A Rough and INCOMPLETE - transcription form sections of the radio piece.
1933 in B…prison camp – by 1945 it had spread through the concentration camps and throughout the world. It is now considered to be one of the greatest of all anti-fascist songs.
The daily routine of a concentration camp was strict and difficult. Marching to and from forced labor, the inmates were forced to sing. From time to time the camp commander gave permission for 'cultural events' to build relationships between guards and the inmates. The "Peat Bog Soldiers" is the first and most famous song to be composed in the concentration camps of The Third Reich. A person by the name of…Wolfgan Langhoff. who later became the director of the German theatre in Berlin asked the minor works poet Esser – for lyrics that could be sung by all of the camps prisoners but would not be too controversial. Langhoff gave them to Goguel, who was a salesman – who had never composed a song before – but grewup in a music loving family)
INTERVIEW with GOGUEL "The song was not written spontaneously, it was written at a very specific moment, as a protest on the part of the resistance fighters against the oppressors." It was in response to a night-time attack on a barracks by the SS; it ended with a dozen or so slightly or seriously wounded prisoners. In response to this assault, we had the idea to organize a cultural program to demonstrate our higher moral value. I got the request from L….to write the melody for a poem….that another inmate Esser had given to him…. My comrades were able to fake an injury for me and bring me to the camp hospital – and there at night, I composed the music to accompany the lyrics. After I left the hospital I found 16 prisoners from an imprisoned men's choir, from Zollen to rehearse the song. They studied it secretly, in a bathroom, for the cultural evening…."
"We can talk about two versions, in addition to these, there are many others." Spanish Civil War and a melody from the Thirty Year War….(Examples of tune variations given at aprox 15:30) Esser recognized a worker's song tune – and put it at the beginning of the well published one, however, that version is not the original one that was written by Goguel in the camp. Years later Goguel heard the tune as the introduction to a radio program and found it went around the world. The original was banned in Germany but traveled from prison to prison . The other version stayed alive in public and was printed in 1935 – and was broadcast on Radio Moscow. Pete Seeger met Esser when Seeger was 14 years old and Seeger's recording is one of the best known– his recording was popular in the USSR. (Seeger clip given at approx) 22:30 – 25:30. Rock version approx 36:00.
Sincerely,
GargoyleClick to play MIDI