In particular the Reichpropagandaminister Joseph Goebbels, as Berszinski writes, noticed early on that down-to-earth, simple songs were a useful propaganda tool. The more that the songs served as a departure from the hard reality into dreamful felicity and affected a sentimental love song idyll, the better the 'true face of Nazi Germany' could be hidden behind the joyful major-key notes. The close connection of National Socialism with the new technical mass media, especially film and radio, came to the contrary and swiftly ensured the popularity of the Nazi songs. The military hits and marches were the 'answer closer approaching war.' In all about 15,000 National Socialist songs were produced between 19, as well as about one and a half million sheets of documents that alone were related to music. The song was and is continued to be perceived as a typical part of the German treasury of songs and is indeed to this day mostly inseparably tied with the German Bundeswehr. For example, in 1983 for the ten-year anniversary of the junta in Chile, the song was a part of the repertoire of the marching band of a Chilean military battalion. It was typically sung by conscripts at the end of basic training.After the twelve-year rupture caused by the Nazis, in the Soviet zone after 1945 attempts were made to reconnect with the traditions of workers’ songs and critical folk songs that were viewed as the cultural heritage of the communist movement.Īn Afrikaans version of the song was the march of the South African Air Force Gymnasium until 1994. One of these ‘repertoires’ of song was that of the 1848 Revolution. In the 1950s GDR researchers such as the Germanist Bruno Kaiser, the musicologist Inge Lammel and in particular the folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz made substantial contributions to the collecting and publishing of the 1848 songs.

Their work provided an important reference point for the singers of the German folk song revival in the GDR from the late 1970s onwards. As the cases of groups such as Folkländer and Wacholder showed, theirs was a particularly creative appropriation of the revolutionary ‘Erbe’ that involved performing protest songs of the past as if they were criticising the present. Nach dem zwölfjährigen Kulturbruch in Deutschland während des ‘Dritten Reichs’ versuchte man nach 1945 in der sowjetischen Zone, an demokratische Traditionen wie die Lieder der Arbeiterbewegung oder sozialkritische Volkslieder anzuknüpfen.

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