You ever remember a fragment of an old song and then spend hours racking your brain trying to remember which one it was? It happens to me all the time. Last night, I dreamed I was learning how to do a handstand, and every time I failed, a cheery voice sang these three words in my head: “Wieder nicht geschafft”—”failed again.”
After I woke up, I thought, “I know that phrase.” A few googles and turns of my memory-Rubik’s-cube later, I found the song: “Walkampf” by Die Toten Hosen, a song from 2004. “The Dead Pants,” as they’d be called in English, are an all-time-great German rock band, and “Whale Fight” is a pun on the German word for election campaigning, which is “Wahlkampf.”
Of all the songs I could have remembered, how appropriate is it that I recall this one the day the US election ended and Germany’s government failed, kicking off a likely journey to early elections? The subconscious just works! And it didn’t end there.
In the upbeat song’s lyrics, the narrator describes his struggles in a dream. He finds himself alone on a beach, facing a stranded whale. The waves, the birds, even the sun, they all tell him one thing: “Push the whale back into the sea!” He tries and tries, but of course, one puny human against a multi-ton animal, what chance does he have? Eventually, the seagulls laugh at him: “Wieder nicht geschafft”—”failed again.”
The next morning, the narrator wakes up in cold sweat. “What a horrible night, what a stupid dream,” he thinks. With sore muscles, he drags himself into the shower. “How good that feels!” Suddenly, he hears his girlfriend calling from afar: “What are you doing in the shower? Push the whale back into the sea!”
Thanks to three words lingering after the dark, my dream, too, extended into reality. Unlike the narrator, however, I managed to break the loop. I found the song—and thus pushed the whale back into the sea. Or did I?
Looking at my real to-do list for today, from finding a job to prepping my taxes to making enough money to pay for them, it sure seems there’s always another whale, waiting to be pushed back into the sea. And while there are plenty of songs from Die Toten Hosen that might help one persevere, the tongue-in-cheek “Whale Fight” offers a special kind of support—a reminder that, even if the work weighs a ton and you can barely bench-press half your bodyweight, you can always show up the next morning and give the whale another push.