“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.
MATHEMATICS
“Occidental mathematics,” writes one Dr. Erwin Geek, in The National Socialist Essence of Education, “as it has developed in the past three hundred years, is Aryan spiritual property; it is an expression of the Nordic fighting spirit, of Nordic struggle for the supremacy of the world beyond its boundaries.”
It sounds like a vast joke against learning — “an expression of the Nordic fighting spirit!” But we have been warned. At least, now, the problems in arithmetic cannot surprise us.
They all have to do with airplanes, bombs, cannon, and guns.
The booklets called Völkisches Rechnen — a new term meaning “people’s arithmetic” or “national-political problems of arithmetic” — account for this puzzling adjustment: sums in terms of bullet trajectories! Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done about national political problems with ordinary addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division as they are usually taught in the public schools. In the secondary schools, more can be done. National Political Practice in Arithmetic Lessons sets the following problems:
I. Germany had, according to the Versailles Treaty, to surrender all her colonies. (An enumeration of colonies and mandates, with estimates of population and area is given) A. What was Germany’s total loss in population and territory? B. How much did each mandatory power receive in territory and population? C. How many times greater is the surrendered territory than the area of Germany? D. Compare the population of Germany with the population of the lost territories.