Heckerlied

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The Heckerlied is a revolutionary song from the Baden Revolution of 1848/1849. Friedrich Hecker tried to gather the revolutionaries in Baden with the Hecker procession starting from Konstanz in order to take the royal seat of Karlsruhe and then to be able to depose the grand ducal government. After this uprising was suppressed by Prussian and Hessian troops in the battle on the Scheideck on April 20, 1848, Hecker and most of the participants had to flee to Switzerland. He did not return to Baden, but immigrated permanently to the USA .

song lyrics

There are numerous different versions of the song.

The text of the following version of the song calls for the replacement of the existing rule in drastic terms. In the chorus there is almost always a hint that one is standing for a free German republic. Lines and passages like ... The nobleman hangs on the priest's bowels ... or ... smeared the guillotine with tyrant fat, tears the concubine out of the prince's bed ... testify to the determination of the rebels. Both the text and the melody are based on the student song Die Freie Republik , which was intoned in the so-called Frankfurter Wachensturm in 1833 on the occasion of the escape of six prisoners from prison at the Frankfurt Main Guard . It says in the last stanza, which is thus taken up again by the first stanza of the Heckerlied ... When people ask you: Where is Absalom? So you can say: Oh, he's already hanging. He doesn't hang on a tree or rope, but on the belief of the free republic .

The first to third of a total of six stanzas of a version of the Heckerlied are:

1. When people ask, is
Hecker still alive?
Can you tell them:
yes, he's still alive.

Refrain:
He's not hanging on a tree,
He's not hanging on a rope.
It only depends on the dream of
the German republic.

2. The blood of a prince must flow
thick with hailstones,
and from it the
free republic sprout .
Yes, thirty-three years
the bondage has been down
with the dogs
From the reaction!

3. Lubricate the guillotine
with tyrant fat !
Throw the concubine
out of the prince's bed!
Yes, thirty-three years
the bondage has been down
with the dogs
From the reaction!

Re-seals

In the second half of the 19th century, the song was part of the student songs as a “tapping song” (“Thirty-three years of bondage”) and at the beginning of the 20th century it was a rough, provocative piece in the repertoire of the young wandering birds . At the end of the First World War there were bitter changes to the poetry that referred to the perseverance policy of the Reich government; in the course of the revolution of 1918, variants spread among revolutionaries as well as their opponents.

An anti-Semitic variant, which was later to spread throughout Germany, probably emerged in March 1921 among the Freikorps that fought in the uprising in Upper Silesia and where particularly brutal pogrom anti-Semitism prevailed. In the later years of the Weimar Republic, the refrain was this anti-Jewish version with parts of the text of the well-known “Sturmsoldaten” song, a contemporary soldier's song rewritten by right-wing extremist associations (“If the storm soldier goes into fire, ei, then he has good courage, / and if so Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then it goes again so well ”), sung - also by the SA for the celebration of January 30, 1933. With the disempowerment of the SA and the changed domestic political interests of the NS leadership, the anti-Semitic Heckerlied is likely to be sung Variant have become rarer.

From the beginning of the 1990s this variant can be traced under the title “Blood” in the German neo-Nazi scene. The first known recording by the band Tonstören was indexed in 1993, whose members were convicted in the same year by the Mannheim Regional Court of sedition, incitement to hatred against sections of the population, use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations and public incitement to criminal offenses. After resolving sound disturbance, the song found its place in neo-Nazi folklore.

reception

The American spy Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), who worked for the Soviet Union, mentioned in his memoir the song of which he had heard a communist version on a trip to Berlin in 1923:

“I hardly knew the words of the song, but I never forgot the melody. Not long after that I should know both the words and the melody very well. They sang:
'Lubricate the guillotine, lubricate the guillotine, lubricate the guillotine
With tyrant fat.
Blood has to flow, blood has to flow, blood, blood, blood. '  "

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roland Jahn : sedition with music - neo-Nazi meeting in the province. Contrasts , August 26, 2004, accessed October 31, 2014 .
  2. ^ Whittaker Chambers: Cold Friday. Random House, New York 1964, p. 136. Original wording: “I hardly knew the words of the song, but I never forgot the melody. I would know both words and melody very well, not long thereafter. They sang: 'Lubricate the guillotine, […] blood must flow, blood, blood, blood. '”

literature

  • Wolfgang Steinitz : The great Steinitz - German folk songs of a democratic character from six centuries. Reprint in one volume, Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt 1983, ISBN 3-88436-101-5 .
  • Alexander Lipping, Björn Grabendorff: 1848 - The German makes the revolution with kindness. Songs and lyrics. (Fischer Taschenbuch 2978) Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt 1982, ISBN 3-596-22978-2 , pp. 100-109.
  • Michael Kohlstruck , Simone Scheffler: The "Heckerlied" and its anti-Semitic variant. On the history and change in meaning of a song. In: Michael Kohlstruck, Andreas Klärner (Ed.): Exclusion and enmity. Studies on anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism. Festschrift for Rainer Erb. Metropol, Berlin 2011, pp. 135–158 ( online ; PDF, 155 KB).

Web links / sources