So to make this more interesting, I’m going to play a game with myself. Every new post will somehow connect to the post before it, whether it’s through the artists, or the theme, or the song, or whatever.
Name: Barbara, née Monique Andrée Serf (1930-1997)
Ethnic/National origin: Her maternal grandmother was Russian, and her family was Jewish.
Connection to previous post: As Barbara was starting to sing in the cabarets in the late 50s/early 60s, she was mentored by Nicole Louvier.
Barbara, like Nicole Louvier, was a singer-songwriter. Like many cabaret singers in the 50s and 60s, she was at first primarily an “interpreter” of songs. A lot of the albums around then had titles like “X-Singer sings Y-Songwriter,” e.g. her first albums were “Barbara sings Brassens” (1960) and “Barbara sings Brel” (1961). This convention was turned on its head a bit when she recorded an album in 1964 called “Barbara sings Barbara.” Sometimes it’s hard for me to read French humor, but I feel comfortable saying this was probably meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The same year she dropped another album “Le Mal de Vivre” (“Despair”, lit. “The pain of life”), and this is where the song “Göttingen” first appears. The story of the birth of the song is interesting. She wrote it when she was reluctantly giving a concert at a music school in Göttingen, Germany (reluctant as any Jew who grew up during WWII would be to visit Germany). Apparently there was a big kerfuffle over the fact that she wanted to play a grand piano, but they provided her with an upright. The concert was delayed while some poor old lady found her a grand and got it to the theater. After that, apparently, the gig went off without a hitch and the the audience simply adored her. The experience turned out to be so positive that she stayed for an extra week. During this extra week, she wrote “Göttingen.” In her autobiography, Barbara writes:
“In Göttingen, I discovered the house of the Brothers Grimm where they wrote the well-known fairytales of our childhoods. It was in a little garden next to the theater that I scribbled “Göttingen,” the last afternoon of my trip. The last night, apologizing to everyone [for its incomplete state], I half-read half-sang it with an incomplete melody. I finished the song in Paris. So I owe this song to the stubborn insistence of Gunther Klein, to ten students, and a compassionate old woman, to the blondness of the children of Göttingen, to a profound desire for reconciliation, but not a desire to forget.” (Wikipedia.fr)
In the 60s in France, people were still not able to forgive or forget what happened during the Second World War, and so Barbara’s song became a hymn to renew the friendships between France and Germany by remembering all that they have in common. Evidently it was considered so important to Franco-German relations that in 2003, the German chancellor Gerhard Schroder mentioned her name during the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of an accord made between de Gaulle and his German counterpart, Adenauer. And she was on a stamp. And they named a street after her in Germany. I just found this BBC article on the importance of the song. Pretty cool stuff.
Live performance: YouTube
Lyrics:
Of course it’s not the Seine
It’s not the Bois de Vincennes
But it’s so lovely, all the same,
in Göttingen, in Göttingen.
There are no quais, no old melodies
lamenting, crawling about,
But love blooms, nonetheless,
in Göttingen, in Göttingen.
Herman, Peter, Helga and Hans,
They know better than we do, I think,
The history of our French kings,
In Göttingen
And, no offense intended,
But the fairytales of our childhood,
those “once upon a times” begin
In Göttingen
Of course, we have the Seine
And we have the Bois de Vincennes too,
But, my God, the roses are beautiful
in Göttingen, in Göttingen
We have our pallid mornings
And Verlaine’s gray spirit
They have same melancholy
in Göttingen, in Göttingen
When they don’t know what to say to us,
They stand there just smiling at us,
But we understand them, even so,
The blond children of Göttingen
And too bad for those who are shocked
And may everyone else forgive me
But children are the same
in Paris or Göttingen
Oh, may they never return,
Those days of blood and hatred
For there are people that I love
in Göttingen, in Göttingen
[Repeat]
And should the alarm sound
and we’re forced to take up arms again
My heart will shed a tear
For Göttingen, for Göttingen
But it’s so lovely, all the same,
in Göttingen, in Göttingen.
[Repeat]
Translation in Practice 