Fly maybeetle

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“Cockchafer, fly!” Drawing by Emil Schmidt, gazebo 1879
Illustration by Paul Thumann, 1881
Des Knaben Wunderhorn , page 235

Maikäfer flieg is a well-known German-language folk and children's song .

history

The creation process of the lyrics known today is often dated to the time of the Thirty Years' War , for example by the poetry researcher Heinz Schlaffer and the art theorist Bazon Brock . The historian Hans Medick objects , however, that the picture sketched out in the text of the outgoing father as a soldier and the family remaining in the hometown did not correspond to the usual tradition at that time; rather, relatives and all their household items have moved behind the armies in Trossen and have formed vagabond , mobile communities. The greatest devastation and destruction of the Thirty Years War also took place in central and southern Germany rather than in Pomerania. Furthermore, it was customary to print folk songs as so-called song pamphlets in large numbers and to distribute them among the population. However, there are no prints of the lyrics from this period - or they have not survived. According to Hans Medick, a possible historical reference arises with the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), which left clear traces in the Pomerania region.

The text version known today can be found in numerous versions in printed form since around 1800. It is performed as a Maykäfer song in the first volume of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn song collection , which was created in 1806/08 by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano . What is striking is the large number of parodies that are already available in the various versions in the Wunderhorn and that continue to the present day. They are also testament to the song's popularity.

The melody of the song known today was composed by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in 1781 according to a folk tune and corresponds to that of the lullaby sleep, child, sleep , a text fragment of which has been passed down since 1611.

Text versions

In today's Lower Saxony the text read according to the folk sagas of Otmar (1800):

May beetle, fly!
The father is at war.
The mother is in Pommerland.
And Pommerland has burned down.

In today's Hesse , the text read, according to Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806):

May beetle fly,
the father is at war,
the mother is in powder land,
and powder land is burned down.

A variant existed in Thuringia , but it had a different melody:

Ladybirds fly
your father is at war
your mother is in Engelland
Engelland burned down

Several variants of the song have survived from the time after the revolution of 1848/49 , which establish a connection with the revolutionary leader Friedrich Hecker .

The Maiakäfer flies,
The chopper is em Kriag,
The chopper is em Oberland,
The chopper is em Unterland.
     Warmbronn, OA Leonberg , Württemberg

Kåəferlə, Kåəferlə fliag!
Dər Heckər is in the Kriag,
Dər Struve is in the Obərland .
And makes d'Republik known.
     Ulm

Fly maybeetle!
The Hecker is at war,
The Struve is in the Oberland,
Make the Republic known.
     Forst, Bayr. Palatinate

Kiéwerlénk fléi,
Deng Mamm déi ass on the Klé,
Déi Papp as on the fruit,
Kiéwerlénk fléi on d'Lûcht.
     (18th century from Luxembourg folk song collection)

Content and interpretation

The content of the song ostensibly describes the custom, which was widespread among children at the time, of catching cockchafer and letting them fly again. This is how Wilhelm Grimm describes it , who in 1808 recorded a variant of the song, which, however, speaks of Marian beetles instead of cockchafer, as a contribution to Des Knaben Wunderhorn :

"The beautiful, colorful dotted Marienwürmchen put them [the children] to the fingertips and let it up and abkriechen until it flies away. They sing:

Marian worms, fly away, fly away!
your house is on fire! the children scream! "

According to Heinz Schlaffer, an anonymous lyrical self tells the Beetle about the absence of both parents, although it is not clear what exactly happened to them. It seems more than questionable whether they will return. “The singer's role is best imagined as that of an older child trying to comfort a younger one after both parents have disappeared. Impressive the desolation in the consolation - the completely hopeless May here. " Aleida Assmann points out the deep paradox of the song - here the lovely lullaby melody, there the soberly told horror; the contradiction between the threatening text and the lovely melody caused deep unrest in the listener. This dissonance of almost schizophrenic proportions could be a reason for the continued popularity of the song, which, according to Bazon Brock, “carries the historical experience of the people in Germany in itself”.

The interpretation of the place names, which change in the various versions, is a particular puzzle. It is unclear whether “Pommerland”, as it is in the most widespread version today, actually means the Pomeranian landscape . Occasionally a connection is made in the literature with the devastation of Pomerania during the Thirty Years' War . Since versions of the text with the wording “Pommerland” can only be found around 150 years after the end of the Thirty Years War, this attribution remains uncertain. Heinz Rölleke interprets the variant “powder country” as a joking reinterpretation: “country in which there is war”. The variant "Engelland" does not necessarily refer to England , but possibly to the "Land of Angels " or Elves .

Wilhelm Mannhardt , a representative of the mythological school of folklore, collected in his habilitation thesis Germanische Mythen: Forschungen (1858) 26 different versions of the song, three of them in English, from which he derives the thesis that the burning house mentioned in the text was the world fire the Nordic-Germanic mythology means. Other folklorists like Franz Magnus Böhme followed this interpretation . Modern folklorists such as Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann point out, however, that such attempts at interpretation "should be handled carefully"; Emily Gerstner-Hirzel is of the opinion that the mythological school "by its not very careful approach brought the belief in pagan relics in nursery rhyme into disrepute".

The agriculture teacher and local historian Arthur Zechlin , who comes from Schivelbein in Pomerania, traced the origin of the song “Maikäfer fliege, ...” back to the centuries-long fear of the Polish invasions of the Pomeranian population in his contribution “The Neustettiner Kreis” from 1886 .

aftermath

The writer Hermann Löns quotes the song in the "Pommernland" version of his novel Der Wehrwolf (1910).

In 1973 an autobiographical novel by Christine Nöstlinger was published with the title Maikäfer flieg! (My father, the end of the war, Cohn and I), whose title goes back to the song.

Maikäfer flieg is the title of the German translation of the book Witnesses of war: Children's lives under the Nazis by Nicholas Stargardt .

The lyrics were also used by the Swiss NDW group Grauzone in their piece of the same name Maikäfer flieg . This piece was released on the 1981 LP Grauzone .

Furthermore, the German thrash metal band Macbeth processed the song on their album Gotteskrieger .

In the musical Ludwig² there is a modified version of the song, which is a childhood memory of the monarch Ludwig II of Bavaria.

In 2010, Theater zum Fear brought out a play by Bruno Max in the Mödlinger air raid shelter under this title , which refers to the song and tells "Twenty fairy tales from a bombing night".

The group Die Grenzgänger wrote the piece on their concept album Maikäfer flieg! Which was awarded the German Record Critics Prize . which contains lost folk songs from the First World War. The 40-page booklet tells the story of the cockchafer barracks in Berlin and the cockchafer plagues against which whole school classes went to the field.

Web links

Commons : Cockchafer, fly (song)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Cockchafer flies  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Lotta Wieden: Old nursery rhyme: cockchafer, fly! In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung No. 14 of April 5, 2015, pp. 43–44 ( online , updated April 12, 2015).
  2. ↑ a b Lotta Y. Wieden: Maikäfer flies - the German song of war. Deutschlandradio Kultur , May 17, 2014, accessed on May 19, 2014 .
  3. ↑ a b c Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano (ed.): Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Old German songs. Critical edition. Edited and commented by Heinz Rölleke . Volume 1. Reclam, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-15-001250-3 , p. 208, comment p. 488 (text also online in the Gutenberg-DE project ).
  4. ↑ Otto Holzapfel : Lied index: The older German-language popular song tradition ( online version on the Volksmusikarchiv homepage of the Upper Bavaria district ; in PDF format; ongoing updates) with further information.
  5. ↑ Ludwig Erk, Franz Magnus Böhme: German song library . Volume 3. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1894, pp. 579-581 ( digitized version ).
  6. ^ Otmar (= Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal): Volcks-Sagen. Wilmans, Bremen 1800, p. 46 ( online at Wikisource ).
  7. ^ Josef Götz: Kindervolkslieder - a collection of real folk songs , Österreichischer Schulbuchverlag, Vienna 1920, p. 23 ( digitized version ).
  8. ↑ a b c d John Meier : Folksong Studies . Strasbourg 1917, p. 244. Quoted from: Wolfgang Steinitz : German folk songs of a democratic character from six centuries. Volume 2. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1962, p. 189.
  9. ↑ Quoted from: Heinz Rölleke (Hrsg.): Das Volksliederbuch . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-462-02294-6 , pp. 256 .
  10. ↑ Lothar Bollwig: Pommernland. BGD - Our German Home No. 75 (4th quarter 2005)
  11. ^ A b c Wilhelm Mannhardt: Germanic Myths: Research. Schneider, Berlin 1858, pp. 346–356 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  12. ^ Wilhelm Mannhardt: Germanic Myths: Research. Schneider, Berlin 1858, p. XVIII ( digitized in the Google book search).
  13. ↑ Art. Cockchafer. In: Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer , Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli (ed.): Concise dictionary of German superstition . Volume 5: Garlic - Matthias. de Gruyter, Berlin 1931/32. Reprint: 1974, ISBN 3-11-084009-X , Sp. 1529 ff. ( Limited preview in Google book search).
  14. ↑ Ludwig Erk, Franz Magnus Böhme: German song library . Volume 3. Leipzig 1894, p. 594 ( digitized version ).
  15. ^ Franz Magnus Böhme: German children's song and children's game. Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig 1897, p. 175 f. ( Text archive - Internet Archive ).
  16. ^ Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann: The book of children's songs. 235 old and new songs: cultural history - sheet music - lyrics. Atlantis-Schott, Mainz 1997/2010, ISBN 978-3-254-08370-8 , pp. 273-275.
  17. ↑ Emily Gerstner-Hirzel: The nursery rhyme. In: Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, Wolfgang Suppan (eds.): Handbuch des Volksliedes. Volume 1. Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1973, pp. 923-967, here p. 930.
  18. ↑ Arthur Zechlin: The Neustettiner Circle. Historically and topographically shown. In: Baltische Studien , Vol. 36 (1886), Gesellschaft für Pommersche Geschichte, Stettin 1886, pp. 1–54, here: page 49 ( Memento of the original from June 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; bibliographic evidence in the Regesta Imperii ; Master data of the author in the genealogy network . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / digibib.ub.uni-greifswald.de
  19. ↑ Hermann Löns: The Wehrwolf. A peasant chronicle . Eduard Kaiser Verlag, 1983, page 169.
  20. ↑ Nicholas Stargardt: “Cockchafer fly!” Hitler's war and the children. From the English by Gennaro Ghirardelli. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-05905-5 .
  21. ↑ Christoph Specht: The new German musical. Musical influences of rock music on the new German musical . Frank & Timme, 2008, ISBN 3-86596-210-6 , pp. 119 ff. ( Limited preview in the Google book search).
  22. ↑ Die Grenzgänger: Maikäfer Flieg - Lost songs from the First World War. [1] (CD, 2014)