ABSTRACT
Right at the end, Mr Becker, you made an interesting observation. Specifi-
cally: you said that those of us who were born later find it inconceivable that what happened during the Third Reich was not seen through. I have the
impression that, to this day, we historians – and this also holds for
the neighbouring disciplines – have not developed a satisfying explanatory
model, a theory that would suffice to make that which happened between
1933 and 1945 conceivable. And here, I would like to follow up on your
observation that the celebration of the ninth of November – the memorial
holiday for the heroes of the NSDAP – was musically framed in 1943 by the
Lied vom guten Kameraden. Now, very few might know that almost no other Fatherland song possessed such a long and deeply rooted tradition as this
hymn of comradeship on the front. The bases of this song are a poem by
Ludwig Uhland and a composition for a men’s choir by Friedrich Silicher
from the 1830s. In the Weimar era, it became – and this can be said without
exaggeration – the secret national hymn of the German nation. It had to be
present in almost all memorial celebrations for the fallen soldiers; and it
was precisely these celebrations in which the majority of Germans realised
their national identity in the shadow of the defeat in the World War. And this majority assumed, self-righteously, that the Germans had conducted a
defensive war against a world of malevolent enemies. In this thoroughly
beloved song, the front soldier who has succumbed to death in battle gave
his comrade the legacy of the further struggle on the way. Years before the
meteoric rise of the National Socialists, this song not only lent highly
effective expression to the revenge idea of anti-Versailles revisionism; on top
of that, it elevated the German warrior to the sphere of divinity. It is striking
in my opinion that this hymn should have formed the heart of the Fatherland ritual. The hymn demonstrates it splendidly: in the planning of their
celebrations and festivals, the National Socialists preferred to fall back on
the established symbols of the Fatherland tradition. Apparently, a much
broader national consensus could be established around it than around such
specifically National Socialist thought as the race theory, for example.
