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Auf uns — Andreas Bourani: German vocabulary & story · Verbomatico

Auf uns

by Andreas Bourani

Language: German
Released: 2014
Genre: pop
Level: A2
Difficulty score: 587
Duration: 4:01

How to study this song

“Auf uns” carries 22 German words, 9 adjectives and 21 verb forms — 52 study entries in all, graded A2. Work through the glossary first: Hoch, Moment and Augenblick are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 21 distinct forms against 9 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

DE	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	NL
Hoch	a cheer, a toast (das)	un vítor, un brindis	un evviva, un brindisi	un vivat, un toast	um viva, um brinde	Het heilgeroep, de toost (das)

Adjectives

DE	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	NL
besser	better	mejor	meglio	mieux	melhor	beter

Verb forms

DE	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	NL
kann	can (er/sie/es, of können)	puede	può	peut	pode	kan (er/sie/es, van können)

What this song teaches you

Level · A2

Vocabulary words: 22
Adjectives: 9
Word combos: 10
Expressions: 10
Verb forms: 21
Quiz questions: 35

Background

About the song

«Auf uns» is the song that turned a summer into a memory for a whole country. Andreas Bourani released it on 25 April 2014 as the first single from his second album, «Hey», which followed two weeks later on 9 May on Vertigo Berlin, part of Universal. He wrote it with Tom Olbrich and Julius Hartog, and Peter «Jem» Seifert produced it, with Bourani, Hartog, Andreas Herbig and Olbrich also credited as co-producers. It runs just over four minutes and it is, on paper, a straightforward piece of German pop rock: a quiet opening, a chorus built to be shouted, a bridge that lifts one more time before the end. What happened to it afterwards had less to do with the arrangement than with the timing.

Bourani was thirty when the record came out and he was not a newcomer, but he was not yet a household name either. He was born Andreas Stiegelmair in Augsburg on 2 November 1983, the adopted son of a Bavarian family; his biological parents were Egyptian and he never met them, and the surname he uses on stage is theirs. He had tried a television talent show as a teenager, signed with Universal in 2010, and broken through in 2011 with a first single that went gold. That was enough to make him a familiar voice on German radio. It was not enough to make him the man who wrote the song the country would sing at the Brandenburg Gate.

The turn came on 5 June 2014. Public broadcaster ARD announced that «Auf uns» would be the song accompanying its coverage of the football World Cup in Brazil. The head of ARD sport at the time, Axel Balkausky, explained the choice in plain terms: here was a song already in the charts whose mood fitted the national team exactly. The broadcaster was not taking much of a risk. The single had been on the radio for weeks, more than fifteen hundred plays a week, and it was climbing. ARD coverage from Brazil began on 14 June and Germany played its first match on 16 June against Portugal. From then on the chorus was attached to every montage of goals, every trailer, every sign-off.

Germany won the tournament on 13 July 2014 in the Maracanã, and the song was played in the stadium after the final whistle. Two days later, on 15 July, Bourani sang it live in front of the crowd that had gathered at the Brandenburg Gate to welcome the team home. That single performance is probably why the song never went away. A World Cup anthem usually has a shelf life of about six weeks; this one moved out of football entirely and into the general stock of German public occasions. It is now sung at school-leaving balls, at weddings, at New Year, at the anniversaries of sports clubs and volunteer fire brigades. Choirs arrange it. Wedding singers keep a version of it ready. It has become, without anyone deciding it, a standard.

Did you know?

The music video was directed by Kim Frank, himself a former pop singer, and was shot in Berlin and Hamburg. It premiered on YouTube on 23 April 2014, two days before the single was on sale, and by 2026 it had passed eighty-nine million views — a figure that puts it among the most-watched German-language music videos of its decade.

ARD did not commission the song. It picked one that already existed and was already a hit, which is unusual for a broadcaster's tournament theme: most of them are written to order and disappear the moment the trophy is handed over. The announcement came on 5 June 2014, six weeks after the single had been released and nine days before the broadcaster's coverage from Brazil began.

Bourani performed it at the Brandenburg Gate on 15 July 2014, at the public reception for the returning world champions. Hundreds of thousands of people were on the Straße des 17. Juni that afternoon, and the recording of that performance is the version most Germans picture when they hear the song.

It has been covered repeatedly and in very different registers: a football-terrace adaptation in 2014, a reading by Xavier Naidoo on the television series «Sing meinen Song» in 2015, and a choral arrangement by the Belgian choir Scala & Kolacny Brothers the same year. The choral version is a good indication of where the song had ended up — not in the sports pages, but in the repertoire.

The song won two prizes in 2015: an ECHO Pop in the Radio-ECHO category, and the Radio Regenbogen Award for song of the year. Both are radio-driven awards, which fits a record whose life was made on the air rather than in reviews.

Andreas Bourani has been almost entirely absent from public life since around 2021, with no new releases and next to no social-media presence. The song, meanwhile, keeps being sung by people who could not name the man who wrote it — which is roughly the definition of a standard, and a strange fate for a record that is only a decade old.

For a learner, the title is worth a moment on its own. «Auf uns» is a toast, the German equivalent of raising a glass and saying «to us», and «uns» here is the accusative of «wir». The same two words appear throughout the song in different grammatical jobs — sometimes the object of the toast, sometimes a plain object pronoun, sometimes a dative — which makes the song a small, repeated lesson in what German pronouns do.