Women’s minister wants men purged from national anthem

Women’s minister wants men purged from national anthem
By Roger Boyes



IN A move that spells trouble for half of Europe’s national anthems, Austria’s Minister for Women’s Affairs has demanded wholesale changes to her country’s paean to purge it of sexist references.

Mentions of the “fatherland”, “great sons” and “brotherly choruses” should be replaced by gender-neutral terms such as “homeland” and “joyful chorus”, said Maria Rauch-Kallat, whose quest stands a fair chance of success.

No matter that Austria apparently has the only national anthem in Europe written by a woman. “Our national anthem is discriminatory,” Frau Rauch-Kallat, of the centre-right People’s Party, said.

“The federal hymn should be part of every Austrian’s identity . . . Women’s politics are also the politics of language and of shaping consciousness.” If she gets her way national anthems across Europe could be in for a shake-up, because all too often they celebrate male heroism hand in hand with national identity.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1799091,00.html


WE the sons of Messapotamia.............

were changed to reflect the fact that not everyone is male.

The Italian anthem opens: “Brothers of Italy . . .”. The French Marseillaise, the most blood-soaked of national anthems, begins: “Children of the fatherland . . .” and complains about soldiers who “come to slaughter our children, our wives”.

Germany’s Deutschland über Alles is unthinkable without the fatherland, and in its second verse makes women seem like a quaint tourist attraction: “German women, German loyalty, German wine and German song/ Shall retain in the world/ Their lovely old ring.”

Perhaps the least sexist of all national anthems is Britain’s God Save the Queen. Since 1745 it has swapped King for Queen, depending on the monarch of the day.

The Austrian national anthem, sung to the tune of a 1791 Mozart cantata, was written by the late Paula von Preradovic in 1947, two years after the modern Austrian state was formed. It won a hotly contested competition in which 1,800 possible anthems were submitted to the Government.

BUT THE POLES' anthem must have been written in expectation of their luck in international football matches: it starts :

"Jeszce Polska nie zginela"

translated means: "Poland hasn't lost yet"...........

we're stuck with.

Vaterland sounds ok, Mutterland sounds odd. Patrie 'fatherland' is good enough ... 'matrie' is incomprehensible. I'm not sure how Italian deals with the word for 'brothers', it may be like Spanish, where a lot of masculine plurals cover any group with at least one male in it. (Making it very strange to talk about 'padres' lit. fathers, but usually 'parents' in the Spanish I learned. It's something I could never do in Russian, for example.)

Jeszcze.

The rest I sympathize with.

The gender neutral "homeland" denotes a place on this Earth for a nation and a people to call home. What it connotes is still up in the air.

Not that it lacks gender-dependent terms.

Wasn't it an Austrian folksong long before Rogers and Hammerstein worked it into "The Sound of Music"?