Last weekend I was up at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, to watch my son play in a basketball tournament. After his game on Saturday, we went to a concert of the Colby Wind Ensemble called “Banned Band Works,” directed by the very charming Eric Thomas.

The first piece in the program was by Hanns Eisler (1898 – 1962) and was entitled “Auferstanden aus Ruinen.” (That means “raised out of the ruins.”) It used to be the National Anthem of East Germany, back when there was an East Germany. Eisler wrote it in 1949, and it was the GDR’s anthem until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany in 1990. I found the piece so beautiful (and Mr. Thomas’s intro to it so intriguing) that I did some research about Eisler.

Eisler began as a 12-tone composer, studying under Arnold Schoenberg, although he later abandoned the atonal and moved toward a more “popular” style. In the 1930s he collaborated with poet/playwright Bertolt Brecht. (That’s Eisler on the left, above, and Brecht on the right.) In 1933 Eisler’s music was banned by the Nazis. (Eisler was Jewish.) He and Brecht both fled the Nazis, and eventually ended up in Hollywood, where Eisler wrote film scores. His successful film career—one of his scores was nominated for an Academy Award–ended abruptly when he was blacklisted in Hollywood as a socialist, after facing the House Un-American Activities Committee.

According to this essay by David Yearsley, the FBI file on Eisler was 686 pages long. Despite support from Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson, Eisler faced certain deportation, and returned to Germany in 1948.

So in 1990, when the Germans realized they had one-too-many national anthems, they opted to go with the West German rendition. That’s the one you’ll hear played at the Olympics when someone from Germany wins a gold medal. The melody was written by Haydn. I guess if your anthem has to get preempted by someone else’s anthem, it may as well be Haydn’s. But really, it’s a shame Eisler’s anthem is no longer played. They’re both pretty awesome.

Click here to hear the East German/Eisler anthem on youtube.

And here is the Haydn melody–the anthem of reunified Germany.

Sources: http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/02/hanns-eisler-s-great-national-anthem-for-east-germany-is-available-make-it-america-s/

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Eisler-Hanns.htm

image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-19204-2132,_Berlin,_Bertolt_Brecht_und_Hanns_Eisler.jpg