Tupac and Germany: Charts, a Statue, German Rap

Outside MARTa in Herford, a rapper stands on a pedestal: life-size, cast in concrete, bare-chested, on top of a column of the kind usually reserved for generals and statesmen. The statue says a lot about Tupac’s relationship with Germany. He became big here late, but he stayed big. His biggest German hit came out two and a half years after his death, and most of his gold records arrived only in the streaming era.

This page collects what ties Tupac to Germany: charts, certifications, the monument in eastern Westphalia, traces in German rap, books, press coverage and the German fan sites this site grew out of.

The Breakthrough Came After His Death

While he was alive, Tupac was a name for insiders in Germany. Me Against the World reached No. 23 on the album chart in 1995, All Eyez on Me No. 16 in 1996. His first top-10 single was California Love with Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman: No. 7, 20 weeks on the chart.

The breakthrough did not come until 1999. Changes, a song about racism, poverty and police violence built on a sample of Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is, entered the singles chart in February 1999 and climbed to No. 2. It held on for twenty weeks. The compilation Greatest Hits, where Changes first appeared, became his most successful album in Germany, peaking at No. 9 with 32 weeks on the chart.

In 2005 came Ghetto Gospel, built on Elton John’s Indian Sunset: No. 3, 21 weeks. Add Runnin’ (Dying to Live) with The Notorious B.I.G. (No. 12, 2003) and Until the End of Time (No. 33, 2001). A German No. 1 never happened.

Source: Official German Charts, via chartsurfer.de. All chart positions are listed on the individual pages of the discography.

Gold From Streaming

The German music industry association BVMI lists seven gold records for 2Pac and no platinum. What stands out is when they came. Only two date from the CD era: Changes (1999) and the album Greatest Hits (2002). The other five followed from 2018 on, once streams counted toward certifications: Ghetto Gospel (2018), Ambitionz Az A Ridah and California Love (both 2023), All Eyez on Me (2024) and most recently Hit ‘Em Up (2026).

Ambitionz Az A Ridah and Hit ‘Em Up never charted in Germany as regular singles. That these two went gold shows how listening has changed. Alongside the radio hits of the day, what counts now are the songs listeners put in their own playlists, including the hardest tracks from Tupac’s Death Row era.

A Rapper on a General’s Pedestal

The statue in Herford, a district town in eastern Westphalia, is probably the only Tupac statue in Germany, according to the local paper Neue Westfälische. It belongs to the art project www.tupacproject.it by Italian artist Paolo Chiasera and has stood outside MARTa, the museum of art and design housed in a Frank Gehry building, since the museum’s opening exhibition in 2005.

Chiasera shows Tupac bare-chested, arms behind his back, eyes lowered. The figure stands on a brick column several meters high: a rapper in the pose of a national hero, in the middle of a small Westphalian town. The platform NRW-Skulptur even calls it the only monument to a Black man in Germany.

A book on the project includes contributions from Hans Ulrich Obrist, among others. In 2019 graffiti artist Sponk repainted the column, spraying 688 bricks.

An anecdote shows how unlikely the location seems. According to the book’s distributor, the German rapper Marteria lost a €50 bet because he refused to believe there was a Tupac statue in Herford. He then went to see it with fellow rapper Casper. In September 2026 the Neue Westfälische called it “Herford’s oddest monument.”

Where German Rap Traces Back to Tupac

Tupac’s influence on German hip-hop shows less in big tribute songs than in biographies. Several rappers name him as their starting point:

• Sa4 of 187 Strassenbande started rapping after Tupac’s violent death, according to laut.de.
• Kontra K drew his first inspiration from Nas, Tupac, Biggie and Naughty by Nature.
• Tice looked to street rappers like Azad or Tupac.
• Veysel discovered Biggie Smalls and 2Pac as a teenager.

Two releases even carry Tupac in the title. Eko Fresh called his 2007 album Ekaveli, a nod to Makaveli; laut.de described it as a “reminiscence of G-funk and rap legend Tupac Shakur.” On it Eko styled himself “the German 2Pac,” and Tupac’s former crew, the Outlawz, appeared as guests. Fler opened his 2014 album Neue Deutsche Welle 2 with the track Weisser Tupac (“White Tupac”), in which he identifies with Tupac.

Critics reached for the comparison too: according to laut.de, reviewers were already putting Kool Savas alongside US greats like Tupac or Jay-Z in 2004. There is also a string of smaller songs with Tupac in the title, such as 2Pac Hologramm by Favorite and Shneezin (2017), whose title recalls the 2012 Coachella projection. International tribute songs are collected on Tributes.

Myth and Murder Case in the German Press

Two subjects shape how German media write about Tupac: the myth and the murder case. Der Spiegel looked back at “the death of the gangsta rapper in 1996” in its history section in 2019. In 2023 it covered his Hollywood Walk of Fame star (“All eyes on him”) and, that September, the arrest of Duane “Keffe D” Davis in Las Vegas.

The trial in the summer of 2026 pushed the case to the front pages. The Süddeutsche Zeitung headlined a long report with the quote “The biggest case in the history of Las Vegas” and stressed that the alleged mastermind was on trial because of his own memoir. Der Spiegel reported on the opening of the trial and, on September 1, 2026, on the guilty verdict.

Deutschlandfunk’s Corso asked what the trial means for ’90s rap. On the 30th anniversary of his death, September 13, 2026, the broadcaster remembered an artist whose lyrics made him the voice of underprivileged Black Americans and whose violent death made him a legend. The state of the case is summarized on Investigation.

Seven Books in German

Most books about Tupac exist only in English, including Staci Robinson’s authorized biography (2023) and the poetry collection The Rose That Grew from Concrete. According to the catalog of the German National Library, these titles have been published in German:

One stands out: Tupac is back by Tobias Steinfeld is an original German young adult novel, reviewed by Deutschlandfunk in 2022. Potash’s book argues for a state conspiracy for which there is no evidence (see Theories). All the books are introduced on Books.

Fan Sites Before Social Media

Long before Facebook and Instagram, German Tupac fans met on their own websites. Three of them shaped the scene:

• 2Pac2K.de carries a copyright notice from 1997, making it one of the first. The Internet Archive has it from March 2000; its last news dates from 2006.
• 2Pacmania.de called itself “the German-language Tupac Amaru Shakur fan site” and is preserved in the archive from November 2002. Its last post appeared in July 2012.
• United-Tupac.Com, for a time also reachable as thug-life.de, started in 2002; the archive documents the site from July 2003. It grew into one of the largest German-language Tupac archives, with a biography, lyrics, interviews and a forum, and ran until 2019.

All three have gone quiet. This site is the rebuild of United-Tupac.Com: new, fact-checked writing drawn from the material of those years.

The Interest Never Left

The silent fan sites are deceptive. Between January 2025 and October 2026, readers in Germany viewed Wikipedia articles about Tupac in all languages around 455,000 times; only the US and the UK accounted for more. The German Wikipedia article alone had about 327,000 views in 2025, mostly between 18,000 and 28,000 a month. In August and September 2026, while the trial was under way in Las Vegas, the figure rose to around 48,000 each month.

People still listen, too: in September 2026 Tupac ranked No. 74 on YouTube’s artist chart for Germany. Thirty years after his death, he is more present in Germany than he was in his lifetime. The most common questions are answered in the FAQ.