Deutschland Deutschland:
A musical journey with Siegmund Nissel

A Film by Frederick Baker,
3SAT/ORF/Media Europa Limited, London & Vienna co-production

This is a film about turning pain into pleasure. A film about he meaning of one song and one man’s life. It is the story of the Jewish violinist Siegmund Nissel´s journey to the sources of the present German national anthem “Deutschland Deutschland” from London to the Croatian villages of Austria. It is a journey that reveals that the same piece of music that can bring both pleasure and pain.

A refugee from Nazi persecution finds himself put behind barbed wire by his savours the British. “Yet out of darkest days all the good things happened”. In British internment he met the men with whom hew would form the Amadeus Quartet, one of the greatest quartet’s the world has ever seen, they where know as the “Classical Beatles”

Millions of TV viewers hear it accompany Germany´s sports successes from Formula 1 to football. Love it or hate it viewers will be amazing to discover that what is considered the most “Teutonic” of tunes has an astonishing heritage: ° The tune itself is the same a Croatian folksong ° It was actually composed in Vienna in 1797, by Joseph Haydn, the inventor of the Symphony. ° The words that we recognise today were a late addition. Only in 1922 did it become the official German national anthem. ° It was the last piece of music that Haydn played before he died on the 31st May 1809.

The Musician

Siegmund `Siggi` Nissel is one of the world´s foremost musicians, he was second violinist in the Amadeus Quartett and is now a professor at the Royal College of Music in London. He was brought up in Vienna. His family on his father´s side is originally from Mikulov in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), but was brought up in Vienna. His mother´s side is from Mattersburg in the Austrian Burgenland. In 1938 he was forced to flee in the Kindertransporte to escape persecution by the Nazis because he was a Jew. On the outbreak of World War II he was interned with other refugees on the Isle of Man, where he met the other members of the quartet. They went on to become world-famous. `Siggi`now lives in London.