Über sieben Brücken musst du gehn

The famous line came from a short story before it was a song. In 1975 the writer Helmut Richter wrote a love story about an unhappy relationship between a Polish man and a German woman, whose heroine, Gitta, keeps returning to the idea that you must cross seven bridges, a thought that holds both her grief and her hope. East German television bought the story in 1976, Richter wrote the screenplay, and director Hans Werner suggested Ed Swillms, keyboard player and main composer of the band Karat, for the music. Richter's line became the title song. Swillms later said he stared at the lyric for two weeks before it suddenly let itself be set to music, and that it had to be recorded between eight and ten in the morning in a cramped outside-broadcast van grandly called the Europa-Studio Grünau. The film aired on 30 April 1978, and that same day viewers from both German states phoned the studio asking where they could buy the song. Karat won the Grand Prix at the Dresden song festival with it, and the single reached second place in the GDR's annual chart. In 1980 Peter Maffay heard it on the radio, visited Karat at a concert in Wiesbaden and asked to record it. His version, with a new saxophone solo, became even better known, partly because the East German culture ministry would not let Karat appear on West German television. After 1990 the two acts sang it together, on stage and on record. A song from the East became a shared German classic.