Sports = Politics = Church Discipline
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.
Hello,
You have now opened a can of worms, and I will try to adress what I believe are the historical and logical mistakes you have made.
First, you have written that in the national anthem “two stanzas represent the horrors of Nazism in both their historical and present milieu..(and) engender the feelings of superiority, power, imperial mandate, and alleged racial purity”.
That is not the historical understanding of the verses, and the link you have provided explicitly (and ironically) refutes your claim :”über alles”, or “before all [others]” refers not to the conquest or enslavement of other countries or the establishment of German hegemony over other peoples”. The verses, by the way, were written in exile and referred not to a hierarchy of nations but a hierarchy of desires by the exilee in Denmark: his longing for a unified German state comprised of Austria, Prussia and the hundreds of other principalities that make up Germany.
In short, the verses do not ‘engender’ the meaning you are alleging.
“Ah, Michael”–you may counter–they may not engender this, ‘but the Nazis used this to promote race hate and aggression”. Here I can undrestand the rational of your statement if you are saying that singing of the national anthem was used to inculcate patriotism and in the fascist context, subservience to the hegemonic state. But there is no determinate link between German patriotism, bellicosity, and anti-Semitism. As evidence, I draw you to anti-fascists martyred in the fight against Hitler, such as von Stauffenberg or Bonhoeffer, all of whom were great patriots and who could not be called anti-Semites.
Related to this point, all states that I know of have used and misused their countries’ cultural and scientific achievements for nationalistic purposes. Where should one begin to restrict music, architecture, or literature favoured and heralded as tokens of German, or Russian, or Chinese, or Japanese, or American superiority, and ultimately, as a tool in their warfare. Shall I give up listening to Mozart (who always called himself German) because several Nazis liked him? Similarly, shall I give up loving the first two verses of the national anthem because they were abused by the Nazis…no thanks.
On German complicity: there are enough refutations of Goldhagen’s thesis to not warrant a lengthy response. Christopher Hitchens called them banal for a good reasons, and you can easily refer to the relevant literature on this.
You wrote your personal note, now here’s mine: at the end of the war, German civilians were forced to give up their own territories. 12 million Germans were compelled to flee, or were evicted, often within hours, from their ancestors’ land, to abandon Silesia, Pommerania, West and East Prussia to the conquering Poles and Russians. Two million Germans died after 1945, and the expulsion is considered the largest ethnic cleansing in European history. I personally know girls who were raped, whose menfolk were summarily executed, who worked as slave labourers in Polish and Russian camps. My own village is occupied by Poles, who courteously destroyed our home. I forgive them that, but I don’t forgive them for destroying our family graves in an effort to make Pommerania become “Polish”.
As a Christian, I look to a new beginning. I love Germany even more that she is self-reflective of her history in a way that no other country I know of is. That is to be expected because of the horrors of the Nazi regime. I hope however that the Poles too will engage their own crimes against the Jews and the Germans and seek forgiveness in the same way.
Best,
Michaelk Borussia