Catchy Tunes

Young Joseph Ratzinger, now the Holy Father, would have sung the Horst Wessel Leid, just like the other kids. Perhaps he did it unwillingly, but someone would have noticed if he did not and reported him. The old Brownshirt Anthem to the punk to died in the street fighting other punks was appended to the German National Anthem, the “Lied der Deutschen,” as a second verse.

“Flag high, ranks closed,

The S.A. marches with silent solid steps.

Comrades shot by the red front and reaction

March in spirit with us in our ranks.

The street free for the brown battalions,

The street free for the Storm Troopers.

Millions, full of hope, look up at the swastika;

The day breaks for freedom and for bread.”

Horst was nothing unusual in his time, either for the Browns or the Reds. He was born in 1903, and only fifteen when the awful First Act of the World War ended. A student and low-life bohemian, Wessel joined the Nazi Party in 1926 and became a member of the Sturmabtielungen (Storm Troopers). He was killed by communists in retaliation for organizing an attack on local communist party headquarters.

His song has a catchy melody, and is believed by those that care to have originally come from Etienne Méhul’s opera Joseph .

“Comrades shot by the Red Front and Reaction

March in spirit with us in our ranks.”

But on the whole, the Red Front punks looked a lot like the Brownshirts, and had essentially the same arguments with the Weimar establishment. After the Red Army ravished and raped the East, the old songs of the Communist Spartikus Movement were resurrected. They had a flag, too. The Red Flag.

“Do you remember? When once the tread

Of the gray columns thundered,

Our red flag marched always with.

Its red was always victorious!

The Fascists and the police fired at it. —

We buried then our dead —

It led us onward, it was there,

That flag, that red flag…

The time came when we were beaten down.

We had to hide the flags.

Bestial murder made many silent…

Yet invisibly over the coffins

The flag flew through the long night.

It burned in our hearts and minds

Until the glimmerings of a new morning

Shone in the East.”

Growing up in Bavaria , young Joseph became convinced that the only answer to the power of fascism was reliance on the moral authority based on the traditional teachings of the Church. They formed a bulwark of unimpeachable authority, derived from God, to counter an authority based purely on the human personality. Rome , for him, became the sole bastion against the brutality of the Nazis.

It is not an entirely Germanic virtue to place faith in strong central authority, but there is certainly a propensity. The followers of the Red Flag mostly steeled themselves and followed the one with the swastika, when it became evident that there was no other course for the Reich to follow. One Reich, One People, One Leader.

Joseph Ratzinger was conscripted late in the war, and walked away from the Army in April of 1945month before it was all over. He returned to the seminary in an Austria which was experimenting with the idea that it was a victim, rather than a partner, in the crime. He was ordained in 1951. His enthusiasm and keen eye for the dogma of the Church was noted. His writings were praised, and he served a variety of increasingly influential positions in the German Catholic establishment.

He arrived at Tübingen University in 1966, just a decade before the 500 th anniversary of its founding. He was still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II. He was known as a priest who wanted to be inclusive, an idealist. He was ready to take his place alongside the other rising theological intellects, especially a fellow Catholic named Hans Kung.

Both were viewed as the future of the German Church , though they were diametric opposites in most regards. Kung aggressively drove a sporty Alfa-Romeo. Ratzinger peddled a bicycle. They were collegial, though, and got on well, dining weekly to discuss the journal they co-edited.

But Kung was growing increasingly progressive in his theological leanings. Things were afoot on campus. Like you, I am a child of the fifties, which is to say that I share the feelings of those that came to young adulthood in the tumultuous 1960s. I remember the allure of the revolution against the stolidity of the generation that had won the war.

In Germany , though, it was a revolution against those who had lost one, and who had been complicit in something so monstrous that it was nearly beyond the imagination. And yet it was real, and committed by their stolid, prosperous parents.

One event in 1968 brought it home as surely as did the unmasking of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim when he stood to run for the Presidency of Austria. as a possible war criminal.

Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld began to dig into the records of the senior members of the government of the Federal Republic . He discovered that West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger had been a liaison officer between the staffs of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbles and Wermacht Chief Joachim von Ribbentrop.

In 1968, Beate slapped him on the cheek in public, beginning a series of highly publicized revelations that culminated with the unmasking of former US Secretary Kurt Waldheim in 1986. Kurt was among the last of the political generation that had public lives during the war.

Waldhiem had always depicted himself as a gentle Austrian, one of millions of victims of Anschluss- the forced annexation with the Nazis. The reality was different. Kurt had been an officer in a German army unit that committed atrocities in the Balkans. Waldhieim denied any knowledge of the murders, and an international investigation cleared him of complicity. But everyone then knew more than they said. Speaking was hazardous to the health then. He was elected President, but treated as a pariah by the more correct members of his former world body. He did not run for re-election in 1992.

Words of violence hung in the air. The rhetoric of violent revolution was in Ann Arbor , when I was there, and other schools across America . They had a certain comic-book air about them. But spoken in German, the words of the Red Front had a special resonance in the Federal Republic .

Berlin was the focus of student radicalism, but venerable Tubingen became the intellectual Mecca of the radicals because of the presence of Ernst Bloch, the father of the 1968 student movement. Radicals once spray-painted ” Ernst Bloch University ” over the sign on the old assembly hall, just as they painted “Ho Chi Minh Bridge” on the overpass where we walked to class in 1969.

Bloch inspired others, who were developing a thing they called a “theology of hope.” Pulpits were occupied, including Ratzinger’s. Some students expressed the desire to elect their own clergy, more in line with their theories of liberation. This is the point that most irritated the future Pope’s sense of order, the idea that there was a theological sovereignty vested in the people.

The idea of the congregation formulating its own doctrine was disturbingly Congregational, if not outright Marxist. Ratzinger left Tubinger after just three years for Regensburg , a new college with no history at all. It was a fresh creation of the German Republic , and an appropriate place to consider the other revolution of 1968, the papal encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae which reaffirmed the church’s stance on artificial birth control. Pope Paul VI’s letter said the use of the Pill was a mortal sin. People were stunned. It was the beginning of the counter-revolution against Liberation Theology.

If the college was new, the town of Regensberg is old. It is one of the first places in Germany where the secular Romans came. Some of their walls are incorporated into the buildings. There had also been a camp there, and the death march in April 1945 in which the inmates were forced to walk away to conceal the evidence of what had happened, falling along the side of the roads and farmlanes.

It was Red Front radicals at Tubingen University that helped push Joseph Ratzinger toward unquestioned obedience to the authority of Rome , the only earthly power he thought could stand against them.

“Do you remember?” the students sang. “When once the tread of the gray columns thundered, our red flag marched always with its red always victorious!”

It’s funny how a catchy song can echo down through the years. Once you get them in your head it is sometimes impossible to get rid of them.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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