The music is the hymn "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser", written in 1797 by the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn as an anthem for the birthday of Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and later of Austria. In 1841, the German linguist and poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote the lyrics of "Das Lied der Deutschen" as a new text for that music, counterposing the national unification of Germany to the eulogy of a monarch: lyrics that were considered revolutionary at the time.

The "Deutschlandlied" was adopted as the national anthem of Germany in 1922, during the Weimar Republic, to which all three stanzas were used. West Germany retained it as its official national anthem in 1952, with only the third stanza sung on official occasions. After German reunification in 1990, in 1991 only the third stanza was reconfirmed as the national anthem. It is discouraged, although not illegal, to perform the first stanza (or to some degree, the second), due to association with the Nazi regime.

The "Deutschlandlied" is also well known by the incipit and refrain of the first stanza, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" ("Germany, Germany above all"), but this has never been its title. This line originally meant that the most important aim of 19th-century German liberal revolutionaries should be a unified Germany which would overcome loyalties to the local kingdoms, principalities, duchies and palatines (Kleinstaaterei) of then-fragmented Germany, essentially that the idea of a unified Germany should be above all else. Only later, and especially in Nazi Germany, did these words come to imply German superiority over and domination of other countries.

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