The bees must

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The bees must! is a phrase meaning that something must be done under all circumstances; especially when forced to do so when it is absurd. In Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander 's lexicon of proverbs and in the lexicon of proverbial idioms by Lutz Röhrich , the phrase is also quoted with the addition "it was about life".

origin

The phrase goes back to an anti-Russian caricature by the Düsseldorf painter Wilhelm Camphausen , which appeared in the Düsseldorf monthly magazine in 1850 . The caption titled Conversation about beekeeping shows a dialogue between a German and a Russian. The Russian claims that bees in Russia are the size of cats; When the German asked how they would then get into the (normal-sized) beehives , he replied in his broken German: “Ha - the bees must! "The drawing shows a hulking to Russian, who cats large bees despite their desperate pleading with the lash in the beehives beating attempted while in the background bees" to Siberia be deported ". Like other caricatures in the Düsseldorf monthly books and similar publications of the German Vormärz , the drawing alludes to the political oppression in the tsarist empire. Even later the proverbial phrase was often related to the political situation in Russia and the Soviet Union .

Camphausen used a much older fairy tale that was first printed in an appendix to the Lale book from 1597. Here it is India, where the bees are supposed to be as big as sheep, and when asked about the possibility of hatching, the narrator replies that he is not worried about that, he leaves that to the bees.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Art. Bee. In: Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander: German Proverbs Lexicon. A treasure trove for the German people. Volume 1, p. 372. FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1867; Digitized at zeno.org
  2. ^ Art. Bien, Biehn . In Lutz Röhrich: Lexicon of the proverbial sayings. Herder, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1994, Volume 1, p. 190
  3. ↑ Conversation about beekeeping. In: Düsseldorfer monthly booklet 3 (1850), plate 8; Digital copy from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
  4. ↑ For example: Gert W. Heumann: What does 'not possible' mean? The bees must! The appearance and reality of Soviet aviation technology. In: Der Spiegel No. 28/1965, pp. 86-88.
  5. ↑ J. [osef] M. [aria] Wagner: fabrications. In: Zeitschrift für deutsches Althertum 16 (1873), pp. 437–466, here: pp. 459–460; Digitized at DigiZeitschriften. Further earlier sources of the fairy tale from Georg Büchmann : Winged words. The treasure trove of quotations from the German people. 32nd edition, Haude & Spener, Berlin 1972, p. 352.