E It’s really ridiculous what the Bavarian Prime Minister is saying. And yet you have to take what Markus Söder says seriously. You can also laugh at Donald Trump’s Greenland fantasies, even if the US President is serious. Söder suggested that all students should soon sing the anthems of Europe, Germany and Bavaria. When the certificates are awarded in July, there should be some singing in order to create “identity”. Most people had already learned the texts in elementary school, so that wasn’t a problem, says Söder.
Really? We would love to know whether Söder has the text of the European anthem ready. It’s not heavy. Because the anthem is sung without lyrics, as explained on the European Union website. “Only in the universal language of music does it express the European values of freedom, peace and solidarity,” it says. But maybe it’s different in Bavaria and they bully the children right in the first grade with a word like Elysium and sing the ode to joy, which is supposed to be a daughter from that same Elysium, as it says in Friedrich Schiller’s text, which Ludwig van Beethoven set to music in his 9th symphony.
And one would also like to know whether Söder knows who or what this cherub is, about whom Schiller’s text says that he or she stands before God. In any case, it is not a Bavarian pork specialty. Even the most snack-addicted meat eaters will never have heard of Doner Cherub. If you don’t know, you can ask a Bavarian elementary school student. No matter what it means, allowing the anthem to be played without lyrics is definitely one of the better decisions from Brussels.
Terrible text security
And what about the text security of the Bavarian anthem? Miserable as a dog. For most residents of the Free State, it doesn’t extend any further than the end of the first line: “God be with you, land of Bavaria!” Former Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber was once caught moving his mouth helplessly because he simply didn’t know what to do next. Incidentally, an anthem debate about what national football players with a migration background have to endure in such cases has not started to rage.
The problem of a lack of text security has been around for a long time. A certain Rudolf Hierl, a master locksmith in Munich, once tried to fight it, largely in vain. The CSU member, who served as a volunteer city councilor in his home community for a whopping 34 years from 1972 to 2006, distributed more than 500,000 cards with the text of the anthem on one side and his portrait on the other over the course of his life. The obituaries for Hierl, who died in 2010 at the age of 88, never failed to mention that he made it into the Guinness Book of Records. The cards are said to have traveled as far as China. Does anyone know the text?