By skyforbes 
Walter Benjamin encounters TikTok
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Walter Benjamin diagnosed the fate of art in modernity: it had lost its “aura,” that sacred, unrepeatable quality bound to its original presence in time and space. In a world of reproduction, he wrote, art becomes political, mass-mediated, democratised — but also emptied of mystery. And yet, in the year 2025, Barbara and her Rhabarberbar (“rhubarb bar”) complicate this prognosis.
Born as a German tongue twister, reborn as an audio meme, and re-reborn as a TikTok dance performed by millions, Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar is less a single object than a layered constellation: a riddle, a rhythm, a body language, a loop. As Benjamin wrote of photography, each reproduction becomes a “picture of a picture.” But TikTok doesn’t stop there: it offers a picture of a reaction to a picture of a sound that references a joke that someone else is explaining. In the “Barbara” trend, we witness the collapse — and perhaps the rebirth — of aura through infinite iteration.
I. The Riddle: “Barbara saß in der Rhabarberbar…”
The trend’s anchor is a sound clip — a recitation of a traditional German tongue twister, remixed into a hypnotic beat. It begins:
Barbara saß in der Rhabarberbar. In der Rhabarberbar saß Barbara.
Barbara’s Bruder brachte Barbara Rhabarber in die Rhabarberbar.
Translation:
Barbara sat in the rhubarb bar. In the rhubarb bar sat Barbara.
Barbara’s brother brought Barbara rhubarb into the rhubarb bar.
The delight lies in its circular structure, the recurrence of “bar” and “rhubarb”, and the phonetic play that twists the tongue even in native German. As Benjamin noted, language contains magical traces — “mimesis” in the material of the word itself — and here, this old riddle embodies that idea. It’s performative, rhythmic, and almost nonsensical — ideal raw material for viral performance.
II. The Dance: Language as Choreography
Then came the dance, choreographed by TikTok creator (@itsalekox), who transformed the recitation into a sequence of literal gestures — pointing for “Barbara”, stirring for “Rhabarber”, gesturing “brother”, and miming delivery. It’s performative semiotics in motion: a physical grammar of nonsense.
Just as Benjamin saw the actor’s aura dissolve in the age of film, here the speaker’s authority is displaced by the dancer’s body. What matters is not who made the riddle, but how it moves. The dance becomes its language — one that you “speak” by repeating. And in doing so, you do not merely replicate: you cite, you participate, you insert yourself into the loop.
III. The Twist: The Original Creators Do the Dance
Then came the perfect recursion: the original voice actors (from the German children’s show Tigerenten Club) who had recorded the tongue twister years ago were found and filmed themselves dancing. They performed their viral echo, adding another Benjaminian fold: the original reenacts the copy of the copy of the original. Their aura, once embedded in the voice, returns through the body, decades later. It’s the “afterlife” of art, which Benjamin discussed in his Task of the Translator: not a fixed origin, but a living mutation.
IV. The Meme: Reactions and Duets and Stitchings
The trend metastasised. Creators around the world — many non-German-speaking — began posting reaction videos:
- One woman exclaims, “What are Germans even saying?”
- Another breaks down the alliteration with phonetic charts.
- One TikTok stitches five versions in a row and ranks them by “Barbara energy.”
In this realm, TikTok becomes a critical machine. Just as Benjamin imagined the reproducible artwork no longer as a singular sacred object but as a thing to be analysed, politicised, and mocked, TikTok makes commentary part of the artwork itself. You can no longer watch Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar without watching someone watching someone watching it.
V. The Explainers: Linguists and Language Nerds Join In
Soon, linguists and polyglots entered the scene. TikTok accounts like @multilingualmarie or @germanwithanja offered breakdowns:
- Why are compound nouns like Rhabarberbar typically German?
- How rhythm helps anchor phonemes in memory.
- Why is Barbara the perfect name phonetically for recursion?
Benjamin wrote that mechanical reproduction frees art from its ritualistic context. That is, once an artwork can be mass-produced, it can be studied like a machine, not worshipped like an idol. TikTok literalizes this: art becomes an object of explanation videos. It’s not just “fun” — it’s an open-source object of study.
VI. Reactions to Reactions: The Infinite Loop
And then comes the truly postmodern moment: reactions to the reactions to the responses.
- A TikToker dances while watching someone else fail to learn the dance.
- A German grandparent watches their granddaughter watch a meme about Germans being weird.
- Someone duets with the original creators dancing and cries, “This is cinema!”
Benjamin might’ve called this the “dialectical image”: a flash in which past and present collide. In these stacked reactions, we see time folding in on itself. The work has no origin anymore. Its meaning is in its movement, its echo, its collective reshaping.
VII. Conclusion: Barbara, Aura, and the Algorithmic Bar
Walter Benjamin never met TikTok, but his theories haunt it. He understood that modernity would dissolve the artwork’s sacred core — but he also hinted that something else might emerge: a democratic, participatory, iterative form. Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar is that form. It is performance as replication, as citation, as cultural play. The aura is no longer a divine glow — it’s a feedback loop. A bar. A rhubarb bar. One that Barbara still sits in, endlessly, eternally, algorithmically.
We cannot locate the “original” anymore. But that’s not the point. The point is that we keep repeating it, distorting it, dancing it. Because in this repetition — comedic, creative, chaotic — we don’t lose the art. We become it.