Nun ade, du mein lieb Heimatland

“Nun ade, du mein lieb Heimatland” is a German folk song identified in the novel’s notes as a work by August Disselhoff, written in 1848. Its title is rendered there as “Farewell my dear Homeland.” The evidence establishes the song’s historical identity, but does not provide its lyrics or specify a performance within the scenes supplied here.

Identification and Historical Context

The note attributes the song to August Disselhoff and dates it to 1848. That compact bibliographic detail places the expression in the nineteenth-century folk-song tradition; the available material does not establish further details about its composition, reception, or musical form.

Berlin in the Surrounding Narrative

The novel’s urban scenes offer a distinct setting around the note’s mention of the song. At Rosenthaler Platz, tramway 68 connects stations and districts across the city, while a passage on Alexanderplatz describes streets lined with homes, shops, bars, groceries, and other businesses. These details show Berlin as a place organized by movement and dense everyday commerce, though the evidence does not connect the song directly to those scenes.

Construction adds another rhythm to that city. In the middle of Alexanderplatz, a pile driver pounds rails into the ground in front of Aschinger’s restaurant, drawing a crowd to watch the repeated blows. Read alongside the song’s farewell title, this urban material can suggest a contrast between attachment to a homeland and a city continually being traversed and remade; that contrast is an interpretive possibility, not an explicit connection established by the text.