Over the past month, millions of people have found themselves stumbling over the twisted, catchy syllables of a song about, of all people, a woman named Barbara and some beer-drinking, beard-trimming rhubarb-loving barbarians. In German.
Or rather: Rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbier.
The popular German tongue-twister’s hypercomposed words about Barbara, her “bombastic” rhubarb pie, and her hirsute clients achieved inexplicable and extreme popularity this spring, a few months after a pair of comedy music content creators from Berlin released a rap version. at the end of last year. Her silly song has over 47 million views on TikTok; For a brief moment on some online streaming charts, Barbara beat out Beyoncé. Beyoncé.
“There is a prejudice that, firstly, Germans have no sense of humor, secondly, they don’t have fun and, thirdly, their language sounds very aggressive,” said Bodo Wartke, the rap lyricist who, along with with Marti Fischer, the composer, he created the viral tune “Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar.” They spoke recently in their Berlin studio while laughing and stumbling over their own verses, which exploit a feature of German grammar that groups nouns into strings of syllables.
“And we proved them all wrong,” Wartke said.
But getting lost in translation, as global imitators stumble over the alliterative story of Barbara, the bar she opens, and the cake that made her famous, is a quirk not only of the language, but also of German food culture. Rhubarb is much more than a German word that sounds a lot like “Barbara”; it is an object of spring fixation, part of a national fanaticism for eating a small group of particular products exactly in season.
Put another way: with or without song, every spring throughout Germany, rhubarb goes completely viral.
The vegetable (yes, it’s a vegetable) is part of a trio of products that includes strawberries and a particular variety of asparagus that peaks in early spring. The warm climate causes a frenzy for everything that characterizes them in a country that still sticks to consumption at the rhythm of the seasons.
In the United States, the convenience of buying a summer peach and a winter squash year-round at the supermarket may have made the idea of seasonal produce all but obsolete. But in Germany, conceiving each food as a treat for a limited time is not considered an inconvenience, but rather a way to whet your appetite.
When spring arrives, the green markets are filled with rhubarb stalks, which are consumed in the form of pies, cakes, preserves and, above all, in a fizzy drink called schorle, a spritzer.
Strawberries also share fleeting prominence. For a few weeks, they glow near grocery store cash registers and appear on signs in stores that say, “They’re here!”
At sidewalk stands shaped like giant strawberries, strawberry vendors sell cartons of fruit and jars of jam in several cities. They come courtesy of Karl’s, a corporate berry grower capitalizing on the trend with a half-dozen (and counting) strawberry-themed amusement parks in northeast Germany.
While rhubarb may be enjoying its pop culture moment, the real star of the German spring is spargel. Theirs is a pale, ghostly version of the vegetable grown under a mound of soil to suppress chlorophyll production, giving the plant a bland flavor and fibrous skin.
During the season, Spargelfest, which semi-officially ends on June 24, multi-course spargel-only menus pop up in restaurants. There is a dish in each of them: blanched spargel served under a layer of hollandaise sauce, along with a handful of new potatoes, a piece of schnitzel and a slice of lemon.
“Rhubarb is very well associated with spring. It’s seasonal food,” said Tobias Hagge, 43, who sings and leads the Real Comedian Harmonists, who, like Wartke and Fischer, specialize in funny songs, including a circa-1930 ballad about a woman named Veronika. whose beauty makes asparagus grow. (Wink.)
At its peak nearly a century ago, the song, with its double entenders, rivaled Barbara’s popularity, Hagge said. Today, it is the most requested song in his group.
“With the Germans, we have a very, very unique relationship with asparagus,” Hagge added. “Many foreigners don’t understand us.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon in Beelitz, an area just southwest of Berlin known for its prodigious spargel harvest, nearly a dozen buses and hundreds of cars filled the parking lot of a roadside asparagus attraction: Winkelmanns Asparagus Farm .
Shaded by 10-foot-tall asparagus trees sculpted in sand, and passing a machine called a Spargelschäler, where a team of women fed the stalks into gears that peeled, cut, and shot the bare stalks out the other end, visitors examined a seasonal exposure. produce extravagance.
Some bought liqueurs with a curl of asparagus floating in the bottle like a worm in mezcal, or tried asparagus ice cream. At a cafe next to a stand that did brisk business selling rhubarb, strawberries and white asparagus by the pound, dozens of people tucked into expensive plates of spargel smothered in hollandaise sauce.
“They call it ‘white gold,’” said Mandy Töppner, 42, an executive assistant from Berlin, who was visiting Winkelmanns that afternoon, though not out of any real love of the vegetable, she said. Rather, like many people interviewed, she attributed the fixation to something like a German asparagus biological clock: This time of year it’s simply spargel time. “It’s just hype,” she said.
In their studio in Berlin, Wartke and Fischer struggled to understand that buzz, and the buzz around their own song, which has somehow become an international earworm. Since their success, they have been invited to appear on Germany’s answer to “Dancing With the Stars,” and there is a popular call for them to represent their country in next year’s Eurovision competition.
But all the singing about rhubarb seems to have done little for the plant itself.
Last season, Germany’s 734 rhubarb farms sold the smallest amount in seven years, according to Lisa Kloke, spokesperson for the Federal Association of German Fruit and Vegetable Producers’ Organizations. And she has no hope that the song will reverse the trend.
Two-thirds of households purchasing rhubarb are over 55, which is not TikTok’s typical demographic, he said. “Most households won’t know the song,” she said, “even if it’s currently viral on social media.”
In fact, on his rhubarb farm in Walberberg, just south of Cologne, Stefan Grusgen, 50, a farmer who grows 1,000 tons of the vegetable a year, said he had never heard of the song until a journalist approached him. He later discovered that his children knew it by heart.
As the end of rhubarb season approaches, singers have been working hard to try to extend their momentum; In mid-May they released a sequel. But if it doesn’t catch on, there is an alternative: at the end of summer, morel season begins.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin.