German Literature Through Nazi Eyes (RLE Responding to Fascism)

G Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415579254
• eBook ISBN: 9781136960369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

The influence of Nazism on German culture was a key concern for many Anglo-American writers, who struggled to reconcile the many contributions of Germany to European civilization, with the barbarity of the new regime.

In German Literature Through Nazi Eyes, H.G. Atkins gives an account of how the Nazis undertook a re-evaluation of German literature, making it sub-ordinate to their own interests. All reference to Jewish writers and influence was virtually eliminated, and key writers such as Goethe and Lessing were re-interpreted. What was left was a military history that was avowedly militant and propagandist.

III
The Revaluation

IT is from the point of view described in the two preceding chapters that German literature is revalued by the Nazi critics. In this chapter an account will be given of the attitude to individual writers, and this will be preceded by a brief general survey of the literary periods chiefly concerned. Only the main lines of development will be traced, and the round figures given must not be taken too literally.

There are from the Nazi point of view good ages and bad ages of German literature. To use the formula coined by Linden, there was a ‘deutsche Bewegung’, and though this formula is rejected by some critics as superfluous, it does broadly represent the orthodox view. It was preceded and followed by Dark Ages.

The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were periods of great popular vigour, not only in the political and economic but also in the cultural field. An independent German national culture was founded, with its ‘Volkslied’, ‘Volksballade’, ‘Volksbücher’, ‘Volksschauspiele’, ‘Märchen’, and ‘Sagen’. From this great German resurgence the Reformation was born at the beginning of the sixteenth century. All this was more or less common ground before 1933.

Then with Luther, Hutten, and Hans Sachs ends this great German ‘Volkskultur’. According to Linden:

It succumbs to the cultural and political forces which now attain the mastery and shift the centre of gravity from the middle to the west of Europe.¹ [33]

From the middle of the sixteenth century French influence sets in; a ‘volksfremde Gelehrtenkultur’ replaces the old popular national literature. That is the tragedy of German cultural life in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this ‘Gelehrtenkultur’ culminates in what is from the Nazi point of view the deepest depth, the ‘Aufklärung’, that west-European philosophy of individualistic freedom of thought, which had only the one virtue of undermining the authority of Christianity.

Linden gives what probably may be taken as a standard exposition of the Nazi thesis of the ‘cleavage of the west-European and the German spirit’ (‘Spaltung des west-europäischen und des deutschen Geistes’), and the conception is so fundamental that the whole passage may well be quoted here:

At this point the history of modern thought begins. From the disintegrating Middle Ages and its religiously unified world modern man gradually struggles forth in his desire for freedom and self-determination. The process of the modern spirit begins, that mighty spiritual and vital movement, partly fruitful and partly destructive, which leads on the one hand to spiritual liberation and on the other to the most terrible dangers of nihilism and dethronement of the gods.

This process is always to be regarded under a twofold aspect: on the one hand it liberates modern man, renders him independent, vivifies and energizes him—it is therefore progress and development, culture and inspiration and as such has always been acclaimed by the liberal party of our distracted modern humanity. On the other hand it means the destruction of the traditional religious, political, economic and social ties, the detachment from soil and home, the empty civilizing ‘progress’ of the capitalistic process and of its devitalized mechanical order (there is too a genuine vital mechanical order!)—it means therefore hostility towards all roots and attachments, all due orders and callings, and as such the conservative party has always had to repudiate and fight it. But the liberal and the conservative are only parts of an organic totality of life to which the German genius in its true essentiality is always directed.

Thus into the spiritual history of modern man in the occidental world a fundamental cleavage is introduced: the cleavage of the west-European and the German genius. The west-European genius affirms the process without reserve; it champions the self-liberation of modern man, frees him from all unifying ties, endeavours to give him the freedom of ‘reason’, of ‘ratio’; it is rationalism, and constantly relapses into the mechanical and abstract character of liberalism. This rationalism reveals itself in the two chief movements of the west-European genius: the Renaissance of the sixteenth century, which still retained a strong vitality and individuality and therefore was closely allied to the German genius, and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which reveals itself as the typical culminating achievement of the west-European spiritual type. The west-European genius has ever been rooted essentially in the rationalism of Enlightenment.¹ [34]

A little later he sums up:

Thus is unrolled the great pageant of the history of modern thought, which consists in the permanent conflict between the west-European and the German genius. [35]

In essentials England passed over from the Germanic to the west-European spirit Germany was saved from that fate in the middle of the eighteenth century, inspired by the victories of Frederick the Great, and then only after passing through a period of impotence and subservience to foreign ideas, its salvation being possible because the German genius (Geist) was ‘weit tiefer, naturhafter, religiöser als der westeuropäische’.

With Klopstock began the reaction against westernism, or, as Linden puts it:

the German Movement, the mighty reaction of the national genius against the intellectual rational culture of west-European Enlightenment. [36]

It is greeted by him as a return, after the lapse of two centuries, to the current of German tradition:

Two centuries of a learned and intellectual culture overlaid with foreign humanistic and christian influences (1550 to 1750) are over. [37]

The Storm and Stress goes back to the primitive forces of German life; the ‘Volkstumsgedanke’ becomes once more the moving force, as opposed to the ‘humanistischen Bildungsgedanken’. Classicism proper is more questionable, for it had, according to Linden, ‘Teile autklärerischen Geistes in sich aufgenommen’. ‘Das politische Leitbild der Klassik ist weltbürgerlicher Art,’ says Koch. There is great difficulty in explaining away all the humanitarian ideals for which it stood. Nothing can alter the fact that Goethe and Schiller were cosmopolitans, and that their ideas had a universal and not merely a national validity. They turned away from the political and practical world, and sought to realize their ideals in the purely human and cultural sphere. That is where they differed from the Nazis:

From the Goethe age to National Socialism stretches a constant and organic continuity of German life. The characteristic difference is: the Goethe age realized its organic and religious world-synthesis, unrivalled in depth and span, only in the ideal, in the cultural sphere and the personal conduct of life; the new movement, without its all-embracing ideality, but more compact and taut, close to reality and conscious of its blood, realizes its aims in state and society and the economic sphere.¹ [38]

Yet if Goethe and Schiller can be accepted only with reserves, Herder, unlike them with their ‘ästhetischen Staat’, can be accepted (on the whole) with fervour:

He took up an attitude towards the men of Weimar, the necessity of which we can only today appreciate. He wished to weld poetry and people in a common fate—at a time when the poetry of a Goethe soared in sublime grandeur above all the ties of nationality. So his path ended in embitterment, and his work is only today beginning to be really fruitful for our nation.² [39]

Along with all the direct and indirect criticism of Goethe and Schiller there is a tendency to challenge their position of solitary pre-eminence, to lessen the gulf dividing them from their contemporaries, some of whom are in fact preferred before them:

The eyes of the German have long been fixed all too exclusively on the one summit. Now the other too shines with a bright radiance. In the trinity—Herder, Friedrich Jacobi…and Jean Paul, with their militant attitude towards German idealism, forces can be perceived which only attain their full effect in the final epoch of the Goethe ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• I The Seizure of Power
• II The New Vocabulary
• III The Revaluation
• IV Heralds of the Third Realm
• V Conclusion
• Appendix ORIGINALS OF THE PASSAGES QUOTED IN ENGLISH IN THE TEXT
• Bibliography
• Index