21 - “Mein Deutschland, strecke die Glieder”

Summary

“MEIN DEUTSCHLAND, STRECKE DIE GLIEDER” (My Germany, Rest Your Limbs) was originally a political poem by Georg Herwegh that commented sarcastically on the failures of the ideals of the 1848 Revolution. Herwegh wrote it in December 1848 and published it in several newspapers the following spring. Thereafter it sank into virtual obscurity, experiencing only scant reception until it was rediscovered in the 1960s in the context of the renewed interest in German democratic song traditions. It was only from this point onwards that it was set to music and performed as a song.

Georg Herwegh was one of the most prolific minds of the Vormärz period. His military misadventure of April 1848, in which he unsuccessfully led a force of German volunteers from their Paris exile to the aid of Friedrich Hecker's uprising in Baden, did not diminish his radical democratic viewpoint. He continued to express this in satirical poems such as “Zu Frankfurt an dem Main,” which conveyed Herwegh's skepticism regarding the newly constituted National Assembly in early summer 1848. The politically disillusioning developments of the autumn—the victory of the counterrevolutionary forces in Vienna in November and in Prussia in December, as well as the debates on the Imperial Constitution—inspired Herwegh to write “Mein Deutschland, strecke die Glieder” in late 1848. The poem was published in early 1849 both in Germany and abroad, firstly in February in Freiheit, Arbeit, the mouthpiece of the Cologne Workers Association, and then in March in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung and the Neue Fränkische Zeitung in Würzburg.

The poem originated against the background of the disputes surrounding the “Paulskirchenverfassung,” the first constitution of the German Empire, which the Frankfurt National Assembly would finally announce on March 28, 1849. The installation of a constitutional monarchy with a Prussian hereditary Kaiser, as desired by the national-liberals, was viewed by Herwegh as the death-knell of all democratic endeavor in Germany. In the face of unchallenged aristocratic power, revolutionary hopes seemed as good as buried. Herwegh lumped the responsibility for this at the door of the Frankfurt Parliament, which he once again derides with biting scorn in “Mein Deutschland,” as he had already done in his text “Zu Frankfurt an dem Main” in July.