by Peter Watson
VERSE “IN THE KEY OF HEROISM”
In cultural terms, in its systems of thought, National Socialism was far more coherent than it is often given credit for. That was part of the problem. In their efforts to impose political synchronization, known officially as Gleichschaltung, the Nazis sometimes assumed, or determined, that there was more coherence than actually existed. Hitler’s idea was that the prejudices of ordinary people could be molded into a Germanic worldview that would end the alienation felt by so many.
It is very doubtful if culture—any culture—can be prepackaged in this way for very long but certainly, so far as German culture in the Nazi period is concerned, the exercise showed that it can work in the short term.10 Herman Burte, a playwright and poet and the author of an anti-Semitic novel, addressed an assembly of German poets in 1940 and, arguing that Hitler was essentially a poet-turned-statesman, asserted that all those involved in cultural creativity must use it to turn the energies of the German people to augment the “German mode of being.” He thought the Führer was superior even to Goethe because Hitler understood the “organic” nature of the German people, the “primacy of the primordial German.” Adolf Spemann, a Stuttgart publisher, lectured his fellow publishers that the age when they could release books that they might not agree with but thought intellectually or commercially worthwhile, was over. The publisher was no longer an “uninvolved cultural mirror,” the “servant of the writer has been changed into a deputy of the state…literature is not to be separated from politics.”11 By 1937, between 50 and 75 percent of all books approved by the National Socialists were peasant novels, historical novels, and novels set in the “native landscape.”12
According to Jay Baird in his study of Nazi heroes, three individuals in particular contributed significantly to National Socialist aesthetics, two of them writers—the poet Gerhard Schumann and the songwriter Hans Baumann. (The third, the film director, Karl Ritter, is considered in Chapter 34.)
Schumann, Baird says, was “a self-styled elitist,” the son of a professor of education and a pious Christian. He joined the German youth movement and went on walking trips, exploring the landscape and ancient castles and churches. It was an idyllic upbringing but then he was pitched into “the bleeding cities of Weimar” and was “shocked into poetry.”13 In the early 1930s he produced his first collection, Die Lieder vom Reich (Songs of the Reich), giving voice to his longing to sabotage the “foreign ideologies” that had overtaken Germany and for a strong “Führer personality” to take the helm and save the nation.
…as he arose the halo of the chosen one
shone round his head. And as he descended
He called the torch illuminating the night.
Millions silently revered him… 14
At the University of Tübingen he found the old, aristocratic, class-based emphasis on classical scholarship out of date with what was required in industrial Germany and as a result, in November 1930, at the age of nineteen, he joined the NSDAP. When Hitler assumed office, Schumann was taken on as a party writer, a position of some prestige. Here he became more infused with Nazi ideology as applied to the arts.15 The so-called Asphaltliteraten, the central approach of the Weimar years, was now outdated, and Schumann was attracted instead by the idea that the new verse was to be “struck in the key of heroism.”
A prolific author (he published nineteen volumes of verse, as well as journalism and two plays), one of his specialities as a party writer, and then as Präsidialrat of the Reich Chamber of Music, when he was only twenty-four, was composing scripts for the great ceremonial occasions. His poems had such titles as “Germany, You Eternal Flame,” “The Purity of the Reich,” and “Hitler.”
In one will all the towering force
of millions living and dead…
In one hand the brotherly greeting
of millions of outstretched hands…
With the thunderous power of all the bells
his voice is ringing over the world.
And the world will hear.
He celebrated the Anschluss with a poem that Hitler so loved that he insisted it be broadcast time and again.16
Schumann saw action in France and Russia in World War II and won the Iron Cross. Despite being severely injured on the Russian front, he volunteered again as soon as he was fit, and continued writing poems that, as he put it, in wartime were really “prayers disguised as poems.” His most famous, “Soldier’s Prayer,” was scored by Eugen Papst and sung far and wide, especially on ceremonial occasions:
O God, we are not much with words.
But please hear our prayer now:
Make our souls firm and strong.
The rest we’ll do ourselves.17
“DO NOT COUNT THE DEAD”
Hans Baumann, “the troubadour of the Hitler Youth,” was nineteen in 1933. An innocent from the Bavarian forest, he enjoyed a meteoric career in the Third Reich, aged only thirty-one when it ended. As a boy he was known as “Happy Hans” and in his memoirs described his mother as “the best mother in the world.” When his father came back from World War I, he brought some old hand grenades which Hans called “my first friends.”18
This idyllic childhood was tempered by the inflation and unemployment in Weimar Germany and some of Baumann’s early poems, written when he was just fourteen, have titles like “Unemployed” and “Four Flights Up,” about living in tenement slums.
As a Catholic, however, he became active in the Catholic youth movement, and this gave rise to some of his early songs, the most famous of which, “Morgen gehört mir,” “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” was popularized in the 1972 film Cabaret. This song helped Baumann’s rise to fame. He had written it when he was eighteen, studying for a career as a teacher at a Jesuit academy in Amberg. The priest in charge was so taken with Baumann’s songs that he approached the Catholic publishing house Köselverlag in Munich, and they brought out a collection in 1933. “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” became famous among the Catholic youth movement long before it was taken up by the Hitler Youth.
Baumann, however, became convinced that Hitler was a savior, and he composed more than 150 songs reflecting that view. These songs got more aggressive as the thirties passed, especially in regard to the East. In the Blitzkrieg years he could be shockingly cavalier about war.
Despite the trembling of brave men,
despite the distress in my heart
Afire with sorrow, I will raise the banner,
with hands that are no more.
Baumann liked to say it was a privilege to be living in Germany’s era of greatness and, in a series of speeches, quoted these lines from Hölderlin:
The battle is ours! Hold high the banner,
O Fatherland, and do not count the dead!
Beloved nation, not one too many
has died for you.19
But Baumann changed. He seems to have had second thoughts around 1941–42, when he began to advocate more charity on Hitler’s part toward Germany’s enemies. This culminated in his play Alexander, which Gustaf Gründgens (see Chapter 34) snapped up for production in Berlin. A great success, with Gründgens in the title role taking twenty-five curtain calls on the opening night, its plot drew not-so-subtle parallels between Alexander the Great and Hitler. Alexander exclaims “Let us be contemptuous of the earthbound,” but he also says, “I am victorious because I love.” Again, Baumann stressed charity among the victors, perhaps feeling that was as much as he could get away with in the Third Reich. Goebbels had the play closed after two nights.
Baumann’s second thoughts gathered pace, aided by the fact that his brother, an artillery captain in Kiev, had seen terrible things there, and his wife, who had been an entertainer on the Eastern Front, had also seen and heard about heartbreaking atrocities. In the army himself now, in the East, Baumann directed a program for cultural understanding for German soldiers, where even Russian works were performed and Russian guests allowed, even members of the Resistance. After the war Baumann became inte
rnationally acclaimed as a writer of children’s books, his work translated into a score of languages and winning prizes in West Germany, Italy, and the United States. Toward the end of his life (he died in 1988 in Murnau, where Kandinsky had spent so much time), Baumann said, “The great thing about having a long life is that one can correct his mistakes.”
In an age before television, Goebbels well understood the power of radio. He inherited a system of centralized control but even so his propaganda ministry acquired all the shares in the National Broadcasting Company, which exercised an influence on other—more peripheral—broadcasting outfits. Pressure was put on electrical companies to produce cheap radio sets—so all citizens could own one—and to construct them so that they could not receive foreign broadcasts.
Hitler moved in on the filmmakers as soon as he moved on the artists. One of Goebbels’s first initiatives when he was appointed propaganda minister was to call together Germany’s most prominent filmmakers and show them Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, his 1925 masterpiece that commemorated the revolution and was both a work of art and a piece of propaganda. “Gentlemen,” Goebbels announced when the lights came on, “that’s an idea of what I want from you.” The minister wasn’t looking for obvious propaganda; he was clever and knew better. But films must glorify the Reich: there was to be no argument about that. At the same time, he insisted that every cinema must include in its program a government-sponsored newsreel and, on occasion, a short documentary.20
By the outbreak of war, Goebbels’s newsreels could be as long as forty minutes, but it was the documentaries that had the most effect. Technically brilliant, they were masterminded by Leni Riefenstahl, an undistinguished actress in the Weimar years who had reinvented herself as a director and editor. The best was Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will; 1935), commissioned by Hitler himself as a record of the first party convention at Nuremberg in 1934. Sixteen camera crews were involved and when it was shown, after two years of editing, the film had a mesmerizing effect. The endless torch-lit parades, one speaker after another shouting into the microphone, the massive regularity of Brownshirts and Blackshirts absorbed in the rhetoric and then bellowing “Sieg Heil” in unison, were hypnotic.
Almost as clever was Olympia, which Goebbels ordered to be made about the 1936 Olympic Games, staged in Berlin. It was there that the modern Olympic Games emerged, thanks to the Nazis. They implemented the idea of the “torch run,” whereby a flaming torch was carried by runners from Greece to Berlin, arriving in time to open the games in style.
For Riefenstahl’s film of the games she had the use of eighty cameramen and crew, and shot 1.3 million feet of film, eventually producing, in 1938, a two-part, six-hour movie with soundtracks in German, English, French, and Italian. She ennobled good losers, supreme winners, and dwelled on fine musculature, particularly that of Jesse Owens, the Negro athlete from the United States who, to Hitler’s extreme displeasure, won four gold medals. Some of Olympia’s sections, particularly those dealing with platform diving, are unsurpassingly beautiful. But Riefensthal was not the only “heroine” of Nazi cinema: Kristina Söderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander were all fêted.21
After the war started, Goebbels used all the powers at his command to make the most of propaganda. Cameramen accompanied the Stuka bombers and Panzer divisions as they knifed through Poland—but these documentaries were not only used for audiences back home. Specially edited versions were shown to government officials in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Romania to underline “the futility of resistance.”
THE SONG OF THE STUKAS
Goebbels used to say that victory makes its own propaganda, while defeat “calls for creative genius,” a sentiment that sums up the career of the film director Karl Ritter.22 A pilot in World War I, Ritter became one of the top two or three film directors in the Third Reich.
After World War I Ritter tried his luck as an artist in Munich, and it was there that he first heard Hitler speak. Devastated by the outcome of the war, Ritter found Hitler’s message more than congenial and joined the NSDAP in 1925. He found his way into films via poster design and public relations and in 1933, UFA, one of Germany’s leading film companies (which would soon become the leading film company) offered him work as production director of Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex), arguably the first Nazi film of any consequence. It concerns a youth who is torn between loyalty to his Communist father and his growing belief in the Hitler Youth movement. He is killed in the course of street disturbances, which the Nazis had made such a feature of their activities in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Ritter went on to produce a series of films which, until Stalingrad, were increasingly influential. Urlaub auf Ehrenwort features a handsome junior officer in World War I and his unit as they are transported by train back to Berlin from one area of fighting before going on to another, where they will almost certainly meet their death. When the unit arrives in Berlin, the men have five hours to wait for their next train. Most of the soldiers come from Berlin and although leave is forbidden, the junior officer allows them to go home after they have given an undertaking they will all be back at the station in time for their train. The film then follows the challenges they face—pacifists and communists taunting them along the way, unfaithful wives, wives who have taken their husband’s jobs, wayward children, illness. All the men save two are back at the station in time, and the others catch up with the train when it makes its first stop.
Non: Pour le Mérite, possibly Ritter’s finest film, was a biography of a World War I pilot, made with the cooperation of the air ministry. Having downed an English ace, who is not wounded, the German pilots honor him—for his bravery—over dinner. Elsewhere, a German pilot withholds fire when he realizes the English pilot’s guns have jammed. The film then shows the still-young pilots going to seed in the Weimar Republic, their talents and war record ignored, only to be redeemed with the arrival of Hitler.23
During the Blitzkrieg years, Ritter shifted his focus to World War II itself. The 1941 Stukas is devoted to comradeship in the flying corps and featured a very popular song, “Stukalied.”24 The film also depicted Prussian mothers who, “instead of sadness and melancholy” because their sons have been killed, feel “pride and a sense of fulfilment that [their boys] had the privilege of dying a heroic death.”25 The Stukalied ends:
We’re not afraid of hell and never relent,
Till the enemy is destroyed,
Till England, till England, till England is crushed,
The Stukas, the Stukas, the Stukas.
Ritter was captured by the Russians, escaped, and returned to Germany. After being “de-Nazified,” he emigrated to Argentina.26
Hitler’s assault on music and musicians was—in its aims at least—no less severe than his attack on artists and publishers, but what transpired was more complex. The modernist repertoire was purged from early on in 1933, with “degenerate” composers such Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Toch and conductors including Otto Klemperer and Hermann Scherchen, expelled. A commission of leading musicians—including Max von Schillings and Wilhelm Furtwängler—was set up in Berlin in June 1933, their task to supervise and censor the programs of music performed in the capital.27
Richard Strauss was treated gingerly and so was Furtwängler. Strauss’s collaboration with Stefan Zweig, the Jewish writer who wrote the libretto for his opera Die schweigsame Frau was not stopped, though performances were forbidden shortly after the premiere, and Strauss was eventually asked to resign his post as director of the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK), “on grounds of age and ill health.” Furtwängler was forced to resign his post as vice president of the RMK in protest against the regime’s treatment of Hindemith, but he wasn’t further harassed, not then anyway.28
Goebbels’s propaganda ministry did not have its own music division until 1936, and only then was pressure stepped up. Just 2 percent of German music was of Jewish origin but the prominence of Jewish musician
s, such as Schoenberg, Klemperer, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler helped the Nazis spread the message that there was a conspiracy to debase what the average German saw as a national treasure—the tradition of German music. Jews were banned from various musical organizations but given their own self-financing cultural outfit, the Kulturbund deutscher Juden. After Kristallnacht, Jewish musical publishers were closed down or “Aryanized.” 29
Goebbels was, however, in general careful about precipitate dismissals. He was told early on that it would take time to replace dismissed Jewish soloists with “Aryan” substitutes and so he held on until they were ready before insisting on change. In the case of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Goebbels was forced to go especially slowly because the orchestra was private, its musicians unaffected by the April 1933 Civil Service Law that removed all Jews from public (civil) service and dismissed artists from their museum and art school posts. Instead, Goebbels arranged for the orchestra to be starved of funds until it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Then he rode to the rescue, guaranteeing funds but at the price—eventually—of the dismissal of all Jews and enemies of the regime. In the end, the RMK expelled more musicians than did any other branch of the RKK as these figures by Erik Levi show:
NUMBER OF EXPULSIONS CARRIED OUT BY RKK
Film: 750 Press: 420
Theater: 535 Music: 2,310
Writing: 1,303 Art: 1,657
Again, to begin with (fateful words), the Kulturbund provided the Nazis with propaganda in that it enabled them to insist there was plenty of work for Jewish musicians in Germany, and statistics appeared to bear this out: between 1934 and 1938 the Kulturbund gave 57 opera performances and 358 concerts, playing before 180,000 people in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, and Munich. It was prohibited from performing Fidelio but otherwise gave a “standard” repertoire. The situation deteriorated first in the provinces and came to a head on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, after which the opera section was closed down, though concerts were given until September 1941.30
