🏴‍☠️ Ode to Theft for the Greater Good© 🏴‍☠️

Let’s play a guessing game, shall we?

1. I am grandiose, overflowing with energy, and celebrate humanity.
2. The Berlin Philharmoniker, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, performed me for Hitler’s 53rd birthday.¹
3. I was used as the anthem of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, whose leadership was openly racist.²³

You guessed right! I’m Ode to Joy, the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

First, let’s remember the only valid interpretation as of today:

Freude! Epiphany!

It’s neither revealing nor new to say that symbols can be used for a multitude of purposes. You could be tempted to say that “both good and bad guys use them.” As much as symbols can be invaluable means of communication, simplifying a message, they can also be misused. Of course, that’s the “boring” part of the discussion you’re most likely familiar with.

Appropriating someone else’s symbols as they are, copying them unchanged and then wearing them as your own identity, is, in my opinion, cowardly and arrogant.

You wouldn’t “appropriate” what’s not yours, would you? (Source).

Unfortunately, the EU did exactly this. Under the guise of “European democratic values,” they took Ode to Joy and proudly proclaimed it as theirs because, after all, we’re all Europeans and celebrate joy.⁴ Beethoven couldn’t revolt against that decision; he had been dead for more than 150 years.

To be clear about the boundary I’m drawing: quoting, reshaping, or answering a work with a new work is normal cultural life. If you openly say, “We’re inspired by X, and here is our own 21st-century take on it,” fine. But if you lift an existing artwork, keep its authority intact, and declare that your institutional identity, it stops being a cultural dialogue.

And yes, I mean this universally. It’s one reason I’m not fond of institutionalism and/or nationalism: it routinely turns the work of dead artists into flags, jingles, and uniforms whether those artists asked for it or not.

Let’s imagine, though, that Amnesty International also wanted a jingle or a song to accompany their content. Could they, like the EU, just nick John Lennon’s Imagine—because after all, all we want is peace—and play it everywhere under the veil of “spreading love”?

Let me be clear: it’s understandable that artworks are constantly quoted, reshaped, and reimagined; that’s what keeps them alive and part of our culture. But slapping an arbitrary sticker on top of something does not make it yours, in my eyes. It’s like taking an unmarked lunch box from a shared work fridge, writing a big “ME” on it with your Sharpie, and using that as your alibi to eat what’s inside.

Not only is it arrogant to steal someone’s work and pretend it isn’t theft because “you’re just a voice of all European peoples” (thought experiment: did or would Beethoven compose the Ninth with such an intention—to “speak for all Europeans”?), it’s also unintentionally grotesque, given the history of controversial usage of the composition. If you were starting a farming business and wanted to look sincere, would you put a hammer and sickle in your logo?

Screw the lyrics, by the way

As a skilful thief, you usually don’t take everything when you’re robbing a house. Why would you try to understand how all the things in the house relate to each other, and to the house as a whole? You just take whatever looks saleable and marketable at first sight. You don’t care for the things anyway.

You wouldn’t steal an artwork. (Generated using Krea.)

Which brings me to the most mind-bending part of the EU anthem story. The EU Council decided not to include Schiller’s poem.⁵

Officially this was framed as a practical and political necessity: no single set of words could work across Europe’s languages, and the text felt too universal to be pinned to a specifically European identity. So the EU went lyric-free and kept only the melody. Sure enough, one of the most quoted stanzas of Schiller’s An die Freude explicitly mentions all people:

German	(Modern) English
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,	Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Tochter aus Elysium,	Daughter of Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,	We enter your sanctuary,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!	Intoxicated by fire.
Deine Zauber binden wieder	Your magic reunites
Was die Mode streng geteilt;	What custom has harshly divided;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,	All people become brothers,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.	Where your gentle wing rests.

Friedrich Schiller: An die Freude (1785)

How dare he, the bastard!

The text is the most crucial aspect of Beethoven’s Ninth. The choir singing Schiller’s poem in the fourth movement was one of the most courageous choices of Beethoven’s time. Vocals in symphonies were rare, almost programmatically excluded on purpose.

Beethoven’s move to include them is what defines the fourth movement; almost everything else is secondary, including the melody. It’s like eating the flour, leaking tomato sauce, and crumbs from a plate of pizza, leaving the pizza untouched, then praising what a good lunch choice this was.

And to give this choice a broader context, there were many “cleaner” options when the EU anthem was being picked:⁶

• Music for the Royal Fireworks (George Frideric Handel, 1749).
• Te Deum in D major (Marc-Antoine Charpentier, 1690s). Also flagged as a possibility, owing to its familiar use (e.g., as the theme for the Eurovision Song Contest).
• Other compositions such as L’Europe unie! (Louis Noiret, 1948) and Chant de la paix (Jehane Louis Gaudet, 1949) that were proposed in the context of European unity efforts.

But since the theft was already sanctioned by the EU Council, it was probably too tempting not to go with the flow. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, which was already being used by the Council of Europe, seemed the obvious choice.⁷

What else was nicked?

I consider the original post-war idea of the EU brilliant and worth pursuing: cooperate so much that it becomes economically impossible to break the peace again. But if the institution deliberately makes such blatantly incompetent symbolic decisions—such as basing its identity on a cherry-picked masterpiece that doesn’t even fit its own stated ideals—it undermines the institution’s credibility.

If an institution wants an anthem, it should own that fact. Anthems are institutional stamps by design; borrowing someone else’s authority and calling it “my identity” is cheap and unconfident.

Wouldn’t it be much more fun if an open competition were organized, leaving room for new composers to express what European ideals mean in the 21st century, instead of lazily leaning on something that no longer resonates today, anyway?

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References

1. Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Ninth with the Berlin Philharmonic in Berlin in April 1942 as part of Hitler’s 53rd birthday celebrations. See the Berlin 1942 Ninth account and context (section on April 1942 Ninth for Hitler) and cultural history discussion. ↩︎

2. “Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia” (1974–1979), including during Zimbabwe Rhodesia in 1979, used the Ode to Joy melody as its tune. ↩︎

3. Ian Smith’s regime was a white-minority state; Smith publicly rejected Black majority rule (“not in a thousand years”) and is widely described as an unrepentant racist leader. Sources for the quote and characterization: Negotiating Black Majority Rule in Southern Africa (p. 1, quoting Smith’s 1976 statement) and NPR obituary. ↩︎

4. Council of Europe adopted Ode to Joy as Europe’s anthem in 1972; the European Communities/EU adopted the same melody in 1985/86. See Council of Europe’s European Athem entry or CVCE for more information. ↩︎

5. The EU/CoE anthem is instrumental because of translation/linguistic neutrality problems and doubts about fitting Schiller’s universal text to a specifically European symbol; Karajan provided the official arrangements. EPRS briefing. ↩︎

6. Alternative candidates and proposals are summarized in the EPRS history of the European anthem. ↩︎

7. EPRS history of the European anthem ↩︎