five years. On top of that, Berlin added that leaden touch of Cold War and nuclear anxiety that has always gone hand in hand with new wave.

In Berlin… it's fine

There's a Super 8 film that accompanies an irreverent, infectious post-punk song, born right in the scarred Berlin of the early 1980s, the same milieu that provided the backdrop to the drug culture depicted in the film "Christiane F.", a regular in those very artistic circles. In a typically punk, run-down setting at the edge of the Wall, among crumbling buildings occupied by squatters and cars burning by the roadside, you can make out a few mysterious girls with pale faces and scarlet lips, seemingly indifferent to the threatening reality around them, while dissonant blasts of sax and distorted guitar underpin that catchy chorus in an atmosphere of dark excitement. The song is called "Your Turn To Run" and would become one of the very few hits by that all-female band known as Malaria!
They'd also be dubbed the "Geniale Dilletanten" (brilliant dilettantes) — the bands of the early-Eighties West German underground — a name taken from a famous concert that brought many of them together at Berlin's Tempodrom in 1981. Theirs was a naive vision of the avant-garde, made of Super 8 films, fanzines, cheap synthesizers and drum machines, with instruments sometimes even replaced by household appliances. And there really is a lot that's amateurish in the entire output of Malaria! and their contemporaries, among them Die Haut, with whom they shared rehearsal space, and Nick Cave's Birthday Party, who likewise sprang from those damp Berlin basements.
But the origins of Malaria! are to be found in another band with the same initial, Mania D, the musical incarnation of the charismatic Gudrun Gut.

Born in placid Lüneburg, a town in Lower Saxony between Hamburg, Hannover and Bremen, young Gudrun was irresistibly drawn to the chaos of Berlin, where she believed her artistic calling could finally find the right nourishment. In the shadow of the Wall, starting in 1975, she moved from one project to another: she began studying visual arts at the Hochschule der Künste art school, then joined the noise-making congregation of Einstürzende Neubauten, led by Blixa Bargeld. They played their first show in the Üntergang area, a former slaughterhouse turned hub of Berlin's underground music scene. And from the very start they introduced the reckless use of unconventional instruments, including pneumatic drills, sheet metal, hoses, compressors and other elements capable of producing an alienating, dissonance-rich sound, perfectly representative of dehumanizing modern industrial civilization.
But Gudrun Gut had no taste for playing second fiddle, and besides, she dreamed of starting an all-female band. She often talked about it with her inseparable university friend Bettina Köster, an accomplished saxophonist, with whom she had already founded a "concept shop" on Golzstraße. The name said it all: Eisengrau, "iron grey". And the shop, crammed with T-shirts, fanzines, bootleg tapes and assorted alternative gadgets, soon became a meeting point for the city's entire underground music community. It was at Eisengrau that Gudrun and Bettina met Beate Bartel, who had also briefly served in Einstürzende Neubauten but was determined to form another band. So in May 1979, Gudrun, Bettina and Beate joined forces with Eva-Maria Gößling and Karin Luner (who had already studied in New York under Lou Reed's drummer, Fred Maher) to form Mania D. It was an eccentric project, mixing, to borrow Battiato's words, free jazz and English punk, with a pronounced "visual" attitude. The grainy frames of Karin Luner's 1979 short film "Fashion Interlection" show the girls in handmade emerald-green outfits, their hair styled with a mixture of beer and eggs. None other than John Peel, the legendary English radio DJ, took notice of them, calling them "queens of noise". But the party that had just begun was already over: "As soon as we'd spontaneously come together, we immediately went our separate ways", Gudrun Gut admits, already with something else in mind. Beate Bartel too was moving on, bound for Liaisons Dangereuses.

"Do you like my new dog?"

From the ashes of Mania D, then, in January 1981 another all-female project came to life, with Gudrun Gut (drums, guitar and vocals) and Bettina Köster (vocals, saxophone) taking full charge. It was effectively an open duo, which would later also include other musicians. A project so infectious that they called it Malaria!
"We wanted to break the rules of music", a defiant Gudrun Gut would recall in an interview some time later. And the lyrics too, we might add, were pretty irreverent, railing on about capitalism, sex and love, sung in both German and English.

In April 1981 the self-titled Ep Malaria! came out, a dissonant manifesto of their Brechtian surrealism, where bursts of free jazz (essentially Bettina's tenor sax) make the obsessive post-punk core even more disorienting. A metropolitan, industrial, shadowy sound, typically Teutonic. A perfect synthesis of this is the lopsided fanfare of "Laufen", in which the two of them stutter vocalizations and strangled screams over a pounding gait dictated by unmistakably Neubauten-style percussion. The menacing liturgy of "I Will Be Your Only One" is effectively the incubator of the later (and more famous) "Your Turn To Run": all it takes is speeding it up and sharpening its electronic backbone to create one of their undisputed gems. The litany of "Verführung", meanwhile, is a grotesque "Bertolt Brecht meets Nina Hagen" over a monotone beat barely flecked by the scratches of the sax.

Buoyed by the positive reception of the Ep, Gudrun and Bettina decided to expand the lineup, bringing in Manon Duursma Pepita (guitar, formerly in Nina Hagen's band), Christine Hahn (keyboards, drums, guitar), trained in the school of Glenn Branca (The Static), and Susanne Kuhnke, ex-Die Haut, on synthesizer. "At first I learned classical guitar, but in punk times — with Mania D and Malaria! — we all decided to play instruments we hadn't been trained for", Gudrun would explain. Together, they set off on a tour that saw them open for bands like New Order, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Slits. They then recorded the single "How Do You Like My New Dog?" for the Belgian label Les Disques du Crepuscule: another fine example of their expressionist post-punk, with a more fully realized structure and dark gothic-style basslines accompanying Köster's magnetic, sinister vocals, scarred as ever by the sax's jarring interjections. Finally their mentor John Peel managed to get them into his studios for a session in 1981.
A US tour followed, during which Malaria! performed in New York alongside acts such as The Birthday Party (at the Danceteria) and John Cale (at the Mudd Club), as well as with fellow German Nina Hagen at the legendary Studio 54. This would in fact be the first tour to export the Neue Deutsche Welle to the United States.

Emboldened by their American experience, Berlin's riot grrrls ante-litteram released a new Ep, New York Passage (1982), produced by Eric Dufaure for Cachalot Records. A small masterpiece in miniature.
The standout is the opening, aforementioned "Your Turn To Run": a gorgeous coldwave liturgy, with Bettina Köster's icy, increasingly goth voice (Siouxsie, anyone?) propped up by hypnotic layers and sequences of keyboards, sharp guitar riffs, handclapping and dissonant sax intrusions, while the chaotic vocals heighten the mood of disorientation: it would reach the top 10 of the indie charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom. "Zarah" sounds like one of Tuxedomoon's avant-garde Middle Eastern numbers, sung by Nina Hagen in some seedy Berlin night-club: a wild mishmash of sounds under the banner of unrestrained surrealism. Finally, "Duschen", with its theatrical spoken-word opening, soon gives way to a post-punk gallop in which the sax slithers menacingly into the wall of drumming.

Cold, clear water

This was Malaria!'s golden moment: on the occasion of a new European tour, they put out another Ep, White Water (1982), which features what would remain their most famous song, "Kaltes Klares Wasser" (literally: "Cold, Clear Water"): a possessed, infectious nursery rhyme driven by a coldwave base and disturbed by liquid piano phrases and guitar riffs. Pure industrial-flavored tanzmusik destined to become a post-punk evergreen, to the point of later being covered by Chicks on Speed. Less effective but still interesting is the other experiment that shares the Ep, "Weisser Himmel, Weisses Meer/White Sky, White Sea", a sort of monotone ceremonial piece where the obsessive pulse and alienated spoken-word merge with increasingly insistent guitar feedback.

Arriving soon after to give their musical formula a more complete and organic definition was their debut album Emotion (1982). It's a summa of their icy, nocturnal, dissonant industrial post-punk, unfolding across a series of minimalist sonic panels, opened by a cry of alarm: “Achtung! achtung!/ geld regiert die welt/ neue religionen, alte religionen” (“Pericolo! Pericolo!/ I soldi fanno girare il mondo/ nuove religioni, vecchie religioni”): it's Bettina Köster's guttural howl rising above a steamroller of disco-synth drums, warning against the new religion of money ("Geld/Money", also accompanied by a fine video directed by B. Bühler and D. Hormel, which went on to win several awards). Through obsessive rhythms, frenzied synth loops and the cacophonous chaos of dissonant saxes and distorted guitars, often tuned higher than usual, Malaria! gave voice to an entire generation's unease with the dehumanizing, alienating development of industrial society, attempting to recover a sort of primal purity — a distant relative of the one that, many miles away, the Irish band Virgin Prunes were yearning for on "...If I Die I Die". On Emotion, though, everything is far starker and bleaker. It's punk nihilism pulverized into proto-industrial, coldwave sketches, with a distinctly feminine sensibility — though not in the most hackneyed sense of the term: "We always wore heavy boots. We were strong women, not delicate maidens, and we wanted to make that clear", Gudrun Gut would later explain. Her bandmate Bettina Köster echoed the sentiment: "Women have a different kind of rhythm, which you can hear very clearly in Gudrun's drumming. She was always complimented because she couldn't keep time! But it was intentional, because we wanted to break the mold that was always pervasive in punk music... We wanted to explore the feminine side, free from preconceptions and established rules".
Always balanced between noisy chaos and more introspective inner landscapes, Malaria! range from the abstract, sinister sarabande of "Eifersucht/Jealousy", a kind of cacophony of industrial hisses, subliminal guitar and funereal drums, to the shadowy apathy of the requiem "Slave Of My Ambition" and the atmospheric instrumental "Einsam/Lonesome", barely smudged by a distant sax drone, from the horror-theatre of "Desire" to the industrial-jazz lieder of "Traum/Dream" and "Mensch", where Bettina's wild sax weaves through the clanging and glitching of machinery, as if almost underlining its malfunction. And while the lopsided waltz of "Macht/Power" accentuates the more surrealist tones of their art, the splendid "Leidenschaft/Passion" manages to get under your skin with its explosive sensuality, filtered through Bettina's hypnotic voice amid walls of drums, blaring sax and dense layers of gothic-industrial electronics.
The album's dramatic high point is probably "Tod/Death", where Köster again takes centre stage with her sensual, agonized lament, exploiting the poetic inflections of German to full effect in deathly lines such as "Ich kuesse den Staub/ Ich hasse den Staub" ("I kiss the dust/ I hate the dust"), where dust alludes to the phrase "ashes to ashes, dust to dust". With the ghost of Nico hovering in the background.
Emotion, which was also distributed in Japan by Columbia, sealed Malaria!'s new Teutonic frontier, a kind of proto-industrial, dark evolution of good old krautrock, from which it also recovers a free-jazz, avant-garde attitude, combined with a decadent theatrical taste typically Brechtian in nature.

After promoting the album on a long European tour across the UK, France, the Benelux countries, Italy and Scandinavia, Malaria! released a new Ep, Beat The Distance (1983), featuring the gloomy synth-pop novelty of "You You", the disorienting cabaret of "Meeting Place" and the driving "Trash Me", with its dry, relentless rhythm underpinning a new expressionist litany that folds in on itself in the finale.
That same year saw the release of the live album ...Revisited, recorded at the Danceteria in New York and the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. on 27 and 28 May 1983.

At this point, the five women from Berlin decided to take a break. It was a time of musical shifts — new wave, including its German strain, the Neue Deutsche Welle, was gradually fading in favor of a new electronic pop. Malaria!'s seeds could no longer take root as they once had. So Bettina and Christine moved to New York, while Gudrun and Manon formed Matador with their old friend Beate Bartel, formerly of Mania D.
Meanwhile, Gut's own label Moabit Musik released Compiled (1991), a valuable document of Malaria!'s musical era, featuring tracks from the 1982 album as well as the various Eps and 12-inches the German band had released up to that point. Among the gems rediscovered, worth mentioning are the absurdist "Geh Duschen", a disorienting sequence of deadpan spoken-word, galloping bass-synth rhythms and spaghetti-western guitar lines(!), the no less deranged Dadaist sketch "Dabo" and the decadent cabaret number "Gewissen", somewhere between Bertolt Brecht and Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat".

Rebirth on the banks of the Mississippi, and the legacy

It all seemed to be over, but Malaria!'s seeds, surprisingly, took root again in the swamps of New Orleans, where Gudrun, Bettina and Manon unexpectedly reunited to record the Ep Elation. But very little remained of the project's original sound: the title track sounds like a late Sisters of Mercy track stripped of its shine; better are the sinister nursery rhyme of "Flittchen" and the Siouxsie-esque "Slow Rotation", while the cover of the classic "Old Man River", conceived on the banks of the Mississippi and produced by Jim Thirlwell a.k.a. Foetus, adds a welcome touch of surrealism.
At this point, the spark had been reignited, and the two old friends returned to Berlin, where the Wall had already been down for four years, to record an actual new album — effectively the second chapter of the Malaria! saga, Cheerio (1993), produced by Johnny Klimek of Lola Rennt. It unveils a kind of dark club dance-pop/minimal-synth that nonetheless comes across as rather flat and monotone, almost "anesthetized" compared to the hallucinated visions of a decade earlier.
There's not much to note here, then: besides tracks carried over from the previous Ep, the dancefloor pulses of "Keep Me In Love" and "Doesn't Matter" go by without leaving a mark, as do the sensual EBM of "Prophet", the seductive vocalizing of the title track and the two late-Siouxsie-style chants of "Von Hinten" and "Slow Rotation" (perhaps the best tracks of the bunch). Curious, but not much more than that, is the electronic cover of Bob Dylan's evergreen "Lay Lady Lay". The polished, glossy production doesn't help recapture the duo's more authentic spirit, but what's really lacking above all is the songwriting.
It was effectively Malaria!'s definitive swan song. A second volume of the anthology Compiled 1981-1984 (2001) and the remix compilation Versus (2001) would follow, the latter also featuring Chicks on Speed's version of "Kaltes Klares Wasser".

The cult status of this Berlin girl-group — perhaps the most important all-female German band of all time — would endure, and its protagonists were certainly not ones to sit on the sidelines. Starting with the irrepressible Gudrun Gut, who, in addition to Moabit, also founded another label, Monika Enterprise, featuring only female artists, while also working as a producer and sound engineer on numerous parallel projects. Gut would also co-host the weekly radio show Oceanclub in Berlin, alongside Thomas Fehlmann, and would make her solo debut with "I Put A Record On" (2007), built on a sinuous, compelling minimal electronic sound.
Her longtime partner-in-crime Bettina Köster would be no less active: besides indulging in a bit of modeling for the 1985 Playboy feature "The Girls of Rock 'n' Roll" (alongside Grace Jones, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar and Diana Ross), she would go on to work on various projects as a writer and film producer, notably with Swiss director Isabel Hegener. She would then make a forceful return to music in 2005, alongside Jessie Evans of Vanishing, in a new duo called Autonervous, and would later also release a solo work, "Queen Of Noise" (2009), for Asinella Records.

The meeting between Bettina Köster and Jessie Evans is one of those encounters that seem written in the stars: two generations, two distant yet complementary stories. Jessie, in fact, in San Francisco, through a dazzling shooting star called Vanishing, lived out her blazing arc by reviving precisely the neurotic, futuristic darkwave of which Malaria! were heroines, crowning herself the new queen of the scene, heir as much to Siouxsie as, and above all, to the less celebrated but no less charismatic Köster. Here they are then, together: Bettina and Jessie, both singers and saxophonists, both creative, curious and eccentric composers. Autonervous, already a side-project of Vanishing, is thus reborn under the sign of anarchy and disorder, with few means at their disposal and plenty of creativity, just as in the days that saw the birth of Abwärts, Neubauten, Malaria! and many other historic groups.
Bettina and Jessie, then: but there's a third party sticking its nose into the Autonervous project, and its name is Berlin. On one side, the legendary, wild post-punk Berlin that Bettina lived in and brought to life before fleeing in 1983 to settle in New York, where she stayed for almost twenty years working in the visual arts; on the other, the mutant, "tronic" Berlin of recent years that Jessie, a Californian self-exiled from the States, has made her new home. Both seethe within the fragile, psychotic weave of an album created and composed following no logic other than the inspiration of the moment.
The material that makes up this record can only superficially be compared to the new wave revival or to more or less recent, plasticky "electro" fads; in reality Autonervous (2006) lives in a limbo all its own, in a labyrinth of crisscrossing directions and dead ends, in a clash of styles, references and quotations that slither and shed their skin without pause. Simple but catchy beats, pumped and venomous basslines, the occasional blare of sax and two voices having fun playing off each other: there's nothing else to it, and yet every song is its own little saga.
Whether it's the vicious electro-clash of "Anchors Aweigh", the pop detours of "Hello Lovers" or the gorgeous, perverse nightmare "Sax New Age", the union between the two women's sensibilities and experiences comes across as natural and flawless, and the fruits it bears are deliciously sick and twisted: even when they cover an old Amanda Lear track, "Gold". In the icy minimalism of "Still Kaltes" and the pure creative chaos that sets "Easter Bunny" ablaze, the marriage between "old" and "new" new wave is sealed.
The ghosts of the old Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire accompany Jessie on "Don't Wait", while the avant-garde urges of "Prescription" bring to a close an album that's alluring, grimy and imperfect. An imperfection justified by the quantity, and quality, of ideas poured into these 35 disorderly minutes of irresistible wet dreams wedged between past and present. And the ever-fertile, contagious seeds of Malaria! take root once again.

Marking the end of one of the most radical and influential artistic trajectories to emerge from Berlin between the Seventies and Eighties, news arrived on March 16, 2026 of the death of Bettina Köster. She was 66 and had long been living in Italy, in Capaccio Paestum, in the province of Salerno. She leaves behind a wealth of sonic insights and fearless experiments that forever left their mark on the history of new wave.

Contributions by Mauro Roma ("Autonervous")

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