As Alexander Zverev displays his fury after being heckled at the US Open by a spectator singing Adolf Hitler’s Nazi national anthem, CONSTANTIN ECKNER explains why these three words are such a sickening insult to Germans
This is the phrase that makes my nation hang its head in shame: ‘Deutschland uber alles’ – Germany above all. To some, it might easily be dismissed as an unremarkable, patriotic chant.
But for Germans like me it is unmistakably the phrase adopted by the Nazi party and now for ever associated with Adolf Hitler’s heinous rule.
There is the swastika, there is the Holocaust and there is this ugly slogan. Nazism is an indelible stain on my country’s collective memory. It is the ghost we live with every day. We learn about it in school and at university, we see it at the cinema and in the theatre.
So when Alexander Zverev reacted with such fury to a spectator who shouted ‘Deutschland uber alles’ during his match at the US Open this week, I was not surprised at all. In fact, I was proud of the young German tennis player.
Alexander Zverev (pictured) reacted with such fury to a spectator who shouted ‘Deutschland uber alles’ during his match at the US Open this week
Not only was the 26-year-old right to be incensed by such a profanity, he was being a brave patriot in standing up to the perpetrator, especially in front of over 23,000 people inside New York’s Arthur Ashe Stadium, and no doubt millions more watching at home.
‘Deutschland uber alles’ is the first line from August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s 1841 poem entitled Das Lied der Deutschen. Von Fallersleben intended the line as a call for national unity against the vested interests of 19th-century monarchs. It was only much later that it was used to express German supremacy.
Admittedly, von Fallersleben may himself have approved of the reinterpretation.
He notoriously penned a number of anti-Semitic poems over the course of his life, as well as developing a visceral hatred for France.
During the First World War, German soldiers are known to have sung ‘Deutschland uber alles’ to a tune composed by Joseph Haydn in 1796 while in the trenches in a bid to boost morale. In no small part because of this, the song became the official German national anthem in 1922.
The spectator, who was sitting in a section where tickets go for around $3,000 each, was escorted out of his seat by security to rapturous applause
The irony that a song about supremacy should be sung by a people defeated and humiliated in the Great War was not lost on Germany’s intellectual elite.
Nonetheless, aware of the patriotic allure of the lyrics and the rousing tune which accompanied it, Hitler decided to continue using it, if only the first verse of three, when he rose to power in 1933.
At major occasions of state it was accompanied by a rendition of the Horst Wessel Song – the official Nazi anthem. Subsequently, ‘Deutschland uber alles’ became associated with the Nazi Party and that immeasurably dark period in my country’s history.
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Today, only the third verse – which does not contain the phrase – is used as Germany’s national anthem. The haunting words of the first have been consigned, thankfully, to history. Until, of course, one foul spectator decided the US Open was the right moment to shout them out.
So thank God for Zverev, the son of two Russian immigrants, who may well not know the entire origin story of that taboo line, but – like most Germans – knows it to be unspeakable. As someone a little older than him, I am relieved that younger Germans still feel the same obligation to step in when Nazi profanity is spread in public.
German athletes, especially the most successful ones, still hear Nazi phrases being directed towards them on occasion when they compete abroad.
To the uneducated, it seems an easy tool with which to agitate or insult Germans, even those who were born, as in Zverev’s case, over 50 years after the war. But it is neither funny nor cool. It is sick.
For Alexander Zverev to stop his match, take himself out of ‘the zone’, and ensure the spectator was ejected from the stadium, shows the moral fortitude that makes me proud to be German.
- Constantin Eckner is based in Berlin
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