Ernst Lissauer, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Ernst Lissauer

German poet

Date of Birth: 10-Dec-1882

Place of Birth: Berlin

Date of Death: 10-Dec-1937

Profession: writer, poet, playwright

Nationality: Germany

Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius


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About Ernst Lissauer

  • Ernst Lissauer (16 December 1882 in Berlin – 10 December 1937 in Vienna) was a German-Jewish poet and dramatist remembered for the phrase Gott strafe England ("May God punish England").
  • He also created the Hassgesang gegen England, or "Song of Hate against England".Lissauer was "a round little man, a jolly face above a double double-chin, bubbling over with self-importance and exuberance," according to his friend Stefan Zweig.
  • He was a committed nationalist and a devotee of the Prussian 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." His devotion to German history, poetry, art and music was, in his own words, a monomania, and it only increased with the outbreak of World War I, when he penned his hate song.
  • Wilhelm II decorated him with the Order of the Red Eagle.
  • Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria ordered it printed on leaflets and distributed to every soldier in the army.Despite his obvious zeal, Lissauer ended by pleasing no one.
  • He came to be criticised by the vigorous anti-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".
  • Houston Stewart Chamberlain declared that the Teutonic German did not "wallow in Old Testament hate." Over in England, Arthur Conan Doyle said in his book The 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."Lissauer himself came to regret writing the Hassgesang, 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. In every sense an unfortunate man, Lissauer spared no pains 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 in Vienna, he wrote: "To the Germans I am a Jew masked as a German; to the Jew a German faithless to Israel."

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