Around that same time, she joined the band Automobil and released the schlager single "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen".

In 1982, Hagen signed a new contract with CBS and released her debut solo album NunSexMonkRock, which became her first record to chart in the United States.

From 1972 to 1973, Hagen enrolled in the vocal training performance program at The Central Studio for Light Music in East Berlin (de).

Her most famous song from the early part of her career was "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (You Forgot the Colour Film)", with words by Kurt Demmler to music by Michael Heubach, a subtle dig mocking the sterile, gray, Communist state,[6] in 1974.

Her label advised her to acclimatize herself to Western culture through travel, and she arrived in London during the height of the punk rock movement.

[1] They released their self-titled debut album, Nina Hagen Band in late 1978:[9] it included the single "TV-Glotzer" (a cover of "White Punks on Dope" by The Tubes, though with entirely different German lyrics), and "Auf'm Bahnhof Zoo", about West-Berlin's then-notorious Berlin Zoologischer Garten station.

The debut album gained significant attention throughout Germany and abroad both for its hard rock sound and for Hagen's theatrical vocals which drew heavily from her operatic training, far different from the straightforward singing of her East German recordings.

It included the single "African Reggae"[1] and "Wir Leben Immer... Noch", a German language cover of Lene Lovich's "Lucky Number".

She became infamous for an appearance on an Austrian evening talk show called Club 2, on 9 August 1979, on the topic of youth culture, when she demonstrated (while clothed, but explicitly) various female masturbation positions and became embroiled in a heated argument with other panelists, in particular, writer and journalist Humbert Fink.

By this time, Hagen's public appearances frequently included discussions of god, UFOs, her social and political beliefs, animal rights, and vivisection, and claims of alien sightings.

During 1984, Hagen spent a lot of time in London- and UK-based MusicSzene magazine chief-editor Wilfried Rimensberger, in conjunction with Spree Film, produced a first TV feature on her and what was remaining from London's 70 Punk movement induced by artist and model Frankie Stein.

39 USA) and a cover of "Spirit in the Sky" and also featured a 1979 recording of her hardcore punk take on Paul Anka's "My Way", which had been one of her signature live tunes in previous years.

While in Brazil she met and befriended Brazilian musicians as diverse as samba diva Beth Carvalho and Brazilian punk singer Supla (who was leader of a punk-new wave band named Tokyo), that invited her to contribute vocals to the hit 1986 song "Garota de Berlim" (Portuguese for "girl from Berlin") that received huge airplay in radio in Brazil.

[14] Wilfried Rimensberger and award-winning film director Lothar Spree produced a TV documentary for the German television station ZDF.

This was followed by a launch of Nina's UFO fashion underwear at anti-SAFT in Zurich, where again Rimensberger joined her up with New Romantic icon Steve Strange performing on stage.

Simultaneously fashion photographer Hannes Schmid produced a Nina Hagen cover for German Cosmopolitan magazine.

This also coincided with leading music publications like BRAVO and MusicSzene running cover stories that all put Hagen back on the forefront of something that, in retrospect, became a final highpoint of what the punk movement was all about.

In 1997 she collaborated with German hip hop musician Thomas D. In 1998, Hagen became the host of a weekly science fiction show on the British Sci-Fi Channel, in addition to embarking on another tour of Germany.

In 1999, she released the devotional album Om Namah Shivay, which was distributed exclusively online and included an unadulterated musical version of the Hare Krishna mantra.

In 1999, she played the role of Celia Peachum in The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, alongside Max Raabe.

She also regularly performs songs by Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau set to Brecht's texts.

Another cover of a Zarah Leander song "Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt" was a minor hit the same year.

Due to the death of Elisabeth Volkmann (†2006), the German voice of Marge, during the dubbing of the hit TV show "The Simpsons" 17th season, Nina was a strong contender for the role, which eventually went to Anke Engelke.

Later albums include Big Band Explosion (2003), in which she sang numerous swing covers with her then husband, Danish singer and performer, Lucas Alexander.

When Angela Merkel ended her 16-year chancellorship of Germany in December 2021, she chose Hagen's song Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (You Forgot the Colour Film) as one of the three pieces to be played at her Großer Zapfenstreich military leaving ceremony.

[21] In 1987, she caught the attention of the media by announcing her marriage to a 17-year-old South African punk named Iroquois, whom she met in Rome in 1985.