Tell me where you stand

October Club with Hartmut König, 1967 in Halle

The song Tell me where you are standing is a propaganda song of the song movement of the GDR . It was written and composed by Hartmut König , recorded by members of the October Club and the Thomas Natschinski group and his group .

The song is musically linked in the melody movement of the chorus to the 1931 US union song Which Side Are You On? from Florence Reece , who was also the inspiration for the statement in the title and the agitational emphasis on the real socialist German version.

In the song, the addressee ("you") is asked by a collective that searches for a certain conscience , which sees itself on the side of social progress ("we bring the time forward"), to "identify" and to turn away from the remaining Im -Circle-walking, to take off the "nodding mask" and thus to reveal the "true face".

Due to its catchy verse structure and its arrangement in the popular Mersey Beat , the song is still considered the most distinctive and successful of the GDR singing movement.

In 1970, the song on the first night of the crime scene film series, Taxi to Leipzig , used.

Bettina Wegner , co-founder of the Hootenanny Club (which later became the October Club ), spoke in 2018 that she expressed her protest against the use of the song as a “mass idiocy” by saying “Say, who are you sleeping with?” At a performance with a fellow singer. “Sang.

Discography

1967: The October Club sings. Amiga
2007: Tell me where you are. 60 years of Amiga Vol. 13, Politbox, Amiga / BMG

literature

Lutz Kirchenwitz: Folk, chanson and songwriter in the GDR - chroniclers, critics, emperor birthday singers. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-320-01807-8 .

Web links

Text at fandom
A cover at Discogs

Individual evidence

^ Berlin - Fateful Years of a City. The year 1967 ( memento of December 17, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). The co-founder and later songwriter, Bettina Wegner, remembers the appropriation of the singing movement and its resistance to it. In: rbb . December 15, 2018, accessed on December 15, 2015 (film documentation by Lutz Pehnert; first broadcast on December 15, 2018 in rbb; 12: 12–13: 26 min.): “[Speaker:] This song will be a hit with the new East Germans Singing movement.
[Recording, lied performance by Hartmut König with band:] Tell me where you are?
[Speaker:] But Bettina Wegner is not comfortable with the line-true refrain. During a performance she swears a fellow singer to a subversive text correction.
[Bettina Wegner:] Then I said to Annette: Let's just sing - instead of: Tell me where you are? - Who are you sleeping with? And Annette and I were very loud and we sang very loud: Who are you sleeping with? Say who are you sleeping with And after a while all of them on stage had say with w ... and didn't notice that they were singing: Say who are you sleeping with? - Well, back then it already had an aftertaste, because it was so - maybe not because of the song, but it was picked up and duplicated and people put in the head ... It was kind of mass idiocy.
[Recording of lied performance; the singer asks the audience:] And again: tell me where you are? "

[1] Berlin - Fateful Years of a City. The year 1967 ( memento of December 17, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). The co-founder and later songwriter, Bettina Wegner, remembers the appropriation of the singing movement and its resistance to it. In: rbb . December 15, 2018, accessed on December 15, 2015 (film documentation by Lutz Pehnert; first broadcast on December 15, 2018 in rbb; 12: 12–13: 26 min.): “[Speaker:] This song will be a hit with the new East Germans Singing movement.
[Recording, lied performance by Hartmut König with band:] Tell me where you are?
[Speaker:] But Bettina Wegner is not comfortable with the line-true refrain. During a performance she swears a fellow singer to a subversive text correction.
[Bettina Wegner:] Then I said to Annette: Let's just sing - instead of: Tell me where you are? - Who are you sleeping with? And Annette and I were very loud and we sang very loud: Who are you sleeping with? Say who are you sleeping with And after a while all of them on stage had say with w ... and didn't notice that they were singing: Say who are you sleeping with? - Well, back then it already had an aftertaste, because it was so - maybe not because of the song, but it was picked up and duplicated and people put in the head ... It was kind of mass idiocy.
[Recording of lied performance; the singer asks the audience:] And again: tell me where you are? "