Berlin Hit

Germany's newest song hit was hummed in streetcars, in movie theaters and at political meetings. Radio Berlin used the opening bars for a musical call signal. Its slow march tune was catchy, and its lyrics fitted Berlin's melancholy mood:

Far and wide as the eye can wander,

Heath and bog are everywhere.

Not a bird sings out to cheer us,

Oaks are standing gaunt and bare.

We are the peat-bog soldiers,

We're marching with our spades to the bog. . . .

But for us there is no complaining,

Winter will in time be past.

One day we shall cry rejoicing:

Homeland dear, you're mine at last!

Berlin's new hit is actually 13 years old. It was first sung in 1933 by prisoners in the Boergermoor concentration camp as they marched off to drain the nearby peat bogs. Prisoners secretly wrote it on barracks walls, whispered it at slave labor chores; it became the favorite song of the German underground. Anti-Nazi Germans took it to Spain with them, taught it to their comrades in the International Brigade. As The Peat-Bog Soldiers it was brought to the U.S. by Loyalist veterans, recorded by Paul Robeson.

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