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The dark side of a Thanksgiving classic
Nov. 19th, 2010 08:12 amOne of my clients went off the air at midnight last night, and using VNC I quickly deduced that the problem was that no Friday schedule had been produced. Since I didn't really know what I was doing when it comes to scheduling commercials, I asked the fellow who called to try to track down an operations person, but told him to call me back if he was unsuccessful. I didn't want to go back to sleep until this was resolved, so I did some Web surfing while waiting for him to call back, which he eventually did.
I can't remember what series of random jumps led me to Leni Riefenstahl's Der Sieg des Glaubens, but since it is only an hour long, I started watching it. 22 minutes into the movie, the assembled Nazi delegates sing Wir treten zum Beten, instantly recognizable by its tune as the familiar Thanksgiving hymn, "We gather together". That piqued my curiosity, and I remembered having encountered it in an old German newsreel, where it is sung in celebration of France's 1940 surrender.
From what I can glean via Google, the hymn is associated with the last Kaiser, William II, and was embraced by the Nazis as an assertion of their regime as the successor of the old Reich.
Interestingly, the hymn seems to have originated as a song of thanksgiving for a 1597 Dutch victory over the Spaniards. Since many of the Plymouth colonists of 1620 had lived in the Netherlands, the hymn may have been known to them, but if they sang it, it must have been in Dutch, as the English-language version dates only from 1894, according to ingeb.org.
I can't remember what series of random jumps led me to Leni Riefenstahl's Der Sieg des Glaubens, but since it is only an hour long, I started watching it. 22 minutes into the movie, the assembled Nazi delegates sing Wir treten zum Beten, instantly recognizable by its tune as the familiar Thanksgiving hymn, "We gather together". That piqued my curiosity, and I remembered having encountered it in an old German newsreel, where it is sung in celebration of France's 1940 surrender.
From what I can glean via Google, the hymn is associated with the last Kaiser, William II, and was embraced by the Nazis as an assertion of their regime as the successor of the old Reich.
Interestingly, the hymn seems to have originated as a song of thanksgiving for a 1597 Dutch victory over the Spaniards. Since many of the Plymouth colonists of 1620 had lived in the Netherlands, the hymn may have been known to them, but if they sang it, it must have been in Dutch, as the English-language version dates only from 1894, according to ingeb.org.
