UBC October 2026 - Ich war noch niemals in New York

In my last post for July's UBC I mentioned Udo Jürgens. One of his most epic song is "Ich war noch niemals in New York" - I've Never Been to New York. It gives me goosebumps and makes me tear up every time I hear it.

The song describes a man who, after dinner, tells his wife that he is just going out to buy cigarettes. She calls after him to take his keys while she checks on their little daughter.

He closes the door and walks silently into the brightly lit apartment stairwell. The smell of floor polish and the conventional, narrow-minded respectability of his surroundings suddenly strikes him. As he walks downstairs, a thought occurs to him: What if this weren't just a trip to buy cigarettes? What if this were my departure? What if I simply kept walking - and never came back?

The chorus expresses everything he feels he has missed. He has never been to New York or Hawaii, never wandered through San Francisco in torn jeans, never experienced what he imagines as genuine freedom. Just once, he wants to do something crazy, to escape all the constraints that have shaped his life.

Once outside, he realizes that he actually has everything he would need to leave: his passport, traveler's cheques — hahaha, this was a thing back then, before everybody had credit cards — and some money. Perhaps there is even a flight he could catch that very evening. He could take a taxi, hitchhike, just keep going. For a moment, the possibility feels almost absurdly real.

And then comes the wonderfully mundane ending.

He puts the cigarettes in his pocket and simply goes home. He walks back through the same stairwell, with its smell of floor polish and suffocating conventionality. His wife calls out, wondering where he's been because the television program Dalli Dalli is about to start. She asks whether something happened.

No. What could possibly have happened?

And the chorus returns: he has still never been to New York, never been to Hawaii, never really been free. The fantasy of escaping every constraint remains exactly that: a fantasy.

And perhaps that's why the song still gets me every time.

Because most of us have had that moment.

Not necessarily I want to leave my family and never come back.

But What if I just kept walking?

What if, for once, I didn't do what was expected of me? What if I left the routine, the obligations, the expectations, and simply disappeared?

Of course, the man in Udo Jürgens' song goes home. The cigarettes are in his pocket, Dalli Dalli is about to start, and tomorrow everything will be exactly as it was today.

He was never really going to New York.

But what if someone actually did keep walking?

Tomorrow, I'll tell you about a phenomenon I recently discovered in Japan, where “I just want to disappear” isn't necessarily just a thought.

PS: Back in the 1970s, Dalli Dalli was the legendary German Thursday-night game show that seemingly the whole nation gathered around the television to watch; the kind of appointment TV you simply didn't miss.