5. Toward a Total Culture

Editor's Introduction

IN THE THIRD REICH the central task of culture was the dissemination of the Nazi world view. What was the place of the intellect in this culture? The National Socialist world view was based upon the rejection of rationalism, and any emphasis upon man's reason was thought to be "divisive," destructive of the unity of the emotionally centered ideology which the whole Volk could understand. Man's "creativity" was put into the foreground of his striving, which was defined through art and literature as well as politics. The very totality of the world view embraced all of these as one interrelated cultural whole.

Those who are involved in cultural creativity must always turn the energies of the German people toward their German mode of being -- as Hermann Burte puts it in his speech to the assembled poets of the Greater German Reich in 1940. The emotional basis of this commitment is made quite clear: Hitler is the poet turned statesman -- a poet because he has a vision of the inmost German being, a statesman because from out of that vision he has created a new people. The differences between poetry and statesmanship vanish in such an analysis. All of fascism has this element in common; the Belgian fascist leader Leon Degrelle called Hitler and Mussolini "poets of revolution."

Hermann Burte had made his mark early in the century with a novel which portrayed a hero in search of his Volk (Wiltfeber, der ewige Deutsche, 1912). He became a supporter of the Fuhrer and felt that the new leader was superior even to the great Goethe because of his grasp of the organic nature of the German people. The inte11ectuals belong to the people, he said, and by this he asserted the primacy of the primordial German image, of German being, over human reason. The Wilna newspaper describes the intellectual as one who believes that everything can be arrived at through reason. Labor Service, performed on the soil, is a good corrective to such an attitude. The very word "intellectual" is twisted into an anti-intellectual meaning: Julius Streicher is offended because those who have fled the Reich do not regard his racist vituperations as part of the "intellectual" struggle between themselves and the Nazi dictatorship. In a nation which bestowed great prestige on academics, it was impossible for many to admit to the anti-intellectualism that was one of the hallmarks of the Nazi ideology.

Even the Heidelberg students no longer wanted to educate the mind but merely to build character -- that is, the right ideological attitude and way of life. It is, perhaps, significant that three years later a military newspaper protests against such opinions. A balance between character and mind must be maintained -- but now it is wartime and the army needs good minds and cannot win battles equipped only with the proper world view.

The anti-intellectualism rests upon an organic view of the German people. The Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture, R. Walther Darre (1895-1953), i11ustrates this well in his speech on the anniversary of a Medieval peasant uprising. The German peasant is symbolic of the Volk, he is the driving force and purifier of all German history. Here is the substance of Germanism, evolving independently of political boundaries, princes, or bishops. German racial stock, German uniqueness, indeed German history -- all of these are in his custody. This might be considered a piece of special pleading by the Reich Peasant Leader, if the same theme did not run throughout Nazi culture: we will meet it often in this chapter and have met it earlier. The peasant was the culture hero of the movement, though other, more recent party heroes existed side by side with him.

The relationship of organization to the Nazi concept of artistic freedom is defined by Joseph Goebbels, whose business it was to enforce this definition. Goebbels' speech of 1937 was addressed to the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer). This organization was founded by a law of September 22, 1933, and was given the ambitious task of encouraging "all forms of artistic creation or activity which are made public." The Reich Chamber became an instrument of cultural control closely linked to the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Goebbels himself assumed its presidency.

The Reich Chamber of Culture was divided into seven subordinate Chambers, concerned with literature, music, films, radio, the theater, fine arts, and the press. Each of these had its own president and administrative apparatus, always linked to the relevant department in Goebbels' ministry. This corporate structure was supposed to give the appearance of self-government by the artistic professions, but in reality the Chambers were an integral part of the complex apparatus of cultural control, directed from a single source. Membership in a Chamber was compulsory for the exercise of any artistic profession; denial of membership meant, therefore, the effective silencing of any undesired creative voice in the nation.

The Reich Chamber of Literature (Reichsschriftstumskammer) is of special importance for our purposes: it included not only all German writers but publishers and libraries as well. Its first president (1934-1935) was a writer who specialized in Old Germanic stories and legends, Hans Friedrich Blunck (1888-1961). His subject matter was close to that of Josefa Berens-Totenohl, who is represented in this chapter. But he proved too old-fashioned and was replaced by the playwright Hanns Johst (see page 116). The secretary of the Chamber was Wilhelm Ihde, who wrote history with a Nazi slant (see page 119).

Typically enough, this elaborate structure was never without its challengers from within the party itself. Alfred Rosenberg and his office, established to "supervise the entire spiritual and ideological education of the NSDAP," maintained a separate department devoted to supervising German letters. Moreover, Philip Bouhler, on the basis of his "party commission for the protection of NS literature," published lists of approved books on his own. There was bound to be friction between all these agencies, but it was Goebbels' ministry which censored all published books, while the Reich Chamber of Culture printed lists of forbidden books and silenced those authors and artists who refused to conform.

Goebbels' speech laid down the principles which were to govern cultural activity. In putting these into practice, publishing was obviously an important cog within the cultural machinery. The German tradition of publishing was highly personal, and publishing houses were known by their specific orientation. Adolf Spemann, the proprietor of the medium-sized Engelhorn publishing house, had in the past published books by Jewish authors as well as translations of Romain Rolland. Spemann was one of those men who, though politically indifferent up to 1933, were captured by the elan of the Third Reich. However, he never became a party member and his only public activity was to direct, for a few years, the "belles-lettres and popular science" section of the professional association of the German book trade. [1] This was a subsection of the Reich Chamber of Literature.

Spemann, however, was a popular speaker, and at a meeting called by Rosenberg's office he defined the new position of the publisher in the Third Reich. This speech also found approval in the eyes of Bouhler, whose list of approved books could only "joyfully underline Spemann's words." [2] Spemann does give reasons why publishing should share responsibility for the National Socialist cultural drive. He writes about ideals which were to become reality. A recent study has shown that by 1937 some 50 to 75 per cent of all book sales were accounted for by approved National Socialist literature. Peasant novels, historical novels, and novels set in the native landscape were the biggest sellers. From 1939 onward their place was taken by novels glorifying the early struggles of the Nazi party, war literature, and books by German writers living on foreign soil, such as Heinrich Zillich (see page 165). [3]

These were, of course, the kind of books publishers put out, but they were bought by the public. Such cultural control meant opposition to all meaningful criticism of literature and art. Goebbels says as much in his speech and he had already carried it through. For on November 27, 1936, he had forbidden the "continuance of art criticism in its past form." The place of the art critic must be taken by the "reporter of art." The public must be the judge. This was indeed safe, for Nazi artistic criteria did correspond to a low common denominator of popular taste. Goebbels sums up this point of view (and gives himself away) when he stresses the unchanging taste of the masses as the only stable element in the process of artistic evolution.

For Hitler the visual arts were the most important and effective part of culture. Kurt Karl Eberlein, art historian and literary critic, summarizes the official line. He expounds at greater length the point which Goebbels makes both in his speech and in his order forbidding art criticism. The rural family (and the peasant is the primordial image of the Volk) does not "judge" art, but accepts it and lives it -- if this art is of the right Germanic kind. Clarity and simplicity are important here, as well as the idealization of familiar and traditional themes.

But if these factors were important, the ties to the history and tradition of the race were equally vital. Heinrich Zillich (b. 1898) was a writer of novels which were set among the Germans in Rumania. Ever since the twelfth century a large German peasant settlement had existed in the Rumanian Carpathians. Zillich's ancestors had for generations lived in that mountainous territory. Small wonder that he advocates the bursting of narrow political and territorial confines. The people and its mission must stand at the center of the poet's work, and history must inform his consciousness. Zillich echoes the point made by Dam~ in his speech: not dynasties determine history, but the evolution and ambitions of the people themselves. The poet becomes a historian in the service of the race.

Zillich spoke as a German separated from his homeland, but his ideas were "official." He expressed them in one of the principal speeches at the meeting of Greater German poets at Weimar in 1938. The Nazis furthered these gatherings at the historical shrine of German culture; Burte made his speech at another such meeting in 1940. Nazi culture and the culture of the age of Goethe and Schiller could in this way appear to clasp hands across the centuries.

What results did these definitions of culture produce? We must confine ourselves to a very few examples. Josefa Berens-Totenohl (b. 1891) wrote in an older tradition of the romantic peasant novel. She was one of the most popular and widely read authors during the period of the Third Reich. She produced the kind of escapist literature which could be tolerated, for it praised peasant virtues, strength, and rootedness. Purely sentimental novels like the immensely popular stories of Hedwig Courths-Mahler (1867-1952) were not considered desirable reading. Her more than 200 novels (27 million copies sold up to 1950) were love stories written for the lower classes and without any ideological overtones. The ideology, however, was present in the writing of Berens-Totenohl, if in muted form (she was never a party member and never played any part in the organizations for culture control, though she did receive the literature prize of Westphalia in 1936).

Der Femhof (1935) was her first book and it brought her immediate fame. It had sold 226,000 copies by 1944. It may be regarded as typical of the peasant novel, which idealized its subject and painted the mythology of peasant life, far from the crossroads of the world.

Tudel Weller's work is included with some regret, but its bad taste and the blatant glorification of brutality directed against the Jewish stereotype do belong to the totality of Nazi culture. Even this book, Rabaukenl (1938), ran through seven editions by 1943. It is only one example of a whole literary genre. But even the Nazis seemed dissatisfied with such products, and by 1941 there was some official agitation to further the writing of a "good racial and blood novel." [4]

The theater had been one of the glories of the German Republic, and the Nazis attempted to use it as a forum for their own cultural ideas. Eckart von Naso, then a young script editor, describes the effect of the Nazi seizure of power upon the Prussian State Theater in Berlin. Though a powerful director with Goring's support could keep up, for a time, a semblance of standards, in the provinces the decline was rapid and inevitable.

The playbills of the city of Herne in the Ruhr Valley (see also page 375) are informative. Johst is represented and so are classical German writers like Schiller and Goethe. But the vast majority of the repertory is filled with light opera -- some by good composers like Franz Lebar and Johann Strauss -- but mostly with works by second-rate tunesmiths who are rightly forgotten. There was an attempt to further a Volk theater. Konrad Dreher had founded the Tegernsee Peasant Theater in 1892 in order to revive an art form which had its roots in the Jesuit drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as in the passion plays. But by the time the troupe appeared in Herne it had long been stocked by professional actors and it performed modern plays with peasant themes and in peasant dialect (two such plays appear here, one by Dreher himself and the other by August Hinrichs). Foreigners are sparsely represented, and then through light entertainment. Calderon's comedy falls into that category, and so does Rossini's opera and even Shakespeare's As You Like It. The only exception is the realistic war play by the Englishman R. C. Sheriff; Journey's End portrays the brutal life in the trenches. The Third Reich used the stage for light entertainment (the practical result of Goebbels' assertion that "the people seek joy") or for patriotic propaganda. Gerhard Menzel's Scharnhorst would be in the latter classification, and so would the Kleist and Grabbe cycles in nearby Bochum. Either the public was to be amused in a harmless way or it was to be uplifted.

Goebbels was obsessed with the power of the radio, and indeed the Nazis made wide and thorough use of this medium of communication. They inherited a system of centralized control, for ever since 1928 the Post Office dominated the National Broadcasting Company (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft) and influenced the provincial broadcasting companies as well. After the seizure of power the Propaganda Ministry acquired all the shares of the National Broadcasting Company and through the Reich Broadcasting Chamber (Reichsrundfunkkammer) controlled not only the broadcasters themselves but also the manufacturers of sets. The National Broadcasting Company lost its importance and became merely the executive organ for day-to-day operations. Through pressure upon manufacturers cheap radio sets were produced, so that every German could afford to own one. These were made in such a way that no foreign broadcasts could be received. From 1933 to 1934 the number of German homes owning a radio set increased by over a million, and by 1936 some 30 million people could be reached over the radio. This figure does not include those subjected to radio through public loudspeakers on the streets or in such places as restaurants and factories.

This was a powerful weapon in Goebbels' hands. The radio program for the winter of 1936 gives an idea of how it was used. The speech by the director of the National Broadcasting Company lays down the principles under which all broadcasting operated. There was to be no criticism of the Nazi movement or ideology; "humorous sketches" were explicitly forbidden.

The Reich Film Chamber (Reichsfilmkammer) controlled the lively German film industry, while a Film Credit Bank (also under Goebbels' control) centralized the financial aspects of film production. The largest remaining independent German film company, the UFA, was bought out by the Propaganda Ministry in 1937. Through the Film Chamber it had been brought under control long before then. The titles of the films officially submitted to the biannual international film festival in Venice show the kind of motion pictures the Nazis thought especially valuable as their international "visiting card." German film stars were encouraged to represent the Germanic ideal of genuine womanhood (see page 39) in contrast to the painted and perfumed "degeneracy" of Hollywood. As a matter of fact, Paula Wessely was an outstanding actress who had come to the film from Vienna's famous Burgtheater. But this fact was less important than her conformity to those emotional ideals which a valuable film should portray.

The people are praised for recognizing the worth of such genuineness, just as they were relied upon to have an intuitively proper attitude toward art. Nazi culture sought a popular base and often found it. At any rate, the sales figures of Nazi-sponsored literature and art seem to lead to this conclusion. There is no reason why the millions for whom the Nazi world view made "life worth living again" should not also be attracted by the products of Nazi culture. Moreover, as has been mentioned earlier, the Nazis did cater to popular taste and preconceptions. But no risk was taken: a thorough apparatus of cultural control accompanied such popularity as Nazi culture may have achieved on its own. In any case, no alternatives were available. Modern dictatorships have sought to spread their total culture widely throughout the population, however this has led not to the elevation of popular taste but to the confirmation of its prejudices.

G.L.M.

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Notes:

1. Adolf Spemann, Menschen und Werke: Erinnerungen eines Verlegers (Munich, 1959), pp. 250 ff.

2. Nationalsozialistische Bibliographie, Heft II (November 1938), p. xviii.

3. Dietrich Strothmann, Nationalsozialistische Literaturpolitik (Bonn, 1960). pp. 384-385.

4. Ibid., p. 406.

Intellectuals Must Belong to the People, by HERMANN BURTE

Contemporary German poetry need not lower its eyes before the outstanding figures of the past. "No art is created during war and revolution," says Balzac. But in her poets struggling Germany seems to belie this assertion: like larks amid a shower of bullets, her poets sing also in war. In the greatest yearning and passion to find and to grasp its own essence, to give it form, speech and value, spirit and taste, in the face of the difficult task of harmonizing a Volkish experience without parallel, of endowing an extraordinary event with an understandable meaning, of changing the shriek of suffering into the song of joy, and finally of existing and enduring as a people through the spirit -- German poetry of the present can boldly take its place alongside every other in the world! Before all things it seeks the heart of its own people, it wants to be one with the feeling of all, and the  calling that is most uniquely its own is to create a special breed.

It must turn all the vital energies of the German people toward the discovery, solidification, and perpetuation of the German mode of being. For how would it help German poetry to win the world but to lose the soul?

The German poet is better than his reputation. We shall mention no names. He whom today the shadows of silence envelope, tomorrow can find light and sound. The wonderful poem of Hebbel, [1] that thinker among the poets, is applicable here: "You have sowed pearls, suddenly it begins to snow, And one sees them no more; Hope for the sun, it comes!"

Like Schiller in his time, present-day German poetry emerges hopefully before the people and the world and awaits its judgment. It respects this judgment, but it does not fear it.

The Germans are scolded and rebuked for being original, and they are, for they knowingly and willingly recognize the excellence of others and seek to understand their essence.

Shakespeare belongs as much to us as he does to the English; indeed, we know him and perform his plays better than they do. And we boldly assert that as Germans of 1940 we in truth are closer to the spirit of the Elizabethan English and their genius William than the Englishmen of today, behind whose throne lurks and rules that Shylock whom Shakespeare recognized and rejected.

Because Goethe's nature was complete, fully sure of itself, he could unhesitatingly absorb all alien things, create the concept of world literature, and entertain the belief that though the great literatures of the world spring from different roots, their branches rise into the lofty atmosphere which belongs to all, into the realm of space up to the very stars!

At this level the poet has indeed achieved fame. As soon as the magic word "fame" is uttered, it is time to look not only at things but through them!

A man whose fame is spread by foreigners, whom one plays off against his people and fatherland, or whom one esteems because he has denied his people and his fatherland and betrayed them in spirit, is a pathetic ghost, a Herostratus, a deception, not a man with a mission!

The fame of a poet must reflect as much on his people, country, and Reich as on himself. Otherwise he must reject it like a poisoned shirt! A German of our militant age achieves the most honorable fame when he steps forward as an accuser before the world, and lashes it for an outrage, an injustice, a fundamental criminal attitude, when he hurls a lightning-like, flaming thought into the stifling expanse around him, and when through the strength of his reasoning, the tone of truth, the force of the accusation, he compels the adversary to respond, against his will and in the agony of confessing his guilt....

The dying Chamberlain [2] had this feeling: a novum has come into the world, and new too in the way in which it came. A book was written, not poetry in a low common sense, and yet a poem, a view of a new people in a new state! The man who wrote it is called Adolf Hitler! At last the stirring, noble Holderlin, who wandered through his Germany with the question "Will the books soon come to life?" has received an answer, an unhoped-for answer: Yes, the books live, and not only the books -- living men emerge and charge them with life! Here is the primordial and model image of the future German being! The spirit journeys forth before the deed as the morning wind goes before the sun! Before he embarks upon his work, the great statesman of the Germans is a kind of poet and thinker, his mind clarifies for itself how things ought to be in the world of things! A prose comes into being with a surging quality uniquely its own, a march-like step, with tensions and projections of that attitude which Nietzsche had in mind when he said: "I love him who hurls forth the great word of his deed, since he wills his fall!" But since the spirit of Hitler lives in Germany, one no longer seeks the tragic, ultimately sweet decline and fall, but the tough, day-bright, enduring upward thrust and drive. Neither the individual nor all are to go under....

Everything is possible in Germany, except the tragedy of the whole! To prevent this tragedy, as the curse of curses, is precisely the meaning of Being and hence of the meaning of poetry. Poetry and this direction of life are as one! The European mission of German poetry is one with the European mission of the German Reich. The Reich of the poets lies in the German world, and its shrine is in Weimar!

A new man has emerged from the depth of the people. He has forged new theses and set forth new Tables and he has created a new people, and raised it up from the same depths out of which the great poems rise -- from the mothers, from blood and soil.

In its deepest essence, in the core and star of its being, the European mission of German poetry is one and the same with the European mission of the German people and its Fuhrer. It should be of little concern to us whether this new type and newly won form, created on the Faustian path to the birth- giving energies of the people, from the sources of Our blood, to the ruthless homecoming to ourselves, at first appears pleasing or not to others. For just as we saw that the new conception and configuration of the Volk and the state was at first not understood in the world and, at a decisive moment in the war, proved itself to be superior and overwhelming, so we believe and feel too that the psychic and spiritual configuration of poetry also brings forth an equally surprising, and unbelieved, but true and truthful, altogether alive work, since it creates out of the same Sources as do the state-creating and military values.

In Truth and Poetry Goethe says that the highest life-content in German poetry came into being through Frederick the Great.

Now, dear comrades, how much more great and more powerful is the life-content and the life-power which Adolf Hitler, through his manner and his work, has brought to the German people and thereby to German poetry.

If Frederick the Great, the far-sighted monarch, the friend and pupil of the rationalist Voltaire, could fructify poetry through his deeds, all the more so can Adolf Hitler, the son of the people, risen from its powerful depths, steeled by suffering and privation, familiar with all that is human, a volunteer soldier in the world war, close to death and the eternal night, rescued and preserved, designated by the Norns as elect, and provided with an earnestness and will, an energy for action and knowledge of people, insight and broadness of perspective, great as orator, greater as man of action. Everyone can feel what an enormous content, what a racially suited form he has bequeathed to our people, and first of all to the intellectuals! For the intellectuals belong to the people or they are nothing!

If fate has bequeathed us the great Fuhrer, it will not deny us the great poet!

From the depths of our heart we thank the Fuhrer, from the fullness of our faith we hope for the future great poet!

He will stand to Adolf Hitler as Goethe stood to Frederick the Great. We know very well that the genius does not come when one calls to him, the spirits will not be ordered about! But just as the remarkable poetry of the Elizabethans arose from the victory over the Spanish Armada, so will -- we see it in our minds' eye -- a new poetry arise from our victory. Fully developed through competition among all segments of the people, everywhere educated and hardened to what is most lofty, true to the mind, devoted to the soul, the great poet will rise like the crystal from the mother-lye!

This future poet will have something which the great of Weimar in their time, in their place, could not possess: the people as a configuration! In place of a social stratum, the multiple I, the people as a whole, emerges as an element.

And we, what should we do during this time? We all serve the future Best One. He will include all that we accomplish in the sum of his accomplishment, without naming names! For he will be a kind of King of the Spirit, to whom belongs all that waves over the summits. To him who has will be given! A serene Siegfried who slays dragons, throws precious stones at ravens, and sings in competition with the birds of the woods, an eternal young German, like Goethe!

With an innate drive to perfection, he will work on himself as did Goethe, and shape and present his essence in peace on a new height. Then the Best in the other peoples will again recognize their Best One in the figure of this German and honor him like the poet of Faust.

Then the European mission of German poetry will again be fulfilled in a new time, in a new space! What must we give and send in this moment before he comes?

"We greet the Fuhrer!" Such is the beautiful, heart-felt expression of the people as they rise in order to thank their savior, to be mindful of him in love, and in order to find and to feel themselves in him!

Following this custom, dear comrades, let us greet the Poet, the unknown one, the future one, who will arise to us -- we deliberately repeat ourselves -- and who must likewise be nourished to a loftier life- content and a stronger poetical power by the mighty manner and the extraordinary work of Adolf Hitler, as Goethe was by the deeds of Frederick the Great. He will not be a Hamlet who flees from himself, because he will set aright the times that are out of joint!

He will be of use to his time as the joint in the socket. He will not, like Werther, suffer the plague of his time; he will not be a Hyperion among the all too inadequate Germans, nor a Wiltfeber in the court, [3] which went under. For through the deeds of the Fuhrer the Fatherland will be so transformed that neither the ruler nor the poet will be tragic figures! They will freely and joyfully fulfill their being, continuously fulfill themselves, and show the world their essence!

But until the poet comes who will gather us all and therefore sustain us, let us in this hour and in this place greet the Master and the great of Weimar!

From a speech delivered in 1940 at the meeting of the poets of the Greater German Reich, published in Sieben Reden von Burte (Strassburg, 1943), pp. 19-21, 27-32.

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Notes:

1. Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863), a Romantic poet and dramatist.

2. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) (see p. 256) acclaimed Hitler as the future leader as early as 1923.

3. Wiltfeber, der ewige Deutsche (1912) was Burte's most famous book.

The Birth of Intellectuals

The accomplishments of which the mind is capable lead from a true appreciation of its value to an over-estimation, and this tempts one into the delusion that everything in the world is to be arrived at exclusively through the mind.... Thus is born the human type we designate as intellectuals. Labor service is an excellent defense against the danger of intellectualism. Manual work makes demands not only on one's physical powers but also on one's character and thus brings about a transformation of one's mental attributes and assists In the full development of the mind.

From the Wilnaer Zeitung, Aug. 21, 1942. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Streicher the Intellectual

The Jews know how to falsify the authentic concept of intellectual struggle. Otherwise, for example, Gauleiter Julius Streicher's remarkable struggle could not have been dismissed as "unintellectual" in the emigre press.

From Carl Schmitt, "Streichers geistiger Kampf: Das Judentum in der Rechtswissenschaft," in the Frankische Tageszeitung, Oct. 3, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

A Balance Is Necessary

We read the following in a book review in a 1937 issue of the Heidelberg student newspaper: "Here the mind is discussed, that is, one's intellectual endowment. We merely wish to declare that today we no longer want to educate this mind; we want to educate the character." This statement betrays a serious and -- we must say it openly -- deplorable misunderstanding of the situation, especially for a student. Mind and character cannot be played off against each other. Reason, of course, by itself does not make the whole man, but neither can we get very far or accomplish anything of importance without reason.

From the Militar-Wochenblatt (the independent newspaper of the German Army), Jan. 12, 1940. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The German Peasant Formed German History, by R. WALTHER DARRE

At the beginning of today's address in remembrance of the Stedinger struggle for freedom 700 years ago, [1] we first of all wish to establish a fact which is valid for the whole German people: while German historiography is industriously engaged in presenting "German history" as the effect of the interests or conflicting interests of imperial rulers, of ecclesiastical and territorial princes, this same historiography is remarkably silent about what one might call "German peasant history." This is all the more striking because no matter how zealously the historians have portrayed matters concerning lords and princes, the German people has preserved in its subconscious the remembrance of the great peasant catastrophes of its history much more forcefully than the cares and tribulations of its ruling lords.

This is seen to be particularly obvious if one bears in mind, for example, that the slaughter of thousands of Saxon peasants by Charles the Saxon butcher [2] in Berden on the Aller more than a thousand years ago has not only been preserved in the memory of Lower Saxonians for the whole last millennium but preserved even despite the fact that a deliberate historical forgery was perpetrated for the purpose of blotting this deed from the memory of the German people. Let us take another example: Schiller's drama Wilhelm Tell, which describes the freedom struggle of the Swiss free peasants against the arrogance of the Habsburgs, contributed much more to turning the German people against its territorial princes in Wallung than any other tendentious play of that time. Incidentally, in learned circles the rumor persists stubbornly that Schiller after the publication of Wilhelm Tell received a warning from the Freemason Lodge, which was not pleased by this glorification of the free peasantry. It would be useful for us historians to investigate such a rumor objectively, on the basis of documents, in the interest of the German people, instead of wasting time and energy trying to keep the German people in a state of unclear or false knowledge concerning the cultural level of its Germanic ancestors.

In reality, however, what we call Volkdom was never brought about by German emperors, German ecclesiastical princes, and German territorial princes. Rather, the precondition for Volkdom was exclusively bound up with the existence of the German peasantry. First there was a German peasantry in Germany before what is today served up as German history could develop from it -- and unfortunately often on its back. Neither princes, nor the Church, nor the cities have created the German man as such. Rather, the German man emerged from the German peasantry. To be sure, princes, Church, and cities were able to place their stamp on a special kind of German man. Nevertheless, the German peasant down the centuries has been their raw material and thus the precondition, the foundation, and the determinant of their impact. We National Socialists, who have retrieved the old truth that the blood of the people is the formative element of its culture, see these things with a crystal-clear knowledge. In every period of history the blood of our cities was supplemented by the peasantry and thus the blood of this peasantry repeatedly determined the Germanic content of our city culture.

Traveling through the German countryside today, one still finds among our peasants customs which have survived for a thousand years. In this we have clear proof that it is here that the ground of a Volkdom is to be sought, rather than in the bloodless abstractions of the scholar's desk. And if we then go through the documentary sources, or search for the historical sources, we find to our amazement that these thousand-year-old customs among our peasantry have not developed, for instance, through the kind understanding of the ecclesiastical or territorial princes. Rather the opposite is true -- the peasantry defended their customs with bitter tenacity against these very ecclesiastical and territorial princes. In this connection it matters little precisely where one comes upon a confirmation of this assertion, whether in the old peasant territory of Lower Saxony, or in Hesse or Thuringia, or in Upper Bavaria or Franconia. Everywhere one will find primordial peasant customs that reach far back into the past. Everywhere there is evidence that the German peasantry, with an unparalleled tenacity, knew how to preserve its unique character and its customs against every attempt to wipe them out, including the attempts of the Church. And it preferred to go under rather than bend its head to the alien law imposed upon it by the lords.

Although the German-minded among our scholars have for some time now turned away from the above-mentioned methods and have begun to devote themselves to the true significance of the peasantry, some of our scholars still stubbornly assert that the contrary is correct, and they are still attempting to prove to us that the Germans, said to be nomads, were first laboriously given culture through what is called a German history -- that is to say, by the fatherly efforts of their imperial, ecclesiastical and territorial princes. Against this sort of scholar I once and for all will coolly and soberly maintain the following: Before there was a German scholarship in Germany, the German peasant was already there and had preserved his essence and his breed. Despite this thousand-year effort to alienate the German peasant from his nature, the common sense and the deep blood-feeling of the German peasant knew how to preserve his German breed, and indeed in the face of a scholarship that with scientific methods aimed to prove the very opposite. If the German peasant during a thousand years possessed enough common sense to be able to survive this form of scholarship, then may the above-mentioned scholars become clearly aware that much of this understanding is still in existence today and will surmount and survive their scribbling. What a thousand years could not destroy, the eager industriousness of certain scholars will not be able to destroy in the next few years.

On the contrary: when today we speak of German racial stocks, of German uniqueness, it is customary to maintain that the unique qualities of these racial stocks are exclusively contained within the frontiers of the territorial principalities that still exist as German regions. This has gone so far that some, for example, consider the frontiers of the South German states so important that they would have the Germany newly awakened under National Socialism believe that the borders of the South German territories are divinely ordained and that to violate them in any way would signify a desire no longer to take into account the racial uniqueness of their population.

The nonsensical character of this assertion can be seen most clearly in the case of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, and Baden, for the borders of these states are neither racial borders nor borders of any kind of principality or any kind of racial stock. Rather, the borders of these states were arbitrarily drawn by Napoleon I, who never gave a thought to racial stocks and history or traditions of any kind. These particular South German border relations prove that the individual landscapes of these states have preserved their primordial uniqueness independently of the borders that were marked out. The fact that they did this, despite the state borders, means that they did it on the basis of laws which have nothing at all to do with these state borders.

For what preserved the unique character of these individual landscapes and gave them their peculiar characteristics was the peasantry that had been preserved in them. A city like Munich, for example, did not receive its Bavarian quality from its monuments or its other peculiarities, for any other German tribe could perhaps have developed these things in its cities. Rather, what we come upon in Munich as typically Bavarian -- as was the case a hundred years ago and before -- are the Bavarian peasants, who today still live on their farms the way their forefathers lived for centuries and who still send their sons to Munich. And what I say here about the Bavarian peasant also applies to the peasantry of every other German tribe. It was on the old peasant landholdings, whose economic structure has in most cases remained unchanged for five hundred years, that German man acquired the special quality of his racial stock. Wherever the generation which occupies such old peasant landholdings clung to the customs of their fathers, there grew the individual German racial uniqueness which today still embodies and represents the variety and multifariousness of German Volk life. No German city can make the same claim. For no German city can produce evidence that the people now living within its walls are authentic blood descendants of those who centuries before gave the city its characteristic stamp. Undoubtedly, however, on our German peasant landholdings there sit, if not the direct, at least the indirect descendants of those who cultivated the soil there centuries before. Here is anchored the eternalness of a racial stock of unique character. When a few weeks ago someone in South Germany said that the Hereditary Health Law' would do more to guarantee the unique character of the racial stock than any kind of regional particularism could ever have done, he was absolutely correct. One can say that the blood of a people digs its roots deep into the homeland earth through its peasant landholdings, from which it continuously receives that life-endowing strength which constitutes its special character.

From Rede des Reichsbauernfuhrers und Reichsministers R. Walther Darre (on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the Stedinger struggle for freedom, Altenesch, May 27, 1934), pp. 3, 5-7.

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Notes:

1. Conrad of Marburg, with the support of the Dominican order, accused the Stedinger peasantry of heresy in 1234. In reality he wanted to take away their rights and bring them under his princely control. His "crusade" was successful.

2. Namely, Charlemagne.

3. See page 90.

Freedom and Organization, by JOSEPH GOEBBELS

My Fuhrer! Your excellencies!

My racial comrades!

Organization plays a decisive role in the lives of peoples. It has the task of forming human groups into units so that they may be brought purposefully and successfully to a starting point. Thus organization is a means to an end and is related to the aim to be striven for, a necessary evil so to speak. Just as organization, when correctly established and formed, can shorten and simplify the way to success (indeed, sometimes it is the only way to success), it is capable, on the other hand, of restricting and holding up natural developments, especially when it forgets its real task and becomes an end in itself.

This possibility, however, which is more or less innate in any organization, must not mislead us into denying the necessity and purposefulness of organization as such. Leadership requires it for the guidance of men and in order to prepare the way for developments in the various vital spheres of politics, economy, and social functions as well as culture. Here organization is most difficult to carry through and thus it is also exposed to the most dangers.

For every organization must demand that its members surrender certain individual private rights for the benefit of a greater and more comprehensive law of life, and thereby a goal-directed point of departure for energies which if isolated are powerless, but which if united have a striking, penetrating effect.

Therefore one should scrupulously see to it that every organization does not lose its specific aim and that the renunciation of individual rights is always promoted only to the extent necessary for its success. One should, therefore, to express it briefly, organize only what must be organized, not everything that can be organized.

Only in this way will a great and complete effect be achieved by the total engagement of all energies. Obviously, it is in the nature of the matter that in the operation of this total engagement of all energies one is often and easily inclined to overestimate the renunciation of private and individual rights as against the purpose and aim that is to be achieved through the total engagement of energies.

In addition, a host of old habits and prejudices, to which many people had become fondly attached, had to be overcome through the organization of the German creative artists in their Reich Culture Chamber and in their individual Chambers. [1] Despite this, these old habits and prejudices still playa certain role in the ideas of some people who have not found the correct door to the new times and its demands. These critics of course eagerly claim, almost as a matter of course, and without any special expression of thanks, the advantages and success brought about in the main through this organization. On the other hand, they do not want to acknowledge that one conditions the other and that the advantages and success of the whole could be brought into being only by the renunciation of individual demands as against the demands of the time.

Hence it has been our constant effort to carry out the inner regeneration of the German art world not so much through a profusion of laws as through a continuous program of self-help. That which in the first months of 1933 was still considered impossible has become a fact, and it now operates in such a way that it is almost taken for granted. Meanwhile the difficulties of solving the countless individual problems which at that time had fallen due, so to speak, have long been forgotten. The reality is there, and it continuously creates new facts....

Our enemy's cry that it is impossible to expel the Jew from German cultural life, that he cannot be replaced, still rings in our ears. We have done precisely this and things are proceeding better than ever! The demand of National Socialism has been thoroughly carried out in this field and the world has visible proof that the cultural life of a people can also -- and indeed meaningfully and purposefully -- be administered, led, and represented by its own sons.

How deeply the perverse Jewish spirit had penetrated German cultural life is shown in the frightening and horrifying forms of the "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" in Munich, arranged as an admonitory example. We have been frequently attacked in the so-called world press on account of this exhibit. But up to now no foreign enthusiast has been found who, in reparation for this cultural barbarism, is prepared to buy the "art treasures" on exhibit in Munich and thereby save them for eternity. They do not like them, but they defend them. And they defend them not on cultural but exclusively on political grounds. It requires barely a contemptuous wave of the hand to dispose of their arguments. It is maintained that one should allow this movement to work itself out, that in this way it would soon come to a standstill. One could have said the same in domestic politics in regard to Marxism or parliamentarianism, in the economic sphere in regard to the class struggle or to class conceit, in foreign policy in regard to the Versailles Treaty or to the theft of German sovereignty rights. A thing of this kind does not come to a dead stop; it must be overcome. The more thoroughly, quickly, and radically this occurs, the better it is!

This has nothing at all to do with the suppression of artistic freedom and modern progress. On the contrary, the botched art works which were exhibited there and their creators are of yesterday and before yesterday. They are the senile representatives, no longer to be taken seriously, of a period that we have intellectually and politically overcome and whose monstrous, degenerate creations still haunt the field of the plastic arts in our time.

How healthy this purging operation was is shown by the reaction of the public and above all of the art buyers to the Greater Germany Art Exhibition in the House of German Art in Munich. Never were so many paintings sold as on this occasion, paintings which were in the main really creative works of art. Never had the general public participated in the questions of the plastic arts in such a lively and intimate way. That the appearance of a new artistic creativeness was combined with the end of a period which had lain on our souls like an oppressive nightmare, was actually greeted as a redemption.

Does this now signify a narrowing of the much-discussed artistic freedom? If so, then only when the artist should have the right to withdraw from his times and its demands and lead an eccentric life outside the community of his people. That, however, cannot and ought not to be. The artist stands in the midst of his nation. Art is not a sphere of life that exists for itself, which must defend itself against the invasion of the people.

Art is a function of the life of the people and the artist its blessed endower of meaning.

And just as the leadership of the state claims for itself the political guidance of other areas of the people's life, likewise does it make the same claim here. This does not mean that politics must interfere in the inner function of art, or that it even desires to do so. It means only that the state regulates and orders its great beginning and total engagement. This right is a sovereign right. It springs from political power and responsibility.

The abolition of art criticism was proclaimed at the congress held last year. This act was directly related to the goal-directed purging and coordinating of our cultural life. The responsibility for the phenomenon of degeneration in art was in large measure laid at the door of art criticism. In the main, art criticism had created the tendencies and the isms. It did not judge artistic development in terms of a healthy instinct linked to the people, but only in terms of the emptiness of its intellectual abstractness. The people had never taken part in it. It had only turned away in horror from an art tendency which could no longer be brought into harmony with its healthy sensibility and could be appraised only as the abortive product of a snobbish decadence. The abolition of art criticism and the introduction of art observation, which has for almost a year now been decried by large sectors of world public opinion as barbaric and impracticable, has in the meanwhile been effected everywhere in our country. Now the public itself functions as critic, and through its participation or non-participation it pronounces a clear judgment upon its poets, painters, composers, and actors.

The purging of the cultural field has been accomplished with the least amount of legislation. The social estate of creative artists took this cleansing into its own hands. Nowhere did any serious obstructions emerge. Today we can assert with joy and satisfaction that the great development is once again set in motion. Everywhere people are painting, building, writing poetry, singing, and acting. The German artist has his feet on a solid, vital ground. Art, taken out of its narrow and isolated circle, again stands in the midst of the people and from there exerts its strong influences on the whole nation.

To be sure, the political leadership has interfered in this, and today it still interferes daily and directly. But this occurs in a way that can only work to the benefit of the German artist: through subsidy, the commission of works, and a patronage of the arts, whose generosity is unique today in the whole world. Theater and film, writing and poetry, painting and architecture, have thereby experienced a fruitfulness which heretofore was wholly unimaginable.

The radio broadcasting system has become a real people's institution. Since the National Socialist revolution the number of listeners has increased from four to nearly nine million. The German press, in a rare demonstration of discipline, daily conducts its educational mission among the German people. The way to the nation has been cleared for all cultural efforts and strivings. We have not only sought for talent but have also found talent. In the new state, opportunities have been offered to talented people as never before. They need only to reach out for them and make themselves master of them.

It is true that in the long run every great art can live only by inducting healthy recruits. Therefore our major concern has been directed to this problem. It cannot be doubted that in a history-making time, so highly tension-ridden, as our own, political life absorbs a host of talents which normally would have been partly at the disposal of cultural life. In addition, there is the fact that the great philosophical ideas which have been set in motion by the National Socialist revolution, for the moment operate so spontaneously and eruptively that they are not yet ripe enough for elaboration in artistic form. The problems are too fresh and too new for them to become artistically, dramatically, or poetically formed. The recruits who one day will have to solve this task are still in the offing. In order to prepare the way for them, we can do nothing else but offer them every opportunity to develop their intellectual and technical aptitudes and skills in the broadest range possible....

What was first achieved for the creative artists of the stage should in no way be an ending. It is the cornerstone on which the old-age security program for all art creators must be established. The necessary preliminary work for the attainment of this goal is already in progress. It is a question of finding an organizational and economic form for every profession in this new field.

Along with this we have also turned our attention, in this year, to the establishment of old-age and recreation homes. Through the magnanimity of the Prussian Minister President not only was a new home for the aged in Weimar bequeathed to German veterans of the stage, but the Marie Seebach Foundation, which has been in existence for many years, was given a secure financial basis. In addition, we created a new old-age and recreation home in Oberwisenthal and two new beautiful recreation homes in Arendsee on the Baltic Sea. They are to be opened next spring and will provide accommodations for seventy to eighty German artists seeking rest and recreation.

The projects which have been successfully carried out here and in other fields of art are cultural acts of the first rank and thus truly worthy of the National Socialist German nation. Nothing similar has even been tried ever or anywhere else in the world. In this field we have not presented any high- sounding program; we have acted. We have courageously tackled these questions, and here also it has been proven that problems can be solved, if one wants to solve them. Germany marches ahead of all other countries not only in art but also in the care which it showers upon artists, and thus sets an illuminating example.

We are all the more obligated in this respect when today German art encompasses the whole nation. The people, participating by the million, have made it their own cause.

One speaks so often in a contemptuous way of mass taste and tries to contrast it to the taste of the propertied classes, the cultured or the upper ten thousand. Nothing, however, is more unjust than that. While the taste of the so-called cultural persons, precisely because they are cultured and have read so much, was exposed to the most manifold ill will and therefore also to fluctuations, the taste of the broad masses has always remained the same. They do not have so many possibilities of comparison in order, in the end, no longer to know whether the good is really good or the inferior really inferior. Nor are they so satiated that out of sheer lack of spiritual hunger they ultimately succumb to the most inane confusions and degenerations of the primitive and thus of clear and pure artistic feeling. Their joy in the healthy and the strong is still naive, untroubled, and sensuously moved. They still feel with the heart, and this heart does not stand in the shadow of an all-knowing, all-perceiving mind which in the end is also destructive and doubtful of all. Their unchanging taste is the only stable element in the great artistic evolutionary processes.

The people have a healthy feeling for authentic accomplishment, but also for words which indeed speak of accomplishments but behind which there are no accomplishments. Its taste derives from a solid predisposition, but it must be correctly and systematically guided. In its sometimes primitive expressions it is nevertheless always right and unwarped. True culture is not bound up with wealth. On the contrary, wealth often makes one bored and decadent. It is frequently the cause of uncertainty in matters of the mind and of taste. Only in this way can we explain the terrible devastations of the degeneration of German art in the past. Had the representatives of decadence and decline turned their attention to the masses of the people, they would have come up against icy contempt and cold mockery. For the people have no fear of being scorned as out of step with the times and as reactionary by enraged Jewish literati. Only the wealthy classes have this fear, when it is combined with insecurity in matters of taste. They succumb all too easily to that kind of demi-culture which is coupled with intellectual pride and conceited arrogance. These defects are familiar to us under the label "snobbism." The snob is an empty and hollow culture lackey who eats only the rinds from the fruits and who then cannot digest them. He goes in black tie and tails to the theater in order to breathe the fragrance of poor people. He must see suffering, which he shudderingly and shiveringly enjoys. This is the final degeneration of a rabble-like amusement industry. In the theater the rich want to see how things go with the poor. What a brutalization of the sensibility! But also what a bestialization of taste and of the whole artistic sensibility!

The Volk visits the theater, concerts, museums, and galleries for other reasons. It wants to see and enjoy the beautiful and the lofty. That which life so often and stubbornly withholds from the people, a world of wonder and of gracious appearance, here ought to unfold before their eyes, gleaming with astonishment. The people approach the illusions of art with a naive and unbroken joyousness and imagine themselves to be in an enchanted world of the Ideal, which life allows us only to guess at but seldom grasp and never obtain. Here lie the origins and the eternally operative driving energies of every great art. Snobbism is sick and worm-eaten. Its taste cannot set the standards and erect the forms for an era. We have had the courage to reject the products of its insolent arrogance. Today they are assembled in the "Exhibition of Degenerate Art," and the people, by the million, walk by this blooming nonsense, shaking their heads angrily, especially because this snobbism, in its insolence and arrogance, presumed to make its appeal precisely to this Volk. In fact, the Fuhrer had acted in the fulfillment of a national duty when he interfered here and again established order and a sure footing in this chaos. The people hardly knew this. "Wherever they met it, they punished it with mockery and contempt. This kind of art was right to avoid the bright, clear eye of the people and to withdraw from them into their salons. The primitive and healthy popular taste demands a corresponding spiritual diet. One does not raise strong people with snobbish over-refinements. Let no one here raise the objection that the people desire only to be entertained. The people seek joy. They have a right to it. We have the duty of giving this joy to them. Most of us have barely an idea of how joyless in general is the life of the people and therefore of how important it is to provide a remedy.

"Hence bread and circuses!" croak the wiseacres. No: "Strength Through Joy!" we reply to them.

This is why we have thus named the movement for the organization of optimism. It has led all strata of the people, by the million, to the beauties of our country, to the treasures of our culture, our art, and our life. Certainly, entertainment has at the same time found abundant expression. In most cases it is the preliminary stage to purely artistic enjoyment. This is where true art almost always originates....

Foreign circles hostile to Germany often attempt to project an image of the contemporary German artist as an oppressed and beaten creature who, surrounded by laws and regulations, languishes and sighs under the tyrannical dictatorship of a cultureless, barbaric regime. What a distortion of the true situation!

The German artist of today feels himself freer and more untrammeled than ever before. With joy he serves the people and the state, who have accepted him and his cause in such a warmhearted and understanding way. National Socialism has wholly won over German creative artists. They belong to us and we to them.

We have not brought them to our side by means of hollow programs and empty phraseology, but by means of action. Ancient artist-dreams have been fulfilled by us, others are in the process of being actualized. How could the German artist not feel sheltered in this state! Socially secure, economically improved, esteemed by society, he can now serve his great plans in peace and without the bitterest cares for his livelihood. He again has a people that awaits his call. He no longer speaks to empty rooms and before dead walls. A noble competition has begun for the laurel of victory in all fields of our artistic life. National Socialism has also drawn the German artist under its spell. It is the foundation of his creativity, the solid basis on which he stands with all of us. He fulfills the task that a great time has assigned to him as a true servant of his people.

In this hour, we all look reverently upon you, my Fuhrer, you who do not regard art as a ceremonial duty but as a sacred mission and a lofty task, the ultimate and mightiest documentation of human life.

You know and love art and artists. Even as a statesman you come from their circles. You follow the way of German art in our time with an ardent heart. You point out its direction and goal as the blessed giver of meaning.

We all thank you for this. May you keep your protecting hand in the future as well over German art and the German race. Accomplishment and deeds will be the answer and the solemn vow of the German artist for this protection.

Our people today, however, are around us and with us. They render their thanks to their artists for the countless hours of joy, recreation, and edification, liberating laughter and excitement. A year of work lies behind us. A year of work lies before us. The success we have achieved summons us to new deeds. By building upon this success, we aim to dedicate ourselves to our tasks with ardent hearts and glowing idealism in the service of art, the great consoler of our life.

From an address by Dr. Goebbels at the Annual Congress of the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Strength Through Joy organization, Berlin, November 26, 1937, published in Von der Grossmacht zur Weltmacht, 1937, edited by Hans Volz (Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt Verlag, 1938), pp. 416-426.

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Notes:

1. See page 135.

On the National Responsibility of Publishers, by ADOLF SPEMANN

There have always been publishers -- and not the worst ones -- who saw it as their function to subordinate themselves, in a purely servile capacity, to the creator of literary works, that the writer himself bore the full responsibility for his work and that the publisher's task was merely to be the most perfect reflection possible of contemporary cultural achievements. In this way the publisher keeps to himself his personal attitude -- which, to use that favorite expression, one is always wont to suspend when one does not wish to take a position or has no point of view. Often this was conceived not only in a purely business way but as a kind of flawless idealism, in which the freedom of discussion appeared more important than any definite idea. But this is precisely the form most often taken by liberalism, out of which ultimately a political, moral, and artistic theory of relativity has emerged.

This attitude of the publisher was strongly influenced by the prevailing views in aesthetics and music and literary criticism, which increasingly came to hold that all artistic, musical, and literary monuments must be grasped and understood in terms of their historical premises. Out of this quickly emerged a second principle: to understand all is to forgive all -- and in the diligent effort to understand all, even that which was fully race-alien to us, one lost every footing and point of reference. Thus it is a sad but indisputable fact that it was precisely the growing knowledge concerning the process of becoming which began to destroy sound judgment concerning being. This attitude which permeated the whole degenerate conception of art before the accession to power of National Socialism, which was mirrored in countless published writings, naturally could not avoid influencing the publishers of these books and periodicals, and for the very reason that they were unable to oppose this decadence with any clear world view or any clear cultural political aim. And thus the ring closed: these publishers in good faith brought out works which fostered the dissolution of all solid forms....

The great fundamental reversal, however, took place only through the seizure of power by National Socialism. The great master of the education of his people, Adolf Hitler, has in a few years transformed our souls and has also sharpened in the whole book-publishing trade the feeling that it bears a tremendous responsibility. The first decisive act in this direction was the establishment of personal responsibility, since from it also arises complete liability: the publisher, in reproducing and distributing a piece of writing, is just as responsible for its contents as is its author. Hence he is forced to concern himself closely with the contents of his books, as closely as should have been decreed long ago by law. Thus the great distance that separates the present-day conception of the publisher's calling from yesterday's becomes quite clear: instead of an inwardly uninvolved cultural-mirror he is a cultural-politician imbued with his task. The servant of the writer has been changed into a deputy of the state. The self-satisfied noninvolved connoisseur has become a militant fighter in the front ranks. Thus today it is not enough for the publisher to master his craft and to be as cultured .s possible; he must be thoroughly imbued with the idea of the state leadership of Adolf Hitler and in this idea he will find the guidelines for his own work. No one will be able to say that he is in no position to do this. The countless great speeches of the Fuhrer, along with his book, afford an exhaustive exposition of the state idea that he has created and espoused, down to the smallest details of personal life. Anyone who fully absorbs, over and over again, the lavish fullness of this brilliant mind which literally runneth over and this example of a truly great life will know what he has to do....

Likewise, however, the publisher will always be conscious of the fact that literature is not to be separated from politics, which in the last analysis is the guidance of man and therefore his education. It all depends on the reply to the question: do books influence or change people or do they not? Now, One of the beliefs of the age of degeneracy that is now behind us was that it was a superstition of anxiety-ridden, power-hungry headmasters that books could warp and destroy the soul. With this cleverly conceived distortion, the literary man created his own license to wash his dirty linen in public and even to get paid for it. Whether one decides that pernicious books are a consequence of decadence or one of its causes is meaningless, and is at bottom a question of taste. The fact is that in daily life cause and effect have entwined themselves into an indissoluble knot. What does one do, however, when one cannot untie a knot? One cuts it in two and masters it. This is what National Socialism has done. In the face of this imperishable accomplishment the fact that it at first believed that it had to destroy many other real values, perhaps unjustly, carries little weight. It is well known that in every great housecleaning some pieces of porcelain are bound to be broken....

The decisive consideration which the publisher today must pose to himself should not, therefore, be the following: "Will this book be a sensation? Will it be a hit? Can I create a need so that I may satisfy it? Can I add new riddles to the ones already in existence? Can I open a discussion which my magazine can feed on for months on end? Can I get hold of this or that famous name for my house? How shall I make a neat turnover at any price?"

No! The publisher must ask himself: "Will this book that I publish now, and in years to come, when I have long departed this earth, fill my children with pride in the accomplishment of their father? Does this book make people stronger, without making them stupid? Will it imbue the soul of the reader with strength and joy, or will it leave a bitter taste and will it steep the heart in lye and jar the nerves? Does it give the individual the strength which aspires to the Whole and forms the community or does it lead him to at deceptive pseudo-consolation of self-sufficient solitude and to flight from this world and the present? Does it broaden the reader's point of view, without alienating him from the roots of his own Volkdom? Does it show him the greatness of the German present and past without obscuring or indeed making contemptible the imperishable cultural accomplishments of other peoples and times, to the extent that these enrich and strengthen us? Will it direct his gaze to greatness in all its associations, without alienating him from loyalty to little things, to details? Will the book be a contribution to the efforts to sharpen the ear of the people, so that it can learn to distinguish the genuine from the false tone, so that it does not imbibe the sparkling brilliance or the intoxicating semi-darkness of stylized language without an inner view and a moral attitude for true poetry, so that it does not confuse handy maxims, cheap sloganeering, or finely spun dialectics with valuable scientific research, so that it does not take foggy haziness for philosophical depth? Does it increase the German cultural patrimony in any way or is it wholly irrelevant to it? In the 2000-year history of our people is it worthy, perhaps, of the unique period which we are experiencing today? Does it serve, if only in a very small way, the great aim of the Fuhrer to create the new German man, that indispensable, irreplaceable building material for the next millennium of German history, whose threshold we have just crossed with wildly throbbing hearts?"

From Adolf Spemann, Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorn Nachf., 1939), pp. 142- 147.

Goebbels Forbids Art Criticism

Because this year has not brought an improvement in art criticism, I forbid once and for all the continuance of art criticism in its past form, effective as of today [November 27, 1936]. From now on, the reporting of art will take the place of an art criticism which has set itself up as a judge of art -- a complete perversion of the concept of "criticism" which dates from the time of the Jewish domination of art. The critic is to be superseded by the art editor. The reporting of art should not be concerned with values, but should confine itself to description. Such reporting should give the public a chance to make its own judgments, should stimulate it to form an opinion about artistic achievements through its own attitudes and feelings.

From Der Deutsche Schriftsteller, Jahrg. I, Heft 12 (1936), pp. 280 ff. Reprinted in Rolf Geissler, Dekadenz und Heroismus (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1964), p. 30, n. 20.

What Is German in German Art?, by KURT KARL EBERLEIN

Art is never objective. It is an offense against romanticism to call the naturalism of Our debased "sailor painting" romantic. "The spirit, in terms of which we act, is the loftiest." And this art spirit is as loveless as a medical diagnosis, a photograph, Or a statistic. The pleinair civilization of modern painting which began with French Impressionism does not belong either to the soul or to the language of the soul: it does not contemplate, but looks. Its art is seen, with susceptible time-conditioned nerves, with time-conditioned eyes, newspaper-like, and in the same way, therefore, is this art to be seen, to be enjoyed, but not to be experienced. Art is contemplation. Here the inner eye decides. Artists have the landscape in their hearts, because they contemplated, because their soul becomes landscape, and their landscape becomes soul. German art is homeland and homesickness and therefore always landscape even in the picture, the land of the soul becomes and grows into soul, it is the language of the homeland even in an alien atmosphere, in the alien atmosphere of foreign lands as well as in the alien atmosphere of animals, flowers, things. Either one speaks German and then the soul speaks, or one speaks an alien tongue, a cosmopolitan, fashionable, Esperanto language and then the soul speaks no more. The casing of this homeland is the house that the German loves so much, the room, the mirror image of his being, the thought of home which the German carried with him even amid the sufferings and death of the trenches. Anyone who knows this German room image knows what I mean, this soul becomes a room, the soul of a room that hardly survives today because the fashion in decoration killed the German room the way it has killed German dress, because the model makes everything equal, alike, and spiritually poor. The new Germany lives in the world on the basis of such rooms, since the magic circle from which all that is called Volkdom unfolds -- namely, the family -- encloses its law of growth here in the family room, whose holy, state-forming character Pestalozzi described so magnificently. Today the principal task of architects is to create a family living room in which the family spirit can dwell and exert its influence. Here lie the real roots of our strength. All those to whom Germandom was an essential entity saw in the family the health, salvation, and future of the state; around the family table they saw the circle sheltering and protecting the qualities of the soul. ... The homeland, the landscape, the living space, the language community are embodied in the family which roams and grows beyond the borders. In it lives the child with mores and customs, the dialect of play, of celebration, in it live the song, the fairy tale, the proverb, native costume and furniture and utensils. In it lie the ultimate energies of primordial folk art, the work done in the home, handicraft, tradition, in it lies also that salutary and profound sentimental feeling for family arts which it would be hazardous to underestimate, for it is the bread and joy of the house. Here work music, dancing music, family music, house music, have a last abode and a potent health-giving magic. Here the life rhythm of the year pulsates squarely through house and field, growing close and vitally out of the very soil. How distant is this venerable life-maturity from all that which stirs the big city, the changing fashion of the day, which revolves around the abiding customs like the earth around the sun. How laughable, puppetlike, and cinematic do the art groups of the big city appear here, the art fashions which are best compared with the exotic animals inside the cages of the zoological gardens of the big city. One may object that the family, especially the rural family, was never a connoisseur or judge of art nor could it be. Certainly not! Thank God, for here nothing is being judged, it is not a question of criticism, but of something much more essential, namely, life itself. It is not a question of the blossom, but of the tree. It is an "achievement" and a result of the Renaissance that art is considered only the surface of aesthetic values, of phenomenal and formal values, that it is enjoyed aesthetically as adornment for a wall, as a decor for a room, as a concert or an exhibit.

Our museum, for this reason, is not a museum for the people. It has not yet lost the character of a castle, the decorative style and charm of an aristocratic, uncomfortable, awesome palace of culture. A visit to it brings to mind a world's fair, a panoptikon, a castle. "Art," therefore, for most racial comrades -- let's be honest about it for once! -- is not the bread of life, not a life value, not a nourishment for the soul. Rather, it still is the priceless unnecessary, the delicate pastry in the store window, the comfortable accouterment of the propertied classes, the speculation stock of the wealthy, the collective ownership of the state. The life of the working people unfolds beyond this art. Bread and work are more important. This is the situation, despite such slogans as "art for everybody," "art for the people," "art without an entrance fee," "art with a sunset glow." This art is still "culture," hence uncomfortable, alien to the people. The fault lies neither with the state nor with the individual, but with that art which is cut off from blood and soil.

From Kurt Karl Eberlein, Was ist delltsch in der deutschen Kunst? (Leipzig: Verlag E. A. Seemann, 1933), pp. 56-59.

The Poet Summoned by History, by HEINRICH ZILLICH

No, I mean poets who are kindled by history and forced to speak because they are overcome by this kinship with a great event, and who must restlessly revolve around this illuminating point in the crisis of their spiritual existence until, in an act of self-redemption, they endow it with that form through which the people can share in fanner living spaces and in their past being because their meaning is revealed to them.

It must be a deep kinship that touches, summons, torments, and blesses the poet. He will become conscious of this kinship only when he finds the way to it from its most characteristic blood drenched experience, that representatively anticipates the necessary and same experience of the people and actually brings it about later through the creative work.

The greatest experience that grew in the German, bitterly at first in the last war and in the subsequent years of tribulation, but then radiantly in the time of ascent, was the self-discovery of the body of his own Volk with all its members, the bursting of the close-fitting skin of the state which had been left over and which was ridiculously restricting the Volk-consciousness by virtue of racial cleavage and political narrowness and which first required the collapse of a world in order to be stripped off and to reveal all the Germans created by God. In this way the reality of the Reich and the Volk became alive in a new form, in a natural wedding as never before. For a poet to remove himself from this amplitude means to lose the ground under his feet. His attitude toward history and its evaluation through science today can rest only upon the new consciousness of the nation, whose strength and relevance to the times, whose noble modesty and at the same time crystalline sense of responsibility intertwined with the world, were truly overwhelmingly proved this year when ten million Germans were able to return to the Reich without striking a blow. [1]

On the basis of this consciousness, of this feeling of the common citizenship of Germans, we can now finally approach a historiography whose judgments are made in accordance with Volkish criteria, in accordance, that is to say, with whether events satisfy the whole people and its mission-neither just the one or the other -- but both the people and its mission. This does not mean that we must falsify the purposes of our actions and ideas into our ancestors' in order to grasp for ourselves external confirmation from history. History confirms to us -- who are rich in history -- the wide spaces that are open to us in the future. But it does mean that, despite our full understanding of the substantiality and uniqueness of past ages, we seek the specifically German dimension in its totality everywhere, which up to now was not perceived in the historiography of dynastic power and territorial interests.

Many a deed whose greatness is indisputable, if considered from the viewpoint of the whole people, only now allows us to see the tragic consequences as well as those of a more fruitful character. To cite an example: If we were to consider the wars of Frederick the Great, we must ask whether those long years of German fratricidal struggle were not a cause of the fact that the broad territories of the Southeast, at that time still sparsely populated ever since the Turkish wars and subject to Vienna's control, were only insufficiently settled by Germans. We must ask whether at that time we did not definitely lose a vast living space which Providence had assigned to us as a sphere of dominion and as a prize for saving Europe from the deadly Islamic threat and which we at a later time had to relinquish completely perhaps only as the ultimate consequence of our fratricidal struggles. Thus must the historical researcher formulate the question to himself, without, of course, attaching any blame to the actors of that time, who in accordance with their value-consciousness could not have foreseen this result.

Thus the poet also is summoned by history to place the amplitude and the unity of the people in the center of his view. At the same time he should try to avoid the error of transferring the spirit of his age into the past. But he should certainly look for the whole people in past ages and give significant form to its fate. For the whole German people also lived at that time. Even at that time -- to conjure another example -- the axes of the Swabian settlers resounded in the Banat, alone, often forsaken, in order to build a new province, while the rulers of the people quarreled over whether an old province, whose German-ness was not under any threat, should be transferred from one German hand to another. What a subject for a heart-rending epic when one considers that the new province remained unfinished!

The amplitude and unity of the people -- this is the kinship which the poet today must perceive in history, and there he will also perceive the relations between the people and the Reich, between the people, the Reich, and Europe, those indissoluble relations of the primordial bond of fate, co-determining the human world order, which redound to the special honor of the Germans.

The Reich often reached out beyond the sphere of the German people, but later it constricted itself until after 1918 it did not encompass more than two thirds of the people. Again a subject to sear the soul! And actually the tragedy of the division of the people in the recent past, within a few years, which we can count on the fingers of our hand, abruptly caused, like a miracle, a number of poets to emerge one after the other with works of a militant, passionate character with the power of created truth born of the most particular experience. They shout forth the song of tribulation of the Germans which touches not only us -- we experienced it a few weeks ago in the unparalleled restoration of a part of the suffering! [2] -- but also Europe to its vital nerve, since we do belong to the responsible master-builders of this continent whose way of life subjected the world. Therefore the poetry of the fate of Germans beyond the Reich, in its most important works, does not cling to territorial and spiritual narrowness, which often enjoys dubious praise as homeland poetry. No, with its presentation of the fate of the homeland, it bursts open larger contexts and becomes a meaningful scripture of German and European fate. In it germinates also the poetry of the law of the eastern spaces and of their bond with the mission and tragedy of our people. A poetry, which -- if all is not deceiving -- in a few years will correctly present the image of the East, up to now distorted by historiography, above all of the Southeast, in terms of its relevance to things German.

From Heinrich Zillich, "Die deutsche Dichtung und die Welt der Geschichte," in Weimarer Reden des Grossdeutschen Dichtertreffens (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938), pp. 43-45.

_______________

Notes:

1. That is, in the Austrian Anschluss.

2. This refers to the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich.

Wulfe's Manor: Two Episodes in a Peasant's Life, by JOSEFA BERENS-TOTENOHL

I

Several leagues downward where the Lenne doubles back in a northwesterly direction, there lay a free manor called the Wulfe manor. Here dwelt the clan of the Wulfes, lordly, free, secluded. The ancestral father of the clan had founded the manor when the hills were still ruled by savage robber bands. Strong, courageous -- wild blood had coursed through the veins of many members of the family. All had increased in number and defended themselves, regardless of the illustrious lords, von Arnsberg, von Mark, and von Koln, whose boundaries were in this region and who attacked each other whenever they had the opportunity. Through all the dangers the Wulfes had kept their holding free and raised it to a power which stood inviolable on the eternally flaming borders between the three princes.

The Lenne River surrounded the lonely manor, towering on a hill, in a thundering bracket which was ominously threatening in times of danger. On the mountainside the water was dammed by a weir. The mill, which stood On the manor, extended to the edge of the weir. Then the Lenne flowed around the whole manor, which, itself almost a mountainous protrusion, pushed out obliquely into the valley.

So that the manor would not be cut of! during a flood tide, a solid dam had been built to the weir because the waters of the Lenne become a sea when they rush past the steep precipices of the mountain. And this occurred every year in November. This affliction was called Catherine's flood.

The manor, built out of the stones of the mountain, covered over by a gray thatched roof, lay in solitude and darkness. At once a refuge and a defense, the walls presented the aspect of a fortress rather than a house. The manor court was narrow. It was enclosed by stables for the livestock, granaries, barns, and workshops. This garland of buildings necessarily lay lower on the hill. A wall also closed this off against the open Lenne. A heavy portal formed the barrier against the outside world.

In these times the Wulfes kept a guard over the manor at night. The peasant collected a body of men, as many as the holding could support, and gathered them for his defense and honor.

Troubles and crises afflicted the countryside. The lords, big and little, wrested power and lands from  each other and were heedless of the fact that they were tearing each other apart. The smell of fire pervaded the land. Misery sat on the hearth. People recited the "Our Father" more frequently than they usually did for the one good petition, the one for bread. But everyone who lay on his deathbed and breathed his last did not pray to the end. In such times it was easy to hate, there were many acts of trespass and trespasses in the making, more than acts of forgiveness, God knows! The hostile hordes of mercenaries tore at each other for the booty like the wild predatory animals in the mountains, forgetting that they had sprung at each other for its sake. Only the Wulfe manor defended itself from becoming booty.

The present peasant, a stocky, fifty-year-old man, sat in an armchair, a brown bearskin spread on the floor in front of him. His grandfather had felled this king of the woods. The armchair was elaborately carved. The arms were formed of two sculptured wolves, the heraldic animals of the Wulfes. The back of the chair showed two eagle-owl heads, which a later ancestor of the Wulfes had added to the escutcheon. The old pagan defiance had sprung up once more in this ancestor and he had the image of the female companion of this God, the owl, the knower among the birds, secretly carved in the ornamental strip of the church pew of the Wulfes in Wormbeeke. The priest, a fanatical persecutor of pagan abominations, had opposed this. The ancestor, firmly defiant, unconcerned at the prospect of being burned at the stake and receiving a harsh court sentence, had said: "Count me out without it!"

Thus the eagle-owl remained on the Wulfes' escutcheon in the church and in the house. For the priest did not want to do without Wulfes and their tithe. The eagle-owl heads gazed, unmoved, upon the Wulfes in their thoughts and in their prayers, when they sat between them. The young Wulfes of several generations had cut their teeth on the springing wolves of the arms of the chair, which were barely perceptible, and had almost reduced them to nothingness with cuts and thrusts.

The peasant was the last Wulfe. His wife Margret had given him only a daughter. Then she was afflicted with an incurable paralysis and sat year after year in her chair near the other windows of the enormous room. Her feet rested on a beautiful wildcat skin with which the peasant had honored her on her wedding day, never imagining that her dead feet would burden it for a whole life. The stillness of old age floated for a long time around this armchair and one perforce already saw deeply, if he wanted to perceive this, that even here a life had been lived far, unutterably far, from peasant life and its necessities.

At that moment the daughter Magdlene came in with the warm evening beer for her father.

"It's going to be bad outside tonight," she said.

"No worse than any other time," decided the peasant.

"It could be, nevertheless. I feel it in my bones like never before," warned the peasant's wife. Thereupon the daughter helped her mother to the bedroom....

The peasant sat still for a long time in the enormous room. Magdlene went into the weaving room, sent the maids away, and worked at the looms by herself. Her loom beat time with the blows of the storm outside, which pounded the corners of the walls, picking up new strength after a moment's pause.

Suddenly a lightning bolt struck, followed by the clap of thunder. The Wulfe daughter hurriedly ran over to her father's side.

"A storm now."

The old man remained silent, serious as though he had heard nothing. He was in another world with his thoughts....

***

And in addition the merchant had to come today! How he hated him! Him, who was only a nothing! He had once placed himself in the hands of this nothing! Of course, it was a long time ago. He had hated him since then. In particular he hated that hour, which he saw as the lowest in his life, and in this hour stood Robbe. Wulfe had never bowed before any prince, yet he had given him, whom he called a dog, he had at one time given him power over him.

It was the only sin that Wulfe recognized in his life. Each time Robbe came, Wulfe thought about this shame, and he certainly would not let him come into the manor if it had not occurred. The peasant always read this triumph in the look of the other, which the shrewd merchant himself never made reference to. But it remained in the abyss, which continuously spewed forth poison.

"Satan!" cursed Wulfe in the direction of the barn.

Wulfe was young, strong, and happy like no other lad in the valley. He had once captured a live wolf and brought him home to his parents. He was the only son and heir of the old manor. In their last progeny the Wulfes were no longer really fruitful! And he was quite aware of his uniqueness.

For years Margret, a rich peasant girl from the Cologne area, had been reserved for him as his future wife. Then fate threw a wild, black-haired gypsy witch into his arms, a girl with smoldering eyes and a fiery passion for rutting, and he forgot all about his blond and quiet Margret and he pulled the alien woman into his riotous nights.

His bedroom, when he was a youth, was located in the wing over the eternally gray weir, the same one which had been swept away by the flood. Hei! How his body flamed when the black witch cowered in the night darkness under the window and cooed up to him. When he flung open the window and she drew close to him! When he grabbed her by her wild lock of hair, and when he heard the wild heartbeat of the woman pound against his equally wild heartbeat, when he hurled his blood into the scorching whirlpool of her flaming desire and lost himself with her in ecstasy! For whole nights, for whole weeks! Then the owls outside screeched their "Huhuhhh!" in vain, the waters roared their warning song to no avail, their song of flood, distress, and disaster.

It was a wild autumn that year, long ago, and it glowed like no other. To this day still, Wulfe's eyes sparkled when on occasion, as on this very night, his thoughts dwelt upon it. He still liked to take delight in this wild exultant time of his life, which otherwise had known only harshness. But then always a stooped, gray shadow crept in, Robbe, and the exultant mood died.

One day, however, the turning point came, the moment in which fate poses the question. For a long time he had secretly tried to flee from her. Many nights it drove him up to the mountains, instead of into her tempting arms, it drove him on the trail of the lynx and the wolf into danger, hardship, and death, instead of to the satiated desire of his senses. A cry for freedom resounded in him, for the proud freedom of his being, which he had betrayed. He wanted to hunt and to fight again for what he had lost on the steep flanks of the cliffs.

Up there in the mountains the old spark sprang up in him, which always drove out the over-drunk sensual frenzy and sated covetousness: hate. The lawful instinct of his peasant blood raised this terrible sword for the revenge of the offenses committed against his being.

Of course, when he came down to the manor again and found the woman waiting for him below, then lust still loudly cried down this spark of salvation. Nevertheless, he returned home hesitatingly, and one wild autumn night he stayed away completely. The mountains resounded with the mighty battle cries of the bucks, the earth trembled under the thud of their hooves. There the woman found him on the owl cliff, from where he had spied upon the raging fury of the battling animals. Thus had he overheard the approach of footsteps.

Even to this day Wulfe shook whenever he thought of this moment, when the shaggy head of the gypsy witch suddenly appeared above the edge of the cliff and was raised higher and higher with a searching, spying look. He had grabbed his javelin, ready to hurl it, for he had thought it was a she-wolf. Then he recognized the eyes.

"You -- here?"

"Yes! Me! You made me wait a long time!"

"You shouldn't have followed me. See!" He showed her the spear. "I was just about to throw it!"

But she just stood there, unmoving, flashing her eyes at him, so that he almost gave way to confusion. He mastered the surge of his blood, or his hatred mastered it. He threw the weapon to the ground.

"Go, go back to your people, woman!"

"My people have gone away, peasant, and you know it! I want to come to you, and 1 want to ask you: When will you make me your peasant wife before all the people?"

"Woman, are you mad?"

"Mad? Didn't you swear to that? A thousand times!"

"What are vows sworn in the night, woman?"

"What are vows, you scoundrel?" she cried, and lunged at him, hanging on his neck, biting and scratching him. "What are vows? Then ask my body, you ..."

If he had not suddenly thrown her back, she would have bitten through his throat like a she-wolf. As though the heavens joined her anger, a fiery glow played around the blazing woman, who stood with smoldering eyes before him, her fists clenched.

"You traitor! Watch out for my people! They will find you! Revenge is sacred!"

Then he stood alone. Before he could lift up his arm to strike her, she had slid down the rock at breakneck speed. No other person could have come out of such a drop alive. Had she saved her life? She had vanished as though the waters of the Lenne had swallowed her and dragged her along. She had left behind with him only her word of revenge and he had brought it home with him.

Thus she was not out of his life.

"If only I had done it!" he wished a thousand times, and every time he regretted that he had not hurled the spear. For, later, she had produced a black gypsy brat, and because of this worm he had to pay with corn and more corn, money and more money. No one was to know about it, neither his old parents nor his quiet bride.

Robbe played the role of intermediary. The rogue! The dog! To this day the peasant always shook with anger whenever the merchant came. But it was too late to order him off the manor. He must be killed. This had always been the peasant's idea, but he never laid him low.

So even today Robbe was again a guest at the Wulfe manor, and even today he had been seated above the domestic servants at the evening meal....

II

"Is Father really dying?" asked Felix, in order to say something, for the silence was becoming oppressive.

"You must adjust yourselves to that! It happens, of course, a little early. How old is he?"

"Barely fifty."

Wulfe was silent.

"He hasn't been able to do anything for a long time now," said Job. Felix, secretly observing Wulfe, added: "There is not much that can really be done on our place."

Here Wulfe was in his element, in which he could find the proper word.

"Everybody knows that the Od manor is falling to pieces. It is all the more regrettable because there are young hands on the place who should be able to do something about it."

He again wanted to summon the devil, but then he thought he heard the throat-rattle from the bedchamber through the rafters of the room, and he did not summon him.

"What shall we do? We don't know to what extent Father has already placed the manor in debt to von Arnsberg," Felix said.

"Your father, indeed, has not worked in a long time. He could do no more. I believe that if his sons had supported and administered the manor in a good, meaningful way, it would not have declined to the point where he had to go to the Count looking for help, which is really not help. Where there are young hands, there should be no decline. This is against all peasant laws."

The sons sat down and were silent. Wulfe continued:

"Your father will not revive. When a tree is rotten, it falls and no support helps. But the land remains. It does not decay. It builds new trees. The manor is your land. You are the new trees. You should know that."

They also knew it. At least they acted as though they did. But to Wulfe their words seemed to have little worth.

"When one lets death come over a manor, then one betrays the immortal soul in creation and God avenges it without mercy. It doesn't matter if your Od manor is run by you or by another. Every manor, however, in the long run requires a strong protector. It rejects the traitor."

The two sons sat before Wulfe as though crushed. They knew his reputation in the whole mountain country and took his words as a judgment and a sentence upon them. Felix was especially depressed. He had nourished a secret hope to marry Wulfe's daughter. Today he realized clearly that he would never be accepted by the people of the Wulfe manor. After his father died, he would find out whether all of them would have to go away from the manor with nothing but a beggar's staff. And such persons would never find mercy at the hand of the peasant Wulfe.

After a while Job arose from his chair. Felix spoke with Wulfe about the work on the manor and in the woods.

"Manual work itself is not even the principal concern of the owner of the manor. Any servant knows how to do that, because otherwise he loses his bread. What counts is the goal of the work. Or its meaning, and this, you say, no longer exists on the Od manor. I say that it is to be found on a manor that is one's own, never on that of another. Happiness too lies in one's own manor. One must only have courage and want to see and conquer it."

"You may talk that way, peasant Wulfe. You would seek yours in vain on the Od manor."

Wulfe looked sharply at the young man. Had things already gone so far that nobody understood him any more? Or did death in the room above lie so heavily on all of them that it wrapped everything in gloom? Wulfe felt a bitter taste on his tongue. What did they want from him? If the freedom of the Od manor was already lost, what was there to do? And his thoughts rose threateningly against the man in the room whom death was now seizing in its grip.

Cecilie's shout interrupted his thoughts: "Hurry, come quickly! He's dying!" She sounded as though she were out of her senses.

In the room, much had changed in one hour. The dying man had acquired a wholly different countenance. The cheeks were completely sunken, the temples showed a deep hollow that gleamed blue and cold. The whole face was waxen, the heart no longer sent a single drop of blood up there. The forehead was beaded with cold sweat. The eyes looked out as though they were already in a distant world. The dying man's breathing was hard and intermittent. They thought that every breath would surely be the last. But his chest rose still once more.

Wulfe remained standing at the door. He saw that Cecilie had also brought in the sisters. They crowded around their mother, fearfully, as though they didn't know what to do with their weeping. The brothers kept in the dark, until Felix came in and supported his fa ther, who wanted to sit up.

The proprietor of the Od manor must still have had something in mind, for he looked around him with eyes that were already dimmed. His thoughts must have achieved a degree of clarity once more. Then his gaze found Wulfe.

Wulfe went up to him immediately. He took the chilling hands in his strong grip, which once had strangled a wolf. And gently Wulfe bent over the man and tried to read his wishes from his lips, but the man could not speak. His tongue no longer obeyed him. A choking gripped the dying man, yet those around him saw that despite this he made every effort to make himself understandable. It was terrible to watch. After a little while, however, it was all over. He had to depart from life, unabsolved, without being able to express the word and his thoughts.

Wulfe let the dead man sink back on his bed and left the room. He had to leave the relatives alone with him. His breed was not good at comforting others, so he took a walk in the night through the manor. It would soon be time for the new day to dawn. The roof of the house already set itself off slightly from the gray sky. He stood there and watched how the beams pushed outward. They stood steep against the sky. It was a lord who had set them up in this way, mused Wulfe the peasant, and he shook his head at the thought that now the Od manor was coming to an end.

But while he was standing before the house, thinking his thoughts, he saw that pieces of the beautiful gable were missing and that a deadly air of forlornness hung like a cloud around the protruding rafters. In the garden the snow had been trampled by wild animals and the manor's own livestock. A broken fence had not been repaired. The stables were poorly protected against the cold. Wulfe's anger rose with every step he took. A dog howled behind the stable. Then Wulfe was struck by a shuddering thought. He was familiar with the belief that faithful dogs often quickly follow their masters to the grave. But when he saw this wretched creature, half-starved and forgotten, tethered outdoors in the cold, he could give solemn assurance to the dead man upstairs that he would not have long to wait before the beast would also have gone his way.

Wulfe did not have the heart to go further. The dilapidated condition of the manor affected him so deeply that he decided to take his stallion and ride home. He did not mourn for the dead man in the house; he saw only the death of the manor and to him this was like murder.

He said so to the two sons, whom he soon met, still and speechless, in the room. They did not know how to lend a hand like the women, who everywhere know better how to cope with the things of life. When he spoke about the dog outside behind the stables, the eldest son asked: "Which dog?" Wulfe refused to answer him.

"My daughter said that the Od manor had lost its honor. She was even more right than I imagined."

His words were heard by the dead peasant's widow, who had just come into the room. She was carrying a piece of linen which was to be the dead man's shroud.

"If only you would speak with von Arnsberg, peasant Wulfe, and tell him that he shouldn't send us a stranger to the --" She could not go on. She was overcome with emotion. The little children gathered around her. Before this poignant scene, Wulfe's bones burned as though he had a fever.

''I'll speak with him," he promised, and rode off.

He sent his daughter to the burial. He could no longer set foot on the desolation of this manor.

It turned out that the deal with the Count had really been concluded. For soon after the burial a proxy of von Arnsberg arrived in order to pick out the best cow and horse for the feudal lord. The members of the Od manor realized that they had lost their freedom. It had happened even before the wretched, neglected dog followed his master to the grave.

From Josefa Berens-Totenohl, Der Femhof (Jena, 1935), pp. 14-17, 39-43, 208-213.

A Rowdy as Hero: From an Anti-Jewish Novel, by TUDEL WELLER

"In any case -- they must already be shrewder than we are, because one thing is certain: they sit on top today in our dear Fatherland and we squat here below. And we pay twelve per cent interest ..." This brought him back to reality.

"First of all, for once I'm now going to look into it," he said. "It's bad enough that this is the first time I've heard about it. Maybe we can get a reduction."

"Do you plan to see Lowenstein?" said his mother in astonishment.

"Why not? He won't gobble me up then and there."

"But you won't get anywhere, Peter. When we were in great need we agreed to everything, and we signed everything."

"Will you still be going away now?" his sister broke in.

"Of course -- but only after everything is settled. After all" -- he held his breath, a little less deep now -- "I do want to study, if it goes right. As I've had in mind for a long time."

The old lady's face lit up. "That would be splendid, if you could do it, Peter. But what will you live on? You know how things are with us right now!"

"Well, I'll try to struggle through as a working student like count less others. I've heard of young men who night after night work at their factory shifts and are to be found in the lecture halls by day. Shouldn't I be able to do something like that?" He looked into the faces of his family with an air of triumph, now more assured. His mother, he could see, was already in agreement with him. When is a mother not in agreement when it involves the well-being and the future of a beloved son?

"And we," she said, indicating the daughter, "we'll live in a smaller space, and rent some rooms to strangers. That way we can give our  student a little helping hand now and then." But he would not hear of it. "I'll get by all right, Mother, but first I want to give this twelve per cent Jew a good dressing down."

More easily said than done. He came to Poststrasse, to a building constructed like a palace. To the right of the lordly entrance glittered a marble tablet on which was inscribed in golden letters: "Sigfried Lowenstein, Real Estate, Mortgages, Purchase and Sale of Landed Properties, Loans." Nice set-up, the young man said to himself. Nothing so clever about that: after all, should he live in a large block of flats, or maybe even in a barn, at twelve per cent?

Already anger began to smolder in him, and it was not inconsiderable.

He had never been able to stand the chosen sons of Israel. He hardly knew why; it must have lain in his blood. Besides, even in the days of his childhood there had been a guiding experience. He didn't like to think about it. It was a dirty Jewish story. In any case, Lowenstein lived in a palace -- that was certain. And now a young fellow named Peter Monkemann stood before his fancy door. And if things were rightly considered-that is, viewed soberly and clearly -- he came here as an insignificant and modest petitioner. His imperceptibly smoldering anger was meaningless. It could have sprung up from nothing but his inner feeling of powerlessness. For he was little fit to be a petitioner ...

He was received by the chief clerk, who in the new building lorded it over a dozen clerks bent deeply over their desks. "How was that now? Speak with Mr. Lowenstein? Speak with him personally, you mean? Anybody can say that! What do you want from him, then? A mortgage matter, isn't it?"

"Yes -- a mortgage matter."

"Fine. Now what's it about? You can settle matters with me at any time, my good man. You think the boss has time for such things?"

"First," said Peter Monkemann, "I am not your good man, understand? Second -- I want to see Sigfried Lowenstein personally, understand? And as quickly as possible!" Now there was hardly a doubt that this young man would achieve his goal. But before that something new cropped up.

The chief clerk became officious, straightened his crooked back, and said condescendingly: "Obviously you didn't come here on a matter that concerns you personally. Certainly you have come at the bidding of your parents. So you will first have to bring us a certificate stating that you have authorization to act for them."

"But I dropped in only in connection with a possible reduction of the interest and I am here at my mother's request!" Peter protested.

"Precisely!" replied the chief clerk, bowing his head. "We must have that in writing, because in the last analysis anybody can say anything."

So Peter returned home without result, but he was sure that he would not give in. Not he. And when he reappeared with the required authorization and the police certification of his mother's authorization was demanded, he also obtained that, although now he was seething with rage and he had to make a strong effort to control himself in order not to fly at the graybeard.

At last he stood before Sigfried Lowenstein. This at least could not be prevented.

He was sitting, broad and bulky, in a big chair behind a writing desk overloaded with piles of documents and papers. His bloated face revealed cheek pouches. Lachrymal sacs like stuffed pillows hung under his oval, ink-colored, shining bullet-shaped eyes. There was no perceptible neck; the cranium seemed to sit directly between the shoulders, which were pulled up high On the fat torso.

He did not stir when Peter Monkemann entered. He hardly raised his head.

Peter said his little piece: Twelve per cent was too much. Would not half that figure be enough? It did not exactly sound subservient.

"What's that, please?" asked the fat man. He seemed not to have understood at all, and perhaps had not listened.

The young man repeated what he had said.

"Who let you in to see me?" the fat man asked, and raised his head.

"Nobody! I have come to see you so that you yourself can decide whether a reduction ought to be made."

"A reduction," came the echo in the deepest astonishment. "Is that correct? ..Did I hear 'reduction'!"

"Yes, that's correct! After all, you must admit that twelve per cent means ..." He wanted to say "usury." But he controlled himself. Perhaps by being prudent he could still attain something. "Twelve per cent, in the long run, means an impossibility for us, since my father died a short time ago and at home we simply have no income!" he concluded.

The other again bent over his desk. "Go to my chief clerk," he said.

"But I just came from there," the younger man remonstrated. "He can't make a decision on that matter. I would like to hear from you yourself about what's to happen now. I was detained long enough back there. I'm simply tired of being shunted back and forth, do you understand?"

No -- Lowenstein did not understand the tone at all. Not at all. ... Rather, he raised his head again toward the speaker in disbelief and in utter surprise. He saw the other's gaze focused on him, in which hatred and contempt were clearly expressed. At this very moment the youth was forced to think: His face looks like a pig's snout; indeed, like a pig's snout!

No -- Sigfried Lowenstein understood not a word of all that. Who let this fellow push his way into his private office? This in itself was an act of unheard-of insolence.... So he at last removed the long- xtinguished cigar from his big fish-mouth and then he straightened up slightly in his chair, as much as was possible in view of his extraordinary obesity. And then he said: "Young man, if you speak to me any further in that tone of voice, I'll have my house servant throw you out, do you understand? As for the rest, who are you, and what do you want from me anyway? Do you think I've nothing else to do except listen to your trivialities?"

Peter Monkemann stood there and stared at him, repressing his anger. Did he not come here as a petitioner? If he now gave in to his inner impulse, if he kicked this fat sack in the belly and landed a punch on his pig's snout, then the whole mess would really get worse. Then the mortgage would be foreclosed -- that was for sure. Then too the police might come with rubber truncheons and handcuffs and he could kiss his studies and his future good-by.

So he just stood there, swallowed hard, and quivered a little.... What did the Jewish pig mean just now? Call the house servant, have him thrown out ... ?

"Be careful, mister," said Peter Monkemann with difficulty. "It takes two to throw me out, so far as I know. And it will not be wholly undangerous, but ..." Now he controlled himself, stiff and steel-like in his bearing. "Besides, it's probably completely unnecessary. I'll disappear without further ado as soon as you agree to a reduction."

Sigfried Lowenstein was moved by an inexplicable feeling. The instinct of his race told him that here really a hidden danger was in the offing, and he always got out of the way of physical danger -- this also was taught to him by his instinct -- like all the members of his race for millennia before him.

So he turned the whole matter into a stupid and bold phraseology, thus toning down the threatening scene. So, smirking broadly and striking his fleshy, ring-studded hand on the table, he said: "May the righteous God strike me dead if I am in the wrong. But I still hear 'reduction.' How can you imagine such a thing? Do you believe, for instance, that it can be done just like that? I didn't find money on the streets either! I don't deal with interest, young man ... whatever you may think!"

"But after all you live only from trade," the young man almost roared, "and an interest of twelve percent is profiteering. It's usury and nothing else!"

Now the lad had called things by their right names and now he had certainly lost his chance.

Sigfried Lowenstein withdrew his arm from the flat part of the desk. He stuck the cigar into his big fish-mouth, leaned back, and placed the thumbs of his two hands jauntily behind his vest. Circumspectly, calmly, and quite the master of this situation, Sigfried Lowenstein said:

"Let me tell you something, young man. I could sue you for accusing me of usury. But I won't do it. I'm a businessman, understand? But to teach you a little lesson, the mortgage is foreclosed, understand? And if your mother doesn't bring the whole sum -- and she never will -- if the money isn't there on the dot, then there will be an auction, understand? Then I'll auction off the place.... It's my good and proper right."

Peter Monkemann took one step forward. He looked threateningly at the fat man, looked squarely into his ugly, fat face.

"You won't do that," he said tonelessly. His fists clenched and unclenched convulsively, but he himself was unaware of it. "You won't do it," he repeated, and stood up against the front of the desk.

Lowenstein's face paled. Suddenly he had a muddy-gray coloration. He expressed an unutterable fear. His eyes almost rolled out of their sockets, the pulsing of the spongy veins was perceptible on his temples, and one bead of perspiration after another arranged itself on his wrinkled forehead, as high as the leather-colored dome of his cranium. The master of the situation suddenly had lamentably collapsed, and despite his physical dimensions he now presented only a pathetic scrap of a man. He rose from his deep chair, drew backward slightly, while his hand stretched out over the flat surface of the writing desk and pressed the buzzer. "Take your paws off the buzzer!" ordered his visitor, and fury glowered behind his forced composure, but the other kept on pressing the buzzer vigorously and now he suddenly began to scream: "This is a threat ... blackmail, yes indeed ... blackmail ... !"

His voice tumbled over itself. The word echoed through the room and the man repeated it, meaninglessly, as if crazed with fear. He was still screaming it when the door opened and his house servant stood on the threshold. Peter Monkemann stepped back. His anger had collapsed like a house of cards at the sight of the frantic fear of this miserable wretch. Now he was the master of the situation. This ridiculous scene, in no way justified, suddenly brought him back to reason.

The broker pulled himself together, and he regained his bearing with such swiftness that Peter Monkemann was filled with astonishment. He pointed to the lad. "Take the man to the door," he said, but his voice was still not wholly clear. It sounded something like the rattle of a beast. "It's not necessary," answered Peter Monkemann, "I'll find the way back by myself." His look had the effect of preventing the servant from coming any nearer. "You will certainly think the matter over," he continued as he was about to leave the room. Nevertheless, when he closed the door he heard the man saying, insolently and provocatively as during the beginning of the dispute: "I won't reconsider it at all, it will be foreclosed ... immediately! And then -- legal execution of the foreclosure!"

The young man hesitated imperceptibly. Should he ... should he not? This scoundrel -- just minutes ago he was a whimpering bundle of flesh -- was baring his teeth again. Peter Monkemann still held the doorknob in his hand, literally uncomprehending. Where does the fellow get such insolence? But naturally -- now he has a witness, his house slave, his protector.

On the steps he said to the servant: "Give your Sigfried a nice greeting from me. Do that immediately and tell him that he will really get to know Peter Monkemann if he tries to carry out his intention."

But that did not mean too much; he knew that very well. As he sat in the train on his journey homeward, he thought about the case. He had achieved nothing. Of this there was no doubt. On the contrary, it would have been much better if he had remained at home. Now things were worse than before. This Manichean would make short shrift of it; he would push for legal foreclosure, because these carrion vultures have a greater knowledge of conditions in the money market than anybody else. Money indeed is scarce in these bad times. He would not be able to find anyone to refinance the mortgage. Things are in a sad way in the German Fatherland, he said to himself in discouragement.... In a word, it makes you vomit! What could be the reason? he brooded. We won the battles in the war, but we lost the war. And it was no different with the Freikorps. [1] We scattered the Red pack, but we didn't triumph at all. On the contrary, afterward, when the work was done, there was the kick in the ass from the top.

Other people triumphed. Just look around you! You see that everywhere.... Where do they sit, do you mean? Stupid question! Rather, you should say, where don't they sit? For there is no high position, no government office, no authority, no trade union, no business office, no management, no board of directors, and no government in which they do not make their way. The same whose necks you wanted to break, to be sure only in harmless song, you stupid novices. [2]

Your Freikorps fought against the red terror, against the Communist gang of murderers, from east to west, from the Baltic to the Ruhr, but you forgot the Jew. And today he is breaking your neck, and sometimes it is twelve per cent. Today you sit below, and he sits on top. And who knows? Perhaps it would have been better if you had let Spartacus [3] in. Doesn't one often expel the Devil with Beelzebub?

"No," murmured the young man. For after all it is one and the same gang -- it's chips from the same block. Have you forgotten how the city commandants of March 1920 looked? Oh, it's a cursed world! ...

[Peter Monkemann now definitely leaves home for study in Berlin. On his way he passes again through Lowenstein's town.]

The next train would not be leaving for two hours, and for one who was so immersed in himself as this traveler, this was a long time. He did not want to fall once more into brooding. Instead, he wanted to be alert and open to all that was new. He wanted to burn all the ships behind him, strike the tents, the past was to be a dead thing, he would march with a light pack. With an assault pack, so to speak, because otherwise he would not move forward fast enough and this he must do.

What then should he do in these two hours? Naturally -- the only right thing. Obviously, to go to Sigfried Lowenstein and tell him: "In order that you may know what's what -- the money for the mortgage is ready. It will be paid off and then, praise God, we shall have nothing more to do with each other. Now you can swindle others with your twelve per cent. You usurer. And there won't be a legal execution of the foreclosure either. I've taken care of that, you Jew!"

He could not very well deny himself this triumph. Besides, it is a good thing to do anyway. Without any clear declarations, this fat fellow would probably try new tricks with Peter's womenfolk.

Peter Monkemann made his way up to his private office. The Jew was terrified no little: "Are you here again already?"

"It's me, Mr. Sigfried Lowenstein. To your regret, I must declare to you that I have the money for the refinancing of the mortgage. It's all over with usurious rates of interest. You have swindled yourself out of business. At least with us, Mr. Sigfried."

He smiled. Fat and spiteful. "So," he said slowly, almost enjoying it, "so you found a stupid person. I was mistaken ... it can happen ... so much money -- so much money -- but whom have you conned? -- if it's true!"

He didn't say any more. Peter Monkemann leaned over the desk, grabbed him by the collar with one hand, shook him from one side to the other, and pushed him back and forth. Then in a sudden, flaming,
unbridled rage he hurled a word at him that will remain a word of abuse and insult as long as the world goes round and round: "You Jew! -- You Jew! -- You dirty Jew!"

Lowenstein made a rattling sound. But he didn't scream. He didn't scream even when the angry bull let him go.

He hunched himself -- ashen-pale and in a state of collapse -- in the big chair. Then with a tired movement he picked up two shirt buttons that had fallen off and which were lying on the desk. When Peter was about to leave the room, he noticed that the Jew's ring-studded hand was picking up the telephone receiver.

Now's the time, thought the young man.

Sigfried Lowenstein thought it over. What had happened? A chap, a goyim, had screamed a word that always strikes out at him more painfully than the lash of a whip. As true as it may be.... And this chap had grabbed him by the collar, not exactly very gently, oh not at all, and only because he had used the expression "conned"? That was a bit thick, a bit thick, but to call the police for this reason? Ridiculous! Sigfried Lowenstein had other methods. Methods which gave him a chance to vent his lustful rages and at the same time brought in more money.

From Tudel Weller, Rabauken! Peter Monkemann haut sich durch (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1938), pp. 14-15, 17-23, 29-31.

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Notes:

1. The Free Corps, army units that refused to disband after World War I and fought first in the Baltic and Silesia and then against the Communist governments in Bavaria and Saxony. They were also active against the French in the Ruhr (see p. 94).

2. This reference is to the threat against Jews in the Nazis' "Horst Wesser" song.

3. The Spartacus revolt was a Communist uprising in Berlin (January 1919) .

Events at the Prussian State Theater, by ECKART VON NASO

Although mostly already "coordinated" and "Aryanized," the press and public had lost nothing of the spontaneous sureness of their judgment, and when winter returned, with prudent regret they were forced to realize that the Staatsbuhne, which was much quarreled over and nonetheless interesting, was in danger of becoming a philistine provincial theater. At that time they could still express such criticism; later it was no longer possible.

Specifically, Goebbels invented "art observation" in the place of criticism. One, to be sure, had the right to "observe" -- but was forbidden to pronounce a judgment. Thus criticism was stripped of all meaning. The "art creators," which was the name given to actors, composers, painters, sculptors, and writers, no longer saw themselves.  here was no mirror. They did not know whether their accomplishments were good or bad. All one learned was that they had accomplished something, though the masters of the journalistic craft could smuggle in the carefully camouflaged truth between the lines. Remarkably enough, one was allowed to praise. Obviously this was not a judgment, but observation. And the whole invention thereupon led to removing the, in part, pathetic propaganda plays in brown uniform from the danger of adverse criticism.

Many funny things happened at that time. Thus at first Charlemagne was prohibited as a dramatic personage because he had proved himself to be a race-alien "Saxon-slaughterer" and had slaughtered with Christian chauvinism. Then upon further consideration one convinced oneself that after all he had certainly accomplished something for German interests: so Carolus Magnus was again a dramatic persona grata. On the other hand, Cromwell was regarded as harmless and was liked by the Fuhrer. Real mushroom cultures of Cromwell sprouted from the earth. Julius Caesar also seemed to be much in demand, although he had come to a questionable end. But one probably thought if one could go as far as he had, the Ides of March no longer played a role. But it was not at all easy to find one's way through this maze of prohibitions and desiderata, because often enough the desiderata, for undiscoverable reasons, were sooner or later placed on the prohibition list.

The tragedy was permeated with farcical events. Among the 2400 manuscripts which were sent in to the script department in 1933, among which were 500 dramas about Arminius and Thesnulda, [1] there was also a bloodthirsty, anti-Jewish play of an undiscussable kind. "Be careful," said Johst, [2] "I know the author." I dictated a polite letter of rejection. Johst signed it -- not a pleasant function, which soon enough was to be assigned to me. An angry letter came back which read something like the following: "Esteemed Party Comrade Johst! Do you dare to send back my play? Don't you know that I have a party number in two figures -- and what do you have? A party number in six or seven figures! I will file a protest with the Fuhrer. Heil Hitler!" We both had to laugh. "That's how they are," said Johst. "The party number decides all." Yes, these were the farcical events of a tragic time....

Since the director had suddenly given up apprentice, journeyman, and master tests, the producer [3] now needed only to give free play to his motor powers in order to bring the machine to high speed. His secret was that he did not start out from the world of literature but from the world of low comedy. He had and still has a flair for the theater, indeed for the primitivity of the theater, if it is real and kindles a spark. A man named Shakespeare had the same. He did not believe in ghosts; he himself had said so in his great monologue in Hamlet: "... from whose world no traveller returns...." Despite this he began the play with a ghost scene, because he understood the theater and knew that a ghost on the stage has a sure-fire effect.

The producer Grundgens wanted a Dionysian, not a literary, theater -- certainly not the philosophizing theater of the deep thinking to which he gave a very funny name in which only the syllable "deep" was repeated. He also knew that tragedy once had arisen from the intoxication and bewitchment of the wine god, in order to couple play-instinct and poetry. Therefore he decided to play Scribe's Glass of Water with more determination than his friends could assume at that time, who urgently advised him against such an old, used-up "theatrical" antique.

Grundgens did not let himself be side-tracked from his opinion. The theater first of all needed a public, and the public, weary of "blood and soil," had again deserted our theater. It had to be won back. This, however, could be done only by giving the play program an electrical charge. It the tensions were perceptible, the sparks would fly further.... This bold experiment succeeded. Kleist's Hermannsschlacht, otherwise no play for the public, performed three days after Glass of Water, was drawn into the success of the witty Scribean dialectic. With such a two-pronged attack, which forged a connection between the play instinct and poetry, the theater became once again an interesting place. People talked about it; they sensed the vibration. The long line at the box office, which formerly had looked like a blind worm, now finally resembled the legendary Mittgart, [4] which circled around the Gendarmenmarkt the way its predecessor had encircled the world.

Even the premieres were hits. Thus I had the dramaturgist's pleasure to assist at the birth of two playwrights who had stumbled upon the theater from other fields: the epic poet Hans Friedrich Blunck and the lyric poet Hans Schwarz. Of course, Blunck had also written lyrics of great form, as is proved by his Ballads. Schwarz was the editor of the collected works of Moeller van den Bruck, whom the Nazi state at first had praised to the skies.... [5]

Be it as it may: Blunck's Country in the Twilight with the man-and-wife acting team of Kayssler and Helene Fehdmer and The Rebel in England by Hans Schwarz with Hermine Korner as Elizabeth and Paul Hartmann as Essex, were impressive visiting cards. The great representative drama had again replaced the peasant play.

From Eckart von Naso, Ich liebe das Leben: Erinnerungen aus funf Jahrzehnten (Hamburg: Wolfgang Kruger Verlag, 1953), pp. 617-618, 648-649. (Reprinted by permission.)

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Notes:

1. Arminius was a Germanic hero who defeated the Roman legions at the battle of the Teutoburger Forest (9 A.D.). Thesnulda was his wife.

2. See page 135.

3. Gustav Grundgens (1899-1963), perhaps Germany's best-known actor, became the producer of the Prussian State Theater in Berlin, over which Goring maintained control.

4. The serpent which, according to Germanic legend, entwines itself around the globe.

5. For Blunck, see page 135. Hans Schwarz (b. 1890) refined the technique of the Greek chorus in his plays, a device much used in the Nazi liturgy.

Playbills of the Herne City Theater, 1936-1940

In July 1937 the chief office of the National Socialist Cultural Community was transferred to the Strength Through Joy organization. The local theater directorate, naturally, announced a new winter program, but it could not carry it out. As a result, the performances were sponsored by the Strength Through Joy organization. This led, as far as such was still possible, to a further superficialization of the program, which in 1937·38 unfolded as follows:

The city now also involved itself in the new theater season and granted subsidies to the Strength Through Joy organization, without thereby improving the quality of the program.

Winter program 1938-39:

Program for 1939-40:

Thus the level had sunk more and more; the program contained almost only propaganda pieces, comedies, operettas. If to this one adds the cabaret-like performances, a cultural nadir was reached below which one could no longer sink. This is astonishing in view of the fact that the National Socialists in other cities promoted an authentic cultural life or at least guaranteed it. Thus during these years the Stadt-theater in Bochum, under its director, Saladin Schmitt, attained a new high cultural level with its cycles of Kleist, Grabbe, [9] and others. One must assume that the taste of the people responsible for cultural life in Herne was so shallow and bad that they were not able to offer the people anything of a special character. During the war years an attempt was made at first to carry out a program, but after the proclamation of total war, actors and musicians were integrated into the war economy.

Program for 1940-41:

From Herne, 1933-1945: Die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, edited by Hermann Meyerhoff (Herne, 1963), p. 63.

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Notes:

1. Gerhard Menzel (b. 1894) wrote Scharnhorst in 1935. Scharnhorst (1755-1813), a Prussian general, reformed the army by introducing universal military service. It was in 1935 that Hitler reintroduced conscription in Germany.

2. A realistic war play (1929) by C. R. Sheriff.

3. August Hinrichs (b. 1879) wrote books and plays in native peasant dialect.

4. Written in 1913 on a theme by the nineteenth-century author Eduard Morike.

5. Konrad Dreher founded this group in 1892.

6. Konrad Dreher, after World War I, continued with his own "folk theater" ensemble.

7. Dario Niccodemi (1874-1934). a writer of comedies. This, his most famous, was written in 1915.

8. Karl Zeller (1842-1898), Austrian composer.

9. Both Kleist and Grabbe were chosen as patriotic nineteenth-century writers. Kleist was acclaimed wholeheartedly by the Nazis as the "conscience of the nation," Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801-1836) wrote "heroic" historical dramas. The Nazis created a special "Grabbe week" in 1936.

The Winter Program of the German Radio, 1936

Munich, October 28. Reich broadcasting director Hadamovsky, [1] at the order of Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels, in the main broadcasting studio of the German radio broadcasting system of Munich, announced the winter program of the German radio to the directors and co-workers of the radio broadcasting system and representatives of the party and the government. According to the Reich broadcasting director, the main purpose of future programming is to create joy and to solidify the community. Hence the new program is called "Joy and Community." The German Labor Front and the Strength Through Joy organization are to be drawn into the program through a uniform regulation of work breaks, an energetic propaganda campaign among workers, and the shaping of leisure evening hours.

This year, for the first time, a preliminary program containing all the important broadcasts of the winter will be given to the German public and to radio listeners abroad.

The program contains the political broadcasts of the Reich broadcasting directorate and the major radio features and broadcasts of the Reich broadcasting system and the German short-wave broadcasting system. The major political broadcasts of the winter can be found in the section entitled "The Party Has the Floor!" The programs for the work breaks of the German workers are to be broadcast under the motto "Joy in the Plant and at Home." The work-break broadcasts in the Reich railway repair works at Munich-Freimann will begin with a festival under the slogan "Music and Dance in the Plant." The work-break concerts will take place from 6 A.M. to 8 A.M., from 8:30 A.M. to 9:30 A.M., and from 12 A.M. to 1 P.M. Plant managers are urged to cooperate in this program by arranging work breaks in the plants in such a way that they correspond with this schedule.

During the winter the German radio will hold evening leisure hours in which conductors and soloists of the first rank will interpret important musical works. These broadcasts will also be transmitted to factories. Under the title "Peasantry and Landscape," provisions have been made for general broadcasts on the German peasantry along with agricultural news. The Hitler Youth and the National Socialist Teachers' Association will jointly sponsor the "Hour of the Young Nation" on Wednesdays and the "Morning Celebrations" on Sundays.

The Reich broadcasting director gave details on the music program of the radio station. According to him, the music program of the radio broadcasting system has been continually broadened since the seizure of power by National Socialism, increasing from 25,000 broadcasts in 1932 to more than 40,000 broadcasts in 1935. In the future, overtures, feature programs, and the great dramatic works of world literature are to replace lectures and readings more frequently than has been the case up to now.

The Deutschlandsender [2] is to visit the Reich Autobahn, the airports of Lufthansa, the German coal- mining districts and the blast furnaces, porcelain factories and amber-laundries, cloth and linen weavers, herring ships and herring fishery centers, fishing ports and refrigeration plants, the auxiliary Bavarian troop and the motorized troop "Deutschland" of the NSDAP, and in addition provide a series of radio reports on the NSDAP and its organizations. The section "Germany Calls the World!" contains a summary of the important broadcasts of the German short-wave broadcasting system. The German short-wave system broadcasts forty hours daily. Six separate programs are especially designed for the various areas of the world: Southern Asia and Australia, Eastern Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, and North America.

The radio broadcasting system in Germany today includes about 8,000,000 owners of radio sets, and counts on about 30,000,000 listeners. There are about 70,000 broadcasting hours and over 250,000 individual broadcasts. In the last years the number of listeners has increased by about 1,000,000 annually.

From the Frankfurter Zeitung, Oct. 29, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

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Notes:

1. Eugen Hadamovsky was the first National Socialist Reich director of radio broadcasting (Reichsendeleiter).

2. Main central radio transmission station.

Fundamental Features of Radio Programming, 1938

Berlin, August 9. Each year the members of the German radio broadcasting industry come together from all the districts of the Reich to meet in Berlin during the great Radio Broadcasting Exhibition. This year's gathering, which was held on Tuesday in the meeting room of the Kroll Opera House, received its special slogan from Dr. Goebbels with his declaration that "Germany must become the strongest radio broadcasting country in the world."

Reich Superintendent Glasmeier [1] read his report on the basic features of the programming of the German radio broadcasting system. His main point was that the basic attitude of the radio broadcasting system is National Socialist. Moreover, on the basis of this attitude the radio broadcasting system must strive to include the whole range of public life today, to give it support where necessary, especially the enormous program of the Strength Through Joy organization, the great Winter Aid programs, and the activities of the individual branches of the movement.

In connection with the problem of light dance music versus music of greater artistic value, a question which has been widely discussed among radio listeners, Reich Superintendent Glasmeier declared that the radio broadcasting system has held to a healthy middle course, which it would continue to follow in the future.

Reich Superintendent Glasmeier sharply opposed the reinfiltration, by way of the "humorous" sketch, of the destructive Jewish spirit into the radio broadcasting system. We cannot have a situation in which the leaders of the movement extol the sacredness of marriage and the ethos of the German soldier, who must risk his life and blood for the Fatherland, while in the evening these very values are insulted and ridiculed in "colorful" entertainment sketches with the corroding sarcasm of so-called variety programs. (Loud applause.)

Superintendent Glasmeier addressed an urgent appeal to his musical colleagues not to fall asleep at their desks, filing cabinets, and music cabinets, but to set forth on journeys of discovery in the field of German musical literature, to find unknown precious pearls, which can be transmitted to the German people, works of the past as well as works of contemporary creative artists.

At the conclusion of his discussion, Superintendent Glasmeier distinguished between the tasks of the Reich broadcasting stations and the tasks of the Deutschlandsender. [2] The Reich broadcasting stations, which originated because of the particularism of the individual German states, in the new Reich have a twofold task: on the one hand, they must represent their territory; on the other, they must always be conscious of the fact that they are Reich radio stations, that they are the heralds of the idea of the Reich and that they must contribute their share, that clan and provincial borders are increasingly vanishing, and that in all German districts it is the German man who inhabits the German soil.

The Deutschlandsender, however, must present a wholly different face. It is the representative of the German Reich government, of the National Socialist movement, in short a representative of German culture. It must not attend to the needs of the individual territory as such; it must portray the face of the whole German land.

After Dr. Glasmeier's discussion, which received enthusiastic applause, the President of the Reich Radio Chamber, Kriegler, took the floor. In his speech he pointed out that the Radio Broadcasting Exhibition had never before met with such a great response from the public. Obviously, much of this was due to the new "German small receiver 1938," which was a truly socialistic community accomplishment of the radio broadcasting directorate and the radio industry.

Today about 54 per cent of the households in the Reich are linked to the radio network. Of the rest, only a relatively small part has remained outside broadcasting range because of disinterest. The majority of the population, however, for financial reasons has not been in a position to buy the 65- Reichsmark Volk-receiver and in addition to pay the monthly radio fee of 2 Reichsmarks. Our special  promotional efforts and concern must be directed at these racial comrades.

From the National Zeitung (Essen), Aug. 10, 1938. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

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Notes:

1. Heinrich Glasmeier, director-general of the German Broadcasting Company (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft). Before 1933 he was an archivist in Westphalia.

2. See page 192.

German Films for Venice, 1938

German films will be strongly represented at this year's Biennale exhibition. The following films will be shown:

"Olympia-Film [1] ("Feast of the Peoples," "Feast of Beauty"); Homeland; The Model Husband; Furlough on Word of Honor; Traveling People; Youth.

Other films to be shown are the documentaries The Bee State; Feathered Seaside Guests on the Baltic Sea; Riemenschneider, the Master of Wurzburg; German Racing Cars in Front; Fliers, Radio Operators, Cannoneers; Black Forest Melody; Splendor of Color at the Bottom of the Sea; Speed Streets; Pilots of the Air; Nature in Technique; Cuttlefish; Moorlands; Youth in Dance.

From Der Mittag (Dusseldorf), July 20, 1938. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

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Notes:

1. Taken at the 1936 Olympic Games.

The Film Public Is Not So Stupid

At the Gloria-Palast in Berlin one can witness a remarkable event -- a film in which the leading lady is something less than a movie beauty. Whenever this actress, who has none of the charms of Hollywood, appears, the audience is enthusiastic and applauds at the end of each scene. We would advise all film producers to attend one of the ordinary evening performances. They would then see that the usual answer, that the film public demands platinum blondes, girls with mascara around the eyes, and a sexy look even as in toothpaste ads, is a poor answer. The excellent film at the Gloria- Palast is called Masquerade, and the lady is Paula Wessely, the most outstanding of the new young actresses of the stage. Here, in her first appearance on the screen, she plays the part of a simple young girl unaffectedly and directly, with an astounding power to portray human beings. A stir of excitement runs through the theater -- this is the impact her acting has upon people. Why? This is not the first time that such acting has been seen. But it is a rare event, even in German films, when one can look to the great actress, rather than to the charming starlet for one's enjoyment. This success has proven the Vienna Film Society right: the public is not as stupid as we are led to believe. Sometimes it exhibits perfectly good instinct -- for instance, when it laughed during the deadly serious scenes of a certain new film drama that was based on mechanical hodge-podge and banal dialogue. Or when, as here, it applauds the achievement of a real actress and finally leaves the theater visibly moved to its innermost being.

Today in Germany we should ponder this, and instead of sensational effects we should allow real artistic accomplishment to come to the fore. Unfortunately, this seldom happens. But it can be done earnestly and -- this is very important for the film -- cheerfully. Then we will once more attain the leading place that is due to us even in the eyes of the most demanding people.

From the Dusseldorfer Allegemeine Zeitung, Aug. 26, 1934. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

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