HAIFA, Israel — On June 28, 1914, the Serb student Gavrila Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo.
A month later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia for the act of one Serb. The guilt of one person was shifted to the Serbian people and their country. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia because a Slav killed a German-speaking prince. The blame of the Slav was placed on all Slavic peoples and states. This was the same principle by which, 1900 years earlier, the actual or imaginary guilt of a group of Jerusalem Jews for the murder of Christ, was shifted to all Jews, including those born many years after the crucifixion. This approach, contrary to Christian morality, became the basis of the main anti-Jewish blood libel. Christian nations declared war on each other to the extermination of 20 million people and the mutilation of tens of millions. The sixth biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” was broken on a scale unprecedented in history.
The Jews of Germany and Austria went into patriotic ecstasy. In the first week of the war, Sigmund Freud wished to see columns of German soldiers entering Paris in victory. He declared a desire to “give all his libido to Austria-Hungary.” His attitude toward the war began to change after the mobilization of his sons into the army. The leading Reform rabbi of Germany, Leo Baeck, wrote: “It (the war ‒ A. G.) allows us to feel that the life of the homeland is our life.” The philosopher Martin Buber proclaimed war as cultural liberation. He saw it as a “sacred spring.” Alex Ross, biographer of music reformer and Viennese composer Arnold Schönberg, a Jew by birth, calls the composer’s behavior “an act of war psychosis.” The philosopher Hermann Cohen believed that “in this patriotic war the highest ideals will be realized” and that it will bring Germany “a heroic victory” over her vicious enemies. He wrote of a “profound brotherhood between Judaism and Germanism,” with brotherhood to be “a fundamental feature of the Germanic spirit.”
The German poet of Jewish origin, Ernst Lissauer (1882 ‒ 1937), rose to the peak of German nationalism on August 4, 1914, when he wrote the poem “Song of Hate Against England,” which became the most famous work created in Germany of those war years. The hymn has these lines:
The fierce hatred of seventy million,
United in the name of love, United in the name of hate.
They all have only one enemy, England.
According to Lissauer, 70 million Germans, all as one, are united in love, as comrades in arms, and in hatred of the despicable enemy, England. When the poet writes of unity, he means equality in the rights of Germans and Jews to love Germany while hating the English. Song of Hate against England was a hymn of love for Germany, which unleashed World War I. The hatred of the British Empire was a sublimation of the poet’s identification with his German homeland. The internal aggression of the assimilated Jew toward his own people broke out and turned against the enemy state with a force that knew no bounds.
In his memoir “The World of Yesterday,” Stephan Zweig writes: “The Kaiser was enthusiastic and awarded Lissauer the Red Order of the Eagle, the poem was reprinted by all newspapers, teachers in schools read it aloud to children, officers recited it before the soldiers ̶ until everyone had learned this litany of hate by heart. The little poem, set to music and intended for chorus, was performed in theaters; soon there was not a single person among seventy million Germans who did not know the Song of Hate against England from first to last line, and soon ‒ with less enthusiasm, of course ‒ the whole world knew it. Overnight Ernst Lissauer gained the loudest fame a poet has acquired in this war.”
The poet supported the German nationalists with all his might and argued that the Jews were not one people and that as a German Jew he had nothing in common with the Jews of Eastern Europe. He attacked Zionism and preached complete assimilation. The Jews rejoiced: their tribesman had become a national hero! Lissauer’s popularity among German Jews was enormous. The reaction to Lissauer as a phenomenon is described by Leon Poliakov in his book “The History of Anti-Semitism” — “German Jews expressed general joy at the fact that one of them was being honored as the mouthpiece of righteous German anger and the spokesman of the German soul.” Indeed, one nationalist commentator wrote that the work reflected “the deepest feelings of the German people”, while another emphasized that “Song of Hate Against England” is an excellent reflection of our state of mind, expressing the depths of the people. Neither knew that Lissauer was Jewish.
In “The World of Yesterday” Zweig writes of Lissauer: “He came from a wealthy German family […] and was perhaps the most Prussian of all the assimilated Jews I knew in Prussia. He spoke no other language, he never traveled abroad. Germany was the world to him, and the more German something was, the more it inspired him.” Lissauer’s father was a wealthy silk merchant. He was also one of the founders of the Jewish Reform community. From a Reform perception of Judaism, Lissauer stepped into German nationalism. Zweig writes: “No one knew German literature better, no one more in love with the German language than he, more fascinated by it; like many Jews whose families had joined German culture comparatively recently, he believed in Germany more than the most orthodox German.” Lissauer’s German nationalism made him, a Jew, a supporter of Junkerism and old Prussianism. His ideology was especially pronounced in his collection of articles, “1813,” and in the chauvinistic poem of hatred of England mentioned above.
About two years after the outbreak of hostilities, the failures of the German army became apparent, and the intensity of the blame for Jewish defeats at the front increased. “The poet-patriot’s” stock began to decline along with the increasing losses of the German army and the growing dissatisfaction of the people with the war. The poet Ernst Lissauer became the personification of hatred.
The fame of the great German patriot, the Jew Ernst Lissauer, passed after the ignominious end of the war for the Germans. Society was looking for those responsible for the shameful defeat of the war. The Jews were the most suitable candidates, although Rathenau and Nobel Prize winners Haber and Wilstetter had miraculously strengthened the German war machine, preventing its collapse during the first months of the great and horrific German military adventure. The pain, the frustration, the humiliation of a defeated Germany, and the payment of monstrous amounts of reparations found an outlet in the attacks on one who had poetically expressed and strengthened the national spirit during the war. The war hero Ernst Lissauer became its victim, the scapegoat. Stefan Zweig describes the change in national mood as follows: “As soon as the war was over, and the businessmen were again willing to trade and the politicians to agree with each other, every effort was made to repudiate this poem, which called for eternal enmity with England. And in order to throw off the blame, poor “Hate-Lissauer” was exposed as the sole perpetrator of a mad hysteria that in reality was shared by everyone from small to large in 1914. In 1919, everyone who had praised him in 1914 ostentatiously turned away from him. The newspapers no longer published his poems; when he appeared among his fellow writers, there was a tense silence.”
Lissauer, cursed by Germans for bigotry and by Jews for compromising tribesmen, despised by the British and French for nationalist extremism and inciting hatred against them, was forced to emigrate from Germany in 1923. Lissauer remained a German patriot all his life. He continued to praise the “German war” from 1914 to 1918. However, in a moment of reflection and doubt, he wrote: “O my people, my people! But what is my people? The heavy burden of two nations will I bear, the weight of the stones of history. In the eyes of the Germans: a Jew disguised as a German, in the eyes of the Jews: a traitor.” Ernst Lissauer, super-German, the romantic hero of the early period of World War I, became the anti-hero of a lost war. The poet moved to Austria, the only country whose language he knew, and died in Vienna in 1937, a year before the Nazi takeover. He died persecuted, hounded, humiliated and forgotten. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna. The German patriot Ernst Lissauer lost this title and was an unwanted and despised Jew in a country which he was deeply attached to, in whose language he wrote, thought, felt, loved and hated.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.