Dresden, December 1989: Suddenly Johannes R. Becher’s verse is back.
Photo: dpa/Wolfgang Kumm
One might consider it an ironic footnote to the history of the cynical 20th century that the GDR’s anthem was first heard in Poland. In the country that was attacked and devastated by the Germans a few years earlier. It was the end of October 1949, three weeks after the founding of the GDR, when the composer Hanns Eisler sat down at a grand piano in Zelazowa Wola to play the melody to the poet Johannes R. Becher. On an instrument by Frederic Chopin; The two visitors visited the Pole’s birthplace on his 200th birthday.
Becher had asked Eisler to set his verses to music on behalf of GDR President Wilhelm Pieck. The matter was urgent, because the Republic would not remain without an anthem for long. Becher’s text was a call for peace, born from the experience of the World War, and for the unification of the country divided by the Allies.
Things then moved quickly: the anthem “Risen from Ruins” was approved by the SED committees – a composition by Ottmar Gerster failed – and premiered publicly in Berlin on November 7, 1949. The two creators stood for two ways of fighting fascism: the KPD member Becher had emigrated to the Soviet Union, the non-party communist and Brecht friend Eisler spent the winter primarily in exile in the US.
Both were caught up in the conflicts of the 20th century and were also confronted with the contradictions in the GDR. Becher, in exile in Moscow in danger of becoming a victim of Stalin’s terror like many of his comrades, also navigated between morality and power, artistic demands and political corset in the GDR as Minister of Culture and was sidelined after the unrest in Hungary in 1956. Eisler was successful as a musician in the USA, was nominated for an Oscar twice, but was suspected and spied on as a leftist and was ultimately expelled by the anti-communist McCarthy justice system. Celebrated in the GDR, he also had to put up with accusations of formalism.
His music for the anthem outlived the lyrics. Becher’s verses disappeared from public view in the early 1970s. The SED no longer wanted to sing about “Germany, one fatherland.” The GDR had an anthem without lyrics for almost 20 years. Eisler’s music also did not go unchallenged. The composer Peter Kreuder unsuccessfully filed several plagiarism lawsuits against Eisler. He allegedly copied the first bars from Kreuder’s Hans Albers tearjerker “Goodbye Johnny”.
In 1989/90 it became clear that the East Germans’ memory worked. Although no longer intoned, the unpleasant line “Germany, unite Fatherland” became one of the great slogans of the upheaval. Even though Becher and Eisler had imagined it completely differently. The moment Becher’s wish came true, the anthem finally disappeared into the orcus of history.
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