Die Wacht Am Rhein - Stage and Film

Stage and Film

The song has figured in stage works and motion pictures.

The tune is quoted near the end of César Cui's opera Mademoiselle Fifi (composed 1902-1903), set in France during the Franco-Prussian War.

In Lewis Milestone's 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front, the song is played at the end of the first scene as schoolboys, whipped into a patriotic frenzy by their instructor, abandon their studies and head off to enlist in the military. It is also heard in the background of the 1979 remake version of All Quiet on the Western Front when Paul (played by Richard Thomas) is preparing to board the train on his way to the front for the first time.

In Jean Renoir's 1937 film La Grande Illusion, two songs are juxtaposed in exactly the same way as in Casablanca five years later. In the latter movie, "Die Wacht am Rhein" was sung by German soldiers, who then were drowned out by exiled French singing the "Marseillaise" (which began as the "War Song for the Army of the Rhine", written and composed at the Rhine). Originally the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" was slated to be used in the scene as the German song, since it was at that time part of the de facto national anthem of Nazi Germany. However, the producers realized that the "Horst Wessel Lied" was copyrighted. While that would not have been a problem in the United States, the UK or other Allied nations, a copyright dispute would have hurt or prevented showings in neutral nations which still honored German copyrights. Thus, the producers of Casablanca chose "Die Wacht am Rhein".

The song provides the title for Lillian Hellman's cautionary pre-World War II play Watch on the Rhine and derivative works.

In the first and second part of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1980 epic film adaptation of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf starts singing the song (as in the novel).

The title of John Ringo's Science Fiction novel "Watch on the Rhine" is derived from the song (the book's plot deals with human-eating alien hordes landing in France and then advancing towards Germany, which must quite literally try to maintain a Watch on the Rhine).

In Timo Vuorensola's film Iron Sky, this song is used as the Nazi national anthem, but with different words.