The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  The goal of an emergent German nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century was above all the creation of a linguistically and culturally homogenous Germany. The nationalist sentiments culminated in 1848, when a wave of revolutionary fervor swept across Europe. In Germany there was an uprising of liberals, intellectuals, students, and workers against the old, autocratic, and repressive elites in the German ministates, but it was put down by the conservative principalities.

  It was during the aftermath of this revolution and the political gloom following in its wake that Ernst Rietschel’s statue of Goethe and Schiller was erected before the National Theater in Weimar.

  “After the wars of liberation in German lands had brought neither political freedom nor national unity, the citizenry began to seek in cultural pursuits a substitute for what they still lacked. For example, they erected monuments to intellectual giants, usually at the most conspicuous location in the city, an honor that until then had been reserved for princes and military men,” writes the German art historian Paul Zanker.7

  Until the mid-1800s it had been unusual to raise costly monuments to artists, but after the revolution, statues of Goethe and Schiller would adorn every other town, as an expression of a literary, nationalistic movement. According to Zanker, these statues of authors and poets were regarded as representatives of ideal Germans, moral paragons depicted in contemporary dress—not naked, untouchable Greek divinities, but citizens. A cult was created around these monuments, inspiring the publication of newspapers, illustrated books, and plush volumes of the authors’ collected works. It was during this period of activity, writes Zanker, that the Germans began to regard themselves as “a people of poets and thinkers.” Yet, Zanker continues, these monuments were not supposed to inveigle the people to new revolutions and protests—rather the opposite. The bourgeoisie raised these statues to promote citizenly virtues: order, obedience, and loyalty to one’s superiors. That the great Weimar writers had been in service at the Weimar court was considered an ideal worthy of emulation.

  Goethe, the national poet, who came to personify these ideals, was destined to be transformed in the late 1800s into the moral role model of the new German nation. Everything that did not conform to this image of Goethe was hidden at the bottom of the archive and even destroyed. Letters of admiration, sent by Goethe to Napoleon, were burned. Goethe had openly spoken in favor of both cosmopolitanism and internationalism, yet his ideas were reinterpreted after his death as strictly nationalist—not least after the German dukedom was formed in 1871. The same distortions also afflicted philosophers such as Hegel, Fichte, and Herder, whose ideas were misapplied, overemphasized, or even falsified in order to confer legitimacy on nationalism.

  Goethe’s criticism of the political sphere was later used by right-wing nationalists as a cudgel against the formation of political parties and democracy.8 Meanwhile, the Left regarded Goethe as a proponent of liberalism and parliamentarianism. The battle for Goethe’s soul was set to continue into the next century. The strong inner tensions between the light and the dark side of Weimar, and the place and stage for this conflagration was a symbolic one: the National Theater behind Rietschel’s statue of Goethe and Schiller.

  • • •

  On February 6, 1919, a congress opened at the National Theater in Weimar. More than four hundred delegates from some ten political parties took their seats before the stage that had once belonged to Goethe and Schiller. They had gathered there to save Germany. The dukedom, hardly fifty years old, which until quite recently had appeared strong and even invincible, was in dissolution. The German nation, forged by Bismarck with “blood and iron,” was imploding like a house of cards. In order to save Germany, they had gone back to their roots and convened in Weimar.

  Almost one year earlier, on March 21, the German army had instigated the Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle), a massive attack along extensive stretches of the western front, in an attempt to break the stalemate. In fact, the show of strength was a desperate last-ditch attempt to win the war. When the Allies counterattacked in the summer, the German lines teetered on the verge of complete collapse. In late October 1918, naval personnel in Kiel mutinied, and within a matter of days the November Revolution had spread across the whole of Germany. The war was over. But the uprising went on, with terrible political chaos as rival groups clashed and millions of disillusioned German troops returned from the front. German Communists formed Soviets, based on the Russian precedent, and they even managed to seize power in Bavaria in the spring of 1919. But the German Social Democrats put up resistance, as did the Freikorps (free corps), paramilitary groups formed by decommissioned soldiers and officers, who brought back with them a brutal, inhuman culture of violence nurtured in the trenches.

  The shadow of these events hung over the delegates as they gathered in February 1919 in Weimar, on the initiative of the German Social Democrats whose ambition was to form a parliamentary democracy. After the abdication of the kaiser, the party led by Friedrich Ebert had formed a provisional government. Ebert, a moderate and pragmatic politician, had had no choice but to form an alliance with nationalists and reactionary groups of free corps, in order to isolate the radical left. It had been Ebert’s idea to relocate the constitutional representatives to provincial Weimar, where a new constitution would be drawn up for the establishment of what would later become known as the Weimar Republic.

  The choice of Weimar was both an act of symbolism and realpolitik. The risk of a coup against Ebert’s government was profoundly likely in Berlin, where the so-called January Uprising had broken out. The free corps had put down the remaining resistance in both Berlin and Munich with astonishing brutality: hundreds of people were murdered in summary executions, with the Communists unable to resist the battle-hardened frontline troops. And so, although the dawning German democracy was cast in blood, Friedrich Ebert had the intention of washing it clean with the help of Goethe. Ebert’s choice of Weimar as the birthplace of German democracy was thus an attempt to gain legitimacy for the new democracy by associating it with the elevated ideals of Weimar classicism.

  But the choice of Weimar as a capital was not only classical nostalgia but also the mark of a new brand of culture, which would eventually define the new republic. The modern movement, most articulately portrayed in German expressionism, would permeate and revitalize literature, art, music, theater, architecture, and design in the Weimar Republic. In all areas, a new generation broke away from the ossified conventions of the past. Yet Weimar culture became a point of focus for an incandescent struggle between German’s two irreconcilable aspects—modernism, cosmopolitanism, and democracy on the one hand, and the beauty cult, violence, and fascism on the other. In literature, a new kind of experimental prose emerged, in which empty, bourgeois ideals, patriarchal family structures, and repressed feeling became standard themes. The new movement could release its pent-up energy without restraint, finding essential oxygen for its growth in the existential vacuum left behind by the war. “This is more than just a war that has been lost. A world has ended. We have to find a radical solution to our problems,” wrote the German architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school.9,10

  Yet, even though the old world seemed to be down for the count, it was never defeated. The modern movement had immediately divided Weimar and Germany into two entities. Modernism was met with animosity from the old Wilhelmian elite: the aristocracy, the reactionary bourgeoisie, and the universities, which regarded themselves as the guardians of tradition. The new movement was seen as depraved and immoral—and there were some that felt physically sick at what they saw, heard, and read.

  The reactionary backlash began to mobilize. Resistance to the Weimar Republic, its democratic ideals, culture, and modernism, was destined to be of a violent nature, from conservatives, nationalists, and right-wing extremists.

  Unlike the Communists and democrats, the German Right had been holding out for a true conserva
tive revolution. This was a reaction to modernism, which, in their eyes, was stampeding into the arena of life, in the process creating a soulless mass society, robbed of all magic.11 The counterwave rejected the materialism, rationalism, and capitalism of the time—which hollowed out human relations and idealism. The new world eroded the aristocratic and romantic values that were considered higher than any other: honor, beauty, and culture. As a movement it had already started growing before the war. Many had put their faith in a conservative rebirth as a consequence of the Great War. Only the war could alter the course of the ongoing collapse, submitting the nation to a necessary purification rite, and forcing the people to raise themselves above materialism to a higher spiritual level. To these conservative revolutionaries the First World War was not about territory, natural resources, or trade hegemony, it was actually a spiritual war in which French civilization was pitted against German culture. In other words, a war between French Enlightenment and German romanticism.

  One of those who took this view, and who spoke in favor of a conservative revolution, was Thomas Mann, who long remained skeptical and even hostile to democratic development, which, he felt, was alien to the German people. Mann romanticized the war and felt that the violent life in the trenches brought out the best in the human beings who were there. According to Mann, the war would finally induce “the masses” to sacrifice themselves for a higher purpose and, in so doing, turn themselves into a “people”: “The War is the effective cure for the rationalistic destruction of our national culture,” continued Mann, who was dreaming of an authoritarian nationalistic state in which power and culture were integrated—a “Third Reich,” as he prophetically decided to call it. Such ideas do not pass away with the war or its horrors and the unimaginable losses suffered by Germany—far from it, the resistance was rather dependent on such ideals to mobilize its rejection, and during the democratic “decadence” of the Weimar Republic, these were the very concepts that formed the world picture of the extreme right. Conservative intellectuals like Thomas Mann had a slightly different point of departure, but their fiery nationalism, their concern for feudal ideas and the romanticism of war as a higher spiritual struggle nonetheless contributed to legitimizing National Socialism and its even more radical view of reality.

  Literary resistance to modernism took form in a genre of its own, known as free corps literature. Free corps groups, which had been formed by returning soldiers, were destined to go on throughout the 1920s and fill the spiritual vacuum created as a result of the German army being limited by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 men. The free corps were out of sync with the new order of the Weimar Republic, in which the old military virtues of honor, obedience, and brotherhood were ridiculed and spat upon. Their sacrifices at the front now seemed largely meaningless. It was in free corps groups that the so-called Legend of the Dagger Thrust (Dolchstosslegende) was cultivated, this being the view that Germany had not been defeated on the western front but rather on the home front—where Social Democrats, Socialists, and Jews had stabbed the nation in the back. Widely established in German society, the theory eventually became the main political question asked by the newly formed Nazi Party.

  Free corps literature, emerging in the 1920s, was a genre of books often sold in kiosks or similar pulp outlets, in which war, violence, and manliness were idealized. It achieved broad success in the interwar years, and certain books even reached a larger, mass audience. The books vented the feelings of bitterness, disgust, and hatred experienced by many Germans after the war, but also a longing for something deeper—a world that had been lost.

  The archetypal action in these stories centers on a young man of bourgeois background and his journey of self-development. Confused by the shallow materialism and spiritual poverty of contemporary life in the cities on “the home front,” the young man seeks a deeper meaning. It is in the presence of death, at the front, that he “wakes up” and reaches an insight into the actual meaning of life, this being that he must accept his fate and sacrifice himself for his fatherland, his friends, and his blood. The lessons learned at the front form an existential, almost religious, experience. This is also the source of the Dagger Thrust: the uninformed masses in the city drive the dagger into the backs of the honorable soldiers, whose return from the front becomes an experience filled with humiliation and disgust. Here, the veterans meet all the revolting aspects of the emerging modern movement: democratization, the advance of workers, experimental culture, sexual liberation, and women’s emancipation. The combat ideal of free corps literature—the repressed sexuality, the romanticization of violent acts, and the feelings of revulsion at the modern world—were in most cases closely allied to, and incorporated into, the Nazi ideology of violence.

  But there were also those who presented another perspective. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque examined the ideals of frontline combat and laid bare the emptiness and dishonesty of “honorable” sacrifices. He also depicted the close friendships that were created by the constant proximity of death, but there was no heroism, and the friends were seen meeting a coincidental and meaningless fate. Remarque, who was also a veteran, delivered a blow to the very heart of combat-inspired romanticism. For this reason, when it was published in 1928, the book gave rise to vehement response from reactionaries and the far right—and was therefore one of the first to fall victim to the book burnings in 1933.

  Between the wars, there was also an emergent genre of more explicitly racist, anti-Semitic novels, some of which reached mass audiences. Literature became a mass medium for spreading and establishing the Fascist concept of the world. The Germans were a book-reading people, and they kept not only Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks on the bedside table, but also novels that are no longer widely known, such as Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum and Karl Aloys Schenzinger’s Der Hitlerjunge Quex.

  Until the assumption of power by the Nazis, contemporary modernist and expressionist ideas coexisted with the free corps writings that glamorized violence, as well as anti-Semitic and racist novels. The bound-up tension between violence and progressive ideas was constantly present in the literature and cultural life of the Weimar Republic. On the one hand there were left-leaning, liberal writers and poets such as Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, and Bertolt Brecht, and, on the other, right-wing extremists and nationalistic writers such as Emil Strauss, Hans Carossa, and Hanns Johst.12 Yet there were also writers that ended up somewhere in the middle.

  The most difficult position was that occupied by bourgeois, conservative intellectuals like Thomas Mann, who were worried by democratic developments while also revolted by vulgarities of the Nazis. In 1922, after the brutal murder of the German foreign minister Walter Rathenau, Mann saw no other option but to redefine his stance, which he did in a much-publicized speech in Berlin: Von deutscher Republik (The German Republic). In his lecture he publicly rejected the imperial ambitions of Wilhelmian Germany and spoke instead in favor of the Weimar Republic. Mann proclaimed that he had now come to see that democracy was, in fact, more “German” than he had previously thought. It was a conversion driven by his feelings of guilt at having in some way played a part in promoting the political violence.13 But there was probably also a measure of fear of the “demon,” which the violence, the war, and the military defeat had conjured, and which now took its first tottering steps as a radical, Fascist party in Munich.

  Old, hierarchical Germany with its militaristic, imperial, and nationalistic ideals had been reincarnated as a new political movement radicalized by the war and nurtured by the Legend of the Dagger Thrust. In turn, the free corps had found a new conduit for displays of violence on behalf of the growing National Socialist Party.

  The movement was destined to make its first gains on the very stage of the birth of the Weimar Republic. The Nazi Party re-formed in 1925, having been outlawed after its failed Beer Hall Putsch a few years earlier. Only four years later the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arb
eiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP) had its first major election gain in Germany, when the party was included in the coalition that took charge of Thüringen. The Nazis, led by the state minister for internal affairs and education, Wilhelm Frick, instigated a fierce attack on Weimar’s cultural life by the introduction of an extreme, institutionally racist cultural program developed by Alfred Rosenberg and his circle. His organization, Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture), was set up in 1928 and sought to amalgamate the country’s abundant radical right-wing cultural organizations to clear out Jewish and other “alien” influences from German culture. In a matter of a few years, Weimar changed from a free zone for modernist experimentation to a cult site for Nazism. Thüringen became the test map and a model state for the radical race politics that were soon to be rolled out across Germany as a whole.14

  The film dramatization of All Quiet on the Western Front was prohibited in the state, and the Castle Museum in Weimar was cleared of works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee. Composers such as Stravinsky were blacklisted, as was “black” music, including jazz.