Horst-Wessel-Lied
| English: Horst Wessel Song | |
|---|---|
Former co-national anthem of  Nazi Germany | |
| Also known as | "Die Fahne hoch" (English: "Raise the Flag") |
| Lyrics | Horst Wessel, 1929 |
| Published | 1929 |
| Adopted | 1933 |
| Relinquished | 1945 |
| Preceded by | "Deutschlandlied" (as sole national anthem) |
| Succeeded by | "Ich hab' mich ergeben" and "Hymne an Deutschland" (by West Germany) "Auferstanden aus Ruinen" (by East Germany) "Bundeshymne der Republik Österreich" (by Austria) |
| Audio sample | |
 "Horst-Wessel-Lied" (1936 rendition)
| |
The "Horst-Wessel-Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song"; German: [hɔʁst ˈvɛsl̩ liːt] (
listen)), also known by its opening words "Die Fahne hoch" ("Raise the Flag", lit. '"The Flag High"'), was the anthem of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) from 1930 to 1945. From 1933 to 1945, the Nazis made it the co-national anthem of Germany, along with the first stanza of the "Deutschlandlied".[1]
The "Horst-Wessel-Lied" has been banned in Germany and Austria since the end of World War II.
History[]
The lyrics to "Horst-Wessel-Lied" were written in 1929 by Sturmführer Horst Wessel, the commander of the Nazi paramilitary "Brownshirts" (Sturmabteilung or "SA") in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin. Wessel wrote songs for the SA in conscious imitation of the Communist paramilitary, the Red Front Fighters' League, to provoke them into attacking his troops, and to keep up the spirits of his men.[2]
Horst Wessel[]
Wessel was the son of a pastor and educated at degree level, but was employed as a construction worker. He became notorious among the Communists when he led a number of SA attacks into the Fischerkiez, an extremely poor Berlin district (he did this on orders from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Gauleiter [regional party leader] of Berlin).[3] Several of these incursions were only minor altercations, but one took place outside the tavern which the local German Communist Party (KPD) used as its headquarters. As a result of that melee, five Communists were injured, four of them seriously. Communist newspapers accused the police of letting the Nazis get away while arresting the injured Communists, while Nazi newspapers claimed that Wessel had been trying to give a speech when Communists emerged and started the fight.[3] Wessel's face was printed together with his address on Communist street posters.[2] The slogan of the KPD and the Red Front Fighters' League became "strike the fascists wherever you find them."[3]
Wessel moved with his partner Erna Jänicke into a room on Große Frankfurter Straße.[4] The landlady was the widowed Mrs Salm, whose husband had been a Communist. After a few months there was a dispute between Salm and Wessel over unpaid rent. Salm requested Wessel's partner to leave but Jänicke refused. Salm appealed to Communist friends of her late husband for help.[5][6][7] Shortly thereafter on 14 January 1930, Wessel was shot and seriously wounded by two Communist Party members, one of whom was Albrecht "Ali" Höhler.[2][8][9] Wessel died in hospital on 23 February from blood poisoning, which he contracted during his hospitalisation.[8][9] Höhler was tried in court and sentenced to six years' imprisonment for the shooting.[10] He was taken out of prison under false pretenses by the SA and shot dead three years later, after the Nazi accession to national power in 1933.[2][11]
Nazi Party anthem[]
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Gauleiter and owner and editor of the newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), had made several attempts to create Nazi martyrs for propaganda purposes, the first being an SA man named Hans-Georg Kütemeyer, whose body was pulled out of a canal the morning after he attended a speech by Hitler at the Sportpalast. Goebbels attempted to spin this into an assassination by Communists, but the overwhelming evidence showed it to have been suicide, and he had to drop the matter.[12] Thus, Goebbels put considerable effort into mythologizing Wessel's story, even as the man lay dying. He met with Wessel's mother, who told him her son's life story, his hope for a "better world", and his attempt to rescue a prostitute he had met on the street. Goebbels saw Wessel as an "idealistic dreamer".[4]
Wessel himself had undergone an operation at St. Joseph's Hospital which stopped his internal bleeding, but the surgeons had been unable to remove the bullet in his cerebellum. Wessel was brought to his mother's home to die. In his diary, Goebbels described Wessel's entire face as being shot up and his features distorted, and claimed that Wessel told him "One has to keep going! I'm happy!" After a period where his condition stabilized, Wessel died on 23 February.[4]
Goebbels consulted Hermann Göring and others in the party on how to respond to Wessel's death. They declared a period of mourning until 12 March, during which party and SA members would avoid amusements and Wessel's name would be invoked at all party meetings. Wessel's unit was renamed the Horst Wessel Storm Unit 5.[4]
From a mashup of fact and fiction, Goebbels' propaganda created what became one of the Nazi Party's central martyr-figures of their movement. He officially declared Wessel's march, renamed as the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song"), to be the Nazi Party anthem,[13][14] which aided in promoting Wessel as the first of many in the Nazi cult of martyrdom.[15] Wessel was buried on 1 March 1930. Contrary to Nazi claims, there were no attacks on the funeral procession.[16] His funeral was filmed and turned into a major propaganda event by the NSDAP.[16] The "Horst Wessel Song" was sung by the SA at the funeral, and was thereafter extensively used at party functions, as well as sung by the SA during street parades.
Co-national anthem[]
When Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the "Horst Wessel Song" became a national symbol by law on 19 May 1933. The following year, a regulation required the right arm be extended and raised in the "Hitler salute" when the (identical) first and fourth verses were sung. Nazi leaders can be seen singing the song at the finale of Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film Triumph of the Will. Hitler also mandated the tempo at which the song had to be played.[17]
Some Nazis were extremely sensitive about the uses to which the "Horst Wessel Song" was put. For instance, a bandleader who wrote a jazz version of the song was forced to leave Germany, and when Martha Dodd, the daughter of William E. Dodd, at the time the US ambassador to Germany, played a recording of an unusual arrangement of the song at her birthday party at the Ambassador's residence in 1933, a young Nazi who was a liaison between the German Foreign Ministry and Hitler's Chancellery, turned off the record player, announcing "This is not the sort of music to be played for mixed gatherings and in a flippant manner."[18] The song was played in some Protestant places of worship, as some elements of the Protestant Church in Germany had accepted the Horst Wessel cult, built as it was by Goebbels on the model of Christian martyrs of the past.[19]
Post World War II[]
With the end of the Nazi regime in May 1945, the "Horst Wessel Song" was banned. The lyrics and tune are now illegal in Germany, with some limited exceptions. In early 2011, this resulted in a Lower Saxony State Police investigation of Amazon.com and Apple Inc. for offering the song for sale on their websites. Both Apple and Amazon complied with the government's request, and deleted the song from their offerings.[20]
A special marine commando unit within the Chilean Navy, uses the same melody as the Horst-Wessel-Lied with different lyrics called "Himno de la Agrupación de Comandos IM no. 51".[21]
Lyrics[]
The words to the "Horst Wessel Song" were published in September 1929 in the Nazi Party's Berlin newspaper, Der Angriff (The Attack) which Joseph Goebbels owned and ran.
