“On the shores of the Neckar”

A hurdy-gurdy man is playing in the courtyard:


Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Here’s a 1926 recording of “Ich hab’ mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren,” music by Fred Raymond, lyrics by Fritz Löhner-Beda and Ernst Neubach (1925). And here are the lyrics, in German and in Google Translate’s best English. Lyrics by Harry S. Pepper appear on recordings of the song in English, as in this 1932 version.

That juxtaposition of voices in Döblin: modernism. I think of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Langston Hughes’s “"The Cat and The Saxophone (2 A.M.).”

Related reading
All OCA Döblin posts (Pinboard)

[Occation: not a typo.]