I am trying to track down for my mother some of the rhymes she learned in her childhood from her grandmother, who was born in or near Berlin around 1865 and moved to Brooklyn about 1885. I haven’t been able to find any trace of my mother’s favorite rhyme. It’s probably a nursery rhyme, so I’m not hoping to discover an author, but I’d love to know if anyone else has ever heard the rhyme, or anything similar, and especially if it’s ever appeared in print. (I’ve searched all the Germany nursery rhyme books I could find, but I haven’t found anything like it. Most nursery rhymes seem to rhyme “Kuh” with “muh.”)
Caveat: This is a rhyme repeated eighty years ago to a small child and transcribed by me, and I know no German. So I’ve probably gotten some of the words wrong. Maybe fixing my grammar and/or spelling would help the search?
Die rote Kuh, die weiße Kuh
Sie macht die Augen auf und zu.
Sie hat die ganze liebe nacht,
Die augen auf und zu gemacht.
Die rote Kuh, die weiße Kuh
Sie macht die Augen auf und zu.
Sorry, I never heard this rhyme. A quick search in some German-language search engines indicated they never heard it, either.
Perhaps your grandmother made it up herself?
I don’t know any german, so fed your words into google translate. The english output is a bit messy, but it mentions the colours red and white, cows, and love.
Searching for those words in english lead to -
I’m just wondering if someone may have heard the RLS poem and reworked it to rhyme in german.
No, your German is pretty good. It sounds like a Deutsch version of “Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man/Bake me a cake as fast as you can,” though it’s about a red and white cow whose eyes bounce around all night long.
I learned another German version of “Patty-cake” a long time ago. So far as I remember, it goes
“Backe, backe, kuchen!”
Der Backer hat gerufen.
Er hat gerufen die ganze Nacht,
[CHILD’S NAME] hat kein Teig gebracht!
(Basically, the town baker is calling for all the women to come use his oven, but the child forgets to bring his/her dough.)
The red cow, the white cow,
she opens and closes her eyes.
During the whole dear night
she opened and closed her eyes.
The red cow, the white cow,
she opens and closes her eyes.
This was actually a very common practice in many places. The dough for cakes was prepared at home, then brought to the bakery with the more professional oven.
Another (IMO more common) version of this nursery rhyme lists the ingredients of the cake:
Backe, backe Kuchen,
der Bäcker hat gerufen.
Wer will guten Kuchen backen
der muss haben sieben Sachen:
Eier und Schmalz,
Zucker und Salz,
Milch und Mehl,
Safran macht den Kuchen gel.
(Bake, bake cake,
the baker has called.
If one wants to bake a good cake,
one must have seven things:
Eggs and lard,
sugar and salt,
milk and flour,
saffron turns the cake yellow.)
Thank you for checking with a German grandma. I did consider the possibility that my great-grandma made up the rhyme herself, but from what I’ve heard of her, she doesn’t seem to have been the type who would create whimsical rhymes about cows. Maybe a family friend made it up for her.
It could have been just a neighborhood/regional rhyme.
I know when I was a kid, mostly the little girls in the neighborhood had silly rhymes like that when they played hopscotch or jumped rope. Some rhymes were very specific about other friends or places in the neighborhood - so I can imagine this might have just been what all the kids in that particular neighborhood, during that particular era, used to say.