The German singer-songwriter Konstantin Wecker is said to have had a relationship with a minor – at the age of 58.Image: APA/APA
Marie Franz was ten when the German songwriter Konstantin Wecker became her idol. The fact that she became intimate with him as a minor still weighs on her today.
June 21, 2026, 10:12 p.mJune 21, 2026, 10:33 p.m
1997. The Spice Girls have just declared girl power mainstream with “Wannabe.” Eurodance goes with Aqua and Sash! slowly let out the air. And today’s convicted sex offender Sean Combs, aka Puff Daddy, is still in the top five of the hit parades.
This year, 10-year-old Marie Franz received an album as a gift from her father. On the cover, a German songwriter named Konstantin Wecker. In the 1970s and 1980s he thrilled audiences as a rebellious bard with his poetic and moral messages about peace, anti-fascism and love.
In the consumer-hungry 1990s in which this story takes place, Wecker’s criticism of capitalism has almost faded away. Alarm clock does not occupy a place in the charts. But for the girl Marie Franz it is an instant hit.
“It was the first time in my life that art really grabbed me, I lost myself in this music,” says the 38-year-old during our phone conversation. In her room there is no typical poster of the German casting band Bro’sis, but one of “K”. She calls him “God.” And from now on God lives in her children’s room.
This could be the beginning of an exemplary fan biography of an introverted child, plastered with posters, love letters and fan fiction. Experienced by countless girls during adolescence. Psychologically explainable: the search for self-affirmation and identity.
At 16 she wrote her first love letter
At the age of 12, Marie Franz received a concert ticket as a gift from her parents. She loves the religious atmosphere at Wecker’s concerts. Whenever he comes near where she lives, she goes. When she was 16, she wrote him a love letter, and he replied to her by hand. She has his name written on her arm at autograph signings and then doesn’t wash it anymore. She is the teen among his aging fan base.
Musician Konstantin Wecker at the piano in February 2001.Image: AP
«With his texts, I always had the feeling that I was on the right side of history. For me he stood up for the right values, showed backbone and said no when others remained silent. All of this made a big impression on me.”
In 2005, when she was 17, the 58-year-old artist took her aside at an autograph session and asked her if she wanted to go for a drink with him. She’s here with her boyfriend, so she writes down Alarm Clock on a piece of paper: “9:00, Hilton, room 4050.”
The next day, Marie Franz skips school. The mother asks: “What if he wants more?” She doesn’t say anything more.
“We had sex twice within a short period of time and spent two hours in the hotel room talking about books and spirituality,” Franz remembers their encounter. “What a beautiful reward you are for my songs,” he is said to have said before she returned to school. She writes down the alarm clock number backwards under her desk. People write to each other, make phone calls.
In the Konstantin Wecker song “Eavesdropper Behind the Tree,” published in 1973, the artist puts himself in the perspective of an old voyeur who looks under the skirts of young girls behind bushes. “In the evening, when the good children go home to their mother,/many old men stand behind their trees./Eyes closed, mouth open, their hands are very close/to the thing that maybe something happened to twenty years ago.”
People protest in front of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin before a planned concert by the German hard rock band Rammstein.Image: keystone
Wecker was 25 years old when he released the song, but he hasn’t stayed behind in his old age. We know that today. Four women have come forward to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” in the last few months. Everyone was 15 or 17 years old when they became fans of the much older artist. All do not deny that the sexual intercourse was consensual. But all biographies are paved with psychiatric hospital stays, depression and attachment problems. In one case there is said to have been a compensation payment.
When Wecker stops contacting Marie Franz after a few meetings, her world collapses. She writes poems in which she exaggerates the artist religiously in order to process her pain. Her cousin will later personally present the handwritten poems to Wecker. She never receives an answer.
It took the #MeToo movement, the debate about the fan culture of the band Rammstein and their sophisticated groupie recruiting system, so that “I could finally classify my experiences,” says Franz, who, at Wecker’s request, never revealed the “relationship” – only two friends at school knew about it.
Today, 20 years later, she says: “As a young girl, I misinterpreted Wecker’s interest in my body as an interest in my personality; his breaking off contact was a catastrophe for my underdeveloped self-esteem.”
Years later, they are still accompanied by anxiety and panic attacks. “To this day I still have problems getting involved with someone and recognizing my own body boundaries, and asking myself what I actually want in intimate relationships, because my youthful body was only used by Wecker.”
About a year ago, Marie Franz began writing down her experiences and looking through the poems that she once dedicated to Wecker. Today she is embarrassed by them, who write declarations of love with an absoluteness that only young people can write or adults about God. Nevertheless, Marie Franz has now published these texts in a book with real names. «I realized how important it is that I tell this story publicly, for me to gain sovereignty over the interpretation of my story. For others so that they can learn from my experience.”
Under scrutiny: sexual morality in the 1970s
The reassessment of her experiences, which shifts the question of guilt to the artist Konstantin Wecker, is not just the result of successful psychotherapy. This also reflects a change in the zeitgeist.
Nastassja Kinski was portrayed naked in Wim Wenders’ film “False Movement” at the age of 13Image: keystone
Just a year after the release of the song “Eavesdropper Behind the Tree,” German director Wim Wenders will shoot his film “Falsche Movement” with the then 13-year-old Nastassja Kinski. A film scene shows the young actress naked in a sexualized depiction of violence. And like Marie Franz, Nastassja Kinski has only now turned to the public and asked the director to remove the scene from the film because as a child she felt “that it wasn’t okay”.
In the same year as Wenders’ film, the French author and intellectual Gabriel Matzneff published the book “Les Moins de Seize Ans” (“The Under-16s”), in which he glorifies relationships with young girls. Supported by intellectuals, he called for the lifting of the ban on pedophilia with a petition in the newspaper “Le Monde” in 1977. Using Marxist arguments, intellectuals at the time wanted to free children from adult rule. Arguments from psychoanalysis were used against the inhibited post-war society.
Wecker is silent about Marie Franz
The sexual morality of the 1970s, which also shaped Wecker’s worldview, seems to be under scrutiny in 2026. The author Gabriel Matzneff, who has been honored with awards for decades, was temporarily investigated. And the blame changes sides – hesitantly. “It still takes me a lot of effort to say that it wasn’t my fault,” says Marie Franz. “But I would like to encourage women who have experienced something similar not to blame themselves.”
“He could have set an example and taken responsibility for his actions.”
Marie Franz
Wecker himself publicly apologized through his lawyer last year after another relationship with a 15-year-old student became known. He remains silent about Marie Franz and two other cases. His lawyer told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” that Wecker was “unable to remember for health reasons.” Our request for a statement also remained unanswered by management.
Marie Franz is disappointed. “He could have set an example and taken responsibility for his actions,” she says. His silence was a “missed opportunity to have a positive influence on the narrative”. She no longer listens to Wecker’s songs, which he performed with great poise.
Marie Franz: “Chosen”. Goldblatt Verlag, 96 p. (schweiztoday.ch)