THE PASSIONS—‘I’M IN LOVE WITH
A GERMAN FILM STAR’ (POLYDOR 7”, 1981)

Four slow notes of shiver, blush, echoplex, and delay, then a tiny cascade, a shimmer, and a drop. A perfectly distracted rhythm section. A cold glow of voice. Not the first record I ever bought, but the first time I ever heard music.
It hadn’t been a glamorous world, but now it was.

THE CURE—‘ALL CATS ARE GREY’
(FROM FAITH, FICTION, 1981)

I lay on the threadbare carpet in my room and watched the lights from passing cars throw abstract movies across the walls. I’d put this on and the room became a cathedral of shadow and smoke. It’s the last track on side one and the tone arm on my record player didn’t work properly so the music faded into the hiss and scratch of the runout groove. Even then, I knew that somewhere out there, Magda was listening to this, too.

LA DÜSSELDORF—‘SILVER CLOUD’
(TELDEC 7”, 1976)

I wouldn’t hear this until much later, but when I did I knew that Magda had spent the long summer of 1976 dancing to it with a boy called Andreas or Jürgen or Max who was not worthy of her.

BERNTHØLER—‘MY SUITOR’
(BLANCO Y NEGRO 7”, 1984)

A video shop had opened between the chippy and the florist and as if by accident or magic they had a small section of the titles I only ever saw namechecked in the NME or showing at the Aaben in Hulme. The owner didn’t seem to know what certificate they were and didn’t blink when I checked out Herzen und Knochen. It isn’t her best film, but it was enough.
Magda’s luminous face appears fifteen minutes in. Her first word—zwischen—is a mere preposition that becomes a jouissant epiphany as she says it. All my future lay in those five phonemes.
John Peel played this record around the same time, but I couldn’t get hold of it until it received a UK release nearly a year later. For some reason I became convinced that Magda was the singer, even though I knew it wasn’t her. I could hear her, I thought, singing to me through it. The last scene of the film would have been so much better had this been its soundtrack.

THE DURUTTI COLUMN—‘SKETCH FOR DAWN (II)’
(FROM LC, FACTORY, 1982)

An example of how music can go beyond evocation to become the thing itself. The bass is a long narrow avenue somewhere in Europe, the piano the high windows of a slightly shabby late-nineteenth century apartment building, its echo the footsteps in their stairwells. There are trees, it is late summer or early autumn. The guitar is the touch of mist in the air.
Vini Reilly (who is the Durutti Column) recorded this in a damp flat in Chorlton, but several years later I would find myself buying then living in the place he had brought into being in this song, on the street that had been one of the principal locations for Die Flammende Haut. Reilly mutters the song’s few words, but there’s something in there about a late night or early morning cigarette burning dreams away, and I’m not sure if it was this line or the way Magda held a cigarette in Herzen und Knochen that made me take up smoking. I blame neither of them for it.

ASSOCIATES—‘WHITE CAR IN GERMANY’
(SITUATION TWO 12”, 1981)

I’m listing the twelve-inch here, but it is also track one side one of the duo’s Fourth Drawer Down LP, which I listened to obsessively on a Walkman throughout 1982 as I took the bus to school, already seeing myself on the open autobahn, speeding past cities, through forests, and over bridges in a vintage Porsche 911 convertible, a scene that would form the title sequence of Tränen sind im Regen unsichtbar, Magda’s only venture into romantic comedy, and still much underappreciated.

WIM MERTENS—‘STRUGGLE FOR PLEASURE’
(ARIOLA/LES DISQUES DU CRÉPESCULE 12”, 1983)

It’s been used everywhere (phone adverts, a Peter Greenaway film, some godawful Café del Mar chill-out compilation) and at first I thought I’d leave it out, but I’m certain I remember hearing it over the tannoy in Brussel-Zuid, or perhaps it was Köln Hauptbahnhof, or maybe Amsterdam Centraal, that first time I boarded a train to the Continent. On one long leg of the journey I met a girl called Claudia, who was interested in me because I was pretending to read Kafka, and who I was interested in because I told myself she looked like Magda. She fell asleep on my shoulder and woke up when we got to Hannover, or Hamburg, or somewhere, then got off, leaving me her name and address written on a slip of paper that I put between the leaves of the Penguin Modern Classic and forgot about, until now, when I listen to this piece of music again.

ROBERT GÖRL—‘MIT DIR’ (MUTE 12”, 1983)

Find the video for this and at three minutes forty seconds in, watch very carefully to see Magda appear as one of the faces in the slowly dancing crowd. The camera closes in on her and then, as if almost afraid of so much beauty, rapidly cuts away.

GRAUZONE—‘EISBÄR’ (EMI ELECTROLA 7”, 1981)

In a small feature in Kino magazine (Sept ’83), Magda lists this as one of her favourite records.

CLOCK DVA—‘FOUR HOURS’ (FETISH 7”, 1981)

Many years later I got a rare chance to see Mein Herz ist eine Bombe, mein Kopf ist ein Gedicht while sitting on an upturned beer crate in a Kreuzberg basement. An experimental short made while Magda was still a drama student, it’s not part of her official filmography (as much as one exists at all), but essential viewing for anyone seriously interested.
As the Super 8 projector spooled and whirred and the image on the screen flickered, I knew that the director of the film and Magda had been fucking while listening to this record.

NEU—‘SEELAND’
(FROM NEU 75, UNITED ARTISTS, 1975)

This is the music in the closing scenes of Die Flammende Haut, where we see Magda walking for hours through the deserted city, alone, as dawn slowly breaks and she eventually reaches the sea. I knew the song long before I got to see the film and when I saw it, it felt like a homecoming. There is no more poignant scene in the history of cinema.
The film is currently unavailable on streaming, DVD, or even VHS, so I have instead played my copy of the record so often I can no longer tell where the rain effect ends and the surface noise of the worn vinyl begins.

DAVID BOWIE—‘HELDEN’ (RCA 7”, 1977)

Via the address of the production company listed at the end of Haut, I wrote to Magda asking what this song meant to her, or even—I hoped!—if she would record herself singing it. I never received a reply, and suspect that this is because while Bowie himself remained tight-lipped on the subject, the two must have run into each other during his time in Berlin. There is one line in the song which can only refer to Magda. His decision to record this version of his most bleakly yearning and melancholically ecstatic song auf Deutsch was surely an indirect message to her.

BLONDIE—‘ATOMIC’ (CHRYSALIS 7”, 1980)

Silbernes Feuer, Magda’s last film, was famously troubled. On-set tensions, three directors, and a production company going bust meant it was never properly finished, and despite the existence of several dubious ‘final’ cuts it has never received an official release. This song was supposed to accompany the climactic scene in which Magda leads revellers from a nightclub onto the streets of a collapsing city, but licensing issues rendered it unavailable. It was replaced with a cover version by legendary DDR punk band Zwitschermaschine, which I have sadly been unable to track down.

TONNETZ—‘MAGDA’ (CHAIN REACTION 12”, 1997)

All glitch and sparkle, this immersive piece of low-slung minimal techno I found via a recommendation on a discussion board dedicated to German cinema. The site told me many things: that she had married four times; that she was living in Los Angeles and working on a new film; that she had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery in order never to be recognised again; that she still loved clubbing; that she had been a Stasi agent; that ‘Magda’ was only ever a pseudonym used to cover her real identity; that she had made several other films that had gone straight to streaming; that she was living in Prestwich; that she had never really existed at all. I knew that most of these theories were nonsense.

ALVA NOTO—‘A FOREST’ (NOTON DL, 2020)

The famous Cure song stripped to vapour traces, murmurs, and distant sighs. This was playing out in Berghain when I saw her again. Despite the darkness I recognised her immediately but did not approach as I had been taking some very strong painkillers while recovering from the high-speed accident that had written off the Porsche. She was dancing, of course, incredibly slowly, alone, and unselfconscious. I wanted to leave her that way.
This is the only Magda song that I do not possess as an object (its only physical form is an extremely expensive limited edition etched disc that I can no longer afford), and I rue this absence, as I fear my memories and dreams will vanish as quickly as a single spoken word or the vision of a face on a screen if I cannot touch them.

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Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is available now from Melville House.

C. D. Rose is an award-winning short-story writer and the author of the novels The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, as well as the story collection The Blind Accordionist. He lives in Hebden Bridge, England. Twitter: @cdrose_writer