Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink

Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink is a popular drinking song whose refrain turns drinking into a brief escape from trouble. Its appearance at a Berlin amusement venue places it among the novel’s scenes of collective leisure, where music and performance offer a shared, if temporary, change of mood.

Identity and Provenance

The song is identified as a popular drinking song, with words and music by Wilhelm Lindemann, dated 1927. That attribution gives the number a specific contemporary setting: it belongs to the commercial popular culture of the Berlin depicted in the novel, rather than appearing as an anonymous folk fragment.

Performance at the Neue Welt

After a scene around a sofa, the narrative carries its company toward Hasenheide and the Neue Welt, described as a place of merrymaking with a prize for the slimmest calves. A band dressed in Tyrolean costume sits on a balcony and plays the song softly. The staging combines a recognizable drinking number with a public spectacle of costumes, music, and amusement.

The song’s words promise that drink can leave troubles at home: sorrow and pain are to be put aside so that life can seem like a joke again. The lyric repeats this turn from distress to cheer, making its optimism sound both communal and deliberately short-lived. The performance does not resolve anyone’s troubles; it gives the crowd a familiar refrain through which, for the moment, they can be set aside.

Popular Entertainment in the Novel

The performance belongs to a wider urban landscape of paid entertainment. Elsewhere, Franz enters a crowded picture house with a Wurlitzer playing, while spectators laugh together at the film; the street outside advertises another cinema and gives its entrance price as 60 pfennigs. These scenes place the drinking song alongside other accessible forms of mass amusement without making it interchangeable with them: here, a band performs a song whose refrain explicitly offers relief from sorrow.

The novel also presents public sociability through music, laughter, and shared spectacle, as in the coffee-shop scene where a group listens to a man telling a story. Against this broader soundscape, the song’s appeal is plain and practical. It does not ask its listeners to forget that pain exists; its repeated promise is that, with a drink and a tune, they may briefly treat life as a joke.