679. Germany: The Song Hitler Stole (Part 3)

19:23Dominic Sandbrook:Yes. Or the Merz, because it's coming up in our next episode. So, there's the Merz, runs down from the Netherlands into France. Then the next one is die Memel. This is the River Niemann, we would call this now. So, that's kind of Poland, Lithuania kind of area. uh the edge is the adige that's in italy and the last one and in belt the belt the little belt is a danish strait off the coast of jutland now you might look at that and say what what's going on here yeah hoffman wants to construct this vast empire that um that that includes other people's rivers what's he thinking actually what he's thinking is this there was no germany at this point the map is very fluid he's looking at the map and saying well there's kind of german speakers that way that way that way it's just a sort of very vague ideal of roughly where germany is it's absolutely not an irredentist kind of gabrielle denuncio style program it's a bit menacing for the danes i mean the danes at this point could console themselves that they actually exist whereas the germans don't sure but i mean it's that you have poets coming up and kind of menacing you with lyrics.

20:37Dominic Sandbrook:I think you're only saying that because you're aware of what happened subsequently. So at the autumn of 1841, the song is finished and it's first performed on the night of the 5th of October. We know exactly when. There's a liberal politician from Baden called Karl Wecker and he's visiting Hamburg where Hoffman and his mates are. Hoffman and his mates, who are from a local choir, they go to this bloke's hotel. They sing songs outside by torchlight. Of course they do. Annoying if Karl Wecker wants to get some sleep, I suppose. Anyway, one of them is this song, The Song of the Germans. Is it a massive hit?

21:10Dominic Sandbrook:No, it doesn't really catch on. It's actually reprinted in some student songbooks. But unlike, say, The Star Spangled Banner, which we did last week, or God Save the King, which we also did last week, this is not an overnight hit by any means. People aren't running around the streets singing it or something. The next year, Hoffman loses his job as a professor in Breslau because the Prussian authorities say this bloke's a dangerous subversive with his long hair and his hymns. Get rid. Do you think they've been nobbled by the Danes? Surely. Definitely. So he's sent off. He goes off into exile in Switzerland.

21:44Dominic Sandbrook:Six years later, revolution sweeps across Central Europe. We did an episode about this a couple of years ago. This is 1848. In 1848 with Professor Sir Christopher Clarke. And for a brief moment, it looks as though all the German states are going to be united in a liberal, federal, you know, super state. There's a lovely flag, a tricolor of black, red, and gold. But it doesn't happen. The Austrian and Prussian monarchists fight back. They suppress the revolution. Hoffman ends up being pardoned. He never gets to see his name in lights. He becomes very boringly, he becomes the librarian to the Duke of Rattibor.

22:21Dominic Sandbrook:No one wants that. And he dies in obscurity in 1874.

22:26Tom Holland:Can I just ask one question? So this kind of irredentist list that you say isn't irredentist? Yeah. Is Austria part of this? Is he kind of ambitious to see Austria become part of Germany?

22:38Dominic Sandbrook:Well, if you think that the Adige, which is in Italy, that would imply that Austria would become part of this. Yes. And I don't forget, until the advent of Bismarck, it's not clear that Germany will not include Habsburg, Catholic, Austria. In fact, there are lots of people going right into the 20th century who think that Austria should be part of Germany.

22:59Tom Holland:And so if that's the case, is his kind of appropriation of the Austrian anthem a way of saying, well, what is good for Austria is good for all Germans, do you think?

23:08Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I think possibly. I think people would recognise it by this point as an Austrian anthem. But don't forget, we've already said there were different composers who had written versions of it. So it's sort of gone viral, I suppose, and is being adapted. But yeah, I think people would, in Germany, let's say in Hamburg, when they're first singing it by Torchlight, no one says, hold on, this is an Austrian anthem. I think they think it's completely reasonable that Germany would have, you know, that a song about the Germans would have an Austrian tune because the Austrians, of course, are part of the German family.

23:37Dominic Sandbrook:That's what they think. Understood. Anyway, by the time he dies in 1874, Germany has become a reality. It is not the liberal federation that he and his friends envisaged. It's been created by Prussia and particularly by Prussia's minister president Otto von Bismarck with his policy of blood and iron. so actually what the Prussians have done they fight three wars in six years against Denmark the Danes again Tom Denmark Austria and France and what they do is they weld together all the German states except Austria in one empire so there are 25 different states of this empire and the overall emperor is the king of Prussia and the king of Prussia yeah doesn't Prussia have

24:23Tom Holland:our own beloved national anthem, or at least it did for a time. It had the tune of God Save the Queen as its anthem.

24:31Dominic Sandbrook:Yes, it does. So the Prussians do not adopt the sing of the Germans. They see it as part of the failed, long-haired liberal experiments of the 1840s. The Prussians have their own anthem they don't share with the other parts of the empire. It's just the Prussian anthem. And you're absolutely right. The anthem is called Heil der im Siegerkranz. hail to thee in the victor's crown and it is a direct ripoff of god save the king so it goes

25:05Dominic Sandbrook:and so on and so forth they sing it better than i do it is not popular outside prussia and the southern kingdoms of bavaria and wörtenberg they're part of the empire but they still have their own kings they want nothing to do with this anthem they just see it as prussian rubbish so actually the song that is much more popular across the kaiser's germany is another song which is called die wacht am rhein the watch on the rhine so this come is similar vintage it comes from 1840 but it's not a sort of long-haired liberal song at all it's a much more militaristic song so in 1840 there was a brief panic that the french were going back to their old tricks and they were going to invade and seize the Rhineland and a poet another poet though not a sort of um not not quite not a pacifist poet a manly poet a manly poet with the excellent name of Max Schneckenberger wrote a poem and he called on all patriotic Germans to make sure no enemy ever sets his foot on the shore of the Rhine so the chorus in English dear fatherland put your mind at rest, firm and true stands the watch, the watch on the Rhine.

26:19Dominic Sandbrook:And because it's militaristic and because it is anti-French, soldiers sing it in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. It becomes a massive hit in Germany. Bismarck loves it and he gives Schneckenberger's widow an annual pension. So if Germany has an anthem at this point, it's probably closer to being the watch on the Rhine. meanwhile the song of the germans people have kind of forgotten about it by this point to quote michael geisler it's moldering away in the basement of a hamburg publishing house which is nothing not a fate anyone would welcome but then it's again the british the british re-enter the story so it's an interaction with the british that revives it in july 1890 britain and germany sign a treaty to swap some territory.

27:07Dominic Sandbrook:So the British get Zanzibar and a bit of Kenya. The Germans get another bit of East Africa and they get Heligoland. I'm really sad about that. You'd like Heligoland to still be British? I'd have loved to have kept it, yeah.

27:20Tom Holland:What would you do with it? I would make a massive naval base.

27:26Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, that would have been fun in the First World War.

27:27Tom Holland:I'd menace the Baltic and the German coast. You'd blockade Lübeck or something. You see, I feel Britain got the worst of that deal. You don't rate Zanzibar, clearly, which is sad.

27:37Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, it's a bit far away, isn't it? I guess so. The Heligoland is colder, but I can imagine you going there for some sort of seaside break. A bracing walk. Bracing walking holiday. Exactly. Anyway, Heligoland has been lost to Britain, which is sad for you. There's an official ceremony to mark its incorporation to the German Empire. and the organizers of the ceremony say well ideally could there be a song written in Heligoland that celebrates German unity. Menacing the Danes perhaps? And they scout around in the basement of this Hamburg publishing house and guess what? They blow the dust off it.

28:15Dominic Sandbrook:Unbelievable! Such a song exists. So they sing it at the ceremony and now it starts to catch on and it's played in the 1890s and student groups start to sing it and whatnot. Not everybody liked it so Nietzsche, I know you're very interested in Nietzsche. Nietzsche hated the German anthem. Did he kind of want a Wagner opera or something? Go on for seven hours. I think what he didn't like about it, he just thought it was bass and philistine. Well, it is. I mean, that's the point, isn't it? Yeah, I suppose. He didn't approve of the nationalism of the late 19th century. He kind of gave up his German citizenship.

28:50Dominic Sandbrook:He did. Exactly. Exactly. So that's the first moment that enshrines it. The second moment we actually already mentioned on the show. So Germany entered the First World War on the 1st of August 1914 And on the trains, the Prussian soldiers, when they go to war They're singing Heil der im Siegekrant Now unfortunately, this has the same tune as God Save the King So it's not appropriate So it's like the England fans booing Liechtenstein, exactly So the Prussians actually did get a composer called Hugo Kaun To write a new tune, but it didn't really catch on And meanwhile, the lot of people are singing The Watch on the Rhine.

29:31Dominic Sandbrook:So to quote one old soldier's memoir of the First World War, he's on his way to the front and he says, For the first time I saw the Rhine as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend this, the German stream of streams from the greed of the old enemy. He means the French. The old watch on the Rhine roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky. I felt as if my heart would burst.

29:55Tom Holland:And Dominic, who is this old German soldier? Are you about to pull a trick that you have been known to play before?

30:02Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, it's a trick. So this is testing listeners whether they listen to our original First World War series. Because this kindly old soldier is actually the worst man in history. It's Adolf Hitler. So Hitler remembers singing the watch on the Rhine on the train. And then they get to the front. And there's a scene again that we mentioned in our First World War series. Hitler says as he goes into action from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears coming closer and closer blah blah blah the song reached us and we passed it along Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles, über alles in der Welt and what he's doing as we talked about before is Hitler is repeating one of the great German legends of the First World War the story of the Kindermord the idea at this place at Langermark in November 1914 student volunteers go into action in heavy fog They're moaned down by the British and they are singing the song of the Germans.

30:57Dominic Sandbrook:And this was reprinted in loads of German newspapers at the time. There's probably an element of truth in it because there are accounts by British and French soldiers saying they remember people doing this. And of course, we've already said it's not a militaristic song. And I think this is what makes that story so powerful. Because they're singing an idealistic song about their love of the idea of Germany. It's Germany above all else.

31:24Tom Holland:It's students, isn't it, as well? So again, a kind of link back to that dreamy philosophical age.

31:31Dominic Sandbrook:It's a much more powerful story because it's this utopian, idealistic song than if it had been the Wash on the Rhine or a song about the emperor of Prussia or whatever. Yeah, it's doomed youth. Doomed youth, exactly. Anyway, as everybody knows, Germany loses the First World War. The Kaiser's overthrown. The empire's abolished. You've got the new Weimar Republic takes power. Germany is humiliated. It's been dismembered. Everybody's very embittered. Bled of reparations and all kinds of things. Reparations, the Treaty of Versailles, exactly. The new leaders are trying to find symbols around which Germany can unite.

32:12Dominic Sandbrook:One obvious one is the flag. So there are flag wars, flag controversies all the way through the 20s. People can't agree on what flag to fly. If you're on the right, you want the old flag, which is black, white, and red. If you're on the centre, on the left, you go with the government-approved flag, which is the black, red, gold flag of 1848. That's the flag that Germans have today. But the first president of the Weimar Republic, who is a social democrat, he's Friedrich Ebert, he says, look, well, we've got to give the Conservatives something. If they're not going to get the flag, we've got to give them something.

32:48Dominic Sandbrook:I want to have the army on board. You know, I don't want them against me. And so on the third anniversary of the Weimar Constitution in August 1922, he decided to give them the song that had played such a key part in that story about the trenches, the Kindermord story, the story about the students being shot. So this, of course, is the song of the Germans. And in his speech announcing it, actually, he doesn't talk about the first verse, Deutschland über alles. He talks about the third verse, which is the one Germans sing today. And he says in his speech, unity and right and freedom in times of internal fragmentation and oppression.

33:26Dominic Sandbrook:This triad from the poet song voiced the longing of all Germans. Let it accompany us now on our arduous path to a better future. So basically, he thinks everyone can unite around this song. There's something here for the liberals. There's something here for the conservatives because of its First World War associations. and, you know, it will smooth the path towards a better Germany. And how does that work out? That doesn't work out well. So he dies of appendicitis in 1925. He's succeeded by Paul von Hindenburg, Prussian Walrus. He hates the Social Democrats. He doesn't really believe in the Weimar Republic.

34:04Dominic Sandbrook:And in January 1933, as so many of our listeners will know, Hindenburg appoints us his new chancellor, the man who wrote that memoir about singing Deutschland über alles going into battle and that man is of course the worst man in history adolf hitler so after the

34:21Tom Holland:break uh we will find out what happens to germany's national anthem under the nazis and whether the nazis have any other anthems that they might like to see adopted um we will then investigate the strange story of east germany's communist anthem um and also the anthem we've already mentioned that was written by Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright. And Dominic, we will explore just why the German anthem remains controversial to this day. So lots to look forward to. See you soon.

34:58Dominic Sandbrook:This episode is brought to you by The Times and The Sunday Times. Tom, as another summer of top international football returns, it's truly incredible isn't it to think about how much the world has changed between the various

35:12Tom Holland:tournaments looking back to when uh england hosted back in 1966 everyone in the crowd supporting england were waving union jacks so yeah what fascinating trends does that illustrate and i

35:24Dominic Sandbrook:suppose the last time the united states hosted the tournament was in 1994 and the mood in america in the early 1990s you know the cold war was over clinton was in the white house i was there for I was in Boston. Really? I mean, that's an aspect of the story that's very rarely reported on your presence. I know. So you know what this reminds me of, Tom? It reminds me that the future is always uncertain. You never know what's coming, but the facts need not be uncertain. And when the world feels like it's moving too fast, the Times and the Sunday Times empower you to make smarter, more confident decisions.

35:58Tom Holland:Click or tap the banner now to learn more or visit thetimes.com.

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37:45Tom Holland:Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest is History. It is January 1933 and Adolf Hitler has just been appointed the chancellor of Germany. And Dominic, as everyone will know, Hitler despises the Weimar Republic. He wants to tear it to pieces. But what is he to do about this anthem, the song of the Germans, which was adopted only 11 years earlier and which he had heard being sung by doomed students on the Western Front? So on the downside, it's Weimar. On the positive side he associates it with german heroism fighting the enemy yes it's meaning

38:24Dominic Sandbrook:is ambiguous isn't it and hitler doesn't scrap it even though it's associated with the weimar republic actually you can see why those opening words deutschland deutschland uber alles germany above everything yeah you can reinterpret it right yeah even though hoffman meant them differently if you're a Nazi, they fit your creed quite nicely. So the Nazis do keep it as a national anthem, but there's a tweak. So I mentioned before the break, Friedrich Ebert, when he adopted the anthem in 1922, said, let's sing the third verse, unity and right and freedom. The Nazis say, forget the third verse. Let's go for the first.

39:04Dominic Sandbrook:Let's sing that first verse, Germany above all. And of course, it's very effective. If you're a German nationalist, if you see the opening of the Berlin Olympics, Hitler comes in to a stadium full of thousands of people singing Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber, Alice. If you're a nationalist, this is classic Nazi theatre. Your heart sings with the sound of it. but there is a complication because this is not the only song that the nazis want you to sing by this point by the berlin olympics the song of the germans is competing with an anthem that is much dearer to the nazis hearts and this is a song called the horst vessel lead which was written in 1929 by the paramilitary stormtrooper commander horst vessel and tom you know a lot about this guy don't you i don't mean that's an indictment of you i mean yeah as a tribute to your scholarship

40:03Tom Holland:he features in dominion i have to say that's why i know about it yeah um so we we talked about him in the series we did on the rise of the nazis so i can't remember what episode it is but it's there somewhere yeah so just to say he was a berlin law student he was enthusiastic nazi he was a brown shirt he was an anti-communist who would lead members of his squad through the streets of Berlin, beating up Reds and all of that. And he is shot dead by communist paramilitaries in 1930. He's only 22. There's been a big argument about his girlfriend, who is also a prostitute, and there's to do with the rent and all kinds of things like that.

40:42Tom Holland:So it's all very squalid and not remotely heroic. But Goebbels isn't going to be worried by something like that. He completely rewrites the story turns vessel into this kind of martyr and vehicle for nazi pr and then when the nazis come to power in 1933 he turns him into a national figure the kind of the embodiment of the good nazi yeah the almost divine figure who um other germans should aspire to yes

41:12Dominic Sandbrook:exactly right and part of this is the song vessel had written songs himself marching songs yeah for Or when they're kind of marching through Berlin. Exactly.

41:20Tom Holland:Kind of roughing up the Reds.

41:21Dominic Sandbrook:And it actually had one published in a Nazi paper. And this is it. Die Fahner hoch, die Reihenfest geschlossen. Es aar marschiert mit ruhig festem schritt. Raise the flag, the ranks tightly closed. The SA marches with calm and steady step. And he borrowed the tune from a naval song, the Königsberg lead, which had been popular in the First World War. So it's a classic example. We've had this already multiple times in this national anthem series of people taking a familiar tune because they know that will get them a better audience. The Nazis love this song. They sing it at rallies. Whenever you go to a beer hall, people are singing it.

42:02Dominic Sandbrook:It's their answer to the Internationale of the communists. And Hitler made it official in 1933. It was declared as a national symbol. and then in 1934 there was a government edict that basically whenever it was played you had

42:15Tom Holland:to give the nazi salute well you know it it literally becomes an anthem because the protestant churches pick it up and they sing it on kind of reformation day it's incredible isn't it yeah it's

42:27Dominic Sandbrook:kind of sanctified yeah i saw that detail they sang it in churches and i just thought well the protestant churches some of them are so close to nazism aren't they they're kind of ring wraith churches yeah yeah anyway uh it becomes the musical emblem of the third reich so if you were to go onto youtube and watch some random documentary bbc documentary about um the nances there's undoubtedly a point where it's playing in the background and there's people marching

42:55Tom Holland:in torch lights or something yeah kind of fair head uh members of the hitler youth beaming exactly

43:02Dominic Sandbrook:so when germany loses the war in 1945 both the tune of the horst vessel lead and the lyrics were banned and they're banned to the extent that in 2011 there was a police investigation into amazon and apple and both of them had to take it down from their websites and there was a court ruling in the german supreme court or whatever in 2009 ruled that you cannot even put the first words, die Fahner Hoch, on a T-shirt. You can't wear a T-shirt with the first three words of the Horst vessel lead. It is seen as so toxic.

43:36Tom Holland:So as a German national anthem, that's a busted flush.

43:39Dominic Sandbrook:Yes. Yeah, chances of becoming the post-war anthem are nil, are precisely nil. So yeah, we've got to 1945. Germany devastated, defeated. This is what the Germans call Stunde null, zero hour. and as lots of listeners will know, Germany was divided into four occupation zones. The Soviet zone in 1949 became East Germany and we'll come to East Germany in a second but for now we'll stick with the three Western zones which in May 1949 had become the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany. So West Germany, the people who run West Germany have a very complicated and conflicted attitude to German history.

44:20Dominic Sandbrook:On the one hand, West Germany, it claims a fundamental continuity with earlier German states. So the West German leadership say we are tracing our lineage back to the 19th century, to all those long-haired poets, to the 1848 revolutions, to a buried tradition of German idealism. Yeah. On the other hand, West Germanist politicians say, well, 1945 is a great break and a chance for a completely new beginning. The Weimar Republic was a failure. The Third Reich was a criminal aberration. All previous political constitutional arrangements are null and void. We have a totally clean slate and we are starting again from scratch.

45:01Dominic Sandbrook:Now, that's not quite how it works because obviously the flag, they dust down the old 1848 flag. And then there's the anthem. And right from the start, people on the sort of centre-right of German politics, so Christian Democrats. So like Adenauer, the first chancellor. Yeah, like Conrad Adenauer. They say, let's have the Song of the Germans. Let's have the, you know, work for the Weimar Republic. It was popular in the 1840s. Perfect. But a lot of people say, no, it's too tainted. It was the official anthem during the Third Reich. You can't have it. So to start with, they have no anthem at all because they can't agree.

45:39Dominic Sandbrook:and when they have public events they will often play Beethoven's Ode to Joy which of course has words by the playwright Schiller so there's that at other official events madly they play a carnival song called the Tri-Zone easier song and this is written by a jokester from Cologne so Aliyah our producer is from Cologne this guy's from Cologne too and he was called Karl burbauer a german jokester german funster he wrote it for the cologne carnival at the end of 1948 and the great joke here is that with germany having been divided into different parts west germany is made up of three of these three zones and so they all live in this made-up tri-zone easier oh yeah very good and the chorus it's the most west german thing imaginable so when i picture West Germany, I picture people in the beer hall in 1972 laughing and slapping their thighs as they, you know, as they turn out Audis and BMWs.

46:39Dominic Sandbrook:In my imagination, they're singing this, because this is the song. We are the natives of Tri-Zonesia. Heidi shimmela, shimmela, shimmela bum. We have maidens with fiery wild natures. Heidi shimmela, shimmela, shimmela bum. We may not be cannibals but we kiss all the better for it we are the natives of trisonesia heidi shimala shimala shimala bum does it have a comedy tune undoubtedly surely an umper band that's what it is i would imagine yeah now this song starts as a joke and actually people start to they think it's serious they start playing it seriously i mean callum says quite correctly that it would win eurovision it totally would win eurovision it's a very 70s eurovision though i think yeah yeah banger banger boom actually so they hosted a cycle race in in cologne curl in 1949 and this was played as the german and a lot of german politicians just said this is such i mean we've disgraced ourselves recently in in multiple ways yes with the whole fascism thing with the nazism business but this is this is almost as bad this is terrible this is even worse and the chancellor of west Germany, Conrad Adenauer, who was a former mayor of Cologne.

47:53Dominic Sandbrook:So he basically had, you know, this was personal for him. He gave a press conference in April, 1950. And he said to the press, several Belgian military personnel were present in uniform and eventually the national anthems were played. The band struck up this lovely carnival song. Numerous Belgian soldiers stood up and saluted, believing it to be the national anthem. And Adenauer said, this isn't shaming for Germany. Like, come on, bring back the song on the Germans. This is nonsense. This is shimmelah, shimmelah, shimmelah bum business. And actually, polls showed that it adds an aspect for the majority.

48:28Dominic Sandbrook:So seven out of 10 people in the early 50s said, come on, we want the old one back. The problem, though, was that the president of Germany was a guy called Theodor Hoist, and he was a liberal, free Democrat. And he said, no way, that's a Nazi song. You can't have that back. And he actually commissioned his own rival song called A Hymn to Germany by a Protestant hymn writer, which was very dull. Land of faith, German land, land of fathers and heirs, land of faith, German land. It just goes on and on like that. And that never caught on. Adenauer campaigned and campaigned for the Song of the Germans.

49:03Dominic Sandbrook:He used to get people to sing it at rallies, which was very controversial. And finally, after a massive standoff, he wrote to this bloke, Hoist, the president. He said, this has gone on much too long. I'm sick of this now. I'm formally, officially asking you, approve das Lied der Deutschen as our national anthem. And Hoyst, the president, cracked and he said, all right, fine, as long as we can sing only the third verse, not the first two. It's often thought the first two are banned. They're not banned, actually. It's a convention that you don't, you know, it starts as a convention that you don't sing them.

49:38Tom Holland:So by this point, they're worried about the sexism angle as well as the whole.

49:41Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I think so.

49:42Tom Holland:kind of conquering people misinterpretation.

49:44Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, the sort of ha-ha-ha German wine and women and song. I think wine, women and song, if you're a woman, it's kind of, are you going to sing that with joy? I mean, surely not. At the time, when the news got out that they were adopting the old anthem, a lot of the foreign press, you can imagine what people made of this in our own dear country, they were displeased. They said, oh, they're Germans, they haven't changed. They're back at it again. Yeah. First, you know, one minute they're bringing back the old anthem, the next they're marching into Poland. Yeah. And the first big flashpoint, actually, since this is a series tied to the World Cup, it comes at the World Cup.

50:17Dominic Sandbrook:So some people may remember this from when we did a series about the history of the World Cup tournament back in 2022. The World Cup was held in Switzerland in 1954. And the big favourites were Hungary, who hadn't lost for 32 games. They played West German in the final. This was the first exhibition of the Germans' irritating habit of making implausible comebacks from the brink of defeat. The Hungarians went 2-0 up after eight minutes, and the Germans came back to win 3-2. And this was a massive moment in the cultural history of West Germany. The historian Joachim Fest calls it the true birth of the country, no less.

50:55Dominic Sandbrook:And when the German captain Fritz Walter went up to collect the World Cup trophy, a Swiss band starts playing the German national anthem. And the German fans in the crowd, who had been drinking, of course, start to sing the first verse, Deutschland über alles. Oh, yeah, the menacing one. And it is said that, now this is very much a sort of ancient history, it is said that Swiss radio was so shocked they cut the broadcast. I don't know whether that's actually true because the only source for that is football journalism written in the 1990s.

51:32Tom Holland:Or from the Swiss, perhaps, trying to pretend that they were braver in standing up for the Germans than they actually were.

51:38Dominic Sandbrook:The Swiss would never do that. Have the Swiss any history of doing that? Surely not. Anyway, the fact that they've been singing the wrong words, the old words, is reported in the world's press. And what is then worse, the president of the German Football Association, Pico Bauens, who was a former member of the Nazi party, gave a celebratory speech in a Munich beer hall. I mean, Jesus, all the places to give a celebratory speech. And he said, brilliant, we've won the World Cup. Our players were inspired by Wotan and Thor and all this. And the West German president we've already met, Theodor Heuss, he was appalled by this.

52:18Dominic Sandbrook:and actually at the official public celebrations at the Olympic Stadium, which were attended by 80 ,000 people in Berlin, West Berlin, he publicly reprimanded the head of the German FA and then he said he read out the third verse of the anthem, Einig, Keiten, Rechtern, Freiheit, and he said, this is our anthem. I want the whole stadium to sing it. And do they sing it? Yeah, which they did.

52:42Tom Holland:Because that's always risky, asking a load of football fans to sing a particular song. I mean, you're kind of asking for trouble.

52:49Dominic Sandbrook:And never, ever. Anyone who's been to a football match knows that asking the crowd to do anything never, ever works. Now, I'll tell you who's watching this with glee. That is West Germany's neighbours in East Germany. Of course they would be, wouldn't they? Because the East Germans have always said the Federal Republic, West Germany, is basically the Third Reich and the cuddlier guys. And they say, well, this is the proof. So one paper in East Berlin said, Oh, well, our neighbours have let the cat out of the bag. They're just the Nazis. When fascists start singing Deutschland über alles in the Horstwessel song, that has nothing to do with sport, but to do with death.

53:28Tom Holland:But they're not singing the Horstwessel song.

53:29Dominic Sandbrook:No, I think that's untrue.

53:30Tom Holland:That's a massive exaggeration.

53:31Dominic Sandbrook:That's a massive exaggeration. It's very unfair. They didn't sing the Horstwessel song at all.

53:35Tom Holland:And I mean, unless the head of the German FA was doing it in his beer hall when he wasn't toasting Woten out of a skull, no doubt.

53:42Dominic Sandbrook:That would definitely have been reported if he had. I mean, it would have been so punchy for them to have sung the horse first song after winning the World Cup in the 50s, and they didn't do it. I mean, I want to stress they didn't do it. Now, of course, the East Germans have a different song at this point. They have adopted a new anthem with none of the shilly-shallying in weak democratic West Germany. This is the great positive, Tom, are living in a totalitarian dictatorship. You can decide instantly. so within three days of the foundation of east germany in october 1949 the president who was a stalinist called wilhelm peak he set the ball rolling he commissioned a text from somebody he'd known in exile in moscow who was an avant-garde poet there's a lot of poets in this johannes becker no relation to boris no relation to boris and the title of the new anthem was alfershtanden aus Ruinen.

54:36Dominic Sandbrook:And the opening lines in English, from the ruins newly risen to the future turned we stand. Let us serve your welfare truly, Germany, our fatherland.

54:47Tom Holland:I mean, that's not kind of overtly communist, is it?

54:51Dominic Sandbrook:No, well, we'll come to this. The lyrics are not overtly communist. And actually, what's really interesting, just before we get to the lyrics, the tune is compatible with Haydn's tune. You could sing it to the old tune. They don't, though. They don't. They commissioned competing tunes by two guys who sang them. They put on performances at the Cultural Workers Club in East Berlin, and the Politburo voted. So kind of communist Eurovision. Communist Eurovision. And they voted for a tune by a guy called Hans Eisler. Eisler was a communist of very long standing. He'd been a member since he was 14. he'd been exiled this is a great great story actually the guy who wrote the East German Anthem had been exiled to the United States during the Third Reich he was accused when he was in America of being a Soviet agent was he?

55:46Dominic Sandbrook:in sort of McCarthyism I think he probably a bit was because he was a communist probably was a bit yeah he was a Stalinist they called him the American press called him the Karl Marx of music I like that surely that's Billy Bragg isn't it he was he was put on a hollywood blacklist and he was deported well he's a communist of course he was put on a hollywood blacklist yeah but deported is harsh i mean he literally was a communist he literally was a communist you're right he was deported in 1948 right that's the that's the debit side on the credit side i'm just going to absolutely pin my colors to the mast my east german colors i think his anthem the east german anthem is an absolute all-time banger and for me and I know you'll say I hate Britain, but I'm just going to, I think there's only one better anthem and that's the anthem of the Soviet Union.

56:35Dominic Sandbrook:I think they are brilliant anthems. Madness. You do hate Britain. So a couple of interesting things about the anthem. First of all, Eisler said, I've written it as a humanistic anthem, nothing jazzy, nothing military. And nothing about mountains and lakes or anything like that? Not really, no. There were allegations that he ripped it off from an Austrian pop song from the 1930s. and actually the Austrian bloke took the case to the United Nations Copyright Commission but he didn't win.

57:03Tom Holland:And can I just ask what is the Austrian anthem by this point? Is it still the Haydn one or have they moved on from that?

57:09Dominic Sandbrook:No. So they had the Haydn tune right up to the Anschluss but then they dropped it when Austria was reborn in the 1940s and they adopted a very boring anthem called Land der Berge, Land Amstronmer, Land of the Peaks, Land by the Stream. So one of the generic geographical anthems. What a falling off was there. Yeah, exactly. Disappointing from the Austrians. But the other interesting thing about the East German anthem is it was designed not as the anthem of East Germany, but as the anthem of all Germany. Oh, right. Because at this point, the East Germans claim basically all Germany. And so the first verse explicitly mentions Deutschland einig Vaterland.

57:51Dominic Sandbrook:You know, I would love to hear this at the end of the episode. We will play it at the end of the episode because it is such a banger. Deutschland, a united fatherland. This is for Dominic Sandbrook, his favourite song. My Desert Island Disc Selection. Which one is it to be? Always these shaman, surely. There's nothing communist about the lyrics. You were right about that. So there's nothing about workers. There's nothing about peasants, that the word socialism never appears. There's nothing about class struggle. It's all kind of the shining sun, youth, peace, things that I stand for, Tom. Yeah.

58:22Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. No wonder you love it. Yeah. German youngsters laughing in the sunshine. That's what I'm all about. And actually, it was not controversial at the time. So this is a very unusual example of a national anthem that didn't provoke any controversy. The DDR, the East German authorities, made a great effort to push it. They played it in public. They put up banners with the lyrics. They made children sing it in school. But there's a historian, a German historian called Heike Amos, and she's looked into this and she says, all the evidence from party reports and stuff is that, you know, when people are reporting back, they said people actually love this anthem.

58:59Dominic Sandbrook:They can't get enough of it. It becomes a part of, an integral part of life in East Germany. And a much-loved part of it.

59:05Tom Holland:Yeah.

59:06Dominic Sandbrook:Like a Trabant. Like a state-sponsored week's holiday in some sand dunes. On the Baltic. While the stars watch you from behind a load of reeds.

59:16Tom Holland:That's less loved, isn't it? Yeah.

59:18Dominic Sandbrook:So in East Germany, you would do a ceremony when you were 14, This is when you became an adult and got your identity papers and pledged yourself towards the defense of socialism. It was called the Jüngendweier, Youth Consecration Ceremony. And you would have to sing all three verses of the East German anthem. So I would have enjoyed that. I would have very much enjoyed it. Anyway, there is a twist in the late 60s after the building of the Berlin Wall. It is obvious that East Germany's ambitions to become all Germany are going to be frustrated, basically because East Germany is terrible and everyone is trying to escape.

59:52Dominic Sandbrook:And then in the early 70s, both Germanys are admitted to the United Nations as separate states. And so about this point, the East Germans start to discourage people from singing this great anthem because they don't want people to think about Deutschland, Einig Vaterland, a united fatherland. Actually, what they're trying to do now in the 70s is to tell people, you know, the idea of a united Germany was always mad. East Germany has always been different. West Germany is full of Catholics. We've always been Protestant and Lutheran. We have our own separate traditions. We have our own cultural identity.

1:00:31Dominic Sandbrook:Let's stop singing this song about a united fatherland. So madly, they now have a situation where you do the anthem at school, you stand for it, it plays, but you are discouraged from singing. Oh, so they don't just replace it and come up with new lyrics or something? No, which they should have done. I mean, why not just change the words? I suppose because changing the words would mean some sort of admission that they'd been wrong, which they don't want to do. Yeah. So anyway, this is the position all the way through to the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are two anthems. There's the Song of the Germans in the West.

1:01:03Dominic Sandbrook:There's Aufmerstand und Aus Ruinen in the East. Then the Berlin Wall falls. The two Germans are going to be reunited. And the question is, which anthem are they going to pick?

1:01:12Tom Holland:Well, it's obvious, isn't it? I mean, they'll go with the West German one because the West German one's basically swallowing it.

1:01:16Dominic Sandbrook:No, that's not obvious. So, first of all, the Song of the Germans has been massively controversial all the way through in West Germany. Polls in the 70s and the 80s found that sort of lefty West Germans didn't like it. They said it's reactionary. It's a relic of Nazism. You know, if you're sort of Bader-Meinhof adjacent, you're not a fan of this anthem.

1:01:40Tom Holland:You have those kind of stickers with the smiley sun that's against nuclear power.

1:01:43Dominic Sandbrook:Completely. You're going on demonstrations against Pershing missiles, and you hate Ronald Reagan. 99 red balloons. Precisely. Meanwhile, on the right of West German politics, Christian Democrat politicians keep trying to sneak the old words back in. Deutschland über alles. They keep trying to get that first verse in. They love that first verse. Like Helmut Kohl trying to slip down another pig's knuckle. Exactly. Exactly. So every now and again, and this always happens in Baden-Württemberg, every now and again in Baden-Württemberg, there'll be a controversy because it'll turn out that some local politician has been trying to get schools to sing the first of the anthem.

1:02:29Dominic Sandbrook:And meanwhile, anti-nuclear green campaigners say he should be tarred and feathered as punishment. So there's that. Meanwhile, there's the issue that 17 million East Germans have been brought up to believe that the Song of the Germans is an evil capitalist relic of Nazism and militarism and stuff. So the last prime minister of East Germany, who was a guy who Lothar de Maizière, suggested a compromise. He said, well, do you know what? We can use our lyrics with your tune. Why don't we have Haydn's tune and the East German lyrics?

1:03:07Tom Holland:Yeah. I mean, that's quite a neat idea. It is a neat idea. And it's a kind of prefiguring of what we're going to be talking about in our last episode about South Africa.

1:03:16Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

1:03:17Tom Holland:Where there are similar agonized debates and actually a very effective compromise has arrived at it.

1:03:23Dominic Sandbrook:Very good compromise. Exactly. And the West Germans, Helmut Kohl, roused, you know, lifts himself from the gravy to say, no way. He says, no way. These are the lyrics of a, you know, a cruel dictatorship. We're never going to have the lyrics that were sung by the Stasi and the people who built the Berlin Wall. You can forget your lyrics. So at this point, Germanist intellectuals say, well, there is another song. And this is the song that we alluded to right at the beginning. but you said your friend likes, but we haven't mentioned. And this is a song written by Bertolt Brecht by one of Germany's best-known playwrights, one of Germany's best-known 20th-century intellectuals.

1:04:04Dominic Sandbrook:Brecht, in the 1950s, wrote this, and it's called the Kinderhymne, the children's anthem. And again, it's a sort of compromise because he wrote it in response to Adenauer's decision to bring back the old anthem in West Germany. and he had it set to music by the bloke who wrote the music, Eisler, the Karl Marx of music for East Germany. So if you look it up online, Brecht's children's anthem, you can see A, why people on the left love it and why everybody else thinks it's mad. Because basically it's massively self-flagellating. So the second verse explicitly says, our great hope is that other countries will no longer recoil from us in horror at our crimes.

1:04:50Tom Holland:I mean, we could have that. A lot of countries could have that.

1:04:53Dominic Sandbrook:Well, I think no country. It's very unusual to have a national anthem in which you flagellate yourselves. And the third verse says explicitly, Und nicht über, nicht unter, an den Wolken wollen wir sein. And not over and not under other nations will we be. But you know my favourite lines from it?

1:05:15Tom Holland:Go on. It may seem dearest to us, just as other people's countries seem dearest to them. I mean, those are banging lyrics. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, imagine that at the World Cup. Someone has a massively bombastic anthem, and then the Germans smugly sing, well, you know. Winner better than anybody else. Yeah, it may seem dearest to us, but doesn't everyone think that?

1:05:42Dominic Sandbrook:You're putting Paragrae on somebody, you have an incredibly strutting anthem about the glories of Asunzigen. And then the Germans sing, you know, we're very sorry, we behave poorly. Please don't recall from us in horror anymore. The end result of all this is they end up sticking with the Weimar anthem. That's the song of the Germans, third verse, Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit. So unity and right and freedom. And this becomes basically the motto of the reunited Germany. Those words, Einigkeits und Recht und Freiheit, they are printed on the belt buckles today of German soldiers. They are printed, they are engraved on the edge of every two euro coin that is minted in Germany.

1:06:25Dominic Sandbrook:But as with the first two anthems that we talked about, the arguments just do not go away. So in the late 1990s, the Green Party in Germany said, we've made a massive mistake. We should have Brecht's anthem after all. We should have the flagellating anthem. We cannot go on having a national anthem whose first verse is sung by the radical right and whose third verse is sung by conservatives. An anthem sung by conservatives, the horror. People still make this case today. But since this is a World Cup associated podcast, we'll just end with the 2006 World Cup because that, I think, is the key moment for Germany and its embrace of its anthem.

1:07:05Dominic Sandbrook:This was the first time that a united Germany had hosted the World Cup. And there was a big debate before the tournament about the anthem. And lots of commentators said, the problem we have is that the eyes of the world will be on us. Lots of people will not be singing the anthem. Der Spiegel, very prestigious German paper, said, a historic opportunity was missed back in the 50s because these verses no longer work today. Anyone who sings unity and justice and freedom knows that there are also two other undesirable verses. And in today's Germany, they sound about as modern as a teacher with a cane in a high school.

1:07:43Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway, the Spiegel was wrong because actually loads of Germans did sing the anthem and nobody complained at all. And the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle said after the tournament, the sight of the German team, their arms around one another as das Deutschlandlied, another way of putting the song of the Germans as the Germany song played was an emotional moment for many of us it seems that football has done what politics could never do, give a voice to a generation to whom patriotism is not a dirty word and maybe it's okay to be a German and proud of it after all.

1:08:14Tom Holland:Yeah, I mean the biggest controversy of that World Cup was all the wags going shopping. In Baden-Baden and distracting our brave boys from more important things like scoring penalties.

1:08:25Dominic Sandbrook:More bad behaviour in Baden-Württemberg everything that's terrible happens there exactly it all goes back to that doesn't it yeah agreed the wags let themselves down in that world cup i don't think they did i mean i enjoyed it posh spice but england should have won that world cup tom we had a good team we had a really good team and we just played abysmally the golden generation but as for the anthems my personal view is i think it's a good anthem the german anthem yeah i like it i think if i was german i would sing it with great enthusiasm. I mean, let's bear in mind it's written by a guy who loved

1:08:56Tom Holland:Nelson.

1:08:57Dominic Sandbrook:What's not to like?

1:08:58Tom Holland:Let's see the problem.

1:09:00Dominic Sandbrook:Just to remind people, next time the Netherlands and then next week Brazil and South Africa. But Tom, it would be remiss of us not to say at the very end that although the German anthem is good. It's not as good as East German. It's not as good as what they could have had.

1:09:19Tom Holland:So, ladies and gentlemen, Here it is, Dominic Sandbrook's Desert Island Disc. Take it away, Callum.

1:09:50Ein Rat, den Hut it fest zu singen, in es heat denn ziver weit. Et es muss uns auch gelingen,

1:10:04Dominic Sandbrook:dass die Sonne Schemini über Deutschland scheint. Über Deutschland scheint.

1:10:42CHOIR SINGS

1:10:46Dominic Sandbrook:of peace in the month the

1:11:22Thank you.

1:11:56Tom Holland:Hello, everybody. Now, as those of you who are good children will know, here in Britain, on the 21st of June, it's Father's Day.

1:12:06Dominic Sandbrook:But not just here in Britain. It's also Father's Day on the 21st of June in the United States, in Canada, and in the Republic of Ireland. So those are four countries that are united by dads who love to listen to The Rest is History.

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