The German people were not merely to be improved socio-economically, they were also to be physically and spiritually uplifted through education, sport and art. In late March 1933, Hitler called for the ‘political detoxification’ and ‘moral renovation of the body politic of the people’. ‘The entire education system, theatre, film, literature, press, [and] radio,’ he continued, ‘are all means to this end’ and were designed to ‘preserve the eternal values’ of the German people.45 For this reason, Hitler put particular emphasis on education. He sponsored a variety of elite schools, such as the ‘National Political Institutes of Education’ (NAPOLAs), and the Adolf-Hitler Schulen. His model here was the British public schools, whose mix of physical and mental toughening he hoped to surpass. ‘On the one side, Eton College,’ he wrote later, ‘and on our side the Adolf-Hitler Schools or the NAPOLAs.’ There were ‘two worlds’, Hitler continued, ‘in the one case children of the people, in the other case only the sons of this money aristocracy, these financial magnates’.46 Throughout the Third Reich, in fact, the British public school system served as an inspiration for Nazi education policy. Exchanges were encouraged and a delegation from Eton was invited to visit.47
Though he had a horror of physical exercise himself, Hitler was keen that German youth should spend much of its leisure time on sporting activities. His enthusiasm for sport was driven by two factors. First, he saw an opportunity for the Third Reich to shine internationally in the light of its sporting achievements. When Max Schmeling knocked out the American Steve Hamas in a widely publicized bout in Hamburg, and celebrated by giving the Hitler-salute to the audience, the Führer was ecstatic. Nowadays, we are accustomed to see leaders identifying with major sporting figures, but at that time Hitler, like Mussolini, was something of a pioneer. More importantly, Hitler saw sport as part of the general racial toughening of German youth, necessitated by the supposedly lamentable current condition of the Volk. In contrast to the ‘beer philistines’ of the past, ‘the German boy of the future must be slim and lissom, as fast as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp steel’. To be ‘tough’ was the highest accolade Hitler could award, and it was often used in connection with British tenacity. ‘We must,’ Hitler continued, ‘raise a new person so that our people does not decay.’48
If Hitler saw German youth as ‘Sparta’s children’, he did not neglect Athens.49 To be sure, he had very little interest in literature. Hitler read no novels or poems, and the Goethe Museum in Weimar tried in vain to get him to visit; when in the city he went to Nietzsche’s house instead.50 Just the same, he gave a subsidy which made the museum possible. Hitler defended humanistic education against demands for a more technical training. This was not least because he wished to associate present-day Germans with the cultural achievements of antiquity, rather than the primitive Germanic tribes of the same period.51 Hitler had no time for Himmler’s enthusiasm in this connection. Instead, he insisted on connecting his Kampf with that linking ‘Greekness and Germanness’ across the millennia.52
Hitler’s interest in art and artists was not mere surface glamour, or personal indulgence; it was a central plank in his project of ‘racial’ elevation. In September 1933, he established the Reichskulturkammer to coordinate and superintend artistic production. In his first keynote speech on culture, given that year–which he repeated over and over on subsequent occasions–Hitler stressed that the artistic ‘disposition’ was part of the supposed racial ‘inheritance’.53 Discerning and enjoying ‘true art’, Hitler believed, assisted the programme of racial ‘sifting’ or filtering. ‘It is the task of art,’ Hitler remarked during the debate on the enabling law, ‘to express a particular spirit of the age’, so that ‘blood and race will once more become the inspiration of artistic intuition’. Art should turn away from ‘cosmopolitan contemplativeness’ towards celebrating ‘heroism’.54 One of the main vehicles of racial improvement here was the appreciation of architecture, which he believed expressed the ‘racial core’ of the ‘body politic of the people’.55
The other medium Hitler relied on most here was music, especially the works of Richard Wagner, whose idea of an artistic Gesamtkunstwerk–embracing the aural, the spiritual and the intellectual–had particular appeal. Hitler appeared as guest of honour at the commemoration at the Leipzig Gewandhaus to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death. By August 1933, he had seen Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg no fewer than 135 times. Contrary to widespread belief, and despite the various ways in which his works might be interpreted, Hitler did not use Wagner to promote anti-Semitism,56 but rather as a source of inspiration and edification for the German people.57 Fourteen months or so after the seizure of power, Hitler used the occasion of the laying of the foundation of the Richard Wagner monument in Leipzig to praise the composer as a man who ‘embodied the best of our people’, and called for ‘coming generations of our people to be drawn into the magic world of this powerful sound poet’.58
Hitler sought to bring Wagner to the masses and thereby to uplift them.59 He took his time, however, about reaching out to the obvious partner, the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, run by his friend Winifred. This was a potential minefield at many levels. An international event attended by many foreign Jews and at which German Jews performed as a matter of course, the festival could not be Aryanized overnight without throwing the organization into confusion and creating a public éclat. Besides, Hitler wanted to bring Wagner to the people, not entomb him in a purpose-built shrine. He pointedly refused, for example, to give Bayreuth a monopoly on Wagner or to suppress the rival performances at the Munich Prinzregententheater. Despite many hints, he never acceded to Winifred’s demand that Parsifal only be performed at Bayreuth. Prominent foreigners were already beginning to boycott the festival. Arturo Toscanini, perhaps the most eminent of all living conductors, who had performed to general acclaim at the 1930 and 1931 festivals, refused Winifred’s invitation for 1933, citing political reasons; his was the first name on a New York petition expressing solidarity with German Jews. In early April 1933, Winifred and her daughter Friedelind were invited for lunch at the Chancellery. She asked Hitler to appeal to Toscanini, which he did, but–embarrassingly–without success. Hitler was furious. To rub it in, the Italian went to the rival festival at Salzburg instead.
Then Hitler went to ground as far as Bayreuth was concerned. He ignored Winifred’s birthday present of tickets in late April. The festival spent most of the spring and summer of 1933 in crisis, as international interest, especially in the United States, slumped, and with it ticket sales. Hitler stepped in only at the last moment, in late June 1933 to guarantee tickets and thus the continuation of the festival. Hitler allowed Winifred to keep Jewish performers for the 1933 festival, and kept on some Jews at the Berlin Staatsoper because they would be needed at Bayreuth; the rest were sacked. At almost the last minute, Hitler announced his intention to attend in person, and was welcomed with great fanfare. The character of the whole festival now changed radically. Instead of being an exclusive international gathering of Wagner connoisseurs, Bayreuth increasingly became a socially more accessible and ideologically more conformist instrument of the Nazi regime. It also became a signature event in Hitler’s own political calendar, conveniently timed before the annual party congress in nearby Nuremberg. For now, however, Hitler was still anxious not to give more offence to foreign guests than absolutely necessary. He forbade, for example, the singing of the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and even of the national anthem within the festival building, though the ubiquitous swastikas surrounding the precincts must have told their own story.60
The Führer also hoped that art would help to overcome the persisting regional divisions in Germany. Though administratively rigorously centralized through the establishment of various imperial ‘chambers’,61 it was rhetorically regionalized. In his speech announcing the creation of a Haus der Kunst, Hitler distinguished between the legitimate ‘distinctiveness of the German lands’, the ‘variety of our inner life
’ and the allegedly pernicious ‘spirit of division’ which threatened ‘the unity of the nation’. ‘If Berlin is the capital of the Reich,’ he continued, ‘Hamburg and Bremen the capitals of German shipping, Leipzig and Cologne the capitals of German commerce, Essen and Chemnitz the capitals of German industry, then Munich should once again become the capital of German art.’ ‘May this city,’ he continued, ‘reflect back on its real mission’, which was to be ‘the site of the elevated and the beautiful’.62 This, then, was the role which Hitler envisaged for Munich, not just political ‘capital of the movement’, an accolade granted at the city’s own request some way into the Third Reich,63 but the artistic capital of Germany. ‘The capital of art and of our movement is Munich and will stay Munich,’64 Hitler announced at the laying of the foundations of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in mid October 1933.
Hitler’s artistic tastes were conservative, but not in any meaningful sense of the word kitschy. Some senior Nazi figures, in particular Goebbels, admired modernists such as Emil Nolde, Edvard Munch and Ernst Barlach, all of whom were initially considered part of new ‘Germanic’ art. Hitler had no interest in them. He preferred Böcklin, Makart, Feuerbach and Spitzweg, all painters still highly regarded today. His artistic sensibility was recognized even by connoisseurs.65
If Hitler laid particular stress on high culture, he did not neglect popular entertainment. He was quick to recognize both the opportunities and the threat of cinema and popular music.66 Hitler did not ban Hollywood or foreign productions as such,67 and western films formed a major part, sometimes the largest part, of the cinematic offering in the first years of the Third Reich.68 Many Hollywood studio bosses–some of them Jewish–tried to protect their profits by avoiding offending Hitler.69 The Führer himself was an avid consumer of American films, including a few banned by the regime, such as Mickey Mouse, not least because there were not enough German productions to satisfy his demand.70 The new German cinema thus did not replace Hollywood, but coexisted and competed with it. Most home-grown productions were pure entertainment, but in so far as they contained a political message, this was primarily directed not against Bolshevism, but against the idea of a better future for Germans across the Atlantic. Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (1936), for example, portrayed the career of the German-born pioneer John Sutter as an example of extreme cultural and economic alienation; unlike most contemporary American westerns, it also portrayed the Red Indians in a favourable light. As for jazz, where Hitler’s objections to ‘Negro music’ were well known, it was widely played and indeed–in the shape of ‘Charlie and his Orchestra’–later even offered to international audiences by the regime itself.71
That said, Hitler intervened repeatedly in the cinematic field. Sometimes, his motivations were ostensibly aesthetic. On other occasions, the concern was political. When the International Film Congress met in Berlin in 1935, Hitler sent a welcoming message, and gave a private audience to the leaders of the various international delegations. He hoped that the ‘high cultural mission of film’ would help to ‘deepen mutual understanding among nations’. This was code for a demand to avoid the production of any films–such as those supposedly sponsored by Jewry–which tended to complicate Nazi Germany’s relations with the outside world.72
The final and, as it would turn out, most important way in which Hitler sought to raise what he regarded as the racial value of the German people was through agrarian policy. In the short term, he wanted to revive the agricultural sector in Germany, improve rural living standards, and increase the production of foodstuffs for the purposes of national self-sufficiency. This was a critical battlefront for the new government, because, in comparison with Britain and the United States, Germany was still a very rural country; it fact it was distinctly ‘backward’. When Hitler came to power, more than 9 million people, just under 30 per cent of the total workforce, were employed in agriculture. In June 1933, Hitler appointed Walther Darré minister for agriculture and food supply. That autumn of 1933, he and Herbert Backe set up the ‘Imperial Nourishing Estate’, whose immediate task was to set agricultural prices; this meant the end of the free market in that sector.73 Hitler did not, however, want to return Germany to some sort of pre-modern rural arcadia. Rather, he saw agriculture as the key to incubating a new German elite, a ‘new aristocracy from blood and soil’, as Darré put it in his seminal text on the subject. Nazi agrarian policy was specifically intended to supplant the ‘old’ Junker aristocracy, which had supposedly failed Prussia and Germany, and it was designed to be open to every ‘real German’.74 It also sought to rationalize German farming, whether noble or not.
In the autumn of 1933, Hitler introduced the Reichserbhofgesetz (State Hereditary Farm Law). He wanted to prevent, as he told the cabinet, the reduction of the German population to 30–35 million within thirty-five years. Hitler’s reasoning here was that the weakness of the farming sector, which he attributed to the workings of the capitalist system, endangered the food supply and thus the substance of the nation. It was for this reason, he argued, that ‘the whole power of the people lay in the maintenance of a healthy farming class’. One way or the other, Hitler argued, ‘the farmer would have to be lifted out of the free economy’.75 The demographic, political, military and racial purpose of the new law was made clear in the preamble, which committed the Reich to maintain the peasantry as the ‘blood source of the German people’ by preserving the inherited holding through the prevention of fragmentation by inheritance.76
Unlike the previous late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prussian agrarian legislation, which had been designed to protect Germans against Slavic subversion, mainly by Poles, the criteria of the Reichserbhofgesetz were racial, rather than national. Those specifically excluded from ‘the capacity to become farmers’ were Jews and Africans. By contrast, the law placed peoples of ‘tribally related blood’ on the same level as non-Jewish ‘Germans’. The Ministry of the Interior defined these as peoples who ‘had lived in coherent national settlements in Europe some time back in historical time’. Gypsies were explicitly excluded, even if they were sedentary, but the list of acceptable farmers included not only all supposed ‘Aryans’, but also many other ‘races’ such as the Hungarians, Estonians, Finns, Slavs, Danes and Lithuanians.77 If they had German citizenship, they could become or remain farmers. In other words, the potential racial pool comprised virtually the entire European continent. Some of these exemptions may have been driven by diplomatic considerations, but Hitler’s relatively relaxed view of the Slavs, and perhaps also a sense that he would have to make do with the demographic material he had, probably also played a role. This was to have important long-term consequences.
At home, the historical inspiration for the Reichserbhofgesetz was the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Prussian Bauernschutz, which was designed to protect not so much the peasant as a pool of recruits for the army. Abroad, it was clearly the law of primogeniture as practised by the British aristocracy, according to which the entire estate passed to the eldest surviving son by entail, while his younger brothers were forced to seek productive employment in the army, the law, the church and even commerce. So long as the supply of land remained the same, the effect of the Reichserbhofgesetz, and also its intent, was to reduce the rural population, and to increase agricultural productivity.
In the longer term, of course, Hitler planned to expand the supply of land. He envisaged putting Germany’s food supply on a secure basis beyond the threat of war and blockade. Hitler also looked to the capture of new territories to sustain a vibrant class of racially sound soldier farmers and colonists which would gradually elevate the rest of the German people from the current trough. Like the modern United States, which had moved from a (perhaps mythical) Jeffersonian system of rural smallholders to large-scale farming with machinery, Hitler wanted to transition from an economically unsustainable, and in his view racially pernicious, system of intensive cultivation of smaller holdings to more extensive farming on a large scale. Like
the United States, he sought to increase his population through the encouragement of valuable elements and the elevation of those not completely beyond the pale. The difference, in geopolitical terms, was that while generations of Americans were urged to ‘go west’, Hitler told the Germans–as he had done ever since the mid 1920s–to ‘look east’.
This was what we might call Hitler’s ‘German Dream’, a vision competing with, but also in some ways inspired by, the ‘American Dream’. Here ‘living standards’ not only mattered as much as ‘living space’, but were interdependent in ways pioneered by the United States. In Hitler’s view, Germany needed space to realize its full racial potential, but it also needed racial strength to secure space. Given that Germany was short of space to start with, this placed a particular premium on increased racial cohesion at home. This deadly dialectic of space and race was to drive policy and politics throughout the Third Reich.
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