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A2

Auf uns

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

DEENESITFRPTNL
Hocha cheer, a toastun vítor, un brindisun evviva, un brindisiun vivat, un toastum viva, um brindeheilgeroep, toost
Momentmomentmomentomomentomomentmomentomoment
Augenblickinstantinstanteattimoinstantinstanteogenblik
Zeittimetiempotempo

What this song teaches you

Level · A2

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

More German songs at this level

  • Leuchtturm — Nena (1983)A2
  • Verschwommen — Ski Aggu & Ericson (2026)A2
  • Atemlos durch die Nacht — Helene Fischer (2013)A2+
  • Vielleicht Vielleicht — MilleniumKid x JBS (2023)A2+

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.

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temps
tempo
tijd
Tagdaydíagiornojourdiadag
Tagedaysdíasgiornijoursdiasdagen

This card holds 16 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

DEENESITFRPTNL
besserbettermejormegliomieuxmelhorbeter
bestebestlo mejoril megliole meilleuro melhorbeste

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

Verb forms

DEENESITFRPTNL
kanncanpuedepuòpeutpodekan
seinto beser, estaressereêtreser, estarzijn
denkt anthink ofpensad enpensate apensez àpensem emdenk aan
liegenlie, arequedan, estánstanno, restanosont, restentficam, estãoliggen, zijn

This card holds 17 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

For someone learning German the song is unusually generous, because almost every line does something a textbook spends a chapter on. Its core structure is the toast: «ein Hoch auf …», where «das Hoch» is the noun for a cheer raised in someone's honour, and the preposition «auf» takes the accusative because the phrase points at a target rather than describing a location. That one formula is repeated across the chorus with a different object each time — a time, a life, a moment, a day — so the learner hears the same frame filled six different ways, which is exactly how case endings are best learnt. Around it sit the other two things the song is built from: the imperative addressed to a group, the «ihr» form, which is used to call the listeners to remember something; and the first-person plural, the «wir» that runs through the verses and does the emotional work. German does not need a special construction for «let us»: the plain present tense of «wir» already carries the exhortation, and the song uses it again and again.

There is more in the verses. A separable verb opens the song: «einfrieren», to freeze something, appears with its prefix parked at the end of the clause, which is the first thing that trips up learners of German and the reason separable verbs are worth meeting inside a melody rather than inside a grammar table. There is a perfect tense formed with «sein» rather than «haben», which German reserves for verbs of movement and change of state. There is a future built with «werden» plus an infinitive at the end. There is a relative clause introduced by a pronoun that looks exactly like the definite article. And there are three compound nouns of the kind German assembles on demand — a word for fireworks made of fire and work, a word for an instant made of eye and glance, a word for endlessness built from an adjective plus a suffix. Learners who can take those apart have understood something about how the language manufactures vocabulary.

Musically the song is deliberately plain. The verse is carried by a single voice and very little else, the chorus opens out into a wall of backing vocals that sound like a crowd rather than a studio, and there is a handclap pattern under it that any group of people can join without rehearsal. That is the whole trick, and it is a good one: the arrangement leaves room for the audience. Critics at the time were not uniformly kind — one German review dismissed the album as pop built for department stores — but the reviews stopped mattering some time around the middle of July 2014, and the song has outlived every one of them.

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.

Charts & streaming

The single went to number one in Germany, where it spent two weeks at the top, nineteen weeks inside the top ten and eighty weeks on the chart altogether — an exceptionally long run for a German-language pop single. It also reached number one in Austria, with one week at the top and seventy-two weeks on the chart, and number two in Switzerland, where it stayed on the chart for fifty-five weeks.

In the 2014 year-end tables it finished fourth in Germany, ninth in Austria and twenty-eighth in Switzerland, and it was still placed in the 2015 year-end charts of both Germany and Austria more than eighteen months after release. On the German decade chart covering 2010 to 2019 it ranks tenth, which makes it one of the ten biggest singles of its ten-year period in that market.

Its certifications tell the same story. Germany awarded it diamond status for more than a million units counted across sales and streaming, a level very few German-language records reach; Austria and Switzerland each certified it platinum. Across Europe the song is credited with sales of roughly 1.06 million copies.

The parent album, «Hey», released on 9 May 2014 with thirteen tracks, entered the German album chart at number three and stayed on the chart for well over a year and a half. By June 2018 it had been certified seven times gold in Germany, twice platinum in Austria and platinum in Switzerland, for total sales above 750,000 units — confirmation that the single pulled a whole record along with it rather than standing alone.