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"First they came ... " ( German : Zuerst kamen sie ... ) is the poetic form of a 1946 post-war confessional prose by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).
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Apr 11, 2023 · This Martin Niemöller quote originated after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. After the war, Niemöller was well-known for his opposition to the Nazi regime and as a former victim of Nazi persecution. In 1946, he traveled on a lecture tour in the western zones of Allied-occupied Germany.
The author was a Lutheran pastor and theologian born in Germany in 1892. This quotation and many variations of it appeared in his public addresses in the 1930’s, and in the 50’s people began to line it out as poetry, which further boosted its popularity.
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‘First They Came’ by Pastor Martin Neimölleris a powerful poem that explores the nature of responsibility in times of war and persecution. The poem speaks briefly about several of the groups hunted down and imprisoned or killed by the Nazis during WWII. The speaker acknowledges each of these and that he did nothing to stop them. By the end of the p...
‘First They Came’ by Pastor Martin Neimöller is a fifteen-line excerpt from a speech made by the pastor. The lines do not follow a specific rhyme scheme, although there are similarities in the endings used. These are seen through the repetition of the suffix “-ist” in the first few lines. Rather than appearing as a selective rhyme scheme or half-rh...
Neimöller uses several poetic techniques in ‘First They Came.’ These include, but are not limited to, repetition, epistrophe, and anaphora. Repetition is one of the most important techniques at work within these short lines. The words majority of the lines follow a repeating pattern of “Then they came for…” and “And I did not speak out / Because I ...
Lines 1-7
In the first lines of ‘First They Came,’ the speaker begins by using the phrase that later came to be used as the title. He addresses the fact that the Nazis first came for the Communists. He knew this well, and despite the fact that men and women were being taken from their homes, forced into slavery, worked to their deaths, and murdered, he did not speak out. He was not a Communist and, therefore, could ignore what was happening. This is a pattern that repeatsthroughout the poem. He says th...
Lines 8-15
In the next few lines of ‘First They Came,’the speaker adds that he did not speak out when they “came for the Jews.” It is with this reference that a reader should be aware, if they do not have access to the context of the poem before reading it, what the speaker is alluding to. The Nazis made their way through the different groups that offended them, and then, finally, things changed. The speaker was put at risk. “They came for me,” he says in the thirteenth line. In an expected but still po...
Readers who enjoyed this poem should also consider reading some related poems. For example: 1. ‘The Measures Taken’ by Erich Fried– is a powerful piece about war and loss. 2. ‘August 6’ by Tōge Sankichi– is an emotional poem that explores the aftermath of the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. 3. ‘Courage’ by Anna Akhmat...
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Martin Niemöller is best known for writing First They Came, but he is a complicated figure. Initially an antisemitic Nazi supporter, his views changed when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp for speaking out against Nazi control of churches.
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (German: [ˈmaʁtiːn ˈniːmœlɐ] ⓘ; 14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. [1][3] He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted 1946 poem "First they came ...".
This page pursues the origin of the quotation 'First they came for the communists, but I wasn't a communist, ...', by Martin Niemoeller. It was compiled by Harold Marcuse, a professor of German history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
