Horst Wessel, a national hero in the new Germany, was the son of a North German pastor, a chaplain during the War, This man, whose name-song is the national anthem now, was always fond of playing soldiers, of handling daggers and revolvers; his intelligence was definitely below normal, and he never could find his way into a civil profession. Still at school age, he joined one of the quasi-military organizations which were springing up, German nationalist in character, and composed of young men with nothing better to do who gathered in the hope that the War might yet be won. Horst Wessel became the leader of a group called Crown Princess, affiliated with the rather childish Bismarck Bund. It was not long before he was joining more sinister groups, the Viking, the infamous Organization Consul, and finally the Black Reichswehr.
Many of the members had come back from the War desperate, de^ feated soldiers, completely lost in civilian life. Some went to Silesia or the Baltic region in the hope of rescuing lost German territory; but Horst Wessel, who had been too young to go to war, was never more than an adventurous loafer. The organizations, moreover, were losing their purely nationalist character and degenerating into bands of terrorists.
The National Socialist movement, in its attempt to gather power, gathered in the debris of these Freikorps, becoming their successor; Horst Wessel became a Nazi. To appease his relatives and the world in general, he decided to attend a university; but he never was even a Bummel student (a chronic student, behaving as though the academic life were a profession), for he hardly set eyes on a university. He was living in one of the most disreputable sections of Berlin, and engaging in a more remunerative profession. The pastor’s son was living with a notorious whore, and earning money as procurer. But the Nazis made sure that he would not forget his appetite for playing soldier. While his mistress was making money, he was breaking up meetings and taking part in the bloody street fights between workers and Nazi toughs that were then so common. During one of those brawls, Horst Wessel was killed.
He had never worked in his life. He had been a degenerate who never accomplished a thing that can be counted in his favor. But he has become the national hero of Germany, and his song, Die Fahne Hoch (Up with the Flag) the national hymn.
It is one of the shabbiest works ever to reach fame; lacking talent and craft, its brutal, bombastic text is set to a melody full of mistakes — a melody Horst Wessel had stolen, which does not even coincide with the limping rhythm of the verse. Two high legal courts handed down, as late as 1937, an astonishing decision based on the authoritative verdict of musical experts of the Sachverständige Kammer für Werke der Tonkunst. It settled a suit between two music publishers, and is as follows:
“As far back as 1900, there was a popular song called Sea Voyage to Africa (beginning, ‘Once I lived in the German fatherland’), whose first line, with only a slight alteration in the sequence of notes, and minor differences in rhythm, has exactly the same melody as that of the first two lines of the Horst Wessel song. The third line and the beginning of the fourth of this song, almost bar for bar, can be found in the still older song The Fisher and his Love (beginning, ‘I am but a poor fisher-lad’). The closing bars of the Horst Wessel song correspond to the end of the second line of the Storndorfer folk song, There was a man who wanted to go home, which was, again, sung to almost the same melody in Westphalia, in the song, Sea Voyage to Africa. ”
The astonishing thing is that a Nazi court dared to pass so severe a verdict on the Nazi hymn. The judges, however, were careful not to refer to Horst Wessel as a plagiarist, but to some vague “singer of the Horst Wessel song.” Nevertheless, they went on to say: “Above all, an artist with a strong musical sense will feel himself bound to conform to the words far more than did the author of the song Up with the Flag. The very beginning shows a definite discrepancy of word and tune; the line ‘Up with the flag’ would seem to indicate a movement upwards, whereas the melody goes downward, without any apparent necessity for this. A further disagreement between words and melody is to be found in the line, Kameraden die Rot Front und Reaktion erschossen, for the text, contrary to the meaning, emphasizes die with a higher note, which, quite gratuitously, is also louder than the rest of the text.”
The hero and martyr of Hitler’s regime died as a notorious pimp; the “National Hymn,” his life work, is not only a plagiarism, but a clumsy one.
However, Nazi school children know Horst Wessel as a heroic, saintly figure of light, a godlike hero hated by the enemies of the Nazis, a man who sacrificed his life in the battle against evil. His song, they are told — and they have not so much as a suspicion that the accuracy of what they are taught is doubtful — is one of the greatest creations of the German spirit. And they sing it lustily.