The German Genius

SS character. 8 Elsewhere, among many other examples, sunshine became “Hitler weather,” * and Klemperer noted that in the university physics department the Hertz unit of frequency could not be referred to in that way because Hertz’s father’s family was Jewish. Just occasionally, he notes that the Nazi use of language gave him hope: whenever German troops were reported to be fighting “valiantly,” they were losing. 9
    V ERSE “IN THE K EY OF H EROISM”
     
    In cultural terms, in its systems of thought, National Socialism was far more coherent than it is often given credit for. That was part of the problem. In their efforts to impose political synchronization, known officially as Gleichschaltung , the Nazis sometimes assumed, or determined, that there was more coherence than actually existed. Hitler’s idea was that the prejudices of ordinary people could be molded into a Germanic worldview that would end the alienation felt by so many.
    It is very doubtful if culture—any culture—can be prepackaged in this way for very long but certainly, so far as German culture in the Nazi period is concerned, the exercise showed that it can work in the short term. 10 Herman Burte, a playwright and poet and the author of an anti-Semitic novel, addressed an assembly of German poets in 1940 and, arguing that Hitler was essentially a poet-turned-statesman, asserted that all those involved in cultural creativity must use it to turn the energies of the German people to augment the “German mode of being.” He thought the Führer was superior even to Goethe because Hitler understood the “organic” nature of the German people, the “primacy of the primordial German.” Adolf Spemann, a Stuttgart publisher, lectured his fellow publishers that the age when they could release books that they might not agree with but thought intellectually or commercially worthwhile, was over. The publisher was no longer an “uninvolved cultural mirror,” the “servant of the writer has been changed into a deputy of the state…literature is not to be separated from politics.” 11 By 1937, between 50 and 75 percent of all books approved by the National Socialists were peasant novels, historical novels, and novels set in the “native landscape.” 12
    According to Jay Baird in his study of Nazi heroes, three individuals in particular contributed significantly to National Socialist aesthetics, two of them writers—the poet Gerhard Schumann and the songwriter Hans Baumann. (The third, the film director, Karl Ritter, is considered in Chapter 34.)
    Schumann, Baird says, was “a self-styled elitist,” the son of a professor of education and a pious Christian. He joined the German youth movement and went on walking trips, exploring the landscape and ancient castles and churches. It was an idyllic upbringing but then he was pitched into “the bleeding cities of Weimar” and was “shocked into poetry.” 13 In the early 1930s he produced his first collection, Die Lieder vom Reich ( Songs of the Reich ), giving voice to his longing to sabotage the “foreign ideologies” that had overtaken Germany and for a strong “Führer personality” to take the helm and save the nation.
    …as he arose the halo of the chosen one
shone round his head. And as he descended
He called the torch illuminating the night.
     
    Millions silently revered him… 14
     
    At the University of Tübingen he found the old, aristocratic, class-based emphasis on classical scholarship out of date with what was required in industrial Germany and as a result, in November 1930, at the age of nineteen, he joined the NSDAP. When Hitler assumed office, Schumann was taken on as a party writer, a position of some prestige. Here he became more infused with Nazi ideology as applied to the arts. 15 The so-called Asphaltliteraten , the central approach of the Weimar years, was now outdated, and Schumann was attracted instead by the idea that the new verse was to be “struck in the key of heroism.”
    A prolific author (he published nineteen volumes of verse, as well as journalism and two plays), one of his specialities as a party writer, and then as Präsidialrat of the Reich Chamber of Music, when he was only twenty-four, was composing scripts for the great ceremonial occasions. His poems had such titles as “Germany, You Eternal Flame,” “The Purity of the Reich,” and “Hitler.”
    In one will all the towering force
of millions living and dead…
     
    In one hand the