The Leuthen Chorale

There is a story about Frederick the Great, during the Seven Years War, that after the Battle of Leuthen, as his army was marching away from the field, one of his soldiers seemingly on a whim started to sing a well-known hymn in German, in thanksgiving to God for their victory. This was the Leuthen Chorale, and instead of being disciplined for singing out of turn the soldier was joined in song by his comrades each in turn until the whole army was singing with one voice. (I know of no actual connexion, but the atmosphere is I am sure captured in Kenneth Branagh’s famous post-battle scene in his film version of Henry V.)

The hymn itself, with the words ‘Nun danket alle Gott’, is still popular today both in Germany and in English-speaking countries, where it is sung ‘Now thank we all our God / with hearts and hands and voices’. In Frederick’s own time it was to become the unofficial battle anthem of the Kingdom of Prussia.

When Frederick died he had left instructions that he should be buried at San Souci, his summerhouse in Potsdam, in the pet cemetery he had had dug there for his beloved greyhounds. In the event however his wishes were overruled by his nephew, who succeeded him to the throne and deemed such a burial place unsuitable for so great a King of Prussia. Frederick’s body was instead interred at Potsdam in the Garrison Church there, which would eventually become a national shrine for the whole of Germany. It was there in 1933 that Adolf Hitler, as the Leuthen Chorale was sung by the Germany Army, declared the inauguration of the Third Reich. Indeed, several Nazi films were made about Frederick the Great, implicitly but quite perversely casting the most liberal and progressive European ruler of the eighteenth century as a precursor of Hitler. One of these was actually called Der Choral von Leuthen.

After the War, Frederick’s remains were removed again and the Garrison Church was demolished by the new Communist government. But the Leuthen Chorale was not forgotten, and it was sung publicly once again in the 1950s on the occasion of the release back to their families in West Germany of the last German prisoners of war, who had been held captive for so long in the Communist East. Amidst great emotion for all present, it was the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself who intoned the singing.