Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn

“Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn” is the opening line and identifying title of Mignon’s Italian song in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In the reference notes, the lyric matters not only as a literary allusion: its lines are identified as the source of a parody referring to an advertisement for an NSU motor bike. The connection sets the song’s yearning language beside commercial promotion, while the surviving note gives no wording from the advertisement itself.

Literary Source

The note attributes the song to Mignon and names Goethe’s novel as its source. Its quoted English rendering begins, “Do you know the land where the lemon blossoms grow,” then, after an omitted passage, returns to the destination in the repeated phrase “Dahin! Dahin,” rendered as “Tis there! Tis there!” The speaker’s desire is expressed as a wish to travel with a beloved: “I fain would go with you my dear belovèd.” The passage therefore joins an imagined place to both movement and intimacy; the destination is not presented as an isolated landscape, but as somewhere the speaker longs to reach with another person.

The Advertisement Parody

The reference note explicitly links the lines to an advertisement for an NSU motor bike and describes the connection as a parody. That identification makes the change of register central: a lyric voiced as longing for a distant, idealized country is recalled in a commercial context. The note does not reproduce the advertisement’s text or specify exactly how its wording alters the song, so the parody’s precise verbal mechanics cannot be reconstructed from this evidence. What it does establish is the pairing itself: Goethe’s lyric supplies the recognizable material, while the motor-bike advertisement gives that material a new, promotional setting.

Meaning of the Allusion

The allusion turns on the distance between the song’s intimate wish and its advertising use. In the lyric, the repeated call toward the desired place gathers force through the speaker’s wish to go there with a beloved; in the reference note, those lines are redirected toward a product advertisement. The effect depends on recognition of the borrowed song and on the contrast between its poetic journey and the commercial purpose of the new context. Because the evidence preserves the source lines but not the advertisement’s copy, the contrast can be identified without assigning the ad a specific promise or inventing a rewritten lyric. The expression consequently functions both as a literary reference and as material available for parody.