Rammstein and Snow White

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The music video for Rammstein’s “Sonne” has many elements that are very different from other versions of the story but is also very similar. A common symbol in the different depictions of Snow White is of the glass coffin. In “The Young Slave”, when Lisa is cursed, her mother puts her in “seven caskets of crystal, one within the other” (92) where she stays until the curse is broken. Likewise, In the Grimm Brothers’ version of “Snow White” the dwarves find Snow White lifeless on the floor after eating the poison apple and “They were about to bury her, but she still looked like a living person with beautiful red cheeks” so they put her in “a transparent glass coffin” and brought “the coffin up to the top of a mountain” where “one of them was always there to keep vigil” (101). In Ann Sexton’s “Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs” the seven dwarves cannot bring themselves to bury her, so they “bury her in the black ground / so they made a glass coffin / and set it upon the seventh mountain / so that all who passed by / could peek upon her beauty” (105). In Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples” the queen’s stepdaughter is put in a “glass-and-crystal cairn” (114) made from various pieces bought by townspeople. 


The image of the glass coffin that is most similar to that of Rammstein’s music video is the Grimm’s fairy tale version, with the coffin on a mountain watched over by the dwarves. This makes sense since the band Rammstein is a German rock band, so would therefore be more familiar with a German fairytale. The idea of Snow White being a dangerous or villain figure, however, is more familiar to Neil Gaiman’s take on the classic story, in which the stepmother is in fact the victim and Snow White is dangerous yet inescapable, which is mirrored in the Rammstein music video with Snow White oppressing the dwarves and at the end waking up because of an apple.

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