As Alexander Zverev displays his fury after being heckled at the US Open by a spectator singing Adolf Hitler’s Nazi national anthem, CONSTANTIN ECKNER explains why these three words are such a sickening insult to Germans

This is the phrase that shames my country: ‘Deutschland uber alles’ – Germany above all. To some, it could easily be dismissed as an unremarkable, patriotic chant.

But to Germans like me, it is unmistakably the term adopted by the Nazi Party and now forever associated with Adolf Hitler’s horrific reign.

There’s the swastika, there’s the Holocaust and there’s an ugly slogan. Nazism is an indelible stain on the collective memory of my country. It is the spirit we live with every day. We learn about it in school and at university, we see it in the cinema and in the theatre.

So when Alexander Zverev reacted so angrily to a spectator shouting ‘Deutschland uber alles’ during his match at the US Open this week, I wasn’t surprised at all. In fact, I was proud of the young German tennis player.

Not only was the 26-year-old right to be outraged by such blasphemy, he also showed courageous patriotism by standing up to the perpetrator, especially in front of more than 23,000 people at New York’s Arthur Ashe Stadium, and no doubt millions more. watch at home.

‘Deutschland uber alles’ is the first line from August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s 1841 poem, entitled Das Lied der Deutschen. Von Fallersleben intended the line as a call for national unity against the vested interests of 19th-century monarchs. Only much later was it used to express German supremacy.

Admittedly, von Fallersleben himself may have approved the reinterpretation.

He wrote a number of anti-Semitic poems over the course of his life and developed a deep-seated hatred of France.

During World War I, German soldiers are known to have sung “Deutschland uber alles” to a tune composed by Joseph Haydn in 1796 while in the trenches in an attempt to boost morale. Not least because of this, the song became the official German national anthem in 1922.

The spectator, who was seated in an area where tickets retail for about $3,000 each, was escorted from his seat by security to loud applause.

The irony that a song of supremacy should be sung by a people defeated and humiliated in the Great War was not lost on the German intellectual elite.

Nevertheless, aware of the patriotic appeal of the lyrics and the rousing tune that accompanied it, Hitler decided to continue using it, even if only the first verse of three, when he came to power in 1933.

On major state occasions, it was accompanied by a rendition of the Horst Wessellied – the official Nazi anthem. Subsequently, ‘Deutschland uber alles’ became associated with the Nazi Party and that immeasurably dark period in my country’s history.

Today, only the third stanza – which does not contain the phrase – is used as the German national anthem. The terrifying words of the former have thankfully been consigned to history. Until, of course, some dirty spectator decided the US Open was the right time to shout them out.

So thank God for Zverev, the son of two Russian immigrants, who may not know the whole origin story of that taboo line, but — like most Germans — knows it’s unspeakable. As someone slightly older than him, I am relieved that younger Germans still feel the same obligation to intervene when Nazi profanity is publicly disseminated.

German athletes, especially the most successful, still occasionally hear Nazi expressions directed at them when competing abroad.

To the uneducated, it seems an easy tool to agitate or offend Germans, even those born, as in Zverev’s case, more than fifty years after the war. But it’s neither funny nor cool. It’s sick.

For Alexander Zverev to stop his match, take himself out of ‘the zone’ and cause the spectator to be evicted from the stadium is a testament to the moral determination that makes me proud to be a German.

• Constantin Eckner is based in Berlin