The German Genius

brotherly greeting
of millions of outstretched hands…
     
    With the thunderous power of all the bells
his voice is ringing over the world.
     
    And the world will hear.
     
    He celebrated the Anschluss with a poem that Hitler so loved that he insisted it be broadcast time and again. 16
    Schumann saw action in France and Russia in World War II and won the Iron Cross. Despite being severely injured on the Russian front, he volunteered again as soon as he was fit, and continued writing poems that, as he put it, in wartime were really “prayers disguised as poems.” His most famous, “Soldier’s Prayer,” was scored by Eugen Papst and sung far and wide, especially on ceremonial occasions:
    O God, we are not much with words.
But please hear our prayer now:
Make our souls firm and strong.
The rest we’ll do ourselves. 17
     
    “D O N OT C OUNT THE D EAD”
     
    Hans Baumann, “the troubadour of the Hitler Youth,” was nineteen in 1933. An innocent from the Bavarian forest, he enjoyed a meteoric career in the Third Reich, aged only thirty-one when it ended. As a boy he was known as “Happy Hans” and in his memoirs described his mother as “the best mother in the world.” When his father came back from World War I, he brought some old hand grenades which Hans called “my first friends.” 18
    This idyllic childhood was tempered by the inflation and unemployment in Weimar Germany and some of Baumann’s early poems, written when he was just fourteen, have titles like “Unemployed” and “Four Flights Up,” about living in tenement slums.
    As a Catholic, however, he became active in the Catholic youth movement, and this gave rise to some of his early songs, the most famous of which, “Morgen gehört mir,” “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” was popularized in the 1972 film Cabaret . This song helped Baumann’s rise to fame. He had written it when he was eighteen, studying for a career as a teacher at a Jesuit academy in Amberg. The priest in charge was so taken with Baumann’s songs that he approached the Catholic publishing house Köselverlag in Munich, and they brought out a collection in 1933. “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” became famous among the Catholic youth movement long before it was taken up by the Hitler Youth.
    Baumann, however, became convinced that Hitler was a savior, and he composed more than 150 songs reflecting that view. These songs got more aggressive as the thirties passed, especially in regard to the East. In the Blitzkrieg years he could be shockingly cavalier about war.
    Despite the trembling of brave men,
despite the distress in my heart
Afire with sorrow, I will raise the banner,
with hands that are no more.
     
    Baumann liked to say it was a privilege to be living in Germany’s era of greatness and, in a series of speeches, quoted these lines from Hölderlin:
    The battle is ours! Hold high the banner,
O Fatherland, and do not count the dead!
Beloved nation, not one too many
has died for you. 19
     
    But Baumann changed. He seems to have had second thoughts around 1941–42, when he began to advocate more charity on Hitler’s part toward Germany’s enemies. This culminated in his play Alexander , which Gustaf Gründgens (see Chapter 34) snapped up for production in Berlin. A great success, with Gründgens in the title role taking twenty-five curtain calls on the opening night, its plot drew not-so-subtle parallels between Alexander the Great and Hitler. Alexander exclaims “Let us be contemptuous of the earthbound,” but he also says, “I am victorious because I love.” Again, Baumann stressed charity among the victors, perhaps feeling that was as much as he could get away with in the Third Reich. Goebbels had the play closed after two nights.
    Baumann’s second thoughts gathered pace, aided by the fact that his brother, an artillery captain in Kiev, had seen terrible things there, and his wife, who had been an entertainer on the Eastern Front, had also seen and heard about heartbreaking atrocities. In the army himself now, in the East, Baumann directed a program for cultural understanding for German soldiers, where even Russian works were performed and Russian guests allowed, even members of the Resistance. After the war Baumann became internationally acclaimed as a writer of children’s books, his work translated into a score of languages and winning prizes in West Germany, Italy, and the United States. Toward the end of his life (he died in 1988 in Murnau, where Kandinsky