During my dive into the drinking and singing traditions of the Wilhelmine officer corps, I came across a good deal of musical heritage including one song that could be sung in a similar rhythm and state of inebriated camaraderie, but comes from very much the opposite social sphere. It also feels particularly apposite in our current situation. This is the Lied der Petroleure.
It is not really funny. If the venerable Krambambuli of Prussian military distinction can be read as a humorous take on severe alcohol dependence, this is a jocular celebration of political arson. That part may need a bit of explaining. During the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, a legend was spread in the press that the revolutionaries planned to destroy the city using petrol bombs. This was nonsense, but the story spread beyond France’s border and attached to wider and wilder imaginings of what the Socialist and Anarchist underground might be up to. In 1881, the Social Democratic journalist Jacob Audorf wrote a mocking song about this spectre of terror that stayed popular through the pre-WWI years.
Wir sind die Petroleure
Das weiß wohl jedermann
Drum tun wir alle Ehre
Dem Petroleum an.
Und weil´s so schön zum Brennen ist
Und uns viel Licht verschafft,
Sei auch Petrol zu dieser Frist
Uns edler Gerstensaft!
Hier Petroleum, da Petroleum
Petroleum um und um!
Laßt die Humpen frisch voll pumpen:
Dreimal hoch — Petroleum!
Philister rümpft die Nase
Und meint, es riecht nicht gut
Schimpft hinter seinem Glase
Uns „Sozialistenbrut“
Er liest im Geldsacksblatt sich dumm,
meint was er liest, sei wahr
Brenn heller, lieb Petroleum
Mach ihm den Standpunkt klar!
(refrain)
Schon brennt es in den Städten
So licht und frank und frei
Man spürt, daß es vonnöten
Auch auf den Dörfern sei
Es leuchtet in dem Heere schon
Man ist vor Staunen stumm
Trotz Sub- und Ordination
Hell das Petroleum!
(refrain)
Und ob auch trüb die Zeiten
Wir wollen treu vereint
Stets mutig vorwärts schreiten
Ist mächtig auch der Feind
Und sperrt der Bruder Staatsanwalt
Auch einmal einen ein
Kriegt´s Petroléum mehr Gehalt
Und brennt noch mal so rein!
(refrain)
Petroleum-Genossen
Ihr Brüder, wanket nicht!
Tu´ jeder unverdrossen
Die Petroleuren-Pflicht!
Wir kümmern uns den Kuckuck um
Die schwarze Stöckerei
Das Wahlrecht und Petroleum
sei unser Feldgeschrei
(refrain)
We are the petroleurs
As everybody knows
So we hold in high honour
Petroleum (i.e.kerosene)
Because it burns so well
And gives us much light
Let petroleum be to us today
Our noble beer!
Petroleum here, petroleum there
Petroleum all about
Let us fill the beer mugs afresh
Three cheers for petroleum!
The philistine sneers
And says it smells unpleasant
Behind his glass, he insults
Us as "Socialist rabble"
He reads himself stupid in his millionaire newspaper
Thinks what he reads is true
Burn brighter, dear petroleum
Make our position clear to him
(refrain)
It's already burning in the towns
Bright and free
You feel it is also needed
In the villages
It's already lighting up the army
We are stunned into silence
Despite sub- and ordination
Petroleum's burning bright
(refrain)
And though the times are dark
We will always stay united
Steadily going forward
Though the enemy is mighty
And though brother prosecutor
May lock up someone sometimes,
The petroleum is the stronger
And burns all the purer for it!
(refrain)
Comrades in petroleum
Brothers, do not falter
Let every man unfailingly do
His petroleering duty
We do not care a button for
"Black Stöcker" policies
The vote and petroleum
Will be our battlecry!
(refrain)
It actually scans pretty well and sings easily, as in this later recording.
As an explanatory aside, the German word Petroleum correspons roughly to what the Victorians called kerosene, common lamp and household stove fuel. In an age before cars, that was how people encountered distilled crude oil. The Stöcker referenced in the fifth stanza is Adolf Stöcker, an early exponent of popular antisemitism and conservative outrage politics.
Unlike the drinking ritual of military officers or student fraternities, this songh had no specific location or time. It could be sung in the company of Social Democrats and their political fellow travellers, which would usually mean a drinking place, a Kneipe. To this day, in the face of competition from bars, bistros, and clubs, the oldfashioned Kneipe has retained a place in Germany’s culture. It is where you go to drink with friends, a traditionally (but never exclusively) masculine space for beery companionship and conversation. The typical aesthetic of today is a brewery-sponsored post-WWII phenomenon, though. Working class Kneipen before 1918 were often extremely basic. They were also known hotbeds of sedition and revolution, monitored closely by the undercover police. Richard Evans turned those files into an absolutely fascinating book, Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich.
This was a very different place to an Offizierskasino. Barriers to entry were few. The people here had nothing to defend by exclusion – they gained strength from unity and had little beyond numbers on their side, after all. Keeping up appearances was not a full-time occupation, though masks of masculinity and good cheer were uniquitous in Wilhelmine Germany. You could still be unwelcome, but it would be by appearing to look down on them. Subject to daily humiliation, working class men could be a prickly lot.
What these places had in common was alcohol and music, the universal social lubricants of pre-modern Germany. Officers might have pianos, fine wines and cuisine bourgeoise while workers made do with draught beer and Schmalzbrot, but this part was the same: Men sang together, they drank together, swaying to the rhythm, built social bonds and identities. We can still see this in football (soccer) fandom or the Oktoberfest. It used to be universal. There were teetotal Socialists, but it was no easy path to tread.
Many of the songs were the same, fashionable ditties and folk tunes, but as for the student fraternities and the military, there was a distinct corpus of working-class songs, many of them overtly political. Singing them was not without risk. There was no such thing as ‘illegal music’ in Wilhelmine Germany, but on a bad day, the authorities could still nab you for anything from public nuisance to incitement to riot. That said, the law had considerable latitude and people used it to the hilt.
That is where songs like this fit in. You could sing about the great tomorrow, poke fun at the police and the clergy, or versify the political struggles of the day, but there was an anarchic joy in associating with this brand of violent activism. Of course the people who sang this were not arsonists. The whole point of the song was the absurdity of the idea that working class associations were some kind of dark international cabal dedicated to the destruction of civilisation. Even anarchists who might be open to some incendiary ‘propaganda of the deed’ were a vanishingly small percentage of the movement. But if you spent you days organising people into committees and mutual aid organisations, holding debates, struggling endlessly over incremental progress, and suffered the disdain of the establishment for it, imagining a different kind of revolutionary power must have been a balm. What would it be like, to actually be the people the bourgeoisie imagined and feared? What if you had the power to simply burn it all down?
It must have been tempting to imagine, a few beers in, on a hard wooden bench.