Wir sind groß

About the song

«Wir sind groß» is the song that turned Mark Forster from a well-liked German pop singer into a voice that an entire country heard several times a night for a month. It was released as a single on 1 April 2016, three and a half minutes of guitar-driven pop sung entirely in German, and it was the first track lifted from his third studio album, «Tape», which followed on 3 June that year on the Four Music label. Within weeks of its release the German public broadcaster ZDF announced that it had chosen the song as the theme for its coverage of the 2016 European Football Championship, held in France between 10 June and 10 July. From then on the chorus was played at the end of every match ZDF televised, which is how a song about friendship became, for one summer, the sound of a football tournament.

The man singing it was born Mark Ćwiertnia in Kaiserslautern in January 1983, the son of a Polish mother, and he speaks both German and Polish. He took his stage name from the street in Berlin-Kreuzberg where his first studio stood. His breakthrough had come a few years earlier with a duet alongside the rapper Sido that became one of the best-selling singles ever released in Germany, and by 2016 he had two albums behind him and a growing reputation as a songwriter who wrote plainly and warmly in his own language at a time when most German chart pop was sung in English. That choice matters for anyone learning the language: the song is not a translation of an English idea, it is written the way people actually talk.

Seven people share the writing credit, which is unusual for a song that sounds this simple. Alongside Forster himself there are Robin Haefs, Ralf Christian Mayer, Daniel Nitt, Konstantin Scherer and Vincent Stein — the production duo known as Djorkaeff and Beatzarre — and Nico Wellenbrink, who a few years later became famous in his own right under the name Nico Santos. Forster, Mayer and Nitt produced the track, with Djorkaeff and Beatzarre as co-producers, and the recording was made at the Gismo7 studio in Motril, on the southern coast of Spain, with Mayer in charge. Alex Grube played the electric guitars and Nitt the acoustic guitar and keyboards. The result is deliberately unpolished in places: a strummed guitar, a big open chorus, and a wordless singalong hook designed for a stadium or a living room full of people.

What the song is about is friendship, and specifically the stubborn kind that shows up when things go wrong. The first verse is a small scene rather than a declaration: two people on a bicycle taken from a park, one pedalling, the other holding on, with no intention of returning it before the next morning. Time is short, the singer says, and they intend to spend it extravagantly. Nobody has to prove anything to anybody. The chorus widens the lens until the world itself looks small and the two of them look enormous, and it ends with the promise that this is how it stays — young and outside time. The second verse adds a car, a drive south towards the sea, an offer to take the wheel when the other one is too tired to keep their eyes open, and the idea of laminating their best mistakes and carrying them in a pocket, which is the best joke in the lyric and also its thesis: the things that went wrong are worth keeping.