German has provided some of the most jaw-straining single words in the history of human language. Fußbodenschleifmaschinenverleih (rental shop for floor-sanding machines), anyone? Not to mention
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, a late lamented state law for labelling meat.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a former defence minister with a dastardly difficult name to say, was long seen as a likely successor to the relatively pronounceable ex-chancellor, Angela Merkel. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s resignation as the conservatives’ party chief came as a relief to news presenters the world over, clearing the way for the tight three-syllabic Olaf Scholz. Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, once a federal justice minister and the ultimate double-barrelled tongue-tripper, was not invited to join his cabinet.
Now German, the primary vernacular of about 100 million Europeans, is turning its prickly peculiarities into an asset with an embrace of Zungenbrecher (literally, tongue-breakers) that have touched off a global comeback of the wordplay, even among people who do not speak the language.
Its biggest star is Bodo Wartke, 47, a Berlin-based cabaret performer, playwright and pianist who has a remarkable gift of the gab. His songs – intricate rap tales spun out from existing German tongue-twisters and set to infectious beats – have garnered tens of millions of TikTok and YouTube views, beginning with Der dicke Dachdecker, about an overweight roofer, and culminating in Barbaras Rhabarberbar (Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar) parts I and II.
In those monster hits, Wartke and musical partner, Marti Fischer, tell the story “once upon a time” of a bar owner named Barbara who enchants all who try her rhubarb cake, including a group of bushy-bearded, beer-swilling barbarians who bring their barber back to try a bite.
A sequel released last month sees the successful Barbara hire help to meet the mounting demand: a “smart, charming and well-read” bisexual woman named Bärbel. The two fall in love, get married with barbecuing barbarians in attendance and rhubarb cake on the menu. Months later, a child is born and then raised in the bar by Barbara, Bärbel and the doting barbarians. In other words, a Rhabarber-Barbara-Bar-Barbarenbartbarbier-Bierbar-Baby.
It took several months for the initial video to go viral, first in Germany, where Wartke and Fischer briefly bested Beyoncé on the TikTok music charts, then across Europe and finally around the world. The choreographer Kaycee Stroh, US influencers, Bavarian nuns, a dirndl- and lederhosen-wearing couple, a circus performer deploying whips, and two Australians in a bathroom all grooved to the rhyme while lip-syncing the bits they could pronounce. The YouTube chef Sally Özcan baked a rhubarb cake to the song.
Many of the online comments below the original clips are in English. “I don’t speak German, but damn this was fire,” one Instagram user wrote. “Just amazing, I don’t understand a thing but I just can’t stop listening to it,” said another. An English version from, yes, Santa Barbara, helped decipher the rhymes, and the German videos were eventually given English subtitles.
Imitators then kicked in, with the French comedian David Castello-Lopes delighting fans by mastering the rhyme in a sweet Gallic accent, followed by cracking Swedish and Danish versions.
“I think it surprised a lot of people that the German language can sound so cool,” Wartke said, pointing to praise for his “sehr clean” rhymes.
“There are certain stereotypes about Germany – we don’t know how to have fun, we don’t have a sense of humour, our language sounds totally aggressive. And then you see Marti and me having a blast rapping this song, dancing and making music out of German. You don’t have to understand German to join in the fun.”
Wartke, who many say should carry the German flag into next year’s Eurovision song contest, owes a big debt to hip-hop, particularly mastery of metre, end rhyme and double rhyme. He calls Eminem the Beethoven of flow. The German composer “took motifs, condensed them and varied them – an unbelievable revolution in classical music. That’s the way Eminem raps. Nothing was the same afterwards.”
But he said he also finds a lot of his inspiration from speech therapy sites that recommend tongue-twisters to people regaining their faculties after a stroke.
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The Wortakrobat (word acrobat) himself has to practise his own songs – of which there are now more than four dozen – incessantly before they are perfect enough to film in one go. Barbaras Rhabarberbar needed 144 takes over two days to become flawless.
Tongue-twisters are a key component of Wartke’s sound, but it also builds on alliteration, colliding consonants and spoonerism, in which a speaker flips the opening letters of two words for effect. Conga-line-like compound words that are commonplace for Germans and reliably hilarious to foreigners round out the toolbox.
Charlie Chaplin skewered the comedic potential in German in The Great Dictator, his iconic 1940 Hitler sendup, said the linguist Dr Peter Rosenberg at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border. With it, Chaplin put his finger on some of the reasons German is perhaps especially well suited for tongue-twisters.
“German has a lot of consonant clusters – consonants followed by consonants like in Strumpf (stocking) which just has one poor little vowel in the middle,” Rosenberg said. “Then Chaplin adds the German gargling r’s,” known as uvular in phonetics, in his nonsense speech to the volk.
Rosenberg said Wartke did much of the same while producing “intelligent” texts. He admires his ability to find the beauty in his long-maligned mother tongue, battered by Hollywood Nazis and US humorist Mark Twain, who pulled his hair out over German’s “slipshod and systemless” syntax and cases.
The author Gerhard Henschel, whose book Zungenbrecher looked at the universal appeal of tongue-twisters, said a “high level of difficulty” determined the best performances. But even failure to pull one off without stumbling rarely triggered schadenfreude, he said. “On the other hand a perfectly articulated tongue-twister can get a big laugh.”
Wartke said he loves that sense of “relief” in the audience when he performs live and on point, a kind of catharsis familiar from the theatre.
His next step toward tongue-twister world domination will be an English-language collaboration with Fischer, spinning a yarn from the classic Three Swiss witches watch three Swatch watches.