We were off Madagascar

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We were lying off Madagascar is in Germany known folk song . It is attributed to the composer and lyricist Just Scheu ; the year of creation is 1934. It can be sung to four voices and is common in different versions.

text

The song consists of seven stanzas and is about a crew stuck with their sailing ship who have to watch one after the other die of thirst or die of the plague:

We were off Madagascar
and had the plague on board.
In the cauldrons, the water rotted.
And every day someone went overboard.

We had been lying for a fortnight
and no wind whistled in the sails.
The thirst was the greatest plague.
We ran into a reef.

The text is shown changed several times. So the water in the different versions rots once in "kettles", "buckets" or "barrels". The characters "Langbein" or "Lange Hein" "drink" or "drink" from the water. In addition to obvious spelling and transcription errors ("store" instead of "lay" "... in front of Madagascar", "sometimes" or "some" instead of "daily" "... someone went overboard") there are a number of text changes and additions up to Addition or suppression of entire text passages, on the basis of which the question of the original version arises.

Historical background

The text is sung in several variations. The song is generally regarded as a sea shanty, but was also known as a cruising song in the 1930s . It appeared rewritten (in the inserted lines of text it is emphasized, for example, that the "plague" could not frighten the group of edelweiss pirates named here as "Navajos") in the songbooks of groups of the forbidden alliance youth ( edelweiss pirates ), thereby targeting them the Gestapo got.

In terms of content, the song coincides with events from the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904/1905). On the journey to relieve the Russian armed forces trapped in Port Arthur , the so-called Second Russian Pacific Squadron under the command of Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Roschestvensky , which sailed from the Latvian port of Libau on a course through the North Sea and around Africa, had to stay involuntarily due to urgent repairs off the north-west coast of Madagascar near the island of Nosy Be . Period ("... We were already fourteen days") and accompanying circumstances (illness, death) are congruent with the text of the song. Many of the Russian soldiers died, not of the plague, as stated in the song, but of typhus , and were buried at Nosy Be. A Russian monument to commemorate the events was later erected in Hell Ville , the island's ancient capital. However, there is no conclusive evidence of a connection.

reception

As is known from soldier songs, the melancholy text is performed by the rhythm in a cheerful, lively melody in a relaxed mood. Through the singing of the song by well-known artists such as Heino , Freddy Quinn and Andi Haeckel , the evergreen became a hit over the years . The music rights are currently held by Harth Verlag. In 1976, Achim Reichel produced a well-known version under the title Pest am Bord (on the album Dat Shanty Alb'm ).

The melody is kept quite simple and trivial. Two bars of tonic are always followed by a bar of dominant , which leads back to the tonic, the last bar of every block of four. This four- measure scheme runs through both verse and chorus without exception. But it is precisely this simplicity that is characteristic of the piece and triggers the so-called catchy tune effect.

In German ice stadiums at ice hockey games on the occasion of the tangible arguments between two or more players in ice hockey, fan groups often intend the refrain in the variation "Skin on it, comrades, skin on it, skin on it ...". The fan chant “Skin on it, comrades, skin on it, skin on ...” is also used in football to encourage one's own team to improve its performance.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ WDR ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ (page 28 ff., Chapter re-sealing) History and original version.
  3. ↑ Jochen Wiegandt : Do you sing Hamburgisch? 2nd Edition. Edel Books, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8419-0195-8 , p. 226.
  4. ↑ Reinhard copyz, Guido Brink: football fan chants: a fan omenology. Königshausen & Neumann, 1999, p. 32 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  5. ↑ Clemens Schwender: Media and emotions: evolutionary psychological building blocks of a media theory. Springer, Berlin 2013, p. 184 ( limited preview in Google book search).