Thus the Jews became the target of a further “action” staged by the regime designed to consolidate its hold on power. It was one in which Goebbels figured prominently. On March 26, after visiting Hitler in Berchtesgaden, he was set on drawing up a proclamation calling for a boycott of German Jews.66 At the same time Party headquarters formed a “central committee” to organize the boycott. Its membership included Robert Ley, Heinrich Himmler, and Hans Frank but no government representative: Nuremberg Gauleiter Julius Streicher presided. On March 29 the committee published in the Völkischer Beobachter a text composed by Goebbels67 and explicitly authorized by Hitler.68 From April 1 the population was urged to boycott all Jewish shops, doctors, and lawyers and all goods marketed by Jews.
The proclamation immediately had the desired effect: Various Jewish organizations issued declarations of loyalty to the regime and tried to exert a moderating influence on international criticism of the new government. On March 31, the eve of the action, after consulting Hitler and Göring, Goebbels called a press conference to announce that the measures would be confined to Saturday, April 1, and would only be resumed on the following Wednesday if the “atrocity propaganda abroad has not ceased completely.”69 This time limit was in deference to the reservations of their conservative coalition partners, who feared that the boycott would bring economic sanctions down upon Germany and have negative foreign policy repercussions. In addition, the deadline gave the Party leadership an early opportunity to declare the action an overwhelming success, which they duly did on the evening of April 3.70
Thus confined to a single day, the action—the first centrally directed anti-Semitic campaign under the new government—produced an unusual sight on German streets: In front of shop windows covered in anti-Semitic slogans stood SA and SS men on guard, preventing passersby from entering the shops.71 On April 1 Goebbels checked out the effect of these measures for himself.72 That evening he delivered a speech at a mass Nazi rally at the Berlin Lustgarten, in which he made it clear that the boycott could be resumed at any time.73
Shortly after the boycott—which was followed a few days later by the first special anti-Semitic legislation, including banning Jews from holding civil service positions—Goebbels addressed the subject of the future of Jewish artists in German cultural life. The occasion was provided by a letter from the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler protesting the ousting of Jewish artists from German musical life and the disruption by Nazi activists of concerts under Jewish conductors such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer. Goebbels sent a reply in which he suggested to Furtwängler that he should publish the correspondence in the press, which the conductor proceeded to do.
In his response, Goebbels said he could not follow Furtwängler’s argument that he was only prepared to make one “distinction,” that between good art and bad art. Goebbels retorted that only “art that drew fully upon Volkstum [the spirit of the people] could be good art and mean something to the Volk for whom it is created.” The kind of “art in an absolute sense” that “liberal democracy” believed in did not exist. In this letter Goebbels also solemnly announced that there would be support for artists “of real ability whose activities outside their art do not offend against the basic norms of the state, politics, and society.”
Furtwängler (whom Goebbels, shortly before the correspondence was published, made a point of visiting backstage on April 10 during a concert intermission) may have read this sentence as a guarantee that Jewish musicians could continue to perform. But such a guarantee was far from Goebbels’s mind: He had no intention of letting Jewish artists continue appearing with German orchestras. For Goebbels, however, the correspondence was a great success. After all–coming as it did only a few days after the anti-Jewish boycott and the passage of the bill excluding Jews from the civil service–it gave him a welcome chance to demonstrate his generous approach to cultural policy. “That worked well,” he noted in his diary.74
BEGINNING TO ENJOY POWER
By April the regime seemed to be so firmly in the saddle that Goebbels could afford to relax somewhat and bask in his newfound fame. To add to his sense of well-being, his relationship to Hitler, after the irksome early phase of the “seizure of power,” was now fully restored. Whenever Hitler was in Berlin—and that was where he most often was during these months—Goebbels saw the leader almost daily, whether on official business or privately, with or without Magda.
In mid-April he permitted himself an “Easter trip.” On Good Friday he flew from Berlin to Cologne, meeting Magda there. They went on to Koblenz, where they had a serious heart-to-heart talk. His diary shows that yet again they had differences to settle: “We felt that something wasn’t quite right. The air needed to be cleared. Everything is straightened out now.”75 The next day they traveled to Freiburg via Heidelberg—towns that, of course, held many memories for Goebbels. Mentally at this time he was on an Anka nostalgia trip. So they continued via Konstanz, where he had spent time with Anka in 1918, to Meersburg, Lindau, Innsbruck, St. Johann, Bad Reichenhall, and finally to Berchtesgaden. “With Hitler by 9o’c. Like being at home.”76
Goebbels and Magda stayed at Hitler’s residence on the Obersalzberg, the Berghof, overnight. The next day Goebbels set out for Berlin with Hitler. Hitler was detained in Traunstein to pay his respects to a dying Party comrade, so Goebbels continued on his own to Munich, catching the night train to Berlin.77 On April 19 he was surprised to find that Hitler had not yet returned to Berlin. In fact, he was spending his birthday on April 20 in seclusion on the Tegernsee, while, in his honor, meetings, torchlight processions, and marches were taking place throughout the Reich.78 He was not back in Berlin until April 21.79 Magda, who had remained on the Obersalzberg, traveled directly from there to the Rhineland, where Goebbels indulged in one of the greatest triumphs of his life so far: an official reception for this great son of Rheydt, recognized at last by his hometown.80
He saw this well-prepared visit as a “pure triumphal procession.” The townsfolk lined the street—now, of course, renamed in his honor—where his parental house stood, and as his motorcade swept into sight “the cheering became tempestuous,” as the report in the Rheydter Zeitung had it. His status as local hero was definitively confirmed when he announced the next day in front of the Town Hall that the incorporation of Rheydt into the neighboring town of Mönchengladbach in 1929, which had been an extremely painful blow to local pride, was about to be reversed. Joy was unconfined; Party formations staged a two-hour torchlight procession in honor of the minister, and the National Socialist council showed its gratitude by bestowing on him the Freedom of the City. Back in Berlin, he gloated over the fact that the “Rheydt press was madly enthusiastic.”81
When the law restoring the independence of Rheydt was proclaimed on June 24, Goebbels was back in the market square of his hometown basking in the applause of the population, which did not deter him from expressing his private aloofness from this small-town population: “The petit bourgeois are going wild,” he remarked in his diary.82
NATIONAL LABOR DAY
As early as March 24—he had only just begun to construct his new ministry—Goebbels had proposed in the cabinet the introduction of three new national holidays: March 21, the “Day of the German Uprising”; May 1, “National Labor Day”; and the last Sunday in September, the “Day of National Honor.”83
The most provocative of these suggestions was of course the idea of declaring May 1, then less than six weeks away, a national holiday. Since the end of the nineteenth century the First of May had been celebrated within the international socialist movement as the “day of the working-class struggle” and was observed in many countries with demonstrations and rallies. The socialist parties in Germany, since the end of World War I, had been pressing to have the date permanently recognized as a national paid holiday. Now this new government had adopted it. The other two proposals were deferred.84
Given the shortness of time, the preparations were bound to be somewhat hectic, but the P
ropaganda Ministry still managed to dress up “National Labor Day” as a day of bombastic national celebration.85 On the morning of May 1 Goebbels and Hindenburg spoke in the Lustgarten, where “German youth” were drawn up. In the afternoon, according to official figures, a crowd of a million and a half assembled on Tempelhof Field, including workers’ representatives from across the Reich. Goebbels opened the rally, and then Hitler spoke. The event was broadcast on the radio, of course, and included a commentary transmitted from a zeppelin circling above the grounds.86
Immediately after these pompous festivities had paid homage to the German worker, on May 2 the regime showed the other, authentic face of its labor policy: The unions were forcibly disbanded, an action Goebbels had discussed with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in mid-April. He noted its results in his diary on May 3: “Functionaries arrested. It all goes like clockwork. With Hitler. High spirits. The revolution continues.”87
BUILDING THE PROPAGANDA MINISTRY
Goebbels was now making progress with constructing his ministry. The first structural features were beginning to emerge.
The directive to set up the ministry issued on March 13 had prescribed that its precise duties should be determined by the Reich chancellor, specifically including those that had previously been the responsibility of other ministries. This meant that Hitler was given carte blanche by the cabinet to reassign powers, even those central to the ministries in question; a control of controls that went far beyond previous practice. So Goebbels found himself in a favorable negotiating position vis-à-vis other departments, but he was dependent on Hitler’s support. The new style of government was becoming apparent. Decisions geared to personalities were to replace responsibilities defined and fixed in advance.88
By March Goebbels had already taken over control of the radio from the Reich postal service and the Reich Ministry of the Interior.89 He had also secured Göring’s support for a transfer of authority over theaters to his new ministry’s jurisdiction, out of the hands of the Reich Ministry of Education.90 However, a few months later he was to find that Göring had arrogated to himself extensive powers over playhouses in Prussia.91
Early in April Goebbels procured assent in principle to the reallocating of the cultural section of the Reich Interior Ministry to his department.92 But by the end of April it transpired that he was only going to be given responsibility for art. Overcoming further difficulties, he successfully negotiated more concessions in the end.93 All in all, it is clear that his cabinet colleagues were not prepared to add to Goebbels’s portfolio without a struggle, despite Hitler’s solid support for him.
In May he succeeded against Foreign Office opposition in creating a foreign department of his own. The old press department of the Foreign Office remained in existence, but Goebbels would now take over “active propaganda” directed at foreign countries. It was a ruling that was to lead in later years to many tedious disputes between competing authorities.94
In May Goebbels took his first active steps in a variety of cultural areas. As with his speech to media representatives a few weeks earlier, on the one hand he flaunted the Nazis’ claim to power, but on the other he tried to counter the impression that an era of cultural dictatorship was about to impose its own attitudes and tastes. He often took an implicit stand against the kind of one-sided, doctrinaire, völkisch traditionalism characterized by the activities of the National Socialist “Combat League for German Culture” under Alfred Rosenberg. Addressing theater managers and directors in the Kaiserhof on May 8, for example, Goebbels came across as relatively restrained: “Art is a matter of ability, not of will,” he had no intention of “cramping artistic creativity.” In his speech Goebbels tried to give the assembled theater people a little artistic orientation. He acknowledged that Expressionism had had “healthy beginnings” but had then degenerated into experimentation. But his prescription for the future direction of art was rather different: “German art in the next decade will be heroic, steely but romantic, factual without sentimentality; it will be nationalistic, with great depth of feeling; it will be binding and it will unite, or it will cease to exist.”95
His initial contribution to a new order of things in German literature was even more drastic. By way of an “intellectual” contribution to the Nazi revolution, the German Students Association decided to cleanse public libraries of “trashy and obscene” literature. The high point was a public book burning, which took place on the Opernplatz in Berlin on May 10.96 The official speaker at this barbaric event was Joseph Goebbels, who declared that the “age of pretentious Jewish intellectualism” was over. He praised the book burning as “a strong, great, and symbolic action—an action meant to put on record for the whole world the collapse of the intellectual basis of the November Republic.”97 The books burned that evening included works by Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner, Sigmund Freud, Emil Ludwig Cohn, Theodor Wolff, Erich Maria Remarque, Alfred Kerr, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossietzky, and many more.98
On May 18 Goebbels spoke again, this time to members of the film industry gathered in the tennis courts in Wilmersdorf. His speech spelled out the fundamental message that “film cannot be immune to these mighty intellectual and political upheavals.” At the same time he was at pains to stress that the “tendency” called for by the new government did not imply any intention whatsoever of curbing artistic freedom.99
Goebbels also announced a new film credit bank, to be incorporated on June 1, 1933. Jointly underwritten by the Propaganda Ministry, the film industry, and several large banks, it made credit available on favorable terms. If a project passed the scrutiny of state agents, up to two thirds of production costs could be covered by this credit. By 1935 70 percent of all feature films were being subsidized by the bank. However, it was mainly the big film companies, Ufa and Tobis, who benefited from the support.100
Two weeks later the cabinet passed a law creating an interim Reich Film Chamber under the aegis of the Propaganda Ministry. From now on, everyone involved in the film industry was obliged to join the Chamber, which was empowered to prescribe the framework for their financial operations. The Reich Film Chamber was the first step toward the “corporate” structuring of the entire cultural sector that was to make great strides in the following months.101
In the course of 1933 the Ufa and Bavaria film companies rushed out three films glorifying the Nazi “time of struggle.” These projects did not by any means find whole-hearted favor with Goebbels. The first, Brand of the SA, he initially found “not as bad as I feared,” but by the next day, after the premiere attended by Hitler, he changed his mind, deciding to “make massive cuts.”102
His response to Quex of the Hitler Youth was mixed; here, too, he seems to have intervened, because after the premiere he declared proudly: “After the changes I made, it seems almost like a different film.”103 On the other hand, he would not allow the Horst Wessel film to be distributed to cinemas. When consulted, Hitler agreed with Goebbels’s reaction. It was only after some reworking that the film was released, with the title Hans Westmar.104 The fact was that the brash depiction of SA fighters no longer suited the regime’s policy, which in the second half of 1933 was looking to bring the National Socialist revolution to an end. In a few public speeches, Goebbels made it clear that such films would not be welcome in future.
As minister for film, Goebbels came more and more into contact with directors and actors. Early in April he was already organizing a “film tea” at the Ministry that was attended by the most important film stars. Hitler dropped by and was delighted with the company.105 In May Goebbels had a chance to discuss “film plans” with Luis Trenker (“a wild man”).106 He personally assisted the actress Maria Paudler, who was seeking work.107 During a visit to the Ufa studios in Babelsberg he met the film star Willy Fritsch (“nice lad!”); a few weeks earlier at a party he had spent some time in the company of Hans Albers (“A good lad! Gutsy and decent.”).108
Among the “film creators,” there was one
woman he was particularly taken by: The previous year Leni Riefenstahl had told him she was an ardent supporter of National Socialism, and she had now returned to Germany after a long spell of filming in Switzerland. In mid-May she reacted “enthusiastically” to his suggestion that she should make a “Hitler film,” and at the end of the month she took part in his one-day outing to the Baltic, the diary making a laconic reference to another member of the party: “Boss with us.”109
Goebbels thought that Riefenstahl was “the only star who understands us.” After some discussion with Hitler she made an early start on the proposed film. The close contact between Goebbels and Riefenstahl was to last throughout the summer, culminating in the project of filming the Party rally.110
Meanwhile, the structure of the Propaganda Ministry was taking solid shape. At the end of June the department’s responsibilities were set out in a new decree.111 However, the desired “coordination” of radio—a key ambition of the new minister—faced an obstacle in the summer of 1933: The individual states still had a great deal of autonomy in this sphere. Göring in particular had no intention of giving up this independence for Prussia without a fight. But Goebbels managed to acquire Hitler’s consent to annulling the remaining control of the regions over broadcasting.112
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