A passionate champion of German language and legend, he was prescient about the historical nightmares to come.
By
Adam Kirsch
Dec. 18, 2020 10:38 am ET
For Nazi censors in the 1930s, âDie Loreleiâ presented a special problem. One of the best-known German poems, it tells of a maiden who sits on a mountaintop overlooking the Rhine, combing her golden hair and singing a melody so enchanting that sailors below are transfixed and shipwrecked. âDie Loreleiâ had been sung as a folk song for a hundred years, and it could hardly be omitted from verse anthologies. But its author was Jewish, which made it impossible for him to appear in a Nazi-approved book. As a compromise, the poem was credited to âAnonymous.â