“Deutschland über Alles” and “America First,” in Song (2024)

Last weekend, at a tennis tournament in Hawaii, a male soloist accidentally proclaimed German supremacy, traumatizing several tennis players by singing a version of the German national anthem once prized by the Nazis. The gaffe occurred at the Fed Cup, one of the premier events in women’s tennis. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt,” he sang. “Germany, Germany above all—above everything in the world.” Andrea Petkovic, a top German player, said it was one of the worst experiences of her life.

The timing of the error seemed strangely appropriate. In recent weeks, many Germans have drawn parallels between their national anthem and the motto of President Trump. “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first,” Trump said during his Inauguration, invoking a phrase that has troubling rootsin nineteen-forties nativism and anti-Semitism. About a week later, Konstantin von Notz, a Green Party parliamentarianin the German Bundestag, tweeted, “America First is an update of_Deutschland, Deutschland über alles_. . .’” He knew the statement was provocative. “There is one rule in German politics: no comparisons with the Third Reich,” von Notz told me. But he considered his tweet less a comparison than a warning. “Patriotic feelings can lead to putting other people, other nations, down.”

Provocation aside, von Notz had a larger point to make about the way nationalist movements exploit popular culture. Althoughthe Associated Pressandthe BBCreported that the United States Tennis Association had permitted the singing of a “Nazi-era anthem,” the objectionable stanzas actually come from an 1841 song. The “Deutschlandlied,” or “Song of Germany,” was officially adopted as an anthem in 1922. During the short-lived but democratic Weimar Republic, it was considered a proclamation of liberal values like freedom and justice. “It got misinterpreted by the nationalists,” von Notz told me. “And this, from my point of view, is the connection.” His concern is not that America has become a fascist state but rather that political language, when misused, can turn healthy patriotism into toxic nationalism.

The “Deutschlandlied” was written by a poet named Hoffmann von Fallersleben, “a good bourgeois liberal,” according to the German cultural historian Jost Hermand, a retired professor at the University of Wisconsin. Von Fallersleben set his stanzas to the tune of an imperial anthem by Joseph Haydn, but imperialism wasn’t what he had in mind. The mid-nineteenth century was “a period of longing” for a sense of shared identity, Hermand said, because Germanic territories were fragmented into thirty-six separate states. In context, the three stanzas were, if not exactly progressive, unsurprisingly patriotic. The first began with “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” and named the rivers that enclosed German-speaking lands. The second praised “German women, German loyalty, German wine, and German song.” Only the third stanza remains official today. “Unity and justice and freedom are the foundation of happiness,” it declares.

The same evolutionary process has shaped patriotic music in the United States. Earlier this month, at the fifty-first Super Bowl, in Houston, before pretending to jump off the stadium’s roof, Lady Gaga sang verses from “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land," two songs that have been adapted and appropriated by both the left and the right.

“God Bless America” was written by the Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin, in 1918, as part of a tribute to his then-employer, the U.S. Army. One original line had a militaristic ring: “Make her victorious on land and foam.” But, as Sheryl Kaskowitz documents in her book, “God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song,” Berlin removed that line. In 1938, he added a stanza that seemed to discourage American intervention in the Second World War:

While the storm clouds gather
Far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance
To a land that’s free
Let us all be grateful
That we’re far from there
As we raise our voices
In a solemn prayer

Fascism in Europe soon felt closer to home, however. On the day that Kate Smith premièred Berlin’s song, November 10, 1938, she also relayed the latest news from Germany: “Mobs roamed the cities and towns last night, wrecking Jewish shops and setting fire to synagogues.” Berlin soon deleted his anti-interventionist verse, leaving only a simple hymn asking for guidance and praising America’s beauty. It became just the song to boost wartime morale. (Ironically, in 1940, a group of American fascists boycotted it because Berlin was Jewish.)

On September 11, 2001, “God Bless America” was sung spontaneously by both political parties during a joint session of Congress. Nine days later, George W. Bush declared a “war on terror.” That same year, Major League Baseball made “God Bless America” a tradition during the seventh-inning stretch of every game. “You imagine that you know what a song means,” Kaskowitz told me. “Then you realize that part of the power comes from this sort of shared construction of what it means.”

Woody Guthrie, meanwhile, first wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as a biting response to “God Bless America.” (Its original title was “God Blessed America for Me.”) His song both praised America’s natural beauty and questioned his country. One stanza described a “big high wall there that tried to stop me.” Another asked, “Is this land still made for you and me?” But according to Will Kaufman, a folk singer and historian, Guthrie almost never sang these stanzas in public, for reasons that remain unclear. He certainly considered them important. His son, Arlo, who is sixty-nine, remembered learning the omitted lines when he was seven or eight. “My father and I were sitting outside behind our house,” he told me in an e-mail. Arlo had a three-quarter-scale Gibson guitar, which, as Woody taught him the chords, passed back and forth between father and son. “After I learned the chords, he began going over the lyrics, and I was told to remember the verses that were not in the printed version.”