Des Volkes Blut verströmt in Bächen

Des Volkes Blut verströmt in Bächen, translated in the note as “The People’s Blood streams out in Torrents,” is identified as a song whose words belong to Boleslaw Czerwienski and whose later reworking is associated with Rosa Luxemburg. Its musical source, the Paris Commune song Le Drapeau rouge, places the expression within a history of political song rather than treating it as an isolated phrase.

Identification and textual history

A note gives the words’ date as 1881 and credits them to Boleslaw Czerwienski. It then records that Rosa Luxemburg reworked the song. The note distinguishes the text’s authorship and subsequent adaptation from its musical lineage: the melody is identified with the Paris Commune song Le Drapeau rouge, glossed there as “The Red Flag.”

Political and musical associations

The combination of a named song text, a later political reworking, and a tune linked to the Paris Commune gives the phrase a collective and historical resonance. The title’s image of the people’s blood flowing in torrents is not merely a private emotional expression; in the cited song tradition, it belongs to a language of popular struggle and political memory. The evidence establishes this association through the note’s attribution, without specifying where or how the song is performed in the narrative.

Place in the novel’s urban world

Elsewhere, the novel renders Berlin through the sounds and routines of public life: a cinema’s Wurlitzer and audience, music at the Neue Welt, tram routes and fares, and the pile driver working at Alexanderplatz. These scenes place popular entertainment, transport, and construction side by side. The song citation adds a political history to that wider soundscape, though the available evidence does not establish that the song is heard in any of those particular scenes.