We'll drown our grandma's little house

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The refrain of a song that the vaudeville comedian Robert Steidl (1865–1927), a singer from Szczecin and star of the Metropolitan and Apollo Theaters in Berlin, published in 1922, is the chorus of a song we drown our grandmother's little house . He wrote the text and music himself. For the melody of the chorus he used the trio part from the Rhinelander Die Holzauktion (around 1890) by Franz Meißner . It was published by the Berlin-based Fidelio-Verlag and is also contained in Volume 4 of the series Zu Tee und Tanz , jointly organized by Drei Masken Verlag, Berlin, and Fidelio-Verlag, Berlin.

background

The mood song that came out in Germany during the time of hyperinflation hit the nerve of the times. It became a “hymn of the time of inflation” and is now referred to as a popular hit because of its wide distribution . Originally it was once also called “In the youth it feels good” (with the beginning of the song “I was as round as a sausage as a little boy”), but “the catchy grandma chorus quickly established itself as the song title. The grandma motif and the melody of the second chorus part soon formed the basis for new parodic song verses ”.

Refrain:

We drown our grandma, her little house,
her little house, her little house.
We'll mess up our grandma, her little house,
And the first and second mortgages.

Frank Schirrmacher wrote in The Methuselah Conspiracy : “The message of the text is clear: it is the height of inflation in Germany, the lifetime achievement of the elderly is just good enough to be wasted in times of complex capital depreciation. Probably no generation was more influential in the history of the XX. Century than those who sang that back then. Roughly speaking, they were born between 1883 and 1903, who experienced two world wars and inflation. "

Kurt Tucholsky discussed the song as “Peter Panter” in the Weltbühne in 1922 and asked ironically: “Is this a folk song -? It is in its purest form. This is how the people sing. Here speaks the soul of your people. Here it is whole. "

Towards the end of the Weimar Republic , the song was mixed with another, younger hit, probably on the basis of the common theme of "Oma". This foxtrot with the text "My grandma drives a motorcycle without brakes, without lights" by Ernst Albert was composed in 1928 by the Hamburg singer Erwin Bolt , who was employed by the Nordische Rundfunk AG (NORAG). In August 1930 he recorded it on gramophone record with the accompaniment of Theo Mackeben's jazz orchestra . Albert's verses were sung to the older melody while Bolt's music was forgotten.

A further mixture took place after the Second World War with the joke song My grandma drives a motorcycle in the chicken coop , whose text also took up the motif of the motorized old lady. It is an example of "how a melody can be adapted in a traditional way, combined with new texts and thus constantly changed and re-contextualized" (Christoph Meinel), is still productive and widespread as a joke and children's song.

The director Piel Jutzi quoted the song in his 1929 proletarian silent film Mother Krausens Fahrt ins Glück in an intertitle.

In the film Liebeswalzer (1930), one of the first German sound film productions, the piece of music is used continuously for a minute and a half for a pub scene. The actor Georg Alexander , who was very popular at the time, sings it together with a choir of around 50 people swaying, partying and cheering. Since this film became the second most successful blockbuster of the 1929/30 season and attracted millions of viewers to the cinemas, the sequence placed in the center of the film is likely to have contributed significantly to the comeback of the song around 1930.

Continue to work

Even years after it was first published, the song keeps appearing in different places:

In fictional literature

Hans Fallada quoted the song both in his 1937 novel Wolf unter Wölfen (“Because the young man had made the chafing festival a pleasure: he walked with the evacuating women, the suitcase gramophone in hand, and how it could be swept, how made beds when music was played, such as ›Puppchen, you are my eye star‹ or ›We'll drunk our grandma's little house‹ - that couldn't be said. ”), as well as in his 1938 novel Der eiserne Gustav: “They sat around the table, rocking and swaying, and resounding they sang all the beautiful, funny, cheeky-free songs of their good times: 'We drown our grandmother's little house ...' - 'Who rolled the cheese to the train station ...' - ›If you can't, let me ...‹ - › Bananas, of all things ! ‹“.

The American author Mike Whicker quotes the “popular song in 1922 Germany in reference to the runaway inflation” in 2004 in his historical spy novel Invitation to Valhalla . Another American author, James Wesley Rawles, quotes the popular drinking song in 2012 in his end-of-time novel Survivors .

The German narrator Michael Fröml quotes the song in a short story in his volume entitled Schwerkraft with Short Stories, which he published between 2009 and 2012: “We drown our grandma, her little house ... it rang loudly and somehow aggressively in Hermann's pub. You reached under and began to sway to the rhythm of the throbbing alcohol in your temples. "

Friedrich Bornemann quotes the song in 2013 in his “Niederrhein-Krimi” Der Fall de Mol : “A little later Enna and Anne heard several small variations on We drown our grandma's little house . That's funny, said Anne. I have never heard that. Are there any grades of it? "

In her fictional memoir of a forgotten soubrette Henny Walden , which appeared in 2014, Silke Schütze locates the song as “ Carnival hit of the year” in Cologne.

Rebecca Martin quotes the song in 2015, quoting the name of its author, in her novel The Secret Words , which is set during the inflation period: “They all sang Robert Steidl's hit song We drown our grandma's little house, and the first and second mortgage . Those who could afford it lived every day as if it were the last. "

In Gisa Pauly's 2016 “Sylt-Krimi” headwind , drunken cone brothers sang: “The cone brothers began to sing and competed as to who knew all the stanzas of We drunk our grandmother her little house and who could even sing them despite a heavy tongue and lost sense of rhythm . "

In (popular) scientific presentations

Hermann Kähler introduced the song as a “dance song” in 1986 in his study of “The Big City in Literature” with the title Berlin - Asphalt and Light : “At that time, the popular hit was the dance song We drink our grandma's little house  [...] ".

The linguist Wolfgang Sternefeld uses the lied line as an example in his 2013 book Syntactic Limits , in which he deals with Noam Chomsky's barrier theory and its further developments.

In his book, published in 2015, Jürgen Beetz finds Feedback: How Feedback Determines Our Lives, the drowning of grandma’s houses during the inflation period is “comparatively human”, measured by the fact that we are squandering “our grandchildren's livelihoods” today.

Luis Pazos remarked in 2016 in his book Gold-Revision : "A buying panic spread, apocalyptic present-day pleasure shaped that era, whose socio-economic disruption - the well-known hit song 'We drunk our grandma's little' house 'sums up this fact in precise brief - the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had prophesied. "

In the media

After 1945, the song was "defused" into a mere booze and carnival song, and recorded and distributed by appropriate interpreters, in the spirit of the economic miracle , without trying to remember the time of its creation .

The German actor and cabaret artist Thomas Freitag chose the song line as his theme in 1991 when he parodied the popular literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki on a television program on WDR .

Audio documents

  • In the youth it feels good (we drown our grandma's little house). Foxtrot mood song by Robert Steidl. Beka Orchestra [conductor: Otto Rathke ] with refraing singing. Beka No. 31 715, also B. 3410. Berlin May 12, 1922
  • In the youth it feels good (we drown our grandma's little house). Foxtrot mood song by Robert Steidl. Odeon orchestra [conductor Carl Woitschach ] with vocals. Odeon 312.305 (Matr. XBe 3120-2), apply Berlin June 6, 1922
  • We'll get drunk on our grandma's little house. Mood song by Robert Steidl. Polyphonic orchestra with vocals. Polyphon Record 30 966 / 2-27622 (Matr. 125 ax)
  • We drown our grandmother's little house (in youth it feels good). Mood song by Robert Steidl. Homocord orchestra with refraing singing. Homocord No. 83 (Matr. M 16 761), im wax H2D; A 23 11 22
  • We drown our grandma's little house (Steidl) orchestra with refraing singing. Isiphon Concert Record 236 (Matr. 6075)
  • We drown our grandma's little house (R. Steidl) Vox orchestra with singing. Vox 1203 (Mat. 975 B)

Sheet music editions

  • We drown our grandmother's little house (it's good in youth), a mood song. Text and music by Robert Steidl. Berlin: Fidelio-Verlag, cop. 1922 contained in: To tea and dance Volume IV, 24 modern dances, ed. by C. Morena, Drei Masken Verlag, Berlin, and Fidelio-Verlag, Berlin 1922.
  • We drown our grandma's little house (our grandma drives a motorcycle in the chicken coop). Text and music: Robert Steidl. Arr .: Paul Woitschach. Berlin: Fidelio-Verlag © 1954

See also

literature

  • Oliver Bekermann: "There are always miracles": an investigation into the mutual dependence of everyday communication and German hits. Books on Demand, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8370-0045-0 .
  • Gordon Alexander Craig : German History 1866-1945: from the North German Confederation to the end of the Third Reich (= Beck's historical library / Beck'sche series). New edition. Verlag C. H. Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-07815-X , p. 380 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Hartmut Fladt: The music understanding: What we feel when we hear. Structure Digital, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-8412-0504-9 , p. 150 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Helmut Korte (Eds.), Reinhold Happel, Margot Michaelis: Film and Reality in the Weimar Republic. With analyzes of the films "Kuhle Wampe" and "Mother Krausens Fahrt ins Glück". S. Fischer Verlag, 2016.
  • Theo Mang, Sunhilt Mang (ed.): The song source . Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 2007, ISBN 978-3-7959-0850-8 , pp. 597-598 .
  • Peter Panter: A German folk song (Kurt Tucholsky on "We drunk our grandma's little house" by Robert Steidl). In: The world stage . December 14, 1922, No. 50, p. 623. (wordpress.com) (December 30, 2013)
  • André Port le Roi: Schlager doesn't lie. German hits and politics in their time. Klartext Verlagsges., 1998, ISBN 3-88474-657-X , pp. 17, 22, 219.
  • Frank Schirrmacher : The Methuselah plot. Karl Blessing Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-89480-847-0 .
  • Kurt Tucholsky : Collected Works in Ten Volumes. Volume 3, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1975, pp. 294-296.
  • Christine Wagner: Schlager and politics, they don't say goodbye. Popular music after 1945 in the Federal Republic and the GDR. Part I. In: nmz. 2000/10, Volume 49, October 2000, p. 26. (nmz.de)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Meinel: Of wooden auctions, goblins and modern grandmas. Research Center for Franconian Folk Music, March 17, 2014, accessed on January 29, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Sheet music title page, pictured at marktplaats.com . Retrieved August 16, 2016.
  3. ↑ Oliver Bekermann: Miracles always happen . Books on Demand, Norderstedt, 2007, p. 27: “Two examples of how the period of inflation and the poverty associated with it were thematized are the titles Wir drowning our grandma's little house from 1922 and broke broke from 1924 [...] ". Chr. Wagner in nmz 2000/10: " Broke, broke today are all people and we drown our grandma, her little houses became hymns of the inflation period."
  4. ^ Labels from Beka No. 31 715, homocord No. 83 and Odeon 312,305
  5. ↑ Eckhard John, Renate Sarr: My grandma drives a motorcycle in the chicken coop (2008). In: Popular and Traditional Songs. Historical-critical song lexicon of the German Folk Song Archive
  6. ↑ Frank Schirrmacher: The Methuselah plot. Humanity is aging to an unimaginable rate. We must solve the problem of our own aging in order to solve the problem of the world. 6th edition. Karl Blessing Verlag , Munich 2004.
  7. ↑ Peter Panter: A German folk song . In: The world stage. December 14, 1922, No. 50, p. 623.
  8. ↑ Erwin Bolt Kapellmeister Biography , grammophon-platten.de, accessed on August 29, 2016
  9. ↑ My grandma drives a motorcycle. Foxtrot . Theo Mackeben with his jazz orchestra, refrain singing: Erwin Bolt. Orchestrola A 8608 (Mat. No. 2248), apply. 1930.
  10. ↑ Xaver Frühbeis: Without brakes, without lights: "My grandma drives a motorcycle in the chicken coop". BR-Klassik Mittagsmusik extra, December 31, 2010, accessed on August 27, 2016
  11. ↑ Songbook: My grandma rides a motorcycle in the hen house at wikibooks and Christoph Meinel at volksmusik-forschung.de .
  12. ^ Helmut Korte, Reinhold Happel, Margot Michaelis: Film and Reality in the Weimar Republic. With analyzes of the films “Kuhle Wampe” and “Mother Krausens Fahrt ins Glück”. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2016, p. 126: "But then the song We drunk our grandma's little house is sung and Mother Krause is reminded of the letter that lies in the kitchen ..."
  13. ^ Michael Wedel: The German Music Film: Archeology of a Genre, 1914-1945. Edition Text + Critique 2007, p. 255.
  14. ↑ Hans Fallada: Wolf among wolves . 227-230. A thousand copies. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-11057-1 , pp. 610 .
  15. ↑ Hans Fallada: The iron Gustav. Novel. Structure Digital, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8412-0081-5 , p. ??.
  16. ↑ Mike Whicker: Invitation to Valhalla . Publisher iUniverse, New York 2004, ISBN 0-595-29739-0 , p. 11.
  17. ↑ James Wesley Rawles: Survivors. A Novel of the Coming Collapse . New edition. Simon and Schuster, New York 2012, ISBN 978-1-4391-7281-0 , p. 74.
  18. ↑ Michael Fröml: Gravity. Short stories . Verlag epubli, Berlin [2009-2012], p. 23.
  19. ^ Friedrich Bornemann: The case de Mol. A Lower Rhine crime thriller . neobooks, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-8476-4150-6 .
  20. ↑ Silke Schütze: Henny Walden. Memoirs of a forgotten soubrette . dotbooks, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-499-22680-9 (“It was not for nothing that the hit We drowned our grandma in her little house in Cologne was the carnival hit of the year.”)
  21. ↑ Rebecca Martin: The Secret Words. Novel. Diana Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-641-14502-6 .
  22. ↑ Gisa Pauly: Headwind. A Sylt thriller (=  Mamma Carlotta. Volume 10). Piper ebooks, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-492-97354-0 .
  23. ^ Hermann Kähler: Berlin - Asphalt and Light. The big city in literature . Verlag das Europäische Buch, Berlin 1986, pp. 30, 33, 293.
  24. ↑ Wolfgang Sternefeld: Syntactic Limits. Chomsky's barrier theory and its further developments . Springer-Verlag , Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-322-97025-1 , p. 21.
  25. ↑ Jürgen Beetz: Feedback: How feedback determines our lives and dominates nature, technology, society and the economy . Springer-Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-662-47090-9 , p. 358: “Back then, when a hit was still called Schlager, people were singing, We'll drown our grandmother's little house . That was comparatively human. Today we are more future-oriented. We squander the livelihoods of our grandchildren. "
  26. ↑ Luis Pazos: Gold Revision: From the Cosmic Fall to the Earthly Rise of Precious Metals . Books on Demand, 2016, ISBN 978-3-939562-39-9 , p. 17.
  27. ↑ z. B. Raise your cups - cheers, ex, get away! (Mood potpourri part 1) (1956), vocals: Die fidelen Brüder, with the Albert Vossen orchestra , Polydor 20 125 EP 14; Mood bombs with Humba-Tatärä : Fritz & the happy Zecher, LP baccarola (1964), or, in the good mood Dixieland style of the Long Street Rhythm Boys , on the album Olle Kamellen in Dixieland (mood potpourri) (Telefunken UX 4838, 1958).
  28. ↑ Thomas Freitag as Marcel, the reviewer, WDR / ARD 1991 on YouTube
  29. ↑ listen on youtube