Christian Steiffen | Porta³

There are two camps in Schlager music: E-Schlager, which takes its lyrics about love, lust and passion to the stage with the utmost seriousness and celebrates every computer-generated ‘La-La-La’ as the rebirth of serious mass ecstasy – and Christian Steiffen, whose stage name already reveals that self-irony has taken over the baton here. With lyrics that use deliberate ambiguity to complement authentic Schlager chords, but at the same time subvert them. After MEUTE bringing techno sounds to Porta³ music festival for the first time in 2026, Christian Steiffen will put an end to Schlager madness on Friday, June 19, 2026, and instead make it big.

The self-proclaimed ‘God of Schlager’ came within a hair's breadth of only being able to perform as part of a (newly established) town twinning. Because if Christian Steiffen had actually become mayor of Osnabrück, that would probably have been the only thing that could have legitimised a performance on the magnificent arched stage in front of the Porta Nigra. He ran twice, once under his birth name Hardy Schwetter and once under his stage name Christian Steiffen. Twice he was denied political power. But political pop music has always had a difficult time anyway.

And so the New York-trained actor now commands not only 3% of the votes in Osnabrück, but 100% of the votes in Germany – at least among the dance-crazy fans at his concerts, who celebrate the pop star, who oscillates between entertainment and euphoria, like Elvis once did in Bad Nauheim.

What distinguishes Steiffen and songs like ‘Verliebt verlobt veheiratet vertan’ (In love, engaged, married, wasted), ‘Eine Flasche Bier’ (A bottle of beer) or ‘Sexualverkehr’ (Sexual intercourse) from the smooth-ironed world of Schlager is his ability to go against the grain of the genre's highly stylised superficiality, which has been quoted a thousand times over. Where others sing of great love, he prefers to sing about himself (‘Ich hab' die ganze Nacht von mir geträumt’ – I dreamed about myself all night long), and he does so with a disarming boldness and well-measured salaciousness, in beer-fuelled bliss and solemnity, that makes you smile. In other words, Christian Steiffen's greatest sincerity lies in singing about the ridiculous, and his greatest strength is the affectation he performs with his magnificent singing voice, which he pokes fun at – with a great deal of enjoyment. Both on and off stage.

So when Christian Steiffen arrives, he doesn't arrive quietly. He arrives as a ‘worker of love’, with self-pity and self-confidence, with irony and fervour, with an evening in which ancient architecture becomes the stage for contemporary pop madness. There's no question that the Porta will welcome him. There's also no doubt about what it will call out to him, perhaps inaudibly, but full of joy at reflecting the colourful fireworks of nights spent dancing on its black stones for two hours: ‘I feel disco!’