Prior to now month, tens of millions of individuals have discovered themselves stumbling by the contorted and catchy syllables of a tune 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 couple 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 quick second on some on-line streaming charts, Barbara beat out Beyoncé. Beyoncé.
“There’s a prejudice that, first, Germans don’t have any humorousness, and second, they don’t have enjoyable, and third, their language sounds very aggressive,” mentioned 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 latest day of their Berlin studio as they giggled and tripped over their very own stanzas — which exploit a function of German grammar that crams nouns collectively into strings of syllables.
“And we proved all of them unsuitable,” Mr. Wartke mentioned.
However misplaced in translation, as international copycats stumble by 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 rather more than a phrase in German that sounds quite a bit like “Barbara”; it’s an object of springtime fixation, a part of a nationwide fanaticism for consuming a small group of explicit produce precisely in season.
Put one other method: Track or no tune, each spring throughout Germany, rhubarb goes utterly viral.
The vegetable (sure, it’s a vegetable) is a part of a trio of produce that features strawberries and a selected asparagus varietal that peaks in early spring. Heat 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 USA, 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and winter squash yr spherical within the grocery store might have rendered the thought of seasonal produce almost out of date. However in Germany, the conception of every foodstuff as a limited-time-only deal with is seen not as inconvenient, however slightly, as a solution 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 couple of weeks, they glisten close to the money registers at grocery shops and burst from indicators in outlets 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’re 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.
Whereas 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 below a mound of filth to suppress chlorophyll manufacturing, rendering the plant gentle in taste with a fibrous pores and skin.
Throughout 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 below a slathering of hollandaise, beside a clutch of recent potatoes, a slab of schnitzel and a slice of lemon.
“Rhubarb may be very properly related to the springtime. It’s the seasonal meals,” mentioned Tobias Hagge, 43, who sings with and manages the Actual Comic Harmonists, who, like Mr. Wartke and Mr. Fischer, specialise in amusing songs — together with a circa-1930 ballad a few girl named Veronika, whose magnificence makes asparagus develop. (Wink.)
In its heyday almost a century in the past, the tune, with its double-entendre, rivaled Barbara’s recognition, Mr. Hagge mentioned. In the present day, it’s his group’s most-requested tune.
“With Germans, we’ve a really, very distinctive relationship to asparagus,” Mr. Hagge added. “Lots of foreigners don’t get us.”
On a latest Sunday afternoon in Beelitz, an space simply southwest of Berlin recognized for its prodigious spargel crop, almost a dozen buses and a whole lot of vehicles packed the car parking zone at a roadside asparagus attraction: Winkelmanns Asparagus Farm.
Underneath the shadow of 10-foot-tall asparagus sculpted from sand, and previous a machine known as a Spargelschäler, the place a workforce of ladies 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 dear plates of spargel smothered with hollandaise.
“They name it ‘white gold,’” mentioned Mandy Töppner, 42, an govt assistant from Berlin, who was visiting Winkelmanns that afternoon, although not for any actual love of the vegetable, she mentioned. Fairly, like a number of individuals 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 mentioned.
Of their studio in Berlin, Mr. Wartke and Mr. Fischer struggled to grasp that hype, and the hype round their very own tune, which has in some way turn into a global 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.
However all of the singing about rhubarb seems to have accomplished little for the plant itself.
Final season, Germany’s 734 rhubarb farming operations offered the smallest amount up to now seven years, in accordance with Lisa Kloke, a spokeswoman for Germany’s Federal Affiliation of Fruit and Vegetable Producer Organizations. And he or she’s not hopeful the tune will reverse the pattern.
Two-thirds of rhubarb-buying households are over 55 — not the everyday TikTok demographic, she mentioned. “The vast majority of households is not going to pay attention to the tune,” she mentioned, “even whether it is at the moment viral on social media.”
Certainly, 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, mentioned he had by no means heard of the tune till he was approached by a reporter. His kids, he later came upon, knew it by coronary heart.
As the tip of rhubarb season approaches, the singers have been arduous at work attempting to increase their second; in mid-Might, they launched a sequel. But when it doesn’t catch on, there’s a backup: Come late summer season, morel season begins.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin.
