Munich’s freedom
I’ll hold you tight until we meet again. Sunday musical excursion #10
Absence makes the heart grow fonder:
Isle of beauty, fare thee well.
Thomas Haynes Bayly.
Vera Lynn had her We’ll Meet Again and Hawaii has its Now Is The Hour. Meeting and parting is a mainstay of the romantic song repertory.
Münchener Freiheit looks as if they named themselves after a southern German revolutionary movement: it translates literally as Munich Freedom. For the pop group, it’s a double play on words, because it’s also the name of a square in the city of Munich, and the group were named after a like-named café in that square in October 1980, back when I was starting university. Although none of the band members was from Munich, it was there that they found their freedom.
The square itself has had three names in its time (four, technically). It was originally constructed as Feilitzsch Platz (being named after a local politician). In 1933, the Nazis renamed it Danziger Freiheit (Danzig’s Freedom) to express Germany’s aspirations of reincorporating the modern city of Gdansk (in Poland) into the German Reich. After the war, it was renamed Münchener Freiheit to express Munich’s freedom from the Nazis and, in 1998, it was given a more local pronunciation by officially getting the alternative name Münchner Freiheit. So, in a way, it is indeed a southern German revolutionary movement …
The group’s style is that of the German New Wave (get a load of the baggy pants, if you don’t believe me), and the infectious likability of their tunes is fostered by a relatively simple lyrical line, bordering on the schmalzig side (soft-focus romanticism), an insistent drum beat and some clever lyrical turns. The overall sound effect is redolent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound from twenty years previously. I learned to like them when I lived in Germany, after a pal of mine who worked at the British Army squaddies’ store in Herford procured me a tape of their best hits (I think he nicked it, to be honest).
The honesty or otherwise of the procurement did nothing to prejudice my liking for the group and they are still touring as I write, to wit:
Touring venues 2024 for Münchener Freiheit, from their website at http://muenchenerfreiheit.de.
What I especially like about today’s musical excursion is the lyric: I find it clever. Even non-German-speakers will be familiar with the standard expression meaning goodbye: auf Wiedersehen, which, like au revoir in French or arrivederci in Italian, means literally until we see each other again. The expression is given an apparently contradictory, but heartwarming treatment in this song: I’ll hold you tight until we see each other again. I’ve translated it for the English-speakers and endeavoured to maintain the meter and rhyme, so it’s not word-for-word exact.
This YouTube post is a bit scratchy, having been taken from a tv broadcast, but at least you get to see the guys performing rather than just having a rip from the album. Because of the high levels of production on their tracks, the group’s tv appearances were virtually always playback, unfortunately. Stefan Zauner co-founded and fronted the group as lead singer, but quit them in 2011. He co-wrote this song along with Aron Strobel, the band’s other co-founder (dressed in black to Zauner’s right in the film and wearing sunglasses in the photo, above). In interviews and other show appearances I’ve seen, there has never been any sense of big star ego among these lads (as they finish, Stefan even stoops to collect the flowers thrown on stage by their fans, an act of respectful gratitude).
Bis wir uns wiederseh’n
Written by Stefan Zauner and Aron Strobel
Performed by Münchener Freiheit from their 1988 album Fantasie
