The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Goebbels was clear that control over the press should mean that all newspapers and magazines should follow the same line. To help steer their content from the centre, the Propaganda Ministry took over the two main press agencies, Hugenberg’s Telegraph Union and the rival Wolff’s Telegraph Office, in December 1933 and merged them into the German News Office. This supplied not only much of the national and international news content for all papers but also commentaries and instructions as to how the news was to be interpreted. Editors were banned from taking their news from any other source except from their own correspondents. Goebbels’s instructions to editors, issued at regular press conferences and conveyed over the wire to regional press offices for the benefit of the local press, included frequent bans as well as orders about what to print. ‘Pictures which show Ludendorff together with the Leader or at the same time must under no circumstances be published’, said one such instruction issued on 6 April 1935. ‘Ambassador von Ribbentrop suffered a car accident yesterday. His oldest daughter was severely injured in this accident. The ambassador himself is unhurt. This incident must not be reported in the German press,’ ran another sent out on 14 April 1936. ‘In future the names of leading Soviet officials and politicians will only be cited with the prefix “Jew” and their Jewish name, insofar as they are Jewish’, the German press was told on 24 April 1936. ‘The visit of SA-leaders of the Central Group to the Freemasonry Museum during their presence in Berlin may not be reported,’ editors were instructed on 25 April 1936. ‘Reports on Greta Garbo may be positive,’ they learned, perhaps to their relief, on 20 November 1937.70 The detail was astonishing, and was intended to leave little room for initiative on the part of editors.71

  The results of these measures were not wholly successful. As the example of the Frankfurt Newspaper showed, an intelligent and determined editor or correspondent could still convey news that the regime did not want people to read, or engage in veiled criticism of the regime’s actions in the guise of writing about subjects such as dictatorships in Ancient Greece or Rome. On 20 April 1935, a local paper, the Schweinitz District News-Sheet (Schweinitzer Kreisblatt), printed a large photograph of Hitler on the front page in such a way that part of his head covered the letters ‘itzer’ in the title, leaving the letters ‘Schwein’, the German for ‘pig’, to provide what the Gestapo, who promptly banned the paper for three days, thought of as an insulting description of the Leader. It is unlikely that the offending layout was an accident.72 Nevertheless, whatever the journalists of the Frankfurt Newspaper might have been able to achieve, the majority of editors and journalists lacked the ability or the inclination to vary the propaganda they were required to serve up to their readers with any touch of independence or originality. The number of newspapers declined from 4,700 to 977 between 1932 and 1944, and the number of magazines and periodicals of all kinds from 10,000 to 5,000 between 1933 and 1938. And the contents of those that remained became increasingly homogeneous. Moreover, the rapid increase in the importance of radio as a purveyor of instant, up-to-the-minute news confronted daily newspapers with a problem that they still face today, namely how to retain readers when the news they print is not new any more.73 The result was a crescendo of dissatisfaction amongst the newspaper-reading public, relayed through the regular surveillance reports of the Gestapo. ‘The uniformity of the press’, noted the Gestapo office in Kassel in its monthly report for March 1935, ‘is felt to be unbearable by the people and also in particular by those who are National Socialist in their views.’ Furthermore, the report went on, people did not understand why they could not read any reports in the press about things that were everyday current knowledge but were evidently thought too sensitive by the authorities to print. That was the way, the Gestapo considered, to allow rumours to take hold or, just as bad, to prompt people to get their news from the foreign press, particularly German-language newspapers printed in Switzerland, which were selling increasing numbers of copies even in small communities well outside the big cities.74

  But the regime had taken steps to deal with this problem too, and not merely by exercising the power of confiscation of foreign press imports. The Reich Press Chamber controlled the Reich Association of German Railway Station Booksellers, and this body made sure that ‘it must be the first duty of station booksellers to spread German ideas. The leaseholders of station bookshops must be instructed to desist from everything that could promote the distribution of foreign papers.’ And what applied to railway station kiosks also applied to high street news-agents as well.75 With such restrictions in place, it is not surprising that the public became even more distrustful of what they read in the newspapers, as Gestapo reports indicated in 1934-5. They turned instead to other sources. In the course of 1934 alone the circulation of the Party press decreased by over a million all told, and it would have fallen still further in this and subsequent years but for bulk orders by Nazi Party organizations. In Cologne, the circulation of the local Nazi paper dropped from 203,000 in January 1934 to 186,000 in January 1935, while that of the local Catholic paper rose from 81,000 to 88,000 over the same period. Similar developments could be observed in other parts of Germany too. It was therefore less than surprising that 24 April 1935 saw the introduction of the ‘Amann regulations’, which allowed for the revocation of the licence of any paper if it was deemed to be offering ‘unfair competition’ or doing ‘moral harm’ to the readership. The Party press did do a bit better after this; but only because competition was being eliminated, and people were being forced by threats and intimidation to subscribe to Party newspapers instead.76

  Control over the press therefore was gradually tightened as the regime found a variety of ways to stamp out dissent. Journalists, editors and other staff constantly had to make difficult decisions as to how far they could follow the regime’s dictates without wholly abandoning their professional integrity. As time went on, however, they had little choice but to surrender it almost entirely, and all who did not were ousted from their posts. Despite his loudly proclaimed injunction to broadcasters and pressmen not to be boring, Goebbels ended up, therefore, by imposing a political straitjacket on radio and the press that led to widespread popular complaints about the monotonous conformity of these two key opinion-forming mass media and the dull subservience of those who worked in them. Already in 1934 he was telling newspapermen how pleased he was that the press was now reacting to current events correctly without necessarily being told how to.77 But with his customary cynicism, he concluded a few years later that ‘any man who still has a residue of honour will be very careful not to become a journalist’.78

  II

  When he wrote Little Man - What Now?, published in June 1932, Hans Fallada created the last best-selling serious novel of the Weimar Republic. It sold over 40,000 copies in the first ten months, it was serialized in no fewer than ten daily papers, it was turned into a film, and it rescued the book’s publisher Ernst Rowohlt from almost certain bankruptcy. The title itself seemed to sum up the predicament of so many Germans in the desperate last months of 1932, when there seemed no way out of economic depression and political impasse. Many readers could identify with the novel’s protagonist, the humble clerk Johannes Pinneberg, who went through one humiliation after another. He had to come to terms with the fact that his girl-friend was pregnant. He had to marry her despite the hostility of her father. He had to go through numerous travails in order to find a flat for the couple to live in. And then he had to adjust himself to family life when the baby arrived. Inevitably, after many anxious moments, Pinneberg lost his job and joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed. But unlike other characters in the book, he did not take to crime to make ends meet. He remained upright and decent in the face of adversity. That he was able to do so was possible above all because of his wife, who after overcoming her initial inexperience, managed to create a home life that became a refuge from the cruelties and hardships of the world outside. In the end, indeed, it was the wife, ‘Lambkin’, who became the novel’s
central character and whose portrayal was generally agreed to be the key element in the novel’s popularity.79

  ‘Hans Fallada’, the pen-name of Rudolf Ditzen, born in Greifswald in 1893, was not a great writer or a major literary figure. His novels and short stories achieved popularity above all because of their gritty realism and their close attention to the humdrum detail of everyday life. He was a very German figure, who would have found it difficult to make a living from his writing in any other country. Emigration, therefore, was scarcely an option, and in any case, as a largely unpolitical writer and a non-Jew, Rudolf Ditzen did not see why he should leave.80 A member of no political party, and too popular an author to have been elected to august bodies like the Prussian Academy of Arts, he was not considered particularly objectionable by the regime. His books were not amongst those burned on the funeral pyres of literary freedom in Germany’s university towns on 10 May 1933. But he had no other means of making a living apart from his writing, and he had an expensive drinking habit to maintain. During the Weimar Republic, nervous breakdowns and bouts of drug addiction, alcoholism and delinquency had landed him for considerable periods of time in prisons and asylums. These provided the basis for a new novel, Once a Jailbird, completed in November 1933.81

  In order to get the book published, Ditzen felt it necessary to write a preface claiming that the appalling criminal justice system the book depicted was a thing of the past, an assertion which he must have known was the reverse of the truth. Even his publisher, Ernst Rowohlt, considered this ‘too ingratiating’. But Rowohlt himself had been obliged to make his own compromises. Half the books he had previously published were now banned, and to keep his firm going he replaced them with more acceptable titles, as well as engaging well-known right-wing figures, though not out-and-out Nazis, like Ernst von Salomon, a nationalist author who had been implicated in the murder of Walther Rathenau, the liberal, Jewish-born Foreign Minister of the early Weimar Republic. Behind the scenes, too, Rowohlt had worked to get American visas to enable his Jewish authors to emigrate, though as a private employer he was not obliged to dismiss his Jewish staff until 1936, and he kept on key figures such as Ditzen’s Jewish editor Paul Mayer. Income from the sale of foreign rights fell sharply as a result of Rowohlt’s enforced slashing of his list. Rowohlt became a Nazi Party member to try and ease his situation, while he employed Jewish typists and proof-readers and ex-Communist illustrators on a freelance basis behind the scenes. None of this saved him, however; his firm was taken over by the giant Ullstein Publishing House, itself now a part of the Nazis’ Eher Publishing House, and in July 1938 he was expelled from the Reich Literary Chamber and banned from publishing. His firm was passed over to the German Publishing Institution, which eventually wound it up. He left for Brazil, returning somewhat surprisingly in 1940 because he thought the Hitler regime by this time was on its last legs.82

  All this made life increasingly difficult for Ditzen, who relied a good deal on the close personal support of his publisher. Retreating to his modest and remote country home in Mecklenburg, he hoped to continue to make a living by writing fairy-tales and children’s books. In his serious social novels, he aimed at making enough concessions to the regime to keep it happy, while preserving the essence of his work intact and avoiding being co-opted into the regime’s violent antisemitism. This was not easy for someone whose novels were all about contemporary German life. In 1934, Ditzen tried to strike a balance by removing all references to the brownshirts from a new edition of Little Man - What Now? He turned a violent SA man into an aggressively inclined goal-keeper, while retaining the novel’s positive depiction of its Jewish characters. He refused to modify its description of the Communist sympathies of its heroine, ‘Lambkin’. But his most recent novel, Once a Jailbird, was fiercely attacked in the Nazi press for its supposedly sympathetic attitude to criminal ‘degenerates’. Ditzen riposted with a new novel set in the rural world of North Germany, Once We Had a Child (1934), which he hoped could appeal to Nazi ideas of ‘blood and soil’. In practice lacked most of the genre’s key features such as earth-mothers, racism, anti-intellectualism and above all the view of contact with the land as a source of national renewal (the main character in fact was a failure in life and remained so to the end).83

  Under growing pressure from the regime, Ditzen’s balancing act began to wobble ever more violently. His next novel, Old Heart Goes A-Journeying, not one of his best, ran into trouble because it depicted Christianity rather than Nazism as the basis for uniting the people. It led to his being classified by the Reich Literary Chamber as an ‘unwanted author’. Although the classification was soon revoked, Ditzen began to suffer from renewed bouts of depression serious enough to require hospitalization. However, another novel, Wolf among Wolves, set in the inflation of 1923, met with a more favourable response from the Nazis (‘a fantastic book’, Goebbels noted in his diary for 31 January 1938). They approved of its sharply critical portrayal of the Weimar Republic, and the book sold well on its publication in 1937. Its success led to Iron Gustav, a family saga centred around a conservative coachman who refused to compromise with the motor car. Intended from the start to be filmed, with Emil Jannings in the starring role, it attracted the attention of Goebbels himself, who insisted against the author’s original intentions that Ditzen bring the story up to 1933, when he had to show how the hero became a Nazi and the villain a Communist. Despite the fact that Ditzen went along with this humiliating compromise, the film was never made, because Alfred Rosenberg raised serious objections to any filming of a novel by ‘Hans Fallada’, and the book was quickly withdrawn from the bookshops after being criticized as destructive and subversive. Iron Gustav turned out in fact to be Ditzen’s last serious novel published under the Third Reich. The next one, The Drinker, a graphic portrayal of one man’s descent into alcoholism, written in the first person, ran counter to everything the Third Reich thought should be dealt with in works of literature. Interwoven with it on the pages of the manuscript, written upside-down, between the lines, and across the page, so as to make the whole extremely difficult to decipher, was a lengthy account of Ditzen’s own life under the Nazis, shot through with sharp criticism of the regime and suffused with guilt about the compromises he had made. Neither saw the light of day until after Ditzen’s death in 1947. At the time he was writing the manuscript, he was incarcerated in a prison for the criminally insane. ‘I know I’m weak,’ he wrote to his mother shortly after the war, ‘but not bad, never bad.’84

  III

  Rudolf Ditzen’s travails showed how limited the possibilities were for authors who remained in Germany. Nearly all of the country’s internationally famous writers were in exile, including Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque and many others. Here they quickly organized publishing ventures, refounded banned magazines, mounted lecture and reading tours, and tried to warn the rest of the world about the menace of Nazism. Many of the now-classic fictional accounts of the Nazi rise to power and the first years of the Third Reich came from this exile milieu in the mid-to-late 1930s, from Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns to Zweig’s The Axe of Wandsbek. Some, like Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, asked why no one had stopped Hitler coming to power; others, like Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, explored the personal and moral motivations of those who had stayed on to work with the regime. None of these, needless to say, found any distribution within Germany itself. Any writer who had been associated with the anti-fascist movement in the Weimar Republic and had remained in Germany was either under constant surveillance or already in prison.85

  Probably the most prominent of these was the pacifist journalist and essayist Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of the famous left-wing periodical The World Stage (Die Weltbühne), who had been unsparing in his ridiculing of Hitler before 30 January 1933. Imprisoned in concentration camps since the beginning of the Third Reich and badly maltreated by the guards, Ossietzky became the focus of an international camp
aign for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize among other things, for his work in exposing clandestine German rearmament in the late 1920s. The campaign succeeded in drawing attention to Ossietzky’s fragile state of health and in persuading the International Red Cross to put pressure on the regime for his release. Continual bad publicity in the foreign press over the beatings and insults Ossietzky had had to endure achieved the desired effect, and the journalist was transferred to a hospital in Berlin in May 1936 in order, as the Propaganda Ministry declared, ‘not to give foreign media the opportunity to accuse the German government of causing Ossietzky’s death in prison’. Despite all the efforts of the German government to stop it, Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in November 1936. The writer was prevented from going to Oslo to accept it. His representative at the ceremony embezzled the prize money and Ossietzky never received a penny. Shortly afterwards, Hitler banned German citizens from receiving Nobel prizes, and founded a German National Prize for Art and Science instead. Ossietzky’s health never recovered from his maltreatment in the camps and he died, after two years in hospital, on 4 May 1938. Only his widow and his physician were allowed to attend the cremation, and the regime saw to it that his ashes were buried in an unmarked grave.86

  Ossietzky had become a symbol of opposition without actually publishing a word since the end of the Weimar Republic. Open criticism of the regime while remaining in Germany rapidly became impossible; the most active literary opposition came from exiled Communist writers like Bertolt Brecht, Jan Petersen or Willi Bredel, whose work was smuggled into Germany from outside in clandestine pamphlets and periodicals. Such activities ceased once the Gestapo had smashed the underground Communist resistance, which is to say, from 1935 onwards.87 Less politically active writers who stayed in Germany were faced with the kind of choices that had so troubled Rudolf Ditzen. Many chose ‘inner emigration’, retreating from human subjects by writing about nature, replacing description of external events by introspection, or distancing themselves from the realities of the present by writing about far-distant times or topics tied to no particular time at all. Under this guise they could sometimes engage in veiled criticism of the regime, or at least write novels that could be taken as such. Werner Bergengruen’s novel The Great Tyrant and the Law-Court, for example, published in 1935, was praised by Nazi reviewers as ‘the Leader novel of the Renaissance age’ and its author obtained a special permit from the Reich Literary Chamber to continue publishing despite the fact that his wife was classified as three-quarters Jewish. Yet it was read by many for its critical portrayal of tyranny, terror, the abuse of power and the eventual remorse of the guilty tyrant. When it was serialized, the censors in the Ministry of Propaganda changed its title to The Temptation, cut obvious parallels with Hitler, such as the tyrant’s love of architecture, and excised all allusions to political life. The author was careful to disclaim any critical or satirical intent and indeed he had begun the book before 1933, intending it to be a broad meditation on the problem of power rather than a direct attack on the Nazi dictatorship. Nevertheless, issued as a single volume, unabridged, with the cuts made by the censors of the serialized version restored, and, once more under its original title, it became a major best-seller. The political circumstances of the Third Reich lent its message a sharp edge that its author seemed never to have intended.88