A rock band flirts with German taboos, and finds a huge following

Frei.Wild (pronounced FRY-vilt) has become one of the most contentious and successful bands in Germany, where its lyrics about loving one’s homeland have resonated with people who want to challenge the postwar taboo against public expressions of national pride. The band sings in German, and its music is a punk-inflected variant of “deutschrock,” a form of German rock music. But a South Tyrolean identity allows the group to voice nationalist sentiments in German, for a largely German audience, while partly avoiding the backlash that a German band would encounter for making similar statements.

The band’s most recent album, “Rivalen und Rebellen,” (“Rivals and Rebels”) went to the top of the German-language charts in Germany and Austria this spring, and it is the second best-selling album in any language in Germany this year. Many of the group’s tour dates, which included stadium audiences as large as 12,000 people, were sold out.

With songs like “Südtirol” and “Land der Vollidioten” (“Land of Complete Idiots”), which rails against the removal of crosses from schools out of respect for non-Christian children, critics in Germany have argued the band helps to foster anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing nationalism. The musicians argue they are merely singing about their personal experiences, and that their reputation as a far-right band is a media distortion…

A recent article in Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, described the band as “sounding like the soundtrack to the party platform of the AfD,” referring to the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party, which landed a surprising 13 percent of the vote in national elections last year. The band’s recent German tour was met with protests in several cities.

Peter Söder, 52, and his wife, Claudia, 44, traveled to South Tyrol from the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg to see the band at Alpen Flair. “Frei.Wild isn’t just entertainment and fun, it’s also political,” Mr. Söder said. “The lyrics capture the zeitgeist in Germany,” he said.