- Source: Peat Bog Soldiers
- Source: Peat-Bog Soldiers
"Peat Bog Soldiers" (German: Die Moorsoldaten) is one of Europe's best-known protest songs. It exists in countless European languages and became a Republican anthem during the Spanish Civil War. It was a symbol of resistance during the Second World War and is popular with the Peace movement today. It was written, composed and first performed by prisoners in 1933 in a Nazi concentration camp.
Background
This song was written by prisoners in Nazi moorland labour camps in Lower Saxony, Germany. The Emslandlager ("Emsland camps") – as they were known – were for political opponents of the Third Reich, located outside of Börgermoor, now part of the commune Surwold, not far from Papenburg. A memorial of these camps, the Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum (DIZ) Emslandlager, is located at Papenburg.
In 1933, one camp, KZ Börgermoor, held about 1,000 Socialist and Communist internees. They were banned from singing existing political songs so they wrote and composed their own. The words were written by Johann Esser (a miner) and Wolfgang Langhoff (an actor); the music was composed by Rudi Goguel and was later adapted by Hanns Eisler and Ernst Busch. When creating it for Busch, Eisler made several changes to the rhythm, including condensing the meter into two-four time.
It was first performed at a Zircus Konzentrani ("concentration camp circus", a word play on circus Sarrasani) on 28 August 1933 at Börgermoor camp. Here is Rudi Goguel's description of it:
The sixteen singers, mostly members of the Solinger workers choir, marched in holding spades over the shoulders of their green police uniforms (our prison uniforms at the time). I led the march, in blue overalls, with the handle of a broken spade for a conductor's baton. We sang and by the end of the second verse nearly all of the thousands of prisoners present gave voice to the chorus. With each verse, the chorus became more powerful and, by the end, the SS – who had turned up with their officers – were also singing, apparently because they too thought themselves "peat bog soldiers".
When they got to [the last line], ... "No more the peat bog soldiers / Will march with our spades to the moor.", the sixteen singers rammed their spades into the ground and marched out of the arena; leaving behind their spades which now had, sticking out of the peat bog, become crosses.
The song has a slow simple melody, reflecting a soldier's march, and is deliberately repetitive, echoing and telling of the daily grind of hard labour in harsh conditions. It was popular with German refugees in London in the 1930s and was used as a marching song by the German volunteers of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. It was soon picked up by other nationalities and it appears in almost all the collected anthologies of Spanish Civil War songs.
Lyrics
Langhoff and Esser's original song runs to six verses, plus refrains (see below). For performance – and, therefore, for most translation – shorter lyrics are used. These omit verses two, three and four of the original.
Music
= Original
=Source
= Eisler arrangement
=Source
References
Further reading
Hanns Eisler, "Bericht über die Entstehung eines Arbeiterliedes", in Musik und Politik, Schriften 1924–1948 (Ed. Günter Meyer, Munich, 1973, pp. 274–280)
Wolfgang Langhoff, Die Moorsoldaten. 13 Monate Konzentrationslager (new edition, 1995)
External links
"Moorsoldatenlied" by Guido Fackler, Music and The Holocaust, World ORT
Audio on YouTube, Paul Robeson (in English and German)
Peat-Bog Soldiers (Болотные солдаты) is a 1938 Soviet war drama film directed by Aleksandr Macheret and written by Yury Olesha.
Plot
The National Socialists send a German underground worker to a concentration camp. With the help of his friends, he decides to flee from there.
Cast
References
External links
Peat-Bog Soldiers at IMDb
Kata Kunci Pencarian:
- Peat Bog Soldiers
- Peat-Bog Soldiers
- Bog body
- Ernst Busch (actor)
- Emsland
- Emslandlager
- Pete Seeger
- Börger
- Night and Fog (1956 film)
- Eddie Balchowsky
