The melody of the "Deutschlandlied" was written by Joseph Haydn in 1797 to provide music to the poem "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" ("God save Francis the Emperor") by Lorenz Leopold Haschka.

The re-use of Haydn's melody in the "Deutschlandslied" is one of a great number of later such adaptations and reuses; for details see Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser.

The Holy Roman Empire, stemming from the Middle Ages, was already disintegrating when the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars altered the political map of Central Europe.

However, hopes for human rights and republican government after Napoleon's defeat in 1815 were dashed when the Congress of Vienna reinstated many small German principalities.

In addition, with the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich and his secret police enforced censorship, mainly in universities, to keep a watch on the activities of teachers and students, whom he held responsible for the spread of radical liberalist ideas.

The federation was essentially a military alliance, but it was also abused by the larger powers to oppress liberal and national movements.

For a short period in the late 1840s, Germany was united with the borders described in the anthem, and a democratic constitution was being drafted, and with the black-red-gold flag representing it.

However, after 1849, the two largest German monarchies, Prussia and Austria, put an end to this liberal movement towards national unification.

August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote the text in 1841 while on holiday on the North Sea island Heligoland,[4] then a possession of the United Kingdom (now part of Germany).

Hoffmann von Fallersleben intended "Das Lied der Deutschen" to be sung to Haydn's tune; the first publication of the poem included the music.

[5] In the era after the Congress of Vienna, influenced by Metternich and his secret police, Hoffmann's text had a distinctly revolutionary and at the same time liberal connotation, since the appeal for a united Germany was most often made in connection with demands for freedom of the press and other civil rights.

The year after he wrote "Das Deutschlandlied", Hoffmann lost his job as a librarian and professor in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland) because of this and other revolutionary works, and was forced into hiding until he was pardoned following the revolutions of 1848 in the German states.

The song was a birthday anthem to Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor of the House of Habsburg, and was intended to rival in merit the British "God Save the King".

Thus, in a political trade-off, the conservative right was granted a nationalistic composition, although Ebert continued to advocate the use of the third stanza only (as after World War II).

[12] After its founding in 1949, West Germany did not have a national anthem for official events for some years, despite a growing need for one for the purpose of diplomatic procedures.

On 29 April 1952, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer asked President Theodor Heuss in a letter to accept "Das Lied der Deutschen" as the national anthem, with only the third stanza to be sung on official occasions.

By design, with slight adaptations, the lyrics of "Auferstanden aus Ruinen" can be sung to the melody of the "Deutschlandlied" and vice versa.

The Christian Democratic Union of Baden-Württemberg, for instance, attempted twice (in 1985 and 1986) to require German high school students to study all three stanzas, and in 1989, CDU politician Christean Wagner decreed that all high school students in Hesse were to memorise the three stanzas.

In November 1991, President Richard von Weizsäcker and Chancellor Helmut Kohl agreed in an exchange of letters to declare the third stanza alone to be the national anthem of the reunified republic.

In 1977, the German pop singer Heino produced a record of the song which included all three stanzas for use in primary schools in Baden-Württemberg.

[29] In 2009, the English rock musician Pete Doherty sang "Deutschlandlied" live on radio at Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich with all three stanzas.

"[34] Similarly, in 2017, the first stanza was mistakenly sung by Will Kimble, an American soloist, during the welcome ceremony of the Fed Cup tennis match between Andrea Petkovic (Germany) and Alison Riske (U.S.) at the Center Court in Lahaina, Hawaii.

[37] The original Heligoland manuscript included a variant ending of the third stanza for such occasions: ... Sind des Glückes Unterpfand; 𝄆 Stoßet an und ruft einstimmig, Hoch, das deutsche Vaterland.

𝄇 An alternative version called "Kinderhymne" (Children's Hymn) was written by Bertolt Brecht shortly after his return from exile in the U.S. to a war-ravaged, bankrupt and geographically shrunken Germany at the end of World War II, and set to music by Hanns Eisler in the same year.

It gained some currency after the 1990 unification of Germany, with a number of prominent Germans calling for his "antihymn" to be made official:[38] Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe Leidenschaft nicht noch Verstand Dass ein gutes Deutschland blühe Wie ein andres gutes Land.

The German musician Nico sometimes performed the national anthem at concerts and dedicated it to militant Andreas Baader, leader of the Red Army Faction.

[40][41] The German composer Max Reger quotes the "Deutschlandlied" in the final section of his collection of organ pieces Sieben Stücke, Op.

An Afrikaans patriotic song, "Afrikaners Landgenote", has been written with an identical melody and similarly structured lyrics to the "Deutschlandlied".

The lyrics of this song consist of three stanzas, the first of which sets the boundaries of the Afrikaans homeland with the means of geographical areas, the second of which states the importance of "Afrikaans mothers, daughters, sun, and field", recalling the "German women, loyalty, wine, and song", and the third of which describes the importance of unity, justice, and freedom, along with love.

Auferstanden aus Ruinen, the national anthem of East Germany until the German reunification in 1990 The Kaiserquartett, is the third of the six String Quartets, Op.