Last weekend, at a tennis tournament in Hawaii, a male soloist accidentally proclaimed German supremacy, traumatizing several tennis players by singing a version of the German national anthem once prized by the Nazis. The gaffe occurred at the Fed Cup, one of the premier events in women’s tennis. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt,” he sang. “Germany, Germany above all—above everything in the world.” Andrea Petkovic, a top German player, said it was one of the worst experiences of her life.
The timing of the error seemed strangely appropriate. In recent weeks, many Germans have drawn parallels between their national anthem and the motto of President Trump. “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first,” Trump said during his Inauguration, invoking a phrase that has troubling roots in nineteen-forties nativism and anti-Semitism. About a week later, Konstantin von Notz, a Green Party parliamentarian in the German Bundestag, tweeted, “America First is an update of _Deutschland, Deutschland über alles _. . .’ ” He knew the statement was provocative. “There is one rule in German politics: no comparisons with the Third Reich,” von Notz told me. But he considered his tweet less a comparison than a warning. “Patriotic feelings can lead to putting other people, other nations, down.”
Provocation aside, von Notz had a larger point to make about the way nationalist movements exploit popular culture. Although the Associated Press and the BBC reported that the United States Tennis Association had permitted the singing of a “Nazi-era anthem,” the objectionable stanzas actually come from an 1841 song. The “Deutschlandlied,” or “Song of Germany,” was officially adopted as an anthem in 1922. During the short-lived but democratic Weimar Republic, it was considered a proclamation of liberal values like freedom and justice. “It got misinterpreted by the nationalists,” von Notz told me. “And this, from my point of view, is the connection.” His concern is not that America has become a fascist state but rather that political language, when misused, can turn healthy patriotism into toxic nationalism.
The “Deutschlandlied” was written by a poet named Hoffmann von Fallersleben, “a good bourgeois liberal,” according to the German cultural historian Jost Hermand, a retired professor at the University of Wisconsin. Von Fallersleben set his stanzas to the tune of an imperial anthem by Joseph Haydn, but imperialism wasn’t what he had in mind. The mid-nineteenth century was “a period of longing” for a sense of shared identity, Hermand said, because Germanic territories were fragmented into thirty-six separate states. In context, the three stanzas were, if not exactly progressive, unsurprisingly patriotic. The first began with “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” and named the rivers that enclosed German-speaking lands. The second praised “German women, German loyalty, German wine, and German song.” Only the third stanza remains official today. “Unity and justice and freedom are the foundation of happiness,” it declares.
The same evolutionary process has shaped patriotic music in the United States. Earlier this month, at the fifty-first Super Bowl, in Houston, before pretending to jump off the stadium’s roof, Lady Gaga sang verses from “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land," two songs that have been adapted and appropriated by both the left and the right.
“God Bless America” was written by the Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin, in 1918, as part of a tribute to his then-employer, the U.S. Army. One original line had a militaristic ring: “Make her victorious on land and foam.” But, as Sheryl Kaskowitz documents in her book, “God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song,” Berlin removed that line. In 1938, he added a stanza that seemed to discourage American intervention in the Second World War:
Fascism in Europe soon felt closer to home, however. On the day that Kate Smith premièred Berlin’s song, November 10, 1938, she also relayed the latest news from Germany: “Mobs roamed the cities and towns last night, wrecking Jewish shops and setting fire to synagogues.” Berlin soon deleted his anti-interventionist verse, leaving only a simple hymn asking for guidance and praising America’s beauty. It became just the song to boost wartime morale. (Ironically, in 1940, a group of American fascists boycotted it because Berlin was Jewish.)
On September 11, 2001, “God Bless America” was sung spontaneously by both political parties during a joint session of Congress. Nine days later, George W. Bush declared a “war on terror.” That same year, Major League Baseball made “God Bless America” a tradition during the seventh-inning stretch of every game. “You imagine that you know what a song means,” Kaskowitz told me. “Then you realize that part of the power comes from this sort of shared construction of what it means.”
Woody Guthrie, meanwhile, first wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as a biting response to “God Bless America.” (Its original title was “God Blessed America for Me.”) His song both praised America’s natural beauty and questioned his country. One stanza described a “big high wall there that tried to stop me.” Another asked, “Is this land still made for you and me?” But according to Will Kaufman, a folk singer and historian, Guthrie almost never sang these stanzas in public, for reasons that remain unclear. He certainly considered them important. His son, Arlo, who is sixty-nine, remembered learning the omitted lines when he was seven or eight. “My father and I were sitting outside behind our house,” he told me in an e-mail. Arlo had a three-quarter-scale Gibson guitar, which, as Woody taught him the chords, passed back and forth between father and son. “After I learned the chords, he began going over the lyrics, and I was told to remember the verses that were not in the printed version.”
Immediately after the Super Bowl, pundits started arguing about whether Lady Gaga—who campaigned for Hillary Clinton—had made a political statement with her choice of songs. (Curiously, Guthrie once wrote a song about Donald Trump’s father, Fred, who owned an apartment that the singer lived in.) If so, it was subtle. The political right tends to embrace “God Bless America,” and the left tends to embrace “This Land Is Your Land,” but both songs have been pulled toward the middle. As songs become folk songs, and folk songs become anthems, their edge is often dulled by revision and repetition. This may be why Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican of Florida, loved the performance, and a Los Angeles Times_ _review declared, “Lady Gaga misses her Super Bowl moment to say something profound.”
What’s unusual about the German national anthem is that, for a time, its edge was sharpened by the far right and used to support a fascist state—and yet Germany eventually used the very same song to reassert its commitment to democracy. Germans had to build a new state from the remnants of what came before, Anna von der Goltz, a German political historian, explained to me. “How do you incorporate older elements, that people actually know, without conjuring up these uncomfortable associations?” In retrospect, the three stanzas seem to contain the best and worst of a country’s impulses. “You have to work with what you’ve got, in a way.”
Hermand, the retired professor, is eighty-six, and he remembers singing all three verses as a boy. He was one of several million children who joined the Hitler Youth. “I don’t think we were reflecting on that,” he said. “It was played on the radio often, of course, especially during the war.” He now feels that the Nazis hijacked the song. “There was no imperialistic tendency behind it, before the Nazis,” he told me. After Germany surrendered, the U.S. helped implement “denazification” efforts; the first two verses were no longer sung. Still, some Germans thought a new country could be built on “unity and justice and freedom.” “I was also opposed, after the war, that it should become the national anthem,” Hermand said. Vigorous support from the postwar German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, helped keep the final stanza alive, and it has remained official ever since.
Adaptable as patriotic songs may be, the persistence of the German national anthem is still strange and surprising. It has served, in turn, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the West German state, and the reunified Federal Republic of Germany. (East Germany chose a different anthem.) Today, it’s most often sung at sporting events. Hermand said that he has “mixed feelings” when he hears it. When I asked if he thinks nationalism is dangerous, he said, “I’m not against nationalism in general, but I think this exaggerated patriotism is absolutely wrong.” As an example, he, too, brought up “America First.” But Hermand doesn’t believe we can learn how to live in the present simply by studying the past. “It’s a very complex story,” he said, of his country’s anthem. “I think history does not really repeat itself.”
