"Kinderhymne" (Children's Hymn) is a poem by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1950 and set to music by Hanns Eisler in the same year.
The hymn was Brecht's response to the "Deutschlandlied", which he believed to be corrupted by the Third Reich and whose third stanza became the national anthem of West Germany in 1950.
East Germany already had an anthem by the time Brecht wrote the poem and West Germany was in the process of re-adapting the third stanza of the Deutschlandlied as the national anthem by then – Brecht's writing of the text was a reaction in part to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer having the song played at official functions in 1950.
The verse form and the rhyme scheme are similar to both the "Deutschlandlied" and "Auferstanden aus Ruinen", the national anthem of East Germany.
The anthem was decided upon and reconfirmed not by the usual legislative process but by an exchange of open letters between chancellor and president (Konrad Adenauer and Theodor Heuss in the early years of West Germany, and Helmut Kohl writing to Richard von Weizsäcker following reunification).