Max Schneckenburger

The patriotic hymn "Die Wacht am Rhein" uses the text of a poem Schneckenburger wrote in 1840.

The younger brother of Matthias Schneckenburger, he was a co-owner of an iron blast furnace company, and his business sent him across the Rhine River to Switzerland.

The well-known music to his poem was composed by Karl Wilhelm in 1854, five years after Schneckenburger's death.

After the use of the song in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 made him and Wilhelm famous, his widow and two sons were granted an annual pension of 3,000 Mark by Otto von Bismarck's Reichskanzleramt.

In a political essay of Schneckenburger in 1840, he calls for a re-arrangement of the "patch work" European borders into national areas, according to languages spoken, similar to the ideas espoused by Ernst Moritz Arndt.