East Berlin in February, twenty degrees below
Hurrying figures hunched against the darkness and the snow
And I watched them file down Karl Marx Alley, queuing at the light
So they can cross the road and fade into the night
If I could only find the German I once learned from
the BBC
I could ask them: Are they happy? Are they free?
But only one phrase lingers on from lesson three
It remains in my brain like a lonely refrain
Like a song that has no ending and is sending me insane
And I say: Wo sind die Elefanten? Faces turn and stare
The question sparks no answer as it dies upon the air
Wo sind die Elefanten? No one wants to know
Or dares disturb the silence of the snow
And I thought I knew the answer long ago
The young man wears a party badge, a clenched fist in his head
And his speech marks out the future, and for him the future’s red
And I watch him as he builds a wall to keep the shadows out
From an ordered world that has no room for doubt
Does he believe the chants he marches to, the slogans and the lies?
Or does he calculate that that’s the way to rise?
And is that certainty he wears for a disguise?
And again in my brain there’s this lonely refrain
Like a song that has no ending and is sending me insane
And I say: Wo sind die Elefanten? What’s the latest news?
Are they doing tricks in circuses or locked in concrete zoos?
Wo sind die Elefanten? He doesn’t seem to know
Or won’t disturb the silence of the snow
And I thought I knew the answer long ago
Now the Berlin wall is crumbled like sand castles in the sea
And there’s been a revolution where it wasn’t meant to be
And I’ve watched the crowds on TV as if waking in the dawn
They see the old world dead, the new world not yet born
And are they bright with hopes of videos and dish-washing machines
Big Macs, cosmetics, polo magazines
And "Dallas" on their television screens?
And I hear everywhere: Cash is king, drop your share
in the corridors of choices; are there voices still
that dare to ask it?
Wo sind die Elefanten? Nomads roaming free
Once they ruled the continents from the mountains to the sea
Wo sind die Elefanten? No one wants to know
Or cares to break the silence of the snow
And I thought I knew the answer long ago
Once elephants roved Hampstead Heath; it’s still in my mind’s eye
I see them silhouetted against the eastern sky
With their trunks raised up in triumph to salute the rising sun
And then one day I woke and they were gone ...
Those strange fantastic creatures with their gentle caring ways
Too large to fit the landscape of these days
Where nothing is preserved unless it pays
But the poor are still poor and there’s greed and there’s war
And the muck is junk-house squalor that the dollar cannot cure
So tell me: Wo sind die Elefanten? Weeping for their dead
Circulating sadly round the dried-up river bed
Wo sind die Elefanten? Vanished with the snow
Were they just a dream of long ago?
A story for a child I used to know?