Literature Exploring the Turning Point of 1932/3 through Nazi Figures
The examples from the 1920s illustrate that the “Aryan” typology became increasingly adapted to the political objectives of the Nazi movement. Antifascist authors rejected the ideological significance of the Nazi typology. Without fundamentally revising the physical or psychological models set forth in Nazi propaganda, antifascist writers reversed the meaning of the Nazi ideal. They reinterpreted traits that Nazi writing considered to reflect masculine strength and heroism as narrow-mindedness, brutality, and pettiness, and constructed hero figures, often working-class and Jewish characters, to mark their oppositional stance.
German authors in exile tried to expose the brutal measures of the new regime that were intended to destroy Germany’s democratic structures, but their works were often published by exile presses and did not reach the German public. The brain-drain caused by the mass exodus of academics and artists depleted Germany’s intellectual resources, but enabled the Nazi regime to tighten its grip by replacing the exiles with Nazi loyalists. The following exploration of literary responses by exiled antifascists to the Nazi victory in Germany illustrates changing attitudes toward the triumphant regime and its representatives.
Lion Feuchtwanger’s Family Saga Die Geschwister Oppenheim
Die Geschwister Oppenheim by Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), who was already a prominent novelist in the Weimar Republic, showcases a wide spectrum of Nazi characters and organizations. Feuchtwanger’s works were banned and burned by the Nazis. Immediately after taking exile, he wrote his novel based on notes he had taken while still in Germany and information he received from German friends. In his novel, a society portrait set in 1932/1933 Berlin, Feuchtwanger illustrates the increasing popular support for National Socialism and searches for reasons to explain the Nazi Party’s mass appeal. His narrative repeatedly points to careerism, anti-Semitism, and greed as the predominant factors.1 Few of the Nazi characters are genuine fanatics. For the majority of Hitler’s followers, according to Feuchtwanger, race is a matter of indifference or a political tool.
Feuchtwanger contextualizes his fictional characters with references to actual events and historical personalities. For the representation of Nazi characters, he resorts to the available stereotypes of provincial opportunists, power-seekers, and ruffians. Female Nazis are configured as social climbers, who seek advancement through men affiliated with the movement. One of the most radical Nazi males is a small-minded authoritarian, the teacher Bernd Vogelsang. Another figure, the poet Friedrich Wilhelm Gutwetter, calls to mind the vainglory of Bettauer’s Chancellor Schwertfeger, and the furniture-packer Hinkel resembles lower-class Nazi types in the works by Reimann and Roth. Historical references in Feuchtwanger’s novel produce an impression of authenticity in an attempt to discredit Nazi propaganda, which presented the new regime as stable and progressive. The complex narrative structure of Die Geschwister Oppenheim, the astute insights, and the multitude of characters undoubtedly appealed to informed readers, but may have proven tedious to an uninitiated international readership. Even after it appeared in English translation, this epic novel seems to be an improbable vehicle for counter-propaganda.2
The key episodes are set before, during, and after the Nazi takeover. The central figures are the members of a fictitious Jewish family, the Oppenheims, business people, academics, and students, whose lives are intertwined with those of non-Jewish and Nazi characters. Characterizing his literary figures in psychological terms, Feuchtwanger opens perspectives into the mentality that drives the Nazi movement, and his narrator functions as a quasi-objective commentator. To ascertain who stands to gain or lose from National Socialism, Feuchtwanger explores representatives of different social strata, but his primary focus lies on the bourgeoisie. Without making class the determining factor in his characters’ decisions, Feuchtwanger describes loyalties as being in flux. The Nazi takeover transforms the political landscape and certain characters adjust slowly to the new circumstances, while formerly covert Nazi sympathizers suddenly reveal their true colors. Feuchtwanger’s characters include upstanding, intelligent Nazi opponents, who prevail against the generally mediocre and corrupt Nazi figures. Feuchtwanger indicates that there are many Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, but only a few determined dissenters and antifascists.
Reflecting the fascination with mass psychology in the interwar period, Feuchtwanger takes different approaches to the phenomenon of Nazi crowds and to individual Nazi figures.3 He links the outward appearance of uniformed Nazi units to a collective psychological profile. The mere mention of extraneous details such as truncheons, polished boots, and swastika flags suffices to evoke a mentality of ruthless brutality. In contrast, when specific Nazi leaders such as Rosenberg are mentioned by name, their position in the movement is specified and their individual role is mentioned. Hitler, who is mentioned by name, is designated as the “Führer” (leader), as he preferred to be called.4 The casual allusions to Mein Kampf suggest that, in 1933, Feuchtwanger believed Hitler’s manifesto to be universally known.5
Die Geschwister Oppenheim captures Hitler’s personal charisma by describing his reception at mass rallies. The Nazi cadres, on the other hand, resemble cardboard cutouts—some unseen master seems to pull their strings as they march and goose-step. Feuchtwanger furthermore describes the pointless rituals, symbolic gestures, uniforms, and regalia of the SA and SS that serve to
The episodes set in prisons and concentrations camps provide additional information about the Nazi mindset and the society it creates.6 The environment of the detention centers is hidden from the public eye; it serves as the regime’s secret playground. Here, Nazi factotums follow their predisposition for sadism with impunity, as revealed by the segments about Martin and Gustav Oppenheim’s imprisonment. The guards subject the prisoners to mindless drills, keep them under filthy conditions, and feed them disgusting meals. Further torments include beatings, ordering prisoners to sing Nazi songs and for Jews to recite Christian prayers.7 The low-ranking Nazi henchmen are described as primitive men from the dregs of society. They bark their orders, laugh uproariously loud, and try every which way to strike terror in the hearts of their victims.8
As the ultimate insult, these uneducated guards are appointed to conduct brainwashing classes, which consist primarily of the prisoners having to listen to slogans from Hitler speeches and Mein Kampf and repeat in unison disparaging messages directed against Marxists and Jews.9 Feuchtwanger depicts the prison system as a looking-glass world constructed to demoralize the prisoners, who are mostly professionals and intellectuals.10 Finally, the prisoners are forced to engage in pointless work according to the misleading camp slogan „Arbeit ist um ihrer selbst willen da.“11 The sole products resulting from labor such as moving stones back and forth are humiliation and death. Already at the time of the Nazi takeover, Feuchtwanger identifies the principle that, in the context of the Holocaust, became known as “destruction through work.”12
Feuchtwanger illustrates many instances of the pack mentality the Nazis unleash in the general public, pitting individuals against gangs of thugs. Hate speech in public discourse overrides rational debate and incites mob action against harmless citizens. These scenarios evoke a sense of impending doom: resistance against the militias appears to be futile since they are armed and obviously enjoy the support of the masses. The descriptions of the
The changing terminology Feuchtwanger applies to Hitler and his followers mirrors the streamlining of public speech in 1933. He frequently uses the term “die Völkischen” (nationalists or populists) to refer to Nazis and Nazi sympathizers and as a generic designation for a variety of right-wing groups.15 He also applies the term “Nationalisten” (nationalists).16 Without providing a detailed analysis of the factions that brought Hitler to power, the use of these terms implies that the radical nationalism and anti-Semitism of several right-wing organizations overlapped with the ideological spectrum of National Socialism, which prevailed since it combined multiple viewpoints under its umbrella. Feuchtwanger’s bourgeois protagonists respond with consternation to the Nazis’ political fervor, for which they have no explanation. The attorney Mülheim speaks of a barbarian invasion, and the humanist Gustav Oppenheim is dumbfounded that a civilized, modern nation would revert to savagery.17 The Nietzsche-inspired poet Friedrich Wilhelm Gutwetter, who has nothing to fear from the Nazis because he is a conservative and of Aryan background, expects the chaos of 1933 to produce a universal rebirth and a new human race.18
Among the Nazi characters, opportunists stand out, represented by business owners, craftsmen, and workers. Only a few of them rise to positions of relative power, as does the college preparatory teacher Bernd Vogelsang, the central character in the tragic episode involving the suicide of the student Berthold Oppenheim, who incurs the teacher’s wrath because he is Jewish and a liberal. The fascism theories of the 1930s resonate with the portrayal of Vogelsang, an emotionally repressed individual who embodies the traits psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich identified in his examination of the mass psychology of fascism.19 Vogelsang acts cowardly under adverse conditions and as
Vogelsang’s provincial attire was the preferred style of clothing by Nazi insiders and calls to mind Bettauer’s descriptions of the Hakenkreuzler in Die Stadt ohne Juden. The mention of his volunteer service in an authoritarian all-male youth association points to his authoritarian yearnings and possibly homosexual desires.20 Reserved and quiet before Hitler’s rise to power, Vogelsang emerges from his cocoon after the regime change. His transformation symbolizes the transformation of German society:21 „Sein Gesicht war maskenhaft starr, das unheimlich freundliche Lächeln war fort. Er trat als Sieger vor den Besiegten, als Rächer, ehern, der unsichtbare Säbel an seiner Seite.“22 Hitler’s ascent has changed the non-descript, somewhat ridiculous, civil servant into a tyrant.
Vogelsang’s curricular offerings consist primarily of nationalist propaganda.23 In his lectures, he adopts Hitler’s mannerisms and preaches the anti-intellectual tenets of Mein Kampf: „Rede ist wichtiger als Schrift, diese These des Führers der Völkischen hält er [Vogelsang] heilig.“24 Vogelsang’s description matches the Nazi typology, except for his short stature. He is described as having a flax blond moustache, pale blue eyes, and a scar on his cheek—proof of his affiliation with an anti-Semitic fencing society. His crisply parted hair and cliché-riddled language point to a military affiliation.25 The observation that he comes from the “deepest province” further categorizes him. Historian Richard Grunberger, in The 12-Year Reich. A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933–1945, elaborates on the provincialism of the Nazi movement, noting that many Nazi bureaucrats were of “small-town or rural origin.”26 With his lackluster roots in a backward part of Germany, his dialect and squeaky voice, Vogelsang is also reminiscent of Hitler, who came from a rural Austrian town and only gradually overcame his Southern dialect.27
Examining the pragmatic interests that caused various characters to join the movement, Feuchtwanger insinuates that the Nazi ideology expressed the desires of the silent majority. Nazis move into positions of power everywhere, and resistance seems futile. They are merciless in their persecution of perceived enemies and obviously have come, not to collaborate, but to rule. While they do allow “converts” into their fold, they categorically exclude whoever they do not consider racially fit. Feuchtwanger’s Oppenheim family in its diversity represents modern Germany, which is incompatible with the Nazi vision of the Reich.
An important Nazi figure is the Oppenheim’s non-Jewish competitor, the furniture-maker Heinrich Wels. He is a traditional craftsman committed to the guild system and resists mass production. Wels’s convictions coincide with those Dinter endorsed in Die Sünde wider das Blut, where modern business practices and the international finance system are labeled as dangerous Jewish inventions. Feuchtwanger, in turn, takes up the theme of modernity versus traditionalism in a positive way. The old-fashioned furniture-maker Wels demonizes the successful Oppenheim brand, but Feuchtwanger’s narrator provides rational explanations for its popularity: reasonable prices and functionality that appeal to urban customers.
The example of the Wels and Vogelsang rivalry shows that the Nazis want their Jewish competitors out of the way and cannot wait to lay claim to their property or take over their positions. Other iconic episodes trace the breakdown of German civil society and the rule of law to illustrate the efficiency of the Nazis in achieving their goals. The segregation of “Germans” and “Jews” progresses at an incredible pace. Within only a few months, the Nazis have forged a totalitarian society, run by oversight organizations and complete with a network of prisons and concentration camps. All Jewish professionals have been removed from office.
Germans eager to improve their lot now insert themselves into the story of Nazi success, as illustrated by several characters, including Professor Gutwetter and Gustav Oppenheim’s girlfriend Sybil Rauch, who are considered Aryans. When the opportunity arises, both align themselves with the Nazis. Even skeptics, like the headmaster of Bernhard Oppenheim’s school, Professor François, acquiesce out of concern for their families. The shocking experience of non-Jewish employees trying to remain loyal to their Jewish employers is illustrated by the mistreatment of Gustav’s valet by the invading SA men and the contempt displayed towards Edgar Oppenheim’s devoted non-Jewish head nurse.
The second-rate novelist Friedrich Wilhelm Gutwetter represents the intellectual variant of the Nazi type. His name, literally “fair weather,” implies
Lesser Nazi characters demonstrate the ubiquitous Nazi presence in German society. The school janitor, Mellenthin, a wounded veteran of the First World War and a low-ranking Nazi, immediately recognizes Vogelsang as a war veteran and a superior Party member. At their first encounter, he stands at attention and salutes the teacher.33 This soldierlike gesture of respect reveals the military stratification of the Nazi movement, even if the members are in civilian attire. Another example is that of the furniture-packer Hinkel, who turns out to be a ranking SA member and leader of a unit that has secretly infiltrated the Oppenheim furniture company. The proletarian Hinkel comes across as the most genuine adherent of the movement. His trust in the Nazi ideology seems uncontaminated by ulterior motives, and he retains some common decency when he vouches for his former boss Martin to spare him from torture during his detention. Thus, he foreshadows the “good” Nazi of later publications that show the tendency to attribute moral potential to working-class characters.
In the episode of a rebellion in the clinic of surgeon Edgar Oppenheim, Feuchtwanger illustrates the susceptibility of academics, especially those in the medical profession, to National Socialism.34 In Feuchtwanger’s novel, a seriously ill lower-class man incites his fellow patients to resist the orders of Jewish staff members. This episode suggests that even the most uneducated “Aryan” assumes that he is above the law by virtue of race. The main target of the anti-Semitic patient is an East European Jewish doctor, from whom he refuses treatment.35 The calumnies the Nazi patient hurls at this doctor echo those in Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer (The Stormer, 1923–1945). An arriving Nazi delegation functions like a well-oiled machine to bring order to the scene. The fact that the stormtroopers are able to expel Edgar Oppenheim and the Jewish staff members from the clinic within half an hour is proof that the takeover was preceded by long-planned secret preparations and backed by spy organizations and militia. Feuchtwanger’s narrative leaves no doubt that individual citizens could not defend themselves against such a massive onslaught. Entering the clinic in uniform, the SA men unite with Nazi interns in a military-style ritual; each man, cognizant of his rank in the Nazi hierarchy, salutes. The cadre then proceeds in a rehearsed fashion indicative of the men’s paramilitary training. In public, the Nazis avoid the use of excessive violence.36 They “only” place a stamp on the forehead of non-compliant individuals, a gesture that is sufficient to instill terror and ensure submission. The victory of Nazi cadres over medical experts marks the end of the German academic tradition.37
The downfall of the entire Oppenheim family offers a warning to the individuals who are most at risk in Germany, Jews and Marxists. To escape arrest and murder, exile seems the only solution, at least in the short run. The fact that several characters express the opinion that National Socialism is an anomaly in German history vaguely points to the prospect of an international resistance movement and attenuates the otherwise stark outlook for the more distant future. Departing from the Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat were the mainstay of National Socialism, Feuchtwanger envisions Nazi characters in all social groups. Their common denominator is
Ferdinand Bruckner’s Drama Die Rassen
The three-act drama Die Rassen (1934) by Bulgarian-born author Ferdinand Bruckner, aka Theodor Tagger (1891–1958), is an important contribution to the oppositional discourse in exile.38 In his work, Feuchtwanger draws an extensive social panorama with characters described as physical and psychological entities. It would be impossible to provide so many details in a dramatic text. Beyond the limitations of time, location, and dramatis personae, a playwright takes into consideration that the style and cast of each production determine the dramatic effect anew.
Bruckner wrote Die Rassen in 1933 in Switzerland. The setting is the student milieu at a provincial German university. For the medical students in the play, National Socialism is fast becoming a major force, especially since racial science and racial hygiene are popular among medical researchers. In The Nazi Doctors, the historian Robert J. Lifton confirmed Bruckner’s notion that the medical profession was especially vulnerable to National Socialism. Lifton examined the key role the medical profession played in the sterilization and euthanasia programs of the Third Reich and the human experiments during the Holocaust. Similarly, Georg Lilienthal in Der Lebensborn e. V. traced the implementation of the infamous breeding program by Nazi doctors.39 Bruckner’s drama examines the mentality that later fostered these abuses, and focuses on racist anti-Semitism, especially among students, and the issue of declining integrity within the discipline as a result of its politicization. Die Rassen, banned in Nazi Germany, was performed to acclaim in Zürich in 1934, but, like similar works, was soon forgotten.
The drama revolves around the unhappy love story of a privileged Jewish woman and an “Aryan” student. Bruckner’s characters are somewhat similar to those of Feuchtwanger in Die Geschwister Oppenheim. The primary focus
The statements of the radical right-wing student leaders in the play echo the rhetoric of racial science that provided the basis for racial testing as the determinant for German citizenship. Individuals who were found to be deficient were excluded from military and civil service, and from the professions. Die Rassen demonstrates that, at the university, the result was a divided student population: the privileged Aryans serve as the antagonists of Jewish students and faculty members. The Nazi students assume that they are urban warriors, intent on transforming Germany into a racist dictatorship. Bruckner’s protagonist Peter Karlanner is a mediocre student and an alcoholic, who moves between the political lines. Susceptible to temptations of all kinds, he wavers between National Socialism and his love for his Jewish fiancée, Helene Marx. Under the influence of his radicalized fellow students, he eventually abandons Helene along with his academic aspirations.
As a dramatic construct, Karlanner is reminiscent of Goethe’s Faust. Although of lesser caliber, he, too, is torn between good and evil. His childhood friend Tessow plays the part of the demonic tempter who holds out the prospect of a glamorous future in the Nazi movement. He wins out and
Karlanner is an emotionally unstable young man rather than a hardened activist. He only recognizes his growing predicament of having followed the wrong path after it is too late. Instead of leaving a “glimmer of hope,” as Judith Beniston argues, his belated repentance signifies his failure to grasp Helene’s humanistic values when there was still time.45 After Hitler’s rise to power, Karlanner starts down a road of no return, as predicted by his changing use of language: prior to the decisive election, he insists on using the official designation for the Nazi party, Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), and chides Helene for denigrating the Party.46
Bruckner’s choice of a university setting challenges the popular misconception that the Nazis recruited primarily from the ranks of the disenfranchised masses. Die Rassen exposes the predisposition certain students and faculty had for the doctrine of Aryan supremacy, and provides examples of hate-mongering. Karlanner’s statements especially illustrate that approval-seeking is a primary motive for lazy students to join the Nazis. As long as he was serious about his studies, he needed Helene’s encouragement to abstain from drinking. His affiliation with extremist fellow students puts an end to his academic pursuits. Under peer pressure, he abandons his plan to marry Helene because she is Jewish, and resumes his earlier drinking and rabble-rousing.47
Die Rassen depicts National Socialism as a lifestyle associated with drunkenness and brew houses.48 In this milieu that attracts Germans from all walks
Karlanner’s affiliation with Nazi students is partly the product of his alcohol addiction and partly his lack of critical acumen. Deep, deep down he yearns to be included in a strong collective that demands conformity. His tendency to identify with the dominant party comes to the foreground when, after the Nazi takeover, he turns his back on Helene and his academic advisor who is Jewish, since they so obviously have been defeated.51 At that point, Karlanner completely submits to the rituals that shape the daily routine of his Nazi association and adopts their anti-intellectualism and hate speech.52 The student leader Rosloh coaches Karlanner to perform the Hitler salute and to develop the diction and body language appropriate to a member of the “master race.” He also incites Karlanner against his Jewish professors who supposedly treat him unfairly because he is an “Aryan.”53 Eventually, Karlanner no longer wants to become a physician, and instead yearns to be a fighter in the nationalist revolution.54
The process of indoctrination is predicated upon an inordinate appreciation of discipline and fitness. Body building and a militaristic mindset become Karlanner’s top priorities, and he begins to belittle traditional values and the opinions of women. The preeminent critic of racial theory, Wilhelm Reich, considered the kind of irrationalism Karlanner cultivates an integral component
Similarly problematic is the honor code within the student organizations. Bruckner implies criticism of the false sense of honor the fraternities propagate, which involves saving face and aggressive acts. These are part of the Nazi “shame culture” that discourages personal responsibility. As defined by Ruth Benedict, a shame culture dictates ritualistic behavior and adherence to conventions.58 In Nazi circles, a member is rewarded for “choosing what is expected” rather than choosing what is moral, and a man is obligated to defend his reputation by acts of violence and dehumanizing perceived opponents.59 An incident involving a Nazi and a Jewish student demonstrates the mentality gap between Nazis and average citizens. The Nazi spits on the Jewish student’s shoe, a gesture that in his view establishes dominance, while the Jewish student finds it merely absurd.60 The honor code also pits comrades against one another, for example when Karlanner refuses to follow Rosloh’s order to put his former fiancée Helene under arrest. As a consequence, Rosloh declares Karlanner a traitor, who must be killed notwithstanding their earlier friendship.61 Despite these internal tensions, the Nazi contingent closes ranks against the outside and maintains ingroup/outgroup thinking based on nation, race, and gender.
The use of language reflects the attitudinal differences of Bruckner’s characters. Many examples reveal that Nazi speech invalidates the individual through the use of generalizations such as „die typischeste Eigenschaft Eurer Rasse,“62
In agreement with the Nazi Party Program and Günther’s Rassenkunde, Tessow regards German nationals as a cohesive gene pool. Accordingly, Jews, including Jewish citizens of Germany, are a distinct race and must therefore be excluded from German nationhood: „Wenn Du, ein Deutscher, eine Jüdin heiratest, vergrößerst Du den Sumpf der biologischen Erbmischung.“66 Tessow’s fantasies about the Germans mindset reveal a sentimental and mystical streak. For example, he considers the ability to appreciate music and the ability to submit to discipline uniquely German experiences and bases upon them his claims of German superiority.67 Primarily, he articulates the characteristics of the supposed master race in physical terms: blond hair, athletic built, and a light complexion. Following Nazi ideology, his conception of gender roles is binary and patriarchal, and he believes that compliant Aryan femininity complements the heroic masculinity whose appropriate expression is toughness, and is based on a “master ethos.”68
Finally, when Tessow speaks about his own family background, the origins of his attitudes come to light. Like his idol, Hitler, Tessow comes from a troubled home. He blames his fatherless childhood for his rebellious tendencies and confesses that his mother was the first object of his aggression because he considered her a weak person.69 Tessow rejects the Weimar Republic, whose democratic structures strike him as effeminate, he disparages the Treaty of Versailles as Germany’s ultimate humiliation, and proclaims that Germans must embrace the heroic era that lies ahead.70 Tessow has shaped his vision
Karlanner exemplifies the many people who yielded to the temptation of National Socialism but became disillusioned and changed their minds when the criminal character of the Nazi movement became clear. At that point it is too late: Karlanner is taken on a “little trip” to be murdered, and the Nazi ringleaders assert that the business of the execution will be covered up. Karlanner’s death confirms the Nazi victory and the impending destruction of anyone who does not conform. Hitler’s triumph marks the beginning of a tyrannical rule of mediocrity and brutality—the triumph of thugs over intellectuals.
In this drama, privilege in the Nazi state is accorded on the basis of racial identity. The notion that Germans are beings of a higher order is an effective recruitment tool. Enemy images of allegedly inferior humans such as Jews and women instill Nazi males with pride and fuel their aggressions. Die Rassen illustrates through its characters that the ingroup-outgroup bias prescribed by the official party line is a stabilizing element in the Nazi mentality.
Friedrich Wolf’s Drama Professor Mamlock
The medical profession also provides the setting for the four-act play Professor Mamlock (written 1933, premiered 1934) by playwright and physician Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953), who had been a conscientious objector in the First World War.72 Wolf wrote the drama after his escape to France in 1933. The main characters are interns and doctors at a prominent clinic. They are wavering between National Socialism, Conservatism, and Socialism. His young hero, a Socialist from a Jewish physician’s family, and his paramour, a non-Jewish doctor, initially a Nazi who eventually embraces Socialism, offer a vision of hope for the antifascist cause.
In Wolf’s play, racial anti-Semitism is a key factor in the dramatic development. However, equally important is the motif of the class struggle between the Nazis and the proletariat. The determination Wolf attributes to the antifascists injects a positive perspective into the otherwise pessimistic drama. The drama, originally in German, was first performed in 1934 in Yiddish on a Warsaw stage under the title Der gelbe Fleck (The Yellow Badge). In 1935, an English translation appeared, but, similar to Bruckner’s Die Rassen, the reception of Professor Mamlock was limited.
At the turn of the millennium, both Die Rassen and Professor Mamlock drew renewed scholarly attention. Sarah Rosorius analyzed these plays in her study on the responses of assimilated Jews to the Nazis’ rise to power.73 Rosorius notes striking similarities between the two works that review the decline of academic standards and increasing corruption at universities under the auspices of National Socialism. From a Marxist point of view, Wolf foregrounds class-related issues and implies that the anti-Semitism of the Nazi doctors in his play is secondary to their frustrated ambitions and social displacement. The economic crisis in the Weimar Republic has intensified competition among the interns, and race has become a mechanism for exclusion. Many of the conflicts in the play remain unresolved. The absence of a fifth act in Professor Mamlock suggests that, in light of the events of 1933, it was impossible to provide closure. This open-ended structure invites the audience to envision a fifth act, as it were, and a positive change through an antifascist revolution.
The setting alternates between the private living quarters of the protagonist, Professor Hans Mamlock, and his adjacent private practice. The combination of living and work spheres is reminiscent of Sigmund Freud’s private practice and his thoroughly bourgeois existence in Vienna. The time-span in Professor Mamlock is 1932/1933, when the decline of the medical profession occurs in tandem with the destruction of all professional structures in Germany. Mamlock, a Jewish surgeon and head of his own clinic, shares certain traits with Feuchtwanger’s Edgar Oppenheim. He derives his sense of identity from his profession and his patriotism, and staunchly dismisses the idea that anyone could not consider him a German.
The opening lines of the play address the tensions between the junior physicians and the chief surgeon. As the most experienced surgeon, Hans Mamlock performs the difficult procedures himself. Surgical resident Inge Ruoff is adamant in expressing her discontent about Mamlock’s practice of taking charge of the seriously ill patients and leaving the less-challenging cases to the junior staff.74 With ostensible objectivity, her colleague Hellpach confirms that Mamlock is an impediment to the advancement of the interns and concludes that, as long as Mamlock is the head physician, the younger colleagues have no chance.75 This seemingly job-related exchange has strong anti-Semitic undercurrents.
Through his choice of names, Wolf marks his characters in terms of their ethnic background to suggest to the audience that anti-Semitism is his central
There is a generational perspective as well. The senior physicians give first priority to their profession, while the younger “Aryans” are motivated by politics and career considerations. Drs. Ruoff and Hellpach have Nazi allegiances which they hope will help them to advance into leadership positions. They express their identity in racial terms to disqualify their Jewish colleagues as professional competitors.77 Their pan-German visions are couched in supremacist platitudes: „Der Untergang der Untüchtigen, der Feiglinge, der Schwachen.“78 Hans Mamlock, similar to Edgar Oppenheim, insists that he is an apolitical professional and a German patriot. Attributed an impeccable sense of duty, he represents the conservative professional, not in the same league as Feuchtwanger’s Jewish haute bourgeois, but clearly an established professional. Staying true to the Hippocratic Oath, he treats all patients regardless of their background and status.
Wolf uses the pejorative term “Nazi” throughout the play in accordance with his Marxist views. Unsurprisingly, a politically astute proletarian patient provides information about National Socialism.79 Even Dr. Ruoff is impressed by the working-class man’s remarks; from her anti-Semitic point of view, she finds it hard to believe that the antifascist activist is actually Jewish.80 The unfolding
The characters’ statements bring to light the increasing gulf between Jews and Aryans, Nazis and Communists, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Counter-intuitively, the female characters—even those with pro-Nazi proclivities—turn out to be more open-minded than their male counterparts, a fact by which Wolf insinuates that they draw fewer benefits from the Nazi regime and are more aware of their own emotions. By contrasting the adaptability of the women with Hans Mamlock’s unbending adherence to principles for principles’ sake, Wolf reveals a general perspective: the affinity between the professor and professionals of the older generation. Some of Mamlock’s attitudes correspond to the mentality that fascist theory ascribes to the authoritarian personality.
Mamlock’s rigid mindset reflects the military-style education during the Wilhelminian era, which he shares with the veterans of the First World War. In his path-breaking study on the psychology of men and women of the First World War generations, Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies, 1977), Klaus Theweleit maintained that self-control and discipline had been the foremost educational objectives in bourgeois Wilhelminian homes and schools, where flogging was the customary punishment for children, with the result of creating „deutsche nicht zu Ende geborene Mensch[en].“82 The character of Mamlock and his Gentile age-cohort was shaped by this milieu, which fostered obedience and a sense of duty rather than independence and critical thinking. It comes as no surprise that the traditionalist Mamlock tolerates the pro-Nazi statements of his friend Seidel, who praises the Nazis for getting tough on socialist papers and for their swift justice.83 Neither man seems troubled by the mass arrests of communists, pacifists, and internationalists. Only the
Wolf also thematizes the personality cult fostered by Hitler’s sensationalist appearances at rallies and in weekly newsreels, and the display of Nazi propaganda in public spaces.85 Even Ruth Mamlock, the protagonist’s daughter, who will soon be classified as a “Half-Jew,” is taken in by Nazi propaganda.86 The assumption that a girl of Jewish descent expresses admiration for Hitler implies that the charismatic leader exuded movie-star appeal. In contrast, Professor Mamlock attributes rational thinking to the Communist figures, whose resistance is presented as the only viable alternative.
Feuchtwanger had introduced the notion of a resistance movement, but invested little confidence in its ability to succeed. In contrast, Wolf construes Mamlock’s son Rolf as a positive role model whose resolute opposition inspires greater optimism.87 Revolutionary impulses are furthermore ascribed to a female character, Dr. Inge Ruoff, as a model exemplifying that change is possible. In her case, the motivating factor is love. Inge’s affection for Rolf Mamlock helps her to overcome her anti-Semitism and dedicate herself to the cause of antifascism. This romantic subplot suggests that, in the presence of genuine emotions, National Socialism must fail. At the same time, the love story confirms entrenched gender stereotypes by showing that even an academically trained professional woman will follow her partner’s lead in politics and abandon her career to do his bidding.
Communism as a libidinal force was discussed in Marxist psychoanalysis, for example Reich’s Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. According to Reich, the propensity for fascism derived from sexual repression which consumed
Professor Mamlock represents the Nazis as a focused movement with a tremendous capacity for outreach. It is apparent that only an even better organized, more powerful collective would be able to defeat a force of this magnitude. In the framework of the play, only the Communist resistance has the necessary potential for a counter-movement. Wolf subtly redefined the problem at hand: anti-Semitism gradually loses its importance as the focus shifts to the theme of the class struggle. A dialogue between Rolf and Inge suggests that definitions of identity in national or ethnic terms are irrelevant in light of the struggle of the international proletariat against fascist capitalism.88
Professor Mamlock follows the Marxist model for the interpretation of National Socialism. The drama ends with the fourth act, which indicates the end of traditional professionalism in Germany. The bourgeoisie which fostered the German-Jewish symbiosis faces defeat, but the play implies that the Nazi regime is not the final chapter of European history. The missing final fifth act is for the young generations to write: the Communist Ernst, Mamlock’s activist son Rolf, and Dr. Ruoff, who dedicate their lives to antifascism.
Transfigured Germans. Leni Riefenstahl’s Celebration of the National Community in the Propaganda Film Triumph des Willens
Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, ps. for Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl (1902–2003), positioned herself as a German national according to the Nazi Party program and as an insider of the Third Reich. This viewpoint shapes her iconic propaganda film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). The film stands out because of its approach and aesthetic. It projects a stratified, gendered vision of the Third Reich through its soundtrack and imagery. Riefenstahl achieves a totalizing vision that other Nazi films imply but communicate only partially and indirectly.89Triumph des Willens introduces leading
In the interwar period, film had become an important propaganda tool. Earlier works had personalized Nazi ideology through individual stories; for example, Hans Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex (Our Flag Leads Us Forward, 1933), based on the novel with the same title by Karl Aloys Schenzinger (1932), a political melodrama about a working-class boy’s conversion from Communism to National Socialism. Anti-Semitic plots were often presented in historical settings, for example, in Veit Harlan’s Jud Süβ (1940), or ideological messages were embedded in sentimental romantic comedies such as Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Der Mustergatte (The Model Husband, 1937).90 Love and adventure plots in popular movies combined ideological messages with the idealization of the military; for example, in Eduard von Borsody’s Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940).
Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens is distinct from these popular feature films, and is an exception among Nazi non-fiction films disseminating enemy images, as is the case in Fritz Hippler’s Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940), an anti-Semitic propaganda film shot in Polish ghettos under Nazi occupation. In a similar vein, historical documentary films such as Erich Waschneck’s Die Rothschilds (The Rothschilds, 1940) defamed prominent Jewish families, and Gustav Ucicky’s anti-Slavic film Heimkehr (Homecoming, 1941) provides a justification of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Riefenstahl, in contrast, represents the Third Reich in a positive and celebratory manner, and leaves enemy images to the viewer’s imagination.
Impressed by her previous work, Hitler commissioned Riefenstahl to produce a documentary film of the 1934 Party Congress and granted her complete artistic license.91 Riefenstahl’s focus was the resurgent nation under National Socialism with its leaders and collectives making up this new Germany. Supported by virtually unlimited government resources, Riefenstahl was in a position to cast mass scenes featuring Nazi organizations and the military, including the SS, the SA, the Wehrmacht, and the German Labor Front, as the collective protagonist of her monumental spectacle. She was able to hire countless extras and showcased the Nazi elite including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Baldur von Schirach as
The film projects the views on race from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which emphasizes Aryan diversity and a wide-ranging German typology instead of prioritizing the ideal of the Nordic race celebrated in Günther’s Rassenkunde. Only among the children, especially the Hitler Youth boys, does the blond and blue-eyed type dominate to provide the directive for the future. Hitler himself does not represent the idealized racial type of the Aryan male of Nordic provenance. Still, at the pinnacle of the power pyramid, he assumes his preeminent role as the visionary of Germany’s future. Hitler stands by himself without female companion or descendant. His splendid isolation calls to mind Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1883) and the notion that Man represents the bridge between primate and Superman.92
Hitler is usually photographed from below to make him appear tall and imposing as the embodiment of the ultimate leader.93 The thundering applause his appearances draw are registered by the sound track and, along with the images of human masses on the move, the uproar denotes the melting of the nation into one under Hitler’s guidance. By reiterating the same message on both the visual and acoustic levels, Riefenstahl designed a collectivizing filmic strategy. Her cosmovision differs fundamentally from earlier representational models as well as antifascist films and literature that mediate their message
Triumph des Willens derives its momentum from the implied invitation to the viewer to sing along with familiar tunes and to march along through settings that change from day to night, outdoors to indoors, from choreographed mass scenes to individual faces and bodies, and then back to frenetically cheering crowds. In its repetitiveness, the film has a primarily emotional, almost hypnotic effect. It shows rather than argues its message of the growing power of the Nazi movement and invites anyone with the proper qualifications to join the movement, whose representatives promise that it will last throughout millennia.
Triumph des Willens won acclaim not only within Germany, but was also awarded international prizes in France and Nazi-friendly Italy—the film clearly also resonated with non-German audiences.95 According to George Dickie, Triumph of the Will challenged generations of “aestheticians writing about the moral content of art.”96 The preeminent role of choreography and music leaves the film of national rebirth open to interpretation and makes it potentially attractive to viewers outside Germany. Images suggesting discipline and enjoyment, passion and submission are complemented by the soundscape and a stentorian voice-over that denotes an unequivocal national consensus that a reasoned narrative would undermine.97
The symbol of the Party Eagle, fashioned after the earlier Imperial Eagle but more streamlined and positioned upon a swastika encircled by a wreath,
Feuchtwanger and Bruckner had demonstrated the role that political songs played in Nazi indoctrination. Sung by soldiers and men at work, the lyrics and melodies of these catchy songs with their straightforward, simple lyrics were appropriate for harmonizing. One of these songs, Die Fahne hoch (“The Flag On High,” 1929) by Nazi activist Horst Wessel assumed legendary proportions after the author’s assassination in 1930. It became the unofficial anthem of Nazi Germany. In the score of Triumph des Willens, this song serves as the leitmotif. In the last scene in the Party assembly hall, the “Horst Wessel” song rings out and the audience joins in, demonstrating their familiarity with the lyrics, which evokes a mystical union of the fallen fighters and the applauding crowds as the 1934 Party Day comes to a close.
The combination of various forms of expression makes Riefenstahl’s film a total political art and propaganda work that supports aesthetically the political process of bringing all aspects of German society in line. This Gleichschaltung (political synchronization) began with Hitler’s rise to power. Triumph des Willens suggests that this process was complete after the Nazis purged their own ranks of stormtroopers in the “Night of the Long Knives” (June 29, 1934). Riefenstahl’s film is a contribution to the legitimization of the regime after this episode of political murders and introduces the restructured organizations to the national and international public.
The film provides visual evidence of the mass approval the regime claimed to enjoy, amplified by the pomp and circumstance of parades and the apparent popularity of the exclusively male Party leadership. The women and children cheering from the sidelines express complete popular approval. Hitler’s plane and his fleet of cars, the new uniforms and shining boots, and the well-fed onlookers project prosperity and an economically sound state that the international public should both trust and fear. Riefenstahl’s images reinforce Hitler’s model of a varied German population, but within the seeming diversity,
The limitations to apparent inclusivity apply to men and women of non-European appearance, and to any ethnic apparel other than the German regional costumes. Civilian male attire is also not shown. The scarcity of civilian garments suggests the end of Germany’s civil society and the bourgeoisie. Women, with the exception of a few young girls, are not featured as active participants in the spectacle. No woman appears on stage as a presenter, and not one women’s organization is showcased in the pageants. However, the presence of women as spectators is needed to validate the display of male valor. Nazi feature films also followed this gendered model: divas and starlets in feature films were defined by the feminine sphere as wives, objects of desire, and victims.
As a propaganda film, Triumph des Willens is unsurpassed. The Third Reich’s totalitarian world view was exemplified by Riefenstahl’s tightly controlled aesthetics. The seemingly unending sequences of the film make the viewers receptive to the film’s central theme: German greatness. The flow of images stirs the emotions and prevents critical thoughts. Ultimately, the principle of uniformity shaped Nazi Germany’s cultural production as a whole. Nazi works of art communicate the identical core content in varying registers. In contrast, the antifascist cultural production by exile authors reflects divergent attitudes
Representations of Nazi Characters in Exile Literature
Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s Novel Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen
While assessments of the Nazi movement and its followers differed significantly, Nazi characters could be easily identified. Antifascist feminist authors expanded the cast of Nazi figures by expanding the range of female Nazi characters. They explored gender-specific experiences from social critical perspectives. Taking into consideration the unequal status of women in German society, they addressed issues that male authors generally ignored, underrated, or romanticized.
The novel Unsere Töchter, Die Nazinen (Our Daughters, the Nazis, 1935) by Vienna-born aristocrat and feminist Hermynia Zur Mühlen, née Hermine Isabelle Maria Gräfin Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet (1883–1951), was serialized prior to the release of Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens.101 Influenced by Marxist theory, Zur Mühlen explores women’s responses to National Socialism in class-specific terms. Her protagonists, the Nazinen (Nazi girls), find themselves marginalized in the patriarchal society of the Weimar Republic and join the Nazi Party primarily for personal reasons. Preempting Riefenstahl’s film images of unorganized female contingents, Zur Mühlen, however, in an affirmative mode, depicts female Nazis as less-committed to the movement than their male counterparts. Her women can be swayed by better prospects, which makes them unreliable Nazis.
Zur Mühlen wrote from her position of social marginality as a renegade aristocrat and female intellectual. In her novel, she explores various predicaments confronting unmarried women after the First World War and the temptation to join the Nazi movement that promised them social and professional integration. These problems include the fact that the war had drastically reduced the number of potential marital partners, and the economic crisis had depleted employment opportunities. Zur Mühlen features six interconnected first-person narratives by three female narrators from around the time of the Nazi takeover. The narratives explain why women with different social standings embraced an ideology from which they had nothing to gain.
The narrators are three mothers living in small-town Southern Germany. One of them, Kati Gruber, a widowed working-class woman, remains committed to her and her late husband’s Socialist cause. She remembers her married life as a happy partnership of equals. The second narrator, Countess Agnes, also a widow, lost her fortune after the war but maintains her aristocratic lifestyle and has a distinct distaste for Nazi upstarts whose contempt for religion she condemns. After a disappointing marriage to an aristocratic playboy, Agnes leads a secluded life on her Lake Constance estate. The third narrator, Martha Feldhüter, is from the lower middle class. She married a rather unattractive physician to improve her social status and affiliates herself with the Nazi movement for opportunistic reasons.
Gender, politics, and religion are key aspects in Zur Mühlen’s novel. Religion is rarely thematized in exile literature about Nazi Germany. The established denominations, Catholic and Protestant, were also not a topic in pro-Nazi literature, since, as Samuel Koehne points out, the Nazi Party was “contemplating limiting and suppressing doctrines or religious teachings, if they offended the German ‘moral sense’—itself viewed as racially derived.”102 While Nazi policies first and foremost targeted Judaism, more generally, they also promoted anti-Christian views. Similarly, most modernist and Marxist writers also championed secular protagonists and rarely took note of the dilemma facing religious individuals and communities.
The Feldhüter family is Zur Mühlen’s only dyed-in-the wool Nazi family. Martha, or as she prefers to be called in true bourgeois fashion, Frau Doktor Feldhüter, eventually increases her own prospects as a society woman by securing a match for her daughter with a Nazi of aristocratic background. Zur Mühlen draws the Feldhüter family in a stereotypical manner. The women are gold-diggers, and the cartoonish Dr. Feldhüter is reminiscent of derogatory descriptions of Nazi academics in Feuchtwanger and Bruckner. Antifascist authors often targeted the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Like Goebbels, Feldhüter has a club foot—a deformity he shares with the medieval devil who is attributed a cloven hoof to suggests his spiritual flaws. Feldhüter excels in greed and dishonesty; he does not even share his true intentions with his family. In fact, they are surprised when he discloses, after Hitler’s rise to power, that he has been a member of the Nazi Party all along. Similar to the scenario in Wolf’s Professor Mamlock, the resentment of the mediocre Feldhüter is directed at successful competitors, including a renowned Jewish physician.
Zur Mühlen’s narrators, the mothers of the younger protagonists, disclose their experiences in two phases; before the federal election of March 1933,
Primus-Heinz Kucher states that Zur Mühlen’s foremost concern is the alarming progress National Socialism made in all parts of German society. In her novel, she interlinks this issue with generational problems between mothers and daughters. While the daughters of Kati and Agnes have developed a propensity for National Socialism against their mothers’ opposition, in the Feldhüter family there is complete agreement about joining the Nazi Party.104 This constellation contradicts the popular myth that German women had a special affinity with Nazi ideology, which was debunked by empirical studies of the 1970s, showing that women’s political attitudes had been far less predictable than historians assumed. In her novel, Zur Mühlen demonstrates counter-currents in the mentality of the mother-and-daughter generations as opposed to a direct positive or negative transfer from the older generation to the younger.
Of special interest are the aspects of the Nazi agenda that appeal to women as the novel examines the expectations of women of the interwar generation. The assumption arises that they are motivated by traditional “female” concerns (marriage, sex, and security) and that their fears make them vulnerable to right-wing politics. Zur Mühlen justifies these fears in light of the economic woes of the Weimar Republic and the scarcity of eligible men. Other factors include class-related shifts, most notably the decline of the lower nobility and middle classes, gender inequality, and the relentless Nazi propaganda promising a better future. These factors shape the outlook of Zur Mühlen’s protagonists, single women discomfited by their diminished chances of finding a husband or meaningful employment.
Zur Mühlen’s literary cosmos is a small world that allows the differences between her characters to be highlighted. The proletarian mother Kati Gruber is often assigned the role of the commentator who criticizes the Nazi followers
The focus of Unsere Tochter, die Nazinen is on the daughters, Toni Gruber, Claudia, and Lieselotte Feldhüter, who embrace National Socialism. Toni Gruber is robust and intelligent, and Claudia, Countess Agnes’s spinsterly daughter, is hyper-sensitive, but both are equally vulnerable to demagoguery.107 In Toni’s case, the economic crisis, her father’s absence, and the job shortage make the Nazi Party seem like a viable option. For Claudia, the decisive factors are her social and sexual needs. For both the proletarian and the aristocrat, the association with National Socialism is temporary. In contrast, the petty bourgeois Lieselotte uses her Nazi affiliation as a ticket into high society. She does not care which direction the movement will take as long as she benefits from it.
Through her Nazinen, Zur Mühlen highlights insidious modes of benefitting from the regime in terms of material advantages and emotional fulfillment. By validating their male partners, the female characters become complicit in the Nazis’ rise to power. Toni, for example, attends meetings, wears a swastika pin and assumes ancillary roles in Party activities from which she derives a sense of belonging.108 Claudia’s story conforms with accepted views on female sexuality, including those in Anna Fischer-Dückelmann’s widely available Die Frau als Hausärztin (Woman as Family Physician, 1901), which the Nazis temporarily put on the list of banned literature.109 According to Fischer-Dückelmann, premature aging in women is caused by a lack of sexual activity.110 Zur Mühlen
The central section features Martha Feldhüter as a paradigm of Nazi womanhood. Based on her authoritarian family background, she seems ideally suited for life under National Socialism. Her chatty account discloses embarrassing details of her unhappy marriage and complaints about being ostracized by other women, a predicament she blames on her limping husband. Lacking the attributes of Nazi masculinity and the normative racial features, Dr. Feldhüter ironically reflects the Nazi leadership, who bore no resemblance to the Nordic ideal. Trying to compensate for his shortcomings, Martha never tires of proclaiming that Dr. Feldhüter is a verifiable Aryan and a husband to be proud of. However, contrary to Martha’s assertions, Feldhüter completely lacks integrity. His reasons for joining the Party are economic and professional—he is indifferent to the political implications of his decisions. His acceptance into the Party, in turn, shows that the Nazis are not choosy. They welcome him regardless of his mediocrity. Initially, when Feldhüter is not sure that the Nazis will succeed, he keeps his membership secret. Like Feuchtwanger’s furniture-maker Wels, he only displays his party pin after Hitler has been appointed Chancellor. Only then does he disclose his real motives to his wife: he trusts that, with the help of the Nazis, they will acquire wealth and status.112
The character of Martha Feldhüter is split int0 two life stories, presumably a trait of the entire middle class. Zur Mühlen implies that the apparent dishonesty of this social group is the product of the shame culture that shaped it. Martha’s parallel, but conflicting, stories expose the discrepancy between her private thoughts and her public persona. While the first narrative articulates her frustration, the second narrative is aspirational, created by whitewashing
Martha’s attitude towards National Socialism is also ambivalent. In public, she has nothing but praise for the SS and SA, „die schmucken Uniformen,“113 and the „tapferen Burschen, die jahrelang verfolgt und von den Feinden meuchlings überfallen worden sind.“114 In her personal narrative, though, she confesses that the movement and its men leave her unimpressed. To realize her own goals, she is willing to submit to power in the private sphere of marriage as well as in the public sphere of politics. In order to live with herself, she cultivates the ability to ignore inconvenient truths. Thus, she interprets her success in Nazi Germany as the product of her hard work and moral values, which conveniently enough coincide with Nazi ideology, her praise of motherhood being but one example.115 Even Martha’s sense of beauty is entirely practical. Lieselotte meets her expectations of a beautiful daughter because she makes an advantageous match. Martha’s hateful comments about her husband’s competitor, Dr. Bär, are also aligned with Nazi ideology: he is Jewish, which makes her diatribes socially acceptable. Clearly, however, her anti-Semitism is personally motivated and fueled by envy.
Zur Mühlen’s female Nazi characters correspond to the class and gender paradigms of Marxist antifascism theory. Similar to Wolf’s Professor Mamlock, Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen ends on a moderately hopeful note based on the supposition that most Germans fundamentally disagree with the regime, and their acquiescence will end as soon as the proletariat is strong enough to topple the Third Reich.
Klaus Mann’s Roman à Clef Mephisto
The social critical novel Mephisto (Mephisto–Novel of a Career, 1936) by Klaus Mann (1906–1949), the son of Thomas Mann, is an extraordinary literary exploration of the Nazi mentality set within the panorama of the Third Reich
The novel was immediately read as a roman à clef and the chameleon-like Höfgen identified as Nazi star actor and Mann’s former friend Gustav Gründgens.117 Mann drew massive criticism from Gründgens’s associates, who recognized the connection, for configuring Höfgen as a spineless individual and a likely candidate for the Nazi stage.118 The relationship between Höfgen and his sponsor, the portly German Prime Minister, resembles that between Gründgens and Prime Minister Hermann Göring (1893–1946). The politician’s voluptuous blonde wife, Lotte Lindenthal, calls to mind Göring’s wife Emmy, a minor actress who rose to prominence in the Nazi elite. The powerful couple’s rivals are the demonic propaganda minister, who resembles Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Göbbels, and his fussy wife.
Höfgen resembles Bruckner’s protagonist Karlanner, who likewise wavers between old loyalties and the allure of power. Mann’s emotionally unstable protagonist and the rivalries attributed to the Nazi leadership signal volatility behind the rigid façade of the Nazi government. Mann’s novel outlines how the only viable alternative Germans have at the beginning of Nazi rule is making common cause with the Nazis or leaving the country. Staying and refusing to cooperate poses an inordinate risk, as the unhappy fate of several characters shows. Höfgen affiliates himself with the winning party and enters into the inner circles of the regime, thus occasioning a satirical panorama of the Nazi elite, some of whom the author knew personally.
The novel operates on several levels: it’s a realistic-historical novel that chronicles events from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi period, a symbolic-literary tale that reviews key events from the cosmic perspective of Goethe’s Faust, and an autobiographical story that introduces materials from the author’s circle of acquaintances. Through the Faust motifs, which were familiar to educated German readers, Mann satirizes the Third Reich and its major and minor players. Read as a satirical commentary mediated through Goethe’s masterful classical drama, the middle-aged Höfgen represents a Faust-character on a reduced scale. His Afro-German mistress, the domina Juliette, serves as a
The novel also contains a critique of Nazi aesthetics, as is evident in the opening episode at the Prime Minister’s birthday party. The narrator’s comment invokes the apocalyptic horsemen to signify the end of German civilization:
Wehe, die apokalyptischen Reiter sind unterwegs, hier haben sie sich niedergelassen und aufgerichtet ein gräßliches Regiment. … Überall soll ihre Mißgestalt verehrt und angebetet werden. Ihre Häßlichkeit soll bewundert sein als die neue Schönheit. Wo man heute noch über sie lacht, soll man morgen vor ihnen auf dem Bauche liegen.120
These pronouncements signify the near-complete subversion of the norms of modern art and architecture, which the Nazis condemned as degenerate. For their gala event, although the Nazi elite has spared no expense, nothing, including the stage-Mephisto Höfgen, rises above mediocrity. The champagne flows freely and the decorations are of epic proportion, but the music, a potpourri of stuffy military marches, popular ditties, and even jazz tunes, lacks refinement. The women’s vulgar display of wealth clashes with the frugality imposed on the general public and exposes the double standard. While the prominence splurges, the masses still hope for the “the day of freedom and bread” promised in the “Horst Wessel Song.”121 While the majority of the Nazi prominence is in attendance at the gala event, the dictator himself does not appear as an icon of his importance.
Höfgen stands out among many other opportunists because he combines his careerism with the skills of a stage actor. His conversion from Socialism
To indicate that, despite their odd practices, the Nazis are anything but amusing, the Minister of Propaganda, who carries his club foot in the manner of Shakespeare’s stage villain Richard III, evokes terror by his demonic aura. Having assumed the role of supreme arbiter, he regulates the cultural life of the nation.123 Everyone mistrusts and avoids him: „Eine eisige Luft schien zu wehen, wo er vorbeiging.“124 In his presence, Höfgen is reduced to a simple stage-demon. The tension between guests at the party indicates that even Nazi insiders have reason to be careful of one another. The forces shaping public life are interconnected with everyone’s private sphere, even the bedrooms. Ideology dictates family life and morality, and the jealousies among the wives play a role as well; for example, since the dictator is not married, the wife of the Propaganda Minister and Lotte Lindenthal compete for the role of First Lady.
For the construction of his characters, Mann uses descriptions that deviate strategically from the Nazi racial and gender stereotypes. Upon close inspection, the blond, green-eyed, rather than blue-eyed, protagonist Höfgen is balding. The air of controlled calm he assumes in public is an act; in private he is given to tantrums.125 An actor through and through, he makes the most of his unimpressive features and carefully displays his supposedly aristocratic head in the most advantageous manner.126 According to the narrator, Höfgen
Hitler represents Power Incarnate. In their private meeting, he initially subdues the actor psychologically by his mere presence.129 Slowly regaining his senses, the actor observes that the great man has an insignificant forehead and his “legendary” strand of hair is greasy. His unattractive glare and his paunch make the aura crumble.130 These details, in conjunction with the low voice and broad Southern German dialect, seem shocking to Höfgen, all the more as the Leader forcefully expounds his national and racial doctrine.131
A survey of Höfgen’s career further supports Mann’s notions about the deceptiveness of the Nazi elite.132 The account begins in the Weimar Republic and reveals that the actor has had emotional problems throughout his career. His superior, Director Kroge, remarks, „Alles an ihm ist falsch, von seinem literarischen Geschmack bis zu seinem sogenannten Kommunismus. Er ist kein Künstler, sondern ein Komödiant.“133 Höfgen is emphatically characterized as a blond Rhinelander,134 but, in Mann’s typology, blondness is not a positive trait; it usually signifies selfishness and untrustworthiness. For the most part, the blond women in Mephisto are of questionable character and willingly submit to Nazi standards.
Several contrasting figures are introduced to further define Höfgen, including the theater-worker Miklas, a confirmed Nazi and anti-Semite of low status.
Klaus Mann’s pessimistic novel portrays opportunism and hypocrisy as the path to success in the Third Reich. His protagonist follows this path and, becoming identified with the role of Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, becomes the poster-boy for the Nazi theater. To achieve this success, he must repudiate his likes and dislikes, put up with terrible company, and become complicit in heinous crimes. Mann’s prototypical Nazi is someone who, like Höfgen, sells his soul and the people closest to him for money and status. His complete lack of empathy marks Höfgen as a psychopath.
Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Drama Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches
The annexation of Austria, the Night of Broken Glass, and the impending war spurred further literary assessments of the Nazi regime, including Bertolt Brecht’s epic drama Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (The Private Life of the Master Race, 1948), which Brecht began in exile in 1934 together with Margarete Steffin. In 1938, selected scenes were published by the Malik publishing house, and eight episodes were performed in Paris.138 The play was published in the United States in 1944, and for the first time in Germany in 1948. Encompassing the years 1933 to 1938, Brecht’s critical dramatic panorama continues the tradition of Feuchtwanger and Wolf. Brecht’s interpretation of the Nazi mentality is informed by Marxist theory and presents the class struggle as the key element.
Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches traces the ascent of the Nazis through brute force and deception, and depicts a concurrent awakening among the proletariat. Increasingly vigilant working-class characters develop the skills
The title is reminiscent of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, 1847) and implicitly compares the Germans to harlots surrendering to the highest bidder, in this case an illegitimate government. The dramatic trajectory predicts the inevitable downfall of the Third Reich. The final message is that the terror will not last if the common people collectively resist. In chronological order, the individual scenes illustrate Germany’s fate under Nazi rule, showing, on one hand, increasingly radical policies and, on the other, emerging dissatisfaction.
The introductory poem “Die deutsche Heerschau”139 alludes to Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens.140 Brecht takes the phrase “Heerschau halten” (reviewing the troops) from the film and uses it satirically to call into question Riefenstahl’s message that Hitler is a military genius and a national prophet. According to Brecht’s poem, five years after the Nazi takeover, the situation in Germany has steadily deteriorated.141 The plight of the disenfranchised becomes obvious and increases with the prospect of war. Due to the arms build-up, ordinary families go hungry, but their complaints are drowned out by war mongering and military music. With its episodic structure and everyday language, Brecht’s play is geared towards audiences who are ready to prepare for collective resistance.142
Each episode shows German society at a particular historical juncture and builds up to a didactic punch line. Beginning with the methodical infiltration of the social structures, Brecht traces the Nazis’ early successes in co-opting the professions and the administrative establishment through intimidation, bribery, and detention. Over time, Nazi supporters can be found among the working classes as well as the bourgeoisie. Concurrent with the consolidation of the regime, increasing dissent among the proletariat becomes manifest, first
Causing people to act against their own interest, National Socialism destroys intimate relationships, as revealed in Scene Two through the example of a misogynist SA man who spies on his lover, motivated by the paranoia Brecht attributes to the Nazis.144 Reminiscent of Bruckner’s Nazi students, Nazis trust no one, including their fellow Party members. Some low-ranking Nazis seem to have retained a sense of solidarity with former comrades, as suggested in Scene Four, which is set in a concentration camp where the prisoners are routinely tortured.145 In this unlikely setting, a show of solidarity takes place among the prisoners, which certain SS men refuse to expose. The events suggest that the Nazi terror may ultimately turn against itself.146 A further probe into the mentality of the low-ranking SS men in Scene Five reveals that they eventually become demoralized when they are ordered to administer unwarranted punishment.147 The disaffection Brecht ascribes to some of the SS guards foreshadows the figure of the “good Nazi” engaging in covert subversive behavior in postwar literature.
Brecht’s assumption that the lower middle class was most vulnerable to Nazi ideology is borne out by the research of Dick Geary in “Who Voted for the Nazis?” (1998): “The lower middle class of Germany’s Protestant towns did constitute the hard-core of Nazi support and were over-represented in the membership of the NSDAP.”148 On the other hand, Nazi trials and memoir literature reveal that, contrary to these assumptions, there was little solidarity between the prisoners and the camp personnel, and cruelty existed in all ranks.149 Similar to Feuchtwanger, Bruckner, and Wolf, Brecht exposes the
Scene Nine, “Die jüdische Frau” (“The Jewish Wife”), is the best-known vignette in the play. It explores the effects of Nazi race politics on assimilated German Jews. The scene consists of one-sided telephone conversations between a Jewish woman, Judith Keith, and her non-Jewish husband. For his sake, she feels she must leave Germany. Her concern contrasts with her friends’ and husband’s indifference. He makes no attempt to stop her from going abroad. Nathan Stoltzfus confirms Brecht’s assessment of how easy it was to destroy Germany’s integrated society and observes that “much compliance was due to passivity or social conformity.”153 In the case of intermarried couples, he observes that “Germans did not fully exploit their chances for noncompliance.”154
There are parallels to the experience Brecht attributes to Judith Keith and Gustav Oppenheim’s initial disappointment with his lover Sybil in Die Geschwister Oppenheim. In Feuchtwanger, when Sybil abandons her Nazi-friendly sponsor Gutwetter, the incident is all but forgotten. In contrast, Brecht’s scene does not suggest a happy ending; Judith’s departure seems to be the end of this intercultural marriage.155 A further examination of the status of family life in Nazi Germany shows the breakdown of another family because of the son’s
The effects of Germany’s “nazification,” as revealed in Furcht und Elend, include the ideological subversion of the language. Scene Thirteen introduces SA representatives and managers wooing workers with seductive rhetoric that blends socialist and nationalist concepts and glorifies technology as the way of the future. Contrary to expectations, the workers who earn the minimum wage know that they have been duped and voice their discontent.158 The next scene shows that individual dissidents are easy to eliminate; here, they are murdered and the authorities cover up the crime.
Furcht und Elend begins by demonstrating the gap between the organized Nazis and the general population, who are taken by surprise. As the people’s skepticism increases, their will to overthrow tyrannical regime grows. The subplots in Brecht’s play lead up to the conclusion that organized resistance under the leadership of the proletariat is the only viable option for opponents of the Nazis.
Once he had completed this drama, all of Brecht’s writings were banned in Nazi Germany. Thus, his drama could only be received outside of Germany, and its appeal had to be international. Like other antifascist publications, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches had virtually no impact prior to 1945. Indeed, the first production in the United States, in 1945, postdated the developments that Brecht had intended to warn against.159
Veza Canetti’s Novel Die Schildkröten
Vienna-born Veza Canetti, neé Taubner-Calderon (1897–1963), was an author of Sephardic descent. Until her marriage to Elias Canetti, she was a Bosnian citizenship and thereafter stateless. She wrote short stories and a serialized novel that appeared in the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung. Canetti’s narratives of the early 1930s reflect her Socialist views. Before the annexation of Austria by Nazi
The Nazi invasion and the Night of Broken Glass precipitated the Canettis’ escape to England. Veza Canetti’s exile novel Die Schildkröten (The Tortoises, 1999), written in England in 1939, marks a radical change in the author’s point of view. Anti-Semitism and racist persecution are the central topics in the novel, for which she found no publisher in either its German or English version.160
The widespread acceptance of eugenics outside Germany may have been one of the reasons why Die Schildkröten could not be placed for publication. Moreover, the onset of the war made the author’s status in England precarious, and British publishers may have considered the book too controversial for a Jewish refugee author. Anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sentiments had also taken hold in Britain, and may have contributed to the author’s inability to publish Die Schildkröten during the war years.161 The satirical novel The Monster (1940) by Frieda Benedikt (ps. Anna Sebastian), a friend of the Canettis from Vienna, was published by London publisher Jonathan Cape. Benedikt’s book was also potentially controversial because it lent itself to be read as a spoof on Hitler, but it steered clear of the theme of anti-Semitism. These circumstances are inconsistent with Fritz Arnold’s claim that Veza Canetti’s Die Schildkröten remained unpublished because of the war.162
Die Schildkröten identifies anti-Semitism as a tool to disenfranchise Vienna’s Jews. The example of the highly educated Kain family and their acquaintances indicates that this segment of the population differed widely in appearance, lifestyle, and religious identity. Canetti introduces as the Kain’s adversaries two representatives of the invading power, a ruthless German SA officer and his passive-aggressive wife. They complement one another in their greed and disregard for the lives of other human beings and animals. Throughout the novel, the abuse of humans is set parallel to the mistreatment of animals to demonstrate that species categories are fluid. Human beings who, like the Jews under Nazism, are classified as less than human or animals, lose their rights to life, liberty, and property.
Canetti takes issue with “racial science” and the attendant stereotyping that encourages anti-Semitism on one hand and Aryan self-glorification on the
The Pilz family is drawn according to the stereotypical model of the lower-middle-class Nazi household and conservative gender roles. The overbearing husband dominates his simple-minded wife, a former maid, while pursuing other women. Despite her lack of education, Mrs. Pilz, like Zur Mühlen’s character of Martha Feldhüter, is anything but harmless; she nurtures her husband’s ambition and takes care of his material needs. She benefits from his position enough to submit to his wishes. Indirectly, she contributes to the persecution of the Jewish couple, Eva and Andreas Kain, whose apartment she covets, and eventually takes over after having them evicted.
In her portrayal of the German invaders, Canetti suggests that, despite their second-class status in the Nazi regime, women can also be perpetrators. The Jewish protagonist Eva Kain knows that she is confronting a mortal enemy whenever she comes face-to-face with a Nazi—male or female.163 She sees the German occupiers as the embodiment of terror, whether they are singing Schubert arias or marching songs.164 The voluptuous blond Frau Pilz, the identical physical type as Klaus Mann’s Lotte Lindenthal, combines the looks of a Wagnerian Valkyrie with naïve girlish behavior à la Goethe’s Gretchen figure. Eva’s Jewish neighbor Hilde is a contrasting figure to both Eva Kain and Mrs. Pilz. She is blond, and, based on her appearance, she can “pass” as Aryan, but her sophistication and worldliness set her apart from the Nazi German women.
Canetti attributes contradictory traits to her Nazi characters. Baldur von Pilz’s grandiosity clashes with his pettiness. Because of his quirks and mannerisms, Hilde, who underestimates him, thinks he is pathetic. Her miscalculation about a man who enjoys inflicting pain on other humans and animals mirrors the initial reactions to the Nazis, when the public had not realized that Hitler’s erratic behavior did not imply that he was ever harmless. Die Schildkröten makes it clear that despite their grotesque qualities, the National Socialists presented a threat to the entire civilized world.
Canetti’s Nazi characters are consumed by greed. Her Jewish protagonists, counter to popular belief, are shown to be devoted to intellectual and cultural
Die Schildkröten sketches a panorama of occupied Vienna that shows the effects of Nazi rule on the social fabric and on individual persons. The novel also displays the tenets and function of Nazi racism as well as the authoritarian mentality in its male and female manifestations. In her narrative, Canetti rejects the race-based categorization of human beings as well as the Cartesian division between human and non-human animals, as they serve to cement structures of power and privilege.168 The episodes showing Pilz killing several animals serve to identify the Nazis’ attribution of physical and mental deficiency as a strategy for reducing human beings and animals to the status of “life not worthy of living.”169 Thus, Die Schildkröten strikes at the heart of racism—not only Nazi anti-Semitism, but also the racism that was practiced by the colonial empires and in the United States before the Civil Rights Movement. The novel furthermore identifies analogies between speciesism, misogyny, and racism and, preempting the feminist animal rights discourse of the late twentieth century, implies that the killing of animals is a preliminary step to the killing of human beings. Canetti’s novel proposes that ending all discrimination and recognizing the interrelatedness of all creatures is the only way to defeat
Anna Seghers’s Narrative Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen
The narrative Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen (The Excursion of the Dead Girls, 1946) by Marxist author Anna Seghers (1900–1983; ps. Netty Reiling) was written in Mexico and first published in New York. Seghers surveys the period between the declining German Empire and the expected defeat of the Third Reich. Autobiographical references reveal that the narrator is a literary representation of the author; she is even referred to by Seghers’s given name, Netty.170 The fictional Netty is recovering in Mexico after a serious accident. During her convalescence, she reviews the lives of her former classmates at an all-female German high school. This gendered perspective makes Ausflug der toten Mädchen stand out among Seghers’s exile works since it highlights the often-overlooked experience of German women. Before the “Great War,” all of the girls in the story seem to coexist in harmony with one another. Some of them later embrace National Socialism, others oppose it, and Jewish women, including the narrator, are driven into exile. The narrator’s mother, like Seghers’s mother, perished in the Holocaust.
The title of the story refers to a field trip by the high school girls at a time when the cataclysmic events could not be foreseen. The girls, whose tragic end is implied in the title, lead carefree and fun-loving lives.171 The first impression is almost bucolic, and the narrator, who in the narrative present lives in Mexico, discloses that she was part of the group. Mexico was a refuge for members of the antifascist Left, Socialists and Communists. The reference to the deportation of Netty’s mother reveals that Netty is of Jewish background172 and, under National Socialism, is ostracized from the German national community.
Despite similar circumstances, Anna Seghers and Veza Canetti assess Nazi Germans in very different ways. Whereas Canetti in Die Schildkröten depicts an irreparable rift between Jews and the Nazi-dominated mainstream, the narrator in Ausflug der toten Mädchen is empathic towards her former classmates, including those who became Nazis.173 While she condemns the actions of
Class affiliation, milieu, and economic conditions are determining factors in the development of the girls. The proletarian girl Leni, for example, embraces antifascist views as a result of her upbringing in a politically-informed home and her exposure to the workers’ movement. Her partner choice is connected to her activities in Socialist organizations. On the other hand, Leni’s best friend Marianne loses her fiancé, an open-minded youth from a liberal home, in the war, and marries a Nazi, whose political views she adopts. Completely indoctrinated by Nazi ideology, she ends up informing on Leni and abandons Leni’s child when Leni is incarcerated in a concentration camp.
Seghers avoids making categorical distinctions between her Nazi characters and those that may be wavering without committing themselves one way or the other. From a humanist perspective, the author suggests that everyone can change, and that political structures and historical coincidence determine the direction a person’s life takes. The story suggests that everyone living in Nazi Germany, if left to their own devices, was impressionable. Seghers also looks at those who were persecuted for reasons ranging from politics to racial classification and perceived physical abnormality. When the most fanatic Nazi women, including Marianne, perish in Allied air raids, their deaths seem like poetic justice. Netty’s healing after her car crash in Mexico signals that the time for healing has come for her, as it has for her nation of origin which she remembers so well.
The nostalgic tone in Ausflug der toten Mädchen forecasts Seghers’s return to Germany, where she took an active part in the rebuilding of German society in East Germany. She became a distinguished and decorated member of the literary establishment in the German Democratic Republic. As a mirror of her hopes and intentions for herself and German society, Seghers’s literary figures, including those of Nazis, are configured in a manner that does not preclude reconstruciton and reconciliation.
Quotations follow Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim. Translations follow Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns (trans. James Cleugh). Maik Grote (Schreiben im Exil, 65) reports that that the novel was ready to go to press in Amsterdam in 1933 under the title “Die Geschwister Oppermann” when Lion Feuchtwanger’s brother received a threatening letter from an SA leader, a professor by the name of Oppermann, who asserted that there had never been a Jewish family by the name of Oppermann, as he could prove by his genealogy which went back to the 13th century. Feuchtwanger informed the Querido publishing house of the situation and asked that the title of the novel be changed to “Die Geschwister Oppenheim.”
Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns (London: Secker, 1933); Oppermanns (Stockholm: Skoglund, 1933). A Russian film version was also released: Semya Oppengeym, directed by Grigory Roshal, USSR, 1939.
See the classic studies by Le Bon (Psychologie des foules); Freud (Massenpsychologie); Geiger (Die Masse und ihre Aktion); Stieler (Person und Masse); and Canetti (Masse und Macht), which Canetti had begun to research in the 1920s.
Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 133, 370.
„Am 30. Januar ernannte der Reichspräsident den Verfasser des Buches „Mein Kampf“ zum Reichskanzler.“ Feuchtwanger, 143.
Kühnrich, Der KZ-Staat.
Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 414–5.
Feuchtwanger, 410–5.
Feuchtwanger, 418.
Feuchtwanger, 418.
Feuchtwanger, 415; “Still, work is there to be done for its own sake.” Feuchtwanger/Cleugh, 385.
Wagner, “Selektion und Segregation,” 332.
Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 143.
Feuchtwanger, 383.
Feuchtwanger, 279, 305, 326, 370.
Feuchtwanger, 169.
Janzen, Die Darstellung der Weimarer Republik, 24.
Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 144.
Reich, Massenpsychologie.
Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 76.
Feuchtwanger, 221.
“His face was set like a mask, the wryly amiable smile was gone. He entered the room with the air of a victor in the presence of a vanquished enemy, a stern avenger with an invisible sabre rattling at his side.” Feuchtwanger/Cleugh, 202.
Feuchtwanger, 66–7.
Feuchtwanger, 68; “Talking is more important than writing. He considered that thesis of the Leader of the Nationalist party sacrosanct.” Feuchtwanger/Cleugh, 59.
Feuchtwanger, 63–5.
Grunberger, 12-Year Reich, 58.
Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 70.
Feuchtwanger, 50.
Feuchtwanger, 50; “his big, shining, childish eyes.” Feuchtwanger/Cleugh, 39.
Feuchtwanger, 45.
Feuchtwanger, 58.
“ridiculous and touching,” Feuchtwanger/Cleugh, 50.
Feuchtwanger, 64–5.
Proctor, “Nazi Medicine,” 348.
Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppenheim, 183.
Feuchtwanger, 282.
Feuchtwanger, 283.
Bruckner, Die Rassen. Translations follow Bruckner, Races (trans. Ruth Langner).
Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 33–5; Lilienthal, Lebensborn e. V.
Herf, “The Totalitarian Present.”
Herf, 2009.
Bruckner, Die Rassen, 79; “My place is in the front lines … In the racial front lines.” Bruckner/Langner, 108.
“Hammel und Wölfe,” Bruckner, 97.
Sax, Animals, 90.
Beniston, “Drama in Austria,” 48.
Bruckner, Die Rassen, 25.
Bruckner, 7, 9.
Bruckner, 27.
Bruckner, 34; “What is the Jew?” Bruckner/Langner, 43.
Bruckner, 34; “But if the man who’s egging on both sides is eliminated, the worker and employer will fall into each other’s arms, for aren’t they both German?” Bruckner/Langner, 44.
Bruckner, 38.
Bruckner, 38.
Bruckner, 39.
Bruckner, 39.
Reich, Massenpsychologie, 16.
Bruckner, Die Rassen, 19–20.
Bruckner, 23; “All sorts of new songs I’d never heard—beautiful ones.” Bruckner/Langner, 26.
Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
Hiebert, Anthropological Insights, 212.
Bruckner, Die Rassen, 21.
Bruckner, 55.
Bruckner, 29.
Bruckner, 11, 19; “yet it’s absolutely typical of your race” (36), “the Jew” (19), “the Jewess” (6–7), Bruckner/Langner.
Bruckner, 8.
Bruckner, 9; “This is a case of biology, not God.” Bruckner/Langner, 6.
Bruckner, 9; “If you, a German, marry a Jewess, you will only deepen the swamp of our mixed inheritance.” Bruckner/Langner, 6.
Bruckner, 19.
Bruckner, 11.
Bruckner, 11.
Bruckner, 13.
Bruckner, 12.
Wolf, “Mamlock,” 294–365. Translations follow Wolf, Professor Mamlock (trans. Anne Bromberger).
Rosorius, Reaktionen assimilierter deutscher Juden.
Wolf, 297.
Wolf, 297.
Wolf, 297; “Well, in gall bladders he’s undisputed champion.” Wolf/Bromberger, 14.
Wolf, 302.
Wolf, 302; “The destruction of the incompetent, the cowardly, the weak.” Wolf/Bromberger, 21.
Wolf, 305.
Wolf, 306.
Wolf, 310.
Theweleit, Männerphantasien (2000), 221. Translations follow Theweleit, Male Fantasies (trans. Chris Turner, Erica Carter, and Stephen Conway); “The German version of the not yet fully born.” Theweleit/Turner, Carter and Conway, 222.
Wolf, “Mamlock,” 315.
Wolf, 315; “magnificent, a thing of blood, of fate, gigantic, a drama of natural forces: ‘The people rises; the storm breaks loose.’” Wolf/Bromberger 45. The latter phrase „der Sturm bricht los!“—the storm breaks loose—is a verbatim quote from the 1813 poem „Das Volk steht auf, der Sturm bricht los“ from the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon by patriotic poet Theodor Körner (1791–1813) (Körner, Werke I, 109–11). Joseph Goebbels used the lines „Nun, Volk, steh auf, und Sturm brich los!“ as a call for action in his Sportpalast speech calling for “total war” (Goebbels, Speech); “Now, People, Rise Up and Let the Storm Winds Blow.” Rabinbach and Gilman, Third Reich Sourcebook, 828–9.
Wolf, 316–7.
Wolf, 317.
Wolf, 347.
Wolf, 345.
Karsten Witte (“Indivisible Legacy,” 29) remarks upon the exceptionality of Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens and the Olympia films, which retained their prominence after the war: “They remain examples of a shocking and notoriorious power.”
Witte identifies as a central point in the film the German husband’s regaining his position as a patriarch, in keeping with the Nazi ideal of male dominance, and observes this character’s ability to hold his own as an international businessman and a gentleman. (Witte, 26).
Riefenstahl, Der Sieg des Glaubens; Riefenstahl, Triumph.
Nietzsche, Zarathustra; Stramiello, Übermenschen, 71.
Pedrotti, Diktatur, 472–4.
“The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany as Germany is Hitler!” Riefenstahl, Triumph.
Wildmann, Begehrte Körper, 29; Ruch, Medium Film.
Dickie, “Triumph in Triumph,” 151.
Cowan and Sicks, “Premiere.”
Weber, “Clouds,” 339–40.
Theweleit, Männerphantasien (2000), 400; “As Riefenstahl clearly demonstrates, the Nazis attracted the most grotesque individuals, the ugliest, most dispirited of faces—men with sticking-out ears and crooked smiles, watery eyes, bulbous noses, tough and sinewy, or plump and cheery. The very minimum the Nazis promised them was entry into the unique race of a supreme people; on occasion, they offered entry to the elite at the core of their movement.” Theweleit/Turner, Carter and Conway, Male Fantasies, 410.
Theweleit, 400; “The men they addressed were the not-yet-fully-born, men who had always been left wanting; and where was the party that would offer them more? It was certainly not the rationalist-paternalist Communist Party.” Theweleit/Turner, Carter and Conway, 410.
Zur Mühlen, Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen. Translations follow Gossman, “Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen.”
Koehne, “Racial Yardstick.”
Gossman, “Red Countess,” 64.
Kucher and Müller, Österreichische Literatur im Exil, 4.
Zur Mühlen, Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen, 12.
Zur Mühlen, 12–3.
Zur Mühlen, 18.
Zur Mühlen, 25, 27.
Fischer-Dückelmann, Die Frau als Hausärztin, 238.
Oels, “Ein Bestseller der Selbstsorge.”
Macciocchi, “Female Sexuality,” 69.
Zur Mühlen, Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen, 73.
Zur Mühlen, 81.
Zur Mühlen, 81; “She admires the SA and SS men in their handsome uniforms,” “those brave lads who for years were persecuted, treacherously attacked, and murdered.” Gossman, “Unsere Töchter die Nazinen.”
Zur Mühlen, 85.
Mann, Mephisto (1936). Quotations follow Mann, Mephisto (2000). Translations follow Mann, Mephisto (trans. Robin Smyth).
See: Spangenberg, Karriere eines Romans.
Hoffer, “Klaus Mann’s Mephisto,” 245.
Fritz Murnau’s film Goethe’s Faust proliferated the image of Faust’s innocent Gretchen with long blond braids.
Mann, Mephisto (2000), 225–6; “The horsemen of the apocalypse are on their way. Here they have dismounted and conscripted a hideous regiment. From here they mean to conquer the world—where men today laugh at them, they shall tomorrow prostrate before them.” Mann/Smyth, 155.
Mann, Mephisto (2000), 225–6; For the text of the Horst Wessel song, considered the unofficial hymn of the Nazi regime, and a historical analysis, see: Broderick, “Horst-Wessel-Lied.”
Mann, 14.
Mann, 18.
Mann, 18; “An icy wind seemed to blow as he passed.” Mann/Smyth, 11.
Mann, 22.
Mann, 22.
Mann, 23; “The fat leader” (15), “the Fat one” (184), Mann/Smyth.
Mann, 24.
Mann, 357.
Mann, 356–7.
Mann, 358.
Mann, 28–9.
Mann, 38; “Everything about him is phony, from his literary taste to his so-called Communism. He’s no artist, he’s just an actor.” Mann/Smyth, 22.
Mann, 228.
Mann, 73.
“the black girl,” Mann/Smyth, 49.
Mann, 282.
Brecht, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches; Brecht, Private Life (trans. Eric Bentley); See also: White and White, Brecht’s Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches.
Brecht, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, 1075.
Brecht called the poem “a barbaric march.” “The soldiers sing to the tune of the Horst Wessel Song.” Brecht/Bentley, 1.
Hochstetter, Motorisierung und “Volksgemeinschaft,” 188, footnote 208.
White, “Brecht’s Furcht und Elend,” 143.
Brecht, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, 1076.
Brecht, 1081; Steinbacher, Volksgenossinnen, 14–5.
Brecht, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, 1097.
Brecht, 1099.
Brecht, 1101.
Geary, “Who Voted for the Nazis?”
Reinhard Kühnl (“Theory of German Fascism,” 30) identifies the bourgeoisie as the stronghold of fascism, in contradistinction to literature that attempted to shift the blame to the working class; Michael Mann (Fascists, 28) emphasizes the appeal of fascism to young men who were imbued with the ideal of a modern morality involving militarism in secondary and higher education. Mann holds that fascism reached out to people affected by a faltering economy, but did not limit its outreach to a particular class. Rather, it appealed to those who objected to Socialism or Marxism. Its followers were nationalists, and often from military or civil servant families; Alasdair King (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 263) remarks upon the reevaluation of the petty bourgeoisie, who were traditionally considered apolitical, in 1980s German literature.
Brecht, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, 1105.
Brecht, 1109.
Brecht, 1123.
Stoltzfuss, Resistance of the Heart, 3.
Stoltzfus, 9.
Brecht, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, 1133.
Brecht, 1135.
Brecht, 1147.
Brecht, 1152.
Weisstein, “Brecht in Amerika,” 384–5.
Canetti, Die Schildkröten. Translations follow Canetti, The Tortoises. (trans. Ian Mitchell). “Terror now reigns in the Heart of Europe.” Canetti/Mitchell, 21.
Black, War Against the Weak; Degler, In Search of Human Nature; Brunius, Better for All the World.
Sebastian, Monster; Arnold, “Nachwort,” 277.
Canetti, Die Schildkröten, 28.
Canetti, 28.
Canetti, 13, 110; “She looks like a maid who got herself married.” Canetti/Mitchell, 90.
“The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and attitudes far less than emotion and feeling.” Rash, Language of Violence, 20.
Canetti, Die Schildkröten, 121.
Lorenz, “Man and Animal.”
Rees, Hitler’s Charisma, 87, 138; Rees, Auschwitz, 176–7.
Seghers, Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen. Citations follow Seghers, Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen. Erzählungen, 51–82. Translations follow Seghers, “Excursion of the Dead Girls,” (trans. Elizabeth Rütschi Herrmann and Edna Huttenmaier Spitz).
Seghers, Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen. Erzählungen, 53.
Seghers, 80–2.
Gilman and Zipes, Companion to Jewish Writing, 662–70. Maier-Katkin, “Debris and Remembrance,” 91. Fromm, Fear of Freedom; Fromm et al., Studien über Autorität und Familie.