Solidaritätslied

The story

The "Solidaritätslied" (Solidarity Song) is a revolutionary workers' song written between 1929 and 1931 by Bertolt Brecht and set to music by Hanns Eisler. It was written against the background of the First World War, the Great Depression and the social problems of industrial society that Brecht explored in his 1932 film Kuhle Wampe, in which the song appears and its melody recurs. Eisler also used it in his orchestral Suite No. 3, Kuhle Wampe, Op. 26, of 1932.

In 1932 the song was first performed with several working men's choirs, and in the last months of the Weimar Republic it spread quickly, particularly at sporting events. Brecht wrote two versions of the text. The first is closely tied to the film; the second, better known, was written during the Spanish Civil War and is more abstract and ideological.

Eisler's setting is in D minor. The opening syllables of the word "Solidarität" are sung on one repeated note, and the last falls a semitone onto a dominant chord; the coda repeats this change and ends on the dominant rather than returning to the tonic, leaving the song open in music as in words. The melody also carries the B–A–C–H motif in its opening bars.

The text has been translated into many languages. The best-known recording is by Ernst Busch, who also appeared in Kuhle Wampe. In 1961 a group of East German composers, among them Andre Asriel, Fritz Geißler, Günter Kochan and Ruth Zechlin, some of them Eisler's students, wrote joint orchestral variations on it. Frederic Rzewski quoted it in variation 26 of his piano work The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975), and its final two bars served as the interval signal of the East German broadcaster Stimme der DDR.

What it says

A song of workers' solidarity and class struggle, calling working people everywhere to unite; urgent and marching.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.