snowclone: Today ___, tomorrow the world

[Mark Mandel]

Today ___, tomorrow the world

Google reports about 242,000 hits for "tomorrow the world".

Original: "Today Germany, tomorrow the world!", a translation of the Nazi
party slogan "Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!" (1, 2)

According to a post in the Mudcat Forum (3), it "is a citation from the
chorus of a song (from 1932?):" "Es zittern die morschen Knochen" by Hans
Baumann (4, 5). The refrain is

Wir werden weiter marschieren
> Wenn alles in Scherben fällt,
> Denn heute da hört uns Deutschland
> Und morgen die ganze Welt.
>

(so, not so much a citation as perhaps an allusion) --  which, if my
undergraduate German serves me, means approximately

We will march on
> (even) if everything falls to pieces,
> for today Germany hears us
> and tomorrow the whole world.
>

But "da hört uns" 'hears us', as printed here, may well either be a
softening of "gehört uns", or have been understood as "da gehört uns",
'belongs to us' (6).

My first encounter with this snowclone was in (IIRC) William Steig's _The
Lonely Ones_ (7), the great cartoonist's first book, published 1942: a G.I.
collecting litter with litter bag, spiked stick, and a bitter expression,
mutters "Today the area, tomorrow the world!" I was probably younger than 10
and didn't know the phrase "policing the area", much less the original
slogan.

m a m

1.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalsozialistische_Deutsche_Arbeiterpartei;
scroll down to Slogans
2. http://movies.go.com/tomorrow-the-world/d787709/drama
3. http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=55750; search for
"translation", in the post by "Wolfgang" of 24 Feb 2003.
4. http://ingeb.org/Lieder/eszitter.html
5. http://www.kollektives-gedaechtnis.de/texte/vor45/lieder.html
6. http://schmautz.gmxhome.de/nachd.htm, bottom of page
7. http://www.valleybooks.net/cgi-bin/valleybooks/14034.html

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