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

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culture motivated many German writers in the second part of the nineteenth century to diagnose the “disease” and to propose some remedies. As a cultural critic, Friedrich Nietzsche attacked German philistinism prevalent at his time in all spheres of life and art, along with rationalism and an extreme type of aestheticism. Other critics, although of lesser intellectual status than he, shared this diagnosis, but instead of advocating the contemplative power of the spiritual “superman” gaining wisdom from social isolation, they strongly urged for a return to the folk community and the “roots” of German ethnicity. Among them, particularly Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn had a strong influence on the development of Volkish thought that would influence children’s literature a few decades later.

      De Lagarde bemoaned the fact that there was no German history, no German education, and no German folklore in the cultural life of the nation. People had forgotten their heritage; they trampled thoughtlessly upon the ruins of old monasteries and landmarks and hardly remembered Siegfried, the treasure of the Nibelungen, or the old German folktales. Education paid homage to classical ideals of Greece and Rome while neglecting native folklore, history, and literature. Nevertheless, Lagarde thought it was not too late to revitalize the idea of German ethnicity: “The old Germany is not yet dead . . .” he wrote in his Deutsche Schriften (German Writings). Even though life in the cities resembled that of wilting hothouse plants taken out of their natural environment, there was still hope for the German peasantry “rooted” in German traditions: “Behind the plow and in the forest, at the anvil of the lonely smithy, there we will find it. It helps us to fight our battles and grow the corn in our fields.”29 De Lagarde proposed a Nordic Germanic “Volkish” orientation within an “organic” folk community concerned with native religion, art, science, and literature—albeit under a “God-inspired Kaiser.”

      Julius Langbehn, too, advocated a return to the Germanic North. Although he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Greek sculpture and spent much of his time in the South, he idealized the Nordic Germanic peasants and men of the North in general as the “true symbols of Volkish strength.” Like de Lagarde he glorified the German peasant, but more as the true representative of the German Volk who might save the nation from cultural despair. To him, the Germans were a peasant folk at heart, an Urvolk (primeval folk), endowed with native intelligence, a sense of independence and creativity. Rembrandt was his model of the Urvolk, of Nordic Germanic man himself. In his work Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as an Educator) he proposed that Germans had to become true to their character and origin, just as Rembrandt had always been. Only in this way would they be able to unfold their mystical creative powers from within and once more rise as a nation. Langbehn strongly recommended a national art policy that would build up German self-confidence through a contemplation of German history and folklore. His book went through eight editions within the first two years following its publication and turned out to be the “Germanic Gospel” for hundreds of educators. Leaders of the German Youth movement reportedly carried it along on hiking trips, where it helped them to formulate their program.30

      De Lagarde and Langbehn were strongly anti-semitic. For the Nazis, however, who very much admired both of them, their anti-semitism wasn’t strong enough, as they both believed in the “assimilated Jewry” determined by the degree of conversion to Nordic Germanic and conservative thought, rather than by blood.31 On the other hand, we have in the writings of these “Conservatives” already the idea of a cultural policy based on the concept of German ethnicity. In a more radical way Adolf Bartels and Josef Nadler applied this idea to literature around 1900, thus introducing a racially oriented literary policy32 pursued on an unprecedented scale by the Nazis after 1933. While Bartels and Nadler were the first ones to use the term “decadent literature” in association with “undesirable” cosmopolitan, liberal and Jewish influences, the Nazis later added to it the term “heroic literature” in an effort to promote a “positive” censorship policy based on Nordic Germanic heroic ideals and their own ideology.

      This is not to say that all Volkish thought was racist or political, or that Nazism was the inevitable result of a historical evolution. On the contrary, trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries give evidence of a great variety of ideas and concepts existing side by side. The Volkish writers themselves were full of inconsistencies and paradoxes—a fact that the Nazis preferred to ignore. De Lagarde and Langbehn, like Jahn, Arndt, and Riehl, also still believed in the unique individual and his organic role within the folk state—a thought from which the Nazis extracted only the latter part. In selecting passages from their works, National Socialist textbook writers and anthologists worried little about possible misrepresentation of Volkish thought, as long as it helped to support their ideological orientation.33

      Plate 1

      THE PEASANT AND THE NORDIC PAST

      “Either we will be a peasant Reich, or we will not be at all!”

      (Adolf Hitler)

      Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a neo-Romantic wave inspired the writing of a number of regional and historical novels concerned with German ethnicity, the German peasant, and the Nordic Germanic past. Among the historical novels were those of Dahn and Freytag, and among the peasant novels, the works of Keller, Raabe, and Storm. Whereas the first focused on the peasant and warrior of Germanic times, the second glorified the mysterious powers of the landscape and the life of the sturdy German peasant. At the same time there emerged a number of regional novels concerned with the theme of man’s kinship with the soil and his home, namely by Löns, Sohnrey and von Polenz.34 These works were “Volkish,” yet unpolitical in the sense that they served no political interest groups and advocated no national policy for Germany’s cultural reform. Still, the Nazis felt they were well suited for the promotion of their Volkish ideology.

      According to Martin Broszat, the word “Volkish” involved a conglomerate of divergent meanings. “Hardly another word, due to its glittering power of association has so well paved the way for National Socialism as the word ‘Volkish.’ Indeed, under this term we find all kinds of ideologies from anti-semitism to ideas about the folk community; from blood-and-soil theories to the new Germanic mythos.”35

      The history of the children’s literature reform movement around the turn of the century well illustrates the diverse directions which the Volkish movement itself had inspired in this area. In response to the writings of Langbehn and to their own professional conscience as educators, Lichtwark and Avenarius in Hamburg were instrumental in founding the German Art Education movement, the so-called Kunsterziehungsbewegung. They also founded the journal Der Kunstwart (The Art Guardian), and through its pages advocated the revival of art and folklore within the school curriculum and in German cultural life in general, so as to help the nation in its realization of becoming a genuine folk community. Through art and folklore they hoped to cure German civilization from insensitivities and a superficial and fragmented life style developed under the stress of a purely prosaic life. Heinrich Wolgast was a member of this movement and adopted its aesthetic principles for the field of children’s literature, while appealing to educators, writers, illustrators and publishers of children’s books in order to implement his reform suggestions.36

      In 1896 Wolgast published Das Elend unserer Jugendliteratur (The Troubled State of Our Children’s Literature),37 in which he deplored the declining quality of children’s books while setting up new literary and artistic standards for their possible improvement. Wolgast was not alone in his plight. The German Jugendschriften-Bewegung (Youth Book movement or Childrens’ Literature Association) was formed by educators a few years earlier, and in 1893, the various branches of this Association in Augsburg, Berlin, Coburg, Bremen, Frankfurt a.M., Hamburg, Hildesheim, Königsberg, Nördlingen, Wiesbaden and Zerbst jointly issued the first professional children’s literature journal, the Jugendschriften-Warte (Youth Literature Guardian). At the beginning, it was published as a supplement to a major pedagogical newspaper, but then became independent under Wolgast’s editorship. Throughout its existence, until the time when the Nazis took

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