The Eternal Music of Television:
How Hogan’s Heroes Was Found in a 13th-Century Bavarian Chant
By Our Staff Correspondent
(Culture, Antiquities, and Television Studies Desk)
There is a curious truth about the great theme songs of American television: the best of them feel less written than revealed. As if, at some point in the late 20th century, a studio executive simply brushed away the sands of time and said, “Oh look, the Mission: Impossible theme, perfectly preserved, in the original key of Suspense Minor.”
Take The Andy Griffith Show, whose whistled melody sounds like it wandered in from a rural 1830s quilting bee. Or Star Trek, which Alexander Courage scored to sound like pre-war Hollywood at its swooniest, as if it had been composed by a 19th-century Viennese conductor aboard a starship. Or the Perry Mason brass fanfare, which could easily be mistaken for a previously unknown movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5½: “The Case of the Missing Subpoena.”
And of course, Mission: Impossible, which feels timeless because no one can remember a moment before its 5/4 rhythm burrowed permanently into the human nervous system. Infants, if presented with a xylophone, cannot resist tapping out DUN dun DUN DUN DUN with unnervingly professional precision.
All of which brings us to the curious case of Hogan’s Heroes.
Its theme is so perfectly pitched—so brassy, so confident, so pseudo-military—that it seems forever part of the world’s sonic wallpaper. You hear it and think: “Yes, of course. That’s the music people whistle when tunneling out of POW camps. That’s been true since antiquity.”
Except…what if it actually has been true since antiquity?
A Startling Discovery in Bavaria
Scholars from the University of Regensburg recently announced a discovery so unlikely that even the History Channel hesitated to produce a speculative documentary about it.
While renovating the remains of Kloster Sankt Hühnchen—a medieval monastery long abandoned, then partially absorbed into the food court of a modest Bavarian shopping mall named Das MegaEinkaufParadies—workers found a parchment lodged inside a crumbling wall.
The parchment, dated circa 1280, contains a short musical staff in early medieval neumatic notation. At first glance, it appeared to be a fragment of a common pilgrim’s chant. But when doctoral student Anselm Breitkopf carefully transcribed the notes, he reportedly sat back in his chair and whispered:
“Mein Gott… it’s Hogan’s Heroes.”
According to Breitkopf’s transcription, the melody—though not fully harmonized—matches the Hogan’s Heroes March note for note. The ascending fanfare. The brisk martial rhythm. Even the jaunty skip that makes you think, “Yes, this is exactly what you’d whistle while sabotaging a Luftwaffe munitions factory.”
Musicologists quickly verified the finding, though they remain divided on its origins. Some argue it was part of a medieval soldier’s recruitment chant. Others believe it to be an instructional tune sung by apprentice coopers while assembling barrels. A fringe group claims it was the victory music played by neighboring monks after beating rival orders in the annual Bavarian log-rolling championships.
Regardless of its original purpose, the melody appears to be centuries older than Jerry Fielding’s 1965 television arrangement.
Implications for Television History
This revelation raises several questions:
-
Did Jerry Fielding accidentally tap into a deep cultural memory of medieval German martial music?
A proto-Teutonic earworm echoing faintly through the centuries? -
Should the medieval monks of Kloster Sankt Hühnchen receive retroactive royalty payments?
(The Bavarian Ministry of Culture is already looking into this, cautiously.) -
Does this make Hogan’s Heroes the first sitcom to use authenticity-verified Middle High German source music?
If so, it remains an achievement unmatched by ALF, Gilligan’s Island, or According to Jim.
Conclusion
For decades, viewers sensed—however dimly—that the Hogan’s Heroes theme felt strangely eternal, as though pre-existing in the collective unconscious long before the show’s debut. Now we know why: it did pre-exist. Long before Sgt. Schultz declared that he saw nothing, a monk in a Bavarian scriptorium was evidently humming the very same tune while illustrating a manuscript with the day’s quota of suspiciously merry-looking angels.
Television, it turns out, did not merely invent its golden age—it rediscovered it. In Bavaria. Behind a shopping mall. In a monastery partially repurposed as a Thai fusion restaurant.
Truly, the past is never dead; sometimes it’s just hiding behind the escalator.
