Twelve years ago come September I posted a blog in which I identified myself as a serious fan of the German liedermacher/cabarettist Bodo Wartke. I was - and still am - really taken by his marvelous talent as a composer and performer. He combines music and wit with an extraordinarily creative use of language. I bewailed the fact that you needed to be a German-language speaker to fully appreciate the quality and extent of his skills and I made a feeble attempt to give a rough translation of his poetry into English, hoping some of his talent would cross the language-and-culture barrier.
To my delight he - or somebody on his team - picked up my blog and recommended it on their website. Misspelled my name, but hey, even monkeys fall from trees, as the Japanese saying goes.
To my double delight, he has made excellent use of the years since then and, most recently, has hit the millions of viewers of his videos on YouTube. He has greatly expanded his talents as a cabaret artist and counts today as probably Germany's best-known writer of this genre of poetry known as the sprachgesang, (I write it in English, i.e., without a capital letter, since it has evidently entered the English vocabulary), literally a "speech song."
Let me give you an example. Here is Bodo Wartke saying his poem, "The Fat Roofer." I know. It lacks appeal as a concept, but get past that into the rap-like delivery. Note how it differs from rap. Rap is counter-cultural and ventures into the offensive; this is very mainstream entertainment that borders on (and can even cross the boundary into) the nerdy. Here are the words, if you want to follow along, in the original German with an English translation evidently done by a literal-minded machine:
These days (and I don't know how far back this goes) he has teamed up with others to produce popular cabaret-style musical performances, and now has extended even into dance. In the 90s he published a series of pieces about German tongue twisters, once again showing off his facility with language.
There is a silly German tongue-twister that has been around for years about a girl named Barbara - also called Bärbel - known for her delicious rhubarb cakes. She is good enough to open a bar to sell them in. Living in the neighborhood are three barbarians. They become regulars at Barbara's Rhubarb Bar and become known as Barbara's Rhubarb Bar Barbarians. You can see what you can do with these word/concepts in German: Barbara is Barbara in German; rhubarb is Rabarber; bar is Bar; barbarians is Barbaren.
The poem is available in its entirety, line by line in the original German with an English translation here.
The song has gone viral and is widely becoming known as simply, "That German Song" - now in sprachgesang form. It is now crossing language barriers and is available in Italian, English, and French, albeit in literal forms without the rhythm and rhymes of the original. Kids (see here minute 2:39) in Uganda are dancing to it. And it has even led to a sequel [actual sequel begins just after minute 10], in which Barbara teams up with Bärbel and becomes a lesbian. Barbara and Bärbel have a baby named Emily to add to their (warning: German pronunciation of English word family = femily.) If you want more about the background to the poem and the content, have a look at the website of Feli from Germany, who does a bang-up job with that.
But back to Bodo Wartke. Here he is, teamed up with the well-known musical artist, Marti Fischer, doing the original. And here are the Australian couple, Jasmine and James, who, I believe, created the dance, gone equally viral. They met in ballet class in Dresden - she's German, he's Australian and they are now married and living in Australia posting their dances on their website.
There are many more - too many to list here, proof that the world has not lost its appreciation of the absurd.
All is not lost!
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