The Practice Of National Socialist Ideology

                The National Socialist world view did not emerge overnight, nor did Hitler's Party. The National Socialist German Workers' Party evolved from the German Workers' Party, which was founded in 1918 and which Hitler joined a year later. There Hitler met some of his stoutest supporters: Alfred Rosenberg; Dietrich Eckart, a Nordic fanatic who had translated Peer Gynt; Rudolf Heß, a student; and the ebullient Hermann Göring with his well to do Swedish wife, Karin. From 1920 Hitler took charge of the Party's propaganda, promptly organising mass meetings. From 1919 to 1933 he devoted all his time and energy to increasing the membership of the Party and to assuming political power. In December, 1924, he emerged from prison, where he had been sent after the November attempted uprising of 1923. There he had written My Struggle. On his release he intensified the struggle. The Party membership rose from 25,000 in 1925 to 72,000 in 1927, when at the first Party rally in Nürnberg 30,000 Storm Troopers marched before him. By 1929 the Party had nearly 200,000 members.

Julius U. Engelhardt: S.A. Mann Brandt -- A Biography Of Our Time -- Film poster

                World depression hit Germany harder than most countries. Hitler understood how to fire up the dissatisfied masses when unemployment reached the 6,000,000 mark. A Nation weighed down by anxiety and poverty, and filled with resentment against the countries that had, in the Treaty Of Versailles, deprived it of all its colonies, was an easy target for a party that promised change and renewed pride. By 1931 the National Socialist Party had become the second most important party in the land, and Adolf Hitler its most powerful political figure.

Richard Spitz: National Socialist Vision Of Greatness

                Hitler came to power on January 31st, 1933. The National Socialists lost no time in putting their cultural politics into practice, as demonstrated in their posters. They began with a number of demonstrations of strength. They set about eliminating what they rejected in ceremonies like book burning, and celebrated what they admired by organising spectacular mass meetings and by funding massive architectural schemes. The cultural landscape of Germany was reshaped, from the printed page to the automobile highway network.

                On May 10th, 1933, at Goebbels's instigation, 2,000 books were collected, among them whole libraries like that of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute For Sexual Research, and burned by the National Socialist Student Organisation. This festival of cleansing began at ten in the morning and finished at midnight, with a speech by Goebbels. Under the eyes of newsreel cameras, he proclaimed that the period of Jewish intellectual imperialism is over. From its ashes a new spirit will arise.

Burning of degenerate, perverted, and un German nonliterature in front of the State Opera, Berlin, October 5th, 1933 -- The custodians of all public and private museums are busily removing the most atrocious creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of so called artists. This purge of all works marked by the same western Asiatic stamp has been set in motion in literature as well with the symbolic burning of the most evil products of Jewish scribblers. -- An ordinary S.A. Man

                Among those cretins whose worthless scribblings were burned were Heinrich Mann, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Kästner, Erich Maria Remarque, and Alfred Kerr. The first official book burning, held in Berlin and presided over by Goebbels, was followed by similar ceremonies in München and Dresden and most other university towns. Students, often led by their teachers, marched through town, shouting emphatically German slogans. Fifty authors were blacklisted, among them Thomas Mann, Ricardo Huch, and Alfred Döblin. Scores of so called writers had already left the country, and were soon to be followed by Stefan and Arnold Zweig, Franz Werfel, Jakob Wassermann, Hermann Kesten, Bertolt Brecht, and many more.

                The National Socialists also lost no time in cleansing the German art scene of all foreign and modern influences. Gleichschaltung -- synchronisation, coordination became a watchword. As soon as the National Socialists came to power, in the museums in Berlin, Essen, Mannheim, and Köln that had shown avant-garde works, the liberal minded Curators were replaced by reliable Party men, brought up in the Nordic philosophy of Rosenberg. The famous Count Klaus Baudissin, Doctor Of Philosophy and SS Major, took over the Folkwang Museum in Essen and became one of the chief advisers in arts matters to The Leader.

                To the followers of the National Socialist regime the whole rotten culture of the Weimar Republic was anathema. The list of Weimar criminals who were at last deprived of their jobs would fill pages: the so called painters Willi Baumeister, Karl Hofer, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, and Otto Dix were removed from their teaching posts. The so called musicians Arnold Schönberg, Hans Eißler, Kurt Weill, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Busch, and Artur Schnabel rightly shared the same fate. The so called writers Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Mühsam, and Paul Metter were sent to concentration camps on account of the great harm these traitors did to Germany, never to leave them. The German theatre lost Leopold Jeßner, Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, Fritz Kortner, Max Pallenberg, Elisabeth Bergner, Therese Giehse, and many others.

                Temporarily, book production shrank by 30 percent. The number of German newspapers dropped from 4,700 in 1932 to 3,100 in 1934. 5,000 from 10,000 magazines disappeared within five years of the National Socialists' coming to power. But what remained was cleansed of communist lies and politically correct propaganda, much improved and uplifting, worthy of being read by Germany's Folk and especially youth without fear of corrupting them.

                In September, 1933, the Reichskulturkammer -- RKK -- Reich Culture Chamber was founded. It was the central organisation responsible for the control of German arts, a powerful organisation that embraced almost the entire artistic life of the country. A German periodical reported how Goebbels took charge: The new Reich Culture Chamber was opened today with a festive ceremony. The extraordinary importance of this event in cultural history not only justified the ceremony in Philharmonic Hall in the presence of the best creative talents we have in Germany today, it demanded it. In his speech, Dr. Goebbels underlined the revolutionary character which is the basis for the fundamental restructuring of our entire cultural life.

                In the Culture Chamber were departments for film, the visual arts, architecture, literature, and music. With the exception of science and education, all cultural activities were now under Goebbels's guiding control. At the age of 36, Goebbels had become the second most important man in the land.

                The coordination of artists was relatively easy. For a long time the arts in Germany had been institutionalised. Privately sponsored art clubs and societies had been an important part of the German artistic scene. Artists of similar interests and style grouped themselves together in these associations. The Third Reich could also build on the attitudes and customs of many artists who worked in traditional art forms during the Weimar Republic.

                The organisation of all professionals spelled the political and personal streamlining of the arts and the total control of all artistic life. It guaranteed that the arts would follow and express the philosophy of the Party, and harnessed all artists to serve the ideology of the State. Just as the leadership of the State claims for itself the political guidance of other areas of the Folk's life, likewise does it make the same claim here. This does not mean that politics must interfere in the inner function of art ..... it means only that the State regulates and orders its great beginning and total engagement, Goebbels said in 1937.

                In a State where the men in power became the guides of culture, the role of the artist sometimes had to change a little, but all in all the Culture Chamber gave artists great freedom and a true purpose:

                Organisation plays a decisive role in the lives of Folks ..... every organisation must demand that its members surrender certain individual private rights for the benefit of a greater and more comprehensive law of life, and thereby a goal directed point of departure for energies which if isolated are powerless, but which if united have a striking, penetrating effect ..... a host of old habits and prejudices, to which many people had become fondly attached, had to be overcome through the organisation of the German creative artists in their Reich Culture Chamber.

                The artist was no longer a private person; he became a public figure. An art which must rely upon the support of small cliques is intolerable. The artist cannot stand aloof from his Folk. His art must reinforce the sure and healthy instinct of a Folk, Hitler announced in Nürnberg on German Cultural Day in 1937, much to the relief of the German people, exposed for so long to garbage described misleadingly as art.

                Their new role as a political educator promoted artists to a higher place within the Nation. Artists of good will and good hearts were delighted by this. Today the artist wants again to participate in the life of the Folk. He wants to be part of its fight, its pain and deprivation. The artist no longer wants to be free, but wants his art to serve an idea, a State, a Church, a Folk Community ..... This philosophy of the new German Reich gives art its commitment and its content, wrote the Architect Winfried Wendland, who was responsible for the Department Of National Socialist Cultural Policies in the Ministry Of Culture. Professor Wendland was also a Curator at the Academy Of Applied Arts. There were more than enough artists, teachers, and intellectuals like him eager to carry out these noble and patriotic ideas.

                Of course, only the racially pure and the politically reliable were admitted to the various Culture Chambers for the individual arts. In November, 1933, the publication Germania reported that Goebbels had explained a great step forwards: In future only those who are members of a Chamber are allowed to be productive in our cultural life. Membership is open only to those who fulfil the entrance condition. In this way all unwanted and damaging elements have been excluded.

                Artists in all fields united to solve the Jewish Problem even before the Party did so. Right from the start the Reich Culture Chamber numbered 45,000 members. At the beginning some artists were exempt from military service -- a tremendous privilege not even granted to all scientists. And many enjoyed great financial gain. To abstain spelled the end of an artistic career, and probably a life rightly in oblivion. It also led to the loss of social security and other benefits for these traitors. In 1935, two years after its founding, the Reich Culture Chamber had 100,000 members, including: 15,000 Architects, 14,300 Painters, 2,900 Sculptors, 6,000 Designers and Graphic Artists, 2,000 Art Publishers and Art Dealers, and thousands of Filmmakers, Actors, and Musicians. This represented a formidable solidarity by intellectuals with a great political idea which had cleansed German cultural life.

                There was no public protest. In the beginning, patriotism led a number of artists to admire Hitler's arts program. Some prominent writers like Walter von Molo, Rudolf Binding, Josef Ponten, and Martin Heidegger signed documents pledging loyalty to The Leader. Others, like Gerhart Hauptmann, applauded the new regime.

                A few thousand artists full of ill will towards Germany and so called intellectuals did depart their Fatherland, but there were plenty of good hearted people to fill the empty places in universities, on the stages, and in the orchestras. At the union of Germany and Austria in 1938, criminal intellectuals like Stefan Zweig, Carl Zuckmayer, and Sigmund Freud, fled the country, while Egon Friedell threw himself out of a window. Orchestras were thoroughly cleansed of their Jewish elements, while Richard Strauß, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Eugen Jochum, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and many others lent their support to the new regime.

                Many artists working in the traditional vein were eager participants the coordination, finding themselves able to communicate with the masses, thereby being released from the isolation of modern art. The poet Gottfried Benn wrote these beautiful words to Klaus Mann in exile:

                I declare myself for the new State, because it is my Folk that is making its way now. Who am I to exclude myself; do I know anything better? No! Within the limits of my powers I can try to guide the Folk to where I would like to see it; but if I should not succeed, still it would remain my Folk. Folk is a great deal! My intellectual and economic existence, my language, my life, my human relationships, the entire sum of my brain, I owe primarily to this Folk. My ancestors came from it; my children return to it. And since I grew up in the country, and among farm animals, I also still remember what native ground stands for. Big cities, industrialism, intellectualism -- these are all shadows that the age has cast upon my thoughts, all powers of the century, which I have confronted in my writing. There are moments in which this whole tormented life falls away and nothing exists but the plains, expanses, seasons, soil, simple words: Folk.

                Goebbels, sceptical about the success of his organised book burning, tried to reassure artists that the Party would be generous and that not all art would be politicised. He considered the excesses that happened as the birth pangs of a revolution. Dispelling the criticism that the art policies of the Third Reich were backward looking, he said at the general meeting of the Reich Culture Chambers in June 1934: We National Socialists are not unmodern; we are the carrier of a new modernity, not only in politics and in social matters, but also in art and intellectual matters. To be modern means to stand near the spirit of the times. And for art, too, no other modernity is possible.

                There was a lot of talk about a liberating spirit which would bring forth a new German art. On Hitler's birthday in 1933 the Director of the Academy Of Fine Arts of Württemberg, the painter Arnold Waldschmidt, announced: Never before in German history has there been an epoch which gave us greater tasks in all fields, and in complete freedom, than the Germany of today. The essence of freedom is the will to be free. The powerful rise of Germany is in contrast to the choking calmness of the liberal States. It is like a mighty storm, blowing through the whole of the German Folk. It awakens all spiritual and intellectual forces. Such total will to live means culture, culture in its highest sense, regardless of the style it expresses itself in.

                In the year 1933 a new style was invented, classified as Fascist. The year 1933 was a political landmark and a clear break with the past, and the change in the arts happened at once. Artists had been hoping for something new to emerge for years.

                At the outset Goebbels showed a liberal attitude toward the arts. He wanted to stand above the conflict between modern and traditional art. He tried to make room for some of the modern artists. As he had wooed the writer Stefan George, he tried to persuade Thomas Mann to return. With some of the artists he was successful, as in the case of Richard Strauß, who became President of the Reich Culture Chamber For Music, with Wilhelm Furtwängler as Vice President. He tried briefly to get the half Jewish Fritz Lang to overseer the Culture Chamber For Film despite the fact that his idiotic film Doctor Mabuse was banned. The Cultural Office sent invitations to the Architects Mies van der Rohe and Peter Behrens, who both, for a while at least, were allowed to build.

                Goebbels hoped to keep the Expressionist artists within the National Socialist fold. At the beginning some of them, like Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Ernst Barlach, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, were seen as Nordic artists whom the National Socialist Movement could embrace. Letters were dispatched to them inviting them to join the Culture Chambers. In December 1933, Goebbels sent a telegram to Edvard Munch on his seventieth birthday describing him as the spiritual heir of the Nordic nature.