"Die Wacht am Rhein" (English: The Watch/Guard on the Rhine) is a German patriotic anthem. The song's origins are rooted in the historical French–German enmity, and it was particularly popular in Germany during the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War.
In the Rhine Crisis of 1840, French prime minister Adolphe Thiers advanced the claim that the Upper and Middle Rhine River should serve as his country's "natural eastern border". The member ...
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"Die Wacht am Rhein" (English: The Watch/Guard on the Rhine) is a German patriotic anthem. The song's origins are rooted in the historical French–German enmity, and it was particularly popular in Germany during the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War.
In the Rhine Crisis of 1840, French prime minister Adolphe Thiers advanced the claim that the Upper and Middle Rhine River should serve as his country's "natural eastern border". The member states of the German Confederation feared that France was planning to annex the left bank of the Rhine, as it had sought to do under King Louis XIV, and had temporarily accomplished during the Napoleonic Wars and the implementation of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806–1813. In the two centuries from the Thirty Years' War to the final defeat of Napoleon, the German inhabitants of these lands suffered from repeated major and minor French invasions.
Nikolaus Becker answered to these events by writing a poem called "Rheinlied", in which he...
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