GLASGOW band The Tenementals, fronted by David Archibald, is joined by Lily Mohaupt on lead vocals for their version of the seminal German anti-fascist anthem Die Moorsoldaten (The Peat Bog Soldiers) in their debut single released yesterday. 

The song is well-known in Germany but less so here despite versions by Luke Kelly, Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson. The Tenementals reimagine the song, paring the verses down to drums, bass and Lily Mohaupt’s crystal pure vocals emphasising the stark, haunting melody. 

The Tenementals’ EP contains two versions of the song, one in English and German, the other the original six-chorus version in German, rarely recorded. 

As David Archibald puts it: “We take a tiger’s leap into the past; but our aim is to blast the song into the future at a time when its spirit of resilience in the face of oppression has great resonance.”

Archibald’s new English translation has a vitality that contrasts with the dead march of the original. “Every vista and panorama / Peat and bog our only fare / Songs from birds seem not to matter / Oaks stand barren, bent and bare / We are the Peat Bog Soldiers marching with our spades to the moor.”

Composed 90 years ago in 1933 by prisoners of Boergermoor concentration camp, The Peat Bog Soldiers was written as a “conscious protest song of resistance against their oppressors.”
 
Johannes Esser, a Ruhr miner, wrote the lyrics with communist actor/director Wolfgang Langhoff. Rudi Goguel, a sales clerk, composed the melody during a three-day stay in camp prison hospital. The song premiered on August 27 1933 as part of a “Circus Konzentrazani” (Concentration Camp Circus). 

Two days later the camp commandant banned it. Yet prisoners spread it as an expression of resistance and symbol of solidarity. For prisoner Karl Schabrod “It was a song of consolation, a consolation and fight song and a song of camaraderie.”

According to Langhoff “hundreds of copies” were smuggled out by prisoners. A few weeks later Radio Moscow broadcast the song. By 1934 the lyrics were widely republished. Ernst Busch, the communist actor/singer who starred in the original 1928 production of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, debuted Hanns Eisler’s version at the International Workers’ Music Olympics in Strasbourg in 1935. Eisler took the song to the US that year when he gave a benefit concert for victims of Nazi crimes. 

From 1936, the “Song of the Peat Bog Soldiers” became the political prisoners’ anthem in Sachsenhausen camp and found its way into handwritten concentration camp song books. 

It made its way to Spain in 1937 with the Thaelmann Battalion of German volunteers in the International Brigades. It was broadcast by international radio from Barcelona. In 1939, Busch recorded the song again in Paris.  

In 1944, Thomas Geve heard it in Auschwitz. “Ten years ago,” Geve wrote, “this emotional song of isolated, forgotten German anti-fascists was sung in the desolated moor camps along the Ems River. Now 400 youthful voices from across Europe give it new life.” 

David Archibald says: “We hope to bring it to a wider audience and present it in a new way. Somewhat less macho, and less militaristic than some previous versions. 

“We are alive to the international connections that [Glasgow] and its inhabitants have made, be they slave traders or anti-fascist fighters in Spain. Peat Bog Soldiers was a major song during the Spanish Civil war and no doubt many Glaswegians who fought in Spain would have been familiar with it.” 

Peat Bog Soldiers is released by Strength In Numbers; see: strengthinnumbersrecords.bandcamp.com

Alex Gordon is president of RTM