Die Wacht am Rhein

The story

The song grew out of the long enmity between France and Germany over the left bank of the Rhine, which French armies had occupied in the Nine Years' War and again in the Napoleonic Wars. In the Rhine Crisis of 1840 the French prime minister Adolphe Thiers claimed the Upper and Middle Rhine as France's "natural eastern border", setting off a movement of Rhine songs in Germany. Inspired by Nikolaus Becker's successful "Der Deutsche Rhein", the Swabian merchant Max Schneckenburger wrote a poem of five stanzas, first called "Rheinwache"; two more stanzas were added later by others. Like the "Deutschlandlied" and Ernst Moritz Arndt's "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?", and unlike "Heil dir im Siegerkranz", which praised a monarch, it called on Germans to set aside the rivalries of their many states and unite.

Schneckenburger worked in Switzerland, and the poem was first set to music in Bern by the organist J. Mendel and sung by the tenor Adolph Methfessel for the Prussian ambassador; that version did not catch on. In 1854, seven years after Schneckenburger's death, Karl Wilhelm, music director of Krefeld, set the poem again and performed it with his men's chorus on 11 June, the silver wedding anniversary of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the future Emperor Wilhelm I. This setting became popular after it was sung at Dresden.

The song became famous in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. In the German Empire that followed, which included Alsace–Lorraine, it stood beside "Heil dir im Siegerkranz" as an unofficial second national anthem, and Bismarck granted the composer and the author's family an annual pension. Its words appear on the Niederwald monument of 1883 above Rüdesheim am Rhein. From the First World War to 1945 it was one of the most popular songs in Germany, rivalling the "Deutschlandlied" as the de facto anthem. In the Second World War the Wehrmacht's daily radio report opened with its tune until 1941, and its title was the code name of the German offensive of 1944 now known as the Battle of the Bulge. The invasion across the Rhine that the song imagined never came as it pictured: the fighting of 1870–1871, 1914–1918 and 1940 took place in France, and when the Allies crossed the river in Operation Plunder in 1945 Germany was near collapse.

The song figures in stage works and films. In Lewis Milestone's film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) it accompanies schoolboys leaving their classroom to enlist; in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) and in Casablanca (1942) it is sung by Germans and drowned out by "La Marseillaise". Lillian Hellman took its title for her play Watch on the Rhine (1941). Its tune was also borrowed for gentler ends: Yale's "Bright College Years" (1881) and the school song of Doshisha University. After the Élysée Treaty of 1963 ended the French–German enmity, the song kept only historical significance in Germany, where it is now rarely sung or played.

What it says

A call to all Germans to hurry to the Rhine and defend it, presenting the river as German and imagining the nation's youth rising together to keep any enemy from its banks. The mood is martial and defiant, a rallying song of the age of national unification.

The words