Dear Augustin
Augustin was a happy ballad singer who toured Vienna‘s inns entertaining people with jokes, songs and funny stories. He played his bagpipes to help people forget their fear of that strange illness that killed so many of them every day.
The Viennese loved him dearly because of his humour and happiness, they called him Lieber Augustin (Dear Augustin), but even he became sad when fewer and fewer people came to the inns to listen to him. One night he drowned his sorrow in wine and in his drunken state he was unable to walk home properly; he fell in the gutter and went to sleep. It should be remembered that undertakers used to go round the city in those times to pick up the dead from the streets to take them to the mass graves outside the city walls. The drunken Augustin was mistaken for a dead man, picked up and dumped in the nearest mass grave. But Augustin wasn‘t dead, so he was very shocked when he woke up and found himself among all the corpses. As the grave was very deep and the walls to high for him to climb out himself, he started to play his bag pipes as loud as he could to attract the attention of the undertakers when they came round to dump another load of corpses. Luckily, the next undertaker heard him playing and was very surprised to find someone still alive and shouting for help. He was immediately rescued from this dreadful place and was very lucky to remain healthy despite his terrible close contact with the deadly disease. He then told people in his songs about his dreadful experience and they loved him all the more for that. We still all know how to sing his song: “Oh, du lieber Augustin, alles is hin, Geld is hin, Mensch is hin, oh du lieber Augustin, alles is hin“. (Which goes like this: “Oh, dear Augustin, al is gone, money is gone, man is gone, oh, dear Augustin, all is gone“).
