The early German Romantics developed their idealist poetics in the shadow of Goethe’s and Schiller’s classically-inflected cosmopolitanism. Their historicist bent inspired a number of nature poems (e.g. Friedrich Schlegel’s Am Rhein, 1802) or poems on historical topics, often in ballad style or in the folk form of the Lied. But it was not until the increasingly antagonistic atmosphere of the years following 1806 (which had seen the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire and the Battle of Jena) that a programmatically nationalist form of verse burgeoned, peaking in the years 1810-14. The prolific agitator Ernst Moritz Arndt turned from prose to exhortatory songs (Teutsche Wehrlieder, 1814), and with Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? (1813) created an evergreen that was to become Germany’s semi-official national anthem in the following decades. Other established authors who turned to national-political verse were Ludwig Uhland (Vaterländische Gedichte, 1814-16) and, especially, Friedrich von Kleist, who unleashed vehemently aggressive poetry against the French hegemony around 1810. More classicistically restrained in style, the poems of Max von Schenkendorf similarly breathed an anti-French spirit. The extent to which such verse was really a form of (commissioned or internalized) war propaganda can be seen in the work of Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) and Theodor Körner (1791–1813). The Geharnischte Sonnette (“Sonnets in armour”) which Rückert published in 1814 to whip up anti-Napoleonic fervour marked the beginning of a prolific literary career; the verse collected in Körner’s posthumous collection Leyer und Schwerdt (“The lyre and the sword”, 1813) gained fame because their author, henceforth an iconic figure, had been a student volunteer in the anti-Napoleonic militia and had died on the battlefield. They were set to music by Carl Maria von Weber in 1814-16, marking the beginning of that composer’s national status.

Nationalistic verse generally tended to circulate largely in oral performance, as songs set to music. They figured prominently in the songbooks (Commerzbücher) of student clubs and in the repertoire of the many male choirs which flourished from the 1820s onwards. Mostly they are stereotypical in content, extolling the virtue of loving the fatherland, its unity across many landscapes (especially that of the Rhine), the willingness to defend it against foreign aggressors and influences, and praising its heroes of yore. Fresh repertoire usually cropped up in times of international tension, and concerning debated regions and borderlands. German-Danish frictions over Schleswig-Holstein were a standard inspiration to Rückert epigones like Julius Rodenberg (Für Schleswig-Holstein!, 2 vols of “geharnischte Sonnette”, 1850-51); Emanuel Geibel’s poetic career was launched by his Zwölf Sonnette für Schleswig-Holstein (Lübeck 1846), which earned him a Prussian government pension.

An especially rich topic for nationally minded versifiers was the 1840s Rhine Crisis, when France was perceived as once again extending its long-standing expansionist claims to the left bank of the Rhine river. As a topic, the Rhine combined present-day political tensions with an established intertextual tradition going back to Arndt and with (by now formulaic) expressions of attachment to the picturesque, historically-rich and convivially viticultural Rhine valley. The 1840 crisis spawned the well-known Wacht am Rhein (by Max Schneckenburger, 1819–1894) and Nikolaus Becker’s Rheinlied; both became highly and lastingly popular and briefly involved French poets like Musset in a nationalist-poetical altercation. Die Wacht am Rhein gained its status as a national anthem in the context of the 1870-71 war; cast in bronze, its text was affixed to the plinth of the enormous Germania monument erected in Rüdesheim on the Rhine in 1883 to commemorate the war victory and imperial unification of 1871. Conversely, the preparation and inauguration of that monument led to patriotically-minded occasional verse, proclaimed during festive ceremonies and/or printed in large-circulation family periodicals such as Die Gartenlaube. The genre attracted well-known authors (e.g. the omnipresent Felix Dahn, among whose occasional poetry we find Die Schlacht von Sedan, 1871), but an even greater number of obscure ones.

Thus, in the course of the 19th century, nationalist verse, intermedially circulating between monuments, printed pages and public performances, becomes a matter of pathos-infused rhyming reflection on current affairs; it is hardly seen as “poetry” in the literary sense of the word at all, but rather as one of the many embellishments (wreaths, ceremonies, toasts, allegories) which symbolically endow the many celebrations and manifestations of German nationality with a quasi-aesthetic and cultural allure glamorizing its obvious, primary, political purpose. It is so all-pervasive as to be hardly noticeable in its individual instances, and thus begins to partake of the quality of “banal nationalism”. From the conviviality of communal singing to the official ceremonies of the Wilhelminian Empire, nationally-enthusing verse becomes a mere rephrasing of the official political climate. Even songs which, in the pre-1848 climate, were conceived as criticisms of the constitutional status quo, such as Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Lied der Deutschen (“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, 1840) now become mere endorsements of national-chauvinistic triumphalism. Only occasionally was fervent nationalism used in ambitious poetry, e.g. Ernst Lissauer’s cycle 1813 (which appeared in on the centenary of that year). It is emblematic how Lissauer tipped over into propagandistic hysteria after 1914 (his Haßgesang gegen England becoming notorious) and as a result in fact lost his credibility as a serious poet.

How deeply such nationalistic verse, despite its loss of literary prestige, penetrated into the banal, general cultural frame of reference can be shown in two instances: first in 1914, when the Bavarian army made its way to the front, and moved into battle, under the enthusiastic singing of Deutschland über alles and Die Wacht am Rhein (fervently recalled by one of the volunteers, Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf, 1925); the other in 1948 when the Bundestag, in search of an alternative to Hoffmann’s (now discredited) hymn, could fix on Hans Ferdinand Maßmann’s Ich hab’ mich ergeben, which, owing to its inclusion in the student songbooks, was known and spontaneously singable for the great majority of delegates.