Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany - Christa Kamenetsky

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he appointed Walter Darré. Darré himself was thinking in biological terms when considering the peasant to be the perpetuator of the “Nordic race.”53 Statistics of 1937 indicated, however, that none of the practical measures taken had caused a substantial change in the percentage of the rural population. Still, the Nazi ideologists continued to promote the folklore and peasant policy as an “on-going” process in the manner as Krieck had advocated it, to build the “spiritual attitude” needed to consolidate the folk community of the Third Reich. Especially in children’s literature and folklore publications of the Nazi period, the “Volkish” direction of the Nazis’ cultural policy turned out to be a stable factor throughout the twelve-year existence of the Nazi Regime.

      Plate 8

      “Mother and Child”: Symbols of the Healthy Peasant Life

      This “Volkish” ideology of National Socialism shaped the cultural policy of the Third Reich which essentially determined the direction of the Nazis’ censorship and their promotion of children’s literature and folklore. Since the Nazis considered children’s literature and folklore important aspects of German “folk education,” they selected, wrote, and re-interpreted them according to its guidelines.

      The strong emotional and idealistic appeal of the Nazi ideology contributed to the relatively smooth transition of cultural trends from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi Regime. Whereas the Nazis used power and terror to reinforce their one-party system, they employed a “positive” cultural policy in order to establish long-range goals and to stabilize their system of controls. Totalitarian governments are seldom content with mere subjugation of the population but rather aim at a voluntary subordination of their subjects and a worship of the leader.54 The Nazi ideology was intended to form a faithful and religiously devoted followership that had internalized not only the values of the Nordic Germanic past but also the values of National Socialism. Thus, the cultural policy of the Third Reich was not a temporary measure but one that was intended as a continuous process, just as Krieck had defined folk education. It was meant to last as long as the Nazi Regime itself. Due to the Nazis’ clever manipulation of values pertaining to Romantic and Volkish thought of pre-Nazi times, the cultural policy took on an “evolutionary” rather than a revolutionary character, while promising a remedy to German cultural despair. Some writers came to the conclusion after the war that the mythos of Nazism was such a pervasive force, that, without its aid, the Nazi Regime could certainly never have established its reign as it did.55

      If a number of scholars and educators, and a substantial portion of the German public became extremely gullible to the Nazi ideology, Hitler’s “hypnotic power” undoubtedly had less to do with it than the Nazis’abuses of the German nostalgia for a national unity and a genuine folk community, and of the Romantic yearning for political order promising respect for the common man and social dignity for all. Only to the more discriminating minds it was evident from the very start that the Nazis’ concepts of folk, community and personality actually stood in direct opposition to the Western humanitarian and democratic traditions; that unity for the Nazis meant uniformity, and that freedom implied slavery within a totalitarian system of controls.

      Children’s literature, possibly more than any other aspect of German culture during the Nazi period, was strongly affected by the Nazis’ “positive” Volkish approach, for the ideologists knew well that especially young people are more susceptible to an idealistic appeal than to hate propaganda. As children’s literature and folklore were the very media through which the Nazis hoped to shape the “attitudes” of the youngest members of the German folk community toward the Third Reich, these subjects offer a unique testing ground for their methods of indoctrination and their subsequent perversion of traditional humanitarian values.

      Plate 9

      The Führer Cult

      NOTES

      1. “Wider den undeutschen Geist” Deutsche Kultur-Wacht 9 (1933), 5.

      2. “Bücherautodafé” Frankfurter Zeitung (May 7, 1933).

      3. “Die Rufer” Neuköllner Tageblatt (May 12, 1933). See also: Joseph Wulf, ed., Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh, Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1963), pp. 42–45.

      4. Josef Goebbels, “Undeutsches Schrifttum” Deutsche Kultur-Wacht 5 (1933), 13.

      5. “Wider den undeutschen Geist” General-Anzeiger für Bonner Umgebung (May 11, 1933). See also Walter A. Behrendsohn, Die humanistische Front. Eine Einführung in die deutsche Emigranten-Literatur, Vol. I (1933–1935) (Zürich, Europa Verlag, 1946), p. 19.

      6. Behrendsohn, pp. 20–21.

      7. Axel Eggebrecht, “Bücherverbrennung war der Anfang” Die Zeit (May 20, 1977), 9–10. The article is based on interviews.

      8. Ibid.

      9. Thomas Mann went into exile. Dietrich Strothmann, Nationalsozialistische Literaturpolitik. Ein Beitraq zur Publizistik im Dritten Reich (Bonn, Bouvier, 1965), pp. 27–33, and “An Exchange of Letters by Thomas Mann” Friends of Europe Publications No. 52 (London, Friends of Europe, 1937), with a foreword by J.B. Priestley.

      10. Ricarda Huch’s letter was signed on April 9, 1933. Cited in Wulf, p. 27.

      11. Harry Graf Kessler, Aus den Tagebüchern 1918–1937 (Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, G.m.b.H., 1965), p. 355.

      12. Roger Manvill, SS Gestapo: Rule by Terror (New York, Ballantine, 1970), p. 355.

      13. Walter Adolph, Hirtenamt und Hitler-Diktatur 2nd ed. (Berlin, Morus Verlag, 1965), p. 39.

      14. Kessler, pp. 252–253 and p. 361.

      15. Edward Y. Hartshorne, The German Universities (Cambridge, Mass., Oxford University Press, 1949). Cited in Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung. Studien zur Errichtung des totalitären Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland (Cologne, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1962), p. 321.

      16. Behrendsohn, pp. 17–24.

      17. William Sheridan Allan, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experiences of a Small German Town 1930–1935 (Chicago, Quadrangle, 1968), p. 224. Allan reports that in the small town of Thalburg about one fourth of all library books was destroyed.

      18. See the Chapter XIV, footnote 2.

      19. Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (New York, Scribners’s 1960), p. 53. Also: Christa Kamenetsky, “Political Distortion of Philosophical Concepts: A Case History—Nazism and the Romantic Movement” Metaphilosophy 3, 3 (July, 1972), pp. 198–218.

      20. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (Munich, Piper Verlag, 1965), pp. 343–345.

      21. Cited by Walter Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1933–1945 (Frankfurt, Fischer Bücherei, 1951), p. 120.

      22. Ibid., p. 121.

      23. “Aus der Marburger Rede von Papens” (June 17, 1934), Ibid., pp. 66–67.

      24. Hans Schemm, cited by Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, (National Socialist Teachers Association) eds., Jahrbuch 1935 (Munich, Fichte Verlag, 1935), p. 263. See also p. 286.

      25. Aley reports that immediately following the service in the Magdeburg Cathedral, the Nazi flags were sanctioned in front of the Church. See Peter Aley, Jugendliteratur im Dritten Reich. Dokumente und Kommentare (Hamburg, Verlag für Buchmarktforschung, 1969), pp. 13–19. The documents cited also include letters by Fronemann and Rüttgers, as well as Rüttgers’ article on the Magdeburg Conference in the Rheinische

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