Critiques such as Bergengruen’s came from the conservative end of the political spectrum, and were perhaps easier to smuggle through because they were written by authors who had never aroused suspicion as men of the left would have done. The disillusioned journalist and theatre critic Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen managed to publish a historical study of the sixteenth-century reign of terror unleashed in the city of Münster by the Anabaptists under their leader Jan Bockelson, with the title Bockelson. History of a Mass Hysteria (Berlin, 1937) in which the parallels with Hitler and the mass enthusiasm he seemed to generate were obvious. Reck-Malleczewen was a more or less unknown author, whose pseudo-aristocratic contempt for the mob won him few friends; Ernst Jünger, one of Germany’s most prominent right-wing writers, was a different case altogether. Already a best-selling writer for his graphic and heroic depiction of the soldier’s experience of the First World War, he had been close to the Nazis during the 1920s but was ill at ease under the Third Reich. In his short novel On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger depicted a vague, symbolic world, sometimes located in the past, sometimes in the present, centred on a tyrant who has come to power by undermining a decaying democracy and now rules by force and terror. Jünger always denied, even after 1945, any political intentions in writing the novel, and the vague, pre-industrial setting for its story certainly bore few resemblances to Nazi Germany. The book, published in 1939, sold 12,000 copies within a year, and was frequently reprinted. And yet, many readers understood it to be a powerful attack on the Nazi regime, a clear act of literary resistance. In the circumstances of the Third Reich, context could condition a book’s reception far more than its author’s intentions did.89
Jünger was protected from interference, perhaps, because he was a war hero, much admired by Hitler and Goebbels. Others never had any need of protection. There were plenty of journeymen writers prepared to turn out ‘blood-and-soil’ novels set in an idyllic and mythical world of German peasant farmers, to celebrate heroes of the Nazi pantheon such as the murdered brownshirt Horst Wessel, or to pen fawning lyrics praising the greatness of Germany’s Leader.90 Speaking to the Reich Chamber of Culture on 15 November 1933, Goebbels - himself the author of a novel - recommended writers to depict Germany’s reawakening in a positive light. He advocated a ‘steely Romanticism’ as the basic approach to take.91 Versifiers celebrated Nazi values and the reawakening of the German spirit: ‘Germany lies not in parliaments and government palaces’, wrote Kurt Eggers in 1934, but:Where the brown earth bears its fruits,
Where the lord’s hand holds the reins, there lies Germany.
Where columns march and battle-cries sound, there lies Germany.
Where poverty and self-sacrifice build themselves memorial sites
And where defiant eyes blaze towards the enemy,
Where hearts hate and fists are raised:
There germinates, there grows new life for Germany!92
Under the Weimar Republic, Nazi songs and verses had concentrated on raising the spirits of Party members in their struggle against everything they hated - the Republic, the Jews, ‘reaction’, parliamentarism. From 1933 onwards, however, such sentiments gave way to a broader appeal to the entire German nation to mobilize against the country’s enemies within and without. Violent hatred was still present, but it was overlaid now with cloying encomia to the new Germany, the new Reich and above all, the new Leader. Speaking, in his imagination, for the German people, the lyricist Fritz Sotke addressed Hitler in 1934:Lead us home.
Be your path uneven,
And leading over the abyss,
Over rock and iron wastes,
We will follow you.
If you ask us for all we have,
We will give it to you, because we believe in you.
We swear allegiance to you,
None can break this oath -
Even you - only death can break it!
And that is the fulfilment of our being.93
Death was often close to the surface in such lyrics, generalizing the Nazi myth of sacrifice and martyrdom into a general principle for the entire German people.94
Authors of such verses were hardly well-known literary figures. One of the leading German literary and artistic movements of the 1920s and early 1930s was Expressionism, whose exponents were mostly on the left, though a few, like the playwright Hanns Johst, did lend their services to the Nazis from 1933 onwards; Johst indeed became head of the Reich Literary Chamber and wielded considerable power under the new regime.95 The values of Expressionism did in fact bear a superficial resemblance to those of the National Socialists, emphasizing emotional self-expression, the virtues of youth, the evils of the industrial world, the banalities of the bourgeoisie, and the remaking of the human spirit in a revolt against the intellect. On the other hand, Expressionism gained much of its originality from a very un-Nazi rejection of naturalism in favour of the direct communication of emotion from the soul, often avoiding the realistic depiction of outward appearances. The Expressionists’ radical, often unconventional style rendered them on the whole unacceptable to the Nazi cultural apparatus. The most celebrated literary convert from Expressionism to National Socialism, the writer Gottfried Benn, was a case in point. Already an established poet in the 1920s, Benn had another life as a medical practitioner that drew him into the orbit of the racial hygienists. He saw the coming to power of the Nazis as an opportunity for his profession to put the principles of eugenics into effect at last. Previously unpolitical, he now proclaimed his allegiance to the new Reich. He threw himself energetically into purging the Academy of dissident writers. When he was taken to task for this by Klaus Mann, the exiled son of the novelist Thomas Mann, and himself a prominent writer, Benn replied that only those who stayed on in Germany could understand the release of creative energy which the coming of the Third Reich had brought about.96
Although his poetry was pure, elevated and far removed from the struggles of everyday life, Benn none the less praised the regime’s revivification of faith in German nature and rural life. He regarded Hitler as the great restorer of German dignity and honour. But after the initial purges of the Academy, Benn fell rapidly out of favour with the regime. As the Nazi cultural establishment turned its guns on Expressionism in music, art and literature, Benn made things worse for himself by attempting to defend it. The fact that he did so in terms he thought would appeal to the Nazis, as anti-liberal, primal, Aryan, born of the spirit of 1914, did not impress those who denounced it as unpatriotic, over-intellectual, perverse and immoral. ‘If anyone is to be named as the moving spirit of the bolshevistic delight in the disgusting that celebrates its orgies in degenerate art,’ one of his critics told him, ‘then you have a right to be the first to be put in the pillory.’ Poems with titles such as Flesh, Whores’ Crusade, Syphilis Quadrille and similar ‘pornopoetry’ proved it, he said.97 Benn was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Literature in March 1938. Banned from publishing any more verse, he had already taken up a post in the War Ministry in July 1937. In January 1934 he had written: ‘As far as the future is concerned, it seems natural to me that no book should be allowed to appear in Germany that holds the new state in contempt.’ When his own books were put into this category, because their aesthetic spirit was considered alien to the new state’s culture, he had no response.98
As the problems encountered by Rudolf Ditzen and Gottfried Benn showed, the regime had multifarious ways of controlling the literary output of its citizens. Membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature was compulsory not only for all writers, poets, screenwriters, dramatists, critics and translators, but also for publishing houses, booksellers first-and second-hand, lending libraries and anything connected with the book trade, including scientific, academic and technical publications. Jews were excluded, as were any dissidents or people with a politically suspect past. Backing this up was a plethora of different censorship institutions. They based their activities on a decree issued almost immediately after the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancel
lor, on 4 February 1933, which allowed the seizure by the police of any books that ‘tended to endanger public security and order’. Armed with this weapon, censors scarcely needed the additional powers granted by the Reichstag Fire Decree on 28 February 1933. In addition, the Criminal Code had long contained provisions for the seizure and suppression of allegedly dangerous books, and there was a lengthy and legally legitimate tradition of confiscating and banning ‘dirty and trashy literature (Schund- und Schmutzliteratur)’.99
Soon libraries and bookshops were being raided, often in rapid succession, by agents of the Criminal Police, the Gestapo, the Interior Ministry, the courts, local authorities and the Supreme Censorship Authority for Dirty and Trashy Literature, based in Leipzig. The Hitler Youth, the brownshirts and the Nazi students’ organization were equally vigilant in rooting out books by Jews, pacifists, Marxists and other proscribed authors. Rosenberg’s Fighting League for German Culture played its part too, as did the Official Party Censorship Commission, which had to vet publications produced by the Party itself. By December 1933 over a thousand titles had been banned by these various institutions. After the book-burning in university towns on 10 May 1933, the book trade journal issued a blacklist of 300 titles from 139 authors in the field of literature, following this up with 68 authors and 120 works in the fields of politics, and further lists covering other areas. Not only German books were affected. Banned foreign works ranged from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and virtually anything else either written by a Jewish author, dealing with a Jewish theme or featuring a Jewish character. Foreign books were not banned as such, and popular non-German authors in the Third Reich ranged from the blood-and-soil novelist Knut Hamsun to the social critic John Steinbeck and the adventure story writer C. S. Forester, creator of the fictional naval captain Horatio Hornblower. The confusion and overlap of different censoring bodies may have been a nuisance to the tidy-minded, but it achieved the removal of objectionable literature many times over.100 Four thousand one hundred different printed works were banned by a total of forty different censorship bodies in 1934 alone.101 In the first two to three years of the Third Reich, literature by Jewish writers disappeared from public bookshelves, and Jewish poets such as Heinrich Heine were now condemned as superficial imitations of true German writing. The works of non-Jewish classic writers like Goethe and Schiller were reinterpreted in a manner suitable to the regime’s ideology. Inconveniently philosemitic plays such as Lessing’s Nathan the Wise were dropped from theatre repertories.102
Control over the theatre was in some ways easier than control over books, since all performances were basically public events. It was entrusted to the Propaganda Ministry by a Theatre Law passed on 15 May 1934, which enabled Goebbels to license all theatres and performances, including amateur dramatic societies, and limited the prerogatives of other institutions such as the police in this respect. The Reich Theatre Chamber for its part licensed actors, directors and stage and theatre staff, excluding Jews and the politically unreliable in the usual way. The Chamber’s President, Reich Literary and Artistic Theatre Director Rainer Schlösser, ordered that there should be a four-to-one ratio of German plays to foreign plays in the programme of every theatre, and censored new plays in advance. More controversially, the Theatre Chamber harassed and in some cases closed down amateur theatre companies in the economic interests of the professionals, who were still plagued by underemployment as a result of the Depression. Complaints from irate local amateur dramatic societies flooded in to the Propaganda Minister, who overruled the Chamber in March 1935.103 As in other areas, Goebbels was careful not to carry his cultural revolution to such lengths that the popular demand for entertainment was stifled by ideological correctness. Theatres across Germany continued to offer high-quality performances of the classics, and people who felt alienated from the regime could take refuge in the thought that here, at least, German culture was still alive and flourishing. A great actor such as Gustav Gründgens claimed after 1945 that his theatre, like others, had remained an island of cultural excellence amidst the surrounding barbarities under the Third Reich. However, he lived in a villa that had been ‘Aryanized’ from its former Jewish owner, and cultivated close relations with Hermann Göring and his wife. Institutions such as the Munich Chamber Theatre did not become pure instruments of Nazi propaganda, and the number of Party members on the staff remained extremely low.104 Not all theatres were able to resist the pressure to conform. While fewer than 5 per cent of the plays performed by the Munich Chamber Theatre under the Third Reich - roughly 8 per cent - could be described as openly or implicitly Nazi, the proportion at the Düsseldorf Theatre, at 29 per cent, was far higher. A study of four theatres in Berlin, Lübeck and Bochum has shown that only 8 per cent of the 309 plays they put on between 1933 and 1945 purveyed Nazi ideology in any kind of recognizable form. Yet even the least conformist theatres could not mount new, critical or radical plays, or plays banned by the regime. They had to follow the dictates of the regime in outward appearance at least, in the language and presentation of their programmes for example, or in their relationship with Party leaders in Munich. Their flight into the classics was a form of escapism to which Goebbels, who was always alive to the political advantages of allowing people to get away temporarily from the incessant demands of political mobilization and propaganda, was never likely to object.105
Goebbels tolerated mainstream theatre’s presentation of the classics, even where, as in some of Shakespeare’s plays, they dealt with themes such as tyranny and rebellion (though The Merchant of Venice told a story far more congenial to Nazi cultural arbiters). But he was not slow to clamp down in another area, namely a radical movement to create a truly Nazi form of theatre, in the self-styled Thingspiel, or ‘meeting-play’ (after the Old Norse for ‘meeting’), which flourished briefly in the early years of the Third Reich. Performing specially written political and pseudo-Nordic dramas in purpose-built open-air theatres, these ritualistic plays put into dramatic form the Nazi cult of hero-worship and celebration of the glorious dead. But they also involved audience participation, speech-choruses and other elements of the Communist-inspired workers’ theatre movement of the Weimar period. And some of their techniques had too close an affinity with the revolutionary aspects of Expressionist drama for even Goebbels to find them comfortable. Nor, despite the construction of over forty Thing theatres and the mounting of several hundred performances, were they particularly popular or financially successful. Goebbels banned the use of the word Thing in connection with the Party in October 1935 and went on to outlaw the use of speech-choruses in May the following year. This effectively killed the movement off, and it quickly went into a decline from which it never recovered. 106
Goebbels thought that dramatists, novelists and other writers should aim to capture the spirit of the new times, not its outer manifestations. 107 This left at least some room for manoeuvre. Those who were careful not to offend could meet with a considerable degree of success in such circumstances, amongst a book-buying and book-reading public that remained avid for new work. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that many of the best-selling books in Germany during the 1930s often treated themes close to the Nazi heart. Kuni Tremel-Eggert’s novel Barb, published in 1933, sold 750,000 copies within ten years; it did little more than purvey in fictionalized form the key Nazi tenets about women’s place in society. Perhaps the most successful author of the period, Paul Coelestin Ettighofer, sold 330,000 copies of Verdun, the Supreme Judgment , between 1936 and 1940. Ettighofer’s novels were self-conscious responses to Remarque’s grimly realistic view of the First World War in All Quiet on the Western Front: they glorified combat and were full of ideologically driven portrayals of heroism and self-sacrifice on the battle-front. Even more explicitly Nazi was Karl Aloys Schenzinger’s novel Hitler Youth Quex, published in 1932, which sold 244,000 copies by 1940, probably helped by the fact that the story had been filmed and shown in cinemas across Germany. Among ‘blood-an
d-soil’ novels, Theodor Kröger’s The Forgotten Village sold 325,000 copies between 1934 and 1939, and Gottfried Rothacker’s The Village on the Border 200,000 from 1936 to 1940. Some extremely popular books, like Hans Zöberlein’s Conscience’s Command, which sold 480,000 copies from 1936, the year of its publication, to 1943, purveyed a spirit of antisemitism that was hardly less virulent than that of Hitler himself, with frequent references to Jewish ‘vermin’ and similar biological terms inviting readers implicitly to regard extermination as the only way to deal with the Jews. With other previously popular authors often banned, such literature had less competition than it would otherwise have done.108 Moreover, as in the case of newspapers and periodicals, overtly political novels and histories also benefited from mass orders by Nazi Party organizations. Given the massive propaganda effort that went into boosting sales of such works, it would have been surprising if they had not sold well. What the Nazis wanted from books was demonstrated in propaganda events such as the German Book Week, held annually from 1934 onwards. ‘Sixty million people will be roused at the end of October by the drumbeat of book promotion,’ declared one of the leading organizers of the 1935 event. These ‘days of mobilization’ would ‘implement inner military preparedness from the spiritual angle in the cause of building up our people’.109 Speaking beneath a huge banner advertising ‘The Book: A Sword of the Spirit’, the Vice-President of the Reich Chamber of Literature declared on one such occasion: ‘Books are weapons. Weapons belong in the hands of fighters. To be a fighter for Germany means to be a National Socialist.’110
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