Nikolaus Becker
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Nikolaus Becker (8 October 1809 in Bonn - 28 August 1845 in Hünshoven) was a German lawyer and writer. His "poems" of 1841 were not special, unlike the one he wrote earlier.
Inpired by the Rhine crisis in 1840, in which French politicians made demands to occupy the German left bank of the Rhine, he wrote a poem called Rheinlied: "Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien, deutschen Rhein ..." (They shall not have him, the free, German Rhine).
This patriotic poem brought him much praise in the yet-to-unite Germany of the German Confederation. Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, "The Romantic on the Throne", send him 1000 Thaler, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria an Ehrenpokal.
The "Rheinlied" was set to music over 70 times. The french answered, with Alfred de Musset: "Nous l'avons eu, votre Rhin allemand" (We've had him, your German Rhine) rubbing salt into the wounds Napoleon and others had caused, while Lamartine's "Peace Marseillaise" (1841) was peaceful.
Other German writers wrote similar defensive poems. The most famous are Die Wacht am Rhein (which as a German patriotic song is well-known from the movie "Casablanca), and the Deutschlandlied, which became the German national anthem.
[edit] External link
- http://www.jhelbach.de/dichtung/rheinli.htm Der Rhein in der Lyrik
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This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.
