EGN NEWS DESK
In the previous month, thousands and thousands of individuals have discovered themselves stumbling by way of the contorted and catchy syllables of a track about, of all issues, a girl named Barbara and a few rhubarb-loving barbarians who drink beer whereas getting their beards barbered. In German.
Or extra rightly: Rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbier.
The hyper-compound phrases of the favored German tongue tornado about Barbara, her “bombastic” rhubarb cake and her hirsute clients shot to inexplicable and excessive recognition this spring, a number of months after a pair of comedic musical content material creators from Berlin posted a rap model late final yr. Their foolish ditty has greater than 47 million views on TikTok; for a short second on some on-line streaming charts, Barbara beat out Beyoncé. Beyoncé.
“There is a prejudice that, first, Germans don’t have any humorousness, and second, they don’t have enjoyable, and third, their language sounds very aggressive,” stated Bodo Wartke, the rap’s lyricist who, together with Marti Fischer, the composer, created the viral “Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar” tune. They spoke on a current day of their Berlin studio as they giggled and tripped over their very own stanzas — which exploit a characteristic of German grammar that crams nouns collectively into strings of syllables.
“And we proved all of them flawed,” Mr. Wartke stated.
But misplaced in translation, as international copycats stumble by way of the alliterative story of Barbara, the bar she opens and the pie that made her well-known, is a quirk not solely of language, but additionally of German gastronomical tradition. Rhubarb is way more than a phrase in German that sounds rather a lot like “Barbara”; it’s an object of springtime fixation, a part of a nationwide fanaticism for consuming a small group of specific produce precisely in season.
Put one other manner: Song or no track, each spring throughout Germany, rhubarb goes fully viral.
The vegetable (sure, it’s a vegetable) is a part of a trio of produce that features strawberries and a specific asparagus varietal that peaks in early spring. Warm climate units off a frenzy for all issues that includes them in a rustic that also adheres to consumption alongside the rhythms of the seasons.
In the United States, the comfort of buying a summer season peach and winter squash yr spherical within the grocery store might have rendered the thought of seasonal produce almost out of date. But in Germany, the conception of every foodstuff as a limited-time-only deal with is seen not as inconvenient, however fairly, as a strategy to whet appetites.
Come spring, inexperienced markets are piled with rhubarb stalks, that are consumed as cake, pastries, preserves and, above all, in a fizzy drink known as schorle, a spritzer.
Strawberries additionally share the fleeting limelight. For a number of weeks, they glisten close to the money registers at grocery shops and burst from indicators in retailers that learn, “They’re right here!”
In curbside cubicles formed like large strawberries, strawberry sellers hawk cartons of fruit and pots of jam throughout a number of cities. They are courtesy of Karl’s, an entrepreneurial berry grower that capitalizes on the craze with a half-dozen — and counting — strawberry-themed amusement parks in northeast Germany.
While rhubarb could also be having fun with its popular culture second, the true star of the German spring is spargel, or asparagus. Theirs is a ghostly pale model of the vegetable grown underneath a mound of dust to suppress chlorophyll manufacturing, rendering the plant delicate in taste with a fibrous pores and skin.
During the season, Spargelfest, which semiofficially ends on June 24, multicourse spargel-only menus sprout at eating places. One dish is on each final one: blanched spargel served underneath a slathering of hollandaise, beside a clutch of latest potatoes, a slab of schnitzel and a slice of lemon.
“Rhubarb could be very properly linked to the springtime. It’s the seasonal meals,” stated Tobias Hagge, 43, who sings with and manages the Real Comedian Harmonists, who, like Mr. Wartke and Mr. Fischer, concentrate on amusing songs — together with a circa-1930 ballad a few lady named Veronika, whose magnificence makes asparagus develop. (Wink.)
In its heyday almost a century in the past, the track, with its double-entendre, rivaled Barbara’s recognition, Mr. Hagge stated. Today, it’s his group’s most-requested tune.
“With Germans, we have now a really, very distinctive relationship to asparagus,” Mr. Hagge added. “A variety of foreigners don’t get us.”
On a current Sunday afternoon in Beelitz, an space simply southwest of Berlin recognized for its prodigious spargel crop, almost a dozen buses and lots of of automobiles packed the parking zone at a roadside asparagus attraction: Winkelmanns Asparagus Farm.
Under the shadow of 10-foot-tall asparagus sculpted from sand, and previous a machine known as a Spargelschäler, the place a group of girls fed the stalks into gears that peeled, pared and shot the bare spears out the opposite finish, guests perused a seasonal produce extravaganza.
Some shopped for spirits with a curl of asparagus bobbing within the bottle like a worm in mezcal, or sampled asparagus iced cream. In a cafeteria beside a stand doing a brisk enterprise promoting rhubarb, strawberries and white asparagus by the pound, scores of individuals tucked into expensive plates of spargel smothered with hollandaise.
“They name it ‘white gold,’” stated Mandy Töppner, 42, an govt assistant from Berlin, who was visiting Winkelmanns that afternoon, although not for any actual love of the vegetable, she stated. Rather, like a number of folks interviewed, she attributed the fixation to one thing like a German asparagus organic clock: This time of yr, it’s merely spargel time. “It’s simply hype,” she stated.
In their studio in Berlin, Mr. Wartke and Mr. Fischer struggled to know that hype, and the hype round their very own track, which has by some means change into a world ear worm. Since its success, they’ve been invited to look on Germany’s reply to “Dancing With the Stars,” and there’s a grass-roots name for them to signify their nation in subsequent yr’s Eurovision competitors.
But all of the singing about rhubarb seems to have executed little for the plant itself.
Last season, Germany’s 734 rhubarb farming operations offered the smallest amount previously seven years, based on Lisa Kloke, a spokeswoman for Germany’s Federal Association of Fruit and Vegetable Producer Organizations. And she’s not hopeful the track will reverse the pattern.
Two-thirds of rhubarb-buying households are over 55 — not the standard TikTok demographic, she stated. “The majority of households is not going to pay attention to the track,” she stated, “even whether it is at present viral on social media.”
Indeed, on his rhubarb farm in Walberberg, simply south of Cologne, Stefan Grusgen, 50, a farmer who grows 1,000 tons of the vegetable a yr, stated he had by no means heard of the track till he was approached by a reporter. His youngsters, he later came upon, knew it by coronary heart.
As the top of rhubarb season approaches, the singers have been onerous at work making an attempt to increase their second; in mid-May, they launched a sequel. But if it doesn’t catch on, there’s a backup: Come late summer season, morel season begins.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin.
