By Bashkim Trenova
Part Four
NAZIBOLSHEVISM – LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
FOREWORD
Memorie.al / Historians, political philosophers, and intellectuals of various schools and positions have dedicated thousands upon thousands of pages, entire volumes, studies, and articles to the comparison between Nazism and Communism. Generally, their publications and studies focus on the police control of society by these dictatorships; the role of the dictatorial state hierarchy and the head of state as stiflers of free thought; the omnipresent place of official propaganda in society; the mass massacres and the network of concentration camps; and the activities of the police – the NKVD (later the KGB) in the USSR and the Gestapo in the Third Reich. In his book “Le Passé d’une illusion” (The Passing of an Illusion), François Furet notes that Nazism and Communism share the same opposition to liberal democracy and what they call the “capitalist bourgeoisie.” Both ideologies claim to be socialist and utilize the image of socialism. Communist countries called themselves “socialist.” “Nazism” is an abbreviation for National Socialism.
Hans Reyhing’s trilogy, as well as his poems, are typical; they belong to the ideological movement ‘Blut und Boden’ (‘Blood and Soil’). The foundations of this movement are blood – meaning origin or ancestry; the soil as a source of food through agriculture, as a natural dwelling place, and as vital space (Lebensraum); and the peasantry as the essence of the racial origin of the German people. It draws life from racist and Pan-Germanist theories and constitutes a central element of National Socialist ideology. This ideology, by propagandizing racial origin as the basis of the German nation and justifying its expansion at the expense of other peoples and the appropriation of their territories, can also be seen as a supporter and justifier of the war crimes committed by the Nazis.
As early as August 26, 1936, while Hitler was publicly swearing and over-protesting against war as the “greatest peacelover on the Globe,” he issued a secret order (‘Geheimer Fuhrererlas’) stating that the German army must be ready for war within four years. German industry was also required to “be able to ensure the success of the war.” The Hitler Youth was assigned the task of preparing physically, dedicating the weekends of every month to military training. Subsequently, the 8th Congress of the National Socialist Party held in Nuremberg approved the ‘Vierjahresplan’ (‘Four-Year Plan’) with the objective of launching the war.
At the beginning of the four-year plan, only a small part of the German people was ready to support the Nazi adventure – the war and the conquests of the Wehrmacht – regardless of the price to be paid. The majority had to be convinced, hypnotized, stunned, drugged, and lured toward the abyss, the Nazi Golgotha. In this framework, World War I and the German authors who dealt with that period were seen and used as sources of inspiration. During World War I, hundreds of thousands of ultra-patriotic poems were sent to the newspapers and magazines of the time. One of the best specialists of this era, the German author and playwright Julius Bab, estimated that: “in August 1914 alone, about one million 500 thousand poems were sent to magazines. In the ‘Berliner Zeitung’ alone, about 500 arrived every day.”
The content of these poems is draped in phraseology, calls, and patriotic or ultra-patriotic pathos. In the poem Soldatenabschied (Farewell to Soldiers) written in early 1914, Heinrich Lersch, who served as a volunteer in the German army, penned these verses: “We are free, Father, we are free! / did you yourself not once call out to face the bullets: / Germany must live, even if we must die!” Such texts, distributed zealously throughout the country, became “iconic” models for writers engaged in this path during both World War I and World War II. And they were not few in number.
According to American specialist Donald Day Richards, in Germany, “starting from 1933, pacifist literature was banned. The Nazis, in fact, annihilated it. Immediately after this purge, a series of warrior-writers grouped together in 1936 under the direction of the Nazified Association of Warrior Writers called ‘The Team.’ This association took on the task of collecting and publishing testimonies of World War I according to the Nazi view. This view was that of the most famous warrior-writer of the years 1914-1918, Führer Adolf Hitler, for whom the Great War had not yet ended.”
Thus, during World War II, a literature “blossomed” in Germany that heroized the battles and combat operations of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, the destruction and leveling of cities and villages, the sacrifices, and the personal experience of the Reich’s fighters. “Total war” was sanctified. Death became an altar for sacrificed life. It was served as a source of values. In his trilogy Apis und Este (Apis and Este) 1931; Das war das Ende (That Was the End) 1932; and Weder Kaiser noch Köning (Neither Emperor nor King) 1933, Bruno Brehm writes: “We have been accused of loving death, but it must be known that we love it only because we are seeds in the hands of God, seeds that have been planted out of love for the future.”
In August 1944, Hitler placed Brehm on the Gottbegnadeten-Liste (God-Gifted List or List of the Most Talented Writers), which gave him the opportunity to no longer remain active in military service and not be deployed to the front lines. In this spirit, Friedrich Schreyvogel also wrote the voluminous novel ‘Eine Schicksalssymphonie’ (‘A Symphony of Fate’) in 1941. According to the author, in the name of life, “death also has its right to have its say.” Another Nazi writer who hymned death was Wilhelm von Scholz. He is known for the poem ‘Eherne Tafel’ (‘The Bronze Tablet’) written in 1939 on the occasion of Hitler’s 50th birthday. Scholz was one of the German writers who supported ultra-nationalist ideology, terror, and the Nazi butchery.
Hitler included him as well in the Gottbegnadeten-Liste – the Sacred List of the Reich’s most important writers. After the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of Poland, Wilhelm von Scholz published the poem ‘Der harte Wille’ (‘The Unyielding Will’) in the National Socialist newspaper ‘Krakauer Zeitung’. In its verses we read: “We knew the fighting, the victory, the retreat, the victory. The danger of death. / Now we want war…! Mortally wounded, we will wound unto death! With war we will take the enemy’s breath away / we will fight every moment and cause casualties / …We want war. We do not want to wake up from this destructive dream. / Let men kill among themselves / Let the grudges of the universe explode! / We are frightened by the battlefield in peace / Over which many crosses rise / It matters little what future victory brings us / Our life is war / We want war.”
The tone of the poetry and prose of the Third Reich is pathetic. The literature of the time thus aimed to make every German “aware” of the tragic situation they were living in and the sacrifices the homeland expected from them – that the future of the German people was in their hands, in faith in their own strength, and especially in faith in the Führer, who leads toward “a glorious future.” Following this line were H. Stellrecht, E. Wittek, and Hans Zöberlein. The latter is known as one of the early supporters of Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. His first novel, ‘Der Glaube a Deutschland’ (‘Faith in Germany’), published in Munich in 1931 with 800,000 copies, is dedicated to the war.
In the foreword to the novel, Hitler himself mentions “immortal victories” and “invincibility on the battlefield.” The Nazi leader supports the thesis that during World War I, “the troops fought in vain and held the front until the end, until an undeveloped, Bolshevized, and mongrelized traitor stabbed them in the back.” He also targets those he describes as “comrades without a homeland” – the pacifists. These are the allies of the enemy who grant him victory. It is these people who must be shattered and crushed along with the enemy. This is the only path to inevitable victory! The sacred mission of the German people is to sacrifice others or allow them to be sacrificed at the foundations of history! War is the engine of history. According to various data, between 1919 and 1939, war literature occupied 88 percent of the book sales market in Germany.
Literature that did not deal with this field – labeled by the Nazis as “pacifist,” “Jewish,” or “Bolshevik” literature – occupied only 12 percent of this market. However, even this ratio, overwhelmingly in favor of Hitler’s ideology, worried and unnerved the Nazi authorities. Their objective was strict control – 100 percent mastery of every sphere, every cell, every sound or chirp. For them, everything had to be in service of the war, everything in unison with the warmongering Nazi ideology and at its service.
Every violation of this iron rule, written and unwritten, was punished, persecuted, and cursed as heresy, treason, or anti-patriotism, a deviation from duty, a rebellion against order and supreme authority – as an activity of the Jews and their Bolshevik collaborators, harmful to the German soil. Their place was on the gallows, before the firing squad, in concentration camps, etc. Goebbels’ propagandists tried to hide, and even embellish, this reality.
They “testified” that the murders of opponents in prisons or Nazi concentration camps, the mistreatment, or the inhuman acts against them were merely fabrications of the Soviet press, lies of the treacherous social democracy or international Jewry, and slanders of the newspapers of France and Great Britain – countries hostile to Germany. The novel ‘Der Befelh des Gewissens’ (‘The Command of Conscience’), consisting of 949 pages written by Hans Zöberlein and published in 400,000 copies, follows this same line. The author aims to prove that without the presence of the National Socialist Movement, the Germany of the early years after World War I would have rolled into a total catastrophe due to the “cooperation of the social democrats with the Jews.” In the novel, the author describes the career of a front-line soldier, Hans Krafft, a sworn National Socialist.
The novel, which has been described as primitive in its content and language, is also known as one of the most fervent anti-Jewish books in all of Nazi literature – a marking of the road toward Auschwitz. Jews are compared in the novel to “worms” and humiliated with insults such as “Jewish pigs.” Always speaking of the Jews, Zöberlein also proposes radical measures to be taken against them: “The tree that bears poisonous fruit must be cut down and thrown into the fire. There can be no point of mercy for it. Mercy is weakness.” In service of revanchism and the war as its creation is also Karl Bartz, author of several publications with a Nazi spirit such as ‘Großdeutschlands Wiedergebeurt’ (‘The Rebirth of Greater Germany’), and Weltgeschichtliche Stunden an der Donau.
Geleitwort: Hermann Göring (‘Historical Lessons on the Danube’, with a foreword by Hermann Göring), ‘Die Deutschen vor Paris’ (‘The Germans Before Paris’), and ‘Die Marneschlacht’ (‘The Battle of the Marne’). Karl Bartz writes on the suffering of the population of the Saar placed under French administration according to the Treaty of Versailles, on the resistance of the Nazis in the region, and their suppression by France. His publications are extremely aggressive, anti-French, and anti-Belgian. They are characterized by demands for the revision of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and preparation for new wars.
Heinrich Schneider follows in the same footsteps in ‘Unser Saarland’ (‘Our Saarland’). On page 38 of this publication, he writes: “The French government is not satisfied with the looting of the Saar mines…! The French dig wells in French soil (familiarly called ‘thieves’ wells’), crossing the border underground and thus exploiting the very rich layers of Warndt. In this way, work is ensured for French miners at a time when, starting from 1924, in the Saar, about 30 thousand miners have been thrown into unemployment.”
National Socialist literature digs deep into the centuries, into myths and legends, to prove that the Saar and other surrounding provinces have always been Germanic and, consequently, belong to Germany. This spirit is also conveyed by Franz Fahnemann’s 166-page collection entitled: “Füllhorn der Westmark Märchen” (‘Cornucopia of the Western March Fairy Tales’), published in 1940. Parallel to the military preparations by Hitler’s Germany to attack France, there was no lack in National Socialist literature of writings conveying the idea that “with the help of the Jews, France has exploited Germany’s temporary weaknesses to take the Saar,” and that France – this “historical enemy” of Germany and the Germans – is the one that even “dragged” England into World War I and later into the “infamous Treaty of Versailles.”
Of course, Great Britain is not spared by German authors either, especially after the bombings by its Royal Air Force on March 28, 1942, in Lübeck, May 31, 1942, in Cologne, and thereafter. The target, among other things, includes the colonial possessions of Great Britain, which must be ended to pave the way for the hegemonistic appetites of Hitler’s Germany.
Max Clauss, author of several publications such as ‘Frankreich wie es wirklich ist’ (‘France as It Really Is’), ‘Zwischen Paris und Vichy, Frankreich seit dem Waffenstillstand’ (‘Between Paris and Vichy, France Since the Armistice’), and ‘Tatsache Europa’ (‘The Fact of Europe’), preaches the necessity of German hegemony in Europe and beyond. According to him, our continent, devastated by successive crises and wars, can only be saved by being placed under the care of Germany.
In this context lies, generally, what is known as the colonial literature of National Socialist authors—nostalgic for the German colonialist policy prior to World War I and conveyors of Nazi ideas on the superiority of the Aryan race. Thus, for example, Paul Heinrich Kuntze’s book Das Volksbuch unserer Kolonien (The People’s Book of Our Colonies), published in 1938, aims to demonstrate the allegedly humanistic policy of German colonizers, entirely different, according to the author, from the brutal policy of British or French imperialism.
Right in the foreword of this publication, the author writes: “Hitler, just as he shows the direction and objective in all fields of our national life, will likewise, when the moment comes, return our colonies to the German people. But it is the duty of each of us to learn and understand the brilliant ideas of Adolf Hitler in the framework of their world planning. We must be clear about the broader context of world history, because we live in one of its most significant periods. And colonization is possible only when an entire people participate in this with a warm heart and deep understanding. Let this work help to win new partisans of the colonial idea among our people.”
Paul Heinrich Kuntze is also known through publications of the same character such as: Volk und Seefahrt (People and Seafaring), Söldner für Albion: Völker kämpfen für eine Insel (Mercenaries for Albion: Peoples Fight for an Island), as well as for a map of the location of Germans throughout Europe: Gebiete größerer deutscher Streusiedlungen (Areas of Major German Scattered Settlements). German colonization of the East includes spaces that were the object of Nazi Germany’s territorial expansion or annexation, such as German settlements in the Vistula (Weichseldeutsche), in the Carpathians (Karpathendeutsche), as well as the Danube Swabians (Donauschwaben), the Transylvanians (Siebenbürger), the Volga Germans (Wolgadeutsche), and the Caucasus Germans (Kaukasusdeutsche). / Memorie.al
To be continued in the next issue
