Alle Vögel sind schon da

Alle Vögel sind schon da is the song the narrator’s second-oldest brother suggests at the end of a family funeral for a Blackbird. Its appearance brings a familiar communal refrain into a scene shaped by death, argument, and the children’s improvised ceremonies: they sing until they can no longer remember how to continue, then return to the house together.

The Blackbird’s Funeral

The bird has struck the family’s window and is found dead on the morning of the narrator’s father’s fortieth birthday. The family has held many animal burials in its garden: the pet cemetery already contains finches, ornamental fish, a gecko found mummified behind a cupboard, and several other birds killed in window collisions. The Blackbird joins a history of small deaths that the children have given formal, if inventive, attention.

The brothers’ funeral duties are established. The second-oldest brother gives the eulogies; the narrator carries the dead animals on a handkerchief; the eldest brother makes the small wooden crosses. For the Blackbird, the second-oldest brother first proposes cremation, imagining that the bird’s ashes should be scattered into the wind rather than left to decay underground. The eldest brother helps prepare a nest-like pyre, but the narrator’s mother refuses to let them burn a bird in the garden on their father’s birthday. Burial becomes the compromise, and the eldest brother digs a small grave with a single thrust of the spade.

The Refrain at the Grave

The second-oldest brother gives the Blackbird an elaborate, mock-solemn eulogy. He praises its imagined hardships and songs, then accuses the mother’s refusal of cremation of preventing the bird’s last wish. His performance is knowingly fanciful, but it moves the narrator nonetheless. When the eulogy ends, the narrator lets the body slide from the handkerchief into the grave, covers it with earth, and cries while trying to hide the tears.

After the eldest brother places the wooden cross, the narrator asks what they should sing. The second-oldest brother proposes Alle Vögel sind schon da. The brothers sing until the words run out, then walk back into the house together, feeling, as after church, uplifted. The song does not undo the funeral’s sadness; instead, it gives the family a shared action with which to close it. Its familiar, collective form sits beside the improvised eulogy and the children’s contradictory feelings about how the bird should be treated.

Ritual, Play, and Grief

The funeral moves between genuine mourning and playacting. The brothers debate cremation as if settling a practical question, invent a pyre, accept their mother’s prohibition, and proceed with burial; the second-oldest brother’s grand speech is both absurd and affecting. The narrator, meanwhile, experiences the bird’s almost weightless body as a physical encounter with loss and cries over the grave despite trying to conceal it. Singing supplies a final ritual after the argument and performance, but its interruption—continuing only until the children can no longer recall the song—keeps the scene from becoming a neat or complete consolation.

The title’s bird-filled promise acquires a pointed resonance at a funeral for a bird that is no longer alive. In the garden, the refrain belongs not to a gathering of living birds but to three children standing over a small grave. Their walk back into the house gives the ceremony an ending, while the song preserves the tension between communal comfort and the absence that has prompted it.