For the past month, millions of people have been stumbling over a song with a beautiful, catchy melody and lyrics about a woman named Barbara and a group of rhubarb-loving barbarians who drink beer and trim their beards. The song was written in German.
Or to be more correct: Rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbier.
This popular German tongue twister about Barbara, her “exaggerated” rhubarb cakes and her furry customers became an inexplicable hit this spring. A few months ago, a pair of comedic music content creators in Berlin Released a rap version Their zany little song has been viewed more than 47 million times on TikTok late last year; Barbara briefly beat Beyoncé on some online streaming charts. Beyoncé.
“There’s a prejudice that Germans, first, have no sense of humor, second, they have no fun, and third, their language sounds offensive,” said Bodo Wartke, a rap lyricist who co-wrote the viral tune “Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar” with composer Marti Fischer. They talked in a Berlin studio on a recent day, giggling and stumbling over their stanzas — which exploit a feature of German grammar that crams nouns into strings of syllables.
“We proved them all wrong,” Mr. Wattek said.
But the translation errors that have left imitators around the world stumbling over the alliterative stories of Barbara, the bar she opened and the pies that made her famous are not just a quirk of the language but of German food culture. Rhubarb is more than just a German word that sounds a lot like “Barbara”; it’s a springtime fixture, part of a national craze about eating a small group of specific produce when it’s in season.
In other words: Song or no song, rhubarb quickly becomes popular across Germany every spring.
The vegetable (yes, it is a vegetable) is one of three produce items, along with strawberries and an asparagus variety, that peak in early spring. Warm weather has sparked a frenzy for all the produce that features them, in a country that still insists on consuming to the rhythm of the seasons.
In the U.S., the convenience of being able to buy summer peaches and winter squash in supermarkets year-round may have made the concept of seasonal produce almost obsolete, but in Germany, the idea of making every food available for a limited time is seen not as an inconvenience but as a way to whet your appetite.
As spring arrives, vegetable markets are filled with rhubarb stalks, which are used as cakecakes, preserves, and most importantly, a carbonated drink called schorle.
Strawberries have also been in the spotlight. For weeks, they have gleamed near grocery store checkouts and on store signs that read, “They’re Coming!”
At roadside stands shaped like giant strawberries, strawberry sellers in several cities hawk boxes of the fruit and jars of jam, supplied by Kahl’s, a berry-growing company that has capitalized on the craze by building six (and counting) strawberry-themed amusement parks in northeastern Germany.
While rhubarb may be enjoying its pop culture moment, The real star of the German Spring Asparagus, or asparagusTheir vegetables are pale in color and are grown under mounds of soil to inhibit chlorophyll production, giving the plants a bland flavor and a fibrous outer skin.
During Spargelfest season (which semi-officially ends on June 24), restaurants begin to feature multi-course menus that offer only Spargel. Each course ends with a dish: blanched Spargel served with a thick hollandaise sauce, along with a handful of new potatoes, a schnitzel and a slice of lemon.
“Rhubarb is so closely associated with spring. It’s seasonal,” said Tobias Hagge, 43, a singer and manager of the band Real Comedian Harmonists. Like Mr. Wattke and Mr. Fischer, Mr. Hagge is a writer of funny songs, including a circa-1930 ballad about a woman named Veronika, whose beauty made asparagus grow. (Wink.)
Mr. Hager said the song’s double entendre rivaled Barbara’s popularity in its heyday nearly a century ago. Today, it is his band’s most popular song.
“The relationship that Germans have with asparagus is very, very special,” Mr. Haag added. “A lot of foreigners don’t understand us.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon, nearly a dozen buses and hundreds of cars filled the parking lot of Winkelmanns Asparagus Farm, a roadside asparagus attraction in Beelitz, a district southwest of Berlin known for its asparagus production.
Under the shadow of 10-foot-tall asparagus sculpted from sand, and past a machine called a Spargelschäler, where a team of women feed stalks into gears that peel, flay and shoot the naked, tender stems out the other end, visitors peruse a feast of seasonal produce.
Some bought asparagus rolled up in bottles, like bugs in mezcal, or sampled asparagus ice cream. Next to the cafeteria, a stand was doing brisk business selling rhubarb, strawberries and white asparagus by the pound, and scores of people were enjoying pricey asparagus ice cream drizzled with hollandaise sauce.
“They call it ‘white gold,’ ” said Mandy Töppner, a 42-year-old administrative assistant in Berlin, who was visiting Winkelmanns that afternoon, but not, she said, out of any real love for the vegetable. Instead, like several people interviewed, she attributed the fascination to Germany’s asparagus biological clock: This time of year, asparagus is in season. “It’s just hype,” she said.
In a recording studio in Berlin, Wattke and Fischer struggle to make sense of the hype, and of the hype surrounding their own song, which has somehow become an international hit. Since the song’s success, they have been invited to compete on the German version of Dancing with the Stars, and there are calls from the public to represent Germany in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
But all this singing about rhubarb doesn’t seem to do much for the plant itself.
Lisa Klock, spokeswoman for Germany’s Federal Association of Fruit and Vegetable Producers, said sales at Germany’s 734 rhubarb growers last season were the lowest in seven years. She does not expect the song to reverse the trend.
She said two-thirds of the households that bought the rhubarb were over 55, which is not a typical TikTok user demographic. “Most families wouldn’t know the song,” she said, “even though it’s trending on social media right now.”
In fact, Stefan Grusgen, 50, a farmer who grows 1,000 tons of rhubarb each year at Walberberg, south of Cologne, said he had never heard of the song until a reporter approached him. He later discovered that his children knew the song by heart.
As rhubarb season winds down, the singers have been working to extend their time; in mid-May, they Released a sequelBut if it doesn’t catch on, there’s a backup plan: In late summer, morel season begins.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin.
