Why didn’t Germany use “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” as their national anthem after rejoining the west and east? It fits the country, has nothing to do with Nazis and sounds beautiful.

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  3. It was The anthem of east germany. At The reunion east Germany joined West Germany so The west anthem was Set by Default…

  4. Because that was the anthem of the part that stopped existing at that point, whereas the part these states integrated into already had an anthem in place. Also, while there are legitimate questions to be raised about the use of the Deutschlandlied, given it’s nationalist origins, it’s not a Nazi thing. Goes back further than fascism in any form.

  5. I’m not sure why this is marked as NSFW. I mean, seriously?

    Anyhow, there was a discussion about this after reunification. At the time, the (West) German national anthem was officially all three stanzas of *Das Lied der Deutschen* which beings “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”; but for various reasons (mostly because the first stanza describes the borders of Germany as they were in the 19th century, effectively claiming large parts of what is now Poland and Russia and some other territories) only the third stanza was ever actually sung.

    There was some discussion over whether the two anthems could somehow be combined, or if a completely new anthem should be written. But legally, reunification wasn’t a merger of two countries on equal terms into a new country: rather, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and its former territories passed to the already existing Federal Republic of Germany, which simply got bigger.

    The issue was settled once and for all in 1991. Trivial matters like this are established not by legislation, but by the head of government (the chancellor) and the head of state (the president) coming to an agreement. And so they exchanged official letters explicitly setting as the German national anthem the third stanza of *Lied der Deutschen*, which begins “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit”.

    Just to be clear about one thing, though: even the first two stanzas had nothing to do with the Nazis, although the Nazis did wilfully misinterpret it. It was written at a time when Germany was transitioning to a modern nation state, and is in fact a call for unity (the first line is to be interpreted as: “I am above all German; I am Prussian/Bavarian/Saxon/Swabian/whatever second”). As such, it is not a symbol of the Nazi regime; *Auferstanden aus Ruinen* very much is a symbol of a different totalitarian regime — it also contains a slightly problematic line about “defeating the enemy of the people”.

    The song that *is* banned as a symbol of the Third Reich is the *Horst-Wessel-Lied*, which glorified the SA.

  6. The west dropped nearly everything that came from the east – we would never have accepted a national anthem from the east. But they/we missed the chance of making a new one for a United Germany.

  7. A national anthem is more than just a song. I really like the song too, but it was the anthem of a state that oppressed its people, so if we kept it, people would have thought of the GDR every time it is sung. It’s just some emotional baggage you don’t really want to keep.

  8. Weil man lieber das alte Deutschlandlied mit neuem Text wollte. Da fühlen sich auch die Ewiggestrigen angesprochen und müssen auch keinen neuen Text lernen. Und die Neuen Rechten können auch alternativ den Text wählen und in der Vergangenheit schwelgen…

    Because the old and new Nazis like the old ‚Deutschlandlied‘ Uber Alles In Der Welt, since they do not need to lern a new text!

  9. Ha, i remember my music teacher in 8th grade (Hamburg) playing the GDR hymn and calling it „far better“. Guess we ditched it for political reasons…

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