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B1

Komet

Udo Lindenberg x Apache 207

Language
German
Released
2023
Genre
pop rock
Level
B1
Difficulty score
791
Duration
2:47

How to study this song

“Komet” carries 22 German words, 9 adjectives and 27 verb forms — 58 study entries in all, graded B1. The glossary is the place to begin — Möwen, Hafen and Lied are the song’s keywords. This one leans on its verbs: 27 distinct forms against 9 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.

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
Möwenseagullsgaviotasgabbianimouettesgaivotasmeeuwen
Hafenharbour, portpuertoportoportportohaven
Liedsongcancióncanzonechansoncançãolied
Rausschmissclosing time, being thrown outcierre, echar a la gentechiusura, buttare fuori

What this song teaches you

Level · B1

Vocabulary words
22
Adjectives
9
Word combos
6
Expressions
10
Verb forms
27
Quiz questions
35

More German songs at this level

  • Mensch — Herbert Grönemeyer (2002)B1+
  • Issa — Sido (2026)B1
  • Durch den Monsun — Tokio Hotel (2005)B1
  • 7 Mann — Hardwick (2026)B1-

Background

About the song

«Komet» was released on 20 January 2023 by Warner Music, and within a year it had rewritten the record books of the German singles chart. It is a duet between two artists who, on paper, had nothing in common: Udo Lindenberg, born in 1946, the man who taught German rock to sing in German, and Apache 207, born in 1997, one of the biggest names in German rap. Lindenberg was seventy-six when the song came out. Apache 207 was twenty-five. The gap between them is longer than most pop careers, and that gap is the whole point of the record.

The two met the way musicians usually do. Lindenberg went to an Apache 207 concert in Mannheim, the rapper’s home city, and came away impressed; Apache 207 later turned up at one of Lindenberg’s own shows. They began visiting each other, and Lindenberg described what held the collaboration together in one phrase: the mutual respect each of them had for what the other does. The song that came out of it was written by a team that includes both of them, alongside Christopher Brenner, Marco Tscheschlok, Lennard Oestmann and Aris Pehlivanian, and produced by the last two, who work as Jumpa and Sira. It runs for two minutes and forty-seven seconds and became the first single from «Gartenstadt», Apache 207’s second studio album.

The song is about how to leave. The singer is sitting in a bar near the harbour at closing time, in thick smoke, listening to the gulls outside and to the last record of the night, the one that is played to get the guests out of the door. He stopped counting the years a long time ago. The bar is not even the bar it used to be, although the drink tastes exactly the same as it always did, and he admits that the only place that ever really felt like home was wherever there was applause. That is a very Lindenberg confession, and it is also the point at which a young rapper and an old rock singer turn out to be talking about the same fear.

Then comes the image that gives the song its title. If he has to go, he wants to go the way he arrived: like a comet, and specifically like a comet that strikes twice. A comet is bright, it is brief, and it leaves a trail that people remember long after it has gone; hitting twice is the part that is not astronomy but bravado. It may hurt, he says, but he would rather play it safe and make sure he lives forever, so let’s turn the music up one more time. The chorus repeats that thought without any attempt to soften it, and it is the reason the song works at weddings, in football stadiums and at funerals alike.

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fermeture, expulsion
fecho, expulsão
sluitingstijd, eruit gegooid worden

This card holds 18 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

DEENESITFRPTNL
letztelastúltimoultimodernierúltimolaatste
letztenlastúltimosultimiderniersúltimoslaatste

This card holds 7 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

DEENESITFRPTNL
hörI hearoigosentoj'entendsouçoik hoor
sing'nto singcantarcantarechantercantarzingen
zählI countcuentocontoje comptecontoik tel
sitzI sitestoy sentadosto sedutoje suis assisestou sentadoik zit
warwasera, estabaero, eraétaitera, estavawas
schmeckttastessabesa dia le goûtsabesmaakt

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

Apache 207’s verse moves the scene outdoors and into a much more colloquial register. He takes the glass with him out of the club, confetti is lying in the streets, he carries the flag with pride and downs the very last mouthful. He asks the taxi driver where the last few days went, and the driver, answering in broad Berlin dialect, asks him what he actually wants. What he wants is not to fall asleep. He wants a footprint of his own, stronger than time, one that no other foot will ever fit into, and he asks not to be dropped off alone at home, because there are still people who should see him.

For a learner of German the track is unusually generous. Almost every line contains a SEPARABLE VERB, which is the structure that surprises everybody who comes to German from a Romance language: the verb is listed in the dictionary in one piece — einschlagen, aufdrehen, mitnehmen, absetzen, einschlafen — but in a main clause the prefix breaks off and travels to the very end of the sentence. The song shows both behaviours side by side, because a separable verb inside a subordinate clause stays in one piece, which is exactly what happens to the comet that strikes twice. There is the perfect tense built with sein rather than haben, which German uses for verbs of movement. There is the rule that the conjugated verb must stand in second position, so that when a sentence begins with an adverb the subject jumps behind the verb. And there is the weak masculine noun der Komet, which quietly adds an -en in every case except the nominative singular.

The song also teaches something a textbook cannot: how Germans actually talk. Sung German drops the final -e of the first person (ich geh, ich leb, ich hör, ich zähl, ich sitz) and swallows the -en of infinitives into an apostrophe. Apache 207’s verse goes further and quotes the taxi driver in Berlin dialect, where ich becomes ick and was becomes wat. None of that is careless writing; it is the register of the street, and it sits deliberately next to Lindenberg’s older, wearier phrasing. A learner should recognise those forms and then write the standard ones.

Did you know?

The record it broke was one of the oldest in German pop. «Komet» spent twenty-one weeks at number one on the German singles chart — not in a row, but scattered across more than a year — which made it the longest-running number one in the history of that chart, ahead of «Rivers of Babylon» by Boney M. from 1978 and «Despacito» from 2017. It was later overtaken by Mariah Carey’s Christmas single, which returns to the top every December.

It was the first number-one single of Udo Lindenberg’s career. He had been making records since the late 1960s and had reached number one with albums, but never with a single. He was seventy-six years old when it happened, and the song is his biggest commercial success by a wide margin.

Lindenberg matters in Germany for reasons that have little to do with charts. He began as a drummer, founded the band Free Orbit in 1969 and played with the jazz saxophonist Klaus Doldinger before breaking through in 1973 as the man who proved that rock could be sung in German without being a political protest song. In 1983 he recorded «Sonderzug nach Pankow», a rewrite of «Chattanooga Choo Choo» aimed at the East German authorities who kept refusing him permission to play there. The song was banned in East Germany; he was finally allowed on stage in East Berlin on 25 October 1983 for a set that lasted about fifteen minutes, and in 1987 he handed Erich Honecker a guitar during the East German leader’s visit to the West. He is also a painter.

Apache 207 is the stage name of Volkan Yaman, born in Mannheim on 23 October 1997 to a family that came from the Turkish province of Yozgat. He finished school in Ludwigshafen in 2017, began releasing music on his own the following year and signed in 2019 with TwoSides, the label of the rapper Bausa. His single «Roller», released in August 2019, entered at number two and went to number one the week after, and by the time «Komet» appeared he had collected eleven chart-topping singles.

The music video came out on the day of the release and is a comedy. Apache 207 is on trial, Lindenberg is his defence lawyer, and the charges pile up absurdly one after another. Part of it was filmed in the Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht, the higher regional court in Hamburg. It ends with the two of them on a hotel balcony at the Hotel Atlantic, the Hamburg hotel Lindenberg has been associated with for decades, watching a comet cross the sky. By January 2026 the clip had been watched about ninety-eight million times on YouTube.

In February 2024 the song was named the most successful work of 2023 at the Deutscher Musikautorenpreis, the prize awarded by the German songwriters’ collecting society. That award goes to the writers rather than to the performers, which in this case means the whole six-person team that put the song together.

The chorus is built on one grammatical joke that only works in German. Verbs like einschlagen split in two in a normal sentence, so the prefix would normally end up far away from its verb; but in the relative clause that describes the comet, the verb has to stand at the end of the clause and therefore stays in one piece. Learners usually meet that rule in a textbook exercise. Here it is sung four times.

Charts & streaming

In Germany the single reached number one in its second week and then refused to leave. It spent twenty-one weeks at the top, thirty consecutive weeks in the top two and forty-two weeks in the top ten, a figure it shares with «Ein Stern (… der deinen Namen trägt)» by DJ Ötzi and Nik P. In total it stayed on the German chart for about a hundred and twenty-six weeks, which is roughly two and a half years.

It reached number one in Austria, where it charted for about ninety-seven weeks, and number two in Switzerland, where it charted for about seventy-eight. In the 2023 year-end lists it finished first in Germany, second in Austria and third in Switzerland. It also topped the German year-end streaming chart and finished fifteenth on the German year-end airplay chart, which made it the most played German-language title of the year on radio.

The song passed a hundred and twenty million streams across platforms within three months of release. It has been certified three times platinum in Germany, three times platinum in Austria and four times platinum in Switzerland.