The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #26060 Message #3967979
Posted By: Joe Offer
23-Dec-18 - 03:49 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Ach/O du lieber Augustin
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Ach/O du lieber Augustin
The earliest printed version of the Vienna plague version I found is 1902, in an excerpt from an article titled Bubonic Plague: its nature, mode of spread, and clinical manifestations, by Simon Flexner, M.D., Professor of Pathology, University of Pennsylvania.
The literature upon plague contains much that is curious and not a little that is appalling. The fears, panics, terrors, and superstitions and credulities which characterize an earlier and less enlightened era of the world are revealed in the history of the plague epidemics of past centuries. The atrocities committed upon innocent individuals and peoples by a frenzied populace almost exceed human imagination. The fancied poisoning of the wells by the Jews, the smearing of contagious ointments upon walls and door-posts of houses, and other equally absurd beliefs, led to the torture and execution of innumerable innocent victims. There had come down to us from the epidemic in Vienna toward the close of the seventeenth century a popular song, better known perhaps in Germany, where it may be heard in any students' gathering, in which the author, Augustin, a kind of wandering minstrel, whose occupation is sadly interrupted by the general misery, justifies in a finely ironical stanza his nightly libations:
Oh du lieber Augustin,
's Geld ist hin, d'Freud ist hin;
Oh du lieber Augustin,
Alles ist hin!
Ach und selbst das reiche Wien
Arm jetzt wie Augustin,
Seufzt mit mir in gleichem Sinn:
Alles ist hin.
Jeden Tag war sonst ein Fest;
Und was jetzt? Pest, die Pest!
Nur ein grosses Leichennest,
Das ist der Rest!
Oh du lieber Augustin,
Leg nurs ins Grab dich hin,
Ach du mein liebes Wien,
Alles ist hin!
Source: University of Pennsylvania Medical Bulletin, Volume XV, page 287 - November 1902
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Univ_of_Penn_Medical_Bulletin_Vol_XV/BdY5AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Und+selbst+das+reiche+Wien%22&pg=PA287