LOVESONG

National anthems are odes, praises and longings set to music. They are love songs, popular hymns and bloody songs of war devoted to the nation. They tell of a romanticist idea of love that always means the bloodshed of others. Namely, those who are not part of this “Schicksalsgemeinschaft". The proclamation of a nation inaugurates the anthem as an acoustic monument.

In the 19th century Helgoland was an island popular for summer trips in the so called German Ocean, todays North Sea. In one of such trips 1841 Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote the lyrics of the “Deutschlandlied” praising a German Union. In 1922 it was raised to the rank of Germany’s first national anthem and was later played, amongst others, at the construction of the Dachau concentration camp, the destruction of the worker’s movement and the progroms of November 1933. Forbidden by the Allied powers after the war it was raised again to the national anthem in 1952 by chancellor Adenauer. The associations awakened by music can become incredibly powerful. The German national anthem is irrevocably linked to the Nazi regime. Every time it resounds, history resonates as an auditory trauma.

180 years later of the creation of the Deutschlandlied, composer and artist Daniel Dominguez Teruel travelled to Helgoland challenging a romanticist vision of German society, that seems to make it impossible to shake off its “beloved” song.