dubious taste

[brushwolf]

So I'm at Peets drawing during my lunch break. Unlike Starbucks Peets plays classical - or classical styled - music over their PA.

The Deutschlandlied turns out to be by Franz Haydn, and dates from 1797, and apparently someone decided that it'd be soothing to have performed by a string quartet and on the PA. You know. Germany's national anthem (since 1922). The official title has never actually been Deutschland Über Alles.

Obviously my associations are not soothing string quartet. However, thanks mostly to Monty Python, I can't hear the darn thing without my mind filling in John Cleese ranting in pseudo-German (only slightly more coherent and less funny than what little I've seen of Triumph of the Will, possibly the only movie to feature horrifying historical implications while simultaneously being incredibly boring). So I'm listening to this and cracking up.

Comments

[brushwolf]

More stuff I thought was interesting in Wikipedia's entry is that it kinda always was a national anthem, in the most literal sense - the lyrics were intended apparently as a pan Germanic identity thing, that being German was much more important than being Hessian/Prussian/Bavarian/etc - and I can see how that'd qualify it as the anthem during the Weimar Republic, the first time there actually was a unified Germany. Fits it more into all the playing that pretty much everyone was doing with national identity in the 1800s. That and apparently Haydn was told to write something as powerful sounding as God Save the Queen.