I had an uncomfortable night’s sleep in which abattoirs and shambles sticky with blood loomed large. By 8 a.m. I was outside my hotel.
I had arranged an appointment with Peter Longerich, a professor of German history who specialised in Holocaust studies and divided his time between Munich and Royal Holloway in London. He had recently completed a biography of Goebbels, and was also involved in Munich’s long-delayed project to build a museum documenting National Socialism. I hoped he might be able to answer the question that had been bothering me: why the Nazis had been so smitten by Shakespeare in the first place. Filleting the sonnets for references to breeding was one thing, but could one really turn the author of The Merchant of Venice and Othello into the poet laureate of the ‘master race’? Could Hamlet, the play so often co-opted as Germany’s own, really coexist with the absolute will to power?
Out of nowhere, a black Alfa Romeo detached itself from the traffic and squealed to a halt next to the kerb. The door shot open.
Crouched inside was a rangy figure in a black leather jacket zipped against the morning chill, and dark, shoulder-length, thinning hair, worn in the manner of a German rock star of the late 1970s. Longerich. Over the gear-stick, a little contortedly, we shook hands.
His manner was sardonic and lightly amused; I reasoned it needed to be, if one spent much time in the company of Himmler and Goebbels.
As we swung into the line of traffic, I explained the object of my journey. He sent a spent cigarette cartwheeling out of the window.
‘You came to the right place. In Munich we have more Nazis than we know what to do with.’
It was here that the Party had its origins as a fringe group founded in 1919, one of a number of Völkisch extremist organisations that sprang up in the chaos following the Kaiser’s abdication. Hitler became the fifty-fourth person to join what was then known as the German Workers’ Party. He rapidly took control, changing its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and establishing a power base in the city. By November 1923 he had launched the so-called Beer-Hall Putsch, which culminated in a demonstration at the Feldherrnhalle (‘Field Marshal’s Hall’) in the centre of the city. When protestors exchanged fire with police, nineteen people were killed, fifteen of them brownshirts.
The putsch failed, but although the NSDAP was banned and Hitler imprisoned in Landsberg Fortress(where he occupied himself by writing Mein Kampf), Munich was crucial to the movement’s rehabilitation. As soon as the ban was revoked in 1925, Bavarian businessmen and society hostesses replenished its coffers, while the city’s unemployed working class filled the ranks of the Stormtroopers. Membership rocketed from 25,000 in 1925 to 180,000 in 1929. By 1930, following the Wall Street Crash, the Party was polling at 18 per cent nationally. Three years later, Hitler was in the Reichstag.
Munich had always been central to the myth, Longerich explained. In 1935 the city was bestowed with the title of Hauptstadt der Bewegung (‘Capital of the Movement’), and the NSDAP – eternally suspicious of cosmopolitan, liberal Berlin – retained its headquarters here, along with almost every Nazi organisation. We roared along the street that led towards the Feldherrnhalle, which the Nazis had sanctified as a memorial in front of which Munichers were required to give the Nazi salute (with an unlooked-for effect on pedestrian flow; the detour to avoid it became known as the Drückebergergasse or ‘Dodgers’ Alley’).
Longerich parked on the edge of Königsplatz. We walked the rest on foot. Some of the earliest Nazi rallies and book-burnings had been held here in 1935, the same year that the corpses of the brownshirts killed in 1923 were reburied in so-called Temples of Honour. The square was expanded into a vast parade ground, equipped with a state-of-the-art lighting system for rallies and military manoeuvres.
Königsplatz was now covered in grass, and the Temples of Honour were long gone, dynamited by the US Army in 1945, but the plinths in the distance remained, partially shrouded beneath a dark tangle of brambles and weeds. Sombre grey buildings, sombre grey sky; the place had a desolate and wind-nagged air, even on a gentle spring morning like this. It was all too easy to project the grainy black-and-white photographs in the history books on to the scene in front of me: thousands upon thousands of ink-black Stormtroopers standing to crisp attention, swastikas snapping in the breeze.
The Documentation Centre was a sorry story, Longerich explained, subject to endless postwar wranglings about the meaning of the past. After more than a decade of impassioned in-fighting, the project had come close to falling through, and the arguments about what should go inside had still not finally been settled.
He gestured to a cube-like structure swathed in scaffolding and white protective panels, on the site of what had been NSDAP headquarters: at least the builders had begun.
‘One day, you know, we might even get it finished.’
Over coffee and Danishes, Longerich and I debated how William Shakespeare had got himself mixed up in all this.
Kultur and Kulturpolitik had always been vital to the Nazi movement, in Munich most especially: in 1933 Hitler declared the city ‘Capital of German Art’, and it was here in 1937, inside an improvised space in the Hofgarten, that the notorious exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ had been held.
Moreover, the Nazis had a taste, and something of a talent, for drama. The renovations to Königsplatz transformed what had been a humdrum city square into a site for grandiose, semi-mystical ceremonies that could be replayed via newsreels across the world. Torchlit processions and military march-pasts were crafted with a director’s eye, not a detail or uniform out of place. One thinks inevitably of the 1936 Olympics, which became a spectacle of fascist power on the largest stage the world could offer, all captured for cinematic posterity by Leni Riefenstahl.
Theatre was also a private obsession. Hitler’s reverence for Wagner and the more bombastic bits of Beethoven was well recorded, but I hadn’t known about his interest – fed by the intellectual vanity of an intelligent but poorly educated man – in drama. His own theatrics during speeches were rehearsed with actorly precision, and it was a fascination encouraged by his friendship with Joseph Goebbels, a genuinely cultured man who had a doctorate in nineteenth-century German drama and a lifelong passion for high art. Together the two made theatre trips, recorded in exhaustive detail in Goebbels’s thirty-one volumes of diaries. Shakespeare was installed as a favourite author. Though I had a hard time believing that Hitler was ever much of an expert, the historian Timothy Ryback has located leather-bound translations of the plays in the Führer’s private library, and Hitler was given to quoting lines from Hamlet and Julius Caesar, particularly when menacing political opponents. In a sketchbook from 1926 he had roughed out designs for a scene in act one of Julius Caesar, the forum where Caesar is murdered in cold blood.
Goebbels’s own passion, Longerich explained, ran much deeper. At Heidelberg university he had studied with the most famous Shakespearian of the age, Friedrich Gundolf, whose Shakespeare und der Deutsche Geist of 1911 (‘Shakespeare and the German Soul’) became the canonical expression of unser Shakespeare (a bleak irony: Gundolf was Jewish). Goebbels had also spent the early 1920s attempting to forge a career as a writer, composing verse plays – only one of which was ever staged – and writing an expressionist novel heavily influenced by Goethe’s Werther.
As propaganda chief, Goebbels maintained an iron grip on the news agenda and the Party’s image, and he quickly set up a so-called ‘Chamber of Culture’ with draconian powers extending across the press, radio, film, publishing, music, visual arts and theatre. Goebbels used this not simply to regulate what was available for public consumption, but to indulge his own predilections and whims. Shakespeare was one: after seeing Coriolanus in 1937, Goebbels exclaimed that the playwright was ‘more relevant and modern than all the moderns. What a huge genius! How he towers over Schiller!’
There was pure politics behind this, but surely something more: the excitable compulsion of the artist manqué. What Goebbels had so
conspicuously failed to achieve with his own art he could accomplish as Reichsminister.
‘Theatre genuinely meant a lot to him,’ said Longerich. ‘If you read the diaries it’s clear that he’s emotionally touched and driven by the experience. I don’t think it’s cold-blooded propaganda. He really is an enthusiast.’
‘Politics had become the drama of the people,’ Goebbels wrote, and it was a mantra he lived. He set up a number of ‘Reich theatres’ directly under his remit, involving himself in almost every aspect of their work, and appointed Rainer Schlösser, the journalist and DSG member from Weimar, to the new position of Reichsdramaturg. Fond of issuing unprompted director’s notes (in 1936, he gave advice on a new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Deutsche Oper, which the production team scrambled to put into effect), Goebbels also acted as munificent patron. Perhaps a quarter of the ministry’s budget went on theatre, far in excess of its political value, and more than the amount it spent on straight propaganda. Between 1933 and 1942, audiences for German theatre roughly doubled.
The difficulty was what to put on stage. ‘Degenerate’ or left-wing scripts from the 1920s were obviously out; so too were works by playwrights who had any hint of Jewish ancestry – an alarming number. Goebbels’s initial intention had been to mould a new Völkisch culture that could rival achievements in arms production or on the sporting field, but the practicalities defeated the ministry, particularly as so many artists had fled overseas. Goebbels had a brief passion for commissioning Thingspiele, vast outdoor theatre events – part rally, part pseudo-Nordic cult ceremony – but the logistical challenges of building 4,000 outdoor arenas proved impossible, and audiences were mystifyingly resistant. Schemes to commission symphonies and films on National Socialist themes came to little. At a talk for activists in 1935, Goebbels conceded that it was possible to ‘build autobahns, revive the economy, create a new army,’ but not ‘manufacture new dramatists’. Goering admitted that it was ‘easier to make an artist into a National Socialist than the other way around’.
As war crept up it became difficult to commission new plays anyway. It was a headache: a huge number of German theatres, and an ever-shrinking repertoire.
Longerich shrugged. ‘Goebbels realises it’s impossible, it just can’t be done. It’s a vacuum. They have to do something.’
The solution was to stage classics. But even this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Goethe proved problematic (Hitler thought him ‘maudlin’) and Schiller was troublesome because of his insurrectionary themes, most obviously Wilhelm Tell, whose hero was Swiss. (The play was taken off altogether in 1941, after a Swiss plot against Hitler.) Molière had been popular, but was banned after the invasion of France, alongside all French dramatists. Ancient Greek tragedy had the right kind of monumental purity, but was problematically southern European. Spanish Golden-Age drama was permissible, particularly after the cultural pact with Franco in 1939, but never took off. George Bernard Shaw was acceptable because he was perceived as anti-British, but was still alive, so there was the problem of royalties … So it went on. One of the few writers left was Shakespeare. Not only was he politically safe; everyone knew, of course, that he was German.
Proving this last fact beyond all doubt became of urgent importance. The Party issued a pamphlet called Shakespeare: A Germanic Writer, asserting that the nineteenth-century cult had been correct, and that Shakespeare’s true home was now Germany. School curriculums emphasised the role of the ‘Nordic visionary’ in freeing Goethe, Herder and Lessing from the tyranny of French neoclassicism. Schirach’s Hitler Youth staged Shakespeare Weeks. (Invitations were sent to London in 1937, and politely refused.) Managers produced the plays in ever-greater numbers. In 1934, a total of 235 theatres opened seasons with Shakespeare; three years later, the figure was 320. In 1936, the regime boasted that there had been more Shakespeare productions in Germany that year than anywhere else in the world.
Even when ‘enemy dramatists’ were banned after the outbreak of hostilities with Britain in 1939, Shakespeare stayed, now regarded – albeit after some soul-searching – as essential to the war effort. Wille und Macht magazine ran a special issue arguing that Shakespeare held his own in Germany ‘even in the face of the enemy’. On 23 April 1940, as the Wehrmacht were preparing their final assault on France, Germany’s leading intellectual lights made sure to be in Weimar to hear the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’s president declare that ‘two centuries of German work on behalf of Shakespeare have given us the right to treasure the greatest dramatist of the German race’. When Munich’s Kammerspiele agonised about a new Hamlet, they were assured by the propaganda ministry not to worry: for the purposes of paperwork, Shakespeare was officially German. It was rumoured the order came from Hitler himself.
Like every Nazi cultural policy – notably the Party’s almost comically contradictory approach to jazz – this resulted in some tormented interpretational tangles. Given Nazi attempts to emulate the Roman empire, ‘heroic’ plays such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus were candidates for revival (despite uncomfortable echoes between Hitler and Caius Martius). So were the ‘Nordic tragedies’ Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, the last of which was particularly popular, regarded as a ‘ballad’ about a military hero overwhelmed by fate.
Comedies such as Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale remained successful, as much for escapism as anything else, but A Midsummer Night’s Dream had unhelpful associations with the Jewish composer Mendelssohn. The English histories were patently unsuitable, and effectively banned. Antony and Cleopatra was not an option, because, as one official primly put it, ‘a play in which a warlord leaves the battlefield to run after his mistress must be judged as particularly negative’.
But Hamlet, yet again, was in: a version starring the hugely famous actor (and favourite of Goering) Gustaf Gründgens opened at the Staatstheater in Berlin in 1936, and was a huge hit, reaching some 200 performances. With no discernible irony, one critic acclaimed Gründgens as ‘a Hamlet who knows precisely what he wants’. An entire Romantic tradition was overturned at a stroke.
The so-called ‘racial dramas’ remained an obstinate problem. The Reichsdramaturg ruled that it was possible to put Othello on stage, so long as the hero was presented as an Arab nobleman rather than a ‘negroid’ black African. But The Merchant of Venice caused tremors at the highest level. On paper, no other play seemed so in tune with Nazi racial policies – had Hitler not declared in July 1942 that Shylock was a ‘timelessly valid characterisation of the Jew’? In theatres, though, the potentialities of Shakespeare’s script proved dangerous and double-edged.
The unrepentantly anti-Semitic German actor Werner Krauss played Shylock in a notorious version in Vienna in 1943 – a few years after playing a series of identikit Jewish characters in the film Jud Süss – and presented what one reviewer described as ‘the pathological image of the typical eastern Jew in all his outer and inner uncleanness’. But other directors fought shy of the play, wary of raising sympathy for Shylock’s predicament among audiences. Could it really be possible to stage his famous appeal for tolerance in a country where millions were on their way to concentration camps, if not already dead?
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?
Many producers balked. Nor was this the only difficulty; the elopement of Shylock’s daughter Jessica with the Christian Lorenzo was impossible to stage in a country whose race laws expressly forbade miscegenation.
Remarkably, Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser agonised for at least four years over the question, attempting to sell The Merchant of Venice as anti-Semitic propaganda when Shakespeare’s text didn’t quite make that possible. Someone offered to rewrite the ending so that Jessica tur
ned her back on marriage. In the end Schlösser suggested to Goebbels an even more convoluted solution – doctoring the script to imply that Jessica was not of Jewish blood at all, but Shylock’s Christian foster child. As for Shylock himself, that bothersome speech should simply be cut.
By summer 1944, it was obvious the regime was crumbling. Allied troops were about to breach Germany’s borders. Theatres were closed. Yet, despite his ever-growing list of responsibilities, the Reichsminister’s mind remained on finer things. That September, one of the last major propaganda projects to pass across his desk was a lavish film of The Merchant of Venice, with Werner Krauss once again in the lead and directed by Veit Harlan, who had done Jud Süss. Goebbels greeted the idea eagerly, and pushed for production to start as soon as possible – one last chance for his cultural legacy to be assured. The scheme was patently delusional. But it said much about his sense of priorities that, even as defeat loomed, Goebbels couldn’t let Shakespeare go.
I wondered about Longerich’s view. Was this just frustrated ambition, or was there something deeper at work?
He sent a thoughtful stream of smoke in the direction of Königsplatz. ‘If you ask me, I think it’s the idea of creating a kind of alternative world, a fantasy world. The racist imagination and political utopianism are not so different. Why is Hitler so obsessed by Wagner? Because it’s fantasy.’
He ground the cigarette into the ashtray and drained his coffee briskly. ‘You want to go to a place and to see your fantasies becoming reality. That is theatre, yes?’
After three days spent chasing Nazi-shaped shadows, I was hopeful that Michael Thalheimer’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Residenztheater would lighten my mood. It had never been my favourite comedy – a school production where I played a fretful and poorly enunciated Philostrate was to blame for that – but I was sorely in need of some fairy dust. Perhaps the show could provide it.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 12
