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NAZIS

Thuringia premier calls for new German national anthem

Should Germany pick a new national anthem? That was the call on Thursday from the state premier of Thuringia. His comments sparked a political spat.

Published: 9 May 2019 15:46 CEST
Updated: 9 May 2019 17:20 CEST
Thuringia premier calls for new German national anthem
The music for the German national anthem. Photo: DPA

Bodo Ramelow, who is the state premier of Thuringia, said many Germans could not identify with the current anthem, Deutschlandlied or Song of Germany, which was composed by Joseph Haydn in 1797.

Ramelow, who belongs to the Left party (Die Linke) said now was a good time to change the anthem, since the country will mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this year, which led to German reunification the following year in 1990.

SEE ALSO: Should Germany get rid of the world Fatherland from its anthem?

In an interview with the Rheinische Post where he discussed a variety of issues, Ramelow said many Germans from the former communist east did not join in the singing of the current anthem, even 30 years after reunification with the west.

He added: “I would like us to have a collective national anthem. This wish has unfortunately only ever caused an outcry of indignation.”

Ramelow said he himself sings along to the anthem in its modern form but says it still brings to his mind images of the “Nazi marches from 1933 to 1945”.

He suggested the country could find a new “catchy” text “that everybody can identify with and say: 'That is mine.'”

The German national anthem as it is now sung consists of the third verse of the Deutschlandlied by 19th-century poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben. The verse begins with the words “Unity and justice and freedom for the German fatherland.”

The Nazis sang only the first verse of the text, which began with: “Germany, Germany above all, above all in the world.”

However, Ramelow's call provoked a strong reaction. 

CSU Secretary General Markus Blume said: “Hands off our national anthem,” the Rheinische Post reported.

“If Mr Ramelow of the Left Party's SED (the Socialist Unity Party of the former East Germany) successors has a problem with unity and justice and freedom, then he should reconsider his attitude, but not change our national anthem,” he added.

The premier of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer (CDU), also didn't share Ramelow's view. “I associate it with the peaceful revolution, Helmut Kohl and German unity,” he wrote on Twitter. “The anthem stands for the eventful history of Germany and should be preserved.”

Meanwhile, the satirist and television presenter Jan Böhmermann said he had an idea on the back of the Thuringian premier's wish.

On Twitter Böhmermann proposed that the German broadcaster ZDF run a national anthem competition.

Call for gender-neutral anthem

Last year Kristin Rose-Möhring, equality commissioner in the Federal Family Ministry, said it was high time that Germany changed the wording of its national anthem to make it more gender equal.

The word Vaterland (fatherland) should be replaced by Heimatland (home land) and the word brüderlich (brotherly) should be replaced by couragiert (courageous), she suggested in an internal government letter seen by German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

“Why don't we make our national anthem, das Deutschlandlied, gender equal? Rose-Möhring reportedly wrote. “It wouldn't really hurt and it would befit the recent establishment of a ministry for building and the homeland.”

Member comments

  1. Maybe, stopping still giving the long dead Nazis the last word in so much of German culture and instead taking it back and restoring it to its proper roots would be a better option to an unceasing running away from everything they themselves usurped?

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NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Published: 18 November 2021 17:09 CET
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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