Goldfisch and the Language That Deserves Better Than It Gets
In a café in Kreuzberg not long ago, a friend and I got into a real argument about whether the German language would survive the next few centuries. My position: it won’t. Not in any recognizable form. Languages don’t die cleanly—they get absorbed, hybridized, overwritten by whatever tongue carries more economic and cultural weight. In a few hundred years, maybe a thousand, whatever people speak in this territory will be some compound of English and Mandarin and Spanish with German consonant clusters fossilized in the grammar like insects in amber.
I hold this position firmly and it makes me sad every time I think about it. Which is part of why I keep listening to Balbina.
German gets brutalized daily—by advertisers, by politicians, by people who’ve clearly never stopped to consider what they’re actually saying. But in the right hands it’s extraordinary. The compound words that build meaning architecturally. The way syntax holds a sentence together across enormous distances. The specific gravity each syllable is allowed to carry. Balbina uses all of this. Her new song Goldfisch does what only a handful of German artists have ever managed: it makes the language sound like it was worth keeping.
I can’t fully explain the effect. It’s not nostalgia—I’m not sentimental about German as an artifact to be preserved. It’s more that she finds something in it that most people walk past every day without noticing. The texture of it. The weight. Beautiful, and a little melancholy, because that’s how beautiful things work when you know they’re finite.