"At about 6:30 the cry goes up - 'We want the kaiser!' The curtains at the middle window of the palace part, the French doors open, and the kaiser and his wife appear to a thunderous welcome. Wilhelm waves. The noise, the songs, and the cheering slowly abate. Finally, the kaiser speaks. Germans are all one now, he tells the throng. All differences and divisions are forgotten. As brothers they will  achieve a mighty victory. The short speech is greeted with more jubilation and more songs - 'Die Wacht am Rhein' (The Watch on the Rhine) and the traditional hymn of the Protestants, 'Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott' (A Might Fortress is our God)....
   Almost two thousand emergency marriages are performed that Saturday and early Sunday in greater Berlin. The electric atmosphere prompts all manner of organizations and social groups to declare publicly their loyalty to the German cause. Campaigners for homosexual and women's rights, for instance, join the celebrations of nationality. The Association of German Jews in Berlin issues its declaration on Saturday August 1: 'That every German Jew is ready to sacrifice all the property and blood demanded by duty is self-evident.' it proclaims in one of many exuberant assertions.
   On Sunday morning at 11.30 an open-air interdenominational church service takes place at the Bismarck monument in front of the Reichstag. Thousands are in attendance for this ceremony of incomparable symbolism and suggestion. The band of the Fusilier Guards plays, and the service begins with the Protestant hymn 'Niederlandische Dankgebet' (Dutch Prayer of Thanks), with its opening words, Wir treten zum Beten vor Gott den Gerechten (We come tor pray before our Just God). The court preacher, Licentiate Dohring, leads the service, and for his sermon he takes the text 'Faithful unto death'. The war, he says, has been forced on Germany, but, 'we Germans fear God yet otherwise nothing in this world'. The entire congregation then repeats the Lord's Prayer, and the service ends with the Catholic hymn, based on a fourth century tune, 'Grosser Gott wir leben Dich' (Holy God We Praise Thy Name'). Protestant and Catholic are reunited in Germany. The secular crowds on previous days often sang hymns. Now, appropriately, the religious service is followed by secular songs. Church and state, too, have become one. The kaiser, aware of the importance of this kind of symbolism, attends a service at the old garrison church in Potsdam, where Frederick the Great, among other Prussian rulers, lies buried." Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989) pp 61-2.