(“Germany, Germany above all”), national anthem of Germany from 1922 to 1945, of West Germany from 1950 to 1990, and of unified Germany from 1990. The verses were written in 1848 by the nationalist poet and university professor August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich) and were sung to a tune originally composed by Joseph Haydn (Haydn, Joseph) in 1797 as an Austrian imperial anthem. (The tune appears in his Emperor Quartet, Opus 76, No. 3, and was used as an Austrian anthem for more than a century.) On Aug. 11, 1922, the Weimar Republic adopted the song and its first verse as the German national anthem:

It was retained as the anthem of Nazi Germany, along with the party anthem, the Horst Wessel Song. However, during the Nazi Era these lyrics took on unfortunate connotations. What was originally intended in 1848 as a call to place the concept of a unified nation above regional differences—with geographic borders marking the extent to which culturally German settlers had spread—became reinterpreted as a justification for German expansionism and misinterpreted by some as a claim to German world hegemony. For this reason, it was dropped for a while after World War II but then restored in 1950 by West Germany, using officially the third verse: