Fr. Martin Fox commented on the fact that he had little if any interest in the World Cup. His comment generated a firestorm of comments on politics and Church discipline and only a few comments on soccer itself.
I like soccer, it is an exciting, skilled, and fast moving sport, but frankly I have little love for any particular sport. I’m really not passionate about sports. I’d rather delve into reading, cooking, wine, good conversation, even politics and churchy matters.
Anyway, I made a sports related comment and as part of that comment I mentioned that another writer, who also commented about sports, and her particular love for the German team, should not have used the phrase —Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles …—
Perhaps I shouldn’t have broken into politics and history, but I just get a little upset when unknowing ‘fans’ trot out this hymn. It has implications beyond —“ hey my team is great and we will win.
The writer and another writer took me to task for being all sensitive and how dare I criticize the German national anthem.
First of all, check your history. The first two stanzas of the German national anthem are never used (see Das Lied Der Deutschen for background —“ and this from a German writer on the issue).
The official German anthem begins and ends with the third verse (never heard of this happing with any other song —“ i.e., jumping right to the third verse). Why exactly? The anthem jumps to the third verse because the first two stanzas represent the horrors of Nazism in both their historical and present milieu. They were used to engender the feelings of superiority, power, imperial mandate, and alleged racial purity. They were used as part of the pretext for killing millions of innocent people. They remain shrouded in the ethos a Nazism, and no amount of historical documentation, nay saying, or revisionism will change that. As such, the German government has rejected these words and these stanzas since 1946.
The retort comes back —“ but what about the French, American, etc. etc. anthems. They express pride and are warlike. While that is certainly true, it must be remembered that on the whole they were not used as pretext for mass murder (yes and we can debate Native Americans and so on another time…). Further, I am not engaging in a historical analysis of other cultures. I’m talking about something that is personal to me, my family, and my friends.
If you want to study the basis of German complicity and active participation in the Nazi horrors read Hitler’s Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen or Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning or Backing Hitler : Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany by Robert Gellately.
I will not comment further at Father’s site because it is off topic to sports. I do urge that people who are all so happy about proclaiming —Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles …— study history a little more closely, perhaps visit a concentration camp, talk to survivors and former slave laborers, and understand exactly what that song means.