Ernst Lissauer

Who was Ernst Lissauer?

Ernst Lissauer was a German-Jewish poet and dramatist remembered for the phrase Gott strafe 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 "the more German a thing was, the greater was his enthusiasm for it." 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 the 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".