Von hier an blind
Wir sind Helden
How to study this song
The card for “Von hier an blind” is built from 44 study entries at B2-: 20 German words, 4 adjectives and 20 verb forms. Work through the glossary first: Fragen, Lücke and Tagen are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 20 distinct forms against 4 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the words on their own are not the problem — it is the way they are put together that takes the work.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fragen | questions | preguntas | domande | questions | perguntas | vragen |
| Lücke | gap | hueco | vuoto, lacuna | trou, brèche | lacuna, espaço | gat, leemte |
| Tagen | days | días | giorni | jours | dias | dagen |
| Leid | sorrow, suffering | pena, sufrimiento | dolore |
What this song teaches you
Level · B2-
- Vocabulary words
- 20
- Adjectives
- 4
- Word combos
- 6
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 20
- Quiz questions
- 35
More German songs at this level
Background
About the song
«Von hier an blind» is the title track of the second album by the Berlin band Wir sind Helden, and for twenty years it was the quiet favourite of fans rather than a hit. The album came out on 1 April 2005 and went straight to number one in both Germany and Austria; the song itself was released as the record’s third single on 30 September 2005, after «Gekommen um zu bleiben» and «Nur ein Wort». It is a mid-tempo pop rock song built on a guitar figure that keeps circling, with Judith Holofernes singing dense, rhyme-packed verses and then opening up into a chorus that is little more than a confession of not knowing where to go next.
The band had formed in Hamburg in 2000, when its four members met on the pop course run by the city’s university of music and theatre: Holofernes on vocals and guitar, Pola Roy on drums, Mark Tavassol on bass and Jean-Michel Tourette on guitar and keyboards. Their self-released «Guten Tag» and the debut album «Die Reklamation» (2003) made them one of the most talked-about German-language acts of their generation, at a time when much of the national chart was sung in English. «Von hier an blind» was the difficult second album, and the title song is, in a sense, about exactly that situation.
Holofernes has described the song as coming from her own experience: after an ambitious dream comes true, the question that follows is simply what now. The lyric turns that feeling into a small road story in which the singer, a car and her own body all reach the point where they cannot see the way ahead, and decide to carry on anyway. The idea of going on «blind» is not despair but a kind of courage, a willingness to step into a future nobody can know. For a learner of German the song is a compact lesson in storytelling: the verses are told in the simple past, the chorus in the present, and much of the imagery comes from everyday idioms bent slightly out of shape.
The writing credit is shared by Holofernes, Tavassol and Tourette, and the whole album was produced by Patrik Majer at the Freudenhaus studio in Berlin. The single was issued as a CD maxi with extra tracks, a music video and a short making-of. It was an ordinary chart entry in 2005, but in the summer of 2026, more than fourteen years after the band stopped playing live, it was rediscovered by a generation that had not been born when it first came out, and it climbed higher than it ever had.