◆ ◆ ◆
Transfer Beyond Zero Hour, May 1945
DURING THE EARLY years of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels would have wanted Thomas Mann to return to Germany in order to help uphold the country’s reputation around the world in the arts. Having received his doctorate in German literature in 1922, Goebbels knew about Mann’s cultural significance early on, in fact he enjoyed reading him, especially his Buddenbrooks, at the very time he was moving close to the new Nazi Party in the mid-1920s. This was notwithstanding the fact that he considered Mann prone to favoring themes of decadence and decay, and that the loss of such a great literary talent to the cause of the Weimar Republic with its parliamentary democracy was deplorable.1 That Mann was not a Modernist in the manner of other writers who were commanding much attention at that time, and some of whom he liked, was not an issue for Goebbels, as he appreciated Mann’s more traditionalist literary approach. Hence Goebbels should have been happy had Mann decided not to leave Germany at all or to return to it later, as he then could have supported Mann’s personal motto that wherever he was, there was Germany, or its axiom, there was German culture. It is very likely that had Mann accommodated himself to the dictatorship from 1933 like Richard Strauss, who did not contemplate emigration, German cultural matters during the regime would have taken a different course – more favorable to Goebbels than what he actually got. This is provided Mann would have written the same high-quality novels as he produced in exile, without interference by the regime leaders. The prestige of the arts under the Third Reich could have been considerable.
Obviously, Mann did not want to be the representative of what he regarded as a traditional, time-honored culture in a Germany ruled by Nazis. It is therefore not without irony that after they were defeated, he still refused to return to the land of his birth, assuming there a position of cultural authority. There is no question that certain factions wanted him back in Germany, to help with the rebuilding of the country and to be an example to new, budding writers. This was, especially, the view of those officers of the U.S. occupying forces in the American zone (Office of Military Government, United States, or OMGUS) concerned with cultural affairs, although they feared that Mann might be repelled by unacceptable living conditions.2 Knowing the superior lifestyle to which he was accustomed in the United States, this could have been a reason for him to hold back, but what was decisive for him was that influential Germans rejected his putative position of authority. In the bigger picture, his situation was tied into the whole thorny question of emigrating versus sticking it out in Germany; the latter was now being advocated by writers Walter von Molo, Frank Thiess, and even the sometime Nazi Manfred Hausmann, as the best way to have withstood the Nazis. It was Thiess who in August 1945 popularized the neologism “inner emigration” when he wrote in a Munich newspaper that even as an opponent of the regime, having stayed in Germany had enriched his character and was preferable to having watched “German tragedy” unfold from the “theater boxes of abroad.”3 However, Mann may not have known that von Molo and Thiess, like Hausmann, had made well-calculated concessions to Goebbels and other Nazi administrators. During the final phase of the war Mann had claimed that the German people should bear some measure of guilt after all for having supported the Nazis, and he reacted with uncommon acrimony in October by saying he was in fear of a country that had become foreign to him. He would find it difficult to engage with those who had compromised their beliefs and besides, “books that had any chance of being published between 1933 and 1945 now are less than valuable and not worthy of being opened. Blood and ignominy stick to them. They should all be pulped.”4
Thomas Mann returned to Germany from Los Angeles for the Goethe festivities in Frankfurt and Weimar in the late summer of 1949, not least with a view to resettlement. But his visits there, marked by his customary hauteur, did not go over well with his hosts in either West or East Germany.5 His labored justification for emigration and his pro-democracy preaching could not convince critics such as Erich Kästner (another “inner emigrant” who had been well paid for his script for the lavish 1943 Baron Münchhausen film, under the pseudonym of Berthold Bürger), who had earlier published his view that Mann was known mostly for his characterizations of sickly, decadent creatures and had better remain in America.6 Mann, who had always been grateful for the asylum Switzerland had granted him early on, had mentioned a return to Zurich several times in his diaries from late in the war. So it came as no surprise that he decided to move back there in 1952, when conditions in the United States, especially the political witch-hunt for Communists, became unbearable for him.7
Once again, Thomas Mann’s situation was exceptional, as he was in the fortunate position of being able to either accept or reject an offer of residence in Germany. The vast majority of writers who might have wanted to return did not have this choice. They were unwelcome in a society that allowed entrenched Nazis to carry on and merely accorded the benefit of the doubt to pre-1933 established bourgeois authors such as Hans Carossa. On the other hand, this being a new democracy, it did not encourage but neither did it hinder the formation of some younger writers into what they themselves called Gruppe 47 (“Group of 1947”). Those were mavericks who decided to wage a new beginning, predicated on rejecting anything that smacked of the Third Reich. But even these innovative writers, who were semi-officially led by the unexceptional novelist Hans Werner Richter and included Günther Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Walter Jens, and who were of a generation that could still have been conscripted into the Wehrmacht, wished to have nothing to do with older compatriots outside their circle. They possessed a “youthful coolness,” explains a former member of this coterie, the Munich cultural-affairs critic Joachim Kaiser; they wanted to revive, on their own, “language and literature” that the Nazis were said to have destroyed. And anyone with a literary past from the Weimar Republic, they decided, was not for them either.8
Nor were other exiled writers invited back, including Mann’s children, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Bertolt Brecht, not least because there remained a latent strain of anti-Semitism in West Germany, and there existed the beginnings of a new xenophobia. While (the non-Jewish) Brecht eventually found a new home in East Germany, which developed different standards for reintegrating former exiles into a new, Communist-led, society (and which would accommodate other artists as well, on dubious and Soviet-determined conditions),9 the western trizonal part of Germany, and later the Federal Republic, did not want many of these exiled writers. Klaus Mann, in jurisdictions such as West Germany’s where homosexuality was punishable by law, was rejected as a contributor for new newspapers like Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. Also, his novel Mephisto was banned from publication in West Germany, a judgment vigorously supported by Peter Gorski, the former lover and adopted son of Gustaf Gründgens (Mann’s erstwhile lover), after the celebrated actor’s death in 1963, on whom Mann had based his novel. The ban was in force until 1981, during which time one could read the novel only in earlier editions published in Holland and East Germany.10 Although the formal basis for the West German judgment was character defamation rather than an anti-homosexual motive, homophobia was rife in the new German cultural establishment and played a role in Klaus Mann’s rejection as an author.
Beyond that sentiment, there existed an almost demonic energy with which others went after prominent émigrés. Erich Maria Remarque was picked over critically by Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, supposedly liberal journals, and condemned, even in his home town of Osnabrück, for his latest novel, Der Funke Leben (The Spark of Life), which excoriated concentration camps.11 A would-be returnee from exile like Alfred Döblin was marginalized to the point of having his work excluded not only from bookstores but also anthologies, for example school textbooks that habitually still featured Nazi-prone writers like Friedrich Griese and Josefa Berens-Totenohl. No newly formed German publisher wished to publish, or reprint, those questionable émigrés.12
Such mistrust regarding would-be returning refugees extended to all the other arts as well, even if the Soviets, in their zone of occupation, initially made self-serving exceptions. In the Trizone (the American, British, and French areas of German occupation following the end of World War II), led by OMGUS, it had been deemed necessary to resurrect a corrupted film industry by inviting back former exiles from Hollywood to come and help out. However, it proved difficult to appoint a U.S.-authorized commissioner who would then persuade fellow exiles to return. Detlev Sierck, who had made La Habanera with Zarah Leander in 1937 before leaving for Hollywood and taking the name of Douglas Sirk, traveled to Germany but was not tempted to stay, since there he discovered “no profound break” with the past, merely a failure to confront recent history.13 The Americans then prevailed on Erich Pommer, who had produced The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920 and permanently settled in Hollywood after leaving Germany for France in 1933. Pommer supervised the resumption of the film industry in the American zone, but failed to permanently attract important expatriates such as Peter Lorre or Lilli Palmer, much less Marlene Dietrich.14 Lorre, whose Hollywood career was going downhill after the war, actually made one film in Germany in 1951, Der Verlorene (The Lost One), which analyzed the Nazi phenomenon “in a series of rather perfunctory clichés,” according to The New York Times; it did badly at the box office and that sealed Lorre’s fate in the Old Country.15 Those actors who insisted on returning to Germany, such as Walter Weinlaub, who now called himself Walter Wicclair, had become unknowns, and upon introducing themselves to German actor associations that could advance their cause were rebuffed.16 Even Curt Bois, a one-time student of Max Reinhardt who had played a pickpocket in Casablanca alongside Ingrid Bergman in 1942, was snubbed.17
Moreover, the celebrated architect Walter Gropius was looked upon with suspicion when in August 1947 he gave a lecture in Berlin’s Titania-Palast. Gropius had recommended his friend Hans Scharoun, who had lain low in the Nazi period, as a mentor to younger colleagues undertaking new architectural projects, but was told that those colleagues needed “no suggestions.”18 Interest or compassion was also lacking in the music industry, especially where Modernist dodecaphony was involved. Jews like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernst Toch, or Hans Gál were not approached, and even the non-Jewish Ernst Krenek had his Zwölftonkontrapunktstudien (1940) published by Schott only belatedly, in 1952.19 Whereas the master Schoenberg did not even bother to attempt a return to Berlin or Vienna, Egon Wellesz, also a noted champion of dodecaphony and now ensconced in Oxford, obliged his bona-fide anti-Nazi colleague Karl Amadeus Hartmann in Munich (who was now campaigning against the conventional, primal music of Carl Orff), by sending him his twelve-tone In Memoriam string quartet for performance. Wellesz must have registered with bitter-sweet feeling that the Berlin Philharmonic premiered his First Symphony, a diatonic work, under the politically unobjectionable Romanian Sergiu Celibidache in March 1948, but it was not exactly a homecoming.20
THE DEMISE OF CULTURE
All of Wellesz’s string quartets could have been considered part of the canon of German modern music until 1945, had the composer been allowed to remain in the country. Obviously Hartmann thought so, or he would not have wanted them to replace Orff’s music, of which only Carmina Burana would later be regarded as an outstanding work produced in the Third Reich, in fact as the only outstanding work of music, even surpassing Strauss’s – and as such it was a composition that for discerning critics reflected fascism per se. Joachim Kaiser’s sarcastic verdict of 2008 that Furtwängler conducted music better than ever from 1941 to 1945 because musicians played and people listened as if there was no tomorrow, if vaguely credible, would serve as a shameful measure of human motivation.21 After the German capitulation in May 1945, the pickings in other areas of creativity were correspondingly slim.
None of the films made between 1933 and 1945, even the overtly non-political ones, could today be considered classics, except for one or two by Leni Riefenstahl, which are immediately recognizable as ideologically compromised. The same is true for theater productions, even if a very few stage directors, Heinz Hilpert and Jürgen Fehling and also Gründgens, occasionally produced near-masterpieces. In the visual arts, Modernism was to all intents and purposes stifled in this period, and even politically neutral paintings, from an aesthetic vantage point, only reflected mediocrity. In literature, some books such as Werner Bergengruen’s Der Grosstyrann und das Gericht (The Great Tyrant and the Court of Law, 1935), made for stimulating reading, but it had a political subtext potentially friendly to fascism; after 1933, there were no equivalents of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, or Selma Lagerlöf in Germany. In architecture, the really great innovations had occurred in Germany before 1933, through the Bauhaus and from other architects, while the monumental style identified with the Third Reich, inasfar as it could be realized before the outbreak of war, constituted infantilist regression. Radio made some headway technically because of the introduction of tape-recording devices (and even television, invented in this period), but as far as content was concerned, it deteriorated especially after 1939, as increasingly ineffectual propaganda and outright lies overshadowed all other broadcasts. The same can be said about the press, whose journalists, even the formerly bourgeois ones, wrote in order to please Goebbels and avoid being sent to concentration camps. Those claiming after 1945 to have written for readers hostile to the Nazi regime, who knew how to read criticism “between the lines,” thereby concocted one of the more bizarre figments of fantasy by capitulating fence-sitters after the national catastrophe. Articles in Das Reich or any other Nazi newspaper, or, for that matter, Bergengruen’s Grosstyrann, fail to reveal “between-the-lines” content pointing to the inalienable rights of humankind or the need for anything remotely democratic. If there had been any such suggestions in the press before May 1945, the former journalist Goebbels, not stupid, would have uncovered them and arrested those responsible.22 Few journalists in fact suffered significantly at his hands for providing copy that fell short of Nazi standards, or crossed the line. In the few cases where they incensed the regime, they were demoted or transferred to another journalistic post.23 Any journalist who had to endure a long jail term, or worse, would have had to be regarded as a true resister, not someone who was attempting alleged opposition from within. Few journalist resisters are known.
Cultural matters in Nazi Germany worked first in helping to prop up the popularity of the regime during its early victories in the war, but then failed to support the war effort with the ultimate aim of making victors out of soldiers. They also failed to support German occupation structures in conquered territories, whether under Himmler, Rosenberg, or the military governments; the anticipated European “New Order” never came into being.24 At the height of the war poor quality in all areas of culture in Germany was discernible to the extent that sophisticated outsiders, like the Italian Fascist philosopher Ernesto Grassi, exclaimed that the Nazis’ ideal of “a Nordic culture” did not exist.25
To a large extent this decrease in quality, of course, was the result of missing talent as a consequence of having driven out the old masters and having failed to put new and younger ones in their place – because none could be raised. But beyond forced emigration, through which such great artists as Thomas Mann and his family were lost, the demise of culture in the Third Reich was also caused by an absence of leadership in all artistic endeavors, a condition observed by a Berlin scriptwriter as early as October 1933 – and ironic for a country that prided itself on being a “Führerstaat.”26 For the Reich as a whole, unified, central leadership was absent from an administrative foundation that was prone to fissures from the beginning and only fractured further as the regime developed, revealing ever more crippling operational deficiencies under Gestapo terror and a war that went off the rails. Historians of institutions during the Third Reich have noted the divisions and subdivisions that characterized the governance of many affairs of politics and society from 1933 to 1945, including culture, whose fragmenting pattern was, in one sense, a reflection of overall conditions. Apart from Goebbels’s well-documented quarrels with Rosenberg over competency in cultural matters beginning in 1933, the Propaganda Minister’s rivalry with Göring regarding their respective Berlin stages, and Robert Ley’s encroachments on popular culture through the DAF programs, were other examples of structural tension. Additionally, because Bernhard Rust’s ministerial portfolio included not only formal education, which Goebbels had little interest in, but museums and public libraries, which he was keen on, there was friction between the two men in those areas. Furthermore, Max Amann, as head of the Party-owned Eher-Verlag, nominally controlled nearly 80 percent of the German press, and Otto Dietrich, though a titular section head in the Promi, was press chief of the NSDAP and therefore craved institutional independence. And as soon as Martin Bormann was appointed head of the Führer chancellery after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in spring 1941, he began to meddle in cultural affairs. This list of individuals who wielded power in cultural affairs does not even include squabbles over the direction of artistic matters by agencies beyond Goebbels’s purview, such as Himmler’s fight with Rosenberg over prehistorical artifacts (they also disagreed over the mythic Atlantis as a source of Germandom), or the stand taken by Poland’s Governor General Hans Frank against the SS in cultural matters, especially music performance (he was a connoisseur of the classics).27 But even within individual cultural disciplines, there was no organizational uniformity. To take music as an example, apart from Rust, who was in charge of the conservatories, and Hitler’s idiosyncratic interest in Bayreuth, Himmler’s SS research center “Ahnenerbe” had a music department as did Rosenberg, who (like Ley) also sponsored performances; while Goebbels oversaw two offices often in rivalry with one another, the Reich Music Chamber in the RKK and Heinz Drewes’s censorial apparatus planted directly in the Promi. Meanwhile, Goebbels (along with Rust) envied the Hitler Youth its autonomy in music education and vied with its leaders for control over public concerts.28 All these ministers and Gauleiter, even if they thought they were “working towards the Führer,” were contributing to chaos at the end.
To the extent that Goebbels had made propaganda qua culture responsible for the flourishing of the Third Reich both before and during the war, culture’s failure could be said to have been not just a reflection of the regime’s disintegration, but an essential cause as well. Within this context, after identifying a clique of accountable politicians such as Goebbels and Göring, the question of Hitler’s own agency once again arises. Given his already moderate role in cultural decision-making before 1939, which was possible because of so many satraps working (seemingly congenially) towards him, and a less complicated government machinery at that time, he showed even less interest in cultural affairs once the war was under way. Overall, this was wholly in keeping with his incrementally inadequate governance of home affairs. The exceptions were isolated sectors of the visual arts, some architectural day-dreaming, and the Bayreuth Festival. “For five years now I have been disconnected from the other world,” he crowed in August 1944, “I did not visit a theater, listened to no concert, and did not watch a film. I live for the sole task of waging this war, because I know: If no man with an iron will gets behind it, this struggle cannot be won.”29 Because of the pronounced paucity of Hitler’s final judgments in the area of cultural bureaucracy after September 1939, his underlings felt they had an even freer hand and, consequently, through contradictory resolutions, duplications, and negligence, worsened the already heavily corroded infrastructure of culture management.
BEYOND ZERO HOUR
Such culture management, because of the pervasive chaos, ended months before the German capitulation of May 1945. Many Germans attempting a new beginning thereafter assumed a Zero Hour that separated those efforts from the vanquished Reich, with no aspects of which they wished to be associated. They may have been inspired by the doyen of German historians, Friedrich Meinecke, who claimed as early as 1946 that the extinction of Nazi “anus culture” would prepare the path for change.30 Ignoring such a bad example of culture through political and cultural amnesia was thought helpful to many who wanted to safeguard a better future for themselves. Those included the cultish Gruppe 47 members, whose memory lapses even attached to the 1920s; they could make no mental connections, for example, to Jewish intellectuals of the Weimar era who might have inspired them, because throughout the Nazi regime they had been prevented from knowing any Jews.31
Whether on purpose or involuntarily, these Germans wanted to wipe the past “from memory,” in Adorno’s phrase.32 They were oblivious to streams of continuity, especially in cultural matters, from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, from there to the new democratic West Germany, and from the Weimar Republic, leaping over the Nazi regime, again to post-1945 Germany. That various iterations of pre-existing mainstream culture, in all the arts, had been transferred into Nazi Germany, many of them stifled by the time of World War II, is undeniable. At the extreme Modernist flank of that culture, the Nazis had called a halt with their “Degenerate Art” exhibition of July 1937 – at least in the visual arts. At the extreme reactionary flank, the literature of Freikorps fighters, begun after 1918, established the pace well into the 1940s. Somewhere in between, genuine Nazi arts flourished that had been initiated by German fascists in the 1920s. Beyond that, Nazis after 1933 related to the nineteenth-century Romantics, for instance Schiller and Hölderlin.33 Other, if not identical, lines of continuity can be detected in music, film, architecture, and theater.
As for a transition from 1932 to the late 1940s, passing over the Third Reich, at least in the Western zones of the occupying powers there was no Zero Hour. In architecture, for instance, the homey, comfy villa style of Paul Schultze-Naumburg, which had been established in pre-republican times and flourished in the 1920s, was transposed unadulterated after the war and became very popular, as new houses were rebuilt on the ruins.34 In music, a development similar to that in the Weimar Republic was observable. Diatonic compositions were resumed (they had continued under the Nazis), as were experiments in dodecaphony (which had largely been discontinued), but those experimenters were few and only reluctantly allowed into the mainstream.35 It is ironic that Hans Werner Henze, that giant of modern music, was a student of the erstwhile Nazi Wolfgang Fortner, who experimented with Schoenbergian twelve-tone composition even before 1945, but made his Third Reich mark as a Church and Hitler Youth musician.36 In the visual arts, the Modernism of the 1920s inspired Modernism in the early Federal Republic, with abstraction becoming a hallmark of new paintings.37 Many new films of the incipient democracy, long after licenses had been granted by the occupying powers, quoted not masterpieces of Expressionism such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but classics of the, later, Ufa-Film era. Actors such as the celebrated Hans Albers, whose attempt to avoid kowtowing to the Nazis was much less successful than he later liked to insist, even though the regime had separated him from his Jewish girlfriend, claimed that in terms of style and spirit, he was continuing after the war from where he had left off in 1932. (Even the girlfriend, Hansi Burg, returned to him from London in a British uniform after the war, to chase Albers’s current inamorata from his table and his bed.)38
Of great significance would have been a transfer of Nazi culture, or artists working under Hitler, into post-war Germany, certainly the western part. This transfer actually did occur, in two ways. First, ideologically Nazi artists and their art segued into post-war society under cover and continued championing fascism, with a view to undermining the new democracy; their numbers were relatively few, however. Second, and in greater numbers, some artists who had been Nazi sympathizers adapted to the new political regime and made a point of changing their ideology, whether this was genuine or faked.
With respect to the first transfer: Much has been written about the political success of West Germany’s democracy after 1960, which grew in tandem with an enlightened politics and culture critical of the Nazis; in particular an outspoken form of literature evolved, in which members of Gruppe 47 like Heinrich Böll participated and which championed individual human rights and freedoms. But concentrating on that angle of history alone can make one forget that the path leading towards 1960, almost a return to the parliamentary democracy of the best years of the Weimar Republic, was less than smooth. One difficulty true democrats have had to overcome was the fact that certain facets of culture under the Nazis persisted, sometimes in conjunction with a reactionary politics that attempted to exploit gaps in the constitutional and social fabric, as it was overseen by the first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer.39
Adenauer, having suffered in the Third Reich as a retired mayor of Cologne, was known to give quarter to former Nazis in government and appeared to tolerate them at other levels of society, as long as he was in need of expertise in the rebuilding of the country. Full-time Nazi functionaries such as Hans Globke and Theodor Oberländer were in his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), as well as his cabinets. Globke had helped author official Nazi documents to cement the race legislation of 1935, while Oberländer had advocated the cleansing of the European East of Poles and Jews.40 Moreover, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), alongside outright Nazi holdovers such as the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), became a place of refuge for former National Socialists.41 Erich Mende, one of the FDP leaders who had served as an officer in World War II, in 1951 called for the end of a preoccupation in the public mind with the bogeymen of an allegedly evil Nazi past.42 This at a time when a serious examination of the past was more than a decade away.
In 1946, 40 percent of Germans said that Nazism had been a good idea, just not well executed, and in 1952 one-third of West Germany’s citizens still acknowledged some admiration for the Führer.43 In such an atmosphere, National Socialism for many was not yet a phantom of the past but a recent, albeit dormant, reality that had to be re-animated, and the “Hitler Myth” still had currency. A structured, critical, retrospective of Jews as victims of genocide was far off.44 Especially former Nazi literati who now were freelancing exploited this atmosphere, as they had recourse to neo-Nazi publishers and once more found an audience among right-wing Germans. Often they themselves were the publishers, as was Herbert Böhme, a former highly placed SA leader and poet who now co-founded a new journal, Nation Europa, and started the radical-rightist publishing firm Der Türmer.45 His published books, often reprints of older tomes, were authored by the likes of Hans Grimm, Friedrich Griese, Edwin Erich Dwinger, and Hans Friedrich Blunck. As not all copyrights had been dissolved by the occupying Western powers, publishers formerly beholden to the Nazis such as the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Stuttgart, Piper in Munich, and Bertelsmann in Gütersloh continued operating, often steered by their old authors. Grimm himself, a convener for the SRP, organized a congress of former Nazi writers, the “Lippoldsberger Dichtertage,” on the Weser river, in 1949. There he towered over them as an intellectual éminence grise; his most prominent guest arguably was Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, who had won twelve Nazi literary prizes, more than any other writer. Yet another Nazi poet, Gerhard Schumann, proprietor of the neo-Nazi Hohenstaufen Verlag, founded an Europäischer Buchklub that managed to attract 200,000 subscribers. These writers were implicitly supported by old Nazi literary scholars such as Hermann Pongs, Benno von Wiese, Paul Fechter, and Heinz Kindermann, who also guided much of the course of literary studies at the universities, until a fundamental discussion led by younger scholars, foremost among them Karl Otto Conrady, began reforming the field at the Germanists’ annual convention in Munich, as late as 1966.46
There were Nazis in other fields who resorted to the mentality of trench warfare. In the visual arts, for example, the scabrous cartoonist and poster designer Hans Schweitzer, under the Nordic, freaky, name “Mjölnir” had worked for Der Angriff and the Völkischer Beobachter, creating “the hard-faced, heroic storm trooper, known as the ‘Mjölnir type,’ whose opposite image, the bloated, leering Jew, he adapted from nineteenth-century models and invested with a new viciousness.” During his denazification tribunal Schweitzer praised the Nazi regime for having opposed modern art that had departed “from nature,” defended the reduction of “excessive Jewish influence” in German art and society, and praised concentration camps as “necessary emergency measures against spies and other internal enemies.”47 Once appointed a professor by Hitler, he now served as an illustrator for extreme right-wing newspapers in West Germany, while insinuating himself into the federal press bureau in Bonn as a poster draftsman.48 And the former SS officer Count Klaus Baudissin, who had been the nemesis of the artist Oskar Schlemmer and other Modernists, lived as a retired municipal government worker on a pension in northern Germany – a pension he had finagled for himself after suing the city of Essen in a year-long trial.49
Shapers of culture who had served the Nazis and now wanted to quietly integrate into West German society found various ways to do so, depending on their expertise, whom they knew and, ultimately, their chosen path toward earning a living. No one had stood as high under Hitler as Albert Speer, and, ironically, no one succeeded more spectacularly in attaining fame and fortune even after twenty years in prison. Speer did not re-enter the civilian world as the architect he had once been, but as an author of titillating memoirs and a media star who lied about important functions of the Nazi regime. The most grievous falsehoods were that he had not known about Auschwitz and, similarly, that he had not been present at Himmler’s infamous speech of October 1943 to the Gauleiter at Posen, during which the annihilation of the Jews was made crystal-clear.50
Another impressive ascent was managed by Elisabeth Noelle, who, intimate with Adenauer’s CDU and a sycophant of Ernst Jünger, attained a chair in political science at the new university of Mainz, a French creation of 1946, along with the founding directorship the following year of the, eventually famous, Allensbacher Institut für Demoskopie on Lake Constance. That she also worked as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago between 1978 and 1991 is not without irony. Born in 1916, Noelle had attended the University of Missouri on a Promi scholarship in 1937–8, where she had studied journalism and the emerging American techniques for monitoring and shaping public opinion. While there, she wrote for a local student newspaper that “National Socialism is opposed to the mixing of races because it sees herein a danger to the maintenance of national character.”51 From 1940 to 1941 she was a staff writer for Das Reich and, among others, wrote an article about American society. Here she engaged in exile-baiting and railed against Eleanor Roosevelt, who allegedly was forcing the American public to adopt a “Jewish standpoint.” About the prominent columnist Walter Lippmann she remarked that as “a Jew of German origin” he was “most clever in factual deception,” and she accused the broadcaster Dorothy Thompson of “fake logic” and “furious rhetoric.” Hewing to a popular National Socialist cliché that was also adopted by her colleague Margret Boveri two years later, she described Jews as being behind the American press, such as the Chicago Daily News, as well as controlling the film industry, radio, and all the theaters. How exactly she was able to found her institute in 1947 and gain access to the faculty in Mainz awaits discovery, but what is already certain is that she was always heavily supported by the CDU, with Adenauer’s government and subsequent cabinets routinely contracting her for her demoscopic research (which, some scholars have contended, resembled Himmler’s SD reports on the public mood in Nazi Germany, suggesting a direct influence).52
In West Germany, journalists like Noelle found it relatively easy to slip into positions with a newspaper newly licensed by the occupation authorities, because they were all looking for staff with writing experience. With her past plausible closeness to the SD, Noelle was not far removed from Giselher Wirsing, the SS officer who had worked for the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten and was especially mandated by Himmler to analyze the situation of Jews and Palestine for the SD.53 In 1938 he had followed in the footsteps of Adolf Eichmann’s exploratory visit of 1937 to Palestine. But come 1945, Wirsing had effectively changed his spots, becoming chief editor for the conservative Lutheran weekly Christ und Welt. Still, his past would overtake him. In 1959 his continuing connections to SS veterans led him to one Dr. Horst Schumann, who was practicing medicine in Ghana, “the loneliest person I have ever met.” In April that year Wirsing published an article about Schumann, extolling the selfless acts of this Samaritan and calling him “a second Dr. Schweitzer.” But instead of having done Schumann a favor, he had involuntarily exposed him as SS-Sturmbannführer Schumann, the notorious Auschwitz physician who had forced “euthanasia” procedures and sterilization on male inmates. It took the Federal Republic until 1966 to have Schumann extradited to Germany, where he was put on trial in 1970. Wirsing stood by dumbfounded; he died in 1975.54 For his part, Schumann was released from prison in 1972 due to his deteriorating health and died in 1983.
Many Nazis from areas of cultural endeavor managed to secure for themselves a safe spot for a fresh beginning. Alfred Baum, for instance, who had been a deputy director during the filming of Jud Süss, advanced to become chief of the new democratic radio station Sender Freies Berlin, while music critic Walter Abendroth, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite who, among other feats, had hailed the 1938 Düsseldorf Reich Music Festival with tributes to Goebbels and Hitler, in 1948 took over the features section of the newly founded weekly Die Zeit.55 Hans Egon Holthusen, an SS and Party member and aspiring writer, succeeded in an even more illustrious career when in 1961 he became director of the New York Goethe House, which was sponsored by the German government, and, later still, a professor of German at Northwestern University in Illinois.56 Holthusen had prepared for such steps in 1949 by castigating, in a book about Thomas Mann, the “stupid devilries” of National Socialism.57 Mere opportunistic word play! For as a soldier in the Wehrmacht, while vanquishing Poland, Holthusen had written: “Gradually the conquered country was revealing its nature. The further we moved from the German border, the deeper sank the population into a kind of pre-civilized condition.”58 This had been his personal justification for the Nazis’ push into Eastern Europe.
Moving into a university seems to have been a comparatively easy strategy for a number of cultured Nazis. Some of them actually originated from there, such as the journalism teacher Emil Dovifat, who had hailed the limitations on freedom of the press introduced by Goebbels starting in the fall of 1933.59 After 1945, the professor helped Adenauer found the CDU in Berlin and took over a chair in journalism at the Free University, which he had also helped to found (along with Meinecke). In order to avoid embarrassing questions, Dovifat had redacted his own textbooks, written during the Nazi period, eliding anything that could compromise him.60 The music writer Joseph Müller-Blattau, however, who had collaborated heavily with the SS “Ahnenerbe” and had held a chair in the core Nazi university of Strassburg, resorted to a different tactic, as he had lines and passages blacked out in his History of German Music, now freshly used in the seminars, as he changed to a professorship in Saarbrücken in 1952. As a leading German musicologist has noted, that History was remarkable not so much for the text that had been rendered illegible as for the passages still left intact.61
In music itself, as is widely known, all the great composers, conductors, singers, and instrumental musicians with the conspicuous exception of Elly Ney overcame their problematic Nazi ties, to be allowed to perform in public again without major interruptions: Furtwängler, Strauss, von Karajan, Knappertsbusch, Gieseking, and Schwarzkopf. In the opinion of denazifying bureaucrats working in the summer of 1945 for the Americans, it was “silly to dismiss a flutist of the Philharmonic orchestra only because he nominally belonged to the Nazi Party, one important reason being the scarcity of musicians overall.”62 What held true in this case for Berlin was a credo all over Germany’s occupied zones: the traditional belief that music as such was more or less apoliticial meshed with the sentiment that this art was paramount in calming and re-educating a misled populace. This fitted well with Meinecke’s 1946 dictum that German music was, after all, a most superior art and ought to be nurtured, rather than penalized. Yes, “great German music” was able to help denazify, claimed Meinecke, not realizing the hubris inherent in that statement.63 Hence even musicians who had deliberately worked for the regime, such as the Hitler Youth composer and prize-winner Bruno Stürmer, soon were in employment again, ironically at the Darmstadt modern-music festival, having most likely lied, as the need arose, to the authorities about prior political affiliations.64
In film, too, as with the press, radio, the universities, and the music scene, the new authorities needed the old experts. After 1945 German film was not seriously invested with a propaganda mandate as it had been under Goebbels, but apart from its time-honored duty to entertain, as in the Third Reich, it was needed for education. This explains why many formerly dedicated Nazi actors, after a relatively brief hiatus dictated by the victors (least urgently in the Soviet zone), were able to resume their career. Even though the Jud Süss film director Veit Harlan, as the most exposed Nazi in the movie industry, had to undergo two trials because of Nazi collaboration, he was ultimately acquitted in both and resumed making pictures. The acquittal proceedings in his case remained the most controversial ones for entertainers caught up in the justice system, and were deemed by critics as nothing less than scandalous.65 Leni Riefenstahl was ruled as merely a Nazi sympathizer after four denazification procedures. In 2002 she was tried in, but then released from, a civil suit because of the Auschwitz fate of Roma Gypsies she had employed in the Nazi portion of her extended feature Tiefland, released only in 1954 and to moderate acclaim.66
As the occupation authorities attempted to size up the National Socialist proclivities of actors and directors, as well as the Nazi qualities of the films themselves, they made many omissions and errors of judgment, because of their inability to read the subtle propaganda subtexts Goebbels and his film advisors had embedded in seemingly innocuous narratives. Formerly Nazi-committed actors and directors intentionally encouraged overall obfuscation or engaged in self-invention: the actress Lil Dagover grandly declared she had never voted for Hitler; Wolfgang Liebeneiner quickly offered to direct the filming of the vacuous Trapp family saga that included their escape from the Nazis; Heinz Rühmann and Gustav Fröhlich had divorced their Jewish wives for their own advancement and their current opportunist drive toward a stage comeback was abetted shortly after the war by new film directors.67 Hence, although several films were banned, such as Der Herrscher, Die grosse Liebe, and of course Party movies like SA-Mann Brand, those starring Rühmann were still shown, including Die Feuerzangenbowle (The Punch Bowl), a 1944 masterpiece of the escapism-to-steel-yourself genre in the manner of Baron Münchhausen. Like Münchhausen, the film was widely shown again starting in the late 1940s.68 Whereas this was suitable light entertainment, the promised educational value was wanting.
Many early decisions to spurn or not to spurn film actors, actresses, and other personnel after the war were also based on happenstance or lack of judgment, and those decisions often favored the guilty at the expense of the less politically committed. Jenny Jugo, for instance, formerly a close friend of Hitler and Goebbels, was thought too popular by the American authorities to be removed from the silver screen, whereas the relatively innocent Ilse Werner, who had starred in the, now banned, Wunschkonzert movie, was immediately ostracized by the film industry.69 Later, when her ban was lifted, her attractiveness as a young actress had been superseded by the public’s fascination with newer faces – Sonja Ziemann, Hildegard Knef (teenage mistress of the last Nazi film-imperium director and SS officer Ewald von Demandowsky), or Swiss actress Liselotte Pulver with her tomboy innocence.70 Somehow Margot Hielscher pulled through, but right after her Zero Hour she had cleverly allied herself with Gene Hammer, a big-band leader from Texas who played for the American troops; she became his girlfriend and lead singer. Part of a larger re-education effort through culture, Hammer and Hielscher were helping OMGUS to re-animate American jazz in Germany by performing in concerts and nightclub acts, to which young Germans were invited.71 Other known Nazis, such as the enigmatic Sybille Schmitz, first were banned and then had trouble being offered roles; in her case, in 1955 an alcohol problem and dependence on heavy drugs led to Schmitz’s suicide, at the age of forty-five.72
Seldom, therefore, were members of the film industry prosecuted for Nazi transgressions and punished accordingly. One was Marianne Simson, the Moon Woman in the Münchhausen film, a ranking Hitler Youth leader and reputedly one of Goebbels’s favorite concubines. In 1944 she had tried to seduce a Wehrmacht officer who had confided to her his closeness to the circle of Count von Stauffenberg, Hitler’s would-be assassin. Upon being rejected, she denounced him to the Gestapo, and he almost paid with his life. In 1945, aged twenty-four, she was arrested by the Soviet authorities and imprisoned. After her release in 1952, Simson was offered smaller roles in theaters in the southwest of Germany, keeping a low profile until she died, unremembered, in 1992.73
CONJURED VICTIMHOOD
During his trials and in his autobiography, Veit Harlan insisted that Goebbels had forced him to make the Jud Süss film and that he had finally consented under pressure, in order to forestall the worst that might happen. In fact, he claimed to have changed many of the film’s scenes from being highly injurious to Jews to less offensive footage. This, Harlan implied, had ultimately made him into a sort of resister from within, certainly someone who had wrought more good than had he succeeded in avoiding Goebbels’s mandate (in other words, had the film been made by a less sympathetic director). The opposite was true: Harlan was lying on all counts, twisting the facts, for rather than mitigating them, he had wilfully accentuated the anti-Jewish themes.74
To have remained in the system in order to prevent the worst was the first line of defense for many former Nazis, also in the cultural arena. To have stayed on as an inwardly detached person, as an “inner emigrant” awaiting calmer times, was the second best excuse, but still a favorite tool of self-exculpation. As already mentioned, both arguments were used against Thomas Mann and many of his lesser refugee peers, by German cultural players who, while not murderers in the SS mold, after 1945 had a lot of explaining to do. An extreme variant of the hold-out position would have been to style oneself as a victim of the Nazi regime, when in fact indifference, complicity, or co-conspiracy had been in play.
Let us consider that particular argument in some detail: The victim defense reflected an attitude held by Germans who felt they were wronged during Nazi rule, particularly the war period when, so they said, they had suffered primarily at the hands of Allied bombing raids. Indeed, “terror fliers” during the last months of the war, meaning those Allied pilots who had escaped from their stricken bombers by parachuting onto German soil, had been at the mercy of Volksgenossen ready to lynch them instantly on the ground. As Theodor Adorno remarked early on, the bombardment of Dresden or Hamburg was a useful alibi for German apologists to discount the crimes of Auschwitz in an overall reckoning.75 Next as culprits came the Red Army, whose members had driven Germans from the eastern parts of the Reich, raped up to two million women and girls, and killed thousands of civilians. Third only came the Nazis themselves, whose propaganda had not succeeded in calming the population, which had suffered from the loss of relatives, shortages of consumer goods, cramped quarters, and an overall disturbance of peace and quiet. After 1945 Germans not only found themselves bombed out, but facing the shame of unconditional surrender, dissolution of their armed forces, and embarrassing “denazification.”76 Those who suffered allegedly also included Germans who had come to realize the evil nature of the regime and now blamed its leaders as the true culprits and saw themselves as victims of a grand betrayal.77 This was the tenor of the treatise by Meinecke (an anti-Semite early in his career), as he set a strong Zero Hour and viewed “the German catastrophe” as the deplorable result of a perverted governance that was an accident, having had nothing to do with the continuity of, otherwise wholesome, German history.78 With his apologist’s stance, in substance much like Thomas Mann’s beliefs before 1943, Meinecke signaled a demonizing approach to the most recent past, defining the present as morally unsullied, if forcibly skewed and subdued. This attitude was to merge later with a larger German self-consciousness as a people who had extinguished their collective memory of what really happened, which resulted in an eventual “inability to mourn,” mourn their participation in recent history that is, as Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich described it in some detail in 1967.79
Not least because of such intellectual backing as Meinecke’s, a new martyrological subculture had developed already in the late 1940s, pervading society well into the 1960s, with the writing of books and newspaper articles and the making of films, some of the visual arts and certain contributions to broadcasting, for example in radio plays. Film was an early medium to succumb to this wave. The new genre of “rubble film” strove to show Germans in their involvement with – or, more often, detachment from – the Nazi phenomenon as seen from a contemporaneous perspective, one in which the geographic depictions were fields and streets buried under ruins, amid which surviving Germans attempted new beginnings. Those images were accompanied by self-pitying reflections on the recent past – who had done what, and perhaps why. But if someone responsible was found it was either a dead Nazi like Hitler or a person outside one’s private circle who had yet to be called to account. Moreover, in a phase when Nazi leaders were being put on trial in Nuremberg and one could point to them as guilty, such films did not identify their creators as those responsible, nor the Germans as a whole as viewers; rather, these films exculpated them. This, for instance, was the tone of the first movie of this kind (and the first German movie after capitulation in May 1945), written and directed by Wolfgang Staudte, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us). Staudte, born in 1906, had participated in the making of Jud Süss, Pour le Mérite, and the Hitler Youth film Jungens, and obviously used this new approach self-servingly, to legitimize himself in the eyes of the Allied victors.80 His film was made during 1946 in Babelsberg by the newly Soviet-licensed DEFA company, in which a Wehrmacht returnee (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert, born 1907, and a former SA trooper) observes his one-time commanding officer, whom he had witnessed ordering civilians to be shot, from his own moral high ground. In rare scenes reminiscent of the Expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari this former surgeon restarts life in the ruins with a returned concentration-camp inmate (an unbelievably well-preserved twenty-one-year-old Hildegard Knef as obviously not a political ex-prisoner, judging by her utterings). He is trying to come to grips with his former life and the putative guilt of his superior, who is made to look exactly like Himmler, now a struggling small businessman converting old steel helmets into cooking pots. The doctor accuses this man of war crimes he had obviously committed but neglects to search for fault in himself as a compliant member of the very Wehrmacht execution squad in question, nor does he scrutinize Nazi society or politics in general. The ending projects private bliss for the new-found lovers as the businessman keeps screaming “I am innocent!”81 Subsequent rubble films, in which the inhabitants especially of the three Western occupation zones recognized themselves as victims, helped reinforce Meinecke’s interpretation of the Third Reich as a diabolic concert of criminals one could easily distance oneself from, in order to continue with an agenda of healthy harmony. In time, however, viewing people who persevered among the rubble against all odds constituted so dire a scenario that the German public, aspiring pioneers of an economic miracle, tired of these films around 1950. Thereafter they favored, instead, along with a rerun of Ufa period movies such as Der Kongress tanzt (The Congress Dances, 1931), another novel genre, the “Heimat” (homeland) films. Those concentrated on harmony and bliss: the German heath, forests, and mountain pastures, savvy fox hunters or veterinarians in lederhosen, Tyrolean jackets, and fedoras, who sing Volkslieder accompanied by accordions, with innocently pretty girls in braids and dirndls deserving to be chastely wooed and married. Both genres represented escapism of the highest order tailored for their times. The “Heimat” films were thematically related to the Nazi “Blut und Boden” rural-happiness movies of a mere decade earlier; they were even further removed from a genuine moral stock-taking than the rubble films had been, but they guaranteed meat-and-potatoes comfort and a quiet conscience in which to enjoy Hitler’s Volkswagens, which were finally for sale.82
A collective sense of responsibility, let alone guilt, about what had been conjured by Germans between 1933 and 1945 was missing in other sectors of the arts as well. Starting with the preservation of cultural artifacts in the universities, many art and music professors complained after the end of the war: the prehistorian Herbert Jankuhn, already in a new professorship at Göttingen University as of 1956, styled himself as a sacrificial servant of Himmler’s pro-Germanic science and complained about the Americans, who had beaten him close to deafness in the Langwasser internment camp.83 Mistreatment in Allied internment camps was also a grievance of the former Thingspiel author Richard Euringer, who had to endure a writing ban until 1946 but then dedicated himself to the reworking of his older prose.84 The sculptor Arno Breker, who continued to earn big money after 1945, claimed that he had lived in a ghetto during the Nazi period and that he had helped the persecuted, but he also thought he was wrongly ostracized from West German society because of his active engagement with the new radical right.85
In painting, an exorbitant scam was perpetrated around Emil Nolde. Because of the supervision he had had to endure during the last years of Nazi rule, he was able, with the help of several prominent assistants, to reinvent himself as the Nazi victim extraordinaire. He was allowed dedicated exhibitions that emphasized his role as a victim, one in 1950 having been urged by Theodor Heuss of the FDP, the former contributor to Das Reich, who as a member of the Deutsche Staatspartei had voted for Hitler’s Enabling Law in the March 23, 1933, Reichstag, and now was the President of the Federal Republic. It was Heuss, too, who upon reintroducing the Pour le Mérite as the new republic’s highest honor, made sure that Nolde was among its first recipients. Before his death in 1956 the painter re-edited his 1934 memoirs, cleansing them of all xenophobic, in particular anti-Semitic, content.86 Publications by sympathizers featured Nolde’s, admittedly striking, paintings (including some he had done in his hermit phase); they were meant to document his fundamentally anti-fascist character. That he had been too close to the National Socialists was explained in one book as the “political misunderstanding” of a “totally inexperienced and wholly naïve person,” while his anti-French sentiments were denied and charges of anti-Semitism repudiated. In 1968, Siegfried Lenz’s spurious portrait of Nolde, exonerating him completely, was published and turned into a two-part costume drama by ARD television channel 1 in 1971. On the occasion of the book launch Lenz’s friend, the (quarter-Jewish) SPD leader Helmut Schmidt, sent a letter, congratulating him and stating that Nolde’s inclusion in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in July 1937 had caused his own break with National Socialism at the age of seventeen.87 As late as February 1982, Schmidt’s chancellery office in Bonn organized a Nolde exhibition, at whose opening he cemented the legend of the painter as persecuted by the Nazis.88 Even posthumously, Nolde’s stature as a martyr was complete.
THE “INNER EMIGRANTS”
As for the “inner emigrants” who waited out the regime while being critical of it, not proving opportunistic and later possessing the modesty to claim no spoils for victim status – among artists they were rare indeed. Scholars have counted among them Ricarda Huch, who lived mostly in Jena with her husband after her resignation from the Prussian Academy of Arts in early 1933. She continued to publish on historical subjects, making a point of mentioning the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages, which incurred the wrath of the irascible but power-starved Rosenberg, so nothing happened to her.89 The quarter-Jewish theater director Jürgen Fehling, working under Gustaf Gründgens in Berlin, was possibly another “inner emigrant”; signs of non-compliance with the Nazis were there on the one hand, yet also thematic concessions, on the other. He was immediately allowed to direct Goethe’s Urfaust in a small theater in Berlin, in October 1945.90 One poet who kept himself out of sight in the Third Reich was Rudolf Alexander Schröder, potentially a real enemy of the homophobic Nazis because he was homosexual. The composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann did not perform his works in public; he lived secluded with his small family in Munich and Kempfenhausen on Lake Starnberg, supported by wealthy parents-in-law.91
Those artists who claimed “inner emigration” status insisted on never having been associated with National Socialism. “No one had ever been a Nazi,” observed Peter Viertel, Salka’s son, caustically, while monitoring public opinion in the American zone of occupation for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1945.92 This group would include the East Prussian poet Agnes Miegel, who said she had been “apolitical,” after having joined the Party in 1940 and having published poetry ardently in favor of the Führer.93 It also included Sepp Hilz, that most beloved of Hitler’s painters who had created Weather Witch and Peasant Venus, had enchanted the highest Party cadres with his work and became very rich doing it. Hilz passed the denazification process easily after having declared he never made “political paintings” (which was, technically, correct) and having stressed his work for the Catholic Church, which he did, unbeknownst to anyone, down south in rural Bavaria.94
Today Gerhart Hauptmann may be said to have been the prototype of the “unpolitical” German claiming to have endured dictatorship in spiritual isolation, and trying to profit from it. Hauptmann had come to fame as one of the pioneers of Naturalism who late in the Wilhelmine Empire spoke up for the dispossessed, especially with his play Die Weber (1892).95 Having received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1912, Hauptmann fitted well into the democracy of the Weimar Republic. Come 1933, however, he fully supported the new regime, most certainly driven by fear, like Thomas Mann, of losing his immense income from books sold in Germany. Declaring himself for Hitler early on, Hauptmann hailed the Reich’s exit from the League of Nations in October. Days later he participated in the opening ceremonies of Goebbels’s Reich Culture Chamber along with Furtwängler and other artists, and he publicly backed the Anschluss in 1938. Hitler’s victory over France in 1940 found him ecstatic. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union a year later, Hauptmann sent a “Greeting to the Front,” broadcast by Radio Breslau. Officially the playwright, who, like Strauss, had a Jewish daughter-in-law, was silent on the persecution of the Jews, but in private he ranted against them, especially his one-time friend, the critic Alfred Kerr (who had fled to London). Once confronted with the German Jews’ suffering, Hauptmann was contemptuous of “a few Eastern Jews,” labeling them “not so important,” and he denounced Jewish emigrants to the United States who would pretend to represent German culture.96
The Nazis themselves were divided over Hauptmann’s significance for the New Order. Not surprisingly, Rosenberg hated this former pacifist and champion of the Naturalist school, a forerunner of Modernism in Germany, as alien to what was to become a new culture and discouraged the staging of his plays. But Rosenberg’s powers being confined, Hitler had himself encouraged the premiere of a new Hauptmann play, Die goldene Harfe (The Golden Harp), in Munich, in the fall of 1933.97 Besides, Intendanten such as Friedrich Bethge in Frankfurt believed that Hauptmann had already changed his style, adapting it to the new requirements of drama.98 As far as Goebbels was concerned, he agreed with Rosenberg that Hauptmann’s official profile would have to remain low, respecting the writer’s own reservations. Of course he was conscious of Hauptmann’s international market value, just as he was of Strauss’s and would have been of Thomas Mann’s. Goebbels therefore had made no moves to prevent the performance of some of Hauptmann’s dramas particularly after 1939, when it had become obvious that the Nazis’ own young dramatists were not delivering. In June 1942, after a private dinner at the minister’s home, Goebbels voiced his appreciation of Hauptmann’s ongoing enthusiasm over the progress of the war and expressed confidence in his own ability “to win him fully over to the National Socialist regime.”99 Like Strauss and Pfitzner, Hauptmann hobnobbed with Governor General Hans Frank, the slaughterer of Poland, a person “with deep human dispositions,” whom he thought to be “an educated man, anxious to improve his extensive knowledge.” He also liked Baldur von Schirach, who invited him to Vienna for festivities on the occasion of Hauptmann’s eightieth birthday in November 1942, after he had collaborated with Goebbels in putting on more official festivities in Breslau. On that occasion, Hitler had sent a vase, with Hauptmann reciprocating by calling the Führer “the one sent by the stars to realize the destiny of Germany.”100 This was less than three months before the Wehrmacht surrendered at Stalingrad.
After the Soviets had overrun Hauptmann’s village of Agnetendorf in Silesia, they embraced the Nobel laureate who had suddenly found his way back to his socialist-liberal roots, sufficiently so for the Communists to claim him as one of their own. Hauptmann emphasized his apolitical and former pacifist nature to the new masters, as he had already done in the presence of the writer Erich Ebermayer in February 1934, when he had said, after being questioned: “I am no politician. Neither am I a political poet,” and had continued, “I am a poet. Just a poet. And beyond that I am a German.”101 When, in 1967, East German literary critics found themselves in a bind, trying to explain why their culture maven Johannes R. Becher had wooed Hauptmann right after the war, they echoed the playwright’s own refrain of “inner emigration,” namely that he had lived “withdrawn during the Nazi era.”102
Finally, there were those artists who had maintained a comfortable lifestyle within the Third Reich and now, after May 1945, claimed to have resisted it all along. One leading artist was the composer Werner Egk, the functionary from the RMK who now contended that his position had enabled him to protect his (supposedly anti-Nazi) colleagues by preventing adverse legislation and thus doing good instead. During his denazification tribunal in 1946–7 he fabricated a story of having tried to sabotage the Nazis toward the end of the regime. He made much noise about having opposed them as part of a clandestine cell at the Berlin Staatsoper and running courier services to a group in Paris, transmitting details about concentration camps and “crimes against humanity.”103 There was in fact no such cell at the opera nor did that group exist. Nor, as claimed before the tribunal, had there been an attempt by Egk in the spring of 1945 to notify the advancing American troops of local Nazis in the Munich suburb where he was then living.104 On the contrary, once, at a crucial time, Hartmann had asked Egk to take some mail to his brother in Switzerland, a former card-carrying Communist, but Egk had refused. Egk wanted Hartmann to appear as a material witness at his tribunal, but Hartmann in good conscience could not help him, merely consenting to act as a character witness in writing, but never appearing in court in person.105
Although Egk’s one-time teacher Carl Orff had no official appointment under the Third Reich, after the war he also alleged his opposition to the Nazi regime by having, along with the Munich psychology professor Kurt Huber, “founded some kind of a youth group.” The group Orff was referring to in an interview with the OMGUS interrogation officer Newell Jenkins in early 1946 was the White Rose of 1942–3, an anti-Nazi resistance group that Huber had established together with Hans and Sophie Scholl and other students from Munich University. (Huber and the Scholls, along with their co-conspirators, were murdered by the Nazis.) Orff had told Jenkins that story because he wanted the chance to enter public service in the budding democracy of the American zone; for that to happen he had to be removed from a blacklist. As it turned out, Orff then decided against serving in public office (as Württemberg theater intendant in Stuttgart). Having been cleared politically, his new opera, Die Bernauerin, was allowed to be premiered in Stuttgart on June 15, 1947.106
Both Egk and Orff integrated themselves well into the West German cultural establishment. Orff enjoyed his customary position as a pre-eminent composer and Egk filled an important professorial post at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, after the denazification tribunal had accepted his stories of alleged resistance.107 The unbelievable naïveté of the Americans evident in so many of these rehabilitation cases was matched by British and French ignorance or nonchalance and complemented, in the Soviet sector, by shrewd calculation regarding the immediate value of potential Nazi turncoats. In the American zone, the victors’ attitude, combined with German tolerance, also led to leniency for Hans Knappertsbusch, who overcame the initial charges that he had been a Nazi collaborator. There is evidence that he had had a hand in the dismissal of Jewish conductor Bruno Walter as Munich Generaldirektor in 1922; the fiercely anti-Semitic maverick conductor then occupied that position himself. Throughout the 1920s in Munich his rabid hatred of Jews revealed itself further, as the music director, a brilliant Wagner interpreter, aligned himself more closely with the rising National Socialists, although he never joined the Party. In early 1933 it was Knappertsbusch who was instrumental behind the conspiracy to oust Thomas Mann from the Bavarian capital. Then, to the extent that Hitler came to favor Clemens Krauss as chief conductor of the Munich Opera, Knappertsbusch’s position was endangered, and, Hitler never having liked him for musical reasons, had his contract terminated in 1936. But the maestro was allowed to relocate to Vienna and continued to guest-conduct all over the Reich thereafter, including, after the outbreak of World War II, in occupied territories and for Hitler’s birthday.108
Although there remained doubts around Knappertsbusch, in the summer of 1945 OMGUS appointed him once again to the position of Munich Generaldirektor, in the belief that he was currently the cleanest of all the high-ranking German conductors. Using his 1936 dismissal from Munich and counting on his former vast popularity with the Munich audience, Knappertsbusch had portrayed himself as ideally suitable. But realizing their embarrassing mistakes later in 1945, the Americans dismissed him again. In 1947, Knappertsbusch aired his opinion that he had been unjustly treated, adding “we were, everyone in his own fashion, resistance fighters, who through some miracle never got caught.” And so in 1948 a German court reversed the OMGUS ruling and reinstated Knappertsbusch in Munich. While there, he eventually received the enhanced Order of Merit with a star from the Federal Republic, after having served as the first post-war conductor at the Bayreuth Festival, in 1951.109
There are egregious examples of artists, writers, and intellectuals who played a dual role, attempting to navigate the Third Reich in the safest and most comfortable way, all clamoring for resistance status after the war and claiming to have salvaged a part of the common good. In reality, they were cynically trying to ensure the best of two opposing worlds for themselves: one, in which Hitler would be victorious and they could profit from what they would procure for the Nazis; the other, in which the Allies would triumph, where they would have something to show proving they had been opposed to the Nazis.
One of those who burned their candles at both ends was the film scriptwriter Erich Ebermayer, who found himself threatened at the start of the regime because, like Gründgens whom he knew well, he was homosexual. But from the outset of the new Reich, Ebermayer was aware that he held two trump cards, and the fact that he played them seriously exposed him as a man prone to graft and corruption: both Philipp Bouhler, the Nazi functionary, who organized the “euthanasia” program, and Fritz Todt, the engineer who built the autobahns, were his cousins, the last-mentioned by marriage. Throughout his (allegedly secret) diaries, written between 1933 and the beginning of the war, Ebermayer made no apologies for the way in which he attempted to square the circle by falling in with stalwarts of the Nazi system while honing pre-regime contacts with Jews or democrats, such as Klaus and Thomas Mann, and preserving his homosexual lifestyle.110 The upshot of this was that he was allowed, increasingly, to enter the lucrative world of film scripting at Berlin-Babelsberg, carefully avoiding the most overtly political assignments. In an extraordinary show of advertising his formula to Thomas Mann, he traveled to Küsnacht in late February 1936 for a meeting with the novelist, over lunch and coffee. Mann judged that his guest was “an insignificant drip, who is just bedazzled over the success of his Traumulus film with Goebbels and Hitler.”111 That movie, just released in Germany and creating a major trajectory for Ebermayer’s future success, was one of the reasons why the scriptwriter continued in the good offices of the Nazis, because, as he said cynically, if he had not been able to write the script, some Party hack would have done it. To calm his conscience after having been admonished by Mann, Ebermayer chronicled: “The problem of inner emigration! . . . What would I have subsisted on after having emigrated? Is there not already enough emigrants’ misery in the world? But above all, do not Germans like us, whom Thomas Mann recognizes as ‘decent,’ those of us who have remained, do they not face an important task: to help the true, the real Germany through the filth of these times, into a new future? Is it nothing to stay in Fortress Germany, in order to undermine it from within, to weaken the power of evil wherever we can and throughout this to remain true to ourselves, in spite of daily danger to body and soul?”112 This was, of course, the classic argument Mann would have to face some ten years later, from writers like Frank Thiess and Walter von Molo, who as opponents of the regime were just as dubious as Ebermayer. Taking this position always allowed them, as it allowed him, to partake of the sweet fruits of accommodation to a fascist Germany, fruits like, as in Ebermayer’s case, enjoying the sight of, and intimately befriending, attractive Hitler Youths, and benefiting from Goebbels’s 1936 edict prohibiting cultural (film) criticism.113 Ebermayer, having preserved what was most dear to him, wrote many a film script after 1945. A lawyer by training, he also defended Emmy Göring and Winifred Wagner in denazification tribunals.114
This excuse of claiming to do good from within the system was used many times over by artists after 1945 to retroactively justify their immoral existence, whatever the degree. Like Orff, Werner Bergengruen claimed to have assisted the White Rose resistance group in Munich by helping to distribute their illicit flyers, though there is not a shred of evidence he did so.115 The journalist Karl Korn guaranteed a soft landing for himself by participating in the founding of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1949 and becoming its features editor well into the 1970s. Back in 1940 he had written against Jews obsessed with “Talmudic nihilism” and had enthused over the film Jud Süss because it had shown that now “the Jewish problem in Germany has been mentally solved.”116 Then, in Der Spiegel in 1960, Korn reinterpreted the term “Talmudic nihilism” as an act of resistance, because it had connoted “covert” language warning fellow Germans how Jews were being ill-treated. He was referring to the literary style of inferring between the lines deployed in the novella Auf den Marmorklippen by his paragon, the “anti-nihilist” Ernst Jünger, as Korn later explained in an encomium.117
“Slave language” (a phrase originally attributed to Jünger) was also supposed to have been employed by the journalist Hubert Neun when reporting on Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. Only such language would reveal, in hidden form, the exceedingly deplorable aspects of their living conditions there, he betrayed to Der Spiegel twenty-three years later. There was no other means of alerting the public, and his method had been an act of opposition.118 But what exactly did Neun write in Das Reich in March 1941? He justified the removal of the Jews from “other city dwellers” of the Polish capital, and their subsequent isolation. This had calmed civilian life in Warsaw, as the “enormously repulsive multitude of every Jewish type of the East” had now been seen through.119 After 1945, Neun assisted Elisabeth Noelle at the Allensbach Institute and in 1961 became a Bundestag deputy for the CDU.120
The list goes on. The Nazi poet Gerhard Schumann, Nazi theater director Gustaf Gründgens, and, of course, Nazi Wehrmacht captain Ernst Jünger, employing various subterfuges, asserted after the war that they had resisted the regime.121 Like Meinecke and Bergengruen, who transfigured the Third Reich into a “Satanocracy,” thereby abstracting it from the regular stream of German history and absolving its subjects of guilt, the author Hans Carossa demonized the regime as something atypically German and explained his role in it as that of an intrepid regulator, which was why he had assumed the leadership of Goebbels’s international writers’ union.122 Besides, some things about Hitler had been salutary, Carossa argued, for example the execution of the Holocaust. “He had millions of Jews, adults and children killed, and thus effected that all good people on this earth turned to Jewry with boundless compassion. Without his rampage there would, perhaps, not be a state of Israel today.” After all, Hitler had been unjustly treated by the Jews, because of insults hurled by Jews abroad – no wonder German Jews had to suffer the consequences.123 Here not the murderer but the victim was to blame.
Today, given the complex wartime circumstances, it is difficult to sketch the outlines of the ideal, the artists who would have maintained their artistic integrity in the Third Reich, refused to collaborate with the regime, engaged in acts of resistance, and not have felt like a casualty after World War II.124 Perhaps, cynically, one can say that this role could have potentially been filled by Käthe Dorsch. Born in 1890, a one-time fiancée of Göring in 1917, she remained a well-liked actress in Germany even after 1945. It is documented that after 1933 she helped many artists who became targets of one regime leader or another. This was made possible due to her enduring proximity to the Reichsmarschall, who found it difficult to deny her interventions. She acted in several films under Goebbels, none of which were outright propaganda films, with perhaps the exception of one costume drama, Trenck, der Pandur (1940), in which she portrayed the Austrian empress Maria Theresa and soldiering and war were glorified. (It was banned in West Germany until 1953.) But because almost all the films made in this period helped oil the Nazi machinery of governance, one cannot dismiss Dorsch’s film cameos as harmless. Well in tune with the times’ right-wing trends, she remained close to Göring after her love affair of 1917, a man known as an authoritarian and anti-Semite. She remained on social terms with both Goebbels and Hitler, was appointed an actress extraordinaire in 1939 and given an honorific place on the list of exemptions from military and home-front service in 1944, as she continued looking up to these men and their politics.125 Still, the aid she rendered has to be acknowledged.
Perhaps the conundrum may be solved by contemplating two opposing statements on the matter, by persons who considered themselves artists, intellectuals, persecuted by the Nazi tyrants. The first is by the poet and essayist Gottfried Benn, who after 1935 had thought he could find succor by joining the Wehrmacht. In 1950, attempting to justify his earlier position, he wrote disingenuously: “I maintain that many of those who stayed on and continued in their posts did so because they were hoping to preserve their spots for those who had left, in order to pass them on once they had returned.”126 Five years earlier, the Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner, who had had to emigrate to Holland, then to Sweden from Berlin in 1938 because she was Jewish, wrote to her long-time associate Otto Hahn, who had remained in the Reich to keep working on the atomic bomb and ended up with his colleagues in the British Farm Hall detention center in Godmanchester, near Cambridge, in the spring of 1945: “All of you have worked for Nazi Germany and never even tried some passive resistance. Certainly, to assuage your conscience, here and there you helped some person in need of assistance but you allowed the murder of millions of innocent people, and no protest was ever heard.” This, a more valid and honest judgment than Benn’s, could have applied equally to every writer and musician, every painter and actor, every journalist and filmmaker, who, after January 1933, opted to stay in Nazi Germany.127