The German Genius

elevate and unite the audience “in a mystical union,” but from 1936 to 1940 the Grosses Schauspielhaus, now renamed the Theater des Volkes, became the home of operetta. It was argued that operetta could “lead the uninitiated to an appreciation of opera.” Believing that the contentment of the workers was “a task of military importance,” the point of operetta was that it returned audiences to life as it was in the good old days, which the Nazis promised to bring back. 45
    The most imaginative and versatile actor/director of those times was Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), who could sing and dance as well as act, who had worked all over the country with his wife, Erika Mann, her brother Klaus (children of Thomas), and Pamela Wedekind (daughter of Frank) and had a famous cabaret, the “Review of Four.” 46 Gründgens, though married, was a homosexual, but this did not deter Göring from appointing him Intendant at the Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt and instructing him to attract the biggest names. Gründgens obliged, surrounding himself with actors like Werner Krauss, Emil Jannings, and Emmy Sonnemann (who Göring was courting just then). Most importantly, Gründgens employed Jürgen Fehling (1885–1968), who had been a big name in Weimar times, directing plays by several playwrights the Nazis had banned, though he also directed plays by those they approved.
    By no means an ideal director from the Nazis’ point of view, Fehling’s ability protected him. Together with Heinz Hilpert (1890–1967), who had a long association with Reinhardt in many modernist Weimar productions, they managed to keep legitimate theater unpolitical and maintain its excellence. These men maintained some integrity, mainly by producing only German classics and Shakespeare, and keeping works by playwrights who adapted to the Nazis, such as the Austrian, Richard Billinger, winner of the 1932 Kleist Prize. A major scandal was caused when Gründgens allowed Fehling to stage Richard III in 1937. Werner Krauss, as Gloucester, hobbled around the stage, with a clubfoot, “an apparent Goebbels take-off.” Equally bad, the murderers of Clarence appeared on stage “in brown shirts and jackboots, bearing a distinct similarity to Nazi storm troopers.” To cap it all, when Gloucester became king, “a phalanx of eight men in black uniforms accented with silver bijouterie accompanied him; their resemblance to Hitler’s SS was both immediate and frightening.” 47
    Göring, who saw the play, wanted Fehling dismissed, but Gründgens refused and, for once, the Reichsmarschall was defeated. But Fehling went on to direct Nazi plays. As elsewhere, didactic plays became obligatory and the classics were reinterpreted to support Nazi dogma. 48

Scholarship in the Third Reich: “No Such Thing as Objectivity ”
     
    I n the first two years after the Nazis took power, at least 1,600 scholars, some 32 percent of the total of 5,000 university teachers, were dismissed, on either political or racial grounds. By the end of 1938, Germany—including Austria—had lost 39 percent of its university teachers, with Berlin and Frankfurt hardest hit, closely followed by Heidelberg. 1 The first years of the Third Reich comprised the era of the worst student radicalism, which often disrupted the classes of faculty members deemed undesirable but, as Steven Remy has shown in his study of Heidelberg, many faculty members silently acquiesced in the purges. Remy says that American intelligence reports compiled in 1945 identified fifteen Heidelberg professors as informants on their colleagues during the years of the Third Reich. There were protests but they were few and far between. Alfred Weber, the sociologist brother of Max Weber, resisted a plan to fly the swastika over public buildings, including his own institute, was pilloried in the local press for doing so, and forced to resign his position not long after.
    Only a few academics joined the Nazi Party before Hitler actually took power, including the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Philipp Lenard, but once the Nazis were in office “the encomiums began.” In April 1933 the Association of German Universities issued a statement in support of the “new German Reich,” and in November 700 out of a total of some 2,000 full professors signed a document of support to “Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state.” Hundreds of professors now joined the party. 2
    Remy says that at Heidelberg there was a rash of