Burning Books and The Nazification of Literature

German cultural production, as is well known, in the decades leading to Nazidom set about creating a ‘national’ culture by destroying Jewish, communist, humanist and other artwork, banishing the artists and making it impossible for any artist who did not toe the Nazi line to even live. As the edict of September 22, 1933 phrased it, there was the very real possibility of the ‘legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation’.  The instrumentalisation of the literary was to be in the interests of the ‘new’ nation.

The Nazification of the literary field was effected through a multi-pronged approach: crafting principles and theories of literature, the large-scale proscription and destruction of authors and texts seen as detrimental to the national project, and the management of institutions.

Preface (burning of books), main text (burning of people)

On February 4, 1933, German President von Hindenburg issued the ‘Decree for the Protection of the German People’ in which a full section was devoted to ‘printed publications’. It said: ‘publications the content of which is apt to endanger public security or order’ had to be confiscated, destroyed or proscribed. 

Publishers came under the scanner and anything that vaguely resembled anti-national or anti-Nazi – and these were interchangeable, where any criticism of the Party or its Leader (always with an uppercase L) was deemed to be a criticism of the nation – was immediately banned, with publishers being told that ‘supplying and distributing the works named is undesirable for national and cultural reasons and must therefore cease’.  

Two months later, on May 4, 1933, Germany saw the first organised book burnings, including those by Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Franz Kafka, among others. Later, writings by Thomas Mann and H.G. Wells were also targeted under a campaign that came to be called ‘Action Against the Un-German Spirit’ (an experiment to be recreated in the USA in the McCarthy era). The book-burnings – propelled by the speeches delivered by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda – were grand spectacles. These were projected as signs of the cleansing Germany needed of Jewish and other ‘un-German’ traditions, which included communism, pacifism and other ‘contaminating ideologies’. Later, of course, burning books was deemed inadequate to the task of national cleansing and numerous authors were murdered for good measure. The book trade and publishing were tightly monitored, and the books supplied to the readers (including the army at the war front) were carefully put together by Goebbels’ bureaucracy. A declaration of loyalty to the new regime had to be signed, and writers like Mann who refused, had to go into exile. As Johannes Evelein notes in Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany (2014), Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Elias Canetti and other exiles treated their condition as a ‘high moral office’ necessitated by Nazism.

Publishers of Catholic and Lutheran persuasions were placed under surveillance. Noting the increase in Christian and confessional literature (the publication of over a million confessional books was stalled by the government), the government put a squeeze on printing paper.  To further control such errant publishers, a law was passed where the companies “placing themselves primarily in the service of a particular worldview not according with that of the German Volk as a whole, a religious creed, or an institution serving its purposes …must express this objective in their company names in a way that is clear and easily recognised by all.”

In short, the publishing house had to explicitly state its religious and political affiliation, presumably so that the public (and the government) could be forewarned about their books’ contents. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, who founded Goldmann publishing, was denied the right to translate British and American detective novels (detective novels were Goldmann’s speciality). There were also bans on periodical and magazine pulp fiction, although the youth still demanded light and entertaining fiction. 

Nazifying institutions and texts

Goebbels populated the key cultural institutions with Nazi ideologues. The Prussian Academy of Arts with a section on Literature, was now controlled by Nazi-sympathisers and conformist poets and authors, Hermann Claudius, Gustav Frenssen, Enrica von Handel- Mazzetti, Rudolf Huch, Isolde Kurz, and others. This was the new ‘literati’ that would produce the kind of writing Nazi Germany required. 

This was also the case with the German PEN, whose internationalism was a major concern of the cleansers. As a commentator pronounced in a direct attack on the PEN:

a nation can only be represented to the outside world by someone who is rooted to the very depths in his own Volk’s character, and is suffused to the last pore by its sap.

As an extension of this pronouncement, it was proposed that the Combat League for German Culture should enter the PEN Club ‘so as to be able to carry out the cleansing campaign as rapidly as possible’. The policing of literary activities and output had begun in earnest. PEN was to actively work towards the (re)making of German in Nazi colours. As Jan-Pieter Barbian in his The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship (2013) declares:

The PEN Club’s goal of international reconciliation was replaced by the “cultural personality of the fatherland,” defined using the categories of nation and race. 

Goebbels’ ministry also understood the potential significance of public libraries in disseminating their ideology. A Prussian Provincial Office for Popular Libraries was set up to monitor the function – especially acquisition of books – of public libraries and to ensure that they worked ‘with the spirit of the National Socialist state’, as an order from the Office put it. Slowly, the entire library system was centralised. In early 1933, coterminous with the burning of books, many library personnel of Jewish descent or believed to espouse ‘left, ‘liberal’ or ‘communist’ ideologies were dismissed and new employees had to demonstrate racial lineage (Aryan) and a commitment to Nazi ideology in the form of a good conduct certificate from the Party authorities. 

Nazifying approaches to Literature

Literature, literary historiography, linguistics and literary criticism were also Nazified, unsurprisingly, through the National Chamber of Culture. Journals like Englische Studien, reporting on the German Association of Modern Languages conference complained that the view of Germany in England had been crafted by authors like Ernst Toller. Edgar Glässer and Alex Niederstenbruch treated Romance linguistics as a racial discipline in this period. Some of the philological work expressed outright admiration for Arthur de Gobineau’s race theories. Niederstenbruch argued that the style of the English Romantics reflected Nordic influence. Critics like Hertha Marquardt, a teacher of English philology at the University of Göttingen, argued that English vocabulary is a clear index of national character, but mourned that the English are open to foreign influence and as a result the language has lost its Germanic qualities. All this contributed, but not without contradictions, to a ‘mother-tongue fascism’ that admirably fitted the Nazi campaign for racial purity, as Christopher M. Hutton has noted in his book, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (1999).

Theoretical frameworks from philology, literary historiography and theory of literature, included cultural works and polemical commentaries such as Alfred Rosenberg’s 1930 work The Myth of the Twentieth Century (which went into 44 editions by 1946). The Austrian Germanist literary historian August Sauer in his works defined the purpose of not just the literary but modes of reading the literary:

The authors and their works can be classified according to internal and external relationships into groups, parties, and schools. These historical relationships are comprehensible only in the light of the entire political, social, and cultural history of a people. (cited in O.E Lessing’s 1920 essay in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology)

Lessing in this essay, published a decade and some years before Hitler-Goering-Goebbels, endorses Sauer’s stance. He writes: ‘German Literature is not lacking in works that have recognized the importance of considering provincial homogeneousness’. Lessing proposed specific principles for literary production and historiography. First, an emphasis on family history, then an attention to provincial and local literary history. The third principle fits right in with what the Nazis set out to do:

Literary history must make much greater use than hitherto of the results of researches in folklore, and the latter must go beyond collecting and describing to the ethnical and provincial character-science of the German nation. 

Anticipating the exclusionary nativism and the atavistic cultural nationalism that would mark Nazi Germany, Lessing was crafting the principles on which literary judgements could be enacted, as he puts it unambiguously in the fourth principle for German literary historiography:

Attempt must be made to prepare an outline of the history of German literature by starting from the popular foundations, according to ethnical and provincial grouping; by representing the provinces and peoples more than hitherto in their peculiar character and their reciprocal influences; and by determining in the case of every poet, every group of poets, and every work how firmly they are rooted in the German racial character, or how far they are perhaps removed from [it]…

Those poets or works ‘removed’ from German racial character as defined by Lessing, needless to say, would eventually find their books burned and their prospects minimal (if left alive), for not meeting national ideals of racial and cultural purity.

Taken together, these works on the theory of Literature argued that Literature must reflect the community’s aspirations, character and purity. Those literary works founded on such principles not only employed pseudo psychopathology but also the concept of racial hygiene and the volk. As a 1938 essay by John A. Hess of Ohio University in The German Quarterly says, the ‘volk’ of traditional German thought was not the ‘volk’ of the Nazis:

The Fuhrer and his satellites use the word insidiously in a political double sense now as the common people, now as the unique German race and nation. For Hitler is not merely the Reichsfuhrer. He is the Fuhrer des Volkes. The average German, accustomed by tradition to a paternalistic government, is doubtless heartened by Hitler’s intimate greeting to him and his fellows as Mein Volk; he is expected to feel that he is an integral part of the Volk…

Lyman R. Bradley in his 1944 essay ‘Literary Trends under Hitler’  noted that German literature during these years set out to capture this second aspect of volk and novelists like George Grabenhorst, Henrik Herse, Paul Ernst and Hans Richter were happy to produce novels that glorified antiquity, racial purity and therefore national identity. And, by 1939, Hitler’s own Mein Kampf had sold 5,200,000 copies. Free copies of the book were handed out at weddings and naming ceremonies. Aryan ideals, antisemitism and myths of national purity marked both the literary text and the propaganda materials, notes Dagmar Lorenz  in his book Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature (2018).

Erich Auerbach, whose sweeping Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) studied a range of Western authors from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne to Virginia Woolf, and remains one of the most significant works in literary criticism and theory, was an attempt to battle Nazi philological theorisations in favour of a more humanist one, as Avihu Zakai observes. Auerbach, in contrast to Nazi philologists and historiographers who wished to impose a particular pattern which suited their present demagogic and racist needs on the past, writes in Mimesis:

epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises…each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations. 

The past of any culture cannot be interpreted in terms of what is desirable today but in terms of the internal premises, aspirations, contradictions and meaning-making practices of that era. This stance is clearly at odds with what Nazi philological-historiographic theorists and ideologues set out to do. Zakai writes:

Aryan philology was based on racism, anti-Semitism, narrow nationalism, and sheer chauvinism. It strove to eliminate the Old Testament from the Christian canon and, hence, the very fabric of European culture and civilization 

With their emphasis on humanism beyond borders and traditions, Auerbach’s works, writes Zakai: 

Should be regarded as a fierce response to the premises of Aryan philology, völkisch mysticism, and Nazi historiography… directed at the racist, chauvinist, and anti-Semitic premises of Aryan philosophy, including the elevation of myth. 

The Nazi retrieval of myths, legends and folklore selectively, to the exclusion of cultural difference, hybridity and contestations, served their racist project and led directly to genocide. 

A hundred years before Goebbels got into the act, Heinrich Heine, arguably one of the most famous of German authors along with JW Goethe, had prophetically announced that wherever they burn books, they will one day burn humans. Little did he anticipate that he was describing his own country. 

The Nazis tried to curb the power of the word, and met with considerable success. But – and this is salutary – neither their textualisation of hatred nor the Third Reich lasted the much-trumped up 1000 years. The burned books, the crematoria, the ash, taken together constitute the most powerful cinders from the period. Cinders of the burned, remain without remaining, in the form of traces. As Jacques Derrida stated in his text with the evocative title, Cinders: 

In the place of others, plural already, of their names and not of themselves, there are cinders there, “of the others, cinders there are” … The name “cinder” figures…nothing to touch, no colour, no body, only words … but above all because these words… name one thing in the place of another, metonymy when the cinder is separated, one thing while figuring another from which nothing figurable remains. 

Traces, in other words, are a responsibility to ensure that such fires that leave nothing figurable, do not burn again.