The German fatherland

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What is the German Fatherland?

The German Fatherland is a political song that Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote in 1813 before the Battle of Leipzig .

Origin and text

Arndt wrote the underlying poem at the beginning of 1813 in Königsberg , when he was agitating on behalf of Freiherr vom Stein to raise the East Prussians against Napoleon (see East Prussian Landwehr 1813 ). Immediately thereafter, the poem was widely distributed in leaflets and in various print locations. Arndt and vom Stein came with the Russian army from St. Petersburg to Königsberg in January 1813, which moved further west from there and arrived in Berlin in March 1813, while the existing censorship against political writings was largely relaxed. On the occasion of the victory over Napoleon and the invasion of Blücher's troops in Paris, the song was performed for the first time in Berlin in 1814.

In the text of the song, Arndt first asks the German question and finally calls for a Greater German nation-state that should include all German-speaking countries or the German-speaking area of ​​Europe, including Austria and German-speaking Switzerland . One stanza shows anti-French tendencies, which can be traced back to its origin during the Napoleonic occupation ( French times ) and the wars of liberation directed against it.

music

The Jena student and fraternity member Johannes Cotta composed a melody for the poem in 1815, which was soon printed in many song books and thus ensured widespread circulation. Of the many settings of the song, that of Gustav Reichardt is best known today, which he published in a collection of men's quartets in 1826. Reichardt had remembered the tune when he and four friends had climbed the Schneekoppe . Later, the German Language Association had a memorial plaque attached to the chapel there. The German-Swiss composer Joachim Raff processed the melody in his first symphony in D major, op. 96, "To the Fatherland", which was written around 1860.

reception

The historian Thomas Vordermayer calls the underlying poem Arndt's best known. The song was popularized from 1815 onwards, mainly by being printed in books of Kommerslieder and rose to “patriotic folk song No. 1” , especially among the boys and gymnasts , which made it unpopular with restorative authorities such as the Prussian from the first half of the 19th century . The song was sung by the festival choir at the Hambach Festival in 1832 , for example , and its author was repeatedly used to evoke German-French enmity . From 1870 the song was replaced in this role by Die Wacht am Rhein .

When August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874) was in exile in 1843, he referred to it in his autobiographical song about the German foreigner . At the beginning, Hoffmann describes how as a boy he didn't want Austria or Prussia, but a united, large Germany. In exile in Switzerland, he sang in love and anger: / What is the German fatherland? / Only one Austria, one Prussia! / No trace of German freedom. "After the failed German Revolution , on April 28, 1849, he wrote the vicious parody to the melody of Gute Nacht, Gute Nacht, Schöne Anna Dorothee with the title Vetter Michel's fatherland :" Say, where is, say, where is cousin Michel's fatherland? [...] Where a state of siege is a right / And the people are an obedient servant / There is cousin Michel's fatherland! "

The historian Helmut Bock sees the text of the poem as a document for the "German-tumbling zeitgeist" of the time, "which broke with the cosmopolitan humanity ideas of the Enlightenment" and thus paradigmatically embodied the ideological change of the 19th century.

literature

  • Heinz-Gerhard Quadt: Adolf Pompe, Gustav Reichardt, Charles Voss - A contribution to music history in Pomerania. In: Contributions to the history of Western Pomerania. The Demminer Colloquia 1985–1994. Thomas Helms, Schwerin 1997, ISBN 3-931185-11-7 .
  • Sigrid Nieberle: "And God sings songs in heaven": On the precarious reception of Ernst Moritz Arndt's Des Deutschen Vaterland. In: Walter Erhart, Arne Koch (eds.): Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860). German Nationalism - Europe - Transatlantic Perspectives. German Nationalism - European Visions - American Interpretations (= studies and texts on the social history of literature. Vol. 112). De Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-092887-7 , pp. 121-136.
  • Helmut Bock : What is the German Fatherland? For the 200th year of commemoration: 1813. In: Das Blättchen . Volume 16, 2013, No. 21, October 14, 2013. Reprinted from: Napoleon and Prussia. Winner without a win. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2013.
  • Michael Sauer : What is the German Fatherland? In: Michael Sauer (2008): Historische Lieder , Seelze-Velber, pp. 69–74.

Web links

Wikisource: Liedtext in the "Allgemeine Deutsche Kommersbuch" (1858)  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Sigrid Nieberle: "And God sings songs in heaven": On the precarious reception of Ernst Moritz Arndt's Des Deutschen Vaterland. In: Walter Erhart, Arne Koch (eds.): Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860). German Nationalism - Europe - Transatlantic Perspectives. German Nationalism - European Visions - American Interpretations (= studies and texts on the social history of literature. Vol. 112). De Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-092887-7 , pp. 121-136, here p. 124 .
  2. ↑ On the historical circumstances of Karen Hagemann : Aus Liebe zum Vaterland. Love and hate in early German nationalism. In: Birgit Aschmann (Ed.): Feeling and Calculation. The influence of emotions on the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries (= historical reports of the Ranke Society . Supplements. Vol. 62). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 101–123, here p. 108. For the contextualization of Arndt's writing, see Jörn Leonhard : Bellizismus und Nation. Interpretation of war and determination of the nation in Europe and the United States, 1750-1914. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, pp. 261-264.
  3. ↑ What is the German Fatherland. In: Volksliederarchiv.de.
  4. ^ Thomas Vordermayer: The Reception of Ernst Moritz Arndt in Germany 1909/10 - 1919/20 - 1934/35. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 58, 2010, issue 4, pp. 483–508, here p. 499, fn. 90 (PDF) .
  5. ↑ Nils Grosch: Hail in the wreath! For staging the nation and the anthem. In: Michael Fischer, Christian Senkel, Klaus Tanner (eds.): Forging an Empire in 1871: event, description, staging. Waxmann, Münster, New York, Munich, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8309-2103-5 , pp. 90-103, here pp. 90 f.
  6. ↑ a b Helmut Bock : What is the German Fatherland? For the 200th year of commemoration: 1813. In: Das Blättchen . Volume 16, 2013, No. 21, October 14, 2013.
  7. ↑ "The Song of the German Foreigner". In: August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben: German street songs. Literarisches Comptoir, Zurich and Winterthur 1843, p. 33 ( online in the Google book search).