Biography
Brezel Göring was born Hartmut Richard Friedrich Ziegler in Wolfhagen, Germany, in 1967. He grew up in northern Hesse and began playing in local bands, including Haunted Henschel, as a teenager. Performing under the name Fürst Ziegler, he also pursued solo projects. After stops in Kassel, where he founded the group Sigmund Freud Experience, and Dortmund, he moved to West Berlin in 1988. There, he developed a distinctive artistic voice characterized by experimentation, humor, and a strong affinity for subcultural forms of expression.
In 1992, Göring met the musician and author Françoise Cactus. Together, they transformed Sigmund Freud Experience into the trash-punk-electro duo Stereo Total. With its genre-defying DIY sound, multilingual lyrics, and often ironic sensibility, the group developed an international cult following. Over the next three decades, until Cactus's death in 2021, Stereo Total released numerous albums and toured throughout Europe, North and South America, Japan, and China.
Alongside his work with Stereo Total, Göring has been active in theater and performance. He has composed and performed for institutions including Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer and Volksbühne, as well as the Cologne Philharmonic. His theater music ranges from electronic miniatures to pieces incorporating instruments of his own invention. He has also collaborated with artists and groups including Jim Avignon and Neoangin, Kommando Sonnenmilch, Wolfgang Müller, Klaus Beyer, Die Ärzte, and the Oberkreuzberger Nasenflötenorchester.
Göring also wrote a piece about Patty Hearst for a Stereo Total performance, which was later adapted as a radio play and laid the foundation for his subsequent work as an author.
Since the 2000s, Göring has also worked in film. In 2011, he made a brief appearance as the "Man in the Lounge" in Ziska Riemann's award-winning feature debut "Lollipop Monster." That same year, he contributed music and musical arrangements to the Japanese pink-film musical "Underwater Love," co-produced by the German production company Rapid Eye Movies. He went on to contribute to Khavn De La Cruz's Philippine-German co-productions "Ruined Heart" (2014) and "Alipato – The Very Brief Life of an Ember" (2016), as well as Kida Khodr Ramadan's drama "Haltlos," all of which were co-produced or distributed by Rapid Eye Movies.
After Françoise Cactus's death in 2021, Göring dissolved Stereo Total, considering her irreplaceable to both the duo's artistic work and its success. When he later discovered an unpublished novel manuscript by his longtime partner, he adapted it into the screenplay for his first feature film, "Für immer 16" ("Forever 16"). He developed and produced the project in collaboration with Rapid Eye Movies, shooting the film entirely on Super 8.
Made in Palermo with minimal technical equipment and through a strongly collaborative process, "Für immer 16" is marked by its improvised visual style and unconventional approach to sound. The soundtrack draws largely on music by Stereo Total, while Göring deliberately incorporated Françoise Cactus's voice as an additional layer, extending her artistic presence into the film. Lilith Stangenberg stars in a leading role.
Since 2022, Göring has released albums as a solo artist and performed concerts with Psychoanalyse, a group with a rotating lineup of musicians. He has also played synthesizer in the band Nebel3000.
In addition to his work as a musician, composer, and filmmaker, Göring published the book "Unbehagen in der Mittelstufe" in 2012, a collection of plays for school theater written by him.
Brezel Göring lives in Berlin.