CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)
By:
January 10, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
In the same way that a sea shanty invites us to haul on the bowline together, making lighter work by aligning rhythms to tasks, a protest song invites us to band together in our outrage, distilling our fury into anthemic purpose, a declaration of where we stand.
Pete Seeger was the first to teach me — and, I suspect, so many of us — how to do this. We had his 1973 Folk Music of the World on cassette tape in my dad’s car, and in between the songs we already knew and loved (“I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore”), Pete taught us protest songs from other times and places, like the great Korean folk song, “Arirang” and the German folk song that has risen up again and again over the centuries, “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” (“My Thoughts Are Free”).
I think as I please, and this gives me pleasure
My conscience decrees this right I must treasure
My thoughts will not cater to duke or dictator
No man can deny
Die gedanken sind frei
No man can deny
Die gedanken sind frei
As a Jewish kid growing up in the ’70s, just a generation past the horrors of the Holocaust, the German language was generally a terrifying, ugly-sounding thing to my ears. But these four words were the exception, a refrain that reminded me there were voices of resistance amidst this horror, that there are always voices of resistance. Sophie Scholl, an activist who co-founded the White Rose movement in 1942–43 and was later executed for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, played this song on her flute outside her father’s prison window.
As the unimaginable becomes all too vividly real around us, our neighbors being snatched off the streets, detained without due process or the rule of law, we see the echoes from other conflicts, regimes of all kinds throughout human history, horror stories repeated with new backdrops, our fictional dystopias revealed to be drawn directly from real life.
What is there to say about freedom that hasn’t already been said? “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” reminds us that we don’t need new words, that the global folk traditions of resistance kept alive by Pete Seeger and others connect us to a lineage that has the power to withstand the temporary architectures of cruelty.
Tyrants can take me
And throw me in prison
My thoughts will burst forth
Like blossoms in season
Foundations will crumble
And structures may tumble
But free men will cry
Die gedanken sind frei
And free men will cry
Die gedanken sind frei
CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON | Lynn Peril on ZAZOUS | Judith Zissman on DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI | Annie Nocenti on MEDIUM COOL | Mike Watt on FASCIST | William Nericcio on LALO ALCARAZ | Josh Glenn on THE LADY VANISHES | Carlo Rotella on INQUIETUD | Heather Quinlan on CASABLANCA | Adam McGovern on HEART OF GLASS (Mad Jenny) | Matthew Battles on WOODY’S GUITAR | Carl Wilson on PALACES OF GOLD | Ramona Lyons on UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED | Lucy Sante on CAMOUFLAGE | Adelina Vaca on TBD | Tom Nealon on THE BARON IN THE TREES | Nikhil Singh on PARIS PEASANT | Mandy Keifetz on THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED | Gordon Dahlquist on THE CONFORMIST | Alex Brook Lynn on WHY WE FIGHT | Gabriela Pedranti on THE ETERNAUT | Heather Kapplow on ANTI-FASCIST PASTA | Marc Weidenbaum on (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING | Peggy Nelson on PUPPETS | Sonia Marques on CARNATIONS AGITPROP.
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