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 Lehrerzeitung.
26. Hans Steinacher, “Vom deutschen Volkstum, von der deutschen Volksgenossenschaft und vom volksgebundenen Staat” in Paul Gauss, ed., Das Buch vom deutschen Volkstum: Wesen, Lebensraum, Schicksal (Leipzig, Klinckhardt, 1935), pp. 414–417. Heinz Kindermann went so far as to consider Herder’s concept of the folk to be a concept characterized by “a biological attitude toward race.” See Heinz Kindermann, Die Sturm- und Drangbewegung im Kampf um die deutsche Lebensform (Special Issue of the journal Von deutscher Art in Sprache und Dichtung, 1941/42), p. 33.
27. Ibid.
28. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass., Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 215.
29. Alfred Rosenberg, Das politische Tagebuch, 1934–35 und 1939–40. ed. by Hans Günther Seraphim (Nördlingen, Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1964), p. 243.
30. Ibid., p. 24. Rosenberg also referred to the Weltanschauung as “an attitude toward the fate awaiting us outside” while hinting at the “fighting spirit” of the Germanic North.
31. Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt
