Editing Deutschlandlied (section)

== Use before 1922 ==
The melody of the "Deutschlandlied" was originally written by Joseph Haydn in 1797 to provide music to the poem "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" ('God save Franz the Emperor') by Lorenz Leopold Haschka. The song was a birthday anthem to Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor of the House of Habsburg, and was intended to rival in merit the British "God Save the King".<ref name=":0">{{Cite web |title=National Anthem of Slovenia and Its Historical Context |url=https://slovenija30let.si/en-himna.html |access-date=26 November 2023 |website=slovenija30let.si}}</ref>

After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, "{{lang|de|Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser|italic=no}}" became the official anthem of the emperor of the [[Austrian Empire]]. After the death of Francis II new lyrics were composed in 1854, ''Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze'', that mentioned the Emperor, but not by name. With those new lyrics, the song continued to be the anthem of Imperial Austria and later of Austria-Hungary. Austrian monarchists continued to use this anthem after 1918 in the hope of restoring the monarchy. The adoption of the Austrian anthem's melody by Germany in 1922 was not opposed by Austria.<ref name=":0" />

"{{lang|de|Das Lied der Deutschen|italic=no}}" was not played at an official ceremony until Germany and the United Kingdom had agreed on the [[Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty]] in 1890, when it appeared only appropriate to sing it at the ceremony on the now officially German island of [[Heligoland]]. During the time of the German Empire, it became one of the most widely known patriotic songs.<ref name=":0" />

The song became very popular after the [[First Battle of Ypres#Battle of Langemarck|1914 Battle of Langemarck]] during World War I, when, supposedly, several German regiments, consisting mostly of students no older than 20, attacked the British lines on the Western front while singing the song, suffering heavy casualties. They are buried in the [[Langemark German war cemetery]] in Belgium.<ref>{{cite book |last=Mosse |first=George L. |title=Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1991 |pages=70–73 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JwzIUz8aIk4C&pg=PA70 |isbn=978-0-19-507139-9 |access-date=25 February 2014 }}</ref>

By December 1914, according to [[George Haven Putnam]], the song had "come to express the [...] war spirit of the Fatherland" and "the supremacy of Germans over all other peoples", despite being, in past years, "an expression simply of patriotic devotion". [[Morris Jastrow Jr.]], then an American apologist for Germany, maintained that it meant only "that Germany is dearer to Germans than anything else".<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Evening Post 19 December 1914 — The NYS Historic Newspapers |url=https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=evpo19141219-01.1.22 |access-date=6 September 2023 |website=nyshistoricnewspapers.org |date=19 December 1914 |first=Morris |last=Jastrow, Jr. }}</ref> [[J. William White]] wrote into the ''[[Public Ledger (Philadelphia)|Public Ledger]]'' to confirm Putnam's view.<ref>{{Cite book |last=White |first=James William |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MHNMAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA238 |title=A Text-book of the War for Americans |date=1915 |publisher=J. C. Winston}}</ref>