The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #90812   Message #1725169
Posted By: Wolfgang
23-Apr-06 - 06:34 AM
Thread Name: French and German Songs of the Great War
Subject: RE: French and German Songs of the Great War
I'll have a look. I have two books (not here) that have these songs.
"Denn wir fahren gegen Engelland" on the ingeb.org site gives 1939 for the tune. The sentiment of the lyrics is definitely WWI, or shortly before WWI when the German fleet was built.

A very typical song of WWI was BTW that song that the socialists (and not Hitler, he just used it) made the National anthem after WWI, the "Deutschlandlied". It is still our NA though the jingoistic first verse and the not really patriotic second verse are never sung. (The official anthem during WWI was a hymn to the emperor sung to the tune that the British still use today as NA). The Deutschlandlied had been written long before WWI (tune even earlier), but the song was first sung officially in 1890 (when Heligoland came back to Germany; the Deutschlandlied had been written in Heligoland that's why it was played at that event) and took off in 1914 when young German soldiers stupidly were sent to storm against machine gun fire singing this song in Langemarck. The official army report line "they died with the Germany-song on their lips" (starben mit dem Deutschlandlied auf den Lippen) became famous and that's why after the war, when the hymn to the emperor did not make sense any longer, only this song and none else could become the NA. In that that that song is a WWI song.

Wolfgang