TTT: German Poetry in Songs

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

About 112 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.

I have been absent for three months for a lot of work related stuff. And of course, there is my family, including my five year old son. We started preparing for school, which will start for him in about a year, and to make it more fun I was looking for "educational songs". During this research I discovered a great little project called "Junge Dichter und Denker" (Young Poets and Thinker).

In Germany we learn about important (German) Poets pretty early. My first encounter was Goethe and his Poem "Der Zauberlehrling" (Wizzard's Apprentice) in 5th grade. Besides reading it and discussing it we had to learn it by heart and recite it. Doing so was a very dull exercise for me at that time. And I can imagine in other countries and cultures this is similar for most students.

Sadly I went to school in the late 80's and during the 90's. Because in 2012 someone had the fantastic idea to make a song out of it and it became even a catchy one.

I think if I had that song back when I was in 5th grade, it would only have taken me one afternoon to memorize it all.

The project "Junge Dichter und Denker" kept on recording a song version to more and more Poems. Because our German teacher was a huge fan of Goethe we had to learn "Der Erlkönig" (The Elf? King) and now there is a song version for that as well.

They have a huge selection of over 30 German poems as songs to this day. So now I am actually looking forward to my son's turn of learning those poems for class. We can just listen to them in song form for a few days, maybe even play along if he takes up an instrument until then. However it will turn out, it should be a better experience than I had by simply reading it from a page over and over again and just reciting it into a silent room.

As a little gimmick, there is also a (relatively) old "nonsense" poem called "Dunkel wars der Mond schien helle" (It was dark, the moon shone bright).

Every line is either a paradox or contains an oxymoron. While the poem seems to be telling a story it is actually not since every line is contradicting itself.

And as the typical children we had no problem learning this one by heart within a matter of hours. 🤣

This was my selection for #ThreeTuneTuesday. Another blast from the past combined with a look into the future. 😉

I hope you enjoyed it and want to thank you very much for reading and listening.

Keep on rocking 🤘

_{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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