Ubi sunt

The question Ubi sunt, "Where they are (at heart )? " Complete Ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo will carry you? "Where they are (at heart ) who were in the world before us? ", A formulaic recurring topos in preaching and poetry of the Middle ages, which serves to examples of past power or beauty, the transience to call the reader or listener of all earthly things in memory and to refer him to the afterlife than the destiny of man, who at times but also with nostalgic transfiguration the past and time-critical complaint about the presence connects.

The topos, which is similar also common in the Islamic tradition, represents the Christian Middle Ages is a variant of the Judeo-Christian vanitas motif and can already be found in the biblical book of Baruch preformed ( Bar 3:16-19 ):

The motif was first formed in the Middle Ages a commonplace in the field of preaching and then adopted widely in the Middle Latin and vernacular poetry. Even in the early modern period, particularly in the vanitas complaints of baroque poetry, it was still alive. The best-known medieval example is the later so-called Ballade des dames du temps jadis ( " Ballad of the ladies of yesteryear " ) out of the will ( 1462 ) of the poet François Villon, the forms there together with two similar ballads to great men of the past, a triad ( Test. 329-412 ) and by her at the end of each stanza recurring refrain corn ou sont les neiges d' antan ( " But where are the snows of yesteryear? " ) has coined remains today a common proverbial saying. More examples can be found in student songs, so in the early versions of Gaudeamus Igitur since the 13th century as O old Burschenherrlichkeit and its different versions and parodies.

In more recent times about Pete Seeger used in his ( late 1950s ) eliminate anti-war song Tell me where the flowers are such a motive, in turn, Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov borrowed it from the novel, where it in the form of a quotation Ukrainian from a folk song emerges.