homogeneous’ national community united by the new law was supposed to turn
against: significantly, the ‘völkisch legal renewal’ concentrated in its theoretical
discussions upon the ‘unmasking’ of Western and particularly of ‘Jewish’
jurisprudence. 42
In legislative practice, significantly, attempts to codify völkisch legal renewal
in a comprehensive legal reform did not go beyond the drafting stage, while at
the same time an extensive ‘special law’ for ‘ethnic aliens’ (Fremdvölkische) was
created, one which was to be extraordinarily efficient in the practice of
persecution. 43
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
In the natural sciences, attempts to establish a ‘German physics’, a ‘German
chemistry’, or a ‘German mathematics’ were limited to relatively small groups of
researchers, and proved finally to be without consequences. Only the devotees of
‘German physics’ managed temporarily to secure a series of important posts for
themselves. Exactly what the specifically ‘German’ aspect of the individual sub-
jects was supposed to be remained nebulous. While the representatives of ‘Ger-
man’ physics turned against the supposed supremacy of a ‘Jewish physics’,
meaning the theory of relativity in particular, and the devotees of ‘German
mathematics’ also sought to distinguish themselves from a ‘Jewish mathematics’,
German chemistry, as a unified ‘theory of matter’, resisted a supposedly ‘Western’
foreign domination of the subject.
The definitive breakthrough of ideas of racial hygiene in medicine and their
contribution to a ‘weeding-out’ population policy (closely bound up with psych-
iatry, social sciences, educational theory, and jurisprudence) illustrates, on the
other hand, the immediate relevance of racist paradigms based on exclusion
within academic disciplines for social-political practice.
This survey has made it clear that the ‘de-Judaization’ (Entjudung) of the
sciences was not accomplished simply by sacking a few Jewish scientists or
removing them from the educational canon. In fact it was a matter of giving the
individual subjects an authentically ‘German’ character via a comprehensive
distancing ‘from the Jewish spirit’ and other ‘foreign influences’. The survey has
also made it clear that, without permanent reference to the rejected Jewish or
foreign ‘Other’, the paradigm shift to a Germanocentric scholarship could not be
achieved, indeed that the planned theoretical reorientation was largely exhausted
in that distancing. The Entjudung and völkisch-racial cleansing of the discipline in
question was thus—for want of ‘positive rationales’—effectively constitutive; it
was not a single action, but a permanent and continuous distancing process which
served to conceal the lack of any substantial content in the ‘German’ renewal.
The intended internal reorientation of the individual subjects succeeded, as we
have seen, to various degrees; where its success was modest, it was often limited to
rhetorical gestures and remained without significant consequences for practical
academic work. However, through the intended Germanocentric conversion of
disciplines or partial disciplines—even if this was purely declamatory in
character—the theoretical discussions within the individual subjects and thus
their identity were also influenced, new structures and career opportunities were
created; here lay the starting point for National Socialist academics not only to
establish themselves in the individual disciplines, but substantially to change the
character of the individual subjects. The keyword Entjudung was the starting
point for this process of change.
Beyond these theoretical discussions—and the survey has also made that
clear—the Entjudung and Germanocentric transformation of individual discip-
lines also had considerable practical consequences: academics who allowed their
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81
work to be governed by racist paradigms substantially opened up new areas of
work for themselves: the definition and exclusion of those of foreign race.
The Entjudung of Cultural Life as the
Precondition for a ‘German Culture’
The National Socialist project of creating an authentically ‘German’ culture is
inseparably bound up with efforts to achieve a consistent Entjudung of cultural life
as a whole; indeed, to a considerable extent such negative measures constituted the
whole of National Socialist cultural policy.
According to the National Socialist vision, ‘culture was the highest expression
of the creative powers of a people’:44 every artwork of any distinction could accordingly be interpreted as the expression of primal racial-völkisch powers.
Every ‘clearly distinctive race’, as Hitler said in a speech to the Reich Chamber
of Culture in 1934, had ‘its own signature in the book of art’—citing as an
exception ‘Jewry’, which is ‘utterly without its own artistic productive capability’. 45
According to this idea, the liberation of authentically ‘German’ culture from the
Jewish—that is, unproductive, parasitic, alien, corrosive, and finally destructive—
influence formed a leitmotif of cultural-political discourse in the National Socialist
regime.
However, attempts to define the ‘essence’ of art rooted in the German or Aryan
‘racial soul’ remained diffuse:46 all efforts to free ‘German’ music or ‘German’
painting from the context of the European tradition were inevitably destined to
fail, while ambitious contemporary attempts to produce ‘native’ (arteigene)
artworks appropriate to National Socialism were not as a rule convincingly able
to fulfil this claim. The artistic production of the era generally suffered from a lack
of originality and ended up predominantly in the production of kitsch.
Consequently, as in many other policy areas, the National Socialist cultural
policy makers had no option but to execute the intended homogenization nega-
tively, to produce ‘pure’ German culture above all by means of the permanent
cleansing of ‘alien’ art. This tendency to define National Socialist art in negative
terms became more intense the greater the discrepancy between the bombastic
proclamations of a new, National Socialist aesthetic and the actually mediocre
products of National Socialist art production grew: the ‘cleansing principle’ now
became an ‘absolutely exclusive compulsion to purification’. 47
In this cleansing policy, the removal of the supposedly dominant Jewish
influence in German cultural life was very much in the foreground. This was
not only a matter of the exclusion of Jewish artists and the prohibition or
destruction of their artworks; the Entjudung of German culture also concerned
the exclusion of Jews active in the purveyance of culture, since as ‘cultural
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
administrators’, agents, critics, dealers, and so on, they were made primarily
responsible for the distribution and promotion of undesirable modern, ‘degener-
ate’ (entartet) or simply merely ‘foreign’ art. 48 The Jews, as ‘primarily a business
-minded people’, according to Hans Severus Ziegler, General Manager of the
National Theatre in Weimar and a leading Nazi cultural policy maker, at the
opening of the ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition in 1938, had turned ‘cultural and
artistic objects, like the objects of politics, into business commodities’; they had
succeeded ‘in cutting off the Volk from its creative forces, from its gifts and its
genius, and thus removing it from the most vivid examples of race and Volkstum’;
the result was the ‘terrible alienation from its better self, from its own essence,
from all historic values, from its creative personality’. 49 Hence the ‘removal of Jews from cultural life’ could not exempt ‘art-dealers, cinema owners, publishers and
booksellers’.
With the tightening of the conditions of admission into the Reich Chamber of
Culture in the spring of 1934, the ground was laid for the definitive Entjudung
of cultural life as a whole:50 the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Letters) began the process in 1935 with the exclusion of its Jewish members, and
other chambers followed this model over the coming months and in the course of
1936.51 For economic reasons above all, however, a series of exceptional regulations for Jewish artists were put into force. Moreover, Goebbels did not at first manage
to exclude Jews completely from the professions of the ‘culture business’; the
ministerial bureaucracy slowed down this process, so that prohibitions on Jewish
cinema-owners, art and antique dealers, and other professions from working
came into effect only from 1937.52 The existing exceptions repeatedly offered National Socialist cultural policy makers, with Propaganda Minister Goebbels at
their head, the opportunity finally to demand a 100 per cent ‘Jew-free’ cultural
life; 53 it was the ‘Jewish question’, still unresolved in spite of all efforts to the contrary, that according to this view stood in the way of a truly homogeneous
‘German culture’. In fact it was only after the pogrom of November 1938 that this
cleansing process came to an end with the abolition of the last admission regu-
lations for Jewish artists, as well as with the removal of the last Jewish cultural
enterprises. 54
However, that certainly did not mean an end to the efforts to achieve the
Entjudung of German cultural life. This was because the controlling cultural
political institutions—the Propaganda Ministry, the Reich Chamber of Culture,
‘The Rosenberg Bureau’, the Party Censorship Board, and others—had, following
the watchword of Entjudung or ‘removal of Jewish influence’, created an instru-
ment that could be deployed almost at will, to take action against unpopular
artistic trends, predominantly against representatives of modern art, and could
open up the culture industry to artists close to the Party. 55 This process had still not come to an end with the removal of the Jews: as late as 1942, for example, a
National Socialist author recorded the continuing after-effects of ‘unworldly and
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83
Jew-lovers lost to their own kind (artvergessen)’, who had continued the Jewish
‘demolition work’ even after the assumption of power, and had to be hunted down
as ‘slaves’ and ‘comrades’ of the Jews. 56 The new ‘German’ culture could only arise out of a far-reaching cleansing process, permanently dissociating itself from
‘foreign’ influences that had already penetrated far into the German Volk.
The fact that the ‘first major German art exhibition’ showing Nazi-inspired
art, in 1937, was opened at the same time as the propaganda exhibition ‘Entar-
tete Kunst’ (degenerate art), and in the same place, in Munich, 57 reveals the complementary function that the Entjudung of the culture industry and the
construction of a ‘German’ culture had: the new ‘German’ art was not explicable
in its own terms, but needed a constant reference to the negative example of the
‘degenerate’ trend in art. Although the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition showed
primarily non-Jewish artists, in his speech at the Reich Chamber of Culture’s
annual congress in
58
1937
Goebbels significantly singled out the exhibition as a
striking example of ‘how deeply the pernicious Jewish spirit has penetrated
German cultural life’—a striking example, in fact, of the usefulness of the idea
of the Verjudung of art as an all-purpose weapon against unpopular trends
in art.
The programmatic guidelines for German film, published by a Nazi cultural
functionary in 1934, make it clear how ‘German character’ was to unfold on screen
through the removal of actors ‘of non-German descent’: ‘Of particular importance
for the education of all Germans into national consciousness will be the depiction
of the German character in film. National German film should show the German
Volk people of its own kind, whose characters and motives it understands, whose
words are addressed to it from the soul. Hence the law requires the actors to be of
German descent. In future, therefore, actors will appear on the screen in whom the
German will see his own race embodied, and who teach him to love and honour
his nation. German people, German atmosphere, German disposition, German
spirit must make their mark on film. Then it will help to fulfil the great task of
German art in holding up to the German Volk a mirror of its soul.’59
What is particularly interesting about this quotation in our context is the fact
that the removal of actors ‘of non-German descent’ (and other measures for the
Entjudung of the film industry) should have formed the preconditions for the
intended ‘German character’ of film. But in what concrete way did this ‘German
character’ find expression in the individual film productions? 60 The great mass of films, aimed at the light entertainment of the audience, avoided depicting their
protagonists as emphatically ‘German’, but tried on the contrary—not least by
employing a series of non-German stars—to match the international standard of
film entertainment. 61 Those films which did risk emphatically ‘German’ themes generally did so by placing their ‘German’ or ‘Germanic’ heroes opposite comic-ally caricatured ‘foreigners’, whether they were Jews, Slavic ‘sub-humans’,
or Englishmen or Frenchmen identified as Western and decadent (meaning:
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
Jewish-influenced). 62 The characterization of the ‘German’ could not occur without a constant reference to the ‘non-German’.
The most important change in the repertoires of German theatres after 1933 was
due to the fact that Jewish and politically undesirable contemporary dramatists,
who had previously written almost 40 per cent of plays performed, now disap-
peared almost completely, making way for National Socialist and völkisch authors,
who now dominated repertoires with a share of almost 60 per cent—also to the
detriment of foreign dramatists, whose share also fell. The Entjudung of theatre
repertoires—the banning of plays written by Jewish authors or those reflecting the
‘Jewish-liberalist’ spirit of the Weimar Republic, was thus the immediate precon-
dition for the conquest of the theatre by authors close to National Socialism. 63
National Socialist architect
ural theorists did their best to distance ‘German’
architecture from a ‘degenerate’ international or modern architecture described as
‘Jewish’ or ‘culturally Bolshevik’. Jewish speculation had led to the abandonment
of ‘blood-and-soil-bound’ building methods and thus to the deracination of
architecture. 64 ‘The architectural non-culture, which was propagated under the slogan “New Objectivity”, and carried out even in the face of its unanimous
rejection by the people, was nothing but an attempt to remove the cultural value
of the German Volk’s specific homeland and impose Jewish cultural Bolshevism
upon it.’65
The intended Renaissance of ‘German architecture’ was linked with the terms
Volk, organism, homeland, family, blood, and soil, even though no solid archi-
tectural programme could have developed from it. 66
The increasing penetration of everyday life by a Nazi-inspired aesthetic, in areas
such as advertising, fashion, and design, for example, was also impossible without
a constant polemic against the travesty of a ‘Judaized’ (verjudet) everyday culture.
Thus the control of advertising67 by the Nazi state (via the ‘Advertising Council of German Commerce’ and the almost complete monopolization of advertising by
the Party) went hand in hand with a material and stylistic Entjudung and
Verdeutschung (Germanization) of advertising. Advertising, according to the
compulsory guidelines of the Advertising Council, must be German ‘in spirit
and expression’. 68 What the ‘German character’ of advertising might have been was never properly explained; attempts to give the guidelines concrete form or
even encode them in a law were fruitless. Instead, officials restricted themselves to
the contrast between ‘respectable’ German advertising and supposedly Jewish-
dominated ‘Anglo-American commercials’, although without being able to
develop a particularly Nazi style of advertising.
One effort to adapt the everyday look of the ‘Third Reich’ to National Socialist
ideas was the propagation of ‘Aryan-style fashion’. Under this slogan the National
Socialists throughout the whole of the Reich set up associations and organizations
which—supported by strident journalism—were supposed to organize fashion in
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