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A2+

Atemlos durch die Nacht

Helene Fischer

Language
German
Released
2013
Genre
schlager
Level
A2+
Difficulty score
661
Duration
3:42

How to study this song

“Atemlos durch die Nacht” carries 23 German words, 18 adjectives and 26 verb forms — 67 study entries in all, graded A2+. The glossary is the place to begin — Nacht, Straßen and Clubs are the song’s keywords. It is unusually descriptive — 18 adjectives alongside 23 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. 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

DEENESITFRPTNL
Nachtnightnochenottenuitnoitenacht
Straßenstreetscallesstraderuesruasstraten
Clubsclubs, nightclubsclubes, discotecaslocali, discotecheclubs, boîtesclubes, discotecasclubs, discotheken
Stadtcity, townciudadcittà

What this song teaches you

Level · A2+

Vocabulary words
23
Adjectives
18
Word combos
15
Expressions
13
Verb forms
26
Quiz questions
35

More German songs at this level

  • Wir sind groß — Mark Forster (2016)A2
  • Auf uns — Andreas Bourani (2014)A2
  • Vielleicht Vielleicht — MilleniumKid x JBS (2023)A2+
  • Leuchtturm — Nena (1983)A2

Background

About the song

«Atemlos durch die Nacht» is the song that made Schlager respectable again in Germany, and then made it unavoidable. It was released as a single on 29 November 2013 on Polydor, taken from Helene Fischer’s sixth studio album «Farbenspiel», which had appeared six weeks earlier, on 4 October 2013. Nothing about that release suggested what was coming. Fischer was already a star of German-language popular music, with a shelf of awards and a television show of her own, but her audience was the traditional Schlager audience: older, loyal, and almost entirely separate from the pop charts. Within a year the same song was being sung by twenty-year-olds in nightclubs, by football fans in stadiums, and by the German national team in its dressing room on the way to winning a World Cup.

The song has a single author. Kristina Bach, herself a singer and one of the most prolific songwriters in the German-language industry, wrote both the words and the music. In interviews she has said that the whole idea arrived in seconds while she was on Mallorca, and that she had intended to keep it for herself; she only handed it over after Fischer asked her, at an industry event, whether she had anything new. The production was by Jean Frankfurter, the studio name of Erich Ließmann, who had already shaped most of Fischer’s records. What they built around Bach’s melody was not a Schlager arrangement in the old sense at all. Musicologists who have analysed the track point out that it uses almost no acoustic instruments: the strings, the brass and the percussion are all synthesised, the harmony moves within a very small circle of chords in B major, and the verses are deliberately kept flat and narrow so that the chorus can explode out of them. Underneath it runs a discofox pulse, the ballroom-derived dance rhythm that German-speaking Europe has used for forty years, played at a tempo that works equally well on a dance floor and in a stadium.

The words are a night out, told in fragments. Two people move through the streets and the clubs of a city that is never named, the night belongs to them, every rule is switched off, and the singer piles up images of closeness, height and speed: a rooftop, a parachute, a cinema screen, a thousand small surges of happiness. Nothing is narrated in order and nothing is explained, which is exactly the point. The lyric is built out of short bursts of feeling with almost no concrete detail, so that any listener can drop their own night into it. That generality, which critics held against the song at first, is the main reason it travelled so far beyond its original audience: it fits a wedding, a carnival tent, a school-leaving party and a football celebration equally well, and it has been used for all four.

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ville
cidade
stad

This card holds 19 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

DEENESITFRPTNL
atemlosbreathlesssin alientosenza fiatoà bout de soufflesem fôlegoademloos
schwindelfreiwith a good head for heightsque no se marea en las alturasche non soffre di vertiginiqui n’a pas le vertigeque não tem vertigenszonder hoogtevrees
großesbig, greatgrandegrandegrandgrandegroot

This card holds 15 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

DEENESITFRPTNL
zieh'nwe move, we roamrecorremosgiriamoon parcourtpercorremoswe trekken rond
gemachtmadehechofattofaitfeitogemaakt
schließeI closecierrochiudoje fermefechoik sluit
löscheI switch off, I eraseapago, borrospengo, cancelloj’effaceapagoik doe uit, ik wis
istises, estáèestéis

This card holds 21 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

For a learner of German the song is unusually generous, because almost everything that makes German look difficult from the outside is here in a form you can sing. The title itself is a lesson in word-building: «atemlos» is «Atem», breath, plus the suffix «-los», which does what English «-less» does, and German attaches it to almost anything. The same machinery produces «schwindelfrei», literally free of dizziness, the word a roofer or a climber uses about having a head for heights. Then there are the compound nouns that German makes by simply pushing words together: «Glücksgefühle» is luck or happiness plus feelings, «Fallschirm» is the verb to fall plus the word for umbrella or screen, and the song even invents one on the spot by hyphenating love onto tattoo.

The second grammar lesson is the one that catches every beginner: SEPARABLE VERBS. German has a large family of verbs whose prefix detaches in a main clause and flies to the very end of it, so the listener does not learn what the verb actually means until the last syllable. This song uses four of them, and all four are split exactly the way a textbook would split them. «Ausziehen» normally means to take clothes off; here the eyes are the subject and the prefix lands at the end of the line. «Aufgehen» is what a parachute does when it opens. «Festhalten» is to hold on tight, and «zusammenhalten» is to hold together, to stick together, which is also what the phrase means about people. Alongside them the chorus lines up four plain imperatives — come, take, go, fall — none of them with a pronoun, and one of them, the imperative of «nehmen», showing the vowel change from e to i that German strong verbs make in the singular.

The third thing to notice is not in any grammar book, and it is what makes sung German sound different from spoken German. Singers routinely cut vowels to fit the beat, and the printed lyric preserves those cuts with apostrophes. The plural verb loses its ending, the possessive «unsere» loses its middle «e», and four first-person or imperative forms drop the final «-e» they would carry on the page. None of this is sloppiness; it is the ordinary colloquial register of German pop, and a learner who has only seen the full forms will not recognise them by ear. Finally the song is a short course in adjective endings, that part of German grammar that has to be learned and cannot be reasoned out: the same adjective «groß» appears twice with two different endings, once before a neuter noun and once before a feminine one, and the superlative of «hoch» turns up in front of a neuter noun with the definite article. One of those pairs, «großes Kino», is also a set phrase: literally big cinema, used to mean a magnificent spectacle, a real show.

The song’s afterlife is inseparable from the summer of 2014. It became the dressing-room song of the German national football team during the World Cup in Brazil, played before matches, and when the squad came home Fischer sang it with them in front of an enormous crowd at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on 15 July 2014. From that point it stopped being a hit and became a piece of national furniture. It is now the best-selling German-language song in Germany, it sits in the all-time top five of the German charts, and ten years after its release a new version recorded with the rapper Shirin David did what the original never managed: it went to number one on the weekly German singles chart.

Did you know?

Kristina Bach, who wrote both the words and the music, has said in interviews that the song came to her almost instantly while she was on Mallorca, and that she originally meant to record it herself. She only offered it to Helene Fischer after Fischer approached her at an industry event and asked whether she had anything new. Bach later recorded an English-language version of her own song under the title «Take a Breath».

The music video was directed by Oliver Sommer and premiered on 21 January 2014, almost two months after the single. It was shot in Chicago rather than in Germany, and Fischer changes outfits six times in three and a half minutes. It has since become one of the most watched German-language music videos on YouTube.

Helene Fischer was not born in Germany. She was born on 5 August 1984 in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, into a Russian-German family whose grandparents had been Black Sea Germans deported eastwards in 1941. The family emigrated to Wöllstein, in Rhineland-Palatinate, in 1988, when she was four. Between 2000 and 2003 she trained as a musical-theatre performer at the Stage & Musical School in Frankfurt, which is where the stagecraft of her later stadium shows comes from.

The album it came from, «Farbenspiel», spent fifteen weeks at number one in Germany and more than two hundred and forty weeks inside the top one hundred. It won the Echo prize for album of the year twice in a row, in 2014 and in 2015, and the tour that followed filled twenty-two stadium concerts in 2015.

The song became the unofficial anthem of Germany’s 2014 World Cup campaign. It was played in the team’s dressing room before matches in Brazil, and at the homecoming celebration at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on 15 July 2014 Fischer performed it on stage with the squad in front of a crowd of several hundred thousand people.

Exactly ten years after the original, on 24 November 2023, Fischer released a «10 Year Anniversary Version» recorded with the rapper Shirin David. A week later it entered the German singles chart at number one — the first and only time any version of the song has topped the weekly German chart, since the 2013 original had stalled at number three.

For learners, the title word is a small piece of German engineering all by itself. «Atem» is breath and «-los» is the suffix that English writes as «-less», so «atemlos» is breathless. The same suffix is behind hundreds of everyday adjectives, and the song contains a second word built the same way, «schwindelfrei», which uses «-frei», free of, instead: free of dizziness, that is, good with heights.

Charts & streaming

The single was released on 29 November 2013 and was not an instant number one anywhere except Austria. In Germany it peaked at number three on the weekly singles chart, a fact worth stating plainly because the song is so often described as a German chart-topper: it was, but only in the year-end reckoning. What it did instead of peaking was refuse to leave. It spent around one hundred and thirty weeks on the German chart, thirty-eight of them inside the top ten, roughly one hundred weeks in Austria with forty in the top ten, and about eighty weeks in Switzerland, where it reached number two.

It finished 2014 as the number one single of the year in both Germany and Austria, and it also placed high in the Swiss year-end list. In the German decade-end chart covering 2010 to 2019 it came third, and by the end of 2022 it was being counted among the five most successful songs in the history of the German charts, as well as the best-selling German-language song in Germany.

The certifications follow the same shape. Germany awarded it four times platinum for 2.4 million units of sales and streaming, having already given it a diamond award in 2015 once it passed a million; Austria certified it six times platinum for 180,000 units, an extraordinary figure in a market that size; Switzerland certified it platinum for 30,000. Total sales across the German-speaking market are given as around 2.61 million.

The parent album «Farbenspiel», released on 4 October 2013 on Polydor and produced by Jean Frankfurter, went to number one in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, stayed at the top in Germany for fifteen weeks, and remained in the top one hundred for around two hundred and forty-seven weeks. It has been certified thirteen times platinum in Germany for 2.6 million units, eighteen times platinum in Austria for 360,000, and four times platinum in Switzerland for 80,000, with more than 2.7 million copies sold in total, which places it among the best-selling German albums ever made.

The song won the Echo Pop award for hit of the year in 2015 and the SWR4 Hit-Marathon in 2014. The 10 Year Anniversary Version with Shirin David, released on 24 November 2023, reached number one on the German singles chart on 1 December 2023 and took a Polyton award in 2024.