Ode to Joy himself regarded it as a failure later in his life, going so far as to call it "detached from reality" and "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his long-time friend and patron Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write the ode). The lines marked with * have been revised as follows: Academic speculation remains as to whether Schiller originally wrote an Ode to Freedom "(Ode an die Freiheit)" and changed it to an Ode to Joy. "... [T]he thought lies
Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology", the psychoanalytical Communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek comments on the use of the Ode by Nazism, Bolshevism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the East-West German Olympic team, Southern Rhodesia, Abimael Guzmán (leader of the Shining Path), and the Council of Europe and the European Union. During the division of Germany in the Cold War, the "Ode to Joy" segment of the symphony was played in lieu of an anthem at the Olympic Games for the United Team of Germany between 1956 and 1968. In 1972, the musical backing (without the words) was adopted as the Anthem of