The Rest Is History - 679. Germany: The Song Hitler Stole (Part 3)

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

Why is the German national anthem the most controversial of all? Is it true that it is Austrian in origin? And, what happened when Germany split after the Second World War? Did it perhaps lead to an absolute banger in the form of East Germany’s new anthem..? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the history of Germany and its various different anthems. _______ Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton  Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill   Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And Dominic, this time in the World Cup, the Germans aren't kind of massive favorites, are they? But I mean, when it comes to European teams in the World Cup, the Germans are pretty irresistible. They've won the World Cup four times. They've been runners up four times. They have reached the last four 13 times, which is more even than the Brazilians. And as the co-founder of our own beloved production company put it, football is a simple game. 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end, the Germans always win. And the consequence of that is that football fans certainly have got used to hearing the German anthem a great deal.

Yeah, that's right. There are, of course, other reasons why the German anthem is quite familiar, and that's not to do with football at all, but possibly to do with the history of Germany in the 20th century. And you think that as well as being incredibly familiar, it is also actually the most misunderstood because its roots are not kind of militaristic and its lyrics are not an assertion of German power over the rest of the world, as is often sometimes thought. Yeah, I do think that, Tom. I do think it's misunderstood. So I would say that if you would have to stop people in the streets in Britain and say to them,

What is the German national anthem called? I think there's no doubt that most people would say, oh, everyone knows what it's called. It's called Deutschland Uber Alice. I mean, this is just the general assumption in Britain, I think, because we've been traumatized by so many war films. Yeah, and the Uber Alice means Germany number one. Yes, Germany over everybody else. Yeah. Actually, it's not called Deutscheland Uber Alice.

It was written in 1841, and the title of the anthem is Das Lied der Deutsche, the Song of the Germans. And today, when you hear that anthem, so when, you know, in the 1980s, some unlovely German, West German team was storming to a European or world title with a massive mullet. Terrible mullets and mustaches, Rudy Vola or some such way. When they were to the horror of people around the world winning tournaments left, right and center, they never ever sang Deutsche Lund, Uber Alice. It's the kind of thing you would see in newspaper headline in Britain in the Daily Mirror or something. But they actually sing, Einikait and Recht and Freight, which Tom translates, as we both know, as unity and right and freedom. That is not as helpful, is it, to the headline writers of the Daily Mirror?

Not at all, not at all. And that's because what Germans sing today is actually the third verse of the hymn, not the first. And this is for historical reasons that we will get into. So we will be talking about things like the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and so on, East Germany. So there's a lot to unpack in this episode. Yeah. I mean, it is controversial. Exactly.

So there were a couple of controversies actually just a few months ago, like last autumn. So first of all, there was a row when two AFD politicians, so politicians of the far right party, the AFD, they went to New York City and they were filmed singing the first verse in a bar with the president of the Young Republican Club of New York. So they were seeing a Deutsche and Ubarales there, and that was a bad look, I think, both for the Germans. I have to say, I think it was a bad look for the young Republican president as well. And at the same time, the vice president of D'Linka, the left-wing party in Germany, which is a descendant of the old Communist Party of East Germany. This is a guy called Bodo Ramelow, who actually used to be the minister-president of Turingia,

of the estate in the east of Germany. And was actually from West Germany? Yes. So Bodo Ramalo said, I know many East Germans who do not sing the national anthem. And he said we should have a referendum on a new anthem. And what I would like is a song written in 1950 by Bertolt Brecht. And I quote,

a pan-German anthem that we could all sing together with joy. And we'll be coming back to this later on. I have a German friend who completely agrees, with that. Really? Yeah, she loves the Berto Brecht song. Well, come to the Bertolt Brecht song. But let's start with what is the anthem right now,

the song of the Germans. So, Das Li de Deutsche. And I think it has actually perhaps the most fascinating history of any national anthem, including Tom, our own, which is a shocking thing to say. I mean, it didn't get there first, did it? I mean, that's the important thing. We got there first.

Compared with their own, it is a latecomer. So we'll start with the tune. The tune is written 1797 by the Kemp. composer, Yosef Haydn. Haydn was an Austrian, that is to say, he was the subject of the Habsberg Empire. He's obviously one of the titans of 18th century classical music. So Hayden, for people who are not massively into their classical music, he's often seen as the person who invented the symphony, the string quartet, the sonata, Mozart and Beethoven are standing on Haydn's shoulders. He's a tremendous person to have as the writer of your national anthem.

And he's a tremendous person because he's a massive fan of Nelson, isn't he? Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, I've forgotten that. He writes a mass, which comes to be called the Nelson Mass. And he hangs out with Nelson and Emma when they're on their comical procession across the continent. Exactly so. So, yeah, he's from an older generation than Mozart, say. So he spends most of his time basically as a glorified servant.

He's the music director for the Estahazi family in Hungary. In 1790, Prince Estahazi had died. so Hyden was free to do what he liked and he went to London. And there he is a massive celebrity and he hears people, and don't forget this is in the context of the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. So he hears people singing God Save the King, which of course is very current at the time.

The first pop song. He comes back to Vienna and he's a great celebrity in Vienna as well. And he writes this in 1797 and there's a particular reason why he writes it. So 1797 is a very anxious man. for the Viennese. They're fighting against revolutionary France, but they've actually lost their territories in what becomes Belgium, and they're being absolutely hammered by the Revolutionary General Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy. And Haydn wants to do his bit to raise national morale. And he's just come back from London. There, everybody is singing, God Save the King, you know, down with the

French, down with Bonie, all of this. And to quote an official Austrian account written later, he envied the British nation for a song through which it could at festive occasions show in full measure its respect and love for its ruler. Hayden wished that Austria too could have a similar national anthem. And what's impressive about that is that we heard in our last episode that lots of countries copy the tune of God Save the King, like the assumption is that if you've got to have a national anthem, that's the tune that you have to have. But Hayden, as one of the great musicians, he's not going to be content with just ripping off

the tune of God Save the King. He's going to write his own. And he deliberately says, he wants to write it to inflame the hearts of the Austrians to new heights of devotion to their princes and their fatherland. So he teams up with a poet called Lorenz Leopold Hushka to write an anthem. And they dedicate it to the Emperor Franz II, Francis II. And they first perform it on his birthday, 12th of February, 1797. And the first line is a bit of a rip-off of God Save the King.

It is God save Franz the emperor. Gott erheltre Franz Dain Kaiser. So he hasn't ripped off the team, but he's ripped off the words. This guy, Lorenz-Leopold-Hashkar, I suppose, has ripped off the words. Anyway, as anyone who knows the German anthem will know, the tune is quite slow, quite stately. And there's a musicologist who's written about this called Michael Geisler, who is a German scholar working in the United States.

And he argues that Hayden basically gets this from an Austrian. in folk song, that that's the inspiration for it. It's not a march. It is a sort of slow, stately, very hummable, this kind of music that would appeal to the masses, I suppose. But also, it's really interesting because if it's a folk song, this is the age of romanticism, the idea that folk songs arise from the kind of mass consciousness of the people, there is something of the romantic there, but also something of the tradition about the God Save the King, that it has risen from, you know, the ancient depths. It's perfectly calibrated, and for that reason, it's a massive hit.

Hayden is very proud of it. It is said that during his final illness in 1809, he played, this was the song that he played again and again on the piano, and his servant actually recorded this is the last thing Hayden ever played before he died. So, Austrian anthem, very popular, continues for decades, as an account from the 1840s, Who does not know the Austrian song, God Save the Emperor? Who is not, with heartfelt emotion often joined in singing it? It has penetrated the very blood of Austrian.

is inhabitants, all of Germany honors it, and even in foreign lands, the lovely melody has found a welcome reception. And the welcome reception, people like Beethoven, Rossini, Burkna, Chikovsky, they all write adaptations of it or variations on it. But nobody at this stage doubts that it is Austrian and not German. It is a Habsburg anthem. And so now we get to the point where it turns into a German one. And the guy who does this is a poet with the excellent name of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fathersleben. What is it? August Heinrich Hoffman von Flaasleben. Very good. Easy to say, Tom. That was the first take. Listeners, that was Dominic's sixth attempt. So he is from Lower Saxony, from Brunswick. He's the son of a merchant,

and he became a professor of literature in Prussia, in Breslau, which was there. in Prussia, now it's in Poland. Now, Hoffman, we'll just call him Hoffman, he's idealistic, high-minded, he's very frustrated with what's happened to German politics after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So he's a classic German intellectual in the period of the Napoleonic Wars? He's a total German intellectual. Wistful, yearning for all kinds of things that Germany doesn't have. Exactly.

Because what's happened is once the French invaded what becomes Germany in the Napoleonic Wars, You got a sort of dual process. On the one hand, people were inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, but on the other hand, they reacted against French occupation. So this is a huge boost to the idea of German nationalism and the idea of uniting all German speakers in a single state. And a liberal state, so one that will stand up for freedom of the press and democratic citizenship and all these things.

So if you're a poet or a literature professor, or in this bloke's case, both, you're absolutely, you know, you're imbued with all this kind of thing. and you look at what's happened in the 1820s and 30s, so at the age of reaction, basically democratic ideals being put back in their box. So Waterloo, Napoleon has been defeated and the ideals of the French Revolution have been seemed to have been crushed. Yes, exactly so. And so this guy Hoffman is sitting there.

Now, he's already written one hymn. He's written that unusual thing, a song literally celebrating a customs union. It's a hymn celebrating the Zolverine, which is the... This German customs union that paves the way for German unity. So he's written this song. And in 1841, he's on holiday on the North Sea Island of Heligoland. And Heligoland at this point was owned by Britain. It's basically off the northern, North German coast.

Yeah, he's having a British holiday. He's having a British seaside holiday. And he's sitting there and he thinks, probably raining if it's a British seaside holiday, and he thinks to himself, well, I'll write another, these excellent songs. And he writes the song of the German. Germans, das lead der Deutsche. Now, today, as we've already discussed, the lyrics are seen as a little

bit problematic in some quarters. I said that with the seriousness it deserved. So we should say a bit about them. So what you heard at the beginning of the programme is, as we've said, the third verse, Einichite and Reich and Freight. And when you look at the lyrics, they are your absolute standard national anthem bingo. So unity and rights and freedom for the German fatherland, let us strive for this together, brotherly with heart and hand, and so on and so forth. It's a kind of word salad, isn't it? It is a word salad. The second verse is, so this is the one before the third verse, obviously. Master of maths kicking in there. Good to see. Just explaining. So this is seen as inappropriate today, and because it is sexist. So Deutsche Fraun, Deutsche

Troia, Deutsche Vine and Deutsche Sang. So this is German women, German loyalty, German wine, German song. And these are the things that inspire us to do noble deeds. Unfortunately, Tom, you cannot now say German women in that list because that implies that the people who are doing the deeds are men and that women are just like the wine and the song. They're being objectified, unfortunately. But maybe you could change it according to the sex or whoever is singing the song. Deutsche mention or something, would it be? Wouldn't that work? I mean, you should take this up with the...

With the Germans. Yeah, with the Germans. Yeah. Send an email to the Germans and suggest your idea and see how you get on. So that's the second verse. Now, again, my master in maths, before the second verse is the first verse, which nobody sings. And this actually does start,

Deutschland, Deutschland, Deutsche, Ube alas, Uber alas in der Welt. And this does not mean Germany over everybody else. A program for global conquest is not what it means. Right. So what does it mean? Well, Germany at this point doesn't exist. So the Germans couldn't invade and conquer anybody. Hoffman would have been amazed to hear people say this is militaristic and a call for expansionism. What it's actually a call for, the song is aimed at the people of the different states of Germany, this patchwork, this quilt, this mosaic of very fragmented statelets. And he is saying to the

those people and specifically to their rulers and their governments, put aside your differences, your jealousies, your petty regional loyalties and put the ideal of Germany first. So literally, it means Germany above everything else. Let's bury these petty grievances and unite around a collective ideal. So it's like the Oat Joy as the Anthem for the European Union. It's kind of implicitly saying, let's bury our differences and celebrate a greater whole. Exactly. That's what it is. And at the time, this is not a conservative idea, it's a liberal idea.

So the people who are singing this song and the people who love this kind of stuff are students, poets, long-haired people of all kinds, they love all this. There is one other controversial element in the first verse, though, and this is some geographical detail. So, von der Maas been and di Memel, von der Ech, bis and an bedel. Now, I don't know how your European geography is, Tom. Well, I know where the MERS is. Yes. Or the MASS, because it's coming up in our next episode. So there's the MERS runs down through from the Netherlands into France.

Then the next one is Di Mamel. This is the River Neiman, we would call this now. So that's kind of Poland, Lithuania kind of area. De Ech is the Adjjj, that's in Italy. And the last one, and in Belt. The belt, the little belt, is a Danish. straight off the coast of Jutland. Now, you might look at that and say, what's going on here?

Yeah. Hoffman wants to construct this vast empire that includes other people's rivers. What's he thinking? Actually, what he's thinking is this. There was no German 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 de Nouncio-style program. It's a bit menacing for the Danes. I mean, the Danes at this point could consult themselves that they actually exist, whereas the Germans don't. Sure, but I mean, you have poets coming up and kind of menacing you with lyrics. I think you are 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 Barden called Carl Vecke.

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 Vec wants to get some sleep, I suppose. Anyway, one of them is this song, the song of the Germans. Is it a massive hit? 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, you know, 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 blokes 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 goes off into exile in Switzerland. 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 Clark. 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. But there's a lovely flag, a tricula of black, red and gold. But it doesn't really. But it doesn't doesn't happen. The Austrian and Prussian monarchies 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. No, no one wants that. And he dies in obscurity in 1874. Can I just ask one question? So this kind of irredentist that you say isn't a redentist.

Yeah. Is Austria part of this? Is he kind of ambitious to see Austria become part of Germany? Well, if you think that the Adj, 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. 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? Yeah, I think possibly. I think people would recognize it by this point as an Austrian anthem, but don't forget it's that there already been different, we've already said, the different composers 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, a part of the German family. 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 well 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 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. Yes, it does. So the Prussians do not adopt. the sing of the Germans. They see it as a 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 dear im Sieger Krantz. Hail to thee in the victor's crown. And it is a direct rip-off of God Save the King. So it goes, Heil dear im Sieger-Krantz. Herrsher des Vaterlands, Heil, Kaiser, dear, 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 Wurttemberg, 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 De Vacht Am Rhein, The Watch on the Rhine. So this is a 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, 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. And because it's

militaristic and because it is anti-French, soldiers sing it in the Franco-Prussian War of 187071. It becomes a massive hit in Germany. Bismarck loves it and he gives Schneckenberger's widow and 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 mouldering 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-entered 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. 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 still be British. I'd have loved to have kept it, yeah. What would you do with it? I would make a massive naval base. Yeah, that would have been fun in the First World War. I'd menace the Baltic and the German coast. You've blockade Lubeck or something.

You see, I feel Britain got the worst of that deal. You don't rate Zanzibar, clearly, which is sad. I mean, it's a bit far away, isn't it? I guess so. The Heligoland's 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 organisers at this 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. 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. 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, Haileadir im Siegocrat.

Now, unfortunately, this is that 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 Cowen to write a new tune, but it didn't really catch on. Meanwhile, the lot of people are singing The Watch on the Rhine. 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. It 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. And Dominic, who is this old German soldier? Are you about to pull a trick that you have been known to play before? Yeah, it's a trick that's...

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, Uber Alice, Uber Alice 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 Kindermort, the idea that's 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. And this was reprinted in loads of German newspapers at the time. It's probably an element of truth in it because there are accounts by British and French soldiers saying, 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.

It's students, isn't it, as well? So again, a kind of link back to that dreamy philosophical age. It's a much more powerful story because it's this utopian. idealistic song, then if it had been the wash on the Rhine, or, you know, a song about the Emperor of Prussia or whatever. Yeah, it's doomed youth. Domed 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. It's Germany is humiliated. It's been, you know, 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. 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 center, on the left, you go with the government-approved flag, which is the black, red, gold flag of 1848. That's the flag that the German. have today. But the first president of the Weimar Republic, who is a social democrat, he's Friedrich Ebert, he says, look, we've got to give the conservative something. If they're not going to get the flag, we've got to give them something. 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 Kindermode 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, Deutsche Döber Alas, 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, this triad from the poet's song voiced to 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 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 Warus. He hates the Social Democrats. He doesn't really believe in the Weimar Republic. 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 Uber Alice going into battle, and that man is, of course, the worst man in history, Adolf Hitler. So, after the break, 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. we will then investigate the strange story of East Germany's communist anthem

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. 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 tournaments. Looking back to when England hosted back in 1966, everyone in the crowd supporting England were waving Union jacks.

So what fascinating trends does that illustrate? And I 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 that. 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. Click or tap the banner now to learn more.

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Service Now turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit service now.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the rest of 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, meaning 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 Alice, 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. Let's sing that verse first, Germany above all.

And of course it's very effective. If you're a German nationalist, if you see, you know, 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, you know, 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 Lied, which was written in 1929 by the paramilitary stormtrooper commander horsed 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, it's a tribute to your scholarship. He features in Dominion. I have to say, that's why I know about it. Yeah. So 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.

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, the almost divine figure who other Germans should aspire to. Yes, exactly right. And part of this is the song. Vessel had written songs himself marching songs.

Yeah, for when they're kind of marching through Berlin, kind of roughing up the reds. And it actually had one published in a Nazi paper. And this is it. Di Fanahoch, the Ryan Fest, a schlosset, mit ruig festum schreit, raised the flag, the ranks tightly closed,

the SA marches with calm and steady step. And he borrowed the tune from a naval song, the Kurnigsburg lead, which has 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. 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 to give the Nazi salute. Well, you know, 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 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? The kind of ring-raith churches, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, 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 the Nazis, there's undoubtedly a point where it's playing in the background and there's people marching in, torchlight or something. Yeah, kind of fair-haired members of the Hitler youth, beaming. Exactly. 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, Defana Hoch, on a t-shirt. You can't wear a t-shirt with the first three words of the horsed vessel lead. It is seen as so toxic.

So as the German national anthem, that's a bastard flush. Yes. Yes, chances of becoming the post-war anthem are nil, or precisely nil. So, yeah, we're in, we've got it's 1945, Germany devastated, defeated. This is what the Germans called

Stunter nul, 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. On the one hand, West Germany, it claims a fundamental. 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 Germanists politicians say, well, 1945 is a great break and a chance for a completely new beginning. The Weimar Republic was a failure. The third right 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.

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 Adonauer, the first chancellor. Yeah, like Conrad Adonauer. They say, let's have the song of the Germans.

Let's have the, you know, it worked 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 right. You can't have it. So to start with, they have no anthem at all because they can't agree. 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 Trizonesia song. And this is written by a jokester from Cologne. So Alia, our producer, is from Cologne. This guy's from Cologne, too. And he was called Carl Berbauer. A German jokester.

A 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-Zonezier. 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 turn out, Audi's and BMWs. In my imagination, they're singing this, because this is the song. We are the natives of Trizonezia. Heidi Shimola Shimola Shimola bum We have maidens with fiery wild natures Heidi Shimola Shimola Shimula bum We may not be cannibals

But we kiss all the better for it We are the natives of Trizonesia Heidi Shimola Shimala Shimla bum Does it have a comedy tune Undoubtedly, surely an umpah 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 and 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.

Banga, banga, boom. Actually, so they hosted a cycle race in Cologne, Kuhl, 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 multiple ways. Yes, with the whole fascism thing. with the Nazis and business, but 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, 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 Adana said, this isn't shaming for Germany. Like, come on, bring back the song on the Germans. This is nonsense. This shimula, shimula, shimula, shimula, bum, business. And actually, polls showed that Adanah spoke for the majority. So seven out of ten 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 Tejodor Hoyse, 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. Adonauer campaigned and campaigned for the song of the Germans. 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 much too long. I'm sick of this now. I'm formally, officially asking you, approve this lead de Deutsche 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. So by this point they're worried about the sexism angle as well as the whole. Yeah, I think so. Kind of conquering people misinterpretation. Yeah, the sort of 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, 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, the 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. 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 favorites 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 8 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 caused it the true birth of the country, no less. And when the German captain Fritz Valter 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 Uber Alice. 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. Or from the Swiss, perhaps, trying to pretend that they were braver in standing up to the Germans than they actually were. 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 Bowens, who was a former member of the Nazi party, gave a celebratory speech in a Munich beer hall. I mean, Jesus, of all the places

to best, 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, Teodor Hoyce, he was appalled by this. 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 F.A., and then he said he read out the third verse of the anthem, Einichit and Rechten, Freit, and he said, this is our anthem, I want the whole stadium to sing it. And do they sing it? Yeah, which they did.

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. 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 neighbors 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 a cuddlier guy is. And they say, well, this is the proof. So one paper in East Berlin said, oh, well, our neighbors have let the cat out of the bag. They're just the Nazis. When fascists start singing Deutschland Uber Alas and a horsed vessel song that has nothing to do with sports. but to do with death.

But they're not singing the horse vessel song. No, I think that's untrue. That's a massive exaggeration. That's a massive exaggeration. It's very unfair. They didn't sing the horse vessel song at all. And I mean, unless the head of the German Fethe was doing it in his beer hall when he wasn't toasting Wooten out of the skull, no doubt.

That would definitely have been reported if he had. I mean, it would have been so punchy for them to have sung the horse festival song after winning the World Cup in the fifties. 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 democratic, in weak democratic, West Germany.

This is the great positive, Tom, I 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, 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 Alfechstanden oustruinen. 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. I mean, that's not kind of overtly communist, is it? 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. Oh. You could sing it to the old tune. They don't, they? 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 tour. tuned by a guy called Hans Eisler. Isler 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 he 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? And sort of McCarthyism. I think he probably a bit was, because he was a communist. Probably was a bit. Yeah, he was the Stalinist. They called him, the American press called him the Karl Marx of music.

I like that. Surely that's belly brag, isn't it? 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 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. I think they are brilliant anthems. Madness. You do hate Britain. So a couple of interesting things about the anthem. First of all, Isler 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. And can't just ask, what is the Austrian anthem by this point? Is it still the Hayden one, or have they moved on from that? No. So they had the Hayden tune right up to the Anselas, but then they dropped it when Austria was reborn in the 1940s. And they adopted a very boring anthem called Land Der Berger, Land Amsterdam.

Land of the peaks, land by the stream. So one of the generic geographical anthems. What a falling off was there. Yeah, exactly. Dispointing 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 it's 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 Eich Vaterland 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 Deutscheland, a United Fatherland

This is for Dominic Stambrook His favourite song My Desert Island disc selection Which one is it to be Always the showmanee There's nothing communist about the lyrics Yet 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. 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 it banners with the lyrics. They made children sing it in school. But there's a historian, a German historian called Haika 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 about it, they said people actually love this anthem. 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. Yeah. Like a travant. Like a state-sponsored Weeks holiday in some sand dunes. On the Baltic.

While the starsy watch you from behind a load of reeds. That's less loved, isn't it? it. Yeah. So in East Germany, you would do a ceremony when you were 14, and this is when you became an adult and got your identity papers and pledged yourself towards the defence of socialism. It was called the Jungendvaier 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 was 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's trying to escape. And then in the early 70s, both Germans 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, Einich Faderland, 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. Let's stop singing this song about 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. There's Alfa Shandanao's 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? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? I mean, I'll go with the West German one because the West German one's basically swallowing it. No, it's not obvious. So, first of all, the song of the Germans has been massively controversial all the way through in West Germany. Poles 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 Bardem Einhoff adjacent, you're not a fan of this anthem. You have those kind of stickers with the Smiley Sun that's against nuclear power. 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, people, Christian Democrat politicians keep trying to sneak the old words back in, Deutschland, Uberas. They keep trying to get that first verse in. They love that first verse. Like helmet Cole, trying to slip down another pig's knuckle. Exactly. So, if,

every now and again. And it's always, but this always happens in Baden-Vurttemberg. Every now and again, Barden-Vurttemberg, 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. And meanwhile, you know, anti-nuclear green campaigners say he should be tired and feathered

in, you know, 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, you know, Nazism and militarism and stuff. So the last Prime Minister of East Germany, who is a guy who Lota de Mésier, 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? 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. Yeah. Where there are similar agonized debates and actually a very effective compromise has arrived at. Very good compromise, exactly. And the West Germans, Helmut Cole rouse, 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 Starzy 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. Brecht in the 1950s wrote this.

And it's called the Kinderdihimna, the Children's Anthembourg, the children's anthem. And again, it's a sort of compromise because he wrote it in response to Adanauer'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. I mean, we could have that. A lot of countries could have that. 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, and not over, not under, and then vilken, will we be.

And not over and not under other nations will we be. But you know my favourite lines from it? Go on. It may seem dearest to us, just as other people's countries seem dearest to them. I mean, that's a banging lyric. 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. We know better than anybody else. Yeah, it may seem dearest to us, but doesn't everyone think that? You're playing Paragrai or somebody. You have an incredibly strutting anthem about the glories of a Sunsian. And then the Germans sing, you know, we're very sorry, we're behaved poorly. Please don't record from us in horror anymore.

The end result of all this is they end up sticking with the Weimar anthem. That's the song with the Germans, third verse. Einichite and Recht and Freitait, so unity and right and freedom. And this becomes basically the motto of the reunited Germany. Those words, Einichite and Rehecht and Freight, 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. 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. 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 honest, lots of people will not be singing the anthem. Des 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. Anyway, the Spiegel was wrong because actually loads of Germans did sing the anthem and nobody complained at all. And the German broadcaster Deutsche Vela said after the tournament, the site of the German team, their arms around one another as dash Deutschland lead, another way of putting the song in 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. Yeah, I mean the biggest controversy of that World Cup was all the wags going shopping.

In Barden, Barden, and distracting our brave boys from more important things like scoring penalties. More bad behaviour in Baden-Verdtemberg. 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. Yeah. It's written by a guy who loved Nelson. What's not to like? I think that's either problem. Well, 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. So, ladies and gentlemen, here it is Dominic Sam Brooks' Desert Island Disc. Take it away, Callum. 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. 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. And that is why we are offering an amazing. 25% Father's Day discount on the subscription price to the rest is history club because we are all heart. So treat the Peter the Great in your own life this Father's Day to early access to full series. You get early access, that you get that with a membership. You get bonus episodes. You get ad free listening. You get access to tickets for live shows.

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