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Ernst Lissauer (16 December 1882 – 10 December 1937) was a German poet and dramatist best known for coining theanti-British sloganGott strafe England duringWorld War I. He also wrote theHassgesang gegen England ("Song of hate against England").[1][2]
Lissauer was "a round little man, a jolly face above a double double-chin, bubbling over with self-importance and exuberance," according to his friendStefan Zweig.[3] He was a committed nationalist and a devotee of thePrussian tradition as well as an ambitious poet. Zweig said of him: "Germany was his world and the more Germanic anything was, the more it delighted him."[3] His devotion to German history, poetry, art and music was, in his own words, amonomania, and it only increased with the outbreak ofWorld War I, when he penned his hate song.German EmperorWilhelm II decorated him with theOrder of the Red Eagle.Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria ordered it printed on leaflets and distributed to every soldier in the army.[4]
He came under attack by the vigorousanti-Semitic movement of the day for expressing such "fanatical hatred", which they considered "unreasonable", "utterly un-German", and "characteristic of nothing so much as the Jewish race".[citation needed]Houston Stewart Chamberlain claimed that theTeutonic German did not "wallow inOld Testament hate."[citation needed] Over in England,Arthur Conan Doyle said in his bookThe German War: "This sort of thing is, it must be admitted, very painful and odious. It fills us with a mixture of pity and disgust, and we feel as if – instead of a man – we were really fighting with a furious, screaming woman."[5]
Lissauer himself came to regret writing theHassgesang, refusing to allow it to be printed in school text books. After the war he said that his poem was born out of the mood of the times, and that he did not really mean it to be taken seriously. In 1926 he said that rather than writing a hymn of hate against England it would have been better if he written a hymn of love for Germany.
Lissauer attempted to balance two traditions, one Jewish and the other German, at a time when history was forcing them apart. The Third Reich's advent forced him to flee his native land for Austria. In 1936, then living inVienna, he wrote: "To the Germans I am a Jew masked as a German; to the Jew a German faithless to Israel."[6]
