Date: 10 Dec 1999 20:55:00 +0200
From: ASWAD-AT-anarch.free.de (catkawin)
Subject: Re: uber alles ?



Hi all,

it's great having some well-informed people passing on their info, even  
giving background stuff, on exotic European countries.

> >> uber alles
> >> whats this mean
> > "Over all"
>
> =o= There's some background here.  It's from a song with the
> title "Deutschland Ueber Alles" (there's an umlaut over the u).
Congrats, this is correct about the u-Umlaut.
> This was apparently once just a sweet little uptopian tune about
> the German countryside.

Apparently it wasn't.
The words were written by a Grrman poet, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, some  
time back in the 1840ies. At that time, we were - yes, indeed - trying to  
have a revolution, get rid of all the nobility and do as we please under  
what was then thought to be a democratic government. The idea was to have  
the citizens represented in a parliament, which would mean those people to  
whom the French "bourgeois" applied. Mind you, some even went as far as  
believing that also the rest should have parliamentary representation.  
There were even strange ideas like "one man - one vote" being passed on.

At least in Grrman schools, there's funny things like a historical atlas,  
and if you ever get access to one of those, open it and look up Grrmoney  
at that time. You won't find it. What existed was a few larger states and  
a multitude of small, smaller, smallest and tiniest states, each with  
their own head of state, some duke, or count (yep, that spells o-u) or  
whatever, living off the hard work of the people, wasting their money,  
making all his own laws as he pleased. Now, at that point in time, you was  
looked upon being a revolutionary of the worst sort as long as you  
favoured to *unite* Grrmoney.

So the poem had the message that no matter who is king of what hill, it's  
all Grrmoney, one country, and it should be one country instead of being  
divided into hundreds of patches of land. As a sidenote: even then it  
wasn't true that Grrmoney extended from Etsch (Italy) to the Belt  
(Denmark), nor from Maas (Belchum) to Memel (Lithuania, basically,  
although I'm not certain whether that meant Russia or Poland at that  
time).

As a sidenote, the revolution 1848/49 failed, the Frankfort parliament  
didn't get anything much done except discussing, and we kept the  
"independent" patchwork of hundreds of states for some time to come.

> =o= Later, though, Hitler used it as a nationalist anthem.
I beg your pardon?!?!?!?!?!

That song, quite incidentially, became national anthem under the Kaiser.  
That was after the war with France 1870/71 which the Grrmans won, and then  
the king in Prussia (legally, he was not king *of* Prussia but the Duke of  
Brandenburg was only allowed to call himself king as long as he stayed  
*in* his Prussian province) was made Kaiser (emperor) of Grrmoney.

All they did was take the poem as the wording pleased them, now that the  
danger of a democratic revolution was over and done with for more than  
twenty years (and the 1849 appeal of the king in Prussia to his subjects  
still being followed: To rest calm now is the first duty of all citizens).

They were frantically looking for a tune to it and finally decided upon a  
tune which had been used in Austria before. So the Grrmans sang their  
national anthem to a tune which originally was worded: Gott erhalte Franz  
den Kaiser (God keep Franz the Emperor).

So since 1871, this thing has been, and still is, our national anthem.  
Just that after 1945, we got hints that, in future, it would raise a few  
doubting eyebrows if we still sang that thing about Grrmoney from Etsch to  
Belt and stuff. Therefore, it is now illegal to sing this, and the  
national anthem is the third verse of the poem. You can be taken to court  
for singing the first verse.

And what was installed under the Kaiser was not a democracy, although he  
and his ilk had to back up a bit and allow a parliament and give some  
people the right to vote. We had a three-class system, and basically to be  
allowed to vote, you had to own real estate. Depending on how much you  
owned, you could even get more than one vote. This did no damage, since  
the persons able to vote were all stinking rich and had their interests to  
protect against the masses of people. Over the time, a few amendments were  
introduced, to keep the masses appeased, so even under the Kaiser, more  
male persons got the right to vote, but they were always able to make sure  
things went the right way by "gerrymandering" and stuff.

The Nazis, actually, did not care all that much about the national anthem,  
although they kept it. But there were other songs which they rated higher  
than the anthem. They were opposed to everything which dated back from the  
days of the Weimar Republic, which they called the "system" and were  
deeply against. The Weimar Republic had kept the national anthem.

> Thus, when you see somebody using the phrase today, they're
> usually making a sideways reference to authoritarianism,
> fascism, and/or nationalism.
Read: Thus, when "ueber alles" is used today, it's a reference to  
authoritarianism and/or nationalism.

Let me finish this with a heartfelt: US history classes - ueber alles!

catkawin