Old German 1970s Hit Reminisces Of The Hot Summers Of The 1940s And 1950s

Most readers here already know NASA rewrote the temperature records to make the warm period of the 1930s and 40s and the cold spell of the 60s, 70s and 80s disappear. But they can’t make everything disappear, especially old newspaper articles and old hit songs that remind us of hot summers of the past.

An old German song by Rudi Carrell, for example, from 1975 not only reminds us of just how cool and dreadful German summers were in the 1970s, but also how much warmer they had been a couple of decades prior, i.e. in 1940s and 50s.

The title of the song: “When’s it gonna be really summer again”

In the 1975 hit song, Mr Carrell reminisces about the much warmer summers he used to know from earlier decades, which by 1975 had disappeared. Born in 1934, Carrell likely refers to the summers he had experienced in the 1940s and 50s, a period that obviously was also similarly warm as it is today in Germany warm.

What follows are the lyrics in English of Carrell’s song, of course the rhyming gets lost in translation”

We never needed a long trip before
We got tanned on Borkum and on Sylt
But today the tanned ones are only white
Cause here now it’s really cold
Yes, in the old days no heating was needed
The outdoor swimming pool was already open in May
I sat in front of our house until late at night
And, we still got sunburned
And there were giant jellyfish on the beach, and ice cream
And every lifeguard took off his jacket

When will it be summer again,
A summer like it used to be?
Yes, with sunshine from June to September
And not so wet and so Siberian, like last year

And what  
Sweater factories were shut down
There it was up to forty degrees in the shade
We had to be sparing with the water
The sun beat down on our faces
There was no need for any sauna
A sheep was happy to be sheared back then
It used to be like Africa here
It was possible to go nude
But today, all the mosquitoes hum loudly in chorus

When will it ever be summer again
A summer like it used to be?
Yes, with sunshine from June to September
And not so wet and so Siberian, like last year

The winter was the failure of the century
Only above a thousand meters was there snow
My milkman says: “This climate here, who’s surprised?”
It’s all the fault of the SPD
I think that’s going a bit far
But soon it’s vacation time again
And who among us doesn’t think about it all the time?
In spite of everything, I still believe
That the weather will get better
But when, and this is a question that concerns us all

When will it really be summer again
A summer like it used to be?
Yes, with sunshine from June to September
And not so wet and so Siberian, like last year”

Yes, that’s the kind of music Oma und Opa listened to back in the day.

Obviously the summers of the 70s in Germany were cool and gray, and Germans longed for the warmer, sunnier summers they had experienced in the previous decades.

So far this year, summer has started on the tame side. Hopefully Carrell’s song won’t be making a comeback.




4 responses to “Old German 1970s Hit Reminisces Of The Hot Summers Of The 1940s And 1950s”

  1. John Hultquist

    “And there were giant jellyfish on the beach, and ice”

    ice? no ice? What am I missing?

    [Why do trains whistle?
    ’cause they don’t know the lyrics. ]

    1. Joao Martins

      Original German “Eis”: means in English “ice”, but also an ice-cream bar on a stick. So my proposal for translation would be “ice-cream”, not “ice”.

  2. Phil Salmon

    Beautiful!
    Social history is now the more exact science.

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