Wild geese rush through the night
Wild geese rush through the night (also called “Nachtposten im März” in the volume of poems Im Felde between Nacht und Tag ) is a poem by Walter Flex from his book The Wanderer Between Two Worlds (1916). A common folk song-like wrote march tune to Robert Goetz (1892-1978).
text
Slightly different versions of the text have been published in different songbooks (for example at the end of the last stanza: " Sing us an amen in autumn!"). Below is the original version from the Wanderer Between the Two Worlds:
- Wild geese rush through the night
With a shrill cry to the north -
unsteady drive! Be careful, be careful!
The world is full of murders. - Drive through the night-swept world,
gray-iced squadrons!
Pale light twitches, and the battle cry rings out,
The quarrel surges and waves far. - Intoxicate, drive up, you gray army!
Rush to the north!
Drive south across the sea -
what has become of us! - Like you we are a gray army
and drive in the name of the emperor,
and we drive without return,
rustle us in autumn an amen!
Emergence
On the first pages of his book "The Wanderer Between Two Worlds", Walter Flex describes the genesis of the poem as follows:
“As a war volunteer I was lying on the grenade-plowed bare forest as a listening post like a hundred nights before and looked with wind-hot eyes into the flickering chiaroscuro of the storm night, through which restless headlights wandered over German and French trenches. The shower of the night storm swelled up over me. Strange voices filled the twitching air. Above the tip of the helmet and the barrel of the rifle, it sang and whistled sharply, shrilly and plaintively, and high above the hostile army, which lurked opposite each other in the dark, wandering gray geese marched north with razor-sharp screams ... The chain of guards of our Silesian regiment stretched across the Bois des Chevaliers to the Bois de Vérines, and the wandering host of wild geese streaked ghostly over us all. Without seeing the lines running into one another in the dark, I wrote a few verses on a scrap of paper: ... "
reception
The poem and later the song first spread through the Wandervogel movement and the Bündische Jugend , as they viewed it as a symbol for the "Wandervogel soldier" Ernst Wurche, idealized by Flex, who became one through the widespread use of Flex's work The ideal image of the "field wandering bird" was.
Soon it was also sung by the Catholic youth (with a small text variant in the 4th stanza) and later in other associations, such as the Hitler Youth , the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS . The cultural scientist Wolfgang Lindner uses it as an example of how the setting of a text can deviate from the original intention. The “jagged” march melody, to which the song owes its popularity, contrasts with the melancholy of the lyricist Walter Flex. Masculinization and militarization of the Bundischen youth movement took place earlier and independently of the Hitler Youth, whose ideology war as “murders” did not fit in at all. Robert Götz's dashing melody was written as early as 1916, but the song did not become popular until the late 1920s.
After the Second World War, the song was widely used through school lessons until the 1970s. It belonged to the core of the common songs of the groups and associations shaped by the youth movement. The song belongs u. a. to the repertoire of student associations . It was also found on an album by the singer Heino . It is a popular marching song in the German armed forces and in the Austrian armed forces.
In the songs of the French army it exists in several versions under the title Les Oies Sauvages (Eng. The Wild Geese). A version that belongs to the repertoire of the Foreign Legion also contains the first stanza of the German original.
The group Die Grenzgänger plays the song as part of their World War I songs project Maikäfer Flieg! - Verschollene Lieder 1914–1918 (2014) with Götz's melody, but in a manner of presentation that, compared to others, is more suitable for making the audience pensive.
In the four-part film Factory of the Officers from 1989, the song is one of the key elements of the plot. It is started by Lieutenant Krafft during sports, and at the end he is delighted to listen to the singing from the barracks courtyard from his cell.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wolfgang Lindner: Youth movement as an expression of ideological mentality. The mentality-historical preferences of the German youth movement as reflected in their lyrics . Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-8300-0886-4
- ↑ Les Oies Sauvages
- ↑ CD: The border crossers Maikäfer Flieg! - Verschollene Lieder 1914–1918 (2014) ( Memento of the original from July 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved July 28, 2014.
