Übermensch Überhits!

I’ve always said it was a myth that you could find absolutely everything on the Internet, but you could find a lot more than you might have expected. I was reminded of this tonight when I found a recording of a song called “Die Fahne hoch” on Internet Archive tonight. If you don’t recognise that name, you may know its informal title, The Horst Wessel Song.

I found it in a collection called “78rpm Records Digitized by George Blood, L.P.“; as the name may indicate, it is full (literally hundreds of thousands) of 78rpm records posted by George Blood LP, a company specialising in film and audio preservation. It was just… there as part of this collection. In among things like records by Enrico Caruso, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, even up to the early rock ‘n’ roll era, plus early jazz and country and blues and gospel and… whatever the fuck THIS is. The collection is so big that describing it like this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

In fact, there’s more than one Horst-Wessel-Lied recording in the George Blood collection. And they’re all just there like… normal records. And they’re not normal. “Die Fahne hoch” was the official anthem of THE FUCKING NAZI PARTY from 1930 to 1945 as well the other national anthem of Germany under Hitler after “Deutschland Über Alles”. It was a love letter to the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts, the Nazis’ original paramilitary wing of which Wessel had been a commander (and which Hitler would notably come to love rather less than the song). It’s been banned in Germany and Austria since 1945. At least two of these recordings feature the actual SA choir. They’re not normal records. And, I suppose, neither are the Soviet-era records the George Blood collection also includes, to be sure, but somehow even though the Soviet Union was obviously hardly better than the 3rd Reich those Soviet records bother me less than the Nazi ones.

And I say that as someone who, you know, actually owns Nazi-era recordings. Many years ago EMI had a CD series of early recordings of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, mostly from the period of the 3rd Reich. I’ve got products of Nazi Germany sitting in one of my old CD containers. I don’t think of those Bruckner recordings as “Nazi” productions when I listen to them cos, you know, Bruckner himself wasn’t a Nazi or anything, but that’s kind of what they are… I’ve got Richard Strauss doing his Alpensinfonie in 1941. And I’ve got a download of the famous 1945 “Emperor” concerto, famous for being an early stereo tape recording and for having anti-aircraft gunfire in the background during the quieter moments.

Obviously Nazi Germany had arts and entertainment like any other country; it’s just that they were Nazi arts and entertainment. Which is why I shouldn’t be surprised to find recordings of Horst Wessel on the Internet, and I suppose that, really, I’m actually not. I think it’s just the context in which I did find them that took me aback more than the act of finding them did. Anyway, the icing on the cake came at the bottom of the page for the record, in the form of a comment from someone who said words to the effect of “I’m Argentinian and my grandfather used to play this all the time”. I’ll just BET he did, my friend…