Zeugnistag [English translation]

I think I must have been about twelve,

and once again the report cards were due.

But this time, I thought, the school building would collapse from top to bottom,

as mine lay white and bleak before me.

My expectations hadn't even been that high -

I was a slacker and additionally,

quite strange in my ways - but even so, I'd have never thought

that I'm such a complete failure.

"Now it's happened," I thought, "now it's all over" -

not even a D in religious education.

Geez, with this report you better don't show up at home,

at best maybe at the foreign legion.

I didn't show it to my parents and signed the report for them,

nice and colourful, it looked quite good, if I say so myself.

I may have been a slouch in German and biology,

but at least I'd always been good at drawing.

Of course, the spell broke already the next morning,

the forgery might not have been that good after all.

The headmaster came and angrily called me out of class,

and so I stood there, alone, mute and crestfallen.

Then he summoned my parents, and leaned back,

full of self-righteousness he was already looking forward

to the punishment for the fraud, the miscreant,

this forger of documents - your son.

My father took the report card and looked at me,

then calmly said, "as far as I'm concerned,

there's not the slightest doubt

that this is in fact my signature"

My mother, too, said that this was her handwriting,

though scibbled it may be, but one has to understand,

she had just been carrying two big, heavy shopping bags.

Then she said, "come on, boy, let's go."

I lost a few more long years on school benches,

studying absent-mindedly without protest.

Names, tables, theories, backwards and forwards -

somehow, I wasn't dumbed down completely.

But one lesson has emerged from these years,

the only one in a mountain of dead weight:

How good it feels to know that someone will give you shelter,

no matter what you may have done.

I don't know if it was the right thing to do, that my parents

got me out from there - where's the moral [of the story]?

The sages are disputing, the know-it-alls are fighting;

I don't know, but honestly, I don't care.

I just know that I wish to all the children of this world,

and not least, of course, to you as well, my child -

when things get rough, when things go wrong, when the world's falling apart -

parents, who are cut from such a cloth.

• Artist:Reinhard Mey
• Album:Keine ruhige Minute (1979)