Deutschlandlied - Hoffmann's Lyrics

Hoffmann's Lyrics

August Heinrich Hoffmann (who called himself Hoffmann von Fallersleben after his home town to distinguish himself from others with the same common name of "Hoffmann") wrote the text in 1841 on vacation on the North Sea island Heligoland, then a possession of the United Kingdom.

Hoffmann von Fallersleben intended Das Lied der Deutschen to be sung to Haydn's tune, as the first publication of the poem included the music. The first line, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt" (usually translated into English as "Germany, Germany above all, above all in the world"), was an appeal to the various German monarchs to give the creation of a united Germany a higher priority than the independence of their small states. In the third stanza, with a call for "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit" (unity and justice and freedom), Hoffmann expressed his desire for a united and free Germany where the rule of law, not monarchical arbitrariness, would prevail.

In the era after the Congress of Vienna, which was influenced by Prince Metternich and his secret police, Hoffmann's text had a distinctly revolutionary, and at the same time liberal, connotation, since the demand for a united Germany was most often made in connection with demands for freedom of the press and other liberal rights. Its implication that loyalty to a larger Germany should replace loyalty to one's personal sovereign was in itself a revolutionary idea.

The year after he wrote Das Deutschlandlied, Hoffmann von Fallersleben lost his job as a librarian and professor in Breslau, Prussia, because of this and other revolutionary works, and was forced into hiding until being pardoned after the revolutions of 1848 in the German states.