TTT: Der Deutsche Schlager mit Udo Jürgens

It is time for another #ThreeTuneTuesday. For those not familiar with it, here's an explanation.

About 92 Weeks ago @ablaze started this incredible movement:

Every Tuesday I'm going to share 3 songs which I like to listen to and I invite your feedback in the comments below. Or why not have a blast of your own Three Tune Tuesday and mention me in the post and I'll come and find the post and hopefully upvote it. It'll be a sweet way for us all to discover new music.

Did you know that a lot of Germans can not keep up with clapping a beat on 2 and 4? Those off-beat hits you get from the snare in almost every modern pop and rock song throw us off pretty fast and before you know it we're hitting 1 and 3.

Blame the Schlager music. It was very popular in the late 60's and during the 70's reaching into the early 80's. If you ever take a dive into German culture during that time or learn the language, you will have to deal with Schlager music.

The melodies are simple and uplifting, so were (most of) the lyrics. And it gets its name (Schlag=beat; Schlager=beater) from the heavy emphasis of beat one and three or sometimes all four beats.

If I had to pick a symbol or icon for that type of music it would be Udo Jürgens. And for this post I had to pick so I did. 😊

Ok, I'm deviating a little bit from my usual theme. He was actually Austrian. But he sang in German and was very popular in Germany.

And to start us off, here is a typical Schlager by Udo Jürgens.

The lyrics are pretty simple and are about a group of old ladies who regularly meet in a bakery to eat cake. We follow their lives centered around eating cake and the lyrics name all the cakes and pies they are eating.

The title, which is also one of the shortest chorus' I have ever found, is "Aber bitte mit Sahne" - (But) please (put) whipped cream on top and is repeated unusually often.

The song was so popular and well known that the sentence "aber bitte mit Sahne" became an idiom in the German language. It is the equivalent to "the cherry on top".

But Udo Jürgens was also very progressive. In his song "Dieses Ehrenwerte Hause" - This respectable house he is delivering a harsh social criticism to the "Spießbürger" - *Fuddy duddy".

German society went into overcompensation from its past, which turned a lot of people into hypocrites. On the surface the was order and respectable behavior while there was chaos and indecency behind closed doors. But woe betide anyone who was (what others considered) indecent on the surface. Like a couple living together even though not married? Unthinkable in those times... (at least on the surface)

This song from 1975 is about an unmarried couple that gets a letter from all the other tenants in the building. They want the couple gone because they are not married which does not make a good fit for this respectable house (in which they are all living).

He then lists all those who put their signature at the bottom. Instead of their names he lists them by their attributes which include a married woman (from upstairs) who opens her rope for the handyman and a guy (on first floor) with no job but notifying the police about every unlawfully parked car. Among the others are also a woman who prohibited "a black man moving in" and a man who regularly hits his daughter.

Considering that (stereotypically) the favourite music of a "Spießbürger" was the Schlager music, this was a very provocative song for that time in Germany.

There are many more well known songs by Udo Jürgens, even though most of his lyrics were written by someone else and he just bought the rights and performed them.

The last song in my posting today is "Vielen Dank für die Blumen" - Thank you for the flowers.

In the first stanza he is singing as someone trying to woo a secretary and in the progress gets fired. It is hinted that the boss was also interested in her.

In the second stanza he is falling in love with a woman who turns out to be a drag queen.

The chorus tells us that "you win some and you lose some" and sums it up with "Thank you for the flowers".

This expression also found its way into the German language. If one gets criticism hidden in or surrounded by a (trivial) compliment the usual reply of a German can be "Well, thank you for the flowers". This is also applied when (heavy) bad news are combined with (trivial) good news.

Ah yes, I got a bonus again. Around the same time when "Vielen Dank für die Blumen" was released the comics of "Tom and Jerry" were being prepared for German television. These short clips included one in which Tom is discovering Jerry's diary. That episode was cut and the pieces used to give an intro into a collection of the other short clips and tie them together into 25 minute episodes. Between the short clips we would see Tom again, reading the book and turning the page to start a new short clip.

Three things came together to make "Vielen Dank für die Blumen" the perfect song for that show:

• In the beginning Tom is changing his mind and replacing the traps in front of Jerry's mouse hole in the wall for a pie and flowers.
• When finding the diary Tom feels flattered for being a title character in Jerry's book. In the end he realizes that he is portrayed badly in Jerry's writing.
• The chorus of the song also contains the line "Sometimes life is playing cat and mouse with you"

I grew up with this intro to Tom and Jerry in the 80's and loved that show as a kid. Whenever I hear "Vielen Dank für die Blumen" I think of those times, sitting in front of an old TV screen waiting for the Tom and Jerry show. I can hear my mom telling me not to get that close to the screen, it's bad for my eyes and my dad reminding me to go outside afterwards because it's such fine weather.

And the first few bars of the piano playing are usually already enough to trigger those memories. 😉

I hope you enjoyed this little trip into the past of German Schlager music and my childhood memories with me.

Thank you for reading and keep on rocking 🤘

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_{The embedded videos and songs are not mine, nor do I own any rights to them. They are embedded from youtube and serve an illustrative purpose for this article}

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