Branding Heino

Some people feel strongly about Heino and might understand branding the wrong way. Germans don't do branding very well. Or, well, not in that sense. Oh, boy.

Who is Heino?

During our last summer in the U.S., as we spread the word among friends and acquaintances of our imminent move to Germany, the music collector said: Oh, then you might hear of Heino.

Heino?

He is a German crooner, he does popular music, and he was really big in the 1960s to the 1980s, blonde guy always wearing dark sunglasses.

Our hesitant okaaay made our music collector smile, and TheEditor vaguely recalls an ominous "you'll see".

The move, and in particular transporting the cats, kept us busy and became, well, a tad stressful, so checking the airport for any Heino concert posters was not a priority when we finally landed.

Disinterest in German TV and radio  -- both quite boring, sorry to say that -- kept us away from anything Heino for years.

Until friends brought up the more or less good natured tiff between the old crooner and hard rockers Rammstein. We promptly forgot Heino again, having decided that his status as an icon of late 20th century German lower middle class culture did not mean we found his music the least bit interesting.

Then the cake hit us in the bread and cake section of the local grocery store.

There he was, decades younger looking than today, the sunglasses welded to his face, on a seriously overpriced industrial hazelnut cake.

You need to understand that the humble hazelnut is as permanently stuck to Heino as are his sunglasses.

One of his biggest hits was a traditional German song called Schwarzbraun ist die Hazelnuss. The full, soft dark brown color of the hazelnut as a song title?

But wait, the subsequent line provides the answer: Schwarzbraun bin auch ich.
(I am dark brown, too). Followed by "and so should be my girl". It's a little love song about a girl, he praises her dark brown color. It's a little ditty with no particular lyric content, nothing as earthshaking as, say, Greensleeves, if you see what I mean.

A little Random Research into the song brings up something astounding.

During nazi times, this was one of big songs of the Hitler Youths and of the German Army in World War II.

So, this means they cannot be singing about blacks, it must be about dark hair, about the tan from hard yet happy work in the fields.

In light of everything, it makes sense that we found no mention of a happy crowd welcoming then presidential candidate Obama in Berlin with this song.

No, we did not buy a Heino cake even for laughs.