Häschen in der Grube

This is a game before it is a song. One child curls up in the middle as a little rabbit fast asleep in its hollow, while the others join hands and circle around, singing. They coax the drowsy creature — poor little rabbit, are you ill, that you can’t hop any more? — until, on the command “Häschen hüpf!”, the rabbit springs up and hops away and every child hops with it. Then a new rabbit is chosen and it begins again.

Unusually for a nursery song, we know exactly who made it. The words were written in 1840 by Friedrich Fröbel — the educator who invented the kindergarten — at Keilhau in Thuringia, as one of the movement games through which he believed young children learn best. Within two years it had entered the training of kindergarten teachers, and from there it spread across the German-speaking world.

Fröbel did not need a new tune: he set his words to a melody adapted from the folk song “Wer die Gans gestohlen hat, der ist ein Dieb” — the tune Ernst Anschütz had already fitted with new words in 1824 as “Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen”. So the rabbit hops to a borrowed melody — an old tune given a new game — which is perhaps why it has always felt as familiar as if it had been sung forever.