Audiences of Nazism: Using Media in the Third Reich 9781805391005

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Audiences of Nazism

New German Historical Perspectives Series Editor: Paul Betts (Executive Editor), St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford Established in 1987, this special St. Antony’s series showcases pioneering new work by leading German historians on a range of topics concerning the history of modern Germany, Europe, and the wider world. Publications address pressing problems of political, economic, social, and intellectual history informed by contemporary debates about German and European identity, providing fresh conceptual, international, and transnational interpretations of the recent past.

Recent volumes: Volume 13

Volume 6

Audiences of Nazism: Using Media in the Third Reich

Anti-Liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization

Edited by Ulrike Weckel

Edited by Dieter Gosewinkel

Volume 12

Volume 5

Sites of Modernity—Places of Risk: Risk and Security in Germany since the 1970s

A Revolution of Perception? Consequences and Echoes of 1968

Edited by Martin H. Geyer

Edited by Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey

Volume 11

Volume 4

The Force of Comparison: A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World

Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices

Edited by Willibald Steinmetz

Edited by Sylvia Paletschek

Volume 10

Volume 3

Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches

Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective

Edited by Rebekka Habermas

Edited by Jürgen Kocka

Volume 9

Volume 2

Humanitarianism and Media, 1900 to the Present

Crises in European Integration: Challenges and Responses

Edited by Johannes Paulmann

Edited by Ludger Kühnhardt

Volume 8

Volume 1

Space and Spatiality in Modern GermanJewish History

Historical Concepts between Eastern and Western Europe

Edited by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup

Edited by Manfred Hildermeier

Volume 7

Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History Edited by Lutz Raphael For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/new-german-historical-perspetives

Audiences of Nazism Using Media in the Third Reich

Edited by Ulrike Weckel

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2024 Ulrike Weckel All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weckel, Ulrike, 1961– editor. Title: Audiences of Nazism : using media in the Third Reich / Ulrike Weckel. Other titles: Using media in the Third Reich Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: New German historical perspectives; vol 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023017761 (print) | LCCN 2023017762 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390992 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805391005 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nazi propaganda—Germany. | Mass media and propaganda— Germany—History—20th century. | Propaganda, German. | World War, 1939–1945—Germany—Propaganda. | Public opinion—Germany— History—20th century. Classification: LCC D810.P7 G3147 2023 (print) | LCC D810.P7 (ebook) | DDC 940.5488743—dc23/eng/20230422 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017761 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017762 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-099-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-372-6 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-100-5 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390992

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction. Media and Their Users in Nazi Germany Ulrike Weckel

1

1. “To Constantly Swim against the Tide Is Suicide”: The Liberal Press and Its Audience, 1928–33 Jochen Hung

48

2. Active Audiences: Stürmerkästen and the Rise of Der Stürmer’s Activist Readership Hannah Ahlheim

61

3. Reading Fake News: The “Röhm Putsch,” the Hitler Myth, and the Consumption of Political News under the Nazis Janosch Steuwer

84

4. Beyond Approved Reactions: Assessments of the NSDAP’s Nuremberg Party Rallies in Diaries and Letters, 1933–38 Annina Hofferberth

104

5. Call and Response: The Creation of the National Socialist Public Peter Fritzsche

121

6. Advertising and Its Audiences in Weimar and Nazi Germany Pamela E. Swett

136

7. Concert Programs, Ideology, and the Search for Subjectivity in National Socialist Germany Neil Gregor

154

vi

8. The “Entartete Kunst” Exhibitions and Their Audiences Bernhard Fulda 9. Amateur Films from National Socialist Austria as Visual Responses to Nazi Propaganda Michaela Scharf

Contents

177

196

10. The Media of Occupation: German Books and Photographs in France, 1940–44 Julia S. Torrie

219

11. The Migration of Topoi from Atrocity Films to Their Heirs: Modes of Addressing the Audience in German Postwar Cinema Bernhard Gross

240

12. Finding an Unintended Audience: An SS Photo Album and Its Postwar Editions Ulrike Koppermann

262

Postscript Jane Caplan

283

Index

286

Figures

2.1. “A wonderful place” in Hessisch-Lichtenau © Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Amb. 903.2°. Der Stürmer 13, no. 24 (1935). Used with permission.

64

2.2. United with Der Stürmer in Arzheim © Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Amb. 903.2°. Der Stürmer 13, no. 4 (1935). Used with permission.

66

2.3. A growing community of readers: Stürmerkasten in Ochsenhausen © Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Amb. 903.2°. Der Stürmer 13, no. 34 (1935). Used with permission.

67

2.4 and 2.5. The Stürmerkasten at the post office building in Konstanz without and with the activists © BArch. Used with permission.

70

2.6. Sketch of the Stürmerkasten in Bad Polzin by Alexander Gerber © CAHJP, HM2/8791, fol. 1940. Used with permission.

75

2.7. Photograph of Gerber’s shop, the handwritten marks indicating the position of the Stürmerkasten © CAHJP, HM2/8791, fol. 1941. Used with permission.

76

7.1. The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra performing in the Gewandhaus Leipzig concert hall (January 1940). Stadtarchiv München, Historisches Bildarchiv, Münchener Philharmoniker 3, KR 367–68 / II 8. Reproduced with permission of the Stadtarchiv München.

155

7.2. Program for the 40th Popular Concert of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, 25 January 1931. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Winter 1930–31. 40. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

160

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Figures

7.3. Program for the 23rd Popular Concert of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, 12 February 1933. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Winter 1932–33. 23. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

162

7.4. Program for the 12th Popular Concert of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, 26 November 1933. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Winter 1933–34. 12. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

163

7.5. Program for the 5th Popular Concert of the Philharmonic State Orchestra of Hamburg, 11 February 1934. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonisches Staatsorchester. Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

165

8.1. Daily visitor numbers at Degenerate Art exhibitions, 1937–39. Created by the author.

179

8.2. Daily visitor numbers—diachronic comparison. Created by the author.

181

9.1. Still from Urlaub 1938. Maria posing next to the Hohenbergers’ car. Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH).

202

9.2. Still from Urlaub 1938. The almost empty lanes of the Reichsautobahn. LBIDH.

203

9.3. Still from Urlaub 1938. The view through the windshield. LBIDH.

203

9.4. Still from Urlaub 1938. The Reichsautobahn as an ensemble of lines. LBIDH.

204

9.5. Still from Urlaub 1938. The Mangfall Bridge in Upper Bavaria. LBIDH.

205

9.6. Still from Urlaub 1938. The Mangfall Bridge’s massive piers. LBIDH.

205

9.7. Still from Städtefahrt. View of the Bavarian Alps. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum.

207

9.8. Still from Städtefahrt. View of the Chiemsee. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum.

208

Figures

9.9. Still from Städtefahrt. The Reichsautobahn rising up the Irschenberg. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum.

ix

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9.10. Stamp showing the Reichsautobahn at the Irschenberg. Private archive of the author. Photographed by Anna-Lena Neese.

209

9.11. Still from Städtefahrt. Mrs. Apfelthaler poses with the Mercedes. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum.

210

10.1. Cover of a commemorative book of images by Hitler’s official photographer. Heinrich Hoffmann, Mit Hitler im Westen (Munich: Zeitgeschichte Verlag, 1940).

228

10.2. Soldiers standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Photograph in an anonymous album, “Ehren-Chronik,” courtesy of the DeutschRussisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, album number KH 206542. 229 10.3. “Fishermen on the Seine” (“Angler an der Seine”). Photograph by Air Communications Auxiliary Zwanowetz, in H. Lorenz, ed., Soldaten fotografieren Frankreich, ein Bilderbuch mit Erzählungen (Paris: Wegleiter Verlag, 1943), 28.

231

10.4. “Troops and Stairs” (“Truppen und Treppen”). Photograph by Lance Corporal (Gefreiter) O. Lewe, in Lorenz, Soldaten fotografieren Frankreich, 47.

232

11.1. Die Todesmühlen (D/USA 1945). Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration.

243

11.2. Wege im Zwielicht (D 1948). Accessed at Schorcht International Filmproduktion.

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11.3. DEFA-Wochenschau Der Augenzeuge, Nr. 32/2 (D 1946). Accessed at DEFA-Stiftung.

251

11.4. Die Brücke (D 1949). Accessed at DEFA-Stiftung.

251

11.5. Menschen in Gottes Hand (D 1948). Accessed at Schorcht International Filmproduktion.

252

11.6. Lang ist der Weg (D 1948). Courtesy of the National Center of Jewish Film.

254

11.7. Menschen in Gottes Hand (D 1948). Accessed at Schorcht International Filmproduktion.

254

11.8 and 11.9. Phoenix (D 2014). Accessed at Schramm Film, Florian Koerner von Gustorf.

256

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12.1. Cover: Serge Klarsfeld, ed., The Auschwitz Album: Lili Jacob’s Album (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1980). © Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. Used with permission. 12.2. Cover: P. Hellman, ed., The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based on an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor (New York: Random House, 1981). The damage is unintended and due to wearing. © Random House. Used with permission. 12.3. Cover: H.-J. Hahn, ed., Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz. Lili Meiers Album (Berlin: Arsenal, 1995). © Arsenal Verlag. Used with permission. 12.4. Cover: I. Gutman and B. Gutterman, eds., Das Auschwitz Album. Die Geschichte eines Transports (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). © Wallstein Verlag. Used with permission.

Figures

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264 265 265

Acknowledgments

This volume grew out of the Richard von Weizsäcker Visiting Fellowship that I had the privilege and great pleasure to hold at St Antony’s College, Oxford, during the academic year 2017–18. I am indebted to the Volkswagenstiftung, which generously finances this remarkable fellowship. It gives scholars in Germany a break from the too many obligations at their home universities and allows them to develop new ideas in Oxford’s peculiar academic culture and inspiring intellectual community. Even the duties that come with the Weizsäcker Fellowship are delightful. Fellows introduce their current work in a public lecture, organize an international conference, and publish some of its results in a volume in this series. Alas, my fulfillment of this last duty took me quite a while, and I cannot put all the blame on the COVID-19 pandemic. The European Studies Centre at St Antony’s cordially welcomed me and provided excellent working conditions. I thank Paul Betts for having been such a kind host. I am also grateful to Dorian Singh and Adis Merdzanovic for arranging our pleasant breaks from work, taking care that I did not have to eat alone, and introducing me to Oxford’s most charming places. And I express my appreciation to the many colleagues who invited me to their colleges or their homes. My warmest thanks go to Jane Caplan and Susan Loppert for the wonderful friendship that we developed during my stay. This volume’s studies of audiences of Nazism go back to a stimulating twoday conference in May 2018 for which the Volkswagenstiftung enabled me to invite scholars from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The different approaches to this tricky topic that they experimented with at the conference and our lively discussions confirmed my conjecture that it is both possible and fruitful to study audience reception even in a society with controlled media and no freedom of speech. But this is not a conference volume, for some participants have not contributed to it, and some authors joined the project later. Mark Roseman and Jane Caplan attended the conference and presented inspiring closing remarks on how our topic could be taken further. Jane also closely read all of the following chapters and in our regular virtual conversations encouraged me in my role as an editor in a field in which I had not previously worked. The book owes her much more than her postscript.

xii

Acknowledgments

I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their instructive, critical comments. Greg Sax was the dedicated and rigorous language editor for this volume, especially for all of us non-native English speakers. I hope that those who have waited so long for this volume to appear will think upon reading it that the wait was worthwhile. Gießen, April 2023

Introduction

Media and Their Users in Nazi Germany Ulrike Weckel

Nazi Germany was, among other things, a modern media society. By the early 1930s, nearly everyone in Europe was consuming some mass media, probably a mix of printed, visual, audio, and perhaps, occasionally, already audiovisual media. When the Nazis came to power, it was true for Germans as for people across Europe that almost all they knew about their society and the world they lived in they knew through mass media.1 And there are good reasons to assume that what they thought and felt about what they knew was in some or other way related to their interactions with those media and what other media consumers said about those subjects. National Socialists understood the potential of mass media. They made skillful use of the ones that were accessible to them as they gathered followers into a mass movement, e.g., staging the kinds of events that provoked newspaper coverage, which made the young movement look bigger and more impressive than it was at the time.2 And as soon as they controlled the government, they began to take control of the media, pressuring publishers, directors, and producers, when pressure was needed, to get rid of all media practitioners the Nazis considered politically and/or from their racist point of view undesirable. With their dismissal and the rest falling into line, unwanted content disappeared. Consequently, patterns of interpreting current events no longer competed publicly.

Audiences and Their Choices However, this enforced coordination (Gleichschaltung) did not mean that German media consumers no longer made choices.3 For example, subscribers to the

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Communist and Social Democratic papers that the Nazis had shut down had to decide whether to subscribe to another newspaper and, if so, to one owned or published by the Nazi Party or one of the bourgeois papers that were still independent. And everybody who read a newspaper chose how much attention to give to the political news, perhaps even clipping out articles to put into their diary or preferring to read more of the local news, sports, human interest stories, and ads.4 Germans who did not yet own a radio had to make up their minds whether one of the new, comparatively low-priced Volksempfänger receivers fit into their budget. And all radio owners chose whether or not to tune in to the heavily advertised live broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches and the regime’s spectacles, and, if they did, whether to follow the Nazi Party’s suggestion and point their radios out their open windows for others to hear.5 Those without radios still had to decide whether or not to listen to such special broadcasts with their betterequipped neighbors6 or join a communal reception (Gemeinschaftsempfang), if one had been set up in their neighborhood. Book readers could either choose from the selections of public libraries, which had been cleansed of books the Nazis considered undeutsch, or they could buy their reading material at bookstores, which were free to sell the works of German non-Nazi and foreign authors as long as their books did not openly criticize the Nazi regime.7 In the theaters, moviegoers found a variety of apolitical, entertaining feature films, both domestic and foreign, so long as Germany was not at war with the country from which they came. And they could watch films with obvious National Socialist messages, like Hitlerjunge Quex, Triumph des Willens, Heimkehr, and Jud Süß. But whatever they chose, the accompanying program, which included a newsreel and an educational short (Kulturfilm), was not up to them. Though television did not involve the kinds of choices the other media did, a visit to a reception parlor (Fernsehstube) to see this latest medium free of charge did become an option in 1935, but only for people in and around Berlin. However, the heralded Volksfernseher for home consumption never materialized because of the war, and the television sets from the reception parlors were moved to military hospitals to entertain wounded soldiers of the Wehrmacht.8 Whatever media products Germans decided to consume, they had to make sense of them. The fact that the propaganda ministry, established a few weeks after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, banned some media products and controlled the production of the rest, demanding that journalists and filmmakers support, or at least not criticize, Nazi policies, was by no means a secret. Audiences understood that the new government had ended the Weimar Republic’s pluralistic media offerings, and they were well aware of the presence of its propaganda. But how did they feel about it, and how did they respond? Nobody thinks of oneself as blindly believing propaganda. So, how did readers, listeners, and viewers who liked the regime rationalize their approval so as to see themselves as selfdetermining media consumers with agency? When did they find occasions for doubt or disagreement in order to feel good about subscribing to the rest?9 And what did those media consumers who missed opposing political views and the

Media and Their Users in Nazi Germany

3

cultural representations the regime considered corrosive do? How many, or rather how few, were the Germans who risked reading the underground material produced and distributed by activists of the KPD or tried to get hold of the reports on the situation in Germany assembled by the SPD’s executive board in exile?10 A less dangerous alternative was to buy foreign newspapers, perhaps Germanlanguage Swiss papers, or tune in to foreign radio broadcasts. Until the start of the war, foreign papers were available at kiosks and library reading rooms, and German radio guides announced foreign programs and their frequencies.11 Yet turning to a foreign newspaper or radio channel did not guarantee that one would read or hear criticism of the Nazi regime. On an ordinary day with no important political events occurring in Germany, foreign news sources might not have even mentioned German politics, or the new German regime might at times have even received appreciative coverage, at least in its early years. Still, these media were not under the control of the Nazi propaganda ministry and could offer outside perspectives to Germans eager for different views. The propaganda ministry made clear its intolerance of critical discussion and the careful weighing of arguments in the media, in particular with regard to politics. Accordingly, many media products left little leeway for interpretation in their messages. Those in the audience who were already convinced of the message might have welcomed this, for it confirmed their view, letting them feel empowered. But the chances that the media would sway the unconvinced by blaring such messages at them must have been pretty slim, for nothing could prevent such consumers from ignoring the messages or taking away a different one. Journalists who did not want simply to execute the ministry’s directives and readers who wanted to think that they thought for themselves both seem to have taken refuge in ambiguity. After the end of the Third Reich, several journalists claimed that they had tried to write “between the lines,” and many readers remembered searching for hints as to what they signaled there.12 If in retrospect we do not find certain cases of such claims convincing, it does not follow that there was no ambiguity in media products in Nazi Germany. Some were more ambiguous; others were less so. But all were subject to readers’ interpretations; in fact, they all had to be interpreted if consumers were to make sense of them. Therefore, studying the different ways in which audiences could have made and actually did make sense of media products is a fruitful way to better understand the social and cultural history of the Third Reich.

Media and Propaganda in the Historiography on Nazism Most mass media were still quite new at the time, and many Nazi media products reached audiences of a size later media producers could only dream of. Thus, the media and their audiences frequently come up in the historiography on Nazism. Yet it is a matter of real consequence whether authors look at the media only or primarily from the perspective of the regime, that is to say, focus on its propa-

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ganda efforts and media policy of Gleichschaltung, or whether they also consider the media from the perspective of audiences and conceptualize the former’s possible effects on the latter as the results of an interplay among media policies, intended messages, media products themselves, the conditions under which audiences received them, and the reception of actual audiences. The first, and older, approach has led many authors to conclude that the Nazis’ employment of media made their propaganda highly effective, while because the latter approach is best pursued in case studies it has produced much more specific findings that cannot be easily generalized into an overall evaluation of the effects of media consumption in the Third Reich. Looking at Nazi propaganda with a focus on the men in charge of controlling and issuing instructions to the media was the dominant approach in historical research in the first three decades after the end of World War II. It led researchers to study the writings of Hitler and Goebbels, who saw themselves as the gifted creators and masterminds of Nazi propaganda. Historians in this tradition regularly cite Hitler’s notorious claims in Mein Kampf (1925) that the “art of propaganda” is finding the “psychologically correct form” to attract the attention and then reach the hearts of “the broad masses,” whose intelligence is limited, attention span brief, and forgetfulness enormous, all in line with the 1920s’ dominant theories of mass psychology. Therefore, the artful propagandist appeals to people’s emotions, particularly their resentments; confines his message to very few points; and repeats them over and over in the course of simple, one-sided arguments.13 (One would like to know what well-disposed readers of Mein Kampf made of this assessment of audiences, given that they themselves were members of them.14) The reservoir of Goebbels’s quotations about propaganda is much larger. Contrary to Hitler, who did not like to put anything in writing, Goebbels was eager for posterity to find his comments on everything in his newspaper articles, books, essays, speeches, and diaries. As the minister of propaganda, he portrayed himself as a genius who could steer audiences wherever he wanted, the virtuosic conductor of a massive propaganda machine, and, at the same time, the most astute critic of its output.15 Moreover, Goebbels was far more pragmatic than ideological and, so, wrote all kinds of different things in different contexts about propaganda, whatever he thought would work or bring him Hitler’s approval, which he craved.16 Therefore, authors can find his pithy phrases on whatever aspect of Nazi propaganda they want to argue was characteristic: that no realm of public life could escape its influence; that every media product carried invisible propaganda; that propaganda was most effective in small, unnoticed doses; or that the most important thing was for journalists not to be boring (“nur nicht langweilig werden”). It was through historians’ uncritical acceptance of such claims that Hitler and Goebbels, in particular, have come to be seen as the masters of mass persuasion that they dreamt of being. However, documenting dreams of irresistible influence is not discovering evidence that the dreams came true. It is true, though, that the Nazi regime was very invested in propaganda and continuously increased the staff assigned to it.17 The Nazis believed their stab-

Media and Their Users in Nazi Germany

5

in-the-back legend, according to which Germany had not lost World War I on the battlefield but in part because of its weak propaganda, which had failed to keep up the morale of the home front. The Allies had won because of their skillful propaganda, which had welded their citizens together and undermined the resolve of Germans. So the Nazis were determined to learn from the Allies how to win the next war by winning the propaganda war. Once appointed chancellor, Hitler took information policy seriously enough to force the conservative members of his cabinet to agree to a new Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda) with broad authority over media and culture taken from other ministries and agencies; it was tailor-made for Goebbels, the NSDAP’s propaganda leader, though he had expected to be given even more power.18 When he was appointed minister, soon after the elections in March 1933, Goebbels addressed separate inaugural speeches to summoned representatives of the press, radio, and film industry in which, among other things, he let them know that it was now their task to win over the 48 percent who had not voted for the new government and its “national revolution.”19 The media had the power to shape public opinion, Goebbels stated, and this “people’s government” (Volksregierung) would not be satisfied with a minority that merely put up with it. Therefore, the media were to work on the not yet persuaded “until they have fallen for us” (“bis sie uns verfallen sind”).20 In the elections in November of that year, the NSDAP, as the single list on the ballot, received 92 percent of the vote from the 96 percent of eligible voters who turned out.21 Though this increase in popular approval demands explanation, arguing that it was the result of vigorous media activity confuses correlation with causation. Yet many contemporaries and later historians and other scholars have assumed that the coordinated (gleichgeschaltet) media were crucial in generating and maintaining the Nazi regime’s remarkably broad approval among Germans, no majority of whom ever voted for the NSDAP in a free election. In his final statement as a defendant before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in August 1946, Albert Speer constructed the argument that would suit many Germans for some time to come: Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means in a perfect manner for the domination of its own nation. Through technical devices such as radio and loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. . . . Earlier dictators during their work of leadership needed highly qualified assistants, even at the lowest level, men who could think and act independently. The totalitarian system in the period of modern technical development can dispense with them; the means of communication alone make it possible to mechanize the subordinate leadership. As a result of this, there arises a new type: the uncritical recipient of orders.22

Speer, who self-interestedly set himself up as the expert insider and adviser to the Western Allies, was not the only one to identify the modern mass media as the

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central factor in creating and keeping mass support. Many Americans at the time, who wondered how a nation as cultivated as Germany, with its love of Goethe and Beethoven, could have fallen for such a demagogue and supported a regime that had committed unprecedented mass crimes against humanity, suspected the media of manipulative powers. Among the American military government’s first denazification measures were to shut down newspapers and broadcasters and close movie theaters in its zone of occupation.23 It then issued licenses and work permits only to publishers, radio directors, journalists, filmmakers, and theater owners who passed its screening procedures, and it controlled their content for some time.24 In the 1950s, the theory of totalitarianism took two of the essential characteristics of totalitarian regimes to be the interaction of propaganda and terror and the state’s monopoly of the means of mass communication.25 Wanting to see commonalities in Soviet and Nazi rule as this theory did, the fact that both regimes established propaganda ministries and were explicit that their point was to shape public opinion was convenient to notice. However, the theory and its ideal types were not based on empirical research, of which there was almost none of Nazi Germany and none at all of the Soviet Union at the time. The theory’s anti-Communist leaning and its tendency to celebrate Western democracies in contrast to totalitarianism at the height of the Cold War fueled other researchers’ skepticism and so made comparative empirical studies seem uninteresting. Hence, there were none. Nevertheless, the theory’s notions of totalitarian rule and indoctrination exerted a great influence on the early historiography on Nazism. In his seminal book Die deutsche Diktatur of 1969, Karl Dietrich Bracher wrote of the steps the Nazi Party took toward “total domination and manipulation of all thoughts and emotions.” Because Nazi ideology was eclectic to the point of incoherence, Bracher ascribed Germans’ supposedly widespread acceptance of it to pervasive irrationality and Nazi orators’ appeals to “subconscious regions” of their mass audiences.26 Such explanations in terms of mysterious psychological mechanisms decreased over the years but not the conviction of many historians in the remarkable effectiveness of Nazi propaganda. Many alluded to the novelty of modern mass media, the fact that, except for the press, they were relatively new to their audiences, although most did not go into detail.27 Some authors speculated that the Nazis had employed the psychology and techniques of advertising.28 And many surmised that the radio had been the most potent tool in mobilizing consent, some of whom simply repeated Goebbels’s dictum that the radio was “the most modern and the most important instrument to influence the masses that exists,” a line he had used to flatter the broadcasting representatives he had gathered for one of his inaugural speeches as propaganda minister.29 Other authors pointed to the medium’s nationwide scope and its potential reach into every home, workplace, and tavern.30 Occasionally, authors seem to have inferred from the fact that easily sexualized words like ‘intrusion’ (into intimate spaces) and ‘reception’ (of radio waves) were typical of the German discourse that the radio had a peculiar power over women because they were more “receptive” to its messages than men.31 But it is striking how little this literature considered the fact

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that the radio’s ability to reach people in their homes depended on the decisions they made there. The Nazis understood this. Realizing that listeners could switch the radio off or tune in to another station, possibly a foreign one, when a program was too political, too propagandistic, too serious for their taste, or simply boring, from the end of 1933 onward the propaganda ministry instructed broadcasters to supplement political programming with more, and lighter, entertainment.32 The real purpose of all this light entertainment was to keep listeners tuned in, content, relaxed, and “ready to receive” the “Führer” whenever he addressed the nation.33 But it must have occurred to everyone that no programming could hold listeners in such a state of receptiveness, for, first of all, they must be listening rather than letting the radio play in the background. Historical images of German mass audiences may well have aided this longheld thesis about the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda. The Nazis’ many annual festivals and holidays—the Party rallies in Nuremberg, the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Bückeberg, and May Day, to name just a few— drew huge crowds of their followers. One main reason for these events was for participants to feel themselves to be among thousands of like-minded supporters of the regime, a part of a “national reawakening” and a “people’s community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”). Communal radio receptions were intended to generate the same feeling of community on a smaller scale, and one reason why the regime limited the number of movie theaters was so moviegoers would watch certain specially promoted political films in sold-out theaters, not half empty ones.34 The supposed effects of such mass events on their participants were portrayed in and advertised through official press photography and newsreel footage. These showed the crowds performing their assigned role as “the people” supporting the regime, as repeated quasi-plebiscites, so to speak, and the regime used such images to legitimize itself domestically and to the rest of the world. Consequently, still and film photographers sought out motifs like uniformed members of Nazi organizations arrayed in formation at attention; endless columns of men marching in step, with and without flags and torches; and crowds of cheering spectators performing the Hitler salute, and they figure prominently in the visual records of the Nazi period. In employing such images, most authors at least mention their propagandistic function, but many seem not to free themselves from their effect, prefiguring the thesis of successful propaganda. To be sure, what these pictures show did take place; Germans marched and cheered in the millions. But in trying to understand and explain the mobilization of broad consent and occasional enthusiasm, historians should ask further questions. What exactly does a photograph show, and what does it leave out? Whom might it have elated at the time, and whom was it supposed to frustrate or scare? What other, noncommissioned photographs of the same event are there, and what different impressions do they give? Clearly, there are many such questions to ask. In the 1970s, historians began to pay closer attention to people’s behavior and opinions in Nazi-Germany, and studies ever since have contradicted the conception of the Third Reich as a totalitarian dictatorship that engineered consent

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through terror and indoctrination. With the turn from political history to, first, social history, which soon included the history of people’s everyday lives (Alltagsgeschichte), and, then, gender history, and, finally, cultural history and its many specializations since the 1990s, the older thesis that concerted Nazi propaganda manipulated Germans into atypical attitudes they otherwise would not have taken up has been undermined in various ways.35 By studying specific social and professional groups, political and religious milieus, inhabitants of certain regions and towns, as well as gendered groups and age cohorts, historians, unsurprisingly, have reconstructed a broad spectrum of attitudes and practices: Germans who remained unimpressed by Nazi propaganda; Germans who doubted, who wavered in their attitudes, and who changed their minds several times; Germans who did not need to be manipulated because they were already committed to National Socialism’s goals; and Germans who were determined to get for themselves whatever they could out of the regime and its brutal vision. Studies have also shown, again unsurprisingly, that people often had no single attitude toward the regime but adopted different attitudes in accord with their changing personal situations and their perceptions of them.36 One might have adjusted to some circumstances, accepted certain impositions, welcomed some measures whole-heartedly, and participated in some campaigns but grumbled about others; one might even have rebelled at some point, while remaining indifferent to what one thought did not affect one. Thus, historians’ attempts to determine who was “a real Nazi”37 or “fanatical” antisemite, who “only” went along to get along, and who was a genuine opponent turned out to be problematic because they were based on overly simplistic assumptions. Nazi rule is better analyzed as a social practice, an ambiguous field of unequal relationships in which actors adjusted their thoughts and behavior to their perceptions of the particular situation they found themselves in and in which the existence of force was compatible with willing consent.38 The refinements in social, gender, and cultural history corresponded with the shift in the field of communication studies from the earlier thesis of the power of mass media to an understanding of their limited effects and concepts of active audiences whose members choose from the media on offer according to their interests and expected gratifications. In regard to propaganda, studies showed that media users’ views seldom deviate from those of their in-groups, that is, peergroups have more influence than media.39 Building on then recent insights of both social historians and communication researchers, Ian Kershaw introduced a research design in his 1983 article “How Effective Was Nazi Propaganda?” that he hoped would lead historians to a more nuanced understanding of the subject.40 He began by pointing out that Nazi propagandists set themselves extraordinarily ambitious goals, namely, to get the public to adopt a “drastically restructured value system”41 and, in the regime’s last years, to persuade it of final victory despite the obviously desperate military situation. Kershaw argued that any such propaganda would have been very unlikely to succeed. Prima facie, then, the thesis of the success of Nazi propaganda seemed implausible in virtue of facts that its defenders glossed over.

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But in order not to make the opposite mistake and see ineffectiveness everywhere, Kershaw needed to know what the aims of Nazi propaganda were. He determined that its overriding aims were to prepare the population psychologically for war and maintain its morale once it began. In addition, he identified four central themes—“national community,” “racial purity,” hatred for enemies, and trust in leadership—and specified four patterns in the public’s thinking that determined its reception of these themes: (1) values were already widely accepted; (2) prejudices prevailed because of ignorance, which he called a ‘vacuum’; (3) opinions were mixed; and (4) strongly held counter-opinions and disbelief were common. The first pattern, the most promising for propagandists, promoted the success of two themes, namely, hatred for enemies, specifically the political left or “Marxism,” and trust in leadership, i.e., the Hitler cult. According to Kershaw, German antisemitism was a case of pattern (2); it could prevail because of the vacuum of ignorance. Few Germans had regular contact with Jews, and nothing in their education opposed antisemitism. So, the second pattern conditioned the public’s reception of propaganda about “racial purity.” Kershaw found evidence, mostly the findings of the Bayern-Projekt at that time, that antisemitic and other racist propaganda “was by no means as effective as has frequently been assumed.”42 For example, the Nazi regime had troubles in its first years persuading Germans, including Nazi Party members, to cut their business ties with Jews when they promoted their material self-interest. And Germans’ response to the persecution of Jews was more indifference and lack of empathy than enthusiastic approval, Kershaw claimed. He expected that propaganda on the theme of “national community” would also have been of limited effectiveness because of pattern (3). The population held mixed views on social policy and already had class, religious, and regional allegiances. Though many Germans found the idea of unity and harmony among “Volksgenossen” (“ethnic compatriots”) attractive, they remained well aware of social divisions, and the war exacerbated them.43 The regime’s predominant propaganda aim of readying the population for war met in the late 1930s with the counter-opinion of most Germans, who were afraid to go to war yet again, and the aim once the war had started of maintaining morale on the home front met from 1942 onward with more and more disbelief that Germany could win it. Thus, Kershaw argued, propaganda on the fourth pattern was an almost total failure. Kershaw’s article has been very influential.44 It loosened the old thesis’s grip on historians of Nazism and showed them the need to think about audience receptiveness to different themes of propaganda. It soon became the dominant thesis that the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda depended on a combination of the regime’s political and military successes and the material benefits it provided consumers.45 Yet, as plausible as these modified assessments of the effects of propaganda may be, they are neither based on historical studies of media during the Third Reich nor on empirical research of media consumption and audience reception. Since the appearance of Kershaw’s article, historical studies of the press, radio, movies, and television in Nazi Germany have given historians a better

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understanding of how these media functioned and how the regime used them before and during the war. So, though they are still rare, studies of audience reception no longer have to start from scratch.

The Press Karl Christian Führer argues convincingly that it was the daily newspapers that reached the largest audiences, which were larger, geographically wider, and socially more inclusive than the radio and movie audiences that have received so much more attention in the literature.46 He also questions the conjecture that the journalistic monotony that resulted from the closing of hundreds of papers and the Nazis’ rigid press regulations led to a significant decline in newspaper readership and to a loss of trust in the information reported in the coordinated papers already soon after the Nazis came to power, and not just when the war was going badly for Germany.47 In his study of Hamburg as a media metropole, Führer argues that during the first two to three years of Nazi rule overall circulation in the city either remained relatively high or declined slightly but then rose, so that by 1938–39 at the latest almost all of Hamburg’s households subscribed to one of the three big coordinated local dailies, one of which was the official Nazi Party paper that the Party expected its members to subscribe to.48 The figures lead him to hypothesize that subscribers to the Social Democratic and Communist papers, which were prohibited and had their resources confiscated in 1933, did abstain from reading the press for a few years but then joined the growing number of Hamburg’s newspaper readers. Rather than diagnosing a “press crisis” following the Nazis’ takeover of power, Führer advises historians to recognize the continuing prevalence of daily newspaper consumption, which was remarkable given that Germany was still suffering from the world economic crisis.49 Though his calculations are plausible, he bases his argument on what he considers the doubtful accuracy (because driven by wishful thinking) of one Sopade report in the summer of 1936 that newspaper circulation had fallen significantly in most of Germany. But he does not acknowledge that it was not the only such report.50 The Sopade report assumed that readers were growing discontent with so much propaganda in newspapers, an assumption that fits the results of the Nazis’ own internal security reports on the public mood during the first years of their rule.51 After their early accounts of euphoric responses to the takeover of power, informants reported that some Party members were getting tired of the massive political mobilizing; they complained about the many meetings and demands for donations; they were getting bored by constant propaganda; and they expressed dislike of the Party newspapers and magazines. David Bankier infers from the internal reports of the Gestapo and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) that he studied that the circulation of the Party’s periodicals steadily declined “after the first year of Nazi rule, when the new system’s inability to fulfil all its promises became apparent.”52 Several of the reports mentioned cancellations of subscriptions to

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Party newspapers and a drop in sales; a number revealed that readers found their accounts of the regime’s achievements largely exaggerated; others recorded comments to the effect that it no longer made sense to read more than one paper since they all said the same things. However, the reports also warned that when the press provided too little information on certain subjects, rumors flourished; people then tried to read between the lines and sought out more independent news sources. Informants reported that local church periodicals gained readers, and issues of foreign newspapers were quickly bought out and passed on to others who also felt misinformed.53 Aware of these reservations on the part of some in the audience, the Nazi Party often concealed its or its central publisher’s takeover of a newspaper, obviously hoping its readers would not notice, or at least not mind enough to cancel their subscriptions. To be sure, the regime did not take over all, or even most, of the hundreds of mostly local bourgeois newspapers. And though it banned leftist papers immediately after coming to power, it allowed what had been liberal and conservative papers to continue publishing, though under strict supervision.54 Among these were the country’s most renowned and widely read papers: Frankfurter Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt, and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. There were several reasons for this tolerance. In the first year after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis still had to tend to their alliance with conservative elites. The new regime also needed able journalists to write high-quality, credible content, for it did not want international observers to think that it was dictatorial or journalistically provincial. Most importantly, it wanted to win over the readers of bourgeois papers, many of whom had not voted for the NSDAP, through those papers aligning themselves with the regime.55 Norbert Frei and Johannes Schmitz argue that the propaganda ministry expected on the basis of publishers’ conduct so far that the bourgeois press would play a central role in National Socialism’s imminent penetration of German society.56 It seems that the regime did not expect the Party’s periodicals to be able to attract readers through their journalistic quality. It pressured new Party members, and civil servants, to cancel their old subscriptions and switch to the Völkischer Beobachter or the local Party paper. In some locations, the increase in subscribers to the Party paper lagged behind the rise in new members; so the NSDAP aggressively solicited subscriptions door-to-door. This practice may well have kept the local Party papers in business, but it is not likely that it made them more popular with coerced readers or raised their confidence in their reporting.57 To understand better how the members of different audiences read newspapers in the Third Reich, we would need many more and much better analyses of newspapers’ content than we have.58 At best, historians have paid attention to articles about certain events.59 However, every reader of the time read the paper selectively, choosing from an issue’s diverse offering of national, international, and local news, all more or less explicitly political; film, theater, and concert reviews; serialized novels; caricatures, “jokes,” and crossword puzzles; and personal and commercial ads. Though we will never know exactly what readers chose to read or how many chose which items, the study of whole issues reminds historians that

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readers went through their own selection processes and informs them about the possible ways for readers to have made sense of the material they selected.60 This approach shatters the notion that readers could not help but be manipulated by what they read, and it makes us aware of the sort of deliberate decision that tolerating obviously hyperbolic and polemical statements of propaganda requires. Patrick Merziger chooses a different approach to argue that the Gleichschaltung of the media did not lead to a Gleichschaltung of the audience. He shows that the Nazi satirical magazine Die Brennessel offended those many of its readers who did not find its occasional ridicule of the bigotry and backwardness among the Party’s true believers funny. The complaints became so numerous and so bitter that the magazine had to publish an apology and, eventually, refrain from such satire.61 Letters to the editors of Der Stürmer and Das Schwarze Korps also demonstrate that audiences of Nazi followers were neither homogenous, passive, nor necessarily uncritical of government policies. Unlike the offended readers of Die Brennessel, most of these letter writers did not oppose the editors; they embraced their radicalism or even aspired to outdo it. And the editors encouraged readers to write by publishing their letters regularly. Der Stürmer was the place to write to for those antisemites who wanted to denounce their fellow citizens, including Party members, publicly, by name and often address, for patronizing Jewish shops and businesses, socializing with Jews, or being in some other way lax in their antisemitism. Others wrote to demand the death penalty for Rassenschande (race defilement) or to express their impatience for all of the Jews to be killed.62 Das Schwarze Korps, the weekly of the SS, had a broader agenda than Der Stürmer and cultivated a more literate, eloquent criticism in the name of a purer, more fundamentalistic version of National Socialism. Its readers wrote in to denounce Jews and “Jew-lovers”; condemn the Churches, especially Catholic clerics; criticize Party functionaries’ lack of commitment; deplore the bureaucracy; bemoan court sentences they found too mild; and call for even harsher and swifter measures against all those the Nazis considered to be their enemies.63 These examples show that readers of Nazi periodicals were not simply receiving messages and no longer thinking for themselves. The same must be true for readers of the nonNazi press, and it would be fascinating to learn more about the ways in which they made sense of their readings.

Radio The reach of the radio in the Third Reich has been overestimated. What the literature often recounted as the remarkable success story of the Volksempfänger, which brought Hitler’s voice into everybody’s home, to the “last village,”64 is no longer the state of research. It is true, though, that the regime wanted everyone, across the country, to be able to listen to the radio. When the Nazis took power, the broadcasting system, which the state had just recently taken control of, fell into their hands, and they immediately replaced all of its objectionable

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employees with party careerists, which made radio the most thoroughly Nazified medium.65 A nationwide audience was to be reached through inexpensive receivers that households on tight budgets could afford. The idea was not new; even the name ‘Volksempfänger’ already existed. But the Nazis had the political will and persistence to get radio manufacturers to collaborate in producing a receiver that all retailers would have to sell for a fixed price well below more elaborate models.66 The historian of economics and technology Wolfgang König has conclusively debunked the myth that the Volksempfänger was constructed to be incapable of receiving foreign broadcasts. According to König, though reception varied by location, the Volksempfänger was made to receive not only the regional Reichssender but also the nationwide Deutschlandsender located in Königs Wusterhausen, a few kilometers south of Berlin; so, it was technically able to pick up most of Europe’s big broadcast stations.67 The Volksempfänger sold very well in its first two years on the market, almost 1.5 million units. But then sales dipped. Despite intense advertising and an installment plan, the regime could not expand radio ownership much further. Though it proclaimed “total radio distribution” (“totale Rundfunkerfassung”), functionaries knew that most Volksempfänger owners were white-collar workers. Though inexpensive, the Volksempfänger, together with the monthly broadcast fee, was beyond the budgets of most blue-collar workers. Nevertheless, the regime decided against lowering the fee, for the state, mostly the propaganda ministry, counted on the income.68 Instead, it demanded that the industry come up with an even simpler, cheaper model, the Deutsche Kleinempfänger (commonly known as Goebbels Schnauze), which, beginning in 1938, generated another and larger increase in sales. In 1933, 25.4 percent of households owned a radio; the number rose to 57.1 percent in 1939 and to 65.1 percent in 1941.69 Though a significant rise, it was far too small to meet the regime’s announced goal of reaching every household via radio, nor was it noteworthy in international comparison, especially given that no other country’s government had put so much pressure on the industry and so much effort into promotion. In 1941–42, Germany was in a third place in Europe, behind Sweden and Denmark, in the number of radio owners per 1,000 inhabitants (not to mention the huge lead of the United States), and the relative increase between 1934 and 1942 was considerably higher in France and Norway.70 However historians of Nazi Germany evaluate this development, those in the Nazi regime responsible for increasing the radio audience were clearly disappointed in the results of their efforts. There remained a significant gap in radio ownership between the cities and the countryside, where many of the inhabitants polled expressed no interest in owning a radio because they did not have the money or leisure time and rural reception was often poor.71 In the cities, however, surveyed industrial workers said they were very interested but most could not afford a radio and the expenses that came with it. Deregistration for financial reasons was also typical in this group. By far the largest group of radio owners during the Third Reich was the urban middle classes: the selfemployed, white-collar workers, and civil servants.72

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Communal receptions for special radio events, like broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches and Nazi party celebrations, were a strategy to enlarge the listenership and at the same time to get listeners to control each other’s listening, since radio owners could not be made to tune in and listen attentively at home, even if the state declared it a “national duty.”73 Ideally, the assembled listeners, like those at the broadcasted event, would share a feeling of being in the “Volksgemeinschaft.” To achieve this, Goebbels, who was often the announcer for broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches, described the atmosphere in the hall, like the excited anticipation of Hitler’s appearance, trying to transfer some of a mass rally’s effects on its attendants to people who were not there.74 It is hard to evaluate the success of communal receptions. Hundreds of newspaper articles described large groups of committed listeners, but other sources reveal the problems and risks that communal receptions involved. On town squares, it was technically difficult to reproduce a good range of sound. Speer’s grandiose plans for Reichs-Lautsprechersäulen (Reich Loudspeaker Columns) were never carried out, except for a test run in Breslau.75 In factories, offices, and taverns, sound fidelity was less of a problem, but these gatherings ran the risk that people would not show up, not pay much attention, express dissatisfaction about what they heard, or leave early, each of which everyone could notice.76 This brings us to the effects of broadcasting on audiences and their reception, which are not considered by authors who describe the radio as an “immediate instrument of rule” or an element of a “comprehensive power technology.”77 Naturally, many responses were possible to, say, hearing Hitler give a speech. Janosch Steuwer quotes from the diary of a nineteen-year-old gardener’s apprentice, whom he calls Inge Thiele. She came from a poor working-class family and had earlier sympathized with the left but then decided that she “believed in Adolf Hitler.” Shortly after writing that, she listened, together with her boss, the gardener, and his family, to the broadcast of Hitler giving a speech to workers at the Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Berlin, which was the climax of the election campaign in November 1933. In her diary, she noted that Hitler “spoke so plainly and cordially, stressed so vividly his originating from the working classes,” which was why Thiele believed that he understood workers’ “woes and wishes.” “Involuntarily,” she wrote, she had joined the live audience’s shouts of “Heil Hitler” and “Sieg Heil” and added that everybody seated in the living room in front of the radio, “the old and the young ones,” had been enthusiastic.78 Victor Klemperer, the professor of Romance languages who as a Jew had been forced into early retirement, listened to the same broadcast, but in his diary he made fun of the lofty introduction of the speaker: “The savior comes to the poor.” He continued, “Then over forty minutes Hitler. A mostly hoarse, overly screaming, agitated voice, long passages in the whining tone of the preaching sect-leader.”79 From Kurt Tucholsky, we have yet another distinct sort of commentary. During the earlier election campaign in March 1933, he tuned in to one of Hitler’s speeches and wrote to his friend Walter Hasenclever: “The voice is not as disagreeable as one should think—it only smells a bit of trouser bottom, of man, unappetiz-

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ing, but otherwise okay. Sometimes he over-roars, then he vomits. But otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing.”80 In contrast to Tucholsky in exile in Zurich, the conservative school teacher Luise Solmitz from Hamburg eagerly filled in what Hitler had not explicitly said. After listening to the broadcast of his speech on 10 February 1933 from the Berlin Sportpalast, Solmitz wrote in her diary, “he expressed what we had felt, he did not promise that from tomorrow on everything would become better, but he did promise that from now on the German spirit would guide Germany again, that is, he did not say it, but it was the sense.” She, too, thought that Hitler had “over-raised himself ” (“sich übersteigert”) a bit but immediately added that he was “not so much an orator but a genius leader.” She and the three others with whom she had sat in front of the radio were excited by what they heard, and they all had tears in their eyes.81 The quotations from these four writers should suffice for my point. Radio listeners’ responses were quite individualistic; so, they tell us more about the individual listeners and the circumstances of their listening than about the speeches they heard or the staging of the broadcasts. Historians who want to illustrate their theses about the effects of political broadcasts during the Third Reich can choose from a wide spectrum of responses. But none can be generalized. It is their diversity that is informative. As diverse as reception was, many radio listeners in 1933 agreed on one thing, namely, they had heard enough political speeches and explicit propaganda, and they wanted more entertainment programming. Once the propaganda ministry realized that that sentiment was widespread, it reacted promptly. In May 1933, Goebbels restricted the number of speeches broadcast to two per month. And program analyses show a continuous rise in the percentage of music beginning in 1934. Only between the annexation of Austria in March 1938 and the early months of the war did spoken word programming again dominate.82 Listeners insisted that the radio was primarily for their entertainment; it should enrich their leisure time, lift their mood, and accompany them through their hours at home. As the regime wanted to keep “this millionfold invisible telephone connection” open to as many people as possible,83 it accommodated the audience’s common preferences to keep it happy and tuned in. As a result, as researchers have pointed out, listeners received the radio’s political content in the audience’s preferred musical context. However, to infer from this that listeners paid attention to and approved of it is just speculation. The situation changed significantly with the start of World War II. The public’s increased demand for continuously updated news generated another wave of radio purchases and turned listeners’ attention to spoken word programs. It seems that in many homes the radio played in the background all day long, so that residents would not miss any Sondermeldung (special announcement).84 More Germans than previously felt the need to follow current events in order to evaluate what the war meant for them and their families. Just as the war began, however, the regime outlawed listening to foreign broadcasts, creating the new political crime of Rundfunkverbrechen (broadcasting crime). The official rationale was that the enemy engaged in psychological warfare and the aim of foreign

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broadcasting was to demoralize the German home front, which was the regime’s biggest concern as a consequence of the stab-in-the-back legend. According to the preamble to the new decree, the government knew that all responsible Germans would feel a duty to comply; therefore, it was issuing the decree only to alert those Volksgenossen who lacked such a sense of responsibility.85 Within the government, the law was controversial. The Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner, feared, first, that the law would be interpreted domestically and internationally as evidence of a lack of trust between the government and the German people; second, it would undermine audiences’ confidence in the accuracy of news coverage; and, third, it would invite mass denunciations.86 As it turned out, some of his concerns were well founded. Though the risk of denunciation may have deterred some of the radio audience from listening to foreign broadcasts, or at least from talking about what they learned from them, the law apparently did heighten mistrust of the news, and it aroused in some listeners a sense of being entitled to ignore it.87 According to the reports of both Sopade and the SD, there was evidence that listening to foreign broadcasts was widespread, even among supporters of the regime,88 and informants reported that many Germans saw it as a harmless peccadillo.89 For example, the Geheime Lageberichte des SD from 8 July 1943 stated that listening to foreign radio was on the rise, though people did not admit to it, and many argued that the British were allowed to listen to foreign broadcasts and that the German radio’s insufficient information was driving people into the clutches of the enemy’s propagandists.90 The report was later corroborated by some polls the American occupiers took in the last days of the war. Conducted independently of each other, they found that about 51 percent of those polled stated that they had listened to foreign radio stations. Radio Luxembourg was most often mentioned followed by the BBC’s German-language service and some Western Soldatensender (military broadcasters); Radio Moscow was frequently described as unpopular.91 Since the questionnaires were anonymous, there was no incentive to brag or ingratiate oneself with the occupiers. In polls conducted in three Hessian towns in late April and early May 1945, pollsters found that 43 percent of respondents who had listened to foreign broadcasts had started before the war, 23 percent after the German defeat at Stalingrad, 19 percent after the Allied landing in Normandy, and 15 percent only in 1945.92 More men than women had listened, and the higher one’s education, the more likely one was to have tuned in to foreign stations and to have begun relatively early.93 Listeners primarily wanted foreign news: 41 percent thought it truthful; 24 percent thought it gave them a better understanding of events; and 22 percent were explicit that they had wanted to compare the German and foreign news coverage in order to make up their own minds.94 The demand for accurate news coverage of the war grew with Germans’ anxiety about losing and with the realization that German news media reported only carefully selected, biased information and phrased it propagandistically to get the audience to hold out, if for no other reason than fear of the Allies’ “revenge.” However, contrary to the hopes of Allied broadcasters and the exiled Germans

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participating in their programs, the occasional but widespread listening to foreign broadcasts did not generate political opposition inside Germany.95 That possibility had indeed worried the Nazi regime, as it was obviously impossible to prevent listeners from tuning in to foreign broadcasts, and the temptation to do so had grown since the regime had reduced the radio’s offerings to the single national program of the Großdeutscher Rundfunk.96 So, Nazi officials may not have been unhappy over the decline in the supply of radios that began in 1942. With the prioritizing of the military’s needs, private owners could no longer replace their broken receivers or get them repaired, while the bombing campaign against German cities destroyed more and more of them.97 People wrote to government and Party officials begging for receivers and spare parts, and SD informants reported the growing frustration of those without functioning radios.98 It is well possible that many of the frustrated missed the music programs more than the spoken word programs, for music halls, concert venues, and theaters were closed in summer 1944, and the radio, together with those movie theaters still functioning, were the only sources of public entertainment.99

Film The fact that movie theaters were kept open to the end of the war indicates the importance the propaganda ministry assigned to moviegoing and film. Goebbels never tired of telling people how much well-made films could achieve and how much he knew about making them. But, again, the propaganda ministry’s ambitions for the medium do not establish that film had such powerful effects. And, as with radio, the literature often overstates its reach. It is true that theater attendance rose each year after the Great Depression and reached what was probably the all-time peak in Germany in 1943.100 But throughout the interwar period, nearly a quarter of the population seems not to have been interested enough in movies to hassle with the transportation, spend the money, and take the time needed to watch them. Even though the Nazi regime undertook efforts to reach a wider rural audience, e.g., through Tonfilmwagen (mobile film units), moviegoing remained an urban habit, with teenagers and young adults significantly overrepresented in the audience.101 It was not until the war that attendance figures rose so high as to indicate that moviegoing had become a habit across the society, including previously underrepresented milieus and age groups. Gerhard Stahr argues that it was the newsreels that brought them into the movie theaters,102 for Germans were anxious for information, specifically visual information, about the war’s progress. And they kept coming to the theaters even when the newsreels’ certainty of victory became less believable because they then needed distraction from the war. “The cinema did not mobilize the population for war, rather, the war mobilized the population for the cinema,” Stahr concludes.103 In contrast, Joseph Garncarz attributes the remarkable rise in ticket sales during the war to the heightened appeal of feature films, especially the blockbusters that the Nazi

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regime realized through larger budgets and making big production companies, which it had recently nationalized, compete.104 The standard cinema program consisted of commercials, a Kulturfilm, the newsreel, and a feature film. Historians do not know which part of the program lured which members of the audience into the cinema; while some may have had clear preferences, others might have enjoyed the moviegoing experience as a whole. But we do know that they were all in the situation that there were no longer many consumer goods on which to spend their disposable income. That is, as the demand for leisure-time gratifications rose significantly in the course of the war, movie theaters had fewer and fewer competitors. High and rising ticket sales clearly indicate that most moviegoers enjoyed the films they chose and expected to enjoy their next choices. The success of movies largely depends on fulfilling moviegoers’ expectations and their subsequent word of mouth.105 Advertising and press campaigns raise awareness, but they alone cannot make a film a blockbuster. For most of the Third Reich, production companies were private enterprises that had to ensure enough of their films drew large enough audiences to recoup their substantial costs. The pattern of commercial cinema is that the films running at the same time differ considerably in their box office success. A few account for a large percentage of overall ticket sales; several do okay; and many are quickly withdrawn and do not come close to covering their production costs. Thus, production companies repeatedly need blockbusters. They can work in popular genres, hire stars, include catchy songs, and invest in visual effects, but the audience determines success or failure. This was also true in Nazi Germany. To draw large audiences, filmmakers must avoid what is likely to displease or offend viewers. Since politics is inherently controversial, the film industry considers political films, which, at best, appeal to a small minority, box-office poison. Even mere statements or insinuations of ideology in an otherwise purely entertaining movie risk interfering with some viewers’ enjoyment, who may then not recommend the movie. So, it should come as no surprise that by far the largest number of movies produced and released during the Third Reich offered conventional entertainment with melodramatic, comical, and suspenseful plots; lavish sets and costumes; popular actors; and emotional music, all without explicit political or ideological content.106 Relatively few featured obvious propaganda, and most of these were commissioned and sponsored by the state. Many of those seemingly innocuous movies had an afterlife in the second half of the twentieth century,107 and scholars have since debated whether they have hidden ideological messages needing thorough analyses to uncover or whether they fulfilled a political function for the regime exactly because they abstained from politics and, so, constituted positive mood-management for audiences.108 This debate is reminiscent of one that National Socialists already had among themselves. Many of the party faithful deplored the predominance of light entertainment movies and demanded a National Socialist cultural revolution on the big screen.109 One finds repeated complaints in Nazi Party documents that most

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German movies were still, as in the despised Weimar Republic, set in glamorous locations with happy upper-class characters and silly, superficial escapist plots, all of which these critics considered undeutsch. Some of them believed that an uninterrupted influence of “Filmjuden” in the industry was responsible for the alleged continuity;110 others blamed the “arrogant film clique” in the premiere cinemas on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, who ensured that “new ‘German’ films with ‘German’ themes like rural life” were not released in other theaters.111 Goebbels, who had established the propaganda ministry’s control of the whole German film industry and often personally intervened in productions, was fickle on the issue.112 Time and again, he demanded better films that conveyed in their “attitude” more than their subject commitment to National Socialism, and he publicly damned many movies, but at the same time he promoted conventional entertainment to keep audiences happy and the production companies profitable. So he rejected all demands of party functionaries to make movies about the Nazi movement and its organizations, like the early propaganda films SA-Mann Brand and Hans Westmar, that opportunistic production companies had made in 1933 after the takeover of power to cash in on the Nazi Party’s popularity and curry favor with the new rulers.113 These two films had not been popular with much of the audience, and Goebbels had since dismissed propaganda in the form of National Socialists marching across the screen and Party slogans in the dialogue.114 But it is obvious to all who read his diary and articles that Goebbels frequently changed his assessment of movies, for example, in response to Hitler’s comments or when audiences did not respond as he had expected, and that he had no clear notion of the kinds of feature films he wanted to be made. The Nazi debate indicates that the presence of political, ideological messages in entertainment movies was largely up to individual viewers, that is, what they took to be political and how carefully they looked for it. In 1938, an author complained in Wille und Macht, the biweekly paper for Hitler Youth leaders, that Germany had “become political” but the cinema was still “an apolitical oasis,” except for some newsreel segments. He continued, “A really clever person might claim that even if there are no propaganda films [“Tendenzfilme”], there still is propaganda [“Tendenz”] tucked away beneath film’s surface details. This person, though, will have a hard time finding examples to prove his point.”115 After the Third Reich, it was difficult for film scholars and historians to believe that so many of the movies made in those twelve years had been apolitical, given that the Nazis had considered film to be an especially powerful mass medium and counted on its “ability to mobilize emotions and immobilize minds,” as Eric Rentschler puts it.116 Again, the discovery of messages was a matter of individuals’ film analyses. Particularly in early postwar work, authors assumed that Nazi ideology was a consistent set of distinct convictions, and they searched movie plots and dialogue for them.117 In 1991, Stephen Lowry criticized this narrow understanding of Nazi ideology. He pointed out that it was eclectic and sometimes contradictory and that in order to work effectively through movies it had to tie in with beliefs and desires widespread in the audience.118 Inspired by critical

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theory, he advocated a broader understanding of ideology that went beyond the glorification of leaders, the denunciation of Jews and other supposed enemies, the promoting of duty and sacrifice, and “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”) romanticism, which would have resonated only with those viewers who already had such ideas. Lowry extended his own film analysis to protopolitical and structural issues like confirming the status quo, inculcating desired behavior, and checking critical impulses. And he provided examples showing how to find such “latent ideology” in a film’s narrative structure, mise en scène, cinematography, and montage. Lowry and like-minded film scholars acknowledged that much of what they identified as ideological in movies from the Third Reich was not specifically Nazi or fascist, but it still served the regime’s interests.119 If we apply this notion of films’ latent ideology to the audience in the context of the reception of individuals, we can assume that these movies may well have reassured some viewers and reconciled others to the political situation. But they also may have allowed still others to consume them as escapism without connecting them to the present. Perhaps they reminded some of not so very different movies before 1933 or from Hollywood.120 Such scope for audience reception is underlined by Ernst Offermanns’s finding that Jewish moviegoers in Nazi Germany shared many of the rest of the audience’s preferences.121 The most popular movies at the Filmbühne of the Jüdische Kulturbund, the only place where Jews could safely watch movies after they were banned from theaters in December 1938, were among the most generally popular of the year they came out. One of the common favorites was the historical melodrama Robert Koch (1939), starring Emil Jannings, for which some scholars have outlined National Socialist and even antisemitic readings.122 But though Jews watched these movies in circumstances clearly different from other Germans, there is not much reason to think that they read them subversively. Only very few German movies may have allowed for such readings.123 The propaganda ministry took care of that. Broad audience consensus on popular movies was not so much based on their scope for interpretation but, rather, on the widely shared appreciation for stars, captivating plots, alluring scenery and costumes, and high production values. However, there were some obvious propaganda films as well. After the first, clumsy productions in 1933,124 few had Nazi protagonists or were even set in the present (what the Nazis called ‘Zeitfilme’). Most were historical dramas with unambiguous heroes and villains, which invited viewers to determine for themselves which present-day people they resembled. Several of these movies did fairly, or even very, well at the box office. So, it turned out that there were enough moviegoers who were not put off by political propaganda in movies to encourage production companies to keep making them. It seems, then, that the risk such films raised for productions companies had less to do with the audience and more with the possibility that the government would change its policy during a film’s production. For example, at one point the regime wanted anti-Bolshevik and pro-English propaganda films, but that changed with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the beginning of the war. It was not much dif-

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ferent with domestic policy issues. Several film projects were aborted, and some completed films were never released. In other cases, the propaganda ministry demanded cuts and changes, including the reshooting of scenes, which increased costs and made producers hesitant about risky subjects.125 However, when we look at what audiences wanted we find that propaganda movies also needed stars, entertaining plots, and high production values to become blockbusters. Heimat, Pour le Mérite, Jud Süß, Wunschkonzert, Ohm Krüger, and Die große Liebe, to name some of the best known, filled theaters for weeks.126 Most propaganda blockbusters came out during the war, when attendance figures were skyrocketing. So, the war may have whet moviegoers’ appetite for their vicious denunciations of “enemies.” Yet, it is also clear that a majority consumed them as entertainment.127 Documentary-style propaganda films like Triumph des Willens and Der ewige Jude were also seen by millions, but, despite their promotion through special screenings and praise in the press, attendance never came close to that for the most successful propaganda feature films, which followed the conventional recipe for success. One wants to know more about their audience reception, but there have been few case studies.128 Reconstructing audience reception must take the whole programs into account. No matter how many political or ideological messages viewers detected in the feature film, there were definitely more in the Kulturfilm and the newsreel.129 Before the war, the propaganda ministry only gradually exerted its influence on the content of the four different newsreels then produced, which presented the genre’s typical mix of exciting events, sports, exoticism, and human interest or animal stories, by demanding more coverage of Nazi spectacles.130 With the beginning of the war, though, the ministry replaced the four newsreels with Die Deutsche Wochenschau, which it intended to turn into its most forceful propaganda vehicle, reaching the largest audience possible and “building a bridge between the front and the homeland.”131 Much effort went into the project. All of the cameramen were inducted into the Wehrmacht and deployed in combat, and the resulting footage made audiences feel they were in the middle of the fighting. To make the intended reception possible, the newsreel’s issues had to be up-to-date, which required that the necessary steps happen quickly: military censorship of the footage, editing it, synchronizing the rough cut with accurate sounds of combat and martial music, writing and recording the narration, Goebbels’s and Hitler’s reviews and changes, and, finally, printing enough copies for every movie theater to give it a timely screening. By several months into the war, the process was well rehearsed, and with the German invasion of France in 1940 Die Deutsche Wochenschau was enthusiastically received in the theaters, according to the press and the SD’s informants.132 The editing was dynamic; the sounds were exciting; and the images were gripping, for example, shots from the cockpit of a fighter plane. However, it turned out that to maintain its popularity with audiences the newsreel also needed the German military to maintain its advance. Once that ended, in the winter of 1941, the images became monotonous—training and everyday military life—and audiences grew bored and more critical. In-

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formants reported that audience members, soldiers on furlough among them, loudly objected to what they thought was staged or inaccurate.133 What annoyed even more viewers was that the newsreel continued to proclaim victories. Apparently, Goebbels could not convince Hitler that the newsreel should prepare the audience for the coming hardships.134 When they no longer could be denied, in summer 1944, the newsreel turned to the propaganda of fear to justify its appeals to hold out. But that could not draw people to movie theaters; in fact, informants reported that people came in late or left early to avoid the newsreel.135 The reports of such unruliness among audience members raise a final issue that I mention as a subject for future study. Though most people go to the movies with people they know, it is still true that films, unlike the other mass media, are consumed collectively in anonymous gatherings. From the beginning, there has been a custom of noisily commenting, applauding, and jeering during a screening. Although German movie audiences had become more disciplined over the decades, the possibility remained that audience members would spontaneously voice their opinion for all in the theater to hear. Before they came to power, the Nazis had staged protests in and in front of movie theaters as a way to attract media attention and get films withdrawn, most famously All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930.136 Even after they had taken power and controlled film distribution, some Nazis continued the practice. Early on, they fabricated some movie-theater riots, for example against Jewish and “Jewish-looking” actors.137 It is also true that informants for the SD reported that Göring, swelling his opulent uniforms, often provoked laughter; Goebbels’s mistress, the actress Lída Baarová, was booed; and during the war audience members complained that advertised goods were not available.138 To be sure, the Nazi regime did not have to fear that an insurrection would start in movie theaters. However, these facts remind historians not to underestimate the agency of movie audiences.

Television The Nazi regime promoted television primarily for national prestige; it did not affect media consumption much.139 At the 1928 International Radio Exhibition in Berlin, visitors considered television prototypes as technological sensations despite their very poor image quality. Long before it became possible, tele-vision— seeing what was happening far away—was a universal fantasy. In order to beat the British, the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft (Reich Broadcasting Corporation) announced in April 1935 the “world’s first regularly broadcasted television program” and in the following weeks opened fifteen public television parlors (Fernsehstuben) in and around Berlin, in which on three days of the week about thirty visitors could watch a mixed program of one and a half hours on small screens free of charge. Only some cabaret acts were broadcasted live; the rest of the program was clips from cinema newsreels and feature films. So visitors probably came to witness the innovation, and perhaps in anticipation, since several Nazi

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publications asserted that television sets would be on sale to the public in the near future; some even spoke of a Volksfernseher (people’s television set). However, the claim was a bold exaggeration, as the broadcasting range was still limited to Berlin, the few home-receivers were handmade and expensive, and mass-production was years away. The television did score the regime a domestic and international propaganda success during the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. The most advanced equipment for live broadcasting was employed; the number of Fernsehstuben was increased, some with large-screen sets; air time was extended to eight hours per day; and about 10,000 daily visitors showed up to watch. But this level of popularity was temporary. After the Olympics, programing returned to a few live acts and coverage of current events, for example, the party rallies, that was amateurish in comparison to the newsreels. Soon after the war began, the Fernsehstuben’s sets were moved to military hospitals. In the end, it seems that once the fascination had worn off most of Fernsehstuben’s regular visitors were people who could not afford the movies, and some may have been just as interested in a warm, dry place as in the program.140

Audiences of Nazism Most who study the history of National Socialism agree that it would be enlightening to know more about the Third Reich’s media audiences, the attitudes with which people consumed the products they chose, and the effects both individual media products and media coverage in general had on recipients. However, most authors point, with much regret, to the fact that there is no scientific opinion research from this time.141 Several discuss the degree to which the various SD reports, together with Sopade’s Deutschland-Berichte and the reports gathered by Neu Beginnen, can make up for the lack.142 However, the authors in this volume look at less-studied kinds of promising primary sources and test a number of different approaches to the study of audiences and their reception. The first such source that may come to mind is ego-documents like diaries and letters of the time. A historian must study many such documents to find a significant number of comments on media and its reception, for the desire to engage such subjects was rarely the reason why someone wrote a diary entry or letter. A “significant” sample, I suggest, is one that allows us to reconstruct a spectrum of responses on the basis of which we can discuss which kinds of circumstances may have made which kinds of responses more or less likely than others. Such reconstruction is more fruitful than classifying individuals into sorts and trying to determine (and getting frustrated about) how many cases of each sort constitute the practical equivalent of the social scientist’s representative sample.143 Janosch Steuwer has studied about 140 diaries from the Third Reich.144 In his contribution to this volume, he focuses on entries from the summer of 1934 in which diarists tried to make sense of newspaper and radio reports that the government had dispatched members of the SS to kill the SA leader Ernst Röhm and

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more than one hundred other men in order to thwart the (fictional) coup d’état they had (supposedly) planned. In this case study, Steuwer reassesses Kershaw’s central thesis in The “Hitler Myth” that Germans’ widespread blind belief in this tale laid the groundwork for their remarkably enduring admiration of the Führer and the “detachment of Hitler in popular consciousness from the Nazi Party itself and from the misdeeds and sullied repute of local Party bosses.”145 Beginning with the fact that Thomas Mann, reading various foreign papers in exile in Zurich, never doubted that the government’s talk of the planned putsch was its excuse for what really was the cold-blooded murder of former accomplices who had become inconvenient, Steuwer asks whether consumers of the controlled news in Nazi Germany could also distinguish facts from lies. Rather than just assessing diarists’ opinions as part of a discussion of the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda, Steuwer found sources that allow him to study how diarists formed their opinions. He shows that they understood that the regime expected them to keep themselves informed politically and to trust the controlled media. Therefore, among the diarists who blindly believed the legend of the “Röhm putsch” were some who used their diaries to demonstrate to themselves that they were fulfilling the regime’s expectation. Want of evidence and contradictions in the news coverage did not go unnoticed, but these diarists explicitly dismissed their importance. Steuwer calls them “emphatically uncritical.” And, knowing their whole diaries, he can tell us that in this instance they reaffirmed an attitude they had already decided to take toward Nazi media and Nazi rule in general. Thus, the dubious news of the putsch did not affect their faith in either. The same was true for another group of nondissenting diarists who Steuwer calls “emphatically critical.” They used their diaries to prove to themselves that, though they supported the regime, they did not believe whatever they read but made up their own minds about political matters. It is striking, however, that none of the many diarists Steuwer studied either questioned the story of Röhm and his co-conspirators plotting against Hitler or criticized their assassination. Rather, the emphatically critical rejected the media’s glorification of Hitler as the guarantor of order and morality and criticized his decision to keep Röhm on after the Nazis’ leftist political opponents had revealed and scandalized his homosexuality in 1931–32. (Apparently, the political opposition and Nazi supporters shared the homophobia that made the invention of homosexual men conspiring against the state plausible.146) Uncritical and critical news consumers came to the same (false) assessment of the story as true. Steuwer concludes, contra Kershaw, that German society was not held together so much by a shared, steadfast loyalty to Hitler as by controlled media communication that gave Germans different ways to consume fake news. Annina Hofferberth searched ego-documents for evidence to challenge the propagandistic images of hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic participants and spectators at the annual party rallies in Nuremberg. It turns out that one does not come across so many archived diaries and letters whose authors comment on this climax of the calendar of Nazi festivities; in eight archives, Hofferberth found sixteen such ego-documents. She discusses the eight most instructive in her chap-

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ter. It is at first surprising that none of the authors wrote about the rallies’ most prominent events; rather, they took note mostly of the sort of nonpolitical occurrences historians would consider trivial and hardly worthy of study. However, her findings suggest that historians will misunderstand what participants and visitors took from the rallies if they study just the official programs. First of all, nobody attended the full program because, as Hofferberth explains, tickets were expensive and, as her sample of ego-documents shows, authors found the nightly fireworks, a Luis Trenker movie playing in town one year, and the old city of Nuremberg at least as attractive. Catching a glimpse of Hitler, even if it was only as his limousine sped by, was something people waited as many hours for as they would have needed to get a good place for an official event or speech. Besides, the few writers who mentioned attending a speech wrote that they caught only a few sentences. Yet they seem not to have been upset about this. One was much more moved by joining with the crowd in singing the national anthem. On the other hand, local residents complained about the crowds blocking traffic and filling the street cars, the noise and drunkenness, and the rally participants that some apparently felt obliged to host. Though there is an element of chance in Hofferberth’s sample, it does prove that Nazis and the Party’s supporters recognized some of the rallies’ shortcomings, got bored, and criticized the behavior of rowdy Nazis. However, it also proves that their disappointments did not make them any less supportive of the regime. Bernhard Fulda also found telling letters and diary entries that shed new light on audiences’ reception of the “Degenerate Art” exhibitions, the first of which opened in Munich in summer 1937 and the others in about sixteen different cities in the following months. With a total of 3.2 million visitors, this traveling show of changing collections of expressionist, social-critical, and abstract artworks presented as entartet was one of the Third Reich’s most successful propaganda campaigns. But Fulda argues that it was more successful than historians realize in that its clear-cut distinction between art that was undesirable, or not even considered to be art, and the great German art it promoted enjoyed a long afterlife with ‘undesirable’ and ‘great’ switched. He also argues that the openness of works of art to the judgements of viewers allowed for competing interpretations of the exhibitions’ remarkable success. Did visitors buy into the denunciation, or did many of them come to enjoy sophisticated works of modern art for the last time, since German museums would no longer exhibit them? Such overly general questions reproduce the wishful thinking of the time, but they have nevertheless found their way into history books. In rejecting them, Fulda lays out other possible motivations for visiting an exhibition that the newspapers said was immensely popular, produced long queues, was free of charge (in Munich), and entrance to which was supposedly prohibited to those under the age of sixteen. And his findings in private communications further complicate the picture in fruitful ways. All of these visitors believed that they had been members of an audience with polarized opinions about the exhibited works and their denunciatory display. However, while several praised the works of some artists—Fulda focusses

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on Emil Nolde—and defended them against the National Socialist rejection as entartet, they were happy to accept that denunciation of the other works. This was also true of Nolde himself, who successfully demanded that his paintings be removed from the traveling exhibition and its catalogue. Letters are also the starting point of Hannah Ahlheim’s study of an activist audience among the readership of Der Stürmer. From 1935 onward, the vulgar, hateful, antisemitic weekly published letters to the editors in which readers proudly announced that they had built and erected wooden display cases—socalled Stürmerkästen—photographs of which they included, in which they posted for the local public the most recent issue of their beloved paper. At first, it was only the letter-writers who posed for the camera in front of their cases, but soon little scenes of Stürmer readers gathered around a newly erected Stürmerkasten, including whole families and local professional groups, were staged and photographed. Der Stürmer’s publication of the photographs seems to have spurred imitation and competition, and over time the pictured Stürmerkästen got bigger, more inventive, and more richly decorated with antisemitic slogans and carvings. In this way, Stürmer readers, who must have been aware of the disdain many people, including Nazi Party members, had for their pornographic paper, empowered themselves both as regards the hundreds of thousands of other Stürmer readers and in their local communities. In their letters to Der Stürmer’s editors, they often described their unveiling ceremonies for their new cases as a triumph enjoyed after a long struggle against local authorities or opposition. The cases forced all passersby to react to them and the issues of Der Stürmer on display in one way or another. Ahlheim argues that these Stürmer activists turned the sites of their Stürmerkästen into political arenas. Their efforts to spread antisemitism intensified when activists used their Stürmerkästen to post lists of the names and addresses of local Jews, shops owned by Jews, and the names of Gentiles who had been observed, and sometimes even photographed, still shopping in them. By erecting Stürmerkästen, staunch Stürmer readers changed the local political climate. Jews felt threatened by these demonstrations of antisemitism, and the display cases and their effects contributed to their increasing social isolation and the decline of their businesses. Stürmerkästen enabled the most radical readers of a paper to which many Germans turned up their noses to make themselves heard, seen, and feared and to push for more radical antisemitic policies. Peter Fritzsche turns our attention to another way in which audiences in the Third Reich actively participated in National Socialist policies and antisemitic violence. Since their “years of struggle” (Kampfzeit), Nazis had practiced calland-response rituals; in the best-known example, someone yells “Sieg” and the crowd responds with “Heil” as loudly as possible. The Nazis carried this effective strategy for energizing a crowd from their years in the opposition over to public mass gatherings from 1933 onward. Thus, spectators not only became part of Nazi propaganda by appearing in photographs and films of mass audiences, which seemed to prove the propaganda’s effectiveness, they also helped create an impressive (or scary, depending on the listener) soundscape. Fritzsche is con-

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vinced that audiences knew the performance that was expected from them and showed up (and paid entrance fees!) exactly because they wanted to be part of the chorus responding to the call. Goebbels was eager to include a similar kind of excitement and approval in the radio broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches. The noise of the impatiently waiting crowds and then their feverish applause of the speech would confirm for listeners that it was the Führer who spoke. And those radio listeners who felt no inclination to join in the applause would realize how marginalized they were. From the beginning, Fritzsche stresses, the Nazi repertoire of calls and responses included threats of anti-Jewish violence, for example, “Juda verrecke! / Deutschland erwache!” (“Jews, Drop Dead! / Germany Awake!”). He argues that these calls and responses made the participants complicit and reiterated the Nazi logic that Jews had to die in order for Germany to survive, a logic that an increasing number of Germans reversed once they feared that the bombs falling on their cities were the punishment for their having set synagogues on fire some years previously. Audience members can themselves become producers of media messages by submitting contributions. As I mentioned earlier, Der Stürmer and Das Schwarze Korps invited readers to send in their letters to the editors, complaints, jokes, denunciations—everything that would show the government that a part of the audience demanded even more radical or consequential racial policies. Two contributions consider some of the ways in which audience members’ own media products can elucidate the process of reception. Historians have investigated this connection for photography by comparing amateur and official Nazi photographs,147 examining what amateur photographs of violence against political opponents and Jews reveal about the attitudes of onlookers148 and studying the typical motifs of German soldiers’ snapshots of the war and how they arranged them in albums.149 Michaela Scharf adds to this body of work by examining amateur films of the Reichsautobahn, a frequent motif in Nazi propaganda and, as it turns out, a popular subject of amateur filmmakers. Scharf found sixty-six Austrian home movies of trips that include footage of the Reichsautobahn, in several of which scenes of driving on the freeway take up more running-time than those of the sites the filmmakers were driving to. As she shows, amateur filmmakers got their inspiration from the many films of the “Straßen des Führers” that the regime produced, well aware of the representative power of these newly built long lanes set into the landscape and reaching to the horizon, and from the literature for amateur filmmakers, which advised them to imitate these impressive filmic images of effortless motion. Analyzing two examples of film amateurs’ visions of the new freeway and their personal mobility on it, Scharf identifies the elements of the Nazis’ visually rich Reichsautobahn propaganda that these amateurs appropriated for their filmic self-representations and those that they ignored. Neither amateur was a high-ranking Nazi and probably not even a member of the Nazi Party, and, yet, they found personal filmic means to express their satisfaction with the regime’s offer—to the few well-to-do automobilists—of enjoying the sensa-

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tion of smooth, fast driving and exploring the attractions of their homeland, the Reichsautobahn being the newest, most modern, and most auspicious one. Scharf suggests that these personal films, whose viewers would not have been suspicious that they were made with propagandistic intentions, were more effective than official advertisements at convincing their audiences that the Nazi regime had brought about a new era of hitherto unknown progress and pleasure as promised. Julia Torrie’s case study of so-called France books confirms Scharf ’s idea. She shows that the German occupation government in Paris invited ordinary soldiers from across the ranks of the occupation forces to contribute stories, essays, art works, and photographs to these publications to inform their audience of soldiers about the country they occupied. It held contests, organized exhibitions, and printed catalogues of the submitted works and always announced that ordinary members of the occupation forces, not members of the propaganda companies, had produced them. However, this was not always true, and even when it was, contributors’ writings were usually edited or even rewritten to make them fit the occupation government’s propaganda lines better. This practice indicates that the regime thought that audiences would be more drawn to media products and more easily convinced of their messages if they believed that they were not the work of propagandists. Torrie also argues that the number and variety of France books indicate that many German soldiers stationed in France were interested in learning about the country and its culture and history; that is, they considered themselves to be culturally knowledgeable, appreciative conquerors, and they wanted to see the German occupation of France as a civilized endeavor to right the wrong of the outcome of World War I. At least that was the interpretation of soldiers’ occupation experiences that the France books offered, and it was an interpretation many of the amateur writers, photographers, and artists seemed to have been happy to support and help spread. According to Torrie, the France books by and for German soldiers are yet another example of the high degree to which Nazi rule was a “participatory dictatorship” and of how it blurred the line between the producers and consumers of propaganda.150 Another approach to studying audiences and their reception despite the scarcity of reliable primary sources is to investigate how media producers conceived of their audiences, tried to address them effectively, changed their strategies when they were unsatisfied with the results, and how they assessed the effects of those changes. Jochen Hung’s chapter pertains to the years before Hitler was appointed chancellor, when the NSDAP was gaining more and more votes. In the early 1930s, the Nazi Party’s newspapers were not winning as many readers as the party was new voters, which leads Hung to conclude that many Germans at the time voted for the Nazi Party but read prodemocratic, or at least non-Nazi, newspapers and magazines that probably dismissed, ridiculed, or otherwise expressed disdain for these political climbers on the far right. This at least is how the editors of the big, nationally distributed newspapers of the two liberal publishing companies in Berlin, Ullstein and Mosse, diagnosed the situation. Hung argues that the papers’ lack of influence on at least part of their readership

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shook these editors hard, for German journalists had traditionally seen themselves as opinion-leaders whose papers took clear political stands and explained to their audiences why theirs were the right positions to take. Consequently, Hung argues, they were forced to acknowledge that readers picked and chose from papers much more independently than they had assumed and, insisting on making up their own minds, resented being lectured to about politics. The companies’ newspapers’ various responses were uncannily similar to what we see today. Some papers devised new sections and invited readers to contribute to them in order to ensure them that they were taken seriously. Several editors ordered political reporters to eliminate any partisanship from their reporting, which some commentators criticized as political opportunism and argued that circumstances demanded even clearer and more precise argumentation. Others realized that the press had paid too much attention to the Nazis in the past and thereby made them appear more significant than they then were but had now become with their unintended support. Pamela Swett also studies observations that audiences could not be persuaded or manipulated as easily as expected. By the late 1920s, the advertising industry, the media sector probably most suspected of psychological manipulation, had come to realize that it could no longer underestimate the audience and had to address both men and women as mature consumers who based their choices on information, experience, and what they considered trustworthy advice. That understanding was not much changed by the events of 1933. The Nazi regime did not appreciate ingratiation and early on passed the Law for the Protection of National Symbols (Gesetz zum Schutz nationaler Symbole), prohibiting the commercial use of the swastika and other party emblems and slogans. Businesses that wanted to increase their sales by insinuating their support for the new government had to find less blatant ways of doing that. At the same time, the propaganda ministry wanted to induce advertisers to work for the government’s interest, stimulate the economy, and inform the “Volksgemeinschaft” about the consumer behavior that was expected of it while also denouncing what it considered to be underhanded business and advertising practices, a reproach it leveled almost exclusively against businesses owned by Jews. Advertising of consumer goods got tricky even before the war, in 1936, when the regime no longer wanted to stimulate their consumption and the Four Year Plan limited their production in favor of rearmament and other war-related industries. Advertisers then had to figure out how to tell consumers to conserve relevant raw materials in ways that still fostered their companies’ ends and from which inferior substitutes they should dissociate their brands to safeguard their reputation. Swett shows how the Nazi regime’s ability to control market activity was limited with respect to advertisers as well as consumers. And she reminds us, once again, that supposedly clear distinctions between historical media producers and consumers obscure our understanding of how media worked in the Third Reich. Both advertisers and the regime were keen to learn about consumers’ opinions, and many consumers seem to have been happy to discuss their ideas, so that the distinction between the

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senders and the receivers of messages was blurred in the ensuing multidirectional communication, and their power relations shifted case by case. Neil Gregor’s contribution begins with his insights that the Nazi regime was not the only possessor of agency and its propaganda did not inevitably synchronize public opinion. He argues that ‘propaganda’ connotes a top-down process and that we should reject the received view that the regime’s long-lasting popularity verifies the effectiveness of its propaganda, since that thesis can be neither falsified nor confirmed. It is more productive to investigate how everyday media products were adapted to National Socialism and which kinds of audience reception and appropriation they made possible. Gregor’s study pursues this line on the basis of concerts’ advertising brochures and programs. For decades, concert hall culture had been an essential part of German cultural nationalism, a bourgeois practice that showed one belonged to an affluent group that appreciated highbrow culture and knew how to dress for and behave at its presentations. Concertgoers conceived of these conventions as apolitical, and many probably wanted them to remain so. But in the years after 1933, concert programs featured more and more small changes in aesthetics and content, which gave audiences both a sense of continuity and an opportunity to reimagine their musical preferences in new, e.g., more obviously nationalistic, ways. However, Gregor argues that this openness did not constitute a limitation to the regime’s ideological reach. Quite the opposite, the wide range of nationalistic cultural rhetoric familiarized people with National Socialism and, so, made one’s own gradual adjustment to it feel natural and not contradictory to one’s earlier attitudes and values. German news media reported some of the regime’s crimes and uses of terror, for among their functions were intimidating potential opponents, enforcing the social isolation of targeted groups, and making the population accomplices through their cognizance and acquiescence.151 Yet they rarely published visual documentation of Nazi violence. Many of the photographs of Nazi atrocities that come to mind today were taken by onlookers and circulated privately, if at all. For example, the regime instructed the press not to print any images of the anti-Jewish violence and destruction of synagogues and other Jewish property that occurred on 9 November 1938, and newspapers obeyed.152 The prohibition against photographs of the mass killings of civilians behind the Eastern Front, however, must have been policed quite loosely, as the many private photographs that German soldiers, police, and SS men took show that the photographer did not feel the need to be secretive. In concentration and death camps, the prohibition was easier to enforce, but perpetrators may also have been less proud of their deeds and therefore less inclined to violate the order. However, there were a few officially permitted exceptions.153 The best-known official photographic series from a death camp is the album the SS entitled Umsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn (“Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary”), better known today as The Auschwitz Album. It contains nearly 200 photographs that the camp’s Erkennungsdienst (Identification Service) took upon the arrival of various deportation trains bringing Jews from Hungary to Birkenau between May and July 1944. Ulrike

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Koppermann argues that the photographs chosen for the album and their arrangement into seven chapters that follow the steps of the selection process indicate that Höß, the camp’s commandant, intended it to demonstrate to SS leaders, and perhaps some government officials, how efficiently the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau selected the relatively few Jews fit for forced labor from the hundreds of thousands of deportees. We can only speculate about whether the recipients of the album’s probably fifteen handmade copies understood its narrative in exactly this way. However, the album found another audience its producers had not intended to address. One of the copies was discovered during the liberation of the camps, and between 1980 and 2005 four different editions were published and thousands of copies sold. Contrary to the producers’ intentions in 1944, the audience decades later viewed the album as a means to commemorate the dead and return some of their faces to the otherwise anonymous victims of mass murder. In her study of this reception, Koppermann analyzes the four editors’ choices of titles, layouts, and commentaries and a large number of critics’ reviews. It turns out that few reviewers considered these editorial choices and their effects. Most just presented their personal readings of the historical album as if the edition they were reviewing granted them direct access to it. Several commented on the fact that the photographs showed neither physical violence nor the gas chambers to which all those not selected for forced labor were sent shortly after being photographed. Some reviewers voiced their discomfort over looking into the faces of people about to be murdered. At the same time, they thought they could read the album against its producers’ intentions and reappropriate it for the commemoration of the victims. Koppermann shows how all of the editions, in slightly different ways, encouraged this reading by focusing not on the SS’s likely interests but on the remarkable story of the album’s discovery. It was an Auschwitz survivor, Lili Jacob (later Zelmanovic, later Meier), who in the turmoil of forced evacuations and camp liberations found and kept the one known copy, which some Nazi or SS official must have left behind during his flight. Jacob identified several members of her murdered family in some of the photographs and recognized herself in one. As a witness in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, she presented the album to the court, and in 1980 she donated it to Yad Vashem, which permitted the editions. Some editors titled the album after her, and many reviewers called it her “family album”; so it was long assumed that the album specifically documented her transport. Only recently have historians proved that the photographs are of at least four different transports. Thus, it seems that the album’s arrangement of the photographs makes viewers think either that they document the selection for one transport or that the selection process at Birkenau was so well established that it always went the same way, which was likely the message to the intended audience. In addition to perpetrators’ and accomplices’ photographs and rare film footage, which had had only limited, private audiences during the Third Reich, postwar audiences’ visual imagination of the Holocaust is based on the films

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(and photographs) that Allied film crews shot of the liberation of the camps and other places of mass murder. In his contribution, Bernhard Gross argues that these shocking images were well known to German moviegoers after the end of the war since the Allies screened their atrocity films to them. Gross does not study empirical sources of audiences’ responses but as a film scholar takes a different approach to audience reception. He analyzes both atrocity films’ and postwar feature films’ modes of addressing their German audiences. He employs neophenomenological film theory, which does not distinguish between spectator and film. Rather, Gross conceives of them as together constituting filmic perception, with the film offering different ways it can be perceived and spectators choosing from among them or, rather, emotionally responding to some but not to others. Gross first examines Allied atrocity films’ unconscious aesthetical structure and identifies three of their central topoi: addressing the individual; displaying the act of perception, thereby making the spectator self-conscious of her or his own act of perceiving; and underlying disorder and order. He then argues that these topoi migrated from Allied atrocity films to many German postwar feature films, which reconfigured them in one of two ways. Gross discusses several examples of films that alluded to iconic scenes of suffering Nazi victims but replaced the victims with Germans suffering from bombings or displacement. Such films, which appropriated victimhood for all Germans, were popular with postwar audiences for some time. A few less popular films took the second alternative and filled the void that Allied atrocity films inevitably left by telling fictitious stories of victims of Nazi persecution who escape from a deportation train or concentration camp and survive to start life over. Gross does not discuss films’ narratives; he points our attention to their filmic modes of expression in regard to mise en scène, cinematography, style, and the rhythm of montage. Gross’s contribution, like Koppermann’s, demonstrates that the endeavor of this volume—to better understand audiences of Nazism—must not limit itself to sources from the Third Reich. I do not want to adopt Jane Caplan’s last words to this volume in my first words to it. For it is not up to me as its editor to judge whether our contributions succeed at what we set out to achieve. These thorough media analyses of diverse, largely unknown primary sources by (mostly) historians and media, literature, and film scholars hopefully illuminate the fruitfulness of combining the insights and methodologies of media studies and history, particularly micro-, everyday, and cultural history. Our close-up studies of historical media uses reveal that they are much more complex than scholars usually realize, especially when they suspect that media have harmful effects, as historians of Nazi Germany have for quite some time. Not all of our findings will come as a surprise. It was to be expected that audiences of Nazism did not just receive messages and understand them in the intended ways. Neither will it be news that the Nazi regime realized that it needed much of its audience to be satisfied with most of its media consumption, that is to say, that its media policies could not ignore common needs, expectations, and

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tastes but had to cater to them to some degree. But even those of our readers who think of audiences as active, heterogeneous, and willful and, so, do not assume that media have very powerful effects may be astounded to learn that the fact that media users made their own choices of what among the available media products to consume and their own decisions about how to make sense of them lead to productions of meaning that helped stabilize the dictatorship. In their selective appropriations of media, it seems that many Germans chose content that did not require them to entertain serious concerns about the regime’s inhumanity but, rather, what would quiet any worries they may have had. And this may have been easier since most everybody else seemed to do the same and competing patterns of how to interpret what was going on had disappeared from the media. Ulrike Weckel is Professor of History in the Media and the Public at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her research interests include postwar dealings with Germany’s Nazi past, gender history, media history, and audience reception. She is the author of Beschämende Bilder. Deutsche Reaktionen auf alliierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012) and has analyzed audience responses to representations of the Nazi past in various feature films and radio and theater plays.

Notes I warmly thank Greg Sax for his sensitive, astute editing of this introduction and for our many and intense discussions over its ideas, both of which together finally enabled me to say exactly what I wanted to say in this still foreign language. 1. I have borrowed this from Niklas Luhmann’s statement: “Was wir über unsere Gesellschaft, ja über die Welt, in der wir leben, wissen, wissen wir durch die Massenmedien.” N. Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien (Wiesbaden: Springer, 1996), 9. 2. M. Wildt, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 40–41. On Nazi use of media and propaganda before 1933 in general, see G. Paul, Aufstand der Bilder. Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1992). 3. This approach is in line with one of the basic arguments in J. Caplan, Nazi Germany: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), particularly 73–87. My introduction owes a lot to Jane’s book and our ongoing conversations about how to write the history of Nazism. 4. Janosch Steuwer found many newspaper clippings in the diaries he studied. And Corey Ross points to a German survey of media use in Saxonian villages from 1939 that found that most who subscribed to the local daily read the local section and advertisements while less than a half read the political section. J. Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse”. Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), see, e.g., 401–2 and passim; C. Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 322–23.

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5. The Völkischer Beobachter encouraged party members to do so on 4 March 1933, when for the first time all German radio stations broadcasted Hitler’s final election campaign speech live from Königsberg. M. Favre, “Rundfunkereignisse im Dritten Reich (1933– 1939). Fallstudie und Erfahrungsbericht,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 66, no. 11/12 (2015): 663–80, 668. 6. Luise Solmitz, who called herself and her family “Zeitgenossen 2. Ranges” because of their lack of a radio receiver, vividly described her listening to the broadcast of the “Tag von Potsdam” at her neighbors’ and their different perceptions. Cited in B. Meyer, “Tagebuch Luise Solmitz,” in Bedrohung, Hoffnung, Skepsis. Vier Tagebücher des Jahres 1933, ed. F. Bajohr, B. Meyer, and J. Szodrzynski, 143–270 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 178. 7. See H.  D. Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein. Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1981), 7–19. 8. H. Zeutschner, Die braune Mattscheibe. Fernsehen im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1996). 9. Birthe Kundrus points out that one solution seems to have been to see oneself as an expert on propaganda and determine what of it was well done and what was too exaggerated. B. Kundrus, “Totale Unterhaltung? Die kulturelle Kriegführung 1939 bis 1945 in Film, Rundfunk und Theater,” in Die Deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945, vol. 2, ed. J. Echternkamp, 93–157 (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2005), 148. (The volume was translated into English.) 10. On the illegal Communist press work in Hamburg, see K. C. Führer, Medienmetropole Hamburg. Mediale Öffentlichkeiten 1930–1960 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2008), 327–28; on Sopade’s Deutschland-Berichte, small parts of which were sent back to Germany, see B. Stöver, Volksgemeinschaft im Dritten Reich. Die Konsensbereitschaft der Deutschen aus der Sicht sozialistischer Exilberichte (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993), 73–74. 11. Foreign Communist and Socialist media were excluded. Listening to Radio Moskau was prohibited, and several cases were prosecuted already before the war. M. P. Hensle, Rundfunkverbrechen. Das Hören von “Feindsendern” im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Metropol, 2003), 17–26. 12. See N. Frei and J. Schmitz, Journalismus im Dritten Reich (Munich: Beck, 1989), 121–35; C. Studt, ed., “Diener des Staates” oder “Widerstand zwischen den Zeilen”? Die Rolle der Presse im Dritten Reich (Münster: LIT, 2007). 13. A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher, 1925), chapter 6: “Kriegspropaganda,” 193– 205. For an overview of theories of the masses and propaganda in the 1920s and National Socialists’ receptions of them, see T. Bussemer, Propaganda. Konzepte und Theorien (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2005), 61–193. 14. Those readers probably took refuge in what in media studies is called the ‘third person effect’: the conviction that others can and need to be influenced by propaganda much more than oneself. However, according to the findings of Othmar Plöckinger, who reconstructs Mein Kampf ’s contemporary reception in detail, topics other than propaganda figured much more prominently in the early debates that were still shaped by völkisch far-right rivalries. Only one review in Deutschlands Erneuerung of 1925 explicitly praised Hitler’s remarks on mass propaganda and psychology; most others ignored this subject. Georg Stark in his 1930 book Moderne politische Propaganda, published by the NSDAP Reichspropagandaleitung, mentioned Mein Kampf only twice and in passing—in other words, by no means as a foundational text on the matter. Gerhard Schultze-Pfaelzer, a follower of Otto Straßer, in his 1931 brochure “Anti-Hitler” suspected that Hitler was actually afraid of the masses. He argued that Hitler’s request that his speeches be sched-

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15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

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uled in the evenings, since audiences would then put up less mental resistance, could only mean that he did not trust the opinions he offered them. O. Plöckinger, Geschichte eines Buches. Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf ” 1922–1945, 2nd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 333, 353, 360. Patrick Merziger has pointed out that the literature’s frequently occurring image of Goebbels as a “genius conductor” (“genialer Orchesterleiter”) was actually invented by Goebbels himself. By uncritically quoting Goebbels’s depictions of a cleverly orchestrated media system serving a single purpose, authors certify (beglaubigen) the propaganda minister’s daydreams (Träumereien) of omnipotence. P. Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und “Deutscher Humor.” Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 27–28. P. Longerich, Joseph Goebbels: Biographie (Munich: Siedler, 2010), 675–91. For a condensed overview, see W. Ranke, “Propaganda,” in Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, ed. W. Benz, H. Graml, and H. Weiß, 34–49 (Munich: dtv, 1997). If things had gone according to Goebbels’s wishes, he would also have been responsible for Volksbildung (people’s education), including the oversight of schools and universities. See Longerich, Joseph Goebbels, 211–18. Goebbels tacitly included in this calculation the 8 percent of the NSDAP’s right-wing bourgeois coalition partners: the DNVP and Der Stahlhelm. The NSDAP alone did not garner a majority of votes even though the opposing parties ran in the face of credible threats of violence. “Rede vor der Presse über die Errichtung des Reichspropagandaministeriums, 15 March 1933,” in J. Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen: 14 Jahre Nationalsozialismus (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933), 135–50; excerpts from this speech as well as from his speeches to representatives of the broadcasting industry, on 25 March 1933, and the film industry, at the Kaiserhof on 28 March 1933, are translated into English in D. Welch, The Third Reich. Politics and Propaganda (London: Routledge, 1993), 136–54. All other parties had been banned by this time. The only list on the ballot was dominated by Nazis and included some “guests,” who were known supporters of Nazi policies. On the function of such elections, see H. Richter and R. Jessen, “Elections, Plebiscites, and Festivals,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. R. Gellately, 85–117 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Speer’s final statement on 31 August 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 22 (Nuremberg, 1947), 405–7, online at https:// www.uni-marburg.de/de/icwc/dokumentation/dokumente/protokolle-nuernberg/nt vol22.pdf, last accessed 10 December 2022. Cf. E. F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944–1946 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1975). B. Chamberlin, Kultur auf Trümmern. Berliner Berichte der amerikanischen Information Control Section Juli–Dezember 1946 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1979), 11–15. As arguably the most influential formulations, see H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (1951; Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), esp. 341–62; C. Friedrich and Z. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd ed. (1956; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), esp. 129–47. K. D. Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur. Entstehung – Struktur – Folgen des Nationalsozialismus, 6th ed. (1969; Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1979), 164. E.g., H.-U. Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt. Deutschland 1933–1945 (1986; reprint, Berlin: Siedler, 1998), 412, 427–29; B. J. Wendt, Deutschland 1933–1945. Das “Dritte Reich”

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28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

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(Hannover: Fackelträger, 1995), 137–44; L. Herbst, Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), 85. E.g., Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur, 164; Wendt, Deutschland, 137. “Ansprache an die Intendanten und Direktoren der Rundfunkgesellschaften,” 25 March 1933, reprinted in H. Heiber, ed., Goebbels Reden, vol. 1: 1932–1939 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), 82–107, quotations on 91 and 106 (“das allermodernste und . . . das allerwichtigste Massenbeeinflussungsinstrument, das es überhaupt gibt”); quoted, e.g., in Wendt, Deutschland, 139–40; W. Benz, Geschichte des Dritten Reichs (Munich: Beck, 2000), 60. E.g., Herbst, Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland, 86. As a particularly egregious recent example, see O. Jungen, “Erregerphantasien. Eine sentimentale Schneise im frühen Radiodiskurs,” in Die Massen bewegen. Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne, ed. F. Bösch and M. Borutta, 307–24 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2006). Jungen also adopts Marshall McLuhan’s bold thesis that Hitler owed his political existence only to the radio and public-address systems, 308. For a critical analysis of gendered conceptions of listening, see K. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1996), particularly 17–53. More on this below. In 1934, the Reichssender Köln phrased its self-conception as follows: “The main task of German broadcasting is to keep the German ready-to-receive for the hours, in which the Führer steps in front of the people in order to speak to them. It is our biggest concern to keep this millionfold invisible telephone connection to the heart of the people operable and effective, so that, in the case of an emergency, really everybody hears the Führer.” My translation. (“Hauptaufgabe des deutschen Rundfunks ist es ja, den deutschen Menschen in Empfangsbereitschaft zu halten für die Stunden, da der Führer vor das Volk hintritt, um zu ihm zu sprechen. Diese millionenfache unsichtbare Telefonverbindung zum Herzen des Volkes betriebstüchtig und leistungsfähig zu halten, damit im Ernstfall auch wirklich alle den Führer hören, – das ist unsere größte Sorge.”) “Der Reichssender Köln,” Reichs-Rundfunk. Entwicklung, Aufbau und Bedeutung 10, no. 57 (1934): 71–73, 72. B. Kleinhans, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Kino. Lichtspiel in der braunen Provinz (Cologne: PapyRossa, 2003), 29. Instructive primary sources became available in those years through editions of the Gestapo’s and Sicherheitsdienst’s internal secret reports on people’s uttered opinions on the one hand, and, on the other, of the reports from sympathizers of the former labor movement gathered by the executive of the Social Democratic Party and the socialist group Neu Beginnen in exile. All these reports relied on informants with limited contacts and their own agendas, which interpretations must take into consideration. H. Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich. Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, 18 vols. (Herrsching: Pawlak, 1984ff.); T. Klein, ed., Die Lageberichte der Geheimen Staatspolizei über die Provinz Hessen-Nassau, 1933–1936, 2 vols. (Cologne: Böhlau 1986); W. Ribbe, ed., Die Lageberichte der Geheimen Staatspolizei über die Provinz Brandenburg und die Reichshauptstadt Berlin (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998); H.-J. Rupieper and A. Serk, eds., Die Lageberichte der Geheimen Staatspolizei zur Provinz Sachsen 1933 bis 1936, 3 vols. (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2003–2006); K. Behnken, ed., Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, 7 vols. (Salzhausen: Nettelbeck, 1980); B. Stöver, ed., Berichte über die Lage in Deutschland. Die Lagemeldungen der Gruppe Neu Beginnen aus dem Dritten Reich 1933–1936 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996).

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36. See Martin Broszat’s description of this discovery during their Bayern-Projekt: M. Broszat, “Vorwort,” in Bayern in der NS-Zeit. Soziale Lage und politisches Verhalten der Bevölkerung im Spiegel vertraulicher Berichte, ed. Broszat, E. Fröhlich, and F. Wiesemann, 11–20 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1977), 11; for a critical evaluation of this famous early project’s potential and limits, see M. Wildt, “Das ‘Bayern-Projekt,’ die Alltagsforschung und die ‘Volksgemeinschaft,’” in Martin Broszat, der “Staat Hitlers” und die Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus, ed. N. Frei, 119–29 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007). 37. See J. Steuwer and H. Leßau, “‘Wer ist ein Nazi? Woran erkennt man ihn?’ Zur Unterscheidung von Nationalsozialisten und anderen Deutschen,” Mittelweg 36, no. 23.1 (2014): 30–51. 38. See A. Lüdtke, “Die Praxis von Herrschaft. Zur Analyse von Hinnehmen und Mitmachen im deutschen Faschismus,” in Terror, Herrschaft und Alltag im Nationalsozialismus. Probleme einer Sozialgeschichte des deutschen Faschismus, ed. B. Berlekamp and W. Röhr, 226–45 (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1995). 39. See P. F. Lazarsfeld and E. Katz, Personal Influence: The Part Played by the People in the Flow of Mass Communication (Glencoe: Free Press, 1955); and E. Katz, J. G. Blumler, and M. Gurevitsch, “Uses and Gratifications Research,” Public Opinion Quarterly 4th ser. 37 (1973–74): 509–23, to name two of the most influential studies. 40. I. Kershaw, “How Effective Was Nazi Propaganda?,” in Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, ed. D. Welch, 180–205 (London: Croom Helm, 1983). 41. Ibid., 182. 42. Ibid., 190–91. My discussion of this thesis does not consider later research on the attitudes of Germans toward German Jews and on their learning about the ongoing mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe because my interest here in Kershaw’s 1983 essay is its methodological approach to measuring the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda. 43. In the last two decades, a renewed discussion of the Volksgemeinschaft as a powerful idea at the time and of the term’s analytical potential has put forward many more aspects, which, again, are not relevant to the focus of this introduction. 44. See, e.g., U. von Hehl, Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft, 2nd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 29–30; R. J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 217; M. Grüttner, Das Dritte Reich 1933–1939 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2014), 340. 45. E.g., Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt, 434; Herbst, Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland, 89. 46. K.  C. Führer, “Die Tageszeitung als wichtigstes Massenmedium der nationalsozialistischen Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 55 (2007): 411–34. David Bankier assigns the press “a vital role as an agent of political socialization.” D. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 20. 47. This hypothesis can be found in, e.g., Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 141–49; von Hehl, Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft, 28; Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt, 434. 48. Führer, Medienmetropole , 323–441. 49. Führer, “Tageszeitung,” 417. 50. “Das deutsche Zeitungswesen,” in Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, vol. 3, 777–825. Führer’s main argument against the calculations in the Sopade report is that it compares the circulation figures for 1934 and 1935 to those of 1932, which were too high as they included large numbers of free copies as well as returns. However, the Sopade copyeditor did mention the “Auflagenschwindel” common in 1932; yet, unlike Führer, he or she assumed that Nazi papers after 1933 might well have also

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51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

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published overly high figures, since the Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft exercised far less control over them than over the non-party papers. However, the report’s estimations of a huge decline in readership as high as 45 percent was most probably far too optimistic. Bankier, Germans and the Final Solution, 21. Ibid., 22–23. O. J. Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); K.-D. Abel, Presselenkung im NS-Staat. Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Publizistik in der nationalsozialistischen Zeit (Berlin: Colloquium, 1968); Frei and Schmitz, Journalismus im Dritten Reich. The Nazi regime also allowed Jewish German papers to continue to publish until November 1938, when they were all prohibited, and the propaganda ministry established the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt as the only Jewish paper permitted in Germany. See M. Nagel, “1933 als Zäsur? Zu Erscheinungsbedingungen und Funktionen der deutsch-jüdischen Presse vor und nach der Machtübergabe an die Nationalsozialisten,” Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte 17 (2015): 131–66; K. Diehl, Die jüdische Presse im Dritten Reich. Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Fremdbestimmung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997). The Presseanweisungen (press instructions) journalists received from the propaganda ministry were to be followed and then destroyed. However, some journalists kept and hid their notes; so historians can study those parts of the instructions. H. Bohrmann and G. Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit. Edition und Dokumentation, 7 vols. (Munich: Saur 1984–2001); for reporters’ reception of the instructions, see the memoirs of one of the collectors of notes, Fritz Sänger, Politik der Täuschungen. Mißbrauch der Presse im Dritten Reich. Weisungen, Informationen, Notizen 1933–1939 (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1975). Frei and Schmitz, Journalismus im Dritten Reich, 25. In the same vein, Führer argues that it was exactly the papers with a tradition other than the Nazi “Kampfzeitungen” that had to do the real work of National Socialist education (“die eigentliche nationalsozialistische Erziehungsarbeit”). It was a game whose roles were distributed between the party papers and the non-party papers, which the Nazi Party could always end if it wanted. Führer, Medienmetropole, 345, 354–55. See the detailed analysis for Hamburg in Führer, Medienmetropole, 338–43, 387–92. Informers for the Gestapo in Aachen reported that subscribers had said they had taken out subscriptions under duress and planned on canceling them as soon as possible. Bankier, Germans and the Final Solution, 26. Most of them are either old, committed to the totalitarian approach, or not analytical but descriptive or memoirs: E. Martens, Zum Beispiel: Das Reich. Zur Phänomenologie der Presse im totalitären Regime (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1972); M. Boveri, Wir lügen alle. Eine Hauptstadtzeitung unter Hitler (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1965) (on the Berliner Tageblatt); G. Gillessen, Auf verlorenem Posten. Die Frankfurter Zeitung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Siedler, 1986); M. Zeck, Das Schwarze Korps. Geschichte und Gestalt des Organs der Reichsführung SS (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002); D. Roos, Julius Streicher und “Der Stürmer” 1923–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014). S. Paweronschitz et al., eds., Zeitungszeugen 1933–1945. Die Tageszeitung in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, collectors ed. (London: Albertas Limited, 2009–2013). Corey Ross studies German media with regard to international trends and reminds us that also in the Third Reich newspaper readers wanted to be entertained just as much as they wanted to be informed. Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany, 321–30; in the

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61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

72.

73.

39

same vein, see K. C. Führer, “Pleasure, Practicality and Propaganda: Popular Magazines in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939,” in Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany, ed. P. Swett, C. Ross, and F. d’Almeida, 132–53 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). P. Merziger, “Die Ermächtigung des Publikums im Nationalsozialismus? Leserbeschwerden und NS-Propaganda in den Unterhaltungsmedien – Die Satirezeitschrift Die Brennessel,” sowi. Das Journal für Geschichte, Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur 4 (2005): 26–39; for more details see Merziger’s monograph: Nationalsozialistische Satire und “Deutscher Humor,” 113–40. F. Hahn, Lieber Stürmer. Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924–1945 (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1978), 188–245; Roos, Streicher und “Der Stürmer.” Zeck, Das Schwarze Korps. This is exactly the message in the animated advertisement film Die Schlacht um Miggershausen (Commerz-Film AG, 1937). In the village of Miggershausen the rural economy is failing because the inhabitants live behind the moon and have no clue how to farm effectively, until an army of Volksempfänger attacks the village, storms into each house, and teaches the residents how to be successful and happy. (The film might still be available on YouTube.) Between 10 and 20 percent of the broadcasters were dismissed, primarily those in higher positions, and replaced with young party functionaries, most of whom had no broadcasting experience. A. Diller, Rundfunkpolitik im Dritten Reich (Munich: dtv, 1980), 56–168; K. Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland. Politik, Programm, Publikum (1923–1960) (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2002), 55–69; Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany, 279–86. A. Diller, “Der Volksempfänger. Propaganda- und Wirtschaftsfaktor,” Rundfunk und Geschichte 9, no. 3 (1983): 140–56. All of these stations, like the Deutschlandsender, transmitted on the longwave band. Near the border, foreign stations might have been better received than German stations. For overseas stations, however, one would have needed an extra component to receive the shortwave band. Nazi Party periodicals highlighted the Volksempfänger’s ability to receive international stations, that is, until the war. W. König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft. “Volksprodukte” im Dritten Reich. Vom Scheitern einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), 25–99, here 39, 94. Ibid., 57–68; Diller, Rundfunkpolitik, 161–68. Citing an official statistic of 1941, König points out that these figures were for all registered receivers, including those in offices, factories, and taverns, so that the percentage of private households with radios was slightly lower. König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft, 83. Ibid., 84–89. They were the target group of the advertisement film Die Schlacht um Miggershausen mentioned in endnote 64. However, as this film was screened in movie theaters, it seems likely that the ruralites who rejected the radio might have also rejected (far away) movie theaters and therefore never seen it. For more details, see U. C. Schmidt, “Radioaneignung,” in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden I: Radio im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. I. Marßolek and A. von Saldern, 243–360 (Tübingen: edition diskord, 1998). Führer cites several sources that claim that newspapers that printed a complete transcription of Hitler’s speeches on the following day always sold better than on other days. Führer, Medienmetropole, 400.

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74. C. Epping-Jäger, “Laut/Sprecher Hitler. Über ein Dispositiv der Massenkommunikation in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus,” in Hitler der Redner, ed. J. Kopperschmidt, 143–57 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003); D. Gethmann, “Radiophone Stimminszenierungen im Nationalsozialismus. Eine medienwissenschaftliche Perspektive,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 8 (2011): 277–85. 75. König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft, 92–93. 76. Complaints about uninterrupted noise and customers in taverns eating, drinking, and talking during Hitler’s speech are cited in C. Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus, 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 262; Sopade reports about workers sneaking out and grumbling about unpaid overtime and even protesting after the broadcast are cited in M. Favre, “Rundfunkereignisse,” 678–80. 77. I. Marßolek, “‘Aus dem Volke für das Volk.’ Die Inszenierung der ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ im und durch das Radio,” in Radiozeiten. Herrschaft, Alltag, Gesellschaft (1924–1960), ed. Marßolek and A. von Saldern, 121–35 (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1999), quote (“unmittelbares Herrschaftsinstrument”) on 121; Gethmann, “Radiophone Stimmeninszenierungen,” quote (“Instrumente einer umfassenden Machttechnologie”) on 285. 78. J. Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse,” 394–95. (Hitler “sprach so einfach und herzlich, betonte so eindringlich sein Herkommen aus den Arbeiterkreisen, daher das Verständnis für deren Nöte und Wünsche, dass ich unwillkürlich in das Heil Hitler und Sieg Heil mit einstimmte. Alle waren begeistert, die in unserem Stübchen versammelt waren, alt und jung”.) 79. V. Klemperer, Tagebücher (1918–1959), online at https://www.degruyter.com/data base/klemp/html?lang=de, entry 11 November 1933, last accessed 6 April 2023. (“Der Erlöser kommt zu den Armen.  .  .  . dann über 40 Minuten Hitler. Eine meist heisere, überschrieene, erregte Stimme, weite Passagen im weinerlichen Ton des predigenden Sektierers.”) 80. K. Tucholsky, letter to Walter Hasenclever, 4 March 1933, reprinted in Tucholsky, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 20: Briefe 1933–1934, ed. A. Bonitz and G. Huonker (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996), 15. (“Die Stimme ist nicht so unsympathisch wie man denken sollte – sie riecht nur etwas nach Hosenboden, nach Mann, unappetitlich, aber sonst geht’s. Manchmal überbrüllt er sich, dann kotzt er. Aber sonst nichts, nichts, nichts.”) 81. Cited in Meyer, “Tagebuch Luise Solmitz,” 158. (“er sprach aus, was wir empfunden haben, er versprach nicht, daß es von morgen an besser werden könne, aber er versprach, daß von nun an der dtsch. Geist wieder Dtschl. leiten solle, d.h., das sagte er nicht, es war der Sinn. . . . Er ließ die Rede auf Dtschl. vaterunserartig u. mit ‘Amen’ ausklingen, u. er übersteigerte sich etwas. Ist ja auch nicht Redner, sondern genialer Führer. Eine Begeisterung! Es standen uns vier Menschen die Tränen in den Augen.”) One of these three other people was Solmitz’s also very conservative Jewish husband Fredy. 82. D. Münkel, “Produktionssphäre,” in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden I, ed. Marßolek and von Saldern, 45–128, here 99–105; Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 176–243; Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany, 330–40. 83. See the quote in endnote 33. 84. Führer, Medienmetropole, 100–101. The way radio announcements suddenly appear in diary entries and letters confirms that many had made it their habit to let the radio play until the end of the program; see, e.g., I. Hammer and S. zur Nieden, eds., Sehr selten habe ich geweint. Briefe und Tagebücher aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg von Menschen aus Berlin (Zurich: Schweizer Verlagshaus, 1992), 148, 150, 309.

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85. “Die Reichsregierung weiß, daß das deutsche Volk diese Gefahr kennt, und erwartet daher, dass jeder Deutsche aus Verantwortungsbewusstsein heraus es zur Anstandspflicht erhebt, grundsätzlich das Abhören ausländischer Sender zu unterlassen. Für diejenigen Volksgenossen, denen dieses Verantwortungsbewusstsein fehlt, hat der Ministerrat für die Reichsverteidigung die nachfolgende Verordnung erlassen.” “Verordnung über außergewöhnliche Rundfunkmaßnahmen vom 1. September 1939,” in Reichsgesetzblatt I (1939): 1683, online at https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Verordnung_%C3%BCber_ au%C3%9Ferordentliche_Rundfunkma%C3%9Fnahmen, last accessed 10 December 2022. 86. Hensle, Rundfunkverbrechen, 26–37; for Gürtner’s concerns, see 26. 87. See Führer, Medienmetropole, 99–106, for several examples of what in particular triggered disbelief and rumors from early on in the war. 88. K.-H. Reuband, “‘Schwarzhören’ im Dritten Reich. Verbreitung, Erscheinungsformen und Kommunikationsmuster beim Umgang mit verbotenen Sendern,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001): 245–70; Kundrus, “Totale Unterhaltung?,” 145–47. 89. Hensle therefore assumes that the newly created offense did not trigger a wave of denunciations. Although Rundfunkverbrechen were obviously often committed, the number of special court trials was relatively small. Hensle, Rundfunkverbrechen, 347. 90. Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 14, 5447. According to a report of 24 November 1941, a campaign in which local party groups attached cardboard warnings to the tuning dials of people’s receivers was considered to be insulting. Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 8, 3016. Riedel quotes the bulletin for political leaders about how to conduct the campaign politely and assertively. Riedel, Lieber Rundfunk, 127. Reuband assumes that the campaign was soon canceled. Reuband, “‘Schwarzhören,’” 252. 91. A. Diller, “Haben Sie Auslandssender gehört? Eine amerikanische Hörerbefragung am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs,” Rundfunk und Geschichte 24 (1998): 54–62. The BBC began their German-language program in September 1938 and had raised its weekly hours to thirty-three by October 1943; the Americans ran German programs since they entered the war; and Radio Luxembourg was taken over by American forces in September 1944. The stations Germans clandestinely tuned in to also depended on which they best received in their locality. Also see Hensle, Rundfunkverbrechen, 319–28. 92. Diller, “Haben Sie Auslandssender gehört?,” 60. These were the periods the questionnaire offered. 93. This poll result is not supported by the trials of those indicted of Rundfunkverbrechen. In the two districts of the Sondergerichte (special courts) of Berlin and Freiburg that Hensle selected for his study, he found that most German defendants were middle-aged, lowerclass men with no higher education or political affiliation. About a fifth of those indicted were forced laborers from Western countries. Hensle, Rundfunkverbrechen, 346. 94. Diller, “Haben Sie Auslandssender gehört?,” 57. 95. Reuband, Hensle, and Führer argue that most of the so-called Schwarzhören were probably not politically motivated but, rather, acts of nonconformity often consistent with agreement or even loyalty to Hitler or the regime in other respects. Reuband, “‘Schwarzhören,’” 270; Hensle, Rundfunkverbrechen, 328–33; Führer, Medienmetropole, 104. Other authors mistrust the high number reported for Germans who later said that they had listened to foreign broadcasts. See, e.g., König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft, 95. 96. Since June 1940, all German stations were interconnected: Diller, Rundfunkpolitik, 372–86.

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97. König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft, 96–99. 98. Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 11, 4108, and vol. 15, 5941–45. 99. According to Führer, residents of cities targeted by the Allied bombing campaign might have found interruptions in broadcasting even more informative about imminent attacks than the news. Führer, Medienmetropole, 106–11. 100. All of the reported figures are estimates and apply to different territories, but the trend is unambiguous. See Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft e.V., Filmstatistisches Taschenbuch 1961 (Karlsruhe: Neue Verlags-Gesellschaft), 69. 101. The attraction of the cinema was (and has always been) more than the movies shown, especially for young people for whom it provided a (dark!) place without adult supervision where they could go with romantic interests or friends. For most consumers, going to the movies was a leisure-time highpoint, meant not longer being a child and, in some cases, having the means to invite somebody out. On movie attendance in rural areas, see C. Zimmermann, “Landkino im Nationalsozialismus,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001): 231–43; Kleinhans, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Kino. 102. G. Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand? Der nationalsozialistische Film und sein Publikum (Berlin: Hans Theissen, 2001), 168–85. He bases this conclusion on the rise in ticket sales for theaters in the outskirts of large cities that screened the main feature film later and often for longer than downtown theaters. Thus, a significant number of moviegoers seem to have gone for the current newsreel, taking into account to not see a new movie. Ibid., 174–75. 103. Ibid., 283–84. My translation. According to Stahr, the answer to the question in his book’s title is that only during the war years could one say that something like the “Volksgemeinschaft” sat in front of the screen. 104. J. Garncarz, Begeisterte Zuschauer. Die Macht des Kinopublikums in der NS-Diktatur (Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2021), 116–25. Strangely, Garncarz ignores the newsreels and Stahr’s thesis. Klaus Kreimeier characterizes the nationalization of the biggest production companies as a “Zusammenschaltung,” leading to a “arbeitsteilig organisiertes Verbundsystem.” K. Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story. Die Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns (1992; reprint, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2002), 321. 105. Ibid., 45–68. 106. G. Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik. Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme des Dritten Reichs (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1969); Garncarz, Begeisterte Zuschauer, 182–205; Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany, 311–21. Ross adds, “the film world was probably the least Nazified segment of the cultural elite.” Ibid., 313. 107. E. Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Rentschler lists retrospectives, special and matinee screenings, and television broadcasting not only in West Germany but also in East Germany and the marketing of video retailers, including American commercial distributors, 2–5. 108. The latter is the thesis of Clemens Zimmermann, Birthe Kundrus, and Corey Ross, which several historians who do not work on film also defend. C. Zimmermann, Medien im Nationalsozialismus. Deutschland, Italien und Spanien in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren (Vienna: Böhlau, 2007), 175; Kundrus, “Totale Unterhaltung?”; Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany, 311–21, 346–63; N. Frei, Der Führerstaat. Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft 1933 bis 1945, 8th ed. (1987; Frankfurt/M.: dtv, 2007, 111; Wendt, Deutschland 1933–1945, 311.

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109. Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand?, 121–34; F. Moeller, Der Filmminister. Goebbels und der Film im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Henschel, 1998), 151–226. 110. G. Eckert, “Filmtendenz und Tendenzfilm,” Wille und Macht. Führerorgan der nationalsozialistischen Jugend 6, no. 4 (15 February 1938): 19–25, reprinted in Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik, 503–7, 503. For another example, see A. Jason, “Der jüdische Einfluß auf die Filmindustrie,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 6, no. 64 (July 1935): 53–63. 111. Of course, this was again an insinuation that Jews were to blame, and the following sarcastic suggestion that an author made in Das Schwarze Korps in 1935 became indeed the case in 1938: “Die sollten doch einen eigenen abgesonderten ‘Familienzirkus’ bekommen.” “Premierentiger,” Das Schwarze Korps, 24 April 1935, 5. I say more on screenings at the Filmbühne of the Jüdische Kulturbund below. 112. See Moeller, Filmminister, on taking control, 82–150, on changing positions, 151–312. 113. See D. Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945, rev. ed. (1983; London: I. B. Tauris & Co, 2001), 40–49, 61–78; Moeller, Filmminister, 154–60; Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand?, 105–6. 114. See Goebbels’s speech, “In den Turnhallen,” Berlin, 19 May 1933, reprinted in Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik, 442–47. Another reason one only rarely sees swastikas and Hitler salutes in German movies of the time is that Goebbels did not want German film exports and market shares to be further limited; they had been falling since 1933. 115. Eckert, “Filmtendenz und Tendenzfilm,” 504: “Und auch wer ganz klug sein will und meint, daß es zwar an Tendenzfilmen fehle, daß aber die Tendenz in den Einzelheiten der Zeichnung des Films enthalten sei, kann für solche Argumentation kaum Beispiele anführen.” In the text, I quote Rentschler’s translation in Ministry of Illusions, 19. Goebbels sanctioned the paper, and in his diary he called the chief editor a “dumme Rotznase.” Moeller, Filmminister, 190. 116. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusions, 1. 117. See, e.g., D. S. Hull, Film in the Third Reich. A Study of German Cinema 1933–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); E. Leiser, “Deutschland, erwache!” Propaganda im Film des Dritten Reiches (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978); D. Hollstein, “Jud Süß” und die Deutschen. Antisemitische Vorurteile im nationalsozialistischen Spielfilm (Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1983); Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema. 118. S. Lowry, Pathos und Politik. Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 28. 119. Lowry, Pathos und Politik, 32, 34; see also K. Witte, Lachende Erben, Toller Tag. Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1995); Rentschler, Ministry of Illusions; S. Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); M.-E. O’Brien, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment in the Third Reich (Rochester: Camden House, 2004). 120. On American movies screened in Germany before fall 1940, when rumors had it that Hollywood had several anti-Nazi films in production, see K. C. Führer, “Two-Fold Admiration: American Movies as Popular Entertainment and Artistic Model in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939,” in Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Führer and C. Ross, 97–112 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); M. Spieker; Hollywood unterm Hakenkreuz. Der amerikanische Spielfilm im Dritten Reich (Trier: WVT 1999). 121. E. Offermanns, Die deutschen Juden und der Spielfilm der NS-Zeit, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2008). But Jewish audiences had a somewhat greater appreciation for American movies.

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122. Leiser, “Deutschland, erwache!,” 93; J. Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, vol. 3: 1934–1939 (Berlin: Henschel, 1979), 263; H. Segeberg, “Die großen Deutschen. Zur Renaissance des Propagandafilms um 1940,” in Mediale Mobilmachung. Das Dritte Reich und der Film, ed. Segeberg, 267–91 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), 276–77; Garncarz, Begeisterte Zuschauer, 176–79. 123. Klaus Kreimeier points to the biopic Friedrich Schiller (1940), which presented the poet as a national hero, but let him express the historical Schiller’s accusation against tyrants’ oppression of the mind, a scene some moviegoers applauded. Kreimeier, Ufa-Story, 330–31. Also see K. Witte, “Ästhetische Opposition. Käutners Filme im Faschismus,” Sammlung. Jahrbuch für antifaschistische Literatur und Kunst, vol. 2 (Frankfurt/M.: Röderberg Verlag, 1979), 113–23. 124. Less clumsy and more popular that year was Hitlerjunge Quex. See Rentschler, Ministry of Illusions, 53–69; F. Koch, “Hitlerjunge Quex und der hilflose Antifaschismus,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Supplement 31 (1993): 163–79; on the special scrennings’ opulent stagings, see K. Schilde, “Hitlerjunge Quex – Welturaufführung am 11. September 1933 in München. Blick hinter die Kulissen des NS-Propagandafilms,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 59, no. 10 (2008): 540–50. 125. The war changed this situation. Before the war, obvious propaganda meant that a film could not be distributed domestically. With the German occupation of more and more countries, the territory for distribution grew. 126. See the reconstructed yearly rankings in Garncarz, Begeisterte Zuschauer. 127. Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand?, 233. 128. The film most studied in this respect is Jud Süß. See, e.g., Hollstein, “Jud Süß” und die Deutschen; D. Culbert, “The Impact of Anti-Semitic Film Propaganda on German Audiences: Jew Süss and The Wandering Jew (1940),” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. R.  A. Etlin, 139–57 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); A.-M. Lohmeier, “Propaganda als Alibi: Rezeptionsgeschichtliche Thesen zu Veit Harlans Film Jud Süß (1940),” in “Jud Süß.” Hofjude, literarische Figur, antisemitisches Zerrbild, ed. A. Przyrembel and J. Schönert, 201–20 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2006); K. Hickethier, “Veit Harlans Film Jud Süß und der audiovisuell inszenierte Antisemitismus,” in “Jud Süß,” ed. Przyrembel and Schönert, 221–43; A. Nolzen, “‘Hier sieht man den Juden, wie er wirklich ist . . . .’ Die Rezeption des Films Jud Süß in der deutschen Bevölkerung,” in “Jud Süß,” ed. Przyrembel and Schönert, 245–61. 129. The most thorough analyses of Kulturfilme are in P. Zimmermann and K. Hoffmann, eds., Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, vol. 3: “Drittes Reich” 1933– 1945 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005). 130. K. Hoffmann, “Menschen, Tiere, Sensationen. Die Wochenschauen der 30er Jahre,” in Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films, vol. 3, 211–30. 131. Heinrich Roellenberg, director of the Deutsche Wochenschau in 1940–1941, quoted in K. Hoffmann, “‘Sinfonie des Krieges.’ Die Deutsche Wochenschau im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films, vol. 3, 645–89. On the Deutsche Wochenschau during the war, also see Moeller, Filmminister, 364–402. 132. The Meldungen aus dem Reich covered every issue of the Wochenschau. 133. See, e.g., Meldungen aus dem Reich, no. 51, 9 February 1940, 740–41; no. 249, 8 January 1942, 3138–40; no. 259, 12 February 1942, 3300. 134. See P. Bucher, “Goebbels und die Deutsche Wochenschau. Nationalsozialistische Filmpropaganda im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939–1945,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 2 (1986): 53–69.

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135. Meldungen aus dem Reich, no. 364, 4 March 1943, 4892. 136. See K. Nowak, Projektionen der Moral. Filmskandale in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 265–304. 137. See Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand?, 115–61. 138. Stahr found evidence that in 1944 a close-up of a roasted chicken was ordered cut from a Danish movie: Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand?, 235. 139. Zeutschner, Die braune Mattscheibe; K. Winker, Fernsehen unterm Hakenkreuz. Organisation, Programm. Personal (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996); W. König, “Der Einheits-Fernsehempfänger. Gemeinschaftsgerät für einen Zukunftsmarkt,” in Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft, 100–114. 140. “Eine große Zahl von Besuchern kehrt ständig wieder. Die meisten gehören ärmeren Volksschichten an, die durch die Teilnahme an den Fernsehvorführungen die Ausgaben für den Kinobesuch ersparen.” Bericht der Reichspostdirektion Berlin, 1 May 1937, quoted in Zeutschner, Die braune Mattscheibe, 142. 141. E.g., Wendt, Deutschland, 142; von Hehl, Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft, 86. 142. Kershaw, “How Effective was Nazi Propaganda?,” 181; Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, 1–10; Stöver, Volksgemeinschaft, particularly 15–34; P. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006), 23–53, 316–18; Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft, 16–55; Kundrus, “Totale Unterhaltung?,” 142–51; Garncarz, Begeisterte Zuschauer, 62–64. 143. I have spelled out this argument in U. Weckel, “Rehabilitation historischer Stimmenvielfalt. Rezeptionsforschung als Kulturgeschichte,” in Historische Medienwirkungsforschung. Ansätze, Methoden und Quellen, ed. T. Birkner, P. Merziger, and C. Schwarzenegger, 21–51 (Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2020). 144. Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse,” here 27. 145. I. Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1987; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. 146. S. zur Nieden, “Aufstieg und Fall des virilen Männerhelden. Der Skandal um Ernst Röhm und seine Ermordung,” in Homosexualität und Staatsräson. Männlichkeit, Homophobie und Politik in Deutschland 1900–1945, ed. zur Nieden, 147–92 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2005). The press in exile had to look on helplessly as Hitler usurped the political left’s sex-and-crime story about Röhm and almost turned himself into the victim and finally the rescuer. Ibid., 186. 147. R. Sachsse, Die Erziehung zum Wegsehen. Fotografie im NS-Staat (Dresden: Philo Fine Arts, 2003); M. Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology in German Photo Albums, 1933–1945,” Central European History 48, Special Issue 03 (2015): 335–65. 148. K. Hesse and P. Springer, Vor aller Augen. Fotodokumente des nationalsozialistischen Terrors in der Provinz (Essen: Klartext, 2002); C. Kreutzmüller and J. Werner, Fixiert. Fotografische Quellen zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der Juden in Europa (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2012); C. Kreutzmüller, H. Simon, and E. Weber, Ein Pogrom im Juni. Fotos antisemitischer Schmierereien in Berlin, 1938 (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2013); T. Medicus ed., Verhängnisvoller Wandel. Ansichten aus der Provinz 1933–1949: Die Fotosammlung Biella (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2016); see also some of the short chapters in G. Paul, Bilder einer Diktatur. Zur Visual History des “Dritten Reiches” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020). 149. P. Jahn and U. Schmiegelt, Foto-Feldpost. Geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939–1945 (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 2000); P. Bopp and S. Starke, Fremde im Visier. Fotoalben aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2009); F. Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

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150. Julia Torrie convincingly adopts the term from Mary Fulbrook, who uses this “somewhat oxymoronic expression” in regard to the GDR to underline the fact that its citizens were at one and the same time “constrained and affected” by the GDR’s political and social system and “also actively and often voluntarily carried” it. In a similar vein, Frank Bajohr has introduced the terms ‘Zustimmungsdiktatur’ (‘consensual dictatorship’) and ‘Handlungsgemeinschaft’ (‘community of action’) to the study of Nazi Germany. M. Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 12; F. Bajohr, “‘Community of Action’ and Diversity of Attitudes: Reflections on Mechanisms of Social Integration in National Socialist Germany, 1933–45,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. M. Steber and B. Gotto, 187–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 151. H. Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” Jewish Frontier 12, no. 1 (1945): 19–23, online at https://hannah-arendt-edition.net/textgrid/data/3p/pdf/ III-004-organizedGuilt.pdf, last accessed 3 August 2021; Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!,” 201–328; F. Bajohr and D. Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis. Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Alliierten (Munich: Beck, 2006). 152. K. Hesse‚ “‘Vorläufig keine Bilder bringen.’ Zur bildlichen Überlieferung des November Pogroms,” in Es brennt! Antijüdischer Terror im November 1938, ed. A. Nachama, 136–45 (Berlin: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2008); C. Kreutzmüller and B. Weigel, Kristallnacht? Bilder der Novemberpogrome 1938 in Berlin (Berlin: Kulturprojekte Berlin, 2013). 153. In April 1942, Heydrich signed a decree confirming Himmler’s order of 12 November 1940 that prohibited photographs during executions and added that if such photographs were officially necessary, they were to be archived. Fabian Schmidt and Alexander Zöller have argued that the fact that Himmler’s prohibition “was renewed at several levels” suggests that it was “widely ignored.” However, the various violations and exceptions they list hardly support their hypothesis that the SS may have planned to document Nazi mass murder systematically on film. F. Schmidt and A. O. Zöller, “Atrocity Film,” Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 12 (2021), online at https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/article/view/223/515, last accessed 3 August 2021.

Selected Bibliography Diller, A. “Haben Sie Auslandssender gehört? Eine amerikanische Hörerbefragung am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs.” Rundfunk und Geschichte 24 (1998): 54–62. Frei, N., and J. Schmitz. Journalismus im Dritten Reich. Munich: Beck, 1989. Führer, K.  C. Medienmetropole Hamburg. Mediale Öffentlichkeiten 1930–1960. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2008. ———. “Pleasure, Practicality and Propaganda: Popular Magazines in Nazi Germany, 1933– 1939.” In Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany, ed. P. Swett, C. Ross, and F. d’Almeida, 132–53. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. “Die Tageszeitung als wichtigstes Massenmedium der nationalsozialistischen Gesellschaft.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 55 (2007): 411–34. ———. “Two-Fold Admiration: American Movies as Popular Entertainment and Artistic Model in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939.” In Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-

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Century Germany, ed. Führer and C. Ross, 97–112. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Garncarz, J. Begeisterte Zuschauer. Die Macht des Kinopublikums in der NS-Diktatur. Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2021. Hensle, M. P. Rundfunkverbrechen. Das Hören von “Feindsendern” im Nationalsozialismus. Berlin: Metropol, 2003. Kershaw, I. “How Effective Was Nazi Propaganda?” In Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, ed. D. Welch, 180–205. London: Croom Helm, 1983. Kleinhans, B. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Kino. Lichtspiel in der braunen Provinz. Cologne: PapyRossa, 2003. König, W. Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft. “Volksprodukte” im Dritten Reich. Vom Scheitern einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004. Kundrus, B. “Totale Unterhaltung? Die kulturelle Kriegführung 1939 bis 1945 in Film, Rundfunk und Theater.” In Die Deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945, vol. 2, ed. J. Echternkamp, 93–157. Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2005. Lowry, S. Pathos und Politik. Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991. Marßolek, I., and A. von Saldern, eds. Zuhören und Gehörtwerden I: Radio im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung. Tübingen: edition diskord, 1998. Merziger, P. Nationalsozialistische Satire und “Deutscher Humor.” Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung 1931–1945. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010. Moeller, F. Der Filmminister. Goebbels und der Film im Dritten Reich. Berlin: Henschel, 1998. Offermanns, E. Die deutschen Juden und der Spielfilm der NS-Zeit. 2nd ed. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2008. Rentschler, E. The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Reuband, K.  H. “‘Schwarzhören’ im Dritten Reich. Verbreitung, Erscheinungsformen und Kommunikationsmuster beim Umgang mit verbotenen Sendern.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001): 245–70. Ross, C. Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Stahr, G. Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand? Der nationalsozialistische Film und sein Publikum. Berlin: Hans Theissen, 2001. Studt, C., ed. “Diener des Staates” oder “Widerstand zwischen den Zeilen”? Die Rolle der Presse im Dritten Reich. Münster: LIT, 2007. Welch, D. Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945. 1983; revised edition, London: I. B. Tauris & Co, 2001. ———. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. London: Routledge, 1993. Winker. K. Fernsehen unterm Hakenkreuz. Organisation, Programm. Personal. Cologne: Böhlau, 1996. Zeutschner, H. Die braune Mattscheibe. Fernsehen im Nationalsozialismus. Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1996. Zimmermann, C. Medien im Nationalsozialismus. Deutschland, Italien und Spanien in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren. Vienna: Böhlau, 2007.

1 “To Constantly Swim against the Tide Is Suicide” The Liberal Press and Its Audience, 1928–33 Jochen Hung

“Although our readers remained outwardly faithful, there was little doubt that their hearts were no longer with us. Inwardly, fully half of them were already in Hitler’s camp. . . . People rushed to him, swallowed his every word, while continuing, on the side, to read our newspapers.”1 When Hermann Ullstein wrote this in 1943, he had lost his fortune and his home. One of the former owners of Germany’s biggest publishing company, he had been forced by the Nazi regime to sell his business and leave his country for the United States in 1934. His family had commanded some of Germany’s most influential newspapers and most popular magazines, including the venerable Vossische Zeitung and the popular Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), yet millions of Ullstein’s readers helped to lever into power the man who would be responsible for their misfortune. Hermann Ullstein’s quote encapsulates a central paradox of German media history: the failure of Weimar’s liberal, prodemocratic press, despite its formidable reach and influence, to prevent the rise of the Nazis. In their papers, the leaders of Weimar’s liberal press—major publishers like Ullstein, Mosse, and Sonnemann—supported the Republic’s democratic institutions and vigorously attacked Hitler and his party. Together these publications had millions of readers, yet they seemed to have hardly any political influence on them.2 This paradox also represents a more general topic of media studies: how much influence do the media actually have? How strong are so-called media effects, i.e., behavior and mentalities, such as voting preference, occurring as a result of media influence? In many classic studies, the supposed seductiveness of Nazi propaganda has been

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used as a particularly telling example of powerful media effects.3 By contrast, this chapter argues that the rise of the Nazis after 1929 in fact offers a prime example of the limited influence of the mass media: if readers of anti-Nazi newspapers voted for Hitler, then the audience must have had quite a lot of agency in their decision-making. In this perspective of an active audience choosing some content and ignoring other parts of a newspaper—notably, suggestions of whom to vote for—the behavior of Ullstein’s readers does not seem so paradoxical. In fact, it is puzzling only to those who hold to the rather old-fashioned idea of audiences as a mass of atomized individuals unknowingly acting in unison. The impotence of Weimar’s liberal press has puzzled historians for a long time, and their answers have generally focused on institutional or structural explanations. Some have claimed that the commercial orientation of most liberal publications watered down their political agenda, while others argued, in contrast, that their extreme partisanship added to a deterioration of the political climate that benefited the Nazis.4 This chapter contributes to this debate in a different way: rather than looking for explanations for voting behavior, I examine the way liberal publishers in Weimar Germany reacted to the transformation of the political landscape around 1930 and what consequences this had for their view of their audience. In other words, I am not so much interested in finding out why readers of liberal newspapers voted for Hitler as in shedding some light on why this was seen as so surprising. Today, the study of media effects, particularly on voting behavior, is a highly specialized field with various competing schools and approaches from cultivation to agenda setting.5 However, there is a general agreement that media effects are diffuse and hard to measure.6 In the early twentieth century, the situation was very different: there was a widespread belief that mass media had a direct, powerful influence on their audience. Weimar’s liberal journalists and publishers were no exception: they saw their audiences as loyal and easily led followers, an image that was firmly rooted in Germany’s journalistic tradition, which is why their readers’ votes for Hitler came as such as shock to many of them. Historians of the Weimar press are faced with the problem that the archives of many German publishing companies were destroyed during World War II.7 The strategic decisions publishers took during the rise of the Nazis can often only be reconstructed through the coverage of their newspapers rather than be based on internal documents. In this chapter, I try to surmount this obstacle by focusing on the general shift in the way media professionals perceived their audience at the end of the Weimar Republic, based on changes in newspaper content formats, discussions among experts, and a small number of surviving strategic documents. As Bignell and Fickers remind us, “[a]s much as nations are, audiences are also imagined communities, which are summoned into existence by specific discourses.”8 Retracing the way in which liberal publishers constructed the “imagined community” of their audience provides insight into the strategic decisions they took during Weimar’s collapse. I argue that in light of the political “disloyalty” of their readership and external political and economic pressures, the

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liberal press’s understanding of its audience evolved from uncritical and passive consumer to active reader with agency. This undermined their approach to the rising threat of the Nazis: if parts of their audience supported Hitler and did so of their own free will while being immune to media influence, then the only option seemed to be to embrace these readers and their politics in order to retain their audience and ensure financial viability. The struggle of the liberal press of Weimar Germany to come to terms with the rise of an illiberal political force has obvious parallels to today. The popularity of the “alt-right” in the United States, Ukip and the Brexit Party in the UK, or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party in Germany poses a difficult question for established media organizations: how to report objectively about these groups without inflating their real influence or risking the alienation of readers who might sympathize with them. I do not pretend to provide an answer to this question. However, this chapter shows how complex and difficult the terrain is that journalists and publishers have to navigate in such a situation and that there are probably no easy or straight-forward solutions to this conundrum.

The Reader as Loyal Consumer Before 1945, the Anglo-American ideal of impartiality and objectivity was not embraced by German journalists.9 As Jörg Requate has shown, most German newspapermen and women looked to France instead, which they saw as the “paradise (Dorado) of journalism.”10 Like their French counterparts, German journalists openly aligned themselves with political parties and saw it as their calling to convince their readers of their opinions and political convictions. This self-image developed in the nineteenth century, but it still dominated the profession in Weimar Germany and was shared by many scholars in the developing field of newspaper studies (Zeitungswissenschaft) at the time.11 In 1928, Emil Dovifat, one of the founders of German media studies, stressed the “typically German character” of a journalism rooted in ideology: While being able to very quickly research, understand and summarize a topic is of utmost necessity in journalistic work, it has to remain the work of convincing. The purposeful journalist bound by his conviction, rather than the ‘racing reporter’, has to remain the typical representative of German journalism. This should not be understood as belittling the materialistic techniques of journalism in other countries, it simply means a logical and adequate adaptation of our newspapers’ intellectual workers to the intellectual nature of the German national character.12

This interpretation of their professional mission also shaped how many German journalists viewed their audience: newspaper readers were mostly seen as willing followers. In 1929, Georg Bernhard, editor-in-chief of Ullstein’s flagship broadsheet Vossische Zeitung and chairman of the National Association of Journalists, claimed that British and American readers were much more critical than German

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audiences, who did not question what they read in the paper: “The German believes what his paper tells him.”13 To be sure, Bernhard’s pithy quote tells us less about the real behavior of German newspaper readers than about the self-image of German journalists and their ideas about the influence of their newspapers. This belief in powerful media effects was widespread among media professionals of the Weimar Republic, whatever their political orientation: Alfred Hugenberg, an influential right-wing politician and media magnate, spoke of the press as a direct “channel to the brains of the people.”14 Such views were reflected by early media effects research, which was developing during the interwar years and mostly defined the audience as an easily manipulated mass.15 Often influenced by the experience of the extensive use of propaganda during World War I, early media scholars operated with a “hypodermic needle model” of strong, direct media effects. Arguably the most influential study in this respect was Harold Lasswell’s Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), which claimed that the press had the power to “weld thousands or even millions of human beings into one amalgamated mass.”16 In Germany, the first academic institute dedicated to newspaper studies was founded in 1916 with explicit reference to the failure of the German press to create international goodwill during the first years of the war.17 During the 1930s and 1940s, the rise of the Nazi regime and its supposedly masterful crowd manipulation seemed to support such theories of strong, direct media effects on a pliable audience.18 For liberal journalists in interwar Germany, however, the popularity of the Nazis in fact undermined this view of the powerful media because their audience had quite clearly not listened to them. Liberal newspapers of the Weimar Republic told their readers repeatedly that Hitler was not to be trusted. Already in January 1928, before the Nazi Party had become a nationwide success, Mosse’s Berliner Tageblatt reported that the party was supported by secret donations from abroad, including France.19 The liberal Hamburger Anzeiger also reported on the Nazis’ shady financial dealings, which prompted Hitler to send several letters of protest to the newspaper.20 When the Nazis disrupted a stump speech held in Munich by Gustav Stresemann, the country’s foreign minister and a leading liberal politician, the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten condemned the action as a “shameful spectacle.”21 At the end of the year, Ullstein’s Tempo poked fun at the Nazi leader’s infamous rhetorical prowess: “The swastika’s premier force, this man’s an impressive chap. When all else fails, he can rely on his great big trap.”22 On 15 September 1929, on the occasion of the referendum against the Young Plan, Georg Bernhard called Hitler a “scene-shifter” (Kulissenschieber) who “counts equally on the people’s stupidity and their short memory.”23 With the Nazis’ rising popularity and the dramatic decline of the liberal vote, such attacks only grew more frequent and more pronounced. However, significant parts of the German public did not seem to listen, at least in regions like Saxony, where the Nazis gained over 14 percent of the vote in the regional elections of 1929. In Prussia, Ullstein’s and Mosse’s core market, the Nazis were less successful, gaining only 1.8 percent in 1928. But here, liberal publishers faced other problems that

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also undermined the view of the German reader as a loyal consumer of opinions: in October 1929, the manager of the Ullstein branch on Wilmersdorfer Strasse in Berlin reported that many long-time readers of the Vossische Zeitung had cancelled their subscriptions because of its increasingly partisan tone.24 One reader—Herr Dr. Wernicke, Neue Kantstrasse 4—was quoted as saying that the paper “now agitates like the Lokal-Anzeiger,” the far-right tabloid controlled by Hugenberg. The Vossische Zeitung had “lost its class (Feinheit) by trying to impose its political opinion on the reader.” In the increasingly polarized political climate of the late 1920s, the supposedly docile audience actively rejected the attempts of liberal publishers to influence them, even if it meant strengthening the existing political orientation of their newspapers. This posed a serious problem in a quickly deteriorating economy, when no newspaper could afford to lose readers and audience retention became paramount. As a result, German journalists had to strike a more consumer-oriented tone, but this did not mean that they changed their view of the audience and their own educational mission. Rather, they now had to package their content in different ways to satisfy a seemingly more fickle, self-confident readership. On 24 May 1930, the Zeitungsverlag, the official organ of the Association of German Newspaper Publishers, dedicated a special issue to the “psychology of the reader.” In his contribution, the media scholar Kurt Baschwitz, editor-in-chief of the journal, claimed that the audience now wanted “to be treated as independently thinking human beings.”25 This pretension, he argued, was reflected in the fact that many readers “misjudged the real influence of the newspaper” and denied its impact on the formation of their worldview. His advice to publishers was to humor the audience and exercise their influence cautiously: “The readers want to be led, but not bullied.” Still, the feeling among German journalists that the audience had fundamentally changed its behavior toward the media, and that they had to adapt to these changed consumer demands, resulted in new content formats that granted the readers a more active, direct role. On 27 June 1929, for example, Mosse’s Berliner Volkszeitung introduced a regular section called “May I have the floor?” (Ich bitte um’s Wort!), in which readers could pose questions or vent frustrations. The paper called on other readers to write in and discuss these questions, turning the section into a forum for communication among its audience. The very first letter published in the new section complained about the oppressive number of public signs in Germany prohibiting everything from sitting on the grass to spitting on the floor: “For centuries, until the revolution, the authorities have led [the German people] by the nose. Everything we had to do or weren’t allowed to do was dictated by the police or the bureaucracy. Everywhere there are signs with rules and bans.”26 Such an oppressive, authoritarian attitude was not fit for the changed times, the reader argued. The letter expressed a new confidence of German citizens in their relationship to the state, which made it programmatic for a new section named in clear reference to democratic, parliamentary deliberation. In this context, the letter also spoke of a new relationship between the readership

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and their newspaper: it suggested that journalists telling their readers what to think was an aspect of Germany’s undemocratic past. Over the next months, the section was continuously expanded and by October it took over a whole page every week. Other publishers joined this trend: in August 1930, Tempo introduced the weekly column “Ask Ms. Christine” (Fragen Sie Frau Christine) for questions from male and female readers about matters of personal and professional life.27 The column, which also covered a whole page, proved to be very popular and became an important staple of the newspaper. Such attempts to include the readers more closely in the shaping of their newspaper’s content was clearly a reaction to the deteriorating economy during the onset of the Great Depression, which hit newspaper publishers particularly hard, dependent as they were on advertising spending from businesses.

The Active Audience Subjugates “Its Old Master” The shocking results of the general election on 14 September 1930, when the Nazis became the second-biggest party after the Social Democrats, emphasized in dramatic fashion the lack of influence of Germany’s liberal media and of the journalistic profession more generally. The Nazi press was, in general, disorganized, badly produced, and had a fraction of the readers of Weimar’s mainstream newspapers.28 And yet, the party had managed to increase their share of the vote sevenfold, from 2.6 percent in 1928 to 18.3 percent. The high number of Nazi voters, nearly 6.4 million, also suggested that at least some of the readers of liberal newspapers not only rejected a partisan tone but in fact supported Hitler and his party, against their newspapers’ outspoken attacks against him. The fading of the German idea of a powerful press and the rise of the active reader was reflected at the Congress of German Sociologists (Deutscher Soziologentag) in October 1930, just two weeks after the general election. That year, the conference dealt with the topic “The Press and Public Opinion,” and the failure of the liberal press to prevent the success of the Nazis played a central role in the scholars’ discussions. “Last month, a party broke the chains that had made it a prisoner of this press,” the theologian Wilhelm Kapp claimed.29 This was echoed by the editor-in-chief of the Social Democrats’ flagship newspaper Vorwärts, Eduard Stampfer, who represented the journalistic profession at the congress: Where was the gigantic power of the press on 14 September? It had dissolved into nothing. The vanquished of 14 September were the big newspaper publishers Mosse, Ullstein and Hugenberg’s Scherl, and the victorious were—technically speaking—the small rags. Their parties gained immensely, while the parties who have the greatest press apparatus at their disposal did not perform well at all.30

The idea of the audience as an unthinking, homogeneous “mass” came under particular criticism during the congress. Prefiguring later theories about interpersonal influence, Kapp argued that the mass audience was not a tabula rasa waiting

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for the press to fill it with content but that it consisted of many different groups and “cells” that were tightly embedded into their own social and political contexts.31 This had consequences for the whole sector, and in the future “the press will have much less significance in voter decisions.” In a report of the conference, the Vossische Zeitung summed up the discussion with a rather nostalgic farewell to the idea of powerful media effects: “Is the press a sovereign power vis-à-vis its readers? . . . [O]r is in fact the taste of the readers—the firm will of the readers to hear this opinion and to find themselves confirmed in that judgment—the real power which has now subjugated its old master, the press?”32 The results of the 1930 election intensified the trend to include readers in the production of newspaper content. On 27 November, the Berliner Volkszeitung’s “May I have the floor?” column was replaced by an even more elaborate effort to tie the audience to the paper by “giving them a say on the content of the newspaper.”33 The new section was edited by a lay “jury” of readers—the BVZSchöffen—that met with the paper’s journalists twice a week. The three lay editors, chosen from the paper’s subscribers, were paid for their work and changed every two weeks. The paper claimed that this kind of reader participation was “globally unique” and “path-breaking for the whole of the press industry.”34 Even the venerable Vossische Zeitung gave its audience the opportunity to play an active part in reportage: on 2 June 1931, the newspaper invited its readers to act as its “contributors” and to call in to report “accidents, fires and crimes” they witnessed on the street, at home, or at work. This constituted a shift in the newspaper’s conception of its own readers toward an active group with agency. While the audience gained more influence over newspaper content, journalists increasingly lost their traditional role as partisan opinion leaders. On 8 December 1931, the Ullstein management told the company’s senior editors to tone down their political reporting. The political coverage of their newspapers was not to be “of an aggressive or hurtful character or attempt to support any parties or groups” but was “meant to offer a broad audience the opportunity to inform themselves objectively about the latest events.”35 This was a direct rejection of the traditional self-image of German journalists and a reflection of the changed role of the audience: rather than being seen as passive followers, readers were now framed as active individuals making autonomous decisions based on objective information. This escalated the tensions between editorial staff and management that had been building since the economic crisis had begun to undermine the independence of journalists and put consumer demand first. Considering the highly partisan political climate of the early 1930s and—with the Nazis and Communists openly challenging the whole political system—the high stakes involved, many journalists did not give up the chance to influence their readers easily. At Ullstein, the left-wing editor-in-chief of the B.Z. am Mittag, Franz Höllering, who was fired after he refused to toe the new company line, was arguably the most high-profile victim of the conflict between management and editors over their political involvement.36 On 14 December, barely a week after the company had announced its new rules about political reporting, the

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B.Z. published an explosive story about a secret Nazi plan to establish a private air force. This would create a conflict with the Versailles Treaty, which prohibited the operation of military aircraft in Germany. The article caused considerable national and international concern, and Höllering was swiftly removed as editor-in-chief. After Höllering’s dismissal, Carl von Ossietzky, editor of the influential liberal journal Die Weltbühne, attacked Ullstein for their supposed opportunism.37 Instead of using their newspapers to fight against antidemocratic forces, Ossietzky claimed, the company tried to please everybody, from the Nazis to the Communists, out of fear of losing readers. He was convinced that such attempts to follow consumer preference were futile because audiences now expected their newspaper to take a clear stance: “More than anything, the newspaper reader of today wants clarity and precision; no waffling, no equivocation, but full facts.” What the liberal audience did not want, he claimed, were newspapers that also tried to please “the other side of the barricade.” It is obvious from these comments that Ossietzky, true to his convictions as a German journalist, saw the audience in need of more, not less, political orientation, but he also acknowledged the role of readers in actively searching out facts and information. However, the situation of liberal publishers was not as clear-cut as Ossietzky made it out to be. While commercial reasons certainly played a role in toning down the political coverage of their newspapers, the Ullstein management also had doubts whether attacking its political enemies would really have the desired effects on the company’s readership. A few days after Höllering’s dismissal, an internal memo warned that focusing too much on Nazi activities played into Hitler’s hands.38 In fact, supposed secrets such as the alleged attempts to establish a private Nazi air force uncovered by Höllering were often leaked on purpose to boost coverage, creating a distorted view of the real strength of the party, as the memo explained: “[B]y focusing on such news, the politically inexperienced reader will easily be led to the conclusion that the Hitler movement is growing every day and that the leader of the National Socialist party is the next big thing.” This way, the memo suggested, the journalists’ fight against the Nazis could unintentionally convert their own audience to their political enemy’s cause. This argument shows how liberal publishers struggled to find an explanation for the fact that many of their readers seemed to vote for a party their newspapers had opposed so strongly, an argument that has found its eerie echo in current discussions about the media’s treatment of populist politicians.39 Ullstein’s view of the audience that is reflected in the memo acknowledged the readers’ independence from direct media influence, but raised the problem of such an independent audience drawing the wrong conclusions from the media content they were presented with. The shift in the image of the audience from mindless followers to active readers created a strategic dilemma for liberal publishers. If their readers were immune to direct media influence and freely chose to vote for the Nazis, then their political decisions could not be dismissed outright but needed to be taken

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seriously. In May 1932, a strategic memo circulated among Ullstein managers argued that National Socialism had to be interpreted as a “movement for political freedom and economic justice.”40 The memo is indicative of liberal publishers’ acceptance of the Nazis as a genuine political expression of a major part of the population, in other words, of existing and potential readers. In their view, continuing to attack this group in the middle of the most severe economic crisis in history was not a viable strategy. However, this dilemma was not simply an economic one; it also challenged the self-image of many liberal publishers. Ullstein, the biggest German publishing house at the time, is a good example of this. Because of the high circulation figures of the myriad publications owned by the company, it had always seen itself as fundamentally democratic in the sense that it served a broad cross-section of the population.41 This was hard to square with excluding a genuine mass movement, which the Nazi electorate seemed to be after the September election. On 3 December 1932, the media scholar Wilhelm Waldkirch, himself the owner of several newspapers, published a meditation on the relationship between publisher, editorial staff, and audience that reflected the changed view of media effects among media professionals in the late Weimar Republic.42 The audience had only recently become a focus of serious research, Waldkirch argued, but it was already clear that journalists had to serve the specific demands and preferences of their readership if they wanted to have any influence at all because it was the audience that granted newspapers their authority: “If the newspaper as a medium has any effect on the reader at all, this effect is based primarily on the trust of the readership in the intellectual leadership of the newspaper.” This leadership could only be maintained convincingly if the strict separation between a newspaper’s editorial department and its business management was given up for “a firm and unifying management (Leitung)” in the person of the publisher, who “embodied the tradition of his paper.” With such recommendations, Waldkirch openly questioned the independence of editorial staff, which had been undermined since the beginning of the economic crisis. He also constructed a rather paternalistic relationship between a newspaper’s owner and its audience, arguing that the readers were sovereign but that they used this independence to demand leadership. This kind of conceptualization foreshadowed Nazi press politics after 1933.

Conclusion On 28 November 1933, the Hamburger Anzeiger reported on a lecture by Otto Dietrich, the NSDAP press chief, about the role of the press in the Third Reich.43 In Dietrich’s definition, the journalist’s task was almost diametrically opposed to its nineteenth-century tradition. Rather than opinion leaders forming the minds of their readers, journalists were now to express the alleged will of the people. This should be taken to heart especially by “bourgeois” journalists,

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he argued, who had followed the “wrong path” before the “seizure of power” earlier in the year and first needed to be “converted” into National Socialists. In his view, the readership represented the “national community,” which was always right in its political instincts, while journalists only served it by being its mouthpiece. The Nazis, however, were anything but believers in weak media effects, and the regime often used propaganda in an attempt to produce consent among the population. Dietrich’s demand was clearly aimed at putting formerly independent journalists in their place rather than acknowledging the independence of media audiences. However, both Dietrich’s vision of the readership as a “national community” and the idea of the active audience as it was discussed in the early 1930s among scholars and liberal publishers had their roots in the loss of journalists’ authority during the late Weimar Republic. Economic crisis and the rise of the Nazis put liberal journalists on the backfoot and forced them to abandon their traditional educational mission and communicate with their readers, including those who voted for the Nazis, on more equal terms. This fading of the idea of the journalist as educator and opinion leader went hand in hand with a power shift toward management and, above all, the audience: the readers were now seen as the “new masters,” who set the agenda that newspapers had to follow. Seven years after Dietrich’s lecture, Hermann Ullstein bemoaned how his publishing house had “blundered Hitler into power” by not acting decisively enough to use the full force of its newspapers against the Nazis.44 Echoing Ossietzky, he accused the rest of his family of pandering to the audience and thus contributing to Hitler’s rise to power. However, in a private letter, his brother Franz still defended the populist orientation of the company’s newspapers: “To constantly swim against the tide is suicide. . . . The audience may not be sovereign, but you have to respect a majority decision.”45 Current experiences with populist movements suggest that it might indeed not be as simple as Hermann Ullstein and Ossietzky assumed: even constant critical coverage seems to result in free publicity without affecting supporters’ loyalty. Different strategies, like “no-platforming,” i.e., refusing to give attention to certain groups, are problematic for other reasons. Should the press in democratic societies, which depend on freedom of speech, really deliberately exclude certain opinions? This certainly seems a valid approach in the case of groups that openly undermine the democratic order. However, it is doubtful if “no-platforming” the Nazis would have kept them out of power and saved Weimar democracy. In the end, people are not only part of media audiences but also belong to social classes, cultural milieus, religious communities, and a myriad of other groups that shape their political behavior. There are also broader transnational processes, such as economic crises, that have a profound influence on politics but are not directly related to media content. Media consumption does not happen in a social vacuum, and we need to take these contexts into account when examining the role of the media in the past, particularly their role in politics in democratic societies. One contribution to a better understanding of this role, as evidenced in this chapter, is to retrace

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the conception journalists had of their own audience and how this influenced their work. Jochen Hung is Assistant Professor of Cultural History at Utrecht University and focusses on the cultural history of interwar Germany. He has coedited Beyond Glitter and Doom: The Contingency of the Weimar Republic (2012) and The Material Culture of Politics (2018). His book Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy will be published in 2023 by the University of Michigan Press.

Notes 1. H. Ullstein, The Rise and Fall of the House of Ullstein (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), 217. 2. M. Eksteins, The Limits of Reason: The German Democratic Press and the Collapse of Weimar Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 249–50. See also P. Fechter, An der Wende der Zeit. Menschen und Begegnungen (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1950), 53. 3. See, e.g., H. D. Lasswell and D. Blumenstock, World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago Study (New York: Knopf, 1939); H. D. Lasswell, The Analysis of Political Behaviour: An Empirical Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948). This view is still accepted today. See G. Jowett and V. O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (London: Sage, 2012), 239–52. 4. In their classic studies of the Weimar press, Koszyk and Eksteins mostly blame the commercial orientation of liberal publishers for their downfall. See K. Koszyk, Deutsche Presse 1914–1945 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1972), 444–53; Eksteins, Limits of Reason. Ross argues along similar lines, blaming the “consumerist orientation” of many publishers. See C. Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 178. Bosch and Fulda focus more on the radicalized “climate of opinion” at the end of the Weimar Republic and the role liberal publishers played in it. See M. Bosch, Liberale Presse in der Krise. Die Innenpolitik der Jahre 1930 bis 1933 im Spiegel des Berliner Tageblatts, der Frankfurter Zeitung und der Vossischen Zeitung (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 1976); B. Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also J. Wilke, “Geschichte als Kommunikationsereignis. Der Beitrag der Massenkommunikation beim Zustandekommen historischer Ereignisse,” in Massenkommunikation: Theorien, Methoden, Befunde, ed. M. Kaase, 57–71 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989), 69. 5. For an exhaustive overview, see W. R. Neuman and L. Guggenheim, “The Evolution of Media Effects Theory: A Six‐Stage Model of Cumulative Research,” Communication Theory 21, no. 2 (2011): 169–96. 6. D. McQuail, Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction (London: Sage, 1994), 451– 76. For a recent critical view of this conclusion, see N. T. Gavin, “Media Definitely Do Matter: Brexit, Immigration, Climate Change and Beyond,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20, no. 4 (2018): 827–45.

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7. Fulda, Press and Politics, vii. 8. J. Bignell and A. Fickers, “Introduction: Comparative European Perspectives on Television History,” in A European Television History, ed. J. Bignell and A. Fickers, 1–54 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 23. 9. It is debatable to what extent this ideal was really practiced among English-speaking journalists. See M. Hampton, “The ‘Objectivity’ Ideal and Its Limitations in 20th-Century British Journalism,” Journalism Studies 9 (2008): 477–93. However, the important point is that this idea was accepted as a professional guideline. 10. J. Requate, Journalismus als Beruf. Entstehung und Entwicklung des Journalistenberufs im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 399. 11. For Weimar era journalism and politics, see Fulda, Press and Politics, 17–21. 12. E. Dovifat, “Die moderne deutsche Redaktion,” in Pressa. Kulturschau am Rhein, ed. Internationale Presse-Ausstellung Köln, 50–52 (Berlin: Schröder, 1928), 50. 13. G. Bernhard, “The German Press,” quoted in Fulda, Press and Politics, 45. 14. Eksteins, Limits of Reason, 78. 15. J.  G. Webster and P.  F. Phalen, The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997), 1–23; D. McQuail, Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction (London: Sage, 1994), 35–36. 16. H. D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New York: Peter Smith, 1938), 221; see also N. Gullace, “Allied Propaganda and World War I: Interwar Legacies, Media Studies, and the Politics of War Guilt,” History Compass 9 (2011): 686–700, 689–90. 17. T. Wiedemann, M. Meyen, and I. Lacasa-Mas, “100 Years Communication Study in Europe: Karl Bücher’s Impact on the Discipline’s Reflexive Project,” SCM Studies in Communication and Media 7 (2018): 7–30, 16. 18. McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 33; S. Lowery and M. L. DeFleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media Effects (New York: Longman 1983), 12. 19. “Die Finanzquellen der Hitler-Bewegung,” Berliner Tageblatt, 3 January 1928. 20. “Herr Hitler ist kühn,” Hamburger Anzeiger, 18 August 1928. 21. “Beschämende Vorgänge in München,” Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 27 April 1928. 22. “Sylvester-Knallbonbon,” Tempo, 31 December 1928. 23. G. Bernhard, “Die Kulissenschieber,” Vossische Zeitung, 15 September 1929. 24. See monthly branches report, 31 October 1929, Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, Nachlass Carl Misch, fol. 128. 25. K. Baschwitz, “Der Leser und seine Zeitung: Unser Versuch,” Zeitungsverlag, 24 May 1930, 3–6. 26. “Ist das nötig?,” Berliner Volkszeitung, 27 June 1929. 27. J. Hung, “The Modernized Gretchen: Transformations of the ‘New Woman’ in the Late Weimar Republic,” German History 33 (2015): 52–79, 71–78; M. Föllmer, “Auf der Suche nach dem eigenen Leben. Junge Frauen und Individualität in der Weimarer Republik,” in Die ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik. Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters, ed. M. Föllmer and R. Graf, 287–317 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2005), 311. 28. Fulda, Press and Politics, 131–68. See also G. Paul, Aufstand der Bilder. Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1992), 180–86. 29. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, ed., Verhandlungen des siebenten deutschen Soziologentages vom 28. September bis 1. Oktober 1930 in Berlin: Vorträge und Diskussionen in der Hauptversammlung und in den Sitzungen der Untergruppen (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1931), 56.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Ibid., 62. Ibid., 57–58. Vossiche Zeitung, 1 October 1930. German original, “Neue Form, aber—wir bleiben die Alten!,” Berliner Volkszeitung, 27 November 1930. “Am Tisch der BVZ-Schöffen,” Berliner Volkszeitung, 27 November 1930. Memo from Dr. Wolf to Robolsky, Höllering, Elbau, Misch, Goetz, Josef Reiner, Dr. v. Müller, 8 December 1931, in Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, N2193 Misch, Nr. 13, fol. 70. For the following, see J. Hung, “The ‘Ullstein Spirit’: The Ullstein Publishing House, the End of the Weimar Republic and the Making of Cold War German Identity, 1925–77,” Journal of Contemporary History 53 (2018): 158–84, 166–68; Fulda, Press and Politics, 189–90; Eksteins, Limits of Reason, 236–38. C. Ossietzky, “Der Fall Franz Höllering,” Die Weltbühne, 5 January 1932. Unsigned memo, 18 December 1931, in Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, N2193 Misch, Nr. 13, fols. 74–76. See, for example, J. R. Azari, “How the News Media Helped to Nominate Trump,” Political Communication 33 (2016): 677–80; R. Greenslade, “Study Confirms that the National Press is Biased in Favour of Brexit,” The Guardian, 23 May 2016; K. M. Beisel, D. Denk, and A. Föderl-Schmid, “Sind die Medien Schuld am Erfolg der AfD?,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25 September 2017. For the following, see Hung, “The ‘Ullstein Spirit,’” 9–10. Ibid., 5–7. W. Waldkirch, “Eigengesetzlichkeit der Tageszeitung,” Zeitungsverlag, 3 December 1932. “Die Zeitung im neuen Staat. Leistung soll entscheiden! Der Reichspressechef der NSDAP über den Journalismus,” Hamburger Anzeiger, 29 November 1933. H. Ullstein, “We Blundered Hitler into Power,” Saturday Evening Post, 13 July 1940, 12–40, 35. F. Ullstein to M. Mühsam-Edelheim, 1944, quoted in Hung, “‘Ullstein Spirit,’” 173.

Selected Bibliography Eksteins, M. The Limits of Reason: The German Democratic Press and the Collapse of Weimar Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Fulda, B. Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hung, J. “The Modernized Gretchen: Transformations of the ‘New Woman’ in the Late Weimar Republic.” German History 33 (2015): 52–79. ———. “The ‘Ullstein Spirit’: The Ullstein Publishing House, the End of the Weimar Republic and the Making of Cold War German Identity, 1925–77.” Journal of Contemporary History 53 (2018): 158–84. Ross, C. Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

2 Active Audiences Stürmerkästen and the Rise of Der Stürmer’s Activist Readership Hannah Ahlheim

“My Dear Stürmer! After having been united with you for quite some time by now and rather eating dry bread than letting you leave my home, I must tell you that, as a Christmas present, I have prepared a beautiful place for you in our village.”1 This letter, somehow reminiscent of a love letter, was written by the painter Anton Rogendorf to the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer in 1935. Rogendorf, who lived in Arzheim, close to the town of Landau, was only one of many devoted Stürmer readers who built “a beautiful place” for their beloved newspaper, namely, a Stürmerkasten, a wooden display case in which to post the current issue behind glass panes, for all passersby to notice. In the first years of the Third Reich, thousands of Stürmerkästen were put up in central locations in German cities and villages—in market squares and shopping streets; at bus stops; along front yard fences; and in front of town halls, cinemas, and schools—all over the Reich.2 The weekly Der Stürmer was not an official organ of the NSDAP; it was published privately by Julius Streicher, the NSDAP Gauleiter of Franconia and a devoted antisemite.3 Since its foundation in the early 1920s, it had earned its reputation as a “synonym for racial antisemitism.”4 Its articles and illustrations, which characteristically depicted graphic antisemitic cruelty, were motivated by and appealed to primal emotions such as envy, greed, and aggression; violent and sexual fantasies; and the longing for power.5 Der Stürmer’s exact circulation cannot be determined. However, it is likely that from 1935 to 1939 at least 400,000 copies of regular issues were printed and special issues reached one million.6 The

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number of readers may have been higher, for copies were regularly passed on to relatives and friends and publicly accessible in “hotels, restaurants, cafes and hairdressing salons.”7 Furthermore, Der Stürmer was displayed in the Stürmerkästen. These display cases gave every devotee access and widened the paper’s audience,8 but what makes the phenomenon particularly interesting is that the Stürmerfreunde (friends of Der Stürmer), as they called themselves, who erected these display cases were not following any orders from the NSDAP or instructions from the paper’s editors. On the contrary, the friends were a grassroots movement, building and putting up their handmade Stürmerkästen on their own initiative. With the help of such committed readers, Der Stürmer spread throughout the country and found new audiences in almost every region, town, and village. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind that Der Stürmer’s readership remained a minority, even within the Nazi movement. The paper’s graphic cruelty and sexual violence provoked serious criticism from the beginning. So did the Stürmerkästen. They were smeared over and torn down, and their effects on the public were repeatedly criticized.9 In September 1935, for example, the president of the district of Kassel reported on residents’ pronounced disapproval of the display cases and their negative impact on the social atmosphere: “The population’s mood . . . worsened decisively. . . . It cannot be denied that there is the danger that the Stürmerkästen are even used to act out villagers’ personal hostilities.”10 And in summer 1936, the governor of Breslau, the devoted National Socialist Josef Wagner, sent a note to the Interior Ministry in Berlin, asking “to discuss banning the erection of Stürmer-Kästen in public in general.”11 Several concerns prompted his note. There were display cases in and close to schools, and, according to Wagner, the paper’s articles’ and, especially, its illustrations of “sexual things and perversity in fulsome detail” triggered the “sexual fantasies of the youth unnecessarily.”12 And its lurid descriptions did not agree with the “healthy taste” of most of the population. “Proof is the fact that the Stürmer-Kästen are standing abandoned most of the time and are only visited by teenagers and adolescents.”13 Finally, he feared that they would make a bad impression on foreign visitors coming for the Olympic Games. In spite of the criticism, thousands of Stürmerkästen were put up in the first years of the Third Reich. They became part of everyday life throughout the country; everyone saw them, knew what they contained, and had to decide whether or not to look in. Even passersby who just glanced at the headlines or pictures surreptitiously had to decide whether to receive or avoid the message.14 And, contra Wagner, Stürmerkästen were not usually abandoned. On the contrary, in decisive moments they constituted an important political “arena.”15 Devoted Stürmer readers used them to spread their ideology and to widen and secure their local spheres of influence, creating public spaces in which their vicious antisemitism was always on display and Germans had to react publicly to it. Stürmerkästen builders openly claimed that their goal was to spread their hatred of Jews and motivate antisemitic actions. In his letter to Der Stürmer, which I mentioned

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at the start, Rogendorf gave a typical explanation for why he had put up his Stürmerkasten: “I can’t help but enter into the service of your educational work, so that this epidemic plague of Jews no longer enters the village.”16 The paper regularly printed letters such as Rogendorf ’s. Readers also sent in manuscripts, antisemitic jokes, anecdotes, photographs, and their observations of everyday relations between Gentile and Jewish neighbors.17 These submissions were part of an intense personal dialogue between the paper and its devoted antisemitic readers. Most readers’ letters addressed the paper as a person, a “partner and adviser, a teacher and proclaimer of truth.”18 According to Julius Streicher’s statement at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, about 300 employees had been busy editing and answering these letters in the late 1930s,19 maintaining the exceptional “dialogic structure” of the interaction between the newspaper and its readers.20 Stürmerkästen, erected by readers and proudly portrayed in the paper, were an important part of this dialogue in which readers propagated the paper’s aims and contributed to their realization. In explaining the dialogic function of Stürmerkästen, I first scrutinize how their makers portrayed themselves and their community in their letters to Der Stürmer and how their projects shaped their self-conception as its audience. In the second part, I focus on the concrete process of making and erecting a Stürmerkasten and how builders thereby actively repurposed local public spaces during the first years of the Third Reich.21 As I show, by erecting Stürmerkästen activist readers took control of neutral public spaces and made Germans negotiate the expression and vehemence of antisemitic politics. The creation of such public spaces was not a strategy of the Nazi regime but a product of local activists’ engagement with their neighborhoods. In the last part, I emphasize the power of the local public sphere by showing that Stürmerkästen had another involuntary audience: German Jews. Their social annihilation, which occurred in the midst of German society, must be understood as the result of both the Nazi regime’s antisemitic policies and local campaigns to eliminate them from everyday social life. To explain how local Stürmerkästen affected Jewish residents, I describe how Der Stürmer’s activist readers employed them to organize, or at least support, local boycotts of supposedly Jewish businesses.22 The attitudes of Der Stürmer’s activist audience explain its formation and empowerment, and combining its perspective with that of persecuted Jews provides a better understanding of the complex process through which the hateful antisemitism of the former prevailed in the end.

Self-Representation as Self-Assurance: A Snapshot with a Stürmerkasten In June 1935, Der Stürmer published a small photograph of a man posing proudly in front of a wooden display case, smiling straight into the camera and holding up an issue of the paper (figure 2.1). Painted on the case are two swastikas, the words ‘Der Stürmer,’ and two slogans: “The Jews are our misfortune” and “He

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Figure 2.1. “A wonderful place” in Hessisch-Lichtenau © Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Amb. 903.2°. Der Stürmer 13, no. 24 (1935). Used with permission.

who buys from a Jew is a Volksverräter” (traitor to the people). As the caption explains, the man is Adolf Eiges and lives at Bergstraße no. 26 in the small town of Hessisch-Lichtenau, and he reports, “The box has found a wonderful place in one of the busiest parts of our town, on the old city wall.”23 This is one of countless photographs of activist readers and their Stürmerkästen that the newspaper published. In 1935 and 1936, such photos were in almost every issue of Der Stürmer.24 One of the first activists to send in a photograph of his box, in early 1935, was a man named Meyer, the leader of the local NSDAP group in the town of Reutlingen. As he proudly explained in the accompanying letter, “Months ago, I decided to subscribe to Der Stürmer . . . and to make it accessible to the members of the group.”25 It seems that the editors felt that they had to explain why they printed this early photograph of a Stürmerkasten, for they cited Meyer’s remark that he had submitted it “for your archive and further use.” But in the following months, as more and more activist readers submitted such photographs with pride verging on love, publication became common. Many of the earlier photographs show only the boxes hanging on walls or residents’ fences; erected in the middle of market squares; on streets; in parks; and in front of shops, schools, and town halls. But in the course of 1935 and 1936, it became common for photographers to include their makers and caretakers, as Eiges had. These photographs portray men in front of their display cases, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in civilian

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clothes, alone and in groups, and almost always smiling for the camera. The captions sometimes identify them, for example: “Fritz Gillessen, Obertruppführer and Stürmergardist [a self-appointed guard of Der Stürmer]”26 in Gladbach; “Pimpf Heinz Schweriner (left) and Gardist Stamp (right)” in Hamborn; “Kreisleiter Kasper and Ortsgruppenleiter Jakob”27 in Zweibrücken; and the “66-year-old ‘Stürmergardist’ Richard Kittelmann” in Weida-Thuringia.28 Other photographs show Stürmergardisten in action: “Oberfeldmeister Seitz” of the Reichsarbeitsdienst, in uniform and with expressive gestures, “teaching at the Stürmerkasten,” and “Feldmeister Früh” and “Verwalter Sprick” pointing vividly to the newspaper displayed behind the glass.29 At first glance, it may seem that the paper published so many of these photographs in order to give the impression that the display cases and, so, its dedicated readers were ubiquitous. Similarly, the readers who submitted them may have wanted to document their spread across the country. But if we take a closer look, we see that the photographs also illustrate the dedication of Der Stürmer’s activist readership. They document how much such readers wanted to engage in a dialogue with their newspaper. And by staging themselves with Stürmerkästen, they participated in the well-established practice of taking snapshots to preserve and share memorable moments. They also made themselves part of the community of Der Stürmer’s activists by embracing and, thus, reinforcing its stylistic rules, which strengthened their own position within this community and thereby the larger community of antisemites. Finally, by sharing their photographs with Der Stürmer’s audience they showed that they were proud to belong to this community, despite the criticism of the paper as too radical, pornographic, and race baiting. The ongoing dialogue among readers, photograph submitters, and editors instituted the unwritten rules of Der Stürmer’s community. Thus, the style of the photographs changed over time. Step by step, the solitary Stürmerkasten makers and caretakers portrayed in the early photographs were first joined and then replaced by other members of the “Volksgemeinschaft.” For example, Rogendorf, who had found such a good place for his beloved Stürmer in the center of Arzheim, chose another way of presenting his Stürmerkasten in early 1935: he sent in a photograph of three men standing in front of the box, each reading the copy of Der Stürmer he held in his hands, and several young boys grouped around them (figure 2.2). The staging suggested that displaying the paper in Stürmerkästen was a way to attract new readers and maybe also new subscribers who preferred to hold their paper in their hands. And the inclusion of children indicated that Der Stürmer, contrary to the widespread criticism, appealed to the whole family. This kind of representation soon became a trend. Readers sent in photographs of their friends, families, and colleagues reading Der Stürmer at the dinner table; on the beach; while hiking; and, most commonly, gathered around a Stürmerkasten. Thus, children and women were often included, reading, chatting, or posing next to a display case. In one extraordinary photograph from Ochsen-

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Figure 2.2. United with Der Stürmer in Arzheim © Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Amb. 903.2°. Der Stürmer 13, no. 4 (1935). Used with permission.

hausen (in the Swabian Alps), a whole family posed around a box erected by an SS Sturmbann (figure 2.3). Beside one young man in civilian clothes and another in uniform stands a woman wearing a summer dress, and in the middle of the picture, directly in front of the Stürmerkasten, we see a little girl and the youngest family member in a stroller. Here again, we see that devoted Stürmer readers did not see themselves as race baiters on the fringe. We also see that the community of Der Stürmer readers was growing; it now included both men and women, and even children were being raised to belong.30 The paper instituted an editorial policy of publishing one group photograph around a Stürmerkasten in almost every issue, which made each one part of a continuing series. And a series portraying continually different, and different kinds of, people coming together in front of Stürmerkästen suggested that Der Stürmer’s steadily growing community was closing ranks. As the solitary Stürmergardisten at the beginning of the series were replaced by diverse groups, the series represented the whole “Volksgemeinschaft,” which, there could be no doubt, was a community of antisemites. In 1936, the staging of Der Stürmer’s photographs changed once again. Their subjects became larger groups from across Germany that represented specific seg-

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Figure 2.3. A growing community of readers: Stürmerkasten in Ochsenhausen © Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Amb. 903.2°. Der Stürmer 13, no. 34 (1935). Used with permission.

ments of the “Volksgemeinschaft”: “Attentive working men” in Bischofsheim in der Rhön, doctors and nurses from a mental hospital in Eberstadt, the Hitler Youth of Gmünd, “Hildesheimer Pimpfe,” women in the traditional garb of the Spreewald, the firemen of Holtgast, construction workers on a building site in Bielefeld, the railway personal of Leipzig Central Station, stormtroopers from Ottenrath, members of Berlin’s Department of Technical Emergency Relief, the telegraph department in Duisburg, the staff of the Hotel Friesenhof on Germany’s northern coast, the Department of Air Defense in Cologne, the “Federation of German Public Servants,” workers in an armament factory in Erfurt, and a party of Stürmerfreunde in Brazil.31 It is difficult to determine if this change occurred because activist readers began to take and submit a different kind of photograph or because the editors changed their selection criteria. If the latter, the new criteria may have been part of the new editorial policy the newspaper instituted at the end of 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws officially instituted the state’s discrimination against Jews in Germany and Der Stürmer wanted to show that its “educational work” was still needed.32 In any case, the importance of the shift in photographic subjects from individual Stürmergardisten to representative groups of the “Volksgemeinschaft” is that activist readers represented their community as dominating the public space around the boxes. Accordingly, in 1936 and 1937 we find a growing number of stories about unveiling ceremonies for new Stürmerkästen illustrated with official-looking pho-

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tographs of groups of uniformed men together with women and children, who constituted a National Socialist audience formed up and at attention. The Stürmerfreunde proudly presented themselves as part of a community of upright men, women, and children; comrades and workers; and friends and families who occupied a significant place in the new German public. And in forming that community, they had proven, in spite of the criticism of Der Stürmer, that its antisemitic readership had to be taken seriously as an influential part of local society and the Nazi movement. Throughout this process, activist readers’ taking and submitting snapshots of themselves with their Stürmerkästen, and their publication in the paper, served as self-affirmation and self-enhancement. In staging themselves in specific ways in accord with their aesthetic practice and submitting the results for publication, they sought to make themselves visible as active and unabashedly antisemitic participants in the public sphere. The snapshots themselves are an impressive demonstration of the abiding enthusiasm with which Stürmerfreunde championed their paper and invented their own role as its activist audience. And the part they played in the dialogue between the paper and its readers enhanced the Stürmerfreunde’s self-confidence and empowered them socially. Furthermore, a photograph’s publication seemed to prove that the selected individual and his group were worthy of public notice. Finally, the series of photographs sent the clear message that the paper was mobilizing a growing community of readers and bringing them together in locally organized groups.

Erecting a Stürmerkasten: A “Real Man” Triumphs? Der Stürmer’s activist readers’ self-portrayals were not only a way of representing their belonging to and importance in the community of readers. They also saw Stürmerkästen as pushing the antisemitic agenda more than the regime was willing to, and they often had to overcome the opposition of Nazi and local authorities. That is, their project of displaying Der Stürmer in the middle of their neighborhoods was a form of social empowerment that gave them political agency. In the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazi regime limited its antisemitic policies to precise measures to maintain public order and stabilize the economy. It prohibited such actions as boycotting Jewish businesses and publicly threatening their owners with violence, but the virulently antisemitic Der Stürmer opposed this restraint and criticized what it claimed was the regime’s wavering. Thus, the erecting of Stürmerkästen functioned as a “pacemaker” for National Socialism’s Judenpolitik and, so, seemed to Stürmerfreunde worth the local bureaucratic struggle it often required.33 For during the first years of the Third Reich, local authorities often disapproved of Stürmerkästen, wanting to maintain the peace or simply the “uniformity and prettiness of the street scene.”34 The mayor of Frankfurt, for example, feared that erecting Stürmerkästen and posting placards and newspapers on walls and

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fences “becomes the thing,” so that everyone would feel free to hang anything up anywhere.35 Or, like the Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Lower Saxony, they forbade Stürmerkästen because the paper was not an official organ of the Nazi Party.36 Given such resistance, activist readers often described their Stürmerkästen at the unveiling ceremonies as the happy end of a long struggle with local authorities and, as banal as the erection of a wooden display case somewhere in the German provinces might seem, as the hard-won conquest of a contested public space. They may have also seen them as an effective way to stiffen the resolve of National Socialist waverers and, thus, an important contribution to dismantling the old system, maintained by bureaucrats left over from the Weimar period, and establishing the new one. Though it was probably atypical, a well-documented early case from the city of Konstanz, close to the Swiss border in Southern Germany, illustrates the bureaucratic conflicts that setting up a Stürmerkasten could generate. In August 1933, the Oberpostdirektion (OPD), the city’s head postal administration office, reported that the mayor had ordered the installation of a Stürmerkasten on the wall of the main post office building “for political reasons” and asked for the OPD’s approval.37 He was enacting a resolution of the city council, which had agreed to pay for it.38 The OPD reported its acquiescence to the Ministry for Postal Services in Berlin: “We waived our scruples and agreed that a place for the newspaper box should be provided.”39 The Ministry, however, objected to an official display of Der Stürmer and refused its permission. But Berlin’s refusal did not prevent the city from acting. The municipal building authority just ignored the Ministry and set the display case into the wall of the post office during the clerks’ lunch break, when no one was around to interfere (see figures 2.4 and 2.5).40 In September, the postal workers complained bitterly to the Ministry that “decent-thinking circles” agreed that the paper was “on the lowest cultural level,” that local activists used the space to propagandize for National Socialism, and, above all, they objected to a sign hung next to the display case that, according to their letter, read “Christian girls of Konstanz who go out with Jewish pigs (sic) will be denounced and their names and pictures will be published in Der Stürmer.”41 The OPD also criticized the sign, worrying that it would harm tourism, for the post office was directly opposite the central train station and postal workers had received “numerous complaints.”42 It asked the Ministry to support its making the building “clean” again.43 The OPD also reached out to other officials. When the deputy mayor, who had voted for the Stürmerkasten, ended a telephone conversation “by simply hanging up,” it turned to the Nazi Party’s head district administrator.44 In the following weeks, the Ministry of Labor45 and an “expert in racial research” in the Ministry of the Interior got involved.46 Eventually, all of the authorities in Berlin agreed that Der Stürmer’s antisemitic caricatures and the “typewritten placards” threatening the “Christian girls of Konstanz” were a serious threat to the peace in a city so close to the Swiss border.47 After several weeks of back and forth, Berlin prevailed, and the Stürmerkasten was removed in the spring of 1934.

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Figure 2.4 and 2.5. The Stürmerkasten at the post office building in Konstanz without and with the activists © BArch. Used with permission.

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Stürmerkästen could also socially empower local Stürmer activists, as an episode from the small town of Neuenhagen, which is close to Berlin, shows. Neuenhagen was the location of the well-known Waldfried racing stable and stud farm, both of which were important to the town. The manager of Waldfried was Count Rudolf von Spreti, a son-in-law of the eminent industrialist Arthur von Weinberg. Since von Weinberg came from a Jewish family, radical antisemites also considered his adopted daughter, von Spreti’s wife, Jewish. Thus, von Spreti became the target of ferocious antisemitic propaganda. In May 1935, he even made it onto the front page of Der Stürmer, which attacked him as a “Judenfreund” and “Rasseschänder.”48 Seizing the opportunity to agitate against Neuenhagen’s entrenched social hierarchy, Neuenhagen’s chapter of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF) displayed Der Stürmer issue number 18 in its Stürmerkasten hanging on the front yard fence of the house in which it had its office. This caused some trouble in the following days. On 29 May, an employee of von Spreti entered the DAF office seeking the newspaper’s removal, and a few hours later a group of eighteen men arrived seeking the same thing.49 The DAF adamantly refused on the grounds that there was “no official order” to remove it, as its local Pressewart (media spokesman) reported to Der Stürmer’s editors in Nuremberg. The situation escalated. According to the Pressewart’s report, “The people could not be calmed but accosted the DAF officials and threatened them. Then, they violently removed the display case from the fence on the frontage of the premises of Eichenallee No. 61, and carried it to the attic of the property.”50 The little affair had no consequences. A complaint filed with the Gestapo by the excited DAF led to nothing, and von Spreti apparently pulled some strings in Berlin to stop the paper’s attacks on him. Nevertheless, the DAF’s use of its Stürmerkasten to link Der Stürmer’s antisemitic propaganda to local circumstances empowered the DAF officials. In assessing the social dynamics of setting up a Stürmerkasten, it is important to understand that they were the results of grassroots initiatives in response to local circumstances without the support of authorities and often contrary to their prohibition. In the summer of 1935, for instance, Hanover’s NSDAP Ortsgruppe Südbahnhof (South Station chapter) celebrated “our” Stürmerkasten “because we made it entirely on our own.”51 In order to set it up on the sidewalk of a busy street, they had to overcome both a renitent homeowner and the city council. “The former took the view that the Stürmerkasten would ‘blight’ the front yard,”52 and the city council’s intervention on his behalf was in vain. “[W]e did it,” the activists subsequently cheered.53 In Dortmund-Wambel, the jobless Stürmerfreund H. Wiethaus had to jump over several bureaucratic hurdles before he could erect his display case. “I presented myself to the traffic police twice,” he wrote in a letter to the editors. “Then I had to go to the municipal civil engineering department, to the city’s planning office and to the construction police. Yes, it really was a lot of running,” he recounted proudly. “But I did not rest until everything was done.”54 And according to their letter, Stürmerfreunde in Cammin

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(Pomerania) had to fight against “people who caused all sorts of difficulties and finally believed that on top of all this they had to seek the verdict of a provincial conservator. For the erection, a nominal fee of 3 Mark per annum was even charged. Don’t laugh!!!”55 Stürmerfreunde had to raise money or spend their “own funds”;56 find skilled helpers; and deal with city councils, police departments, and provincial conservators. For an unemployed man like Wiethau or a local group of ordinary party members, negotiating such a bureaucratic maze was a real challenge. Thus, finally erecting a Stürmerkasten could feel like a hard-won victory. Der Stürmer sometimes documented these victories, as, for example, in one photograph that showed activists and carpenters on a ladder driving in the last screws.57 And some activists’ stories of their dedication reveal their sense of accomplishment. The Stürmerfreunde in Cammin celebrated their Stürmerkasten as a profound triumph: “the main thing is that the purposeful have triumphed, real men.”58 This self-image as triumphant “real men” and “tenacious, tireless, and unfaltering fighters”59 shows that Stürmerfreunde saw themselves as taking part, on the local level, in the heroic struggle of the National Socialist “Kämpfer” against the political establishment left over from the Weimar Republic. Some historians have described the sometimes confrontational, sometimes harmonious interactions among local activists, the “Volkszorn,” and the NSDAP leadership as a driving force in the radicalization of National Socialist Judenpolitik.60 In this way also activists could experience small successes as triumphs. When local antisemitic agitation began to gain momentum across the country in summer 1935 and thousands of Stürmerkästen were put up, builders expressed their feelings of triumph in their increasingly ostentatious designs. Earlier display boxes had a simple rectangular design, but Stürmerfreunde now wanted to personalize their Stürmerkästen and went to great lengths to make them distinctive. A closer look at the photographs from this period gives one an impression of the time, skill, and money an eye-catching Stürmerkasten required. Most of these later display boxes were decorated with swastikas, the name ‘Der Stürmer,’ and recurring slogans. Almost every one featured “The Jews are our misfortune,” which was often complemented with “The race question is the key to world history,” “Women and girls, the Jews are your ruin,” or “Do not buy from Jews.” For instance, the NSDAP Ortsgruppe in Schreiberhau (in the Riesengebirge) presented its “extraordinarily beautiful” box to Der Stürmer in January 1936.61 It was crowned by a wooden swastika, and on the frame were large carved faces resembling the paper’s caricatures of Jews. “The meaningful carving work comes from the sculptor Helmut Benna,” the caption stated.62 Such supposedly meaningful carvings were frequent. An inventive Stürmerkasten in Wetzlar was decorated with huge, caricatured heads,63 and the caricatures on top of a display box in Wolfenbüttel depicted a Jew whose nose and toes were being cut and ripped off by a tailor with scissors and a blacksmith with pliers.64 Activist readers in Berlin even invented a mobile Stürmerkasten on wheels.

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The creators of such elaborate display cases apparently took their selfassigned task very seriously, and their stylistic efforts expressed their commitment, creativity, and skill. Photograph submitters in this period competed over whose display cases were more ornate, inventive, or simply bigger. At the same time, these features intensified the humiliation of those they targeted and sought to stigmatize and exclude from society. The narrative of ordinary people struggling against the opposition of the old authorities and others was central to the self-perception and self-presentation of Der Stürmer’s activist readers. In this narrative, erecting a Stürmerkasten was a small but manly triumph. Such “purposeful” builders expressed their dedication and skill in the inventiveness of their display boxes.65

Involuntary Audiences: Stürmerkästen as an Existential Threat to Jews in Germany However, erecting an ornate Stürmerkasten in a central location was not the end of the activist’s project. He also wanted to control the “beautiful place” he had found.66 Thus, setting up a Stürmerkasten was only the first step. Its makers and caretakers then began to redefine the space it occupied, using the case and the paper it displayed to carry out their own antisemitic agenda in the local circumstances. One of the main such uses of Stürmerkästen was to display handwritten, typed, or published lists of the names and addresses of Jewish residents, businesses, lawyers’ and doctors’ offices, and, in some cases, the names of local “Volksverräter,” that is, people who still greeted Jews, entered their offices, or bought goods in their shops. So, activists employed their Stürmerkästen to target both Jews and those who tried to stick to their shopping habits, show solidarity, or simply be civil, and such a redefined public space could change a neighborhood’s social climate decisively. Thus, Stürmerkästen contributed to the atmosphere that eventually led to the total social exclusion of Jews. The summer of 1935, when Stürmerkästen appeared all over the country, brought a new and radicalized wave of antisemitic hatred. Boycotts and similar actions became so aggressive that the regime could claim that it enacted the Nuremberg Laws in September to control and channel the “Volkszorn” from above.67 A typical case from this period of the crucial role of Stürmerkästen in a local boycott of Jewish businesses comes from Lyck, a small town in East Prussia. The Swedish Jew Moritz Hirschfeldt, who had a shop in the center of town, reported to the Royal Swedish Legation that three Stürmerkästen had been erected close to his store in which were handwritten lists of the names of all of Lyck’s Jewish inhabitants. “In case that one or two officials, citizens do not know who is a Jew, they are listed here,” read an explanatory note.68 Hirschfeldt felt threatened and as a Swedish citizen turned to the Royal Legation for help. The situation soon got worse. He next reported, “In front of the store, a person positioned himself, standing in a big box, so that one could not recognize who was in that box. The

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box was covered with issues of the newspaper Der Stürmer.”69 The purpose of the box became clear when he took a closer look and saw a camera lens sticking out of a hole in its side.70 A few days later, several young men openly photographed everyone who entered or left Hirschfeldt’s shop. Finally, in early August Hirschfeldt found pictures of nineteen of his customers posted in the cases. “On some photographs one can even recognize the name of the shop above the entrance.”71 These events were not exceptional. Jewish business owners and members of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) (CV) reported on hundreds of similar incidents across Germany. In fact, the CV had been reporting on incidents of antisemitism since the late 1920s.72 But the testimony it gathered in the summer of 1935 reveals how quickly and fundamentally Stürmerkästen could change the social climate for Jewish shopkeepers and residents. In some places, the consequences of such attempts to stir up the atmosphere were soon evident. For example, in the small East Prussian town of Osterode, a batch of denunciatory photographs posted in the town’s Stürmerkasten caused unrest in summer 1935, but calm returned after they were removed. In August, however, Jewish residents and shop owners were confronted with a new strategy. On the market day one week, scaffolds, each with a loudspeaker, had been set up at both ends of the shopping space. “At first, marching music sounded from the loudspeakers.” But the music was soon replaced by the shouts of an activist advertising Der Stürmer and warning, “People, don’t buy from Jews! The Jews are our misfortune! Do you want to be a servant to Jews? Hello, don’t go in there, it’s a Jewish business!” A Jewish observer identified the slogans as Stürmer headlines. Activists repeated them from morning until evening, alternating with music “apparently on records.” The observer reported: “These transmissions had a definite effect; apart from the fact that the noise was perceived by many as extremely inconvenient and annoying, the announcements over the loudspeaker had a noticeable impact on the shopping routine, especially in the Jewish shops in whose immediate vicinity the loudspeakers had been erected.”73 In the same summer, two Jewish shop owners in Pomerania, one in Bad Polzin and the other in Bärwalde, found display cases standing right in front of the entrances to their shops. According to a report to the CV, “entering the store has become more and more difficult and customers have been intimated by those standing in front of the boxes.”74 A few hundred kilometers to the east in Rosenberg, the customers of Jewish-owned shops were photographed for several days, and the public became “extremely scared and does not dare to buy in the shops of Jewish owners,” the CV recorded.75 A new Stürmerkasten was then set up to display the photographs. Also in nearby Riesenburg, such photographs were posted in a Stürmerkasten;76 according to the CV, “[though] in recent days, no more official measures were recorded customers are still very scared, especially the Stürmerkasten has an impact. All Jewish tradesmen are still listed there.”77 The Stürmerkasten in Lauenburg, also in Pomerania, was the decisive element in the campaign against Jewish-owned businesses. For a number of days, photog-

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raphers, accompanied by a large, howling crowd, took pictures of the customers of Jewish-owned shops, which were posted, along with a list of the shops, in the Stürmerkasten. In his report to the CV, Mr. R. stated that he was not able to see them because of “the huge crowds” gathered around the display case.78 The result was that all of the town’s Jewish-owned shops closed. The agitation diminished after three days, but the posted photographs sustained the threat. According to Mr. R., “photographing has diminished considerably. Last Saturday, there was only one photographer in front of a Jewish shop and only for a very short time. The last pictures, about 20, are still displayed in the Stürmerkasten. Our Lauenburg friends see this as a great danger.”79 The economic effects of the Stürmerkasten in Bad Polzin (Pomerania) could be measured. It was set up directly in front of Alexander Gerber’s shop in August, and he complained to the Economics Ministry in October: “Every day, people gather around the box to read the displayed newspapers; they produce congestion, traffic obstructions.” And his turnover declined considerably: “Usually, my sales volume is 10,000 RM, now it has dropped to only 3,000 RM.”80 Gerber had to cancel deliveries and couldn’t pay his employees; the display case threatened his livelihood. We can glean a little of his fear and anger from the efforts he made in his letters to the Ministry to explain the situation. In one, he sketched the box, which was 3.25 meters long, double-sided, and emblazoned with the usual slogans (figure 2.6). It stood 1.5 meters from the entrance to his store, a photograph

Figure 2.6. Sketch of the Stürmerkasten in Bad Polzin by Alexander Gerber © CAHJP, HM2/8791, fol. 1940. Used with permission.

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of which he included (figure 2.7). So Gerber, and his customers, had to face the antisemitic threat on his doorstep day after day. According to some of the reports to the CV, when the phenomenon of Stürmerkästen was new, Jewish business owners and employees did not know what to make of them or how to respond, and, consequently, their effectiveness came as a surprise. H. Louis, who worked at the House of Good Quality, a “Jewish” business in Fürstenwalde (Brandenburg), described his unsuspecting first experience with a newly erected display case in his report to the CV in June 1935: “Although I was aware of the mounting of the Stürmerkasten, I, like all other Jewish merchants here, did not pay much attention to it, because these boxes have recently been set up in all towns.” But a few days later, he realized that he had misjudged things: “On Tuesday, a list of all Jewish residents . . . appeared in this Stürmerkasten, along with an article from the newspaper itself that specifically mentioned the listing.”81 Then, on Sunday, a list of the names of the recent customers of Jewish-owned stores was added: “Of course, this measure is very embarrassing because people are intimidated and finally shy away from entering the Jewish shops.”82 Such reports to the CV about how Stürmerkästen were used to pillory Jewish owners, employees, and their customers reveal how they turned the public space around them into an information and staging area for local antisemitic action. Thus, the low-level antisemitic agitation that had provoked the postal clerks in Konstanz and the ministerial authorities in Berlin in 1933 became both more extreme and more common in many German towns in the following years. In

Figure 2.7. Photograph of Gerber’s shop, the handwritten marks indicating the position of the Stürmerkasten © CAHJP, HM2/8791, fol. 1941. Used with permission.

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this way, Der Stürmer’s radical readers took over public spaces and used them for what they declared was their “educational work” against Jews and, in the process, enhanced their political and social influence.83 Of course, the situation varied from town to town and from neighborhood to neighborhood within towns. As a product of local activism, the impact of Stürmerkästen depended on the social and economic circumstances in the towns and neighborhoods in which they were set up. However, in many cases, especially in smaller communities, Stürmer activists prevailed with the help of their Stürmerkästen. For example, the Stürmerfreunde of Ortelsburg (East Prussia) were close to reaching their goal of completely excluding the town’s Jews from its social and economic life as early as September 1935. A photographer had been taking pictures of customers of “Jewish” stores, especially on market days, since late summer 1934. According to one CV investigator, the photographer was “the merchant Karasch from Ortelsburg,” “a competitor of [a] Jewish business owner.”84 He further reported that Karasch, who distributed Der Stürmer from his car on Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holy day, threatened his competitor’s customers that he would post their photographs in the local Stürmerkasten. According to another investigator, the use of the Stürmerkasten to harass Jews in Ortelsburg had already had serious consequences by 1935: “After many families have moved away from Ortelsburg, a few more are planning to give up their businesses and their places of residence now. . . . This would mean that the once prosperous community of Ortelsburg would be completely diminished.”85 Ortelsburg, Osterode, and Lyck were only three of the hundreds of German towns and villages whose Jewish inhabitants were publicly threatened with antisemitic attacks organized around and informed by Stürmerkästen. The cases I have described show how a Stürmerkasten in a town with a small number of inhabitants and, so, customers could effectively sustain antisemitic action. By gathering and posting information in their display cases, Der Stürmer’s activist readership made every passerby, every shopper, and every Jewish shop owner their audience, often involuntarily, and thereby decisively altered the local social climate.

Conclusion In explaining the genesis of Der Stürmer’s activist community and assessing its campaigns, we must be careful not to oversimplify the facts. The Stürmerfreunde were a radical minority widely repudiated as indecent for their attraction to Der Stürmer’s sexual and violent fantasies, even by the Nazi movement and some of the Party’s leaders. However, they created a unique sort of antisemitic community whose activism influenced the social and political atmosphere of its members’ neighborhoods. They used their Stürmerkästen to control public spaces and make their hateful ideology part of everyday life in German cities, towns, and villages. Their practice of submitting photographs of their Stürmerkästen to Der Stürmer

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and its practice of publishing them were part of the dialogue between the paper’s activist readers and editors. By composing their photographs according to a common style of self-representation, Stürmerfreunde instituted, followed, and confirmed the stylistic rules of their community. This self-creation, in turn, made them confident in what they saw as their heroic grassroots antisemitic movement. This confidence invigorated their local antisemitic campaigns. Der Stürmer was their Kampfblatt, able to “bring together and mobilize like-minded people,”86 and Stürmerkästen were an important part of this mobilization. Building, erecting, and maintaining one was a local project that needed several people to organize funding, craftsmen, bureaucratic permission, and caretaking. Realizing this project could be a challenge, and the shared effort brought and bound local activists together. Especially in the first years of the Third Reich, success constituted a small victory. Thus, the project’s participants could feel that they were taken seriously, creatively and politically, and its success empowered them as members of a local group of committed comrades and an imaged nation-wide “Volksgemeinschaft.” Stürmerfreunde conceived of their community in terms of its “educational work,” in which Stürmerkästen were a kind of pillory in local antisemitic campaigns. The lists of names and photographs posted in them identified local Jews, which gave the abstract Jew of Nazi stereotypes a face, name, profession, and an address. And they publicly exposed and denounced Gentiles for their interactions with Jews. As a result, merely entering a supposedly Jewish-owned shop or greeting a Jewish neighbor became a political act. And the space around a display case was a stage for a public dispute that passersby had to take a side in, especially if it stood close to a “Jewish” business. Under the eyes of the Stürmerfreunde, and the public, shoppers had to decide if they would ignore the threat and enter the shop or heed the agitators’ warnings and avoid it. The reports and letters of Jews in Germany demonstrate the grim effects of Stürmerkästen in everyday life. Jews could not avoid the boxes proudly erected in front of town halls, post offices, and cinemas; on shopping streets; and hung on the front yard fences of private residences. Often, the mere presence of a Stürmerkasten felt threatening to its involuntary Jewish audience. Reports to the CV about their impact on the buying public also reveal how Stürmerkästen contributed to the demarcation of non-Jewish and Jewish spaces in towns and villages, the rapid erection of an invisible wall between the two groups, and Jews’ social elimination from German society. Because their Stürmerkästen addressed every passerby, Der Stürmer’s activist readers created new, unwilling audiences for the paper and widened their own sphere of influence. Thereby, they acquired local political power and became a serious local threat to Jews. Hannah Ahlheim is Professor of Contemporary History at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her research interests include the history of National Socialism and antisemitism and the transatlantic history of sleep and sleep sciences in

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the twentieth century. She is the author of “Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden!” Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland 1924–1935 (Wallstein, 2012), coeditor of the yearbook Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, and is currently completing a textbook, Der Nationalsozialismus 1933–1939 (UTB Seminarbuch).

Notes 1. “Stürmerkasten in Arzheim,” Der Stürmer 13, no. 4 (1935). (“Mein lieber Stürmer! Nachdem ich Dich nun schon längere Zeit mit mir vereinigt habe und lieber trocken Brot esse als Dich aus meinem Hause zu lassen, so muß ich Dir mitteilen, daß ich Dir zum Weihnachtsgeschenk einen schönen Platz in unserem Dorfe bereitet habe.”) 2. Cf. “Stürmer”-Kartei, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg GSI 134 “Stürmer”-Kartei Serie I Personen / Sachen (Karton 1–28). From 1935 on, a list of “new Stürmerkästen” was published in every issue under the heading “Kleine Nachrichten.” Cf. K.-H. Reuband, “Die Leserschaft des ‘Stürmer’ im Dritten Reich. Soziale Zusammensetzung und antisemitische Orientierung,” Historical Social Research 33 (2008): 214–54, here 215. 3. Cf. D. Roos, Julius Streicher und “Der Stürmer” 1923–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014); R. L. Bytwerk, “Julius Streicher and the Impact of Der Stürmer,” The Wiener Library Bulletin 29 (1976–77): 41–46; R. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher (New York: Stein and Day, 1983); H. Froschauer and R. Geyer, Quellen des Hasses – Aus dem Archiv des ‘Stürmer’ 1933–1945, Ausstellungskatalog des Stadtarchivs (Nuremberg: Stadtarchiv, 1988). 4. Roos, Julius Streicher und “Der Stürmer,” 435 passim. 5. F.  F. Hahn, Lieber Stürmer! Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924 bis 1945. Eine Dokumentation aus dem Leo-Baeck-Institut (Stuttgart-Degerloch: Seewald, 1978), 8; A. Przyrembel, Rassenschande. Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); C.-E. Linsler, “Stürmer-Karikaturen,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 7, ed. W. Benz (Berlin: De Gruyter Saur, 2015), 477–80. 6. Cf. Przyrembel, Rassenschande, 185; Hahn, Lieber Stürmer!, 149. The rapid increase in circulation in 1935 can be ascribed to an agreement with Robert Ley’s Deutsche Arbeitsfront to purchase the paper regularly (C. Kreutzmüller and E. Weber, “Unheilvolle Allianzen. Die Rolle des Stürmer bei der Vernichtung jüdischer Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin,” NURINST. Beiträge zur deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte [2008]: 81–98, here 83). Circulation dropped significantly during the war. 7. Reuband, Leserschaft, 215. 8. “The board has its regular clientele because here in the neighborhood not everybody can afford a Stürmer,” explained a letter to the editors. Der Stürmer 13, no. 4 (1935), No. 4. (“Die Planke . . . hat ihre regelmäßige Stammkundschaft, denn in dieser Gegend können sich nicht alle einen Stürmer erlauben.”) 9. Melanie Wager points to the fact that before 1933 Der Stürmer regularly reported on destroyed Stürmerkästen. Cf. Interview “Der ‘Stürmer’ – die Filterblase der Nazis,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 27 August 2019, 11. 10. Regierungspräsident Kassel, Report July and August 1935, 2 September 1935, in O. Kulka and E. Jaeckel, eds. Die Juden in den Geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004), 155. (“Die Stimmung der Bevölkerung hat sich . . . in nicht zu

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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verkennender Weise verschlechtert. . . . Die Gefahr, daß . . . die Stürmerkästen sogar zum Austrag persönlicher Dorffeindschaften benutzt werden, ist . . . nicht von der Hand zu weisen.”) “Aufgrund eines Berichts des Oberpräsidenten von Schlesien / Absicht des Reichsministers die Frage eines Verbots des Aushangs des ‘Stürmers’ sowie der Aufstellung von ‘StürmerKästen’ in der Öffentlichkeit zu erörtern (Regest 30946),” in Nationalsozialismus. Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil 1933–1945. Online-Datenbank. De Gruyter, accessed 14 April 2019. Ibid. Ibid. Reuband, Leserschaft, 221. M. Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919–1939 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007); H. Ahlheim, “Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden!” Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland 1923 bis 1935 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012); Kreutzmüller and Weber, Unheilvolle Allianzen. “Stürmerkasten in Arzheim,” Der Stürmer 13, no. 4 (1935). Cf. Center for Jewish History, Leo Baeck Institute, AR 360 / Bernhard Kolb Collection, Box 2, Folder 7 and 12; Hauptstaatsarchiv Nürnberg (StaNu) NS-Mischbestand (Rep. 503), Sammlung Streicher. Roos, Julius Streicher und “Der Stürmer,” 440. Przyrembel, Rassenschande, 195. Bytwerk, “Streicher and the Impact,” 44; Bytwerk, Streicher, 163ff.; Przyrembel, Rassenschande, 195; Kreutzmüller and Weber, Unheilvolle Allianzen. Wager even claims that Stürmerkästen can be seen as an “analogue” form of a “Social Network,” cf. Interview, “Der ‘Stürmer’ – die Filterblase der Nazis”; M. Wager, “Warenhausjude, Wäschejude, Autojude. Der Stürmer und die Arisierung,” in Entrechtet. Entwürdigt. Beraubt. Die Arisierung in Nürnberg und Fürth, ed. M. Henkel and E. Dietzfelbinger. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung im Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg (Petersberg: Imhof, 2012), 17–39. For the concept of a public sphere in the Third Reich, see Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft; P. Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und “Deutscher Humor.” Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 23ff.; P. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933– 1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006), 23–53. The “Jewishness” of a business or shop was defined by the racial categories of the antisemites and did not refer to the self-conception or religious affiliation of its owners. Der Stürmer 13, no. 24 (1935). Cf. Quellen des Hasses, 29. Der Stürmer 13, no. 7 (1935). Der Stürmer 13, no. 22 (1935). Der Stürmer 13, no. 34 (1935). Der Stürmer 16, no. 21 (1938). Der Stürmer 13, no. 22 (1935). Der Stürmer 13, no. 34 (1935). Der Stürmer 13, no. 22 (1935); Der Stürmer 14, nos. 10, 11, 30, 35, 36, 38, 42 (1936); Der Stürmer 15, nos. 24 and 41 (1937). Cf. Roos, Julius Streicher und “Der Stürmer,” 308ff. Ibid., 441; Ahlheim, Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott, 360ff.

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34. Letter from Oberbürgermeister Frankfurt to Polizeipräsidenten Frankfurt am Main, 1 July 1935, BArch NS 22/915. 35. Ibid. 36. Letter from “Der Reichsorganisationsleiter” to “S.A. der N.S.D.A.P.,” Brigade 12 (Hamburg), Munich, 22 October 1935, BArch NS 22/915. 37. Sketch of a letter by the Oberpostdirektion, Konstanz, 5 August 1933, BArch, R 4701/ 28080, folder 3. 38. Letter by the Oberbürgermeisters of Konstanz, 22 July 1933, BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. 39. Sketch of a letter by the Oberpostdirektion, Konstanz, 5 August 1933, BArch, R 4701/ 28080, folder 3. 40. Letter to the Reichspostminister by the Oberpostdirektion Konstanz, 28 September 1933, BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. 41. Letter to the Reichspostministerium by the Abteilung Reichspost, Konstanz, 11 September 1933, BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. The “(sic)” is in the letter. 42. Report, signed by “Schlegel,” Reichspostdirektion, Karlsruhe, 8 May 1934, BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. 43. Letter to the Reichspostminister by the Oberpostdirektion Konstanz, 28 September 1933, BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. 44. Ibid. 45. Letter by the Reicharbeitsminister to the Postminister, 28 September 1933, BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. 46. Letter 27 November 1933, BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. 47. BArch, R 4701/28080, folder 3. 48. Der Stürmer 13, no. 18 (1935). 49. Transcript of a report by the Pressewart der Ortsgruppe, Jabbusch, Neuenhagen bei Berlin, 30 May 1935, BArch, R 1501/213075. 50. Ibid. 51. “Wie wir unseren Stürmerkasten einweihten. Von der Tätigkeit unserer Stürmergardisten in Hannover,” Der Stürmer 13, no. 25 (1935) (emphasis in original). 52. Ibid. (“Letzter stellte sich nämlich auf den Standpunkt, der Stürmerkasten würde den Vorgarten ‘verschandeln.’”) 53. Ibid. 54. “Wir schufen einen Stürmerkasten. Ein Arbeitsloser aus Dortmund-Wambel schreibt dem Stürmer,” Der Stürmer 14, no. 6 (February 1936). 55. Der Stürmer 13, no. 24 (1935). (“Leute, die alle möglichen Schwierigkeiten machten und schließlich noch glaubten, das Urteil eines Provinzialkonservators einholen zu müssen. Für die Aufstellung wurde sogar eine ‘Anerkennungsgebühr’ von jährlich 3 Mar verlangt. Nicht lachen!!!”) 56. “Stürmerkasten in Hessisch-Lichtenau.” Ibid. 57. Cf., e.g., Der Stürmer 13, nos. 28 and 35 (1935). 58. “Stürmerkasten in Cammin,” Der Stürmer 13, no. 24 (1935). (“Aber, und das ist die Hauptsache, gesiegt haben die Zielbewußten, ganze Männer, der Stürmerkasten in Cammin steht.”) 59. Der Stürmer 13, no. 22 (1935). (“zähe, unermüdliche und unbeugsame Kämpfer.”) 60. Cf. P. Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper, 1998), 31; Ahlheim, Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott, 241ff.

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61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

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Der Stürmer 14, no. 5 (1936). Ibid. Der Stürmer 13, no. 30 (1935). “Wolfenbüttel 33 - Das erste Jahr der Diktatur,” NS-Spurensuche: im Lande Braunschweig, http://www.ns-spurensuche.de/index.php?id=4&topic=15&key=12, accessed 23 August 2019. “Stürmerkasten in Cammin,” Der Stürmer 13, no. 24 (1935). Der Stürmer 13, no. 4 (1935). A. Barkai, “Etappen der Ausgrenzung und Verfolgung,” in Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 4: 1918–1945, ed. M. Meyer, 193–224 (Munich: Beck, 2000), 204–05. Letter by the Königlich Schwedische Gesandtschaft to the foreign office, June 1935 (Durch ein Mitglied der Schwedischen Gesandtschaft Überreichung eines Berichts de . . . [Regest 21242]), in Nationalsozialismus. Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil 1933–1945. Online-Datenbank, De Gruyter, accessed 14 April 2019. (“Sollte dieser oder jener Beamte, Bürger nicht wissen, wer Jude ist, so werden sie hiermit aufgezählt.”) Transcript of cable by Hirschfeldt to the Königlich Schwedische Gesandtschaft, 27 July 1935. Ibid. Ibid. Transcript of a registered letter by Hirschfeldt to the Königlich Schwedische Gesandtschaft, 6 August 1935. Ibid. Cf. A. Barkai, “Wehr Dich!” Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.) 1893–1938 (Munich: Beck, 2002); A. Barkai, “The C.V. and Its Archives: A Reassessment,” LBIYB 45 (2000): 173–82. Report by the CV Landesverband Ostpreußen, Max Angerthal, to the CV headquarters in Berlin, 28 August 1935, CAHJP HM2/8784, fol. 707. (“Diese Beschallung zeigte durchaus Wirkung, abgesehen davon, dass der Lärm vielfach als überaus störend und lästig empfunden wurde, hatten die Verkündigungen durch den Lautsprecher eine deutlich spürbare Beeinflussung des Geschäftsganges zurfolge, besonders in den jüdischen Geschäften, in deren unmittelbarer Nähe die Lautsprecher errichtet worden waren.”) To the Regierungspräsidenten Köslin, 7 November 1935, CAHJP HM2/8791, fol. 1922. Report by the Landesverband Ostpreußen to the CV Berlin, 11 July 1935, CAHJP HM2/8784, fol. 935. CAHJP HM2/8784, fol. 929. Report by the Landesverband Ostpreußen to CV Berlin, 10 September 1935, CAHJP HM2/8784, fol. 925. Transcript of a notice in the Stürmerkasten CAHJP HM2/8791, fol. 1763. Report by the Landesverband Pommern to CV Berlin, 10 September 1935, fol. 1780. Letter by Alexander Gerber to the Reichswirtschaftsministerium, 13 October 1935, CAHJP HM2/791, fol. 1944. Handwritten letter, A. Marcus & Co. Das Haus der guten Qualitäten, founded in 1899, Fürstenwalde, 24 June 1935, CAHJP HM2/8766, fol. 2315/16. Ibid., fol. 2317/18. “Aufklärungsarbeit.” Cf. the letter of Rogendorf, Der Stürmer no. 4 (January 1935). Report CV Landesverband Ostpr. (Angerthal) 1935, CAHJP, HM2/8784, fol. 1157. Report Landesverband Ostpreußen to CV Berlin, 9 September 1935, CAHJP HM2/8784, fol. 663. Hahn, Lieber Stürmer!, 7.

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Selected Bibliography Ahlheim, H. “Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden!” Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland 1923 bis 1935. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Hahn, F. F. Lieber Stürmer! Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924 bis 1945. Eine Dokumentation aus dem Leo-Baeck-Institut. Stuttgart-Degerloch: Seewald, 1978. Reuband, K.-H. “Die Leserschaft des ‘Stürmer’ im Dritten Reich. Soziale Zusammensetzung und antisemitische Orientierung.” Historical Social Research 33 (2008): 214–54. Roos, D. Julius Streicher und “Der Stürmer” 1923–1945. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014. Wildt, M. Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919–1939. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007.

3 Reading Fake News The “Röhm Putsch,” the Hitler Myth, and the Consumption of Political News under the Nazis Janosch Steuwer

They were at the table when they got the news. A chauffeur brought in an extra edition of a Zurich newspaper, Thomas Mann later noted in his diary for the evening of 30 June 1934. “Topsy-turvy in Germany: mutiny by the SA and Röhm, who was expelled and dismissed by Hitler, Braune Häuser [Nazi Party headquarters buildings] occupied by the Reichswehr, huge crowds in Berlin and Munich, arrests and shootings, firefight on Unter den Linden. General von Schleicher murdered.”1 More than a year had passed since the Nobel laureate for literature and prominent opponent of the Nazi movement had left Germany with his wife, shortly after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, and found safe haven in Switzerland. The couple had closely followed the newspaper reporting from Germany: the terrorizing of political opponents, the “Gleichschaltung” of society, the dismantling of the constitutional state, and the conflicts within the Nazi leadership.2 But what they now read was different. The paper quoted official statements about a “plot” by a number of “SA leaders” and their “reactionary allies” that Hitler’s courageous intervention at the last minute had thwarted. The Reich Press Service of the NSDAP spoke openly about “asocial and diseased elements” within the Nazi movement; the “morally so distressing scenes” that the arrests had uncovered; and the shooting of many of the suspected rebels, among them former Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher.3 The incident that had occurred across the border seemed serious and made a “deep impression” on Mann.4 That same evening, 30 June, he called the editorial office of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung “for new reports.” Over the next few weeks, he gathered all the information he could, reading the special editions, listening

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to the news on the radio, and discussing the incident with acquaintances. And he tried to make sense of the contradictions.5 Above all, Mann tried to identify actual events in the thicket of deceptive propaganda that obscured the Röhm purge at the time and still today makes it almost impossible to talk about without recourse to the terms of Nazi propaganda.6 He recorded details that he gleaned about the arrests and shootings and compared commentaries from various German and foreign-language newspapers; thus, he could soon see through the official account of the SA leadership’s supposed coup. “The ‘plot’ against the German state that needed to be bloodily suppressed is turning out more and more to be a criminal sham,” noted Mann as early as 4 July. “That dissatisfaction reigned within the SA was plain, but the course of the operation provides little evidence that the commanders were intending what they are being blamed for.” He concluded that it was more likely that the state’s action was “a preventative bloodbath” staged “as a huge act of moral purification to restore the already completely shattered mood,”7 an assessment that reinforced his view of Nazi Germany. He felt “relief ” and “satisfaction” that “after more than a year, Hitlerism is starting to prove itself to be what one had always seen, recognized, pervasively sensed: the ultimate in baseness, degenerate stupidity, and bloody disgrace.”8 He also noted that the “judgment of the foreign press is on the whole devastating” and that “foreign opinion is unanimous,” which further confirmed his views.9 Mann did not just study the news to assess events in Germany; he also tried to figure out what people in Germany made of them. But he was unsure. On the one hand, it seemed to him that the “revelations about corruption and lasciviousness” and the “murders, suicides, and large number of executions” indicated that “the fiction of the ‘totality’ and the unified Volksgemeinschaft had gone to pieces.” So, the public must see the regime as “splattered with the blood of the civil war.”10 On the other hand, he found it just as plausible “that the petty bourgeois masses would once again see in Hitler the savior.”11 Mann could not decide if newspaper readers in Germany also recognized the Nazis’ baseness, stupidity, and disgrace because their situation was completely different from his: “They are completely closed off; not only all Swiss newspapers but almost the entire foreign press is prohibited. The Germans know nothing, and they only vaguely know that they know nothing.”12 State control of the media created the “sole reign of the propaganda lie, without the faintest possibility for contradiction.”13 Was it possible to distinguish facts from propaganda and rumors in such circumstances? Could news consumers come to an accurate assessment of these events? These are the questions I seek to answer. The Nazi regime’s narrative of a thwarted putsch was a “propaganda coup par excellence,” in which it used the news media to lie more brazenly than on almost any other occasion.14 Thus, the Röhm affair is an especially instructive case for investigating how Germans consumed the news under National Socialism. For this reason, historians in the early 1980s extensively discussed Germans’ reactions to the news of an attempted coup. The picture they drew was the basis of Ian Kershaw’s thesis of the Hitler myth, which is probably the most influential explanation of the socially inte-

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grative force of National Socialism.15 But I have serious doubts about Kershaw’s thesis, in part because, as I show, it rests on an inadequate understanding of the public’s reception of news reports of the “Röhm Putsch.” An investigation of the public perception of the Röhm affair not only provides insights into the perception of this event; it also raises questions about National Socialism’s mechanisms of social integration and the role that mass media and news consumption played in them. Thus, in the first section, I discuss the established view of public perceptions of the supposed putsch and show that the thesis of the Hitler myth is based on weak sources. Next, I take up a new and more fruitful perspective on the questions historians raise about how Germans reacted to news of the affair and the opinions they formed about it. I draw on sources that previous researchers have not consulted, namely, diaries, which, as we saw with Thomas Mann’s, provide insights into how German newspaper readers consumed news.16 Finally, I return to the thesis of the Hitler myth and employ what I observe in diaries to provide a different explanation for the integration of society under National Socialism and the media’s role in it.

The “Röhm Putsch,” the Hitler Myth, and the Opinion Reports Research into Germans’ reactions to news coverage of the “Röhm Putsch” goes back many years. As early as the 1950s, most historians were convinced that almost all of the public believed the regime’s lies spread through the media about an attempted coup that Hitler had crushed.17 But close investigation of news reception began only at the end of the 1970s with the discovery of a source that seemed to report reliably on the attitudes of the German populace and spoke extensively about the Röhm affair, namely, the opinion reports (Stimmungsberichte) that security officials and other Nazi authorities had prepared in the 1930s and 1940s. The new source seemed to confirm the still dominant view that “nobody saw completely through the connections, extremely few had an overview of the consequences.”18 In fact, it offered “a surprisingly consistent portrayal of the opinion of the German populace about the events of 30 June 1934,”19 namely, that the public “mostly completely misinterpreted” what was going on.20 In believing the lies about an attempted coup, “Hitler’s intervention was perceived as securing ‘order.’”21 Accordingly, the “dozens of murders and executions that became known were accepted with near-indifference” as was “the almost total absence of any criticism of Hitler.”22 On the contrary, the public was outraged at the SA’s immorality, which the controlled media’s homophobic reports stoked. These conclusions about the public’s reaction to news stories about Hitler’s betrayal by morally dissolute party functionaries were supported by several studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Kershaw’s were especially influential. He ascribed far-reaching significance to the public’s reaction, arguing that its perception of the Röhm affair was the breakthrough of the idealized image of Hitler that Nazi

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propaganda had systematically constructed, which he called the ‘Hitler myth,’ whose socially integrating force reached beyond the Nazi movement and closely bound the entire populace to the regime. In the Weimar period, the idealized figure of the Führer was crucial for the cohesion of the Nazi movement, but in the wake of the Röhm purge “the new Hitler euphoria crossed social divides” and ensured “support and sympathy among those who had previously shown reserve towards the regime, and even among former opponents of Nazism.”23 The public’s acceptance of the official account “unquestionably strengthened confidence in Hitler” and accelerated the decline of its image of NSDAP subordinates.24 It was the propaganda’s contrast between the steadfast and decisive Führer and his disloyal followers that generated the “basic feature of political opinion throughout the Third Reich,” which was that lower party functionaries were blamed for any dissatisfaction.25 At the same time, people projected their hopes and desires onto the idealized image of the Führer, which, thus, had “an important compensatory function” of defusing discontent and criticism.26 Thus, the propaganda about the “Röhm Putsch” made the Hitler myth the “central motor for integration, mobilization, and legitimation within the Nazi system of rule.”27 Kershaw’s thesis of the Hitler myth is still influential. However, in recent years a few historians have expressed fundamental doubts about his sources, advancing a number of arguments, two of which are important for my purposes. First, critics have argued that the opinion reports did not record actual public opinion but the regime’s notion of what it must have been. It denied that there was any difference between the “Volksmeinung” and its policies. Rather, the regime believed in an invariable “Volkswille” that necessarily united the regime and the Volk. “The public opinion of the German people is National Socialism,” declared Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich, putting the idea in a nutshell.28 Accordingly, criticism of the leadership could come only from “alien” groups in the populace or temporarily confused members of the Volk.29 So, it was impossible for “different voices within the Volk to be of equal value” because its true attitude was always approval, and any critical “mood” was a “superficial phenomenon” that needed to be quickly eliminated.30 Thus, the opinion reports were not surveys of real public opinion; they were part of the state’s effort to make the “opinions, aspirations, and fears of the living members of the Volk” conform to its posited “Volkswille.”31 According to these critics, then, the opinion reports expressed the regime’s worldview. Consequently, it is unclear whether their “very positive reporting about Hitler’s image in the populace actually reflects the opinion of broad levels of the population or whether they show, above all, that reporting criticism of the ‘Führer’ was taboo.”32 The question is especially pressing in the context of the Röhm affair, for May and June 1934 featured an extensive propaganda campaign against “naysayers and quibblers” that made it clear that criticism, of Hitler in particular, would not be tolerated. “One man always remains exempt from criticism—that is the Führer,” proclaimed Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Heß, in a radio address just days before the regime executed Röhm and his supposed coconspirators. In light of this campaign, was “the almost total absence of any crit-

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icism of Hitler” in “the reports on reactions of ‘ordinary’ people throughout Germany following the ‘Röhm Putsch’” really as “striking” as Kershaw maintained?33 The opinion reports are a problematic source for another reason. Researchers in the 1980s used them to support claims about the influence of the media on the public’s political opinions during the Third Reich. But they do not tell us how Germans consumed print and radio news. Neither do the opinion reports produced by the Social Democratic Party in exile (Sopade) and other opponents of the Nazis, which did try to sound out public opinion in Germany.34 Both contain information on the public’s opinions about events, but, as Kershaw pointed out in the early 1980s, they do not show “the formation of opinion based on general and permanent propaganda.”35 They document the outcome but not the process of political opinion formation. But according to Kershaw, since there were no better sources, the opinion reports of both the Nazis and their opponents provided the best data on the formation of political opinion under National Socialism. Consequently, the vantage from which Kershaw viewed news consumption in Nazi Germany was similar to Mann’s. Kershaw, like Mann, understood that the conditions under which Germans followed the news were particular. But he acknowledged that the opinion reports that were his sources provided no information about how those conditions affected the consumption of political news. Even if one assumes with Kershaw that the reports “very reliably” document “the actual attitude—unbroken by propaganda—of the broad populace,”36 they say nothing about how individuals read and listened to the news. However, diaries are a good source for this information, for many diarists in Nazi Germany wrote about news accounts, and their entries provide far-reaching insights into their media consumption. In defending his use of opinion reports, Kershaw stressed that diaries “have not survived in sufficient quantity for representative surveys.” But that is not a shortcoming.37 A representative sample, which would inform us about the distribution of political attitudes, is irrelevant to understanding how Germans in the Third Reich consumed political news. The ways in which they read and listened to the news can only be studied qualitatively. And studying those processes provides a better understanding of the German public’s reactions to the news coverage of the “Röhm Putsch.”

Modes of News Consumption under National Socialism A close look at the consumption of news about the Röhm affair is also needed because historians’ methods for investigating media communication have changed fundamentally over the last three decades.38 In the 1980s, when historians formulated what are still the current theses about the public’s perception of the Röhm affair, they focused on the media’s transmission of messages. Kershaw and others compared propaganda and opinion reports to determine the extent to which the regime had spread its worldview.39 In accordance with the media studies of

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the time, scholars were convinced that the regime had only partially succeeded, for its propaganda was convincing only when it built on the audience’s existing attitudes. Accordingly, Kershaw and others explained the success of the news coverage of the Röhm affair on the basis of “commonly-held social values and prejudices.”40 But media historians no longer confine themselves to the transmission of messages. And, in contrast to the older approach, they acknowledge the complexity of media communication, especially that media products are open to multiple interpretations and need audiences to imbue them with their various meanings.41 Because audiences consume media products in different ways, historians cannot limit their questions about the significance of propaganda to whether it was effective or not. They need to take a closer look at how mass media conveyed their content and how consumers made sense of it. This is quite difficult. Historians of National Socialism have identified a multitude of factors and argued that we can make “even approximate statements” about how people consumed the regime’s propaganda “only” if we reconstruct the conditions of reception.42 Empirical studies of audience reception of Nazi propaganda are few, but they consistently show that it varied according to individuals’ experiences, gender, age, education, and systems of social and cultural reference.43 However, this emphasis on an active audience’s various receptions of media content raises two problems. First, it is unclear how we can characterize the public’s reception of news reports of an event like the Röhm affair in general terms. Second, this emphasis does not help us determine whether, and if so how, the Nazi regime’s control of the mass media affected their consumption. After all, consumers always actively interpret media products. Thus, if there were specific ways in which the Nazi state’s control of the mass media shaped the public’s consumption of its messages, the thesis of audience participation in the constitution of meaning alone would neither reveal nor explain them. The regime did not craft its media policy only to spread its propaganda; it also sought to change radically how audiences consumed mass media content. The media policy was part of its comprehensive effort to induce new forms of political behavior and thought among the German people and thereby fundamentally transform society. New forms of news consumption were crucial to this aim. An especially clear illustration of this is radio, which the regime had been instrumentalizing for the purpose of propaganda since 1933. In the first months of that year, political speeches and lectures dominated the programming, but in the autumn of 1933 popular music largely replaced them. Contrary to what many historians have assumed, that was not because the regime wanted to distract listeners from politics.44 It continued to assign politics an important place in the programming; the “total program,” according to Radio Production Director Eugen Hadamovsky, was designed “on the basis of light music and current news.”45 Beginning in the fall, the main news program was broadcast at 8:00 p.m., in the middle of the prime time music selection, and by the end of the 1930s news was the only feature in talk format aired between 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.46 Accord-

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ing to programmers’ calculations, “only from relaxation” could the listener find “the way to the day’s events that demand his attention.”47 So, rather than distract listeners from politics, the intention was to draw listeners’ attention to the news by making it stand out from the surrounding music programs. Similarly, broadcasts covering state holidays and other important events were made to stand out from the regular programming to capture the audience’s attention.48 This programming reveals that the regime did not want a politically abstinent society.49 On the contrary, as its representatives repeatedly emphasized, National Socialism needed “political people” who “felt shared responsibility for the greater whole” and “endorsed the resolutions of the Führer” for what they thought, or had been told, were good reasons.50 The regime described this ideal of political orientation and the behavior based on it as “faith.” In his radio address of June 1934, Heß proclaimed, “All of our National Socialism is anchored in uncritical loyalty, in a devotion to the Führer that does not ask about the why of the individual case, in the silent execution of his orders. We have faith that the Führer is following a higher calling for the shaping of German destiny! There is no criticism of this faith.”51 Such faith showed itself particularly in the way one consumed news coverage. The German people ought to follow the news to stay informed about political events, but they should not use their knowledge to form their own opinions; they were to accept the official interpretation. For precisely this reason, the regime’s radio programming downgraded the news to an addendum to music, so that its interpretations of events were broadcast in a format that did not invite discussion or independent thought. Thus, through the news the Germans were not only confronted with the regime’s propaganda messages but also with its expectation regarding their news consumption. They were to consume the news attentively but uncritically. This is why the regime did not keep its control of the media, including reporting on the Röhm purge, secret, though it did conceal the extent.52 It wanted the German people to be aware of both its control of political reporting and its expectation that audiences be faithful and uncritically believe the news. The two interests reinforced each other. One diarist, articulating a sentiment that many others expressed in the 1930s, wrote that the “reality of the domestic and foreign political situation is playing out behind all the people,” for the news reported only “ham-fisted half-truths and falsehoods,” but “criticism of the news” was prohibited: “One is ordered to believe it.”53 In light of the regime’s clear expectations, many diarists reflected on what one was supposed to make of the news. Some complained about the censorship and insisted on critically evaluating news reports. For example, Hans Maschmann (born in 1887), an elementary school teacher in Hamburg, repeatedly criticized the propaganda as directed at the “base instincts of the masses,” who are “devoid of criticism and judgment. The propaganda bosses of this movement really know how to influence the judgement of the masses.” But he believed that he had nothing in common with the masses and distinguished, time and again, those who had “lost the capacity for criticism and independent evaluation” and “persons

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with a capacity for judgement” who, like himself, did not just believe whatever was reported. Maschmann wrote, “A free and German man is one who does not fall for the slogans and propaganda methods of the press,” and that was the kind of man he aspired to be, despite his support for the Nazi regime. However, other diarists insisted, in the words of one, that one must “simply believe [the Führer] and endorse what he does.”54 Keeping a diary was not in itself a rejection of National Socialism by withdrawing from the public space it controlled into one’s private sphere.55 Functionaries and supporters of the regime also kept diaries. And they used them to adjust their thinking and, thereby, their conduct to a National Socialist way of life—what one young diarist described as “merging ideology with my self.” For many of these diarists, believing news reports was an important element of such a life.56 It was not only in their writing about the proper attitude toward the news that diarists reflected on how to consume it. They also did so in their descriptions of news coverage. Those who insisted on forming their own opinions often struggled to peer behind the facade of the reporting. Their entries regularly include detailed discussions of news reports in which they attempted to separate truth from lies as precisely as possible. Some authors kept separate “political diaries” to compile and compare news accounts.57 In contrast, the diaries of Nazi functionaries and others who strove to live up to the ideal of an attentive but uncritical news consumer often contain just a few comments on the news, which were not the starting points of deeper consideration. At most, one finds brief comments of approval or self-reassurance that, as one diarist put it, the regime must “surely know why it is doing that.”58 In sum, in reading and listening to the news, Germans were not only confronted with the regime’s propaganda messages but also with its expectation of whole-hearted faith. Accordingly, we need to consider the public’s responses to the news in these broader terms. How Germans consumed news depended, in the first instance, on whether they wanted to heed the regime’s call to believe it uncritically or to form their own opinions.

Reading Fake News: The Consumption of News during the Röhm Crisis The Röhm affair is a good case for examining the correlation between the regime’s expectation of faithful news consumption and the public’s reception of the news because the latter can be traced particularly well in diaries. The news reports of a thwarted putsch caused a sensation and made diarists attentive news consumers. For example, Karl Möhring (born in 1905), a university student in Göttingen, described in his diary how he was taking an afternoon walk through the city on 30 June 1934 when he “saw a gathering of people in front of the Göttinger Tageblatt reading the news about Röhm. Having returned, I listened to the radio at 8 o’clock. . . . At 10 o’clock I listened to the radio again. The next morning I spoke

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with my landlord, who started in on the matter and as a faithful National Socialist was visibly shaken.”59 Other diarists noted the same reaction, for example, “the newspaper report ‘Röhm out of the SA and Party due to Severe Misconduct’ shook everybody up.”60 Diarists paid a lot of attention to the “Röhm Putsch” compared to other political events, but in quite different ways. From their entries, we can see how both an emphatically critical and an emphatically uncritical position affected news consumption. Like Mann, some systematically gathered information from newspapers and the radio and wrote extensively, trying to make sense of things. For example, Möhring, the university student in Göttingen, dedicated much of his entry about the “Röhm Putsch” to its “significance,” and his discussion went on for pages.61 He did the same a few weeks later in his entry on Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag justifying his actions against Röhm and his allies. Möhring discussed in detail whether the speech “corresponds to the facts.”62 Similarly, in his diary Werner Kramp (born in 1893), a civil registrar in Hamburg, asked, “What’s going on and what’s being played?” On 1 July 1934, he summarized the news reports, comparing various “assertions” and “justifications,” pointing out contradictions among them, and trying to formulate his own view about what had transpired. Did Röhm perhaps “merely oppose the downsizing of the SA?”63 Others noted what they had learned from foreign newspapers and radio broadcasts and complained about the German coverage.64 One wrote that the German newspapers did not “report everything.” Another noted that he was comparing the “incomplete reporting about the events of 30 June” with other information he had gathered.65 A third wrote that what he heard from acquaintances and on the street was “completely different” from the news.66 These diarists did not limit their discussions of the Röhm affair to attempting to reconstruct what had really happened from news accounts. Because the news failed to dispel the “darkness” surrounding the executions of Röhm and his “co-conspirators,” they sharply criticized the regime’s control of the media.67 One expressed outrage over how “the significance of 30 June is being hammered into the German people each and every day by radio and the press” while the regime “consistently refuses to answer important questions of detail. Here are a few: How many persons were shot to death and which ones? Did . . . they include Kahr, Lossow, Seisser, Captain Ehrhardt? Who shot them to death? Where? How?”68 Expressing a sentiment shared by many diarists, Maschmann, the Hamburg school teacher mentioned in the previous section, wrote that the newspapers surpassed each other “in exploiting the events of 30 June in order to glorify Hitler.”69 He, like many other diarists, mocked this glorification as a fundamental feature of Nazi rule. In reference to Hitler’s and other Nazis’ speeches in the Reichstag in July, he wrote, “From time to time, when the mood among the people sinks and becomes dangerous, Hitler sends out his bards: Goebbels starts the roundelay as a cantor, and the entire choir from the concert singers to begging singers enthusiastically joins in until the mood of the listeners is perfect again. Then ‘he’ appears, the Führer, the ‘hero’ himself in person and stages the final scene. Then it

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is: ‘The entire Volk is being connected by loudspeaker.’ And it is explained to the Volk how unified it is.”70 In his diary, the Dresden literary scholar Victor Klemperer (born in 1881) also commented on the regime’s pronouncements during the Röhm crisis that he heard on the news. This was when he first had the idea of turning his routine observations into a “study on the language of the Third Reich developed through literature” to investigate how propaganda worked.71 The diarists who wrote extensively about the news coverage of the Röhm affair and severely criticized the state’s control of the media do not conform to current theses about the public’s perception of the affair. They were by no means uncritical of the reporting, nor did they limit their dissatisfaction to lower party functionaries. They blamed the Nazi leadership and even Hitler and were unconvinced by the media’s glorification of him. Maschmann failed to see “in any way the attitude of a hero” in the news reports of Hitler’s actions against the SA.72 In response to the astonishing news that Hitler had personally arrested Röhm at Tegernsee, Daniel Lotter (born in 1873), a gingerbread baker from Fürth, wrote, “I myself am lacking the organ for the theatrics of such an intervention, whose description takes up a lot of space in the official reports.” For Lotter, Hitler’s reported actions only showed that the regime had been wrong to defend Röhm and prohibit public criticism of him for so long and had failed to undertake a “timely intervention” against him.73 Möhring, the Göttingen University student, noted that Hitler “made a major mistake with the Röhm plot.”74 Another diarist wrote that it was “to be assumed from the outset, and so it happened, that the Führer’s propaganda boss had him shining in an even higher and purer light” and bitterly mocked the media for celebrating “in all tonalities . . . what tremendous enthusiasm is now being shown for the Führer in all of Germany. . . . There he stands, how brave and resolute, pure and faithful, how great and gracious, but also how merciless when necessary! The Volk is bound to him more firmly than ever; the Hitler state stands more firmly than ever!”75 But such ridiculous depictions would not “strengthen confidence in the regime.”76 Others also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the regime’s glorification. According to Möhring, the “pious childish belief ” in Hitler, whom the newspapers had always portrayed as “sublime beyond all doubt,” had been “destroyed among the great masses.”77 Except for Klemperer, these diarists did not consider themselves “ideological enemies” of National Socialism, whom Kershaw excluded from the new and widespread “Hitler euphoria” of the summer of 1934.78 Despite his criticism of the news coverage, Lotter, the gingerbread baker, was shocked by what he believed had been “a plot against the life of the Führer.”79 And his criticism of the regime before the Röhm affair reflected his fear that it would not succeed if it did not change its methods: “The Party will fail and what good German could desire this?”80 Möhring felt the same, viewing the Röhm affair as the “final warning sign for undertaking the necessary reforms for the creation of a real National Socialist state.”81 In an earlier entry, he, like many of those cited, described himself as an “advocate of National Socialism,” though one with his own opinions. These diarists did not intend their criticism to, as Möhring put it, “undermine the reputa-

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tion of the state or take away the faith of others.”82 They just insisted on judging matters for themselves rather than simply believing the news. Ironically, such diarists believed the official narrative of a thwarted coup precisely because it fit so neatly into the picture of the regime that their critical reading of the news over the previous months had given them. As one wrote, Röhm and his allies were accused of an “attempted uprising against the Führer and the state; a secret connection with a foreign power and, moreover, a lifestyle dissolute beyond compare, disgraceful and disgusting sexual abnormalities, vulgarity and gluttony, squandering of funds of the Party and thus of the state, etc., etc.” He added, “those are all things that have been common knowledge in Germany for months, but woe to those who would have dared utter them even in the smallest group.” Now, however, the regime was compelled to admit them.83 Möhring, too, was certain that Hitler’s Reichstag speech confirmed his earlier entry that it was “clearly apparent that the Volk was often kept in obscurity about things.” The regime now had “by necessity to give an in-depth report with scandalous details about the revolution, even though the presentation was bound to make a shocking impression on the surprised masses of faithful National Socialists and affirm critics in their criticism.” Thus, he believed that Hitler’s speech “by and large presented the facts.” The speech also convinced Lotter of the coup and that “the most unbelievable abuses had occurred within the much vaunted SA (the guarantors of the German future!).”84 And Klemperer believed that Hitler “probably actually acted in self-defense and avoided a substantially worse shedding of blood.”85 So, despite their critical reading of the news in order to form their own opinions, these diarists did not recognize the attempted putsch as an invention. Rather, it was their critical attitude that made them fall for the story. Other diarists were emphatically uncritical consumers of the news and wanted to believe it. One was Inge Thiele (born in 1914), who completed an apprenticeship as a gardener in Solingen in the 1930s. In the fall of 1933, she averred “to believe in Hitler now.” Subsequently, she no longer just described the days’ events but also routinely wrote about her National Socialist way of life. During the Röhm crisis, Thiele “devoured the newspapers and never missed the radio news. Everything else took a back seat.”86 She described their accounts without remarking on their accuracy or completeness, though she did add some sharp criticism of the SA members involved: “Last night the Führer himself carried out the cleansing operation and uncovered the reprehensible lifestyle of these brothers. They were just then spending the night with young boys (Lustknaben). Around ten of them are no longer breathing, immediately shot. They feasted and splurged on the SA treasury, on the dimes sorely sacrificed by the men of the SA. Oh, these over-sated, crude people, no: animals, no: even standing way below an animal.”87 Thiele adopted the clear distinction between Hitler and his unfaithful followers and added: “The leadership must be a real role model, one must be able to look up to it,” but “only very strong characters remain true to their principles,” for money and power make everyone else “terribly fickle.” Thus, Hitler had to be steadfast and crack down hard on corruption: “Dear God, help the Führer, so

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that he keeps the upper hand over all of the intrigues. Such an endless amount of work still needs to be done, with all of the filth.”88 Another diarist who read the news of a putsch uncritically was a farmer near Chemnitz. Composing the annual update of his family chronicle in late 1934, he wrote, “In spring ‘34, our Führer Adolf Hitler suffered a major disappointment in that a large number of illustrious men among his loyal personnel had directed a conspiracy against the Führer Adolf Hitler. Hitler became aware of it at the last minute and immediately had 100 men shot. That was an act that had not yet been recorded in Germany.”89 We cannot reliably explain the faith such entries express in terms of their authors not having noticed the contradictions and lacunae in the news accounts, not having access to foreign news sources, or not having heard the rumors that circulated because none of these was the case with Herman Schleifenbaum (born in 1875), a sales representative from Berlin who had sympathized with the NSDAP since before 1933. He seldom wrote about the news and then only briefly and descriptively. For example, on 30 January 1934 he wrote, “the Reichstag is meeting and resolves to abolish the state governments and subordinate them directly to the Reich,”90 without commenting on the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich. However, he described his involvement in the Reich Air Protection League and the National Socialist Organization of Crafts, Trade and Commerce in the same rich detail that he devoted to his observations about acquaintances who still shopped in Jewish stores. Schleifenbaum’s entries on the news are not brief because he was uninterested in politics but because he followed the news uncritically, as the regime expected. But his entry on the Röhm affair broke the pattern. On the evening of 30 June, Schleifenbaum recorded the day’s news reports in greater detail than before or after, which shows that they challenged his desire to believe the regime: “One is talking about a putsch against the Führer. A few major SA figures arrested and shot. General Schleicher shot himself during the arrest. In Wiessee, Hitler came across Röhm and Heines in an unbelievable situation, young boys, etc. Gruppenführer Ernst fled to Hamburg or Bremen, was arrested there, according to other statements supposedly had 160,000 marks with him with which he wanted to go abroad.”91 In the next entry, Schliefenbaum added further information he had received, describing the account in the Baseler Zeitung, pointing out its differences with the German accounts, and mentioning sensational rumors he heard on the streets about earlier attempts to assassinate Hitler that had been kept secret. So, in contrast to his usual news habits, Schleifenbaum paid especially close attention to the reporting about Röhm, consulted foreign news sources, and took an interest in rumors. But unlike diarists who tried to peer behind the facade of the propaganda about Röhm, he did not make this information a starting point for his own deliberations: “I consider much of it empty talk.”92 Despite the obvious uncertainties in the official news, Scheifenbaum accepted the media’s version of events. This is also shown by an entry he wrote a month later, when Reich President Hindenburg died unexpectedly. The government scheduled a referendum on the unification of the offices of Reich President and Reich Chan-

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cellor, about which Schleifenbaum wrote, “Bravo! The sympathies for Hitler are increasing by the same degree as the antipathies toward some of his helpers,” drawing that sharp line between the steadfast Führer and his disloyal followers that seemed so dubious to Maschmann, Lotter, and Möhring.93 Other diarists expressed similar attitudes. After hearing from an acquaintance “much about the exciting time in Munich around 30 June when the Röhm putsch was attempted,” one saw no reason to question the news accounts and voiced his satisfaction that “chance and prudence” had thwarted Röhm.94 For those diarists whose news consumption was emphatically uncritical, contradictions and improbabilities in accounts of the Röhm affair were no reason to doubt them or criticize the regime’s control of the news. On the contrary, they were chances to prove their faith in Hitler and National Socialism. This was the attitude of Franz Albrecht Schall (born in 1913). Having joined the Hitler Youth in 1930 and the NSDAP two years later, he expressed his commitment to National Socialism in the pages of his diary, which he viewed as his “movement calendar.”95 In the entry for 30 June 1934, he did not describe the news accounts but pasted in a number of newspaper clippings. That is, he appropriated the official news, which shows that he followed it attentively and without question.96 Not until Hitler’s Reichstag speech did Schall comment on events in his own words, emphasizing the “overwhelming openness and clarity” with which Hitler acknowledged “the frightful seriousness of our situation.” He added, “It was the Führer alone who saved Germany. Have we not again become indifferent and too unconcerned about political things, so that only he was able to seize this rabble of conspirators?” He then related the issue of loyalty to Hitler, which Röhm and the other SA leaders had supposedly raised, to himself: “In the Hitler Youth, too, have we not passively allowed over-achievers and upstarts to make their nests? Have we already completed the Führer’s assignment of being the protectors of his idea? No, we old Hitler Youth must admit that we are not yet worthy of being full pioneers for this our only Führer!”97 Whereas Schall was unhappy that “the difficult ashes of everyday life have covered the embers” of his dedication,98 Rudolf Briske, two years his junior, was joyful that he could prove his commitment to Nazism during the Röhm crisis. In the spring of 1934, Briske volunteered for the Labor Service after the Hitler Youth and the SA had rejected him because of his father’s Jewish origins. On 1 July, Hitler ordered that the Labor Service be deployed in support of the SS and police units conducting operations against the SA, and Briske’s unit was assigned to search vehicles. In his diary entry for that day, in addition to recording the news reports faithfully, he celebrated what would soon be his participation: “We are proud of it. I, too, am proud of it. I never believed that I would ever count for more than the SA and be allowed to protect the National Socialist state alongside the SS and police. Although probably not with a weapon, nevertheless with the entire strength one has within.”99 As we see, Rudolf Briske, Franz Schall, Hermann Schleifenbaum, and Inge Thiele took the news accounts of the Röhm purge as offering them an occasion to demonstrate their faith in the regime.

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The Consumption of Political News, the State’s Control of Mass Media, and the Political Culture of National Socialism What do these observations about news consumption during the Röhm crisis tell us about the prevailing understanding of the public’s response to the news of a thwarted coup and the thesis of the Hitler myth that Kershaw based on it? First, they raise serious doubts about the claim that almost everyone uncritically accepted the news reports. Admittedly, most Germans probably did think that they were more or less accurate. But this was not the result of an enthusiasm for the decisive Führer that gripped virtually every German. Rather, two attitudes toward the news—the emphatically uncritical and the emphatically critical—led to this assessment. Second, diarists’ reactions to reporting on the Röhm purge cannot be interpreted as signaling a turning point in the relationship between the German populace and the Nazi regime. Rather, they suggest that the regime’s propaganda campaign about the purge reinforced both forms of news consumption. Those who had sounded out the news for its truth content and criticized the state’s control of it continued to do so during the Röhm crisis, and after, for they continued to refer to the purge of the SA to criticize the Nazi regime for its lies and brutality.100 Likewise, those who consumed news faithfully took its blatantly incongruous accounts as a call to fortify their emphatically uncritical news reception. Third, those reactions indicate that it was unlikely the Nazi propaganda’s idealization of Hitler “defused frustrations,” “compensated” for criticism of him, or redirected it toward party functionaries, which Kershaw argued were the “basic feature of political opinion throughout the Third Reich.”101 The news media’s portrayal of Hitler as a hero—their persistent evocation of the Hitler myth—in the wake of the executions annoyed emphatically critical diarists, who attributed the false news reports to the regime or Hitler personally and doubted that he had comported himself as blamelessly as the news proclaimed. Clearly, we cannot draw from the diaries that I have discussed any conclusions about how many Germans tended to consume news in each of the two ways or how many believed the reports about a thwarted putsch. They show only the attitudes and conclusions of their authors. One reason we cannot extrapolate from diaries is that not enough diaries have survived, but, more importantly, there is serious doubt about whether there were collective opinions under National Socialism at all.102 Germans could discuss the news with neighbors and acquaintances; they were not “atomized” under National Socialism.103 But the regime’s control of media made it impossible for individuals to compare their views widely in order to come to shared opinions. In exile in Switzerland, Thomas Mann was able to compare his assessments of the Röhm affair with the different opinions of journalists, politicians, and the public quoted in the news. But this was not possible in Germany, where only the public’s approval of Hitler was reported as the opinion of the “Volk.” For this reason, Germans could not reliably infer the truth from the news, especially not the accuracy of the media’s reports of comprehensive public sup-

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port for the regime. They could criticize the state’s obvious control of the news media, but this could not compensate for their lack of reliable and comprehensive information. The controlled news gave readers and listeners only the choice between accepting what the regime said, in which case their views became part of the posited “Volksmeinung,” or complaining about state control without being able to determine what in the news was true. Thus, we cannot conclude from the fact, which Kershaw stressed, that there was no “wave of revulsion and outrage directed at Hitler and his accomplices” that such outrage was only marginal.104 As one diarist wrote just a few weeks after the Röhm purge, “one cannot tell what the German Volk thinks internally” from its “external” conduct, which aptly describes what is still the basic problem in understanding the formation of political opinion in the Third Reich.105 If we take this problem seriously, then we must reassess how the Nazi regime created social cohesion. Instead of hypothesizing a fundamental consensus between the regime and the populace, and thereby adopting the regime’s conception of the “Volk,” we should think in terms of a new political culture that developed after 1933. This culture emerged from the interplay of the regime’s actions, their portrayal in the news, and the different ways Germans reacted to the regime’s expectation of unconditional fealty, and it consisted in the comprehensive ties between the government and the German people that this interplay created. Part of this culture was a system of media communication that, on the one hand, prevented the emergence of collective opinions beyond the enthusiasm for Hitler that it tried to create. On the other hand, however, that system made the public very active news consumers regardless of whether they were emphatically critical or emphatically uncritical. Thus, the new political culture was able to integrate a wide “diversity of attitudes” toward the political and other issues that recent researchers of the Nazi period have identified in German society.106 It is clear the Hitler myth had its place in that culture. An enthusiastic belief in the Führer, driven by propaganda, motivated some Germans to support National Socialism but not all of them. Contrary to the thesis of the Hitler myth, the propaganda’s exaltation of the Führer could not compensate for criticism of him or deflect it to lower party officials and thereby secure the public’s approval of the regime. The ties between the regime and society that integrated the public did not arise from a widespread consensus between Hitler and the Germans. They emerged from a system of media communication that the regime controlled but that still allowed Germans to consume its fake news in different ways. Janosch Steuwer is Research Associate and Lecturer at the Chair of the History of Education at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He has worked on the social history of National Socialism, the history of diary writing in the twentieth century, and the history of childhood since the 1970s. Currently, he investigates how societies and state institutions in Germany and Europe dealt with the challenges of the extreme right between 1980 and 2015. He is the au-

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thor of “A Third Reich, as I See It”: Politics, Society, and Private Life in the Diaries of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (2023) and edited with Rüdiger Graf Selbstreflexion und Weltdeutungen: Tagebücher in der Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung des 20. Jahrhunderts (2015).

Notes 1. T. Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934 (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2003), 453 (30 June 1934). All translations are the author’s. 2. See A. Abel, Thomas Mann im Exil. Zum zeitgeschichtlichen Hintergrund der Emigration (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003). 3. “Erklärung der Reichspressestelle der NSDAP,” 30 June 1934, reproduced in M. Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, vol. 1: 1932–1934 (Wiesbaden: Löwit, 1973), 398–99. 4. For this quotation and the next one, see Mann, Tagebücher, 453 (30 June 1934). 5. Ibid., 454–78. 6. For details, see E. Hanock, “The Purge of the SA Reconsidered: ‘An Old Putschist Trick’?,” Central European History 44 (2011): 669–83, 682–83. 7. Mann, Tagebücher, 458 (4 July 1934). 8. Ibid., 463 (8 July 1934), emphasis in the original. 9. Ibid., 459 (5 July 1934). 10. Ibid., 456 (2 July 1934). 11. Ibid., 458 (4 July 1934). 12. Ibid., 466 (10 July 1934). Mann was wrong in this respect. On the availability of foreign papers in Nazi Germany, see Ulrike Weckel’s Introduction, 3, 11. 13. Ibid., 469–70 (12 July 1934). 14. I. Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 95. 15. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth.” Regarding the state of the debate on National Socialism’s socially integrative force, see J. Steuwer, “Was meint und nützt das Sprechen von der ‘Volksgemeinschaft’? Neuere Literatur zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 53 (2013): 487–534. 16. For an in-depth discussion of diaries from National Socialism, see J. Steuwer, “A Third Reich as I See It”: Politics, Society, and Private Life in the Diaries of Nazi Germany, 1933– 1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023). 17. See K. M. Graß, “Edgar Jung, Papenkrise und Röhmkrise 1933/1934” (Ph.D. diss., Heidelberg University, 1966); H. Mau, “Die ‘zweite Revolution’. Der 30. Juni 1934,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 119–37; H. Krausnick, “30. Juni 1934. Bedeutung, Hintergründe, Verlauf,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B XXV (1954): 317–24; W. Sauer, Die Mobilmachung der Gewalt (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1974), 324–64. 18. Mau, “Die ‘zweite Revolution,’” 135. 19. M. Jamin, “Das Ende der ‘Machtergreifung’. Der 30. Juni 1934 und seine Wahrnehmung in der Bevölkerung,” in Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, ed. W. Michalka, 207–19 (Paderborn: UTB, 1984), 216. 20. I. Kershaw, “Alltägliches und Außeralltägliches: ihre Bedeutung für die Volksmeinung 1933–1939,” in Die Reihen fast geschlossen. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alltags unterm Na-

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21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

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tionalsozialismus, ed. D. Peukert and J. Reulecke, 273–92 (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1981), 287. D. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1987), 75. “Near-indifference”: B. Stöver, Volksgemeinschaft im Dritten Reich. Die Konsensbereitschaft der Deutschen aus der Sicht sozialistischer Exilberichte (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993), 169; “almost total absence”: Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 85. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 90, 86. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 257. O. Dietrich, “Die Presse ist das publizistische Gewissen der Nation,” Deutsche Presse. Zeitschrift des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Presse 25, no. 38 (1935): 467. P. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006), 47. See also G. Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand? Der nationalsozialistische Film und sein Publikum (Berlin: Theissen, 2001), 16–21, 39–41; T. Müller, Recht und Volksgemeinschaft. Zu den Interdependenzen zwischen Rechtspolitik und (instrumentalisierter) öffentlicher Meinung im Nationalsozialismus auf Grundlage der Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS (Hamburg: Dr. Kovač Verlag, 2001); L. Herbst, Hitlers Charisma. Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2010), 270–71. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst,” 48. E. Hubert, Verfassungsrecht des Großdeutschen Reiches (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1939), 195. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst,” 44. See also Herbst, Hitler’s Charisma, 270–71. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 85. Ibid., 8. For a detailed discussion of the value as sources of the opinion reports produced by exiled political groups, see Steuwer, “A Third Reich,” 337–45, 351–54. Kershaw, Antisemitismus und Volksmeinung, 291. U. Kröll, “‘Unser Führer ist der Heiland.’ Meinungsforschung im Dritten Reich,” Communicatio Socialis 6 (1973): 320–34, 332. I. Kershaw, “Antisemitismus und Volksmeinung. Reaktion auf die Judenverfolgung,” in Bayern in der NS-Zeit, vol. 2: Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt, Part A, ed. M. Broszat and E. Fröhlich, 281–348 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979), 283. See also Kershaw, Alltägliches und Außeralltägliches, 274. See, e.g., U. Daniel, “Kommentar,” in Wie bürgerlich war der Nationalsozialismus?, ed. N. Frei, 261–66 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). I. Kershaw, “How Effective Was Nazi Propaganda?,” in Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, ed. D. Welch, 180–205 (London: Croom Helm, 1983). Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 92. See also Jamin, Ende der Machtergreifung, 216. U. Weckel, “Plädoyer für Rekonstruktionen der Stimmenvielfalt. Rezeptionsforschung als Kulturgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45 (2019): 120–50, 120. D. Mühlenfeld, “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man NS-Propaganda? Neuere Forschungen zur Geschichte von Medien, Kommunikation und Kultur während des ‘Dritten Reiches,’” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 527–59, 538. Zimmermann, Medien, 31.

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44. A. von Saldern et al., “Zur politischen und kulturellen Polyvalenz des Radios. Ergebnisse und Ausblicke,” in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden I: Radio im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. I. Marßolek and A. von Saldern, 361–76 (Tübingen: edition diskord, 1998), 363; Zimmermann, Medien, 257. 45. E. Hadamovsky, Dein Rundfunk. Das Rundfunkbuch für alle Volksgenossen (Hamburg: Eher Verlag, 1935), 51. 46. On the history of radio programming, see K. Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland. Politik, Programm, Publikum (1923–1960) (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2002), 181–98. 47. Hadamovsky, Dein Rundfunk, 73. 48. For details, see Steuwer, “A Third Reich,” 405–10. 49. F. Bajohr, “Die Zustimmungsdiktatur. Grundzüge nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft in Hamburg,” in Hamburg im “Dritten Reich,” ed. Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, 69– 211 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 78. 50. H. A. Münster, Die drei Aufgaben der Zeitungswissenschaft (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag Noske, 1934), 5. 51. R. Absolon, Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich, vol. 2: 30. Januar 1933 bis August 1934 (Munich: Harald Boldt, 1971), 142. 52. For details, see H. Bohrmann, ed., NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit. Edition und Dokumentation, vol. 2 (Munich: Saur, 1985), 34–35. 53. Diary of Hans Maschmann, 9 February 1934 and 4 August 1933, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kempowski-Biografienarchiv, 5965/1, 1. The following quotations are of 14 July 1933, 15 August 1934 and 9 February 1933. 54. Diary of Inge Thiele (pseudonym), 11 March 1936, Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Emmendingen, 1512, 3. 55. For details, see J. Steuwer, “A Particular Kind of Privacy: Accessing the ‘Private’ in National Socialism,” in Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany, ed. E. Harvey et al., 30–54 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 56. For details, see J. Steuwer, “‘Weltanschauung mit meinem Ich verbinden’. Tagebücher und das nationalsozialistische Erziehungsprojekt,” in Selbstreflexion und Weltdeutung. Tagebücher in der Geschichte und der Geschichtsschreibung des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. J. Steuwer and R. Graf, 100–123 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015). 57. Diary of Walter Lindemann, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kempowski-Biografienarchiv, 5584, 14/3a. 58. Diary of Inge Thiele, 27 October 1935, 1512, 3. Peter Fritzsche also observed diarists’ self-censoring of critical thought. P. Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 282. 59. Diary of Karl Möhring (pseudonym), 30 June 1934, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kempowski-Biografienarchiv, 1174. 60. Diary of Werner Kramp, 1 July 1934, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 622–1/189, 2/11. 61. Diary of Karl Möhring, 30 June 1934, Akademie der Künste, Kempowski-Biografienarchiv, 1174. 62. Ibid., 14 July 1934. 63. Diary of Werner Kramp, 1 July 1934, 622–1/189, 2/11. 64. Newspapers: Diary of Daniel Lotter, 25 July 1934, 1315; Radio: Diary of Georg Witzmann, 9 July 1934, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, ED 22, 1. 65. “Not everything”: Diary of Stephan Weidenbach, 2 July 1934, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz, 700, 023, No. 8; “incomplete reporting”: Diary of Daniel Lotter, 5 July 1934, Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Emmendingen, 1315.

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

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Diary of Stephan Weidenbach, 2 July 1934, 700, 023, No. 8. Diary of Werner Kramp, 4 July 1934, 622–1/189, 11. Diary of Georg Witzmann, 9 July 1934, ED 22, 1. Diary of Hans Maschmann, 1 July 1934, 5965/1, 1. Ibid., 13 July 1934. For the broadcast of political speeches and the so-called Gemeinschaftsempfang, see H. Pohle, Der Rundfunk als Instrument der Politik. Zur Geschichte des deutschen Rundfunks von 1923/38 (Hamburg: Hans-Bredow-Institut, 1955), 268–72. V. Klemperer, Die Tagebücher 1933–1945. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (CD-ROM) (Berlin: Directmedia, 2007), 27 July 1934. The idea occupied him for the next few weeks. See the entries for 2 August 1934, 10 August 1934, 4 September 1934, 11 September 1934, and 14 October 1934. Klemperer finally published his study in 1947. See V. Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii (London: Continuum Impacts, 2006). Diary of Hans Maschmann, 11 July 1934, 5965/1, 1. Diary of Daniel Lotter, 2 July 1934, 1315. Diary of Karl Möhring, 14 July 1934, 1174. Diary of Georg Witzmann, 2 July 1934, ED 22, 1. Ibid. Diary of Karl Möhring, 30 June 1934, 1174. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 90. Diary of Daniel Lotter, 16 July 1934, 1315. Ibid., 15 April 1934. Diary of Karl Möhring, 30 June 1934, 1174. Ibid., 14 September 1933, 4.1.1934. Diary of Georg Witzmann, 2 July 1934, ED 22, 1. Diary of Daniel Lotter, 16 July 1934, 1315 Klemperer, Tagebücher, 14 July 1934. Diary of Inge Thiele, without date, between 28 June and 19 July 1934, 1512, 1. Ibid. Ibid. Chronicle of the Eichler family, annual review 1934, Institut für sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde, Dresden, Lebensgeschichtliches Archiv, Project 028. Diary of Hermann Schleifenbaum (pseudonym), 30 January 1934, Landesarchiv Berlin, E Rep 061–19, 17. Ibid., 30 June 1934. Ibid., 2 July 1934. Ibid., 2 August 1934. The entry contains the reference “(see 6/20),” which is obviously a typographical error and should read “6/30.” Diary of Christoph Ahrens (pseudonym), 18 August 1934, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 622– 1/174, 2. A. Postert, Hitlerjunge Schall. Die Tagebücher eines jungen Nationalsozialisten (Munich: dtv, 2016), 131 (3 April 1932). Ibid., 299 (30 June 1934). Ibid., 299–300 (14 July 1934). Ibid. Diary of Rudolf Briske, 1 July 1934, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ED 363, 7. See, e.g., Diary of Walter Lindenbaum, 30 June 1935, 5584, 12; 30 June 1937, 5584, 14; and 30 June 1938, 5584, 14/3a.

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Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 84. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst,” 319. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 236–42. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 85. Diary of Georg Witzmann, 1 October 1934, folder ED 22, 1. F. Bajohr, “‘Community of Action’ and Diversity of Attitudes: Reflections on Mechanisms of Social Integration in National Socialist Germany, 1933–45,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. M. Steber and B. Gotto, 187–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2014); Fritzsche, Life and Death; M. Föllmer, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 2013); J. Steuwer, “‘National Socialists’ and Other People of the Twentieth Century: Locating Nazism in German Society,” in Unmastered Past? Modernism in Nazi Germany: Art, Art Trade, Curatorial Practice, ed. M. Hoffmann and D. Scholz, 62–75 (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2020).

Selected Bibliography Fritzsche, P. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Herbst, L. Hitlers Charisma. Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2010. Kershaw, I. The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Longerich, P. “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933– 1945. Munich: Siedler, 2006. Peukert, D. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Steuwer, J. “‘National Socialists’ and Other People of the Twentieth Century: Locating Nazism in German Society.” In Unmastered Past? Modernism in Nazi Germany. Art, Art Trade, Curatorial Practice, ed. M. Hoffmann and D. Scholz, 62–75. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2020. ———. “A Particular Kind of Privacy: Accessing the ‘Private’ in National Socialism.” In Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany, ed. E. Harvey et al., 30–54. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. ———. “A Third Reich, as I See It”: Politics, Society, and Private Life in the Diaries of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. (originally: “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse.” Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017.)

4 Beyond Approved Reactions Assessments of the NSDAP’s Nuremberg Party Rallies in Diaries and Letters, 1933–38 Annina Hofferberth

Images of the Nazi Party Rallies at Nuremberg figure prominently on book covers about the Third Reich: ranks upon ranks of uniformed men formed up in the Luitpoldarena, facing the Ehrentribüne far in front with three huge symmetrical swastika banners hanging behind it; on the Zeppelinfeld, the Lichtdom with its dozens of columns of light rising into the night sky; and crowds of cheering Hitler Youth in the stadium, their right arms extended in the Hitler salute. And almost no documentary on the Nazi dictatorship’s mass support does without some of Leni Riefenstahl’s spectacular shots—black boots marching in step; men of the Reichsarbeitsdienst performing close order drill with their decorative spades; or women, many in traditional garb, joyfully greeting Hitler upon his arrival in the old city—taken from Triumph des Willens, the official film of the 1934 Party Rally.1 Publishers and filmmakers choose such images because they suppose them to be emblematic of Nazi Germany.2 However, this view is the skewed result of Nazi visual propaganda, which has shaped the rallies’ popular and scholarly representation until today. For example, Riefenstahl shot Triumph des Willens as propaganda.3 So, one should not accept its idealized portrayal of the rallies as an awe-inspiring festival, in which participants exhibited perfect discipline and the German people came together in devotion to Hitler. Riefenstahl carefully selected the most suggestive scenes and ignored those that were less impressive or would have contradicted her intended message.4 She edited between 60,000 and 130,000 meters of film (depending on the source) to get Triumph des Willens’s 3,000 meters.5 So, her film is an idealized condensation of 1934’s rally intended to convey a picture of a united and ardently loyal German society. It did not portray what participants and spectators experienced.

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It is also true that attendees were not representative of German society.6 Participants were members of the NSDAP or other Nazi organizations and chosen by them according to how well their physical appearance and demeanor approximated the Nazi ideal. Participants in some events were spectators for others, and spectators were, of course, self-selected. But travel, lodging, and tickets were expensive, and it is likely that only those dedicated to the regime chose to incur such expense. Rally organizers and the regime made clear their expectations for how participants and spectators should behave. The Nuremberg units of Nazi organizations like the SA and Hitler Youth instructed participants in the correct behavior,7 and newspapers and newsreels portrayed appropriately cheering crowds. However, one cannot tell from this source material if these reactions were spontaneous or the result of following directions. The account of Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany from 1937 to 1939, has been widely cited as evidence that the crowds’ reactions were genuine.8 In his autobiography from 1940, he says of the Lichtdom at the 1937 rally: “The effect, which was both solemn and beautiful, was like being inside a cathedral of ice.”9 The common view of historians has arisen because those who assume that the rallies thrilled spectators make preferential use of such source material to argue for their view. Consequently, they have tended to ignore the variety of sources about individuals’ reactions. We get a different picture if we look beyond the few sources that have been quoted over and over and examine some of the many ego-documents of the time. Though ego-documents might not be reliable about the facts, they can, unlike the typical sources, provide insights into participants’ and spectators’ perceptions of the rallies. They tell us how certain aspects of the rallies informed people’s perceptions of them and how spectators and participants dealt with aspects that did not meet the expectations that weeks of prior newspaper coverage had given them. In this chapter, I examine eight diaries and letters to assess the perceptions of participants and visitors more realistically and show which aspects of the rallies they actually found positively and negatively noteworthy. A treasure trove of letters and diaries lies in German archives. Because they are an arbitrary selection of the mass of ego-documents produced during the Nazi regime, the views expressed in the eight diaries and letter files I have selected are not representative of those who attended the Nuremberg Rallies, but my choice was not indiscriminate. Searching six local, one state, and one digital archive, I found eleven diaries, two letter files, and three nonofficial reports that mention the rallies. I selected those whose authors provided the most concise information about their perceptions of the rallies and mentioned whether they were in line with or contradicted the propaganda. After a short overview on historians’ assessments of the effects of the rallies, these eight protagonists will take the stage. I structure my analysis around their main themes. First, I focus on what they said about what was going on in the city beyond the rally grounds. How did the inhabitants of Nuremberg live their everyday lives during those days? How did visitors and participants decide how to spend their time at the rallies and in the city? What was said about alcohol

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consumption and outbreaks of violence? I then discuss what they said about the official events. How did spectators react to delays? What did the events mean to them?

Historians’ Assessments of the Rallies: From Successful to Ineffective In recent decades, historians have discussed in depth which aspects of the Nazi movement and the dictatorship attracted which segments of the population and how audiences responded to national celebrations, like the Nuremberg Rallies and May Day, local Nazi festivals, and war-related events, like Goebbels’s Sportpalast speech.10 Research into what audiences found attractive in such propaganda events has focused on those that historians deemed most effective in reaching and mobilizing the general public. One historian interested in the success of Nazi propaganda events in general and the Nuremberg Rallies in particular is Markus Urban. In Die Konsensfabrik, he investigated the extent to which audiences responded to the rallies in ways organizers had intended.11 He argued that they had the desired effects with officially invited foreign guests, party elites, and first-time participants, but radio listeners, for example, were more prone to perceive shortcomings. Scholars have also consulted sources that give evidence of negative reactions and considered the limits of propaganda in discussing the ways in which audiences’ and participants’ reactions to rallies fell short of organizers’ expectations. The earliest example is Hamilton T. Burden’s The Nuremberg Rallies: 1923–39 from 1967. In later work, Hans-Ulrich Thamer described violence, vandalism, and participants’ breeches of discipline on and off the parade ground; Riccardo Bavaj pointed out that those marching in parades could not appreciate the spectacle and mentioned the shouting of drunken paraders in the city afterward; the political scientist Eckart Dietzfelbinger and the journalist Gerhard Liedtke stated that the unchanging ceremonies made the rallies more tedious every year; the art historian Carolin Höfler and the architect Matthias Karch discussed the traffic jams and increased prostitution; and the archivist Josef Henke mentioned problems at sites where participants were quartered.12 However, these authors mentioned such problems only in passing and did not use them to come to a more realistic assessment of what people thought of the rallies. Historians who write about the Nuremberg Rallies as a story of progress in organization and staging draw on sources like official reports, photographs, film footage, and newspaper articles to support their view. In their optimistic assessments, the rallies’ failings are a sidelight. Consequently, they overestimate the effect the rallies had on audiences. In his book on diary-keeping in the Third Reich, in the chapter “Der Regierung begegnen” about entries on political speeches and mass festivals, Janosch Steuwer provides a new perspective on diarists’ accounts of the rallies and their

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shortcomings.13 He identifies the regime’s demands on citizens and argues that large festivals tended to compel diarists to articulate their agreement with the regime. That is, diaries were a means for authors to convince themselves about Nazi ideology. Therefore, we cannot infer from their positive descriptions of the rallies that their satisfaction motivated their entries, for some diarists were trying to convince themselves that they met the regime’s demands or to write themselves into the narrative of its propaganda. In either case, diarists would have described what they perceived as shortcomings to make them fit the propaganda. In virtue of Steuwer’s subject, he leaves out apolitical entries on festivals. This provides the starting point for my work.

Everyday Life amid the Crowds and Traffic Not everyone who lived in Nuremberg was happy about the rallies let alone awed by them. For the teacher Friederike Dietz*, they hindered her everyday life.14 Her husband worked in Dresden, and they kept in contact through letters, in one of which she described the situation during the rally of 1935: “Here there is unbelievable commotion. You have no idea. It is a feat to get on the tram; often you have to wait forever or walk half the way, and then you are nearly crushed to a pulp. This year, I’ve gotten to know this turmoil more than well enough.”15 Dietz did not experience the crowds as the “Volksgemeinschaft,” as the rally’s organizers intended, but as an obstacle to getting around. Naturally, such problems were the motifs of no postcard or film. Though every large public event has crowds, they were the first thing she mentioned and the main subject of her letter. She also wrote that she had not expected so much singing and shouting in the restaurants. She did add that, though she did not have time to see anything of the rally, the Luftwaffe’s air show looked interesting from afar, and she wanted to see the Wehrmacht’s performances next year. In a letter of 9 November 1934, Michael Siefert*, a Lutheran minister who lived in Nuremberg with his wife and three children, described the chaos: “The highlight was the fireworks yesterday evening, which the children could watch from the apartment of a friend. We had bought tickets, but the hubbub would have been impossible for the children. Even on an ordinary day, when nothing was going on, we lost Ulrich at the Lorenzkirche and yesterday morning a—fortunately empty—purse was stolen from his pocket.”16 He added that an acquaintance had also had his pocket picked. According to Siefert, the crowds were so thick they must have annoyed everyone. Despite the money he had spent on the tickets, which were not cheap,17 and the fun his children would have had among the crowd, it was not worth the trouble. He did not write that the crowds turned him against the rally, but they were the only aspect he found sufficiently noteworthy to write about. His remarks show that Nurembergers and spectators were not all enthusiastic about the rallies. On the contrary, it seems that Siefert could have done without the rally in 1934.

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Individual’s Programs It is easy to see from an official program for the week of a rally that no one could have attended all of the events. Only high-ranking Nazis could have attended more than a couple, for they did not have to pay admission and traffic was halted to allow them to be chauffeured from one venue to the next. Official events were expensive for the average party member or ordinary visitor, and it could take hours to travel with thousands of other spectators between locations. At the same time, no one would have wanted to attend all of the official events. Most were repeated annually, and the speeches announced no new party goals or policies. Many visitors did not stay in Nuremberg for the whole week but attended only a few chosen events, for they were not paid for time away from work.18 In addition to the official program, visitors could choose from a plethora of apolitical activities. The Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude (KdF) was responsible for the unofficial festival, which grew in popularity, and took up more of the printed schedule and the rally grounds, each year. Beginning in 1937, the KdFStadt, the unofficial festival’s venue on the northern margin of the rally grounds, included beer tents, soccer matches, movies, fireworks, and dances throughout the week.19 Its proximity to the official venues reflected what the regime considered to be the close relationship between the political and the apolitical. Local shops, restaurants, cinemas, and museums, which wanted to profit from the influx, also hosted activities. Most of the diarists and letter-writers in my selection did not distinguish between political and apolitical activities. Wilm Hosenfeld did not, and his diary shows how far an individual’s choice of attractions could diverge from the official program. Today, Hosenfeld is known for having taken care of the Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman and others who were in hiding in Warsaw. But in 1936, the 41-year-old Hosenfeld was a member of the SA and a supporter of the regime.20 In his daily entries for the week of the rally, he mentioned only a few of the events he attended, which were a mix of political and apolitical. On his first day in Nuremberg, he watched the Appell des Reichsarbeitsdienstes and a torchlight procession; in the evening, he saw a movie starring Luis Trenker. The next day, he watched the Appell der Hitlerjugend; the day after, he visited a fair and watched fireworks. On the fourth day, he marched in the SA’s parade. On the fifth, he attended the Tag der Wehrmacht, and on his last day the official program was over, and he visited historical sites in the city.21 He merely noted most of these. What he described in detail were the movie; the feeling of being a part of the “Volksgemeinschaft”; the Wehrmacht’s demonstrations, which disturbed him because he thought they foreshadowed war; and the crowds in the city on the last day, which were a nuisance. He did not distinguish between the political and apolitical activities he chose, which is noteworthy given how impressive the official program’s events were meant to be. Another source from 1934 is a booklet consisting of twelve sheets of paper folded in half and held together with cellophane tape. It was made by 14-year-

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old Erwin Kreutzer*, whose parents ran a restaurant in Nuremberg. Kreutzer’s booklet is a hybrid of a diary and a letter to his relatives in which he described that year’s rally through narration and hand-drawn pictures.22 He wrote about attending some events and the hubbub in the restaurant. He also described how visitors especially liked Nuremberg’s historic center.23 Traveling was still a luxury; many people never left their hometowns. And German history was palpable in the old city. As it was also the home of the imperial regalia of the Holy Roman Emperors, Nuremberg represented the supposed historical connection between the Third Reich and the “First Reich.” That is, the city’s history was the source of the regime’s myth of origin. Consequently, sightseeing in Nuremberg was a way to acknowledge the essentially German.24 Blending the propaganda implicit in Nuremberg’s history and that explicit in the rallies made their political content more consumable.

The Rallies’ Declining Appeal, Hosting Visitors, and Public Disturbances Because of the annual repetition, the public’s interest had waned by the middle of the decade.25 To bring back the crowds, organizers strove to make each year’s official program bigger and more elaborate than the previous year’s, and they added more entertainment and sports events, beginning in 1937 with a gymnastics exhibition by the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) and the NS-Kampfspiele, which did not revive widespread interest.26 Even before these changes, many of Nuremberg’s inhabitants had grown weary of the rally.27 One Nuremberger whose interest was not renewed was Eduard Stoll*, who worked for the city as a Verwaltungsinspektor.28 From 1923 until 1938, he noted in his diary each rally’s dates and the themes, announced in the press, that organizers assigned to each day. But in all of those years, he commented on what he saw as a spectator in only two entries. In 1938, when he was forty-two years old, Stoll wrote, “Every year the business has gotten staler.”29 It seems that by this time the rallies even bored someone who had paid attention to them for fifteen years. House guests could also cause mixed feelings, as Stoll’s other entry, in 1933, shows: “For the first time, the political leaders presented a new image; one of them, Herr Hugo Ilgen from Hohentanne, a down-to-earth Saxon, introduced himself as having been billeted with us, and our guest, with the words ‘Heil Hitler, here I am.’ Of all our ‘compulsory guests,’ we remember only him fondly, even though he went to bed with his boots on.”30 Apparently, Stoll was unhappy about having to host party officials. The city’s accommodations office (Quartieramt) organized hotel rooms, dormitories, and rooms in private homes for visitors.31 In the rally’s first years, it was not hard to convince residents to host people.32 Therefore, the compulsion Stoll mentioned is not consistent with our knowledge of the rallies; historians have found no evidence that homeowners were compelled

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to take visitors in. It is possible that as an employee of the city Stoll felt he had to host visitors to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime. And it is true that hosts had no say in who their guests were or how much they could charge.33 Erwin Kreutzer also mentioned mixed feelings about guests. He wrote that he had heard a rumor that an unnamed host had given up his own bed to accommodate a guest from the Rhineland, but when it was time to pay the visitor admitted that he had no money left.34 According to another rumor, a 70-year-old man slept on the couch so his guest could have the bed and fell sick as a result. Kreutzer described both hosts as generous and their guests as inconsiderate. He expected better from the visitors either as a matter of common decency or because he believed they were Nazis and, so, held them to what he thought were the standards of the Party. Kreutzer may have thought that he could criticize Nazis because he was condemning individuals, not the regime, and complaints about the misbehavior of party officials were common.35 Organizers frowned upon drinking while in uniform, for they intended the rallies to be impressive demonstrations of Nazi order and discipline. But drinking was an accepted leisure-time activity, and participants enjoyed drinking with their comrades after the hours of waiting, standing at attention, and parading.36 Kreutzer described one incident of public drunkenness in his parents’ restaurant: “Then all the SA came from their encampment at Langwasser into the city, and the Nuremberg SA was on vacation. So, they all had one too many [eins über den Durst] and . . . so on. The Amtswalter left the most money. One, who I have to tell you about, couldn’t handle the Bavarian beer and after the first half [liter] he was already drunk [literally: he already had a monkey]. The Sunday of Party Week, oh, beer day.”37 Officially, Sunday, the fifth day of the 1934 rally, was called ‘Tag der Sturmabteilungen,’ but in light of what he saw Kreutzer named it ‘beer day.’ His expression ‘eins über den Durst’ is a euphemism for drinking more than one can handle, and the following ellipsis hinted at raucous behavior, and he explicitly described one man as drunk. Nevertheless, he did not condemn their drinking but saw it favorably, perhaps because it meant more revenue for his parents’ restaurant. Many participants threw discipline overboard when they were off duty, sometimes even when on parade. Violence also marred an event meant to demonstrate order. Kreutzer described an occasion on the Tag der Wehrmacht when the SS had to block the entrances to the already overcrowded stadium: “With their full force the SS men shoved the people back, so that one thought they wanted to break all their limbs.”38 He criticized the SS’s crowd control as overly violent and characterized the would-be spectators as victims, writing how aggressively the former “thrust into the poor spectators.” Another of Kreutzer’s descriptions provides some insight into how prone to violence the early part of the 1934 rally was: “This evening I went into the city (with my friend) to see some of the colorful life that prevails here. Schupos stand on all the street corners and order those who stop to keep moving and were perhaps ready to strike should a brawl occur.”39 Kreutzer contrasted the festiveness

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with the possibility of violence, but, unlike his attitude toward the SS’s crowd control, he seems to have been comfortable with the readiness of police to act violently because he acknowledged the possibility of violence breaking out in the crowd. That is, he seems to have seen their disposition to violence as part of their vigilance.

Attractions For Hitler, one of the rallies’ main aims was to give party members a chance to see him.40 That also drew spectators. According to many postcards sent from the rallies, seeing him and other famous Nazis up close was a personal highpoint.41 The collection of private photographs and albums in the Documentation Center of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds includes a significant number of shots of Hitler standing up in his open limousine and saluting the crowd. Many are out of focus, though that did not prevent photographers from putting them in their albums.42 Kreutzer was among those who waited to see Hitler: Behind us, in front of us, next to us, all exits and intersections are occupied, in order to clear the way to the town hall for Hitler. We are closed in. That means waiting. Everyone stands patiently (for at least four hours already) in one spot and waits for the Führer. I wonder how people can stand it. There is very little talking now. . . . And now, from far away a car, no, several cars roar closer and then it is already over. Was that Hitler? Yes, it was him and one can see that it is necessary for him. From one assembly he has to go to the next.43

Kreutzer thought the crowd was patient because people were willing to wait to get a glimpse of their Führer. But the hours of waiting were taxing; apparently, Kreutzer was tired, or he saw that others were. He wrote more about the waiting than about Hitler’s appearance. We do not know if Kreutzer expected to see more of Hitler than he did. His explanation, that Hitler needed to hurry to the next meeting, may have been an expression of genuine understanding, a rationalization to ease his disappointment, or a way to portray himself as a compliant supporter. It is likely that being part of a large and, presumably, like-minded group was one of the rallies’ attractions, and spectators probably felt that affinity while watching events. But there were few reasons to feel it beforehand, when everyone was looking for the best seats. In a letter to his sister, Erich Scheuer*, a pastor and Nazi Party member who participated in the rally in 1935, described the struggle to secure good seats in the vast venues: It was as if all of Nuremberg with its hundreds of thousands of visitors was one single huge family, as if army, party, and people reached out their hands to each other to join together in union for life. For those who have to march and walk along, or those who must spend hours to conquer a spot and secure it in order to have a good view, the outside

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of the rally becomes more prominent than the inside, the speeches and proclamations of the decisive figures. Of this inside, the radio listener who listens to everything at home gets to hear more.44

Scheuer experienced the feeling of being a part of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” as the organizers intended.45 To describe this experience, he evoked the image of a family and, with his choice of ‘union for life,’ that is, of marriage, which, as Grunberger points out,46 official propaganda often used. Curiously, in the same passage he chose a militaristic word (‘conquer’) for staking out good places, in diametric opposition to his previous expressions. Scheuer also distinguished the rally’s “inside,” the speeches, from its “outside,” the parades, and opined that radio listeners heard more of the former than rallygoers could. It seems that he had expected that a participant would be able to experience more of the inside than was possible. But once he saw how big the crowds were, he must have realized how hard it would be to find good seats for the speeches. And even if he succeeded, he realized that radio listeners would hear more. This clash between his expectations and reality takes up a significant part of his letter. However, his portrayal of the radio as the best way to hear the rally’s political message overstated the power of the medium at a time when Nazi propagandists had come to realize that the rallies were not as fascinating over the radio as organizers had originally hoped.47 Still, even though the radio could not convey the speeches’ excitement, Scheuer believed that it was better for hearing them than being there in person. Finally, according to Steuwer, Scheuer was clearly moved by the crowds but not by the rally itself.48 His reaction is not surprising, for the rallies were not set up to give spectators a good view but with an eye to the aesthetics of parading masses.49 Marianne Köhl*, an Arbeitsmaid in the Reichsarbeitsdienst, wrote in her diary that she had trouble hearing Hitler’s speech during the Appell der Politischen Leiter in the rally in 1938, but, in contrast to Scheuer, she wrote that it overwhelmed her: And then the Führer speaks. But I don’t understand what he says. Only single sentences come to my consciousness. I feel only the magnitude and reverence of this moment, and I also feel that I’m not at all able to grasp that in the middle of this big community in this overwhelming setting I am now listening to the Führer and that I am seeing him, though only from afar. As the German national anthem begins to play and I sing with the many German people who are now all steeped in the same big experience, tears fall from my eyes because of excitement and happiness.50

According to Köhl’s explanation, it was not seeing Hitler that made her cry but her feeling of belonging to a large community, as if she were experiencing membership in the “Volksgemeinschaft” of Nazi propaganda. It was not Hitler’s speech but this overpowering experience that she found noteworthy. In light of it, not being able to hear the speech was insignificant.

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While Köhl felt the sublime in the crowd, Kreutzer described it as an entertaining addition to the fireworks: I also bought a ticket for half a Reichsmark. It is quite interesting to watch the many, many people who surge back and forth here like ants. I was also quite annoyed because with a little thought and care you could easily get in for free. . . . Getting into the stadium, the entertainment already starts. Firstly, two beer booths are set up, which groan and crunch in all of their joints under the crush of the thirsty. Several platforms are set up in the middle of the field on which ancient plays are performed to thrill the crowd. But one notices little of that.51

The fireworks show, which was one of the biggest in Germany up to that time, was the highlight of the apolitical festivities. For Kreutzer, the crowd was also worth watching. He compared the people to ants, and he mentioned people getting in without paying and criticized himself for not having done the same. The organizers relied on such ancillary entertainment to excite the crowds and keep them happy while waiting for events to start.52

Perceived Implications Some diarists paid more attention to what they saw as the implications of events than did others. In his entry for 14 September 1936 about the demonstration of the newest weaponry on the Tag der Wehrmacht, Hosenfeld wrote: “At 4 a.m. reveille for the march to the Zeppelin field. 8 a.m. beginning of the Wehrmacht’s demonstration. The modern weapons are shown in combat. Tanks and tank defense. Air force. The spectacle upsets me. Woe betide those, if it were serious, who waged war with such weapons. The handling of those machines requires a long training period.”53 Technology fascinated Germans at the time, and the Wehrmacht’s demonstrations were popular, as the large percentage of private photographs about them at the Documentation Center shows.54 Because the National Railway transported all the participating units to Nuremberg and the Wehrmacht and Reichsarbeitsdienst set up their encampments and operated the field kitchens to feed them, the rallies were in effect rehearsals for mobilizing the armed forces.55 But Hosenfeld understood the difference between a rehearsal and a genuine mobilization and was concerned about the destructiveness of the new weapons. The rallies worried some who did not identify with the regime. Elise Lehnert* listened to the radio broadcasts of the rallies in 1935 and 1938, when she was sixtyfive and sixty-eight years old.56 In her diary entry for 15 September 1935, she wrote, “12:20 p.m. Nuremberg Rallies. Three new laws announced by Göring, Hitler, Heß, and comrades. A strike against Schacht’s speech. Inflation may not be preventable now, and all halfway respectable people are in a deep depression. Today I finally bury all hope.”57 Lehnert, who had leaned to the right during the Weimar Republic, supported Schacht’s economic policies. In 1935, what she saw

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as the consequences of the regime’s abandoning those policies and its new laws left her feeling hopeless. In the following years, though, she changed her mind several times, so often that she called herself a “mercury thermometer.”58 But after listening to the broadcasts in 1938, she was again hopeless: “I am so afraid of the Reichsparteitag and the speeches. We are heading toward war, toward awful destruction. Those up there cannot be entirely normal anymore. Everything could have been so wonderful. Who, which devil, may be influencing our Führer?”59 As Burden argued about visitors to the rally of 1936, Lehnert was “very much aware of the new aggressiveness and belligerency of the speeches, particularly Hitler’s.”60 For Lehnert, the 1938 rally foreshadowed war.

Conclusions Statements in the ego-documents I selected contradict the dominant view that audiences were as uniformly awed by the Nuremberg Rallies as the propaganda, particularly Riefenstahl’s film, suggests. They show, first, that these diarists and letter writers often did not even take note of what organizers and the Nazi media wanted them to and did notice what the planners did not want them to and the media ignored, and, second, writers’ perceptions of the rallies were far more diverse than the dominant view acknowledges. Moreover, they differed with each other over what was noteworthy and why, and each took different aspects to be positive and negative. In so doing, they disappointed the organizers’ intentions in different ways, expressing both criticism of and fascination with different aspects the organizers tried to suppress. To review, the perceptions of all of these authors differed from one another and from the propaganda. The propaganda was silent about problems with the crowds, but they exasperated both Friederike Dietz and Michael Siefert. However, their entries also show that negative experiences did not always turn writers against the rallies, for both expressed interest in the official events. Wilm Hosenfeld’s and Erwin Kreutzer’s accounts show that the rallies mixed the political and the apolitical and both had their attractions. Kreutzer and Eduard Stoll were ambivalent about some public disturbances and house guests. Hosting visitors could be irritating but also pleasant, and public drunkenness was both a nuisance and harmless fun. Kreutzer was critical only of the violence of the SS men toward visitors. According to Kreutzer, Erich Scheuer, and Marianne Köhl, even the rallies’ attractions had their negative aspects. Watching an event involved dealing with the crowds and the struggle to find a good place; one had to wait for hours to catch a glimpse of Hitler, and radio listeners could hear more of the speeches than those who were there. Hosenfeld and Elise Lehnert understood what speeches and military demonstrations foreshadowed, and it unsettled them. Every writer with the exception of Kreutzer expressed such worry. Ultimately, writers’ general assessments of the rallies depended on their political orientation. Ian Kershaw has argued that the regime’s propaganda was only

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effective in persuading people “who did not need much convincing anyway.”61 My sources confirm his claim, for when writers wrote that they felt awe, it was not because of the official program but because of their support of the Nazi movement and their desire to express that in writing.62 Naturally, propaganda about the rallies, in contrast to ego-documents, omitted whatever interfered with their desired effects, such as traffic chaos and failures in discipline. But, as Ute Daniel has shown, many Germans were aware of what propagandists wanted to achieve with their selective use of images and did not believe that it mirrored real life.63 Organizers could not have staged events that lived up to the propaganda’s thoroughly positive portrayal. However, that was not necessary to convince those faithful to the regime. Annina Hofferberth is a historian and a research trainee at the Villa ten Hompel historical research and educational center in Münster. She received a dissertation grant from the Hans Böckler Foundation and submitted her dissertation, “Begeistert, skeptisch, eigensinnig. Zeitgenössische Rezeptionen von NS-Inszenierungen (Euphoric, Skeptical, Willful: Contemporary Perceptions of Nazi Stagings),” at the Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2022. In it, she studied a wide range of ego-documents to investigate how individuals’ appropriations of both large and small Nazi Party spectacles differed widely from what organizers had expected and the propaganda reported.

Notes 1. In an unpublished paper that is part of an ongoing research project at the Film University Babelsberg, Fabian Schmidt also pointed out that documentaries and feature films use Riefenstahl’s movie as a virtual documentary, taking the footage as an accurate illustration of Nazi Germany. 2. J. Caplan, Nazi Germany: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5. See, e.g., the cover of the third edition of Joseph W. Bendersky, A Concise History of Nazi Germany; Thomas Childers’s The Third Reich uses a photograph of ranks of SS men; Richard J. Evans’s Das Dritte Reich. Diktatur and Jonathan Petropoulos’s Royals and the Reich showcase a picture of the Lichtdom; and Robert Smith Thompson’s and Alan Axelrod’s Nazi Germany in the Idiot’s Guide series uses the rally of the SA and SS during the Gefallenenehrung on its cover. 3. Leni Riefenstahl denied this fact her whole life and insisted that Triumph des Willens was merely an apolitical documentary of the Nazi Party Rallies. L. Riefenstahl, Memoiren (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), 224–25; S. Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP in Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Nürnberger Presse, 2002), 229. 4. H.-U. Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community,” in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. G. Berghaus, 172–90 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 172–73. 5. Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 227.

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6. Here and in the following, cf. Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, Faszination und Gewalt. Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nuremberg: Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände, 2006), 62. 7. H. Burden, The Nuremberg Party Rallies 1923–39 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1967), 115; Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 218–20. 8. Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community,” 181–82; Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 285; H. Hoffmann, Mythos Olympia. Autonomie und Unterwerfung von Sport und Kultur (Berlin: Aufbau, 1993), 152; Y. Karow, Deutsches Opfer. Kultische Selbstauslöschung auf den Reichsparteitagen der NSDAP (Berlin: Akademie, 1997); M. Urban, Die Konsensfabrik. Funktion und Wahrnehmung der NS-Reichsparteitage, 1933–1941 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2007); S. Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden. Nationalsozialistische Mythen, Riten und Symbole 1923 bis 1945 (Vierow bei Greifswald: SH-Verlag, 1996), 386; K. Vondung, Magie und Manipulation. Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 105; P. Reichel, “‘Volksgemeinschaft’ und Führer-Mythos,” in Faszination und Gewalt. Zur politischen Ästhetik des Nationalsozialismus, ed. B. Ogan and W. W. Weiß, 137–50 (Nuremberg: Tümmels, 1992), 138; A. Schmidt and B. Windsheimer, Geländebegehung. Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Sandberg, 2002), 128; F. Kießling and G. Schöllgen, “Vorwort,” in Bilder für die Welt. Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP im Spiegel der ausländischen Presse, ed. F. Kießling and G. Schöllgen, vii–viii (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), vii; R. Fritzsch and G. Hofmann, Als Nürnberg “Stadt der Reichsparteitage” hieß. Ereignisse, Personen, Schauplätze (Nuremberg: Hofmann, 1992), 130; R. Fritzsch, Nürnberg unterm Hakenkreuz. Im Dritten Reich 1933–1939 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 73. 9. N. Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 65–67. 10. Most recently, P. E. Swett, C. Ross, and F. d’Almeida, eds., Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); H. Richter and R. Jessen, “Elections, Plebiscites, and Festivals,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. R. Gellately, 85–118 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); D. Mühlenfeld, “The Pleasures of Being a ‘Political Soldier,’” in Pleasure and Power, ed. Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, 205–33. Ute Daniel discusses Goebbels’s intentions in his Sportpalast speech, its significance for German media, and the intended audiences in U. Daniel, Beziehungsgeschichten. Politik und Medien im 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2018), 181–203. 11. Urban, Konsensfabrik. 12. H.-U. Thamer, “Faszination und Manipulation,” in Das Fest. Eine Kulturgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. U. Schultz, 353–68 (Munich: Beck, 1988), 367–68; R. Bavaj, Der Nationalsozialismus. Entstehung, Aufstieg und Herrschaft (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 2016), 94–95; E. Dietzfelbinger and G. Liedtke, Nürnberg—Ort der Massen. Das Reichsparteitagsgelände. Vorgeschichte und schwieriges Erbe (Berlin: Links, 2004), 63; C. Höfler and M. Karch, eds., Marschordnungen. Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg (Berlin: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2016), 19; J. Henke, “Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP in Nürnberg 1933–1938,” in Aus der Arbeit des Bundesarchivs. Beiträge zum Archivwesen, zur Quellenkunde und Zeitgeschichte, ed. H. Boberach, 398–422 (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1977), 421. 13. J. Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse.” Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 432–54. 14. I pseudonymize the authors whose texts are not published to protect their personality rights. Pseudonyms are marked with an asterisk upon first occurrence.

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15. Personal documents of F. Dietz, 1913–73, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 10/104 No. 3, 15. Two of the roughly one dozen letters to her husband and friends address the rallies. The rest deal with everyday life and financial and health worries. This quote: Letters from F. Dietz to G. Dietz, 1935–37, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 10/104 No. 7, 4—my translation. “Hier ist ein unheimlicher Rummel. Du hast ja keine Ahnung. Es ist ein Kunststück in die Straßenbahn zu kommen, oft mußt Du ewig warten oder den halben Weg laufen und dann wirst Du fast zu Brei gedrückt. Ich habe den Trubel dieses Jahr reichlich zur Genüge kennen gelernt.” 16. Personal documents of M. Siefert, 1902–65, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 10/107 No. 73, 4. In several letters to his parents, he wrote about family life, health worries, and religiopolitical topics. One letter mentions that the rallies are an obstacle to everyday life in Nuremberg but also an attraction for the family. This quote: Letters from M. Siefert to his parents G. and M. Siefert, 25 January–28 December 1934, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 10/107 No. 262, 12. “Der Höhepunkt war das Feuerwerk gestern abend, das ich den Kindern [sic] von der Wohnung eines Freundes aus sehen lassen konnte. Wir hatten zwar die angebotenen Eintrittskarten gekauft; aber für die Kinder wäre das Getriebe doch unmöglich gewesen. Schon an einem ganz gewöhnlichen Tag, als in der Stadt überhaupt nichts los war, haben wir den Ulrich verloren bei der Lorenzkirche und gestern früh, als in der Stadt wieder nichts los war, wurde dem Ulrich sein—glücklicherweise leerer—Geldbeutel aus der Tasche gestohlen.” 17. Schmidt and Windsheimer, Geländebegehung, 92. 18. Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 142. 19. W. Wilson, “Festivals and the Third Reich” (Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, 1994), 174–75. 20. W. Hosenfeld, “Ich versuche jeden zu retten”. Das Leben eines deutschen Offiziers in Briefen und Tagebüchern (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004), 22–23. 21. Ibid., 214–15. 22. E. Kreutzer, Heft zu den Reichsparteitagen, 1934, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 1/2214 No. 2. The subject of Kreutzer’s twenty-four-page booklet is the rally’s program, everyday life at the time, and quotes from political speeches. He expresses support for the regime and how it organized the rally. 23. Ibid., 13. 24. H. Beer, “Warum Nürnberg sich so gut als ‘Stadt der Reichsparteitage’ eignete,” in Recht extrem.de. Auseinandersetzung mit Nationalsozialismus und Rechtsextremismus, eds. B. Kammerer and A. Prölß-Kammerer, 63–87 (Nuremberg: emwe-Verlag, 2002), 63. 25. M. Urban, “Die inszenierte Utopie,” in “Volksgemeinschaft.” Mythos, wirkungsmächtige soziale Verheißung oder soziale Realität im “Dritten Reich”? Zwischenbilanz einer kontroversen Debatte, ed. D. Schmiechen-Ackermann, 135–57 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 153. 26. Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community,” 186–87. 27. Urban, Konsensfabrik, 73. 28. Fourth Diary of E. Stoll, 1939–46, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 10/120 No. 4, 40–41. Stoll recorded his everyday life and current events in his diaries. He used only keywords to note the rallies from 1923 to 1938 except for three entries: in 1933; in 1937, when he mentioned only that he hosted a visitor from Westphalia; and in 1938. 29. Third Diary of E. Stoll, 1919–39, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 10/120 No. 3, 197. “Von Jahr zu Jahr wurde der Betrieb muffiger.” 30. Third Diary of E. Stoll, 1919–39, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 10/120 No. 3, 145. “Ein neues Bild gaben erstmals die politischen Leiter; als solcher stellte sich Herr Hugo Ilgen

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

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aus Hohentanne, ein biederer Sachse unsere Einquartierung und unser Gast ein mit den Worten ‘Heil Hitler, da bin ich.’ Wir behielten ihn von allen ‘Zwangsgästen’ als einzigen in freundlicher Erinnerung, wenn er sich auch mit den Stiefeln zu Bett legte.” Henke, “Die Reichsparteitage,” 412; Mühlenfeld, “The Pleasures,” 215. For more on accommodations, see Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 137–49. Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 142. Kreutzer, Heft, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 1/2214 No. 2, 19. See F. Bajohr, Parvenüs und Profiteure. Korruption in der NS-Zeit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001). Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 246. Kreutzer, Heft, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 1/2214 No. 2, 10. “Da kamen alle SA. vom Langwasserlager in die Stadt; auch die Nürnberger SA. hatte Urlaub. Da tranken sie halt alle eins über den Durst und. . . . s. w. Die Amtswalter hatten das meiste Geld sitzen lassen. Einer, das muss ich Euch erzählen, der konnte das bayrische Bier nicht vertragen und bei den ersten Halben hatte er schon ’nen Affen. . . . Sonntag der Parteiwoche, du Biertag.” Ibid., 16–17. “Mit aller Gewalt drückten die SSler die Leute zurück, dass man meint sie wollten ihnen alle Glieder zerbrechen.” Ibid., 2. “Ich ging heute abends (mit meinem Freund) in die Stadt, um auch einiges von dem bunten Leben, das hier herrscht zu sehen. An allen Strassenecken stehen Schupos (Schutzmänner) die die Stehenbleibenden zum Weitergehen auffordern und evt. auch bereit sind bei einem Handgemenge mit reinzuschlagen.” Urban, Konsensfabrik, 83. Of the twenty-four postcards in the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg that were sent from the rallies and have messages written on them, the senders of five wrote that seeing Hitler was the highpoint of the event. I thank Sonja Reischle for this information. In a video interview from the 1990s in the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände (DRPG), two women from Nuremberg remember that as teenagers they had competed over who could get the most glimpses of Hitler, which was about thirteen. Käthe Fettahoglu and Gertraud Hammon, Reichstagserinnerungen (video), archive DRPG. Photo albums 172, 1183, 1208, archive DRPG. Kreutzer, Heft, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 1/2214 No. 2, 3–4. “Hinter uns, vor uns, neben uns, alle Ausgänge und Übergänge sind besetzt, um Hitler den Weg zum Rathaus freizumachen. Wir sind eingesperrt. Da heisst es abwarten. Geduldig steht alles (mindestens schon 4 Stunden) auf einem Fleck und wartet auf den Führer. Ich wundere mich, dass die Leute das aushalten können. Sehr wenig wird jetzt gesprochen . . . Und jetzt, von Ferne braust ein Auto, nein, noch mehrere heran und schon ist es vorbei. War das Hitler? Ja, er war es und das sieht man ja, er hat es sehr notwendig. Von einem Kongress muss er zum andern.” Letter from E. Scheuer to his sister, 24 September 1935, in correspondence of H. MüllerWerth, 1931–46, Institut für Zeitgeschichte: ED 394/2, 194. In the documents of Herbert Müller-Werth, which consist mainly of letters and newspaper clippings, there are six letters from Erich Scheuer to either Müller-Werth or Scheuer’s sister, who was married to him. They mainly address the relationship between faith, the Church, and National Socialism and his daily routine and family life. He mentions the rallies in just one letter to his sister. “Es war, als sei ganz Nürnberg mit seinen Hunderttausenden von Besuchern eine einzige grosse Familie, als reichten sich Armee, Partei und Volk die Hände zum Bunde fürs Leben. Für den, der mitmarschieren und mitlaufen muss, der sich stundenlang einen

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51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

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Platz erobern und sichern muss, um was sehen zu können, tritt freilich das Aeussere des Parteitages mehr in den Vordergrund als das Innere, die Reden und Kundgebungen der massgebenden Persönlichkeiten. Vor diesem Inneren hat der Rundfunkhörer, der sich zu Hause alles abhört mehr.” Urban, Konsensfabrik, 83. R. Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich (London: Phoenix, 2005), 104. Urban, “Die inszenierte Utopie,” 155. On the ineffectiveness of radio broadcasts, see Zelnhefer, Reichsparteitage, 222. Cf. Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich,” 203. Urban, Konsensfabrik, 78–79. Diary of M. Köhl, 1936–40, Institut für Zeitgeschichte: ED 322 – 1, 40. In her two diaries, Köhl wrote about her everyday life, her commitment to the Bund Deutscher Mädel and Reichsarbeitsdienst, and correspondences with pen pals. In several entries, she mentioned festivals in her village and others broadcast on the radio, and in one entry she wrote about the rally in 1938. “Und dann spricht der Führer. Aber ich verstehe nicht, was er sagt. Nur einzelne Sätze kommen mir zum Bewusstsein. Ich fühle nur die Größe und Andacht dieses Augenblicks. Und spüre auch, dass ich es gar nicht voll erfassen kann, dass ich jetzt in mitten dieser großen Gemeinschaft in diesem überwältigenden Rahmen den Führer höre und auch, zwar nur von weitem, sehen kann. Als dann noch das Deutschlandlied erklingt und ich es singe mit all den vielen deutschen Menschen, die jetzt alle von dem gleichen großen Erlebnis erfüllt sind wie ich, da fallen mir die Tränen aus den Augen vor Erregung und Glück.” E. Kreutzer, Heft, 1934, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg: E 1/2214 No. 2, 6. “Auch ich habe mir eine Karte für -.50 RM gekauft. Es ist ganz interessant, die vielen, vielen Leute zu schauen, die hier wie Ameisen hin und her wogen. Ich habe mich auch tüchtig geärgert, weil man mit bisschen Vorsicht und Überlegung leicht umsonst hineinkonnte. . . . Im Stadion angekommen, hat man auch schon Unterhaltung. Erstens sind 2 Bierbuden aufgestellt, die unter dem Andrang der Durstigen in allen Fugen ächzen und krachen. Mehrere Bodiums [sic] sind in der Mitte der Wiese, auf denen altertümliche Stücke gespielt werden, um die Menge zu begeistern. Man merkte aber wenig davon.” Mühlenfeld, “The Pleasures,” 214–15. Hosenfeld, “Ich versuche jeden zu retten,” 215. “Um 4 Uhr Wecken zum Abmarsch auf die Zeppelinwiese. 8 Uhr Beginn der Vorführung der Wehrmacht. Die neuzeitlichen Waffen werden im Gefecht gezeigt. Tanks [Panzer] und Tankabwehr. Luftwaffe. Mich regt das Schauspiel auf. Wehe, wenn es Ernst würde, mit solchen Waffen Krieg zu führen. – Zur Handhabung dieser Maschinen ist eine lange Ausbildungszeit nötig.” T. Bussemer, Propaganda und Populärkultur. Konstruierte Erlebniswelten im Nationalsozialismus (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, 2000), 112. Urban, Konsensfabrik, 87. E. Lehnert, Tagebuch 1933–1939, Stadtarchiv Gießen: 85 – 021, 66. In her diary, Lehnert focused on everyday life and politics. She mentioned festivals in only two entries, one of which is about the rallies, and considered their political meaning. Her exposure was mainly through the radio. Ibid., 22. “12 Uhr 20. Reichstag Nürnberg. Drei neue Gesetze von Göring, Hitler, Heß und Genossen verkündet. Ein Schlag gegen Schachts Rede. Inflation ist nun wohl kaum zu vermeiden, und eine tiefe Depression bei allen halbwegs anständigen Menschen. Ich begrabe heute endgültig jede Hoffnung.” Ibid., 20.

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59. Ibid., 57. “Vor dem Reichsparteitag und den Reden habe ich solche Angst. Wir steuern auf den Krieg, auf eine schreckliche Vernichtung los. Man kann da oben nicht mehr ganz normal sein. Es hätte alles so wunderschön sein können. Wer, welcher Teufel mag unsern Führer beeinflussen?” 60. Burden, The Nuremberg Party Rallies, 135. 61. I. Kershaw, “How Effective Was Nazi Propaganda?,” in Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, ed. D. Welch, 180–205 (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 200. 62. Hosenfeld, “Ich versuche jeden zu retten,” 214; Kreutzer, Heft, 1934, 3–4; Letter from E. Scheuer to his sister, 194; Diary of M. Köhl, 40. 63. Daniel, Beziehungsgeschichten, 200.

Selected Bibliography Richter, H., and R. Jessen. “Elections, Plebiscites, and Festivals.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. R. Gellately, 85–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Steuwer, J. “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse.” Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017. Urban, M. “Die inszenierte Utopie.” In “Volksgemeinschaft.” Mythos, wirkungsmächtige soziale Verheißung oder soziale Realität im “Dritten Reich”? Zwischenbilanz einer kontroversen Debatte, ed. D. Schmiechen-Ackermann, 135–57. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012. ———. Die Konsensfabrik. Funktion und Wahrnehmung der NS-Reichsparteitage, 1933–1941. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2007. Zelnhefer, S. Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP in Nürnberg. Nuremberg: Nürnberger Presse, 2002.

5 Call and Response The Creation of the National Socialist Public Peter Fritzsche

The activation and participation of the audience was built into the most ubiquitous Nazi slogan. ‘Sieg’ went the call and ‘Heil’ was the tumultuous response, a forth-and-back that, as it repeatedly erupted during National Socialist rallies, created participants and performers out of listeners. With the repetition over time, especially of anti-Jewish themes, the format of call and response also formed a community of complicity. It created a common experience and a common purpose, which continued interventions by Nazi leaders during the war attempted, with decreasing success, to reinforce. Call and response set up shared surroundings that carried the “years of struggle” (Kampfzeit) into the years of wartime aggression and destruction. The response of the shouted ‘Heil’ signaled acclamation and expanded both the stage and the cast. Even before Adolf Hitler reached the climax of his hatefilled tirades, the Nazi leader had worked up the crowd that responded to his indictments of the Weimar system with calls for what he declared to be people’s justice: “Hang Them Up,” they cried, or else “Flog Them.”1 Listening to Hitler in 1931, the American journalist Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker regarded him as the “Billy Sunday of German politics,” referring to the former baseball player who found legions of new fans as a charismatic evangelical revivalist at the beginning of the twentieth century: “those he had converted followed him, laughed with him, felt with him. Together they mocked the French. Together they hissed off the Republic. Eight thousand people became one instrument on which Hitler played his symphony of national passion.”2 Paying entrance fees to attend a Nazi rally, which was not the norm in the democratic politics of the Weimar Republic, audience members knew that they were coming to see a show and coming

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to take part in a show. Stepping into the Sportpalast in Berlin, a cavernous hall that could seat about 15,000 people, was like attending church in which the political congregation understood the expectation of creating a spectacle of mass acclamation. The loudspeakers, which had become standard technical devices at political events by the late 1920s, reached many more listeners, whose numbers quickly leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and who themselves formed a mass loudspeaker directed back to the stage when they responded to the speaker’s call.3 The rhythm of ‘Sieg, Heil’ constituted the basic choreography of Nazi action in public space in the “years of struggle” before 1933. Call and response was a show of strength, forward movement, and aggression. It created a chain of intended action, both indictment and promise, as well as judgment. It formed the storm troop. “Who Betrayed and Spat?” came the call, followed by the fighters’ scornful response, “Why It Was the Social Democrat!” “Who Has Dirtied Up the Nest?”; “The Communist!” “Who Will Make Us Free and Hearty?” brought the final fiery answer, “The Hitler Party!” These calls and responses anticipated the signal to attack the enemy when brownshirts ventured into Communist-held territory. It did not take long for working-class militants to gather in the streets to shout out the counteroffensive: “Red Front! Red Front! Red Front!” they chanted; “Down with Goebbels’s Bandits. Out, Out, Out!” The verbal assault continued: “Fascist Dogs, Beat Them Dead.” The SA returned fire, screaming, “Germany, Wake Up! Germany, Wake Up! Germany, Wake Up!” And then the Communists: “Nazis, Drop Dead! Nazis, Drop Dead! Nazis, Drop Dead!”4 When the engagement was over, the fighters from both camps sized up their gains. Whenever the Communists had successfully dispersed the Nazi crowd, the call “Where are the Nazis hiding?” went out followed by the response “In the basement!,” whereupon they gleefully booed. Sometimes the SA succeeded in passing through “red” streets, entitling the Nazi press to belittle the “poor KPD” and to call out, “Where is the Kommune? In the basement. Boo-hooooo!” The terms of engagement continued right through the final Reichstag elections on 5 March 1933, when National Socialist banners stretching across the streets of working-class neighborhoods in Berlin announced with satisfaction the final response: “Where is the Kommune? In the basement. Huhu!”5 The rising crescendo of call and response as the Nazis moved more nimbly through the streets, first on foot and then in trucks, traced the path to victory in Hans Westmar, one of the grittily realistic SA battle movies of the year 1933. The sounds of chanted songs and marching bands mixed with the usual noises of the street: the blare of radios from storefronts, the screech of trams, the tread in the stairwells, the rustle of dishes at midday. The sounds grew more threatening. Karl Aloys Schenzinger set the scene in his novel Hitlerjunge Quex, on which the famous movie was based. The gigantic Karstadt department store stood out ten stories high on Berlin’s Hermannplatz like a “bone-white stump” against a “blue-black” sky. Sounds of thunder rolled over the restaurant garden on the roof. “Danger”: what first sounded like “the trundle of the underground sub-

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way” came and came back, “in rhythm,” “three times.” “Probably voices chanting in chorus.” “Hail Moscow? Or Germany, Wake Up? You could not really understand the words. They were too far away.”6 Sounds in the city broke into menacing slogans. They came closer and closer. That is how the writer Oskar Maria Graf imagined the Nazi seizure of daily life in 1932 and 1933. Sitting at home, Graf ’s protagonist, the old Social Democrat Hochegger, suddenly “flinched.” “Somewhere down in the distant city there were shots, three or four of them.” A while later, he could make out the “tat-tat-tattoo” echo of boots marching from somewhere down the street. The sounds rounded the corner, and Hochegger could clearly hear the singing: “Raise the flag! The ranks closed right! The SA marches with firm steady tread.”7 Screams in the street had become part of the urban soundscape. It was precisely such an eruption of noise, the sound of political will and public acclamation, that the Nazis sought to broadcast on the radio as soon as they had a chance to monopolize the airwaves in the weeks after the seizure of power on 30 January 1933. Hitler kicked off his election campaign two weeks later with a nationally broadcast speech in the Sportpalast. At once, on Friday evening, 10 February, the announcer’s voice came over the radio: “we interrupt this concert and switch to the German Broadcasting Station”; abruptly, right in the middle of the beat, the transmission broke off, and the sounds of the rally suddenly filled the airwaves.8 The interruption of the scheduled program by the cries of the crowd simulated the pressing, unstoppable eruption of the nation. The Nazis’ chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, adapted the format of Hitler’s speech for the radio by incorporating the excitement of a live sports event into the program. He stepped into the role of a reporter attempting to convey the sights and sounds of the thousands of animated fans crammed into the Sportpalast. The excitement mounted as people waited for Hitler to speak, creating a trajectory from the first moments of anticipation to the finale of his deliverance that summarized in a few hours the Nazis’ struggle for power over the years. Already at ten o’clock in the morning on 10 February, the first loyalists arrived with picnic lunches to get good seats, and by six o’clock in the afternoon the police closed the hall, so that late arrivals had to wait and listen outside.9 Goebbels reported on the “fervent, feverish excitement.” He also spoke directly to the Germans gathered around loudspeakers: “You can already hear the noise getting louder as the frenetic suspense begins to build.” What radio could do was transmit the background noise, the shouting and singing, and, later, the call and response when crowds erupted in “Sieg!” and then “Heil!” after Hitler’s declarations. “The entire Sportpalast resembles a gigantic anthill,” Goebbels claimed. He asked his radio audience to imagine the colossal building with its first and second balconies: “You can’t even make out individual people anymore; all you can see,” and here he paused to amplify the cries and chanting before continuing, “is streams and streams of people—a great mass,” the scene of acclamation. He set the scene to allow the people themselves to speak: “you can hear how the cry ‘Germany, Wake Up!’ erupts from the crowd.” The honor guard bearing

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the flags appeared and marched toward the podium: “the entire mass enthusiastically sings along with ‘The Song of the Germans’” (Deutschlandlied, the national anthem since 1922). Goebbels paused his voice-over report to fill loudspeakers across Germany with “swelling, enthusiastic cries of ‘Heil.’ You can hear that the Führer has just arrived! The entire audience is standing up and saluting him.”10 Goebbels’s stage management from the Sportpalast—the grandstand from which a Nazi guidebook later explained, “we spoke to this enormous city”—established the pattern for the broadcast of election rallies for the rest of the campaign.11 Both detractors and sympathizers took the broadcast to be a direct transmission of national emotion. It was the radio that Germans turned on to gauge the “Hitler weather.” Without radio, and the background noise it broadcast, listeners would never have described Hitler as “confident and enthralling,” or “dynamic” and “spellbinding,” or as someone who “ranted and snarled.” The broadcast seemed to transmit the German people standing behind the Führer.12 Indeed, the acclamatory interruptions of the crowd lasted so long they allowed American correspondents to provide immediate voice-over translations for CBS’s and NBC’s audiences. For those inclined to take Hitler’s side, the sounds on the radio were interpreted as the raised, unifying voice of the nation. People could be swept up when attending Hitler’s speeches and participating in the call and response, but radio had a special quality: without spatial coordinates, these first nationally broadcast political speeches seemed to register the voice of the nation. Listening to the radio became a way to take part in the general excitement. At least at the beginning, transmission authenticated emotional feeling. Diarists, for example, noted the “screams of enthusiasm” and wept at the sound of the “Heil cries that came from the depth of the heart.” In Hamburg, the schoolteacher Luise Solmitz felt herself to be a “second-class contemporary.” Without a radio she could not participate fully in the “national awakening.” Luckily, her neighbors down the street had one and invited her and her husband over. Listening to the broadcast of Hitler’s Sportpalast speech left her deeply impressed: “What a march! What enthusiasm!” When the radio ended the program with the national anthem, she and her neighbors stood up and sang along “deeply moved.”13 Fascinated French newspapermen reporting from Berlin during the election campaign also noted how the transmission of the sounds of Hitler’s rallies carried over to the faithful gathered around loudspeakers across the country, constituting street-corner churches in which they held torches aloft and chanted, “Jews, Drop Dead.”14 However scripted the program in the assembly hall, the broadcast apparently prompted listeners to follow along spontaneously. In this way, the script authenticated itself through transmission. What fortified the knowledge of shared, collective experience was the way in which the broadcasts created silence in which stillness fostered anticipation and prepped readiness. Hitler often began his speeches slowly, as if he couldn’t find his point of departure. In the 10 February Sportpalast speech, for example, Hitler stood for almost a minute without saying a word, his arms folded or his hands clasped in front of him or arranging papers on the table by his side. Two

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minutes of silence also preceded Hitler’s speech on 1 May 1933, the Day of National Labor. The hush created a sense of anticipation that served to punctuate the “powerful moment of community” connecting “all classes and estates.”15 Throughout the following years, the silence that only radio could compellingly create was the means to express the fate of the nation. Customers in cafes and restaurants were expected to remain silent and even stand up when the radio broadcast the evening news, and during the war, special bulletins were preceded by “total air silence.”16 Despite the ninety powerful loudspeakers set up on that first May Day in 1933 at Tempelhof Field in Berlin, not everyone could make out Hitler’s words, but even on the periphery of the scene everyone heard the radio silence that pulled together a single listening community. Enforcing conformity, the broadcast of silence was an unexpected means by which the regime attempted to penetrate the body and array it in the formations of the Third Reich. Over the years, Germans became more adept at understanding the manipulations of the media. Even so, the choreographed show of unity was often preferable to the representations of discord and danger that made the SA films of 1933 troublesome. Germans were certainly more willing than not to exert themselves to produce a nearly unanimous result in the dual referenda on leaving the League of Nations and endorsing the new Reichstag that the regime held on 12 November 1933. And, so, it must have been somewhat bewildering for Germans to receive no signals or calls to which to respond when the war broke out. Unlike in August 1914, there was no spontaneous show of unity or support for the war effort in September 1939.17 Therefore, nothing happened. And at the very end of the war, Germans stopped following the signals altogether. The historian Ian Kershaw draws attention to one of the last events of the Third Reich, in the small Bavarian town of Markt Schellenberg. According to a local official, “when the leader of the Wehrmacht unit called for a ‘Sieg Heil!’ at the end of his speech for the remembrance” of the dead on 11 March 1945, he was met with silence. There was no response either from the Wehrmacht personnel who were present, or from the local Volkssturm, or from those residents who had gathered around the local war memorial. The end of Nazism in 1945 was remembered as the moment when “we never have to say Heil Hitler again!”18 At what point the response to the call was withheld or at what moment the transmitted response was no longer cherished is not clear, but it was probably later than earlier, since wartime cheers came to indicate a resolve to avoid the frightening prospect of military defeat. The national broadcasts of acclamation to create the people’s voice had always been a trick, since by no means had everyone voted for the national blackwhite-red coalition on 5 March 1933. But they were believable enough to spur further expressions of acclamation as people listened and responded to the radio. More and more people wanted to bathe in the response ‘Heil’ to the call ‘Sieg.’ This was the important story of the Nazi struggle to power and the first year in power. Such a demonstration of unity was what the new holidays in spring 1933, the Day of Potsdam and the Day of National Labor, were designed to produce. Outsiders found themselves standing more and more alone. However, the very

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unanimity of the response to the referenda in November 1933 also created doubt about what the actual state of public opinion was behind its enforced and hypermobilized representation. The problem became more acute when the war, especially the Battle of Stalingrad, ended whatever good or normal times people believed they had experienced under the National Socialists. Delivered to a specially selected audience assembled in the Sportpalast, Goebbels’s speech “Do You Want Total War?” on 18 February 1943, two weeks after the disastrous defeat of the German Sixth Army, underscored the difficulties of representing public opinion in a convincing way. The very fact that the speech posed a question indicated that what was sought was not affirmation, like the ‘Heil’ after the call ‘Sieg,’ but a recommitment, which suggested an interval between first love and renewed love. The speech brought to a feverish, hyperbolic pitch the mobilized participation of audiences in the “years of struggle.” Like many of Goebbels’s other wartime addresses, it specifically appealed to the years 1932 and 1933 in order to master the troubled situation of 1942 and 1943. If foreign opponents of the Nazis assigned 1943 the status of 1918, the year in which Germany was defeated in World War I, by writing on the walls of Paris and Warsaw the graffito ‘1943=1918,’ then the propagandists of the Nazis doubled down, insisting on the equation ‘1943=1933,’ conjuring a year that began with the Nazis waiting for, and then getting, what Goebbels repeatedly described as a “miracle.”19 Goebbels’s challenge was to use audience reactions to his total war speech to simulate a unified people’s voice. Scholars debate whether the acclamation was entirely choreographed or had its moments of spontaneity. He certainly gave the “right” speech at the “right” time to the “right” listeners in the “right” place.20 As a result, the necessity to obtain utter control seems superfluous. Since Goebbels posed leading questions and paused strategically, an element of choreography to prompt the audience was obviously in play. But since Goebbels was interrupted 142 times over the course of a speech that lasted 113 minutes, including by cries of “Heil,” “Ja,” “Jawohl,” “Niemals,” and “Pfui,” as well as thirty-one separate outbursts of knowing, affirming laughter, a dense dialogic forth-and-back that sometimes overwhelmed the speech itself, it is hard to imagine the audience’s reactions only in terms of finely tuned choreography. In any case, it was the responses of the audience that, more than any other time since 1933, constituted the centerpiece of the speech’s production; the people’s voice was the event’s star performer, and guidelines for newspapers and for the newsreel that appeared a week later confirmed the importance of the image of the audience in what was designed to be a “theater of applause.”21 While Goebbels’s aim was to create a unified and fortified people’s voice through the production of dramatic call-and-response sequences, the speech itself was crafted as a response to the disaster at Stalingrad. In the ten questions that wrapped up the end of the speech, Goebbels took up the claims allegedly made by the English, but this was now response, not call. Goebbels was not just speaking back to a global radio audience; he was also responding in a way that assumed that everyone in Germany was listening to the BBC. “The English contend,” he

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began his first question, “that the German people have lost faith in victory.” He continued with four more English assertions, each of which prompted his own series of questions to elicit from the audience a demonstration of German faith, will, and commitment. However, for all the hoopla of the speech and its transmission, 18 February 1943 was not 10 February 1933. Ten years earlier, the Nazi faithful gathered around listening outposts in impromptu street-corner churches that electrified the atmosphere and carried the Nazi message throughout the Reich. The wartime public broadcast was much more circumscribed. Listeners at home did not become participants. The total war speech on 18 February 1943 was not the first time Goebbels provided direct responses to articulated rumors and anxieties on the home front. Only a few weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Germans had begun to wonder if “we are winning ourselves to death,” a colloquialism that stuck.22 Again, the call was actually a response to the home front. In a speech in Metz on 5 October 1941, Goebbels explicitly took up the phrase in order to deny it: “with these victories we have brought one country after another under our dominion.” The call of the increasing exigencies of the war continued to necessitate responses. A few months later, Goebbels even paraphrased Churchill with a reference to the “sweat, tears, and blood” that “every great objective” required. As the strains of war intensified, Goebbels’s dialogic question-and-answer format became more frequent.23 In the immediate aftermath of the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, which came as a great surprise, Goebbels invoked the trials of the Nazis in the months before the seizure of power: “the great tests come precisely before the great victories”; “the waves always rise to their highest point after having crossed the deepest valleys.” Goebbels lectured: history teaches that progress proceeds in “zigzag form.” The Allies’ quite justified idea that “time is working for us,” since the United States had resources and the Soviet Union soldiers that Germany did not, Goebbels dismissed as nonsense: “they want to give the impression that time is only there to become an ally of the English. . . . I could just as well say: the calendar is working for me—or: the third-class waiting room is working for me [laughter].” He also explicitly countered the Allies’ assumption that the air war would undermine German morale. “To the many questions that frighten and oppress us,” Goebbels believed he had provided answers; “I don’t believe I have concealed anything.”24 As Goebbels responded to the anxieties of the Germans by calling the uncertainties out, he also answered back to claims made by the Allies. In many ways, Berlin’s Sportpalast on Potsdamer Strasse, “where we have over the last fifteen years experienced all the highs and all the lows of German political and now, in the war, military developments,” was engaged in a continual call and response with Madison Square Garden at the intersection of 8th Avenue and 50th Street, the site of numerous anti-German protest meetings and later war rallies.25 Ultimately, the call-and-response format served to announce, legitimate, and spur the violence at the heart of the National Socialist movement. The most

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blatant and perhaps most popular Nazi slogan was simply ‘Jews, Drop Dead! / Germany Wake Up!’ (‘Juda verrecke! / Deutschland erwache!’). Readers need to consider the importance of this couplet. It says almost everything. The slogan was a simple cause-and-effect argument that premised Germany’s renewal on the destruction of the Jews, which syntactically came first and logically had to. In an explicit confirmation of the idea of redemptive antisemitism, a banner at a Sportpalast rally in 1935 read, “Ohne Lösung der Judenfrage keine Erlösung” (“Without the Solution to the Jewish Question, No Salvation”).26 Death was continually evoked to guarantee German life. Indeed, Hitler had kicked off his election campaign in the Sportpalast in February 1933 underneath a banner that read, “Marxism Must Die So That the Nation Can Rise Again” (Der Marxismus muss sterben, damit die Nation wieder auferstehe). It followed that the Day of Potsdam on 21 March 1933, which heralded the accomplishment of national unity with the reconciliation of Hindenburg and Hitler, the old and the new Germany, was also the day when newspapers announced the opening of concentration camps in Dachau and Oranienburg. The two-point lesson was not lost on Germans themselves. “The flags have now been lowered, the cries of the crowds have died down,” wrote one supporter in a happy glow, but she added a watchful note: the “boundless rejoicing” could not absolve the government of the responsibility to “apply an iron fist.” She understood how the newspaper items fit together, explaining at the end of her report on these “great times” that Communists “have to undergo a three-year probation in a concentration camp,” and the “same goes for the Social Democrats.”27 Life was a matter of survival, an embattled, even murderous view of a century founded in war and revolution. The idea that death was necessary so life could flourish structured all the big anti-Jewish actions in the years of the Third Reich. The Nazi Party called for a boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 in response to the so-called atrocity campaign that had been launched by Germany’s former enemies, who were seen once again to have taken up the propaganda play book from the Great War. Announced on 29 March, the boycott followed almost immediately a raucous Madison Square Garden rally in protest of the Nazis’ “attacks on Jews” that had been held in New York City two days earlier. And the boycott was conducted as a counteroffensive in what was considered to be a continuation of the Great War, so that what was at stake was German life. The atrocity propaganda was “like in the war!,” an angry Goebbels concluded. Newspapers protested “German-baiting” and “rabble-rousing according to notorious wartime models.”28 At the end of Boycott Saturday, Goebbels assembled the faithful for his own rally, threatening “the Jewish race in Germany” with further boycotts that would end in “annihilation” if foreigners did not put an end to the atrocity propaganda.29 Framed in the life-and-death terms of the world war, the boycott was something most Germans could support; despite rain, they crowded the streets. Later, the regime also represented the pogroms in November 1938, however tendentiously, as the “people’s wrath” in response to the assassination of a minor German diplomat in Paris.

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The world war was at the center of Hitler’s notorious prophecy regarding the Jews on 30 January 1939. Since Hitler continued to refer to his prophecy in public and in private in the years to come, he provided regular updates to his initial call in which he promised, “if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” Hitler contended that the Jews had always laughed at him, but, he added, “I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face.” He provided a response to their laughter and to his previous calls for a settlement of the “Jewish problem.” By reminding his audience that “I have very often been a prophet,” Hitler also placed his speech in a chain of previous promises and proclamations, which created a common chronology of causes and consequences familiar to his listeners. Once Germany started the war, Hitler elaborated on the theme of the slogan ‘Jews, Drop Dead! Germany Wake Up!’ He made it more urgent in a speech in the Sportpalast on 30 January 1942: “the war can only come to an end when either the Aryan people are exterminated or Jewry disappears from Europe.” Given wartime conditions and in the aftermath of the first stage of deportations from Germany, what had been a prewar prophecy had become a wartime confirmation of an ongoing struggle in which steps to ensure the survival of the Germans by destroying the Jews were already taking place. By the time Hitler spoke in Munich on 8 November 1942, the nineteenth anniversary of the failed Beerhall Putsch, the struggle had already been decided and the prophecy largely realized. “Untold numbers of those who laughed then,” Hitler announced, “are no longer laughing, and those who are still laughing now well might not be laughing for long.” Along the way, the German word ‘Vernichtung” (‘destruction’), which has connotations of a terrible fate, gave way to ‘Ausrottung’ (‘extermination’), a much more muscular and cruel term. In the carnage of the war, Hitler spoke in the bloody terms of the biblical law of retaliation: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:23 but more commonly attributed to Matthew 5:38–39). The mass murderer responded to the call of the prophet in a long chain of associations that created a community of complicity among listeners. Every listener was in the know at every step, and this was the point of the long-practiced call and response. As long as the public accepted the logic of “existence or nonexistence,” dead Jews and living Germans, or rather living Germans or dead Germans, the community remained intact, and the destruction of its enemies appeared justified. The causal chain from ‘Jews, Drop Dead!’ to ‘Germany, Wake Up!’ was a logical conclusion that remained in place for many, if not most, Germans well into the war years. When an American visitor confronted his German hosts about the barbarity of Nazi actions, such as requiring Jews to wear the Star of David, a measure promulgated in September 1941, they “invariably replied in selfjustification that the measure was not at all unusual. It was merely in keeping with the way the American authorities treated German nationals in the United States, compelling them to wear a large Swastika sewn on to their coats.”30 A

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Jewish conspiracy against Germany made sense to more and more Germans. And so did the anti-Jewish response. Goebbels was aware of the credibility of this link when he inserted references to Jews as enemies twenty-five times in his total war speech. In this select audience, the references prompted interjections such as “Hang the Jews,” “Kill the Jews,” and “Away with the Jews.” “Tumultuous applause, wild cries,” and knowing laughter followed Goebbels’s self-correction regarding the Reich’s policy toward the Jews when he said “Ausrott” (the beginning of ‘Ausrottung,’ ‘extermination’) but corrected it to “Ausschaltung” (‘elimination,’ as from a game or competition).31 But the spare logic kept breaking down or being put into reverse. The fires caused by incendiary bombs in 1942 and 1943 often reminded Germans of the fires in synagogues caused by gasoline cannisters in 1938. With the air war, security reports indicated that more and more people felt that making “Jews drop dead” imperiled rather than guaranteed German lives. The association between the persecution of Jews and the bombing of Germans continued until the end of the war without falling out of kilter. The one element held the other, so that as the Allies bombed more German cities more often, German commentary on the raids implicitly revealed the comprehensive and systematic nature of the war against the Jews. Although the association became exculpatory after 1945 because the moral balance sheet had been allegedly evened out, it signaled critical as well as fearful responses to Nazi policies before 1945.32 As the war on the Eastern Front stalled, soldiers wrote letters home expressing their desire for escape and rescue, giving melancholy responses to the bittersweet calls of the big musical numbers of 1942: Zarah Leander’s “Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n” (“I Know There’ll Be a Miracle One Day”) from the movie Die große Liebe (The Great Love) and, especially, Lale Andersen’s hit “Es geht alles vorüber” (“Everything Passes”). These were responses that exposed vulnerability without adding new armor.33 Goebbels and other Nazi leaders persistently sought to reconnect the causal chain between the call for Jewish death and the response of German life. In response to the “brigade of pity” that had allegedly mobilized around Jews after the star decree came into force, Goebbels penned a ferocious article in Das Reich in November 1941: “The Jews Are Guilty!” He scoffed at the images of doubt or faintheartedness, the “cute little babies, whose infantile helplessness should move us, or frail old women.” “There is no difference between Jews and Jews,” he asserted.34 And Goebbels promised that Jews would pay for the death of every German soldier. Although the article did not mention the ongoing deportations, the Party’s declarations did not hide the regime’s intention to attack the Jews as the collective enemy of the German people at a time when German casualties in the Soviet Union had increased dramatically. If people helped Jews, they were considered Jews themselves, and this effectively ended public demonstrations of sympathy.35 In the cities, people could see starred Jews; they could also hear rumors of the shooting of unarmed Jewish civilians in the Soviet Union, including women and children who had been herded to the edges of pits naked or half-naked.

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What Ruth Andreas-Friedrich wrote in her diary in 1944 were the stories of 1941 and 1942: “‘They make them dig their own graves,’ people are whispering. ‘They take their clothes away—shoes, shirt. They send them to their death naked.’”36 The rumors spread like wildfire across Germany in fall 1941, and they did so in a form that expressed horror and shock. Goebbels himself tried to prepare the home front for the hard facts of the battlefront when in spring 1942 soldiers began to come home on leave for the first time since the start of the invasion. He publicly prepared Germans for what soldiers on leave would tell them about the murder of Jews and other innocents. Given all the dead Jews the soldiers might mention, he told family members to buck up. In “Conversations with Front Soldiers,” published in Das Reich in July 1942, he warned civilians that homecoming soldiers might well resemble strangers from another, horrible world. The war was a “gigantic struggle of worldviews,” he explained. Although “it is understandable” that “uncompromising thinking about the war and its causes, consequences, and aims” would produce “points of friction” with “life at home,” families needed to “live up” to the brutal “face of the war.”37 Knowledge of the Holocaust was managed in the regime’s ongoing conversation with German audiences. In the most desperate attempt to reestablish the connection between dead Jews and living Germans, to sustain a forth-and-back with the German people based on long-standing Nazi maxims, Goebbels aimed to reverse the casual chain by compelling Germans to imagine their own death at the hands of Jewish conspirators. In what a British observer aptly labeled the “Strength Through Fear” campaign, a word play on the Nazis’ leisure organization Strength Through Joy, Goebbels insisted that Germany had burned its bridges, an admission that German crimes were of an order that precluded a separate peace with any one of the Allies. The aim was to compel Germans to continue to fight to the bitter end. “A movement and a people who have burned the bridges behind them fight with much greater determination than those who are still able to retreat,” Goebbels noted in his diary in early March 1943.38 To master the crisis of confidence in spring and summer 1943, in the aftermath of Stalingrad, the Allied invasion of Italy, and the end of the “brutal alliance” with Mussolini, prominent Nazis workshopped the news of the “Final Solution” in dozens of meetings with local political elites in order to stiffen the will to resist the approaching enemy. On the road in western Germany in April and May 1943, Alfred Rosenberg explained to a Gauschulungstagung (District Training Day) on 8 May in Trier: “Today our task is to make Germany and Europe clean again. After 2,000 years of parasitical activity, Europe must be liberated from Jewish leprosy. That is not brutality, but clean, biological humanitarianism. Better that 8 million Jews disappear than 80 million Germans. The bridges have been broken behind us, and there is no way back anymore.”39 These revelations did not reach all Germans, of course, but Goebbels published the frightening watchwords that the Germans had “broken the bridges behind us” in Das Reich, with a circulation of 1.4 million, on 14 November 1943. “We will either go down in history as the greatest statesmen of

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all time, or as the greatest criminals,” he concluded.40 The Nazis came close to conceding that Germans might deserve to be objects of revenge. Ordinary Germans could not have misunderstood that the burned bridges were a reference to the murder of Jews and other innocent civilians across Europe. What is remarkable about this propaganda is that it required Germans to see themselves as the Allies did, as criminals, who to save themselves had to press themselves further into the moral wilderness of the Third Reich. For the “Strength Through Fear” campaign to work, Germans needed as much knowledge about the “Final Solution” as the Allies had; Germans needed to simulate for themselves Allied moral outrage in order to arm themselves properly against retaliation. “Goebbels has allowed so much information on German crimes to filter through,” commented a Swedish correspondent in August 1943, “that everyone is conscious of shared responsibility and guilt, and afraid of personal retaliation.”41 Knowledge of the “Final Solution” had become inextricably tied to fear and guilt, and this was to deform comprehension of the Holocaust for many decades after 1945. After Stalingrad, Goebbels persistently invited Germans to imagine their own defeat in a way that conjured up the genocide against the Jews that had already taken place. In his total war speech, Goebbels outlined what would happen to the German people in the event they lost the war: “the liquidation of our educated and political elite,” “forced labor battalions in the Siberian tundra,” and “Jewish liquidation commandos,” all of which closely approximated what the Nazis had already done to Jews.42 Six months later, Hermann Göring applied Germany’s racial judgement of the Jews to German civilians, who would be totally exposed to the wrath of the Jews if the Allies won the war. “Whoever you were, whether a democrat or a plutocrat or a Nazi or a Social Democrat or a Communist, that won’t matter at all. The Jew sees only the German,” he explained. “He intends to destroy what is racially pure, what is Germanic.”43 Delivered in Berlin’s Sportpalast on 4 October 1943, Göring’s speech indicated that biology or Germanness was destiny, just as Goebbels had insisted when he asserted that there was “no difference between a Jew and a Jew” in his scurrilous article in Das Reich in November 1941. Germans were asked to imagine themselves as the “Jews” the Nazis themselves had created and implicitly to imagine the fate of the Jews as their own. The Holocaust was confirmed to Germans in the form of the existential threat they were told they faced themselves. In this end stage of the Third Reich, the regime continued to construct a German audience in dense relays of citation and substitution in which Jewish life called forth the response of the stark possibility of German death. The images of burned bridges and enslaved peoples in the last years of the war upheld the call-and-response format insofar as they referenced previous promises and threats. They trapped Germans in an escalating cycle of violence to mete out death in order to preserve life that had long become familiar. However, the burned bridges campaign broke the casual chain. There were no longer Jews to kill in order that Germans might live. The fact that the Jews had been

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murdered had become the potential cause of Germany’s own annihilation. There was no way forward as had been implied in the call and response ‘Jews, Drop Dead! Germany, Wake Up!’—only the implication of Germans dead as a result of the murder of the Jews. In the last propaganda flurries, the Jewish dead set up German death. Whatever audiences still gathered in the first months of 1945 found themselves in an echo chamber ringing with the calls and responses of unrelenting death and violence. Peter Fritzsche is Professor of History at the University of Illinois where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of numerous books, including Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008) and Hitler’s First Hundred Days (2020).

Notes 1. D. Grieswelle, Propaganda der Friedlosigkeit. Eine Studie zu Hitlers Rhetorik 1920–1933 (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1972), 85. 2. Quoted in V. Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939 (New York: Knopf, 2016), 385. 3. J. Kegel, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” Eine semiotische und linguistische Gesamtanalyse der Rede Goebbels’ im Berliner Sportpalast am 18. Februar 1943 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 107; C. Epping-Jäger, “Laut/Sprecher Hitler. Über ein Dispositiv der Massenkommunikation in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus,” in Hitler der Redner, ed. J. Kopperschmidt, 143–58 (Munich: Fink, 2003), 152, 155. 4. “Riesenpropaganda der ‘meuternden’ SA,” Der Angriff, 10 September 1930, no. 73; J. K. von Engelbrechten, Eine braue Armee entsteht. Die Geschichte der Berlin-Brandenburger SA (Munich: Franz Eher, 1937), 107–8, 137, 139. The original German reads, “Wer hat uns verraten? / Sozialdemokraten! / Wer macht den größten Mist? / Der Kommunist! / Wer macht uns frei? / Die Hitler-Partei!” 5. “Ein kleineres Uebel–riesengroß. Bülowplatz und die Folgen,” Vossische Zeitung, 24 January 1933, no. 39; “Blick über die Reichshauptstadt,” Kölnische Zeitung, 6 March 1933, no. 128. 6. K. A. Schenzinger, Der Hitlerjunge Quex (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte, 1932), 109–10. 7. O. M. Graf, Der Abgrund (1936; reprint, Munich: List, 1994), 64–67. 8. “Eine Volksrede Hitlers,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 12 February 1933, no. 259. 9. “Kampfruf an die Nation!,” Der Angriff, 11 February 1933, no. 36. 10. “‘Welch eine Wendung durch Gottes Fügung!’ Goebbels, Rundfunk Hörbericht, Sportpalast, 10 February 1933,” in Hitlers Machtergreifung. Dokumente vom Machtantritt Hitlers 30. Januar 1933 bis zur Besiegelung des Einparteienstaates 14. Juli 1933, ed. J. Becker and R. Becker, 57–59 (Munich: dtv, 1983). 11. J. K. von Engelbrechten and H. Volz, eds., Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin: Ein Führer durch die Gedenkstätten des Kampfes um die Reichshauptstadt (Berlin: Franz Eher, 1937), 201. 12. See entry for 26 September 1938 in C. Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 76; A. Werth, France and Munich: Before and After the Surrender (New York: Harper and Bros, 1939), 224; “RadioReviews: Adolf Hitler,” Variety, 14 September 1938.

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13. J. Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse.” Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 442; entries for 2, 10, and 11 February 1933, “Tagebuch Luise Solmitz,” in Bedrohung, Hoffnung, Skepsis. Vier Tagebücher des Jahres 1933, ed. F. Bajohr, B. Meyer, and J. Szodrzynski (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 153, 158–59. 14. J. Sauerwein, “Le peuple allemand est allé aux urnes avec passivité,” Paris-soir, 6 March 1933. 15. Entry for 1 May 1933 in E. Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, part 1, vol. 2 (Munich: De Gruyter, 1987), 414–15. 16. C. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 113. 17. On this point, see Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich,” 557. 18. I. Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), 766; Lieselotte G., diary entry for 22 April 1945, in I. Hammer and S. zur Nieden, eds., Sehr selten habe ich geweint: Briefe und Tagebücher aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg von Menschen in Berlin (Zurich: Schweizer Verlagshaus, 1992), 311. 19. On miracles, see J. Goebbels, “Das große Wunder,” 24 December 1932, and “Das große Wunder,” 2 February 1933, in J. Goebbels, Wetterleuchten. Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (Munich: Franz Eher, 1939), 356–57, 365–66. 20. Kegel, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?,” 531. 21. Ibid., 513, 523, 525, 529. 22. See the postwar interviews conducted by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, RG 243, 64b, and, in particular, the response on Russia from a 29-year-old housewife from Lübeck on 13 June 1945: “Denn da konnten die Deutschen sich ja tot laufen: zu den Russen überlaufen–das war doch NIEMALS möglich” (64b, f3, B22). 23. Goebbels to the NSDAP in Metz on 5 October 1941 and in Linz on the fourth anniversary of the Anschluss on 15 March 1942, in H. Heiber, ed., Goebbels-Reden, vol. 2: 1939–1945 (Düsseldorf: Heyne, 1972), 77, 84. 24. Goebbels’s speech to the NSDAP in Wuppertal, 11 November 1942, in ibid., 126–27, 145, 155. 25. Goebbels’s speech in the Sportpalast on the tenth anniversary of the seizure of power, 30 January 1943, in ibid., 159. Anti-German rallies, often Communist Party affairs, took place in Madison Square Garden on 27 March and 5 April 1933; on 16 February, 7 March, 2 June, and 6 July 1934; on 8 and 15 March, 2 May, and 6 June 1937; and on 4 April, 25 September, 5 October, and 14, 16, and 21 November 1938. Pro-German rallies took place on 6 December 1933; 17 May and 6 October 1934—the October date was America’s traditional Steuben Society’s “German Day,” which was hijacked by and then taken back from the German-American Bund on 4 October 1936, on 3 October 1937, and on 20 February 1939. Lindbergh spoke at an America First rally on 23 May 1941. 26. Kegel, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?,” 108. 27. Elisabeth Gebensleben to Irmgard Brester, 22 March 1933, in H. Kalshoven, ed., Between Two Homelands: Letters Across the Borders of the Third Reich, 1920–1949 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 72. 28. P. Moore, “German Public Opinion on the Nazis’ Concentration Camps, 1933–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2010), 30; “Gegen die Greuel-Märchen,” Berliner Morgenpost, 26 March 1933, no. 73. 29. “Berlin nach der Aktion,” Vossische Zeitung, 2 April 1933, no. 157.

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30. D. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 128. 31. I. Fetscher, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” Joseph Goebbels im Berliner Sportpalast 1943 (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1998), 73, 100n5. 32. P. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 2006), 284–85. 33. N. Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 323, 328, 335, 340. 34. J. Goebbels, “Die Juden sind schuld!,” Das Reich, 16 November 1941. 35. Bankier, Germans and the Final Solution, 124–30. 36. Entry for 4 February 1944, in R. Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground 1938–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), 116. 37. J. Goebbels, “Gespräche mit Frontsoldaten,” Das Reich, 26 July 1942. 38. Goebbels’s diary entry for 2 March 1943, cited in F. Bajohr, “Über die Entwicklung eines schlechten Gewissens: Die deutsche Bevölkerung und die Deportationen 1941–1945,” in Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland: Pläne, Praxis, Reaktionen 1938–1945, ed. B. Kundrus and B. Meyer, 180–95 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 194. 39. Diary entry for 9 May 1943 by Paulheinz Wantzen, who attended the meeting. P Wantzen, Das Leben im Krieg. Ein Tagebuch (Bad Homburg: Das Dokument Verlag, 1999), 1093. 40. Quoted in H.-U. Thamer, Verfolgung und Gewalt. Deutschland 1933–1945 (Berlin: Siedler, 1986), 679. 41. C. T. Barth, Goebbels und die Juden (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003), 238. 42. G. Moltmann, “Goebbels’ Rede zum totalen Krieg am 18. Februar 1943,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 12 (1964): 13–43, 22. 43. Göring on 17 November 1943, quoted in B. Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte (Berlin: Propyläen, 2007), 143.

Selected Bibliography Bajohr, F. “Über die Entwicklung eines schlechten Gewissens: Die deutsche Bevölkerung und die Deportationen 1941–1945.” In Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland: Pläne, Praxis, Reaktionen 1938–1945, ed. B. Kundrus and B. Meyer, 180–95. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. Birdsall, C. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany 1933–1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Epping-Jäger, C. “Laut/Sprecher Hitler. Über ein Dispositiv der Massenkommunikation in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus.” In Hitler der Redner, ed. J. Kopperschmidt, 143–58. Munich: Fink, 2003. Kegel, J. “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” Eine semiotische und linguistische Gesamtanalyse der Rede Goebbels’ im Berliner Sportpalast am 18. Februar 1943. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006. Steuwer, J. “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse.” Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017.

6 Advertising and Its Audiences in Weimar and Nazi Germany Pamela E. Swett

In some ways, advertisements are perfect sources for the historian: there are thousands of them; they are easily accessible; and they offer both quantitative and qualitative data on a whole range of topics. I would argue that of all the forms of media and culture discussed in this book, advertisements had the largest audience. They were in all the newspapers and magazines of the day. They were on the radio (until 1935), in the movie theaters, and at the concert halls in the programs handed to audience members.1 Advertisements graced town and city streets. Let us not forget packaging of all sorts and all the ephemera that was popular by this time: matchbooks, calendars, display cases, napkins, branded porcelain—the list goes on and on. Customers could also enjoy product demonstrations in stores, at meetings of organizations, in their apartment block courtyards, or even in their living rooms. Ads were everywhere. However, difficult questions remain about the reception and digestion of commercial imagery. In this chapter, I examine how advertisers sought to motivate their audience of consumers and how they, in turn, received and digested messages from consumers and Nazi officials. Ultimately, I argue that the long-term international trend toward greater respect for female consumers and their economic power remained on track in the Nazi era. At the same time, however, advertisers also had to respond to attempts by the regime to direct consumer behavior in ways that supported its aims, especially after the introduction of the Four-Year Plan in 1936.

Advertising and Its Place in Interwar Germany In the period at the center of this study, most advertisers had little data about their audience and few clues as to how or why some ads appeared to make more

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of an impact than others. Naturally, they wished to have this information to direct their spending, particularly given the inauspicious economic climate that characterized Germany in the interwar period. There was cutting-edge research being conducted within Europe and North America, which used early psychological methods to track and measure audience reception. While ads that garnered greater attention or created longer lasting memories seemed to promise higher sales, determining if and when an advertisement triggered a purchase added an additional set of complex questions to the nascent field of behavioral psychology for which few answers had been found. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the research undertaken on the subject remained for the most part far removed from the daily decisions taken by the vast majority of company managers, retailers, and advertisement copywriters and designers. This disconnect was made greater in Germany by the fact that several Jewish academic leaders in the field emigrated following the Nazis’ rise to power.2 In practice, advertising was still in its infancy in the 1920s and 1930s, and many Germans working in the field did not have sophisticated training.3 It had only been a generation since some business owners insisted that advertising was distasteful, a sign of desperation and perhaps even of a willingness to deceive.4 While few, if any, by the 1920s continued to take the approach that the best companies could sell their products on reputation alone, such longstanding suspicions, coupled with limited knowledge about the effectiveness of ads, meant that some business owners were wary to invest substantial resources in what appeared to have questionable benefits. This was particularly true in the case of smaller firms and retailers, whose resources were tightest. Among most small consumer goods firms and retailers, advertisements remained limited to unimaginative newspaper classifieds and local signage. Larger companies that enjoyed a national market were likely by this time to invest in newspaper and magazine advertisements that showed some attention to brand image through consistent use of design elements and in some cases more highly developed copy. The largest consumer brands with international markets, some of which we still know today, such as Nivea skincare products, were the most likely to think seriously about branding. In the mid-1920s, these companies fueled a short-lived boom in which a small number of full-service ad agencies from Britain and the United States opened branches in Germany, importing the most up-to-date scientific methods for selling through the orchestration of a holistic brand campaign strategy. The arrival of the Depression at the end of the 1920s, however, meant reductions in expenditure on all promotional efforts, and so these agencies closed their doors and retreated to their home countries, leaving only a handful of smaller homegrown agencies to carry on. Throughout the 1930s, therefore, most advertising either continued to be designed in-house at large companies with sizeable staff or it was farmed out to a variety of freelance workers, namely, ad designers with no formal ties to the firm and others whose job it was to place the completed advertisements in various media outlets. While I have painted a relatively unsophisticated landscape for commercial advertising, it would be wrong to conclude that the audience was not in the

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minds of 1930s ad writers and those who employed them. Practitioners and other industry insiders who wrote about the field in the country’s professional journals had a healthy respect for audiences. Gone were the days in which consumers, particularly women, were thought to be completely irrational and easily manipulated.5 This may be surprising given the misogynistic nature of the regime that came to power in 1933, but it is quite clear that in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe and in North America, during the interwar years consumers were beginning to be recognized as a potentially powerful economic and cultural force who were ignored at any businessperson’s or government official’s peril. Though some historians, including Victoria de Grazia and Lizabeth Cohen, have tied this development particularly to the influence of American-style democratic capitalism, the trend was not limited to the United States.6 As Julia Sneeringer has demonstrated, German ads in the mid-1920s began to present images of female shoppers as consumers who made wise decisions based on a rational understanding of their family’s needs and finances and the practical benefits of the products on offer.7 The trend continued after 1933 under the Nazi regime, which recognized the power of consumers and hoped to shape and mobilize their energy for its new national aims.8 For German advertisers, then, there were multiple audiences to whom they spoke and from whom they received messages. On the one hand, advertisers were addressing company owners and employees, consumers, and, in some cases, policy makers or local party leaders or supporters. On the other hand, advertisers were also an audience themselves, receiving messages from consumers and state and party officials and distilling them in their artwork and text. They also continued to receive ideas and opinions from the international network of ad professionals that had sprung up during the 1920s, a network that remained active through the Depression and only really dissolved once the war arrived. Ad writers and designers were also consumers with their own personal desires vis-à-vis available goods and services. Producing ads was a balancing act in which they attempted to distill the myriad discourses that marked the contemporary moment in a way that hopefully made profits for their clients’ businesses. What emerged as advertisements for consumer goods of all sorts did not mirror reality, of course. It was the result of a creative process with multiple authors and audiences. By the 1920s, most people accepted advertising as a permanent fixture in the visual landscape. In general, city dwellers saw advertising as value neutral, a way for businesses to promote goods and services, nothing more or less. Others went further, believing that this standard business strategy could be a force for good. Leaders of industries big and small could educate an increasingly large audience of potential customers about the pros and cons of different products and services, drawing attention to innovations that could lead to healthier living, greater productivity, and more pleasure at work and home. There were also those less interested in advertising’s educational potential who emphasized the cultural value inherent in these artifacts of the zeitgeist, which could entertain as well as stimulate a sense of belonging in an increasingly complex world.

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The Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, saw all these positives in advertising: it could boost the economy, educate consumers, and had cultural value as a form of communication that spoke to the masses and had the potential to contribute to the supposed unity of the “Volksgemeinschaft.” Even during the war, Goebbels was reluctant to limit the presence of advertisements because he feared what such an alteration to the visual landscape would do to morale, and he valued the private sector’s participation in the dissemination of steadfast messages to the population as the situation grew increasingly dire.9 Given the value he placed on advertising, shortly after the founding of the Propaganda Ministry in 1933, Goebbels ordered the establishment of the Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft (the Advertising Council of the German Economy), a collection of bureaucrats and business representatives to lead reform of the industry.10 A key element of the Ad Council’s mandate was to make advertising more trustworthy to its audience. It set standards for pricing and sizing and insisted that all claims in ads be truthful and transparent. To a great extent, the early declarations of the Ad Council about the need to “cleanse” the industry of its underhanded business practices were shorthand for the regime’s antisemitic goals, which included blaming Jews for the country’s economic woes. Consumer goods industries, the retail sector, and the associated advertising industry were believed to be dominated by Jews, and so these industries were by definition in need of reform. In reality, most of the change until 1939 was not driven by the Ad Council but by businesses and advertisers, who initiated changes to suit their needs and keep the regime happy. Still, except for the purging of Jews and socialists from their positions in the mid 1930s, change was subtle. Indeed, that was the intention. In 1933, the Law for the Protection of National Symbols was passed, outlawing the adoption of state or Party symbols, persons, and slogans.11 Those companies looking to align their products or services with the new Reich had to find indirect ways to do so. By the second year of the war, the regime was forced to introduce greater restrictions on ads, at first in response to the very real shortages of consumer goods as the economy shifted fully to support the war effort and later to address the use of limited resources, mainly paper, for advertisements. But by the time the state sought more direct control over advertising and its audience, the private sector and consumers had already adapted to a new, more collaborative relationship, making both groups harder for the regime to direct during the worst years of the conflict.

Growing Interest in the Audience During the Weimar Republic, some advertisers had begun to call for changes they believed would make ads more effective. They argued that while German designers had a strong reputation for producing aesthetically arresting imagery, not enough attention was paid to the ads’ messages. Germany’s most sophisticated ads, as posters or printed in illustrated magazines, highlighted the brand name

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or logo and included an image that either realistically or abstractly represented the product. Only large companies commissioned these artistic ads, however. The bulk of promotional materials remained simple print classifieds that contained minimal imagery and little attention to copy. As the ad man Hanns Brose complained in 1929, the point was to tell the audience one thing only: “we have something that we want to sell to them.”12 Brose, and others, arrived at this damning assessment of German advertisements after comparing them to ads coming out of the United States and Britain. Increasingly text-heavy Anglo-American promotional efforts addressed the consumer with thoughtful reasons to purchase products.13 As Roland Marchand has explained, American ads centered on the life of the consumer with and without the product in question, rather than the product on its own, devoid of the context in which it would be used or enjoyed.14 Unlike their American and British colleagues, German advertisers had been ignoring a whole range of emotions, “from boastfulness to sympathy, from pride to humility,” that could be employed to motivate consumers.15 Some critics argued that British and American advertisers were seeking new and better ways to deceive the audience. Brose responded that the new style, which offered consumers a range of storylines about how a product might contribute to one’s life, rendered ads “[t]he only truly, democratic manifestation of public life today.”16 While undeniably hyperbolic, his point was that even in a republic, citizens had to follow the law, but as economic actors, consumers had complete freedom to buy or not. Brose’s assertion recognized the power and agency of consumers. While some German brands followed this Anglo-American trend of making arguments for products by presenting a narrative that created a personalized context for the goods on offer, growing nationalist sentiment, worsened by the Depression and the banking crisis, led others in the early 1930s to reject “foreign” influence in German commerce. Even ad professionals who accepted the need for change sought a middle ground by warning against ads that were “too American,” i.e., verbose or humorous. Such clever ads, they argued, would be lost on the Sachlichkeit of their German audience.17 Nonetheless, the growing recognition that consumers had power over how they spent their money and that female consumers held the purse strings for over 80 percent of all goods brought into the home, a data point repeated frequently in the early 1930s literature on household consumption, meant that housewives and female shoppers generally were shown increasing attention by advertisers and business owners. It also meant that more intense pressure was put on women during the Depression and later under the Nazi regime to “protect German work” and “buy German goods.”18 Indeed, for some ardent Nazis the work of advertising was completely changed by the political “revolution.” In spring 1933, the ad man Eugen Maecker declared, “awakening needs was a used-up term of earlier times,” for there were already too many needs. The goal now was to determine which needs were the most necessary according to the principle Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz (the common good over individual needs).19

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Some supporters of the new regime agreed with Maecker that now was the time for greater state intervention in the market to remove consumer choice, but most of those in the business community and the Party leadership did not share this view.20 Instead, Goebbels, who protected advertising as a conduit to the masses, and business leaders sought better “Menschenkenntnis” (“knowledge of human nature”).21 Hanns Kropff, Germany’s “father of modern advertising” and a keen supporter of the regime, argued in 1934 that understanding consumers was no longer just a sound business strategy; it had become essential because recent crises had made Germans “more critical, more suspicious” and hence “more cautious” in their decisions.22 Though the pernicious unemployment had begun to wane by this time, the days of instability for consumer goods manufacturers and retailers were not over because the burgeoning armament industries had already come to dominate the economy several years before the onset of war. Consequently, the consumer goods market remained volatile, with certain products disappearing periodically from store shelves, leaving shoppers anxious and at times angry. In particular, items that relied on imported raw materials were regularly in short supply. As a result, consumers hoarded items like bicycle tires and household linens when they could be found,23 and retailers sometimes ordered more of certain goods than was needed in the hope of maintaining their stock if the supply dried up. While the worst of the hoarding slowed after 1934, business owners knew that consumers remained careful with their purchasing decisions and that this audience would act on what it read in the newspaper, heard from neighbors, and saw in store windows. It is not surprising, then, that by the mid-1930s retailers, manufacturers, and those who did their promotional work increasingly sought to develop a two-way street for communication with consumers. This trend was also seen throughout Western Europe and North America in the interwar period, but the idea of building trust between consumers and corporations, it has been argued, was bolstered in Germany after 1933 by the fact that Vertrauen “was utilized to give spiritual content to the interactions between the racialized Volk, professional and community leaders, and the state.”24 Always hoping to capitalize on the mood of the times, the concept was employed by advertisers in their dealings with various audiences. However, focusing too much on teaching the public to trust brands or the government’s aims ignores the multidirectionality of the communication. The attention on consumers, I argue, only made them more confident and sophisticated, a tough audience that was less trusting and harder to direct. As a result, business owners and advertising professionals sought to tread a fine line between empowering and directing consumers—one that recognized shoppers as increasingly savvy and wary of outlandish claims, be they those made by state propagandists or brand proponents. One strategy was to turn to the findings of Wilhelm Vershofen’s Institute for Consumer Research (Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, GfK). The Institute did not study the efficacy of advertisements, per se; it had a less competition- or profit-driven motive, namely, to understand consumer behavior holistically as

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part of the social and economic fabric of modern life.25 This stated lack of interest in advertisements was a bit misleading. The Institute coordinated several studies about company logos and brand identity, and in the 1939 Festschrift to mark Vershofen’s sixtieth birthday, one author presented the pros and cons of different methods for evaluating advertisements, such as asking a consumer what ads he could remember having seen recently and gathering opinions about a selected advertisement. However, the same researcher also doubted that much could be learned in these ways. Consumers were suspicious of such questions, he reasoned, and did not like to admit that advertisements influenced their decisions. 26 While measuring the impact of ads remained largely hypothetical, the better-known product and sector surveys conducted by Vershofen’s teams took consumer behavior seriously and recognized that along with emotional responses to products, consumers also made thoughtful, rational decisions. Indeed, female shoppers were found to be more rational than their male counterparts, preferring to shop around for the best product at the best price.27 Reviewing customer responses to the GfK’s questions offers us examples of the growing self-awareness among this audience. For example, men and women commented that they found brand-name products to be more consistent in quality and pricing, which gave them the confidence to ignore the aggressive sales pitches they encountered in some shops.28 As consumers developed relationships to certain brands, they became more willing and interested in sharing their opinions, not just with those conducting surveys but also by writing directly to the manufacturers. Company headquarters, retailers, and advertisers became the audience and made use of customer feedback in their promotional work. When the company that sold the decaffeinated coffee brand Kaffee Hag received notes from chefs who served it in their restaurants, for example, the company passed along the good news to sales representatives, who surely repeated the claims to their wholesale and retail clients.29 Loyal customers of Nivea skin products also sought to participate in the marketing of the company’s oils and lotions. Fans regularly sent in their own ideas for ad copy and photographs of themselves that demonstrated (in their opinion) how effective the company’s products were at helping them maintain youthful looking skin despite the sun’s rays and winter’s winds. Some brands went a step further and tried to create more formal structures through which they could connect with consumers. In 1933, Sunlicht, the Mannheim-based brand of soaps and detergents, was surprised by the initiative taken by its female consumers when they ran a mail-in coupon program. What Sunlicht had not expected was the large number of the brand’s fans who sent the company’s headquarters, along with their coupon, questions related to household cleaning, child rearing, and family health. The firm seized on the opportunity to keep the conversation going by providing personalized answers to all queries about their products’ uses and answers to questions far outside its area of expertise in cleaning, such as treatments for “whooping cough and gout.” It is hard to know why the coupons triggered such a response from women, but they seem to

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have viewed the firm and its products as an ally in the daily battle with household dirt. Women likely reasoned that Sunlicht, being on the same side in this struggle, would appreciate their advice and be able to provide support on related matters. In other words, they trusted Sunlicht. As one company commentator noted, the coupon campaign “was winning housewives for its products and maintaining their loyalty. Through it we create trust, and trust is a strong bond.”30 But let us not overlook the fact that the company was not only receiving loyalty; it was also listening to consumer needs and desires. This accidental success may have motivated the company’s 1936 launch of a magazine designed specifically for “friends” of the brand: Die Sunlicht Freundin.31 In many ways, this short publication captures the multilateral conversation held between the several audiences I have identified: the manufacturer and its promotional staff; the consumers, who themselves were a varied community; and the regime, which turned up as a subtle presence on the pages of the publication. On the one hand, the company, a German subsidiary of the Dutch-Anglo conglomerate Unilever, was certainly trying to sell more Sunlicht products, and it did so in this case by offering existing customers (many of whom may have felt isolated as housewives) cleaning tips, entertainment, and a sense of community. On the other hand, the company was also listening to customer feedback, answering questions about the products’ uses, and learning about customers’ needs and desires. The third presence in the short publication was the regime. Officials did not pen articles, but the firm tried to feel out its customer base about certain government policies, those that the company supported and those it did not. Sunlicht reminded women of the difficulties of securing fats for detergents and of its support for the reintroduction of whale hunting (a position supported by the Reich). The magazine also regularly referred to household linens as “valuable property of the Volk,” echoing the calls of the dictatorship to conserve and reuse them during the autarchic Four-Year Plan.32 And yet Sunlicht also sought to defend its own livelihood by gently pushing back against state policies that hurt the cosmetics industry and Nazi rhetoric that denounced makeup as unnatural and “un-German.” In a series of articles, the company tested opinions among the magazine’s readers by writing about the economic significance of the personal beauty industry and its long history of success in Germany; in 1939, it even emphasized that certain products were important for women to maintain a healthy self-image—hair dye, for example, was vital for some “career women” to maintain employment as they aged.33 In articles such as these, Sunlicht spoke to their customers’ desire for products that ran counter to the regime’s socially conservative positions on femininity, while also promoting a sector of the economy that was under threat by economic policies that drastically reduced consumer goods manufacturing. The “community,” therefore, that Die Sunlicht Freundin nurtured was not exactly the community envisioned by National Socialist doctrine, but it was also not one of the company’s own making. Rather, it was one shaped by a war-minded state, a

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company that sought to remain solvent, and a customer base that saw potential positive outcomes in an approaching war but who also hoped to maintain their homes and personal appearances in ways they determined. Looking at the practical tips shared among advertisers in the 1930s provides more examples of how companies and their advertisers were thinking about the audience. Cultivating brand recognition was still considered more valuable than producing memorable individual ads. If a positive experience with a product could be linked to the brand in the mind of the consumer, it was thought that she would pass on that assessment to a friend by word of mouth.34 In other words, despite Nazi-era reforms to curtail false claims in ads, consumers were still presumed to be wary of corporate promotions and more willing to believe a personal recommendation. But that did not mean that advertisers were willing to give up the aim of creating needs and desire through ads. Professional journals in the 1930s combined the belief that shoppers prioritized quality, as Vershofen’s conclusions implied, with increasing amounts of advice drawn from psychological studies. For example, professional journals regularly recommended that companies try to connect their brands with consumers by offering arguments tied to one of five components that were thought to constitute the human psyche (or soul): bodily needs (e.g., hunger), love (for romantic partners, parents, the nation, etc.), beauty, nostalgia for past experiences, and the recognition of ideal types (athlete, businessman, artist, mother).35 Putting together the two ideas that German consumers were motivated by psychological needs and desires but also sought to fulfill those needs through reasoned decision-making, advertisers in the 1930s used design and copy to present narratives of trust. The hope was that suspicion could be overcome if the audience believed it was receiving a personal recommendation. In other words, advertisers tried to re-create word-of-mouth advertising in print—text and imagery aimed at making the audience feel it had been let in on a secret, that it was privy to a private conversation in which valuable information was being passed on. Hoping to create this same feeling through point-of-sale advertising, business owners recruited more and more saleswomen to extoll the benefits of their products because it was believed female consumers found them more trustworthy. For the same reason, women were judged to be the best choice to conduct market surveys, even though most interviewees were male.36 Conversations between brands and their consumers also took place as companies solicited consumers’ opinions in the new venues of product newsletters and fan clubs. Salespeople gathered opinions for headquarters. Even local retailers ran contests judging shop-window displays. The point was always to learn what motivated consumers but also to bring them into the conversation, to build relationships of trust.

The Regime’s Audience and the Regime as Audience Of course, the regime too claimed to be fostering Vertrauen. The state-sponsored Ad Council’s mandate at its inception in November 1933 had been to push

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through industry reforms meant to overcome suspicion toward ads. As its very first statement on reform insisted, “All details [in ads] must be true and clear, and the possibilities of misleading [the consumer] should be avoided.”37 Until its last days at the end of the war, the Ad Council actively promoted truthfulness in advertisement claims, particularly in the health care and beauty sectors, by eliminating celebrity endorsements of products and policing companies that hoped to cash in on the regime’s popularity (or coercive force) by integrating Nazi slogans or other movement-related imagery or text into a sales pitch. While the latter assisted the regime by limiting the kitschification of Party symbols and maintaining Goebbels’ ministry’s control over images and text related to the movement, it also decreased the number of false statements in advertisements by those who wanted to claim their products were somehow endorsed by the Nazi movement or its leaders. Even some words that were hardly National Socialist in their origins, like ‘fatherland,’ and other nationalist sentiments, were off-limits to most companies.38 The establishment of the “Volksgemeinschaft” also promised to smooth away societal discord and mistrust. In the racialized national community, all Germans (producers and consumers) were to pull the economy in the same direction, and the regime hoped it had established enough trust with its people to make this goal a reality. The coordination of the economy became increasingly palpable, starting in 1936 with the introduction of the Four-Year Plan. While the point was to shift the economy away from consumer goods toward heavy industry, and armaments in particular, individual consumers had several roles to play. First, they would need to tolerate increasing shortages in items used daily. Second, they were asked to conserve those goods and materials that were becoming increasingly scarce. Third, they were expected to accept the substitutes that were introduced, particularly in the war years, even when these were of inferior quality. Fourth, especially after 1939 Germans were to avoid the black markets and reject spending on consumer goods and luxuries and instead deposit their wages into savings accounts that could be diverted to the war effort. Unfortunately from the perspective of the regime, consumers had become better educated and in increasing numbers more attached to favorite brands. There were two results. The largely female cohort of regular shoppers was more confident as an audience of company promotions and of the regime’s proclamations about the domestic sphere and household economy. Women were consequently less willing to believe that the state (or companies, for that matter) knew better than they did about how to shop and care for their families. Nancy Reagin’s work on housewives during the Four-Year Plan, for example, provides evidence for these assertions. Much to the dismay of Frauenwerk officials and volunteers, notes Reagin, female consumers were often slow to heed the Party’s calls to shop only in “Aryan” stores. While there may have been resistance among some shoppers to the antisemitism that inspired the persecution of Jewish retailers, it seems more likely that women were confident they knew where the best quality goods and prices were, and when both were to be found at a Jewish-owned shop, it took time to convince them to take their business elsewhere.39

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During the Four-Year Plan, the commercial sector also became an audience more than ever before as it too was expected to heed the calls to fall in line with the conservation of goods and raw materials and to educate consumers.40 In the following years, and particularly after the war began, Heinrich Hunke, who led the Ad Council, used this argument to defend the existence of the advertising industry against detractors who argued that advertising had been made superfluous by the war economy. This left consumer goods firms in a tricky position vis-à-vis the consumer audience they had been so tirelessly wooing. It also left them in a delicate position with regard to the state. In response to both, companies with the available resources sought novel ways to maintain a toehold in the market during the rough times ahead. Some consumer goods manufacturers had an easier task ahead of them than others. The Osram lightbulb company was lucky in a way few other firms were. In 1935, just as the Four-Year Plan was about to come into effect, Osram was introducing a new product, a double-filament bulb (D-bulb) that promised 20 percent more light at the same cost. The company wanted to make the most of its innovation and believed it had to counter an indifference to light quality and a preference for cheaper bulbs among consumers.41 Osram had already established itself as willing to present promotional materials that suited the aims of the regime. Through 1933, Osram advocated for electrification generally, which aided the regime’s calls for job creation as electricians were hired to install or expand wiring in homes and businesses.42 In the following year, as the unemployment rate began to decrease and the regime turned its attention elsewhere, Osram smartly shifted its campaign in a way that continued to reflect the regime’s aims but avoided breaching the Law for the Protection of National Symbols. The firm’s new ads mimicked the language of the Nazi mass organization the German Labor Front (DAF) in its call for better lighting to aid both blue- and white-collar workers who were united in rebuilding the nation.43 When the D-bulb hit the shelves, the company once again sought to align itself with messages already in the air. The firm’s advertising team hoped to link better lighting to better eye health, but the medical evidence was lacking; so it relied on slogans that linked better lighting with safety, productivity, and wellbeing. Osram took a cue from other big brands at the time, issuing a magazine that would be sent to retailers. However, the publication’s designers knew that shop owners’ wives were often the ones making the sales. So, the magazine’s content addressed both female audiences: the wives of shop owners as well as the female customers to whom they sold their wares. Even the retailers’ children were kept in mind as potential brand loyalists with columns and puzzles geared toward their interests in the hope that they too would go forth as “advocates for Light-thinking.”44 The imagery and text in the D-bulb brochures and print advertisements also sought another audience: the leaders of the Party’s mass organizations and of the expanding Wehrmacht. These messages hit home. In 1936, Osram reported that sales to the military were up 71 percent over the previous year, and the DAF’s Beauty of Labor program, which launched its own campaign, “Good light—

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good work,” in 1936, helped fuel sales to manufacturing sites. While health and hygiene were common refrains in advertising campaigns across the Western world in the 1930s, behind closed doors the managers at Osram made it clear that their chief aim was to reflect the regime’s priorities in their ads. In 1937, Osram’s directors remarked, “All of Germany stands under the symbols of two slogans, which have been provided by state and party offices: Fight Waste and Fight Danger.”45 Osram bulbs could do both, fighting waste in the storerooms of businesses and larders of German housewives and fighting the dangers of falls and injuries in industrial sites, craftsmen’s workshops, and the kitchens and stairwells of homes across the country. Companies were prohibited from adopting the official propaganda slogans of the Four-Year Plan, like ‘Kampf dem Verderb’ (‘Fight Waste’), but Osram and other firms could easily work around that prohibition with images showing how “better light” helped men and women work more efficiently and conserve and reuse raw materials.46 One of the offices the company teamed up with was the Reich Board for Economic Enlightenment (Reichsausschuß für Volkswirtschaftliche Aufklärung, RVA), which had been created in 1934 under the auspices of the Ad Council, though its portfolio expanded significantly in 1938, when it took over all public education connected to the Four-Year Plan, including the Fight Waste campaign. The RVA led five similar campaigns during the war years to convince Germans to conserve scarce resources.47 Though this sounds like state propaganda, the RVA was a curious office that well illustrates the complexities of “audience” in the Nazi era. Its small staff answered to the Ad Council, which was itself only a semiofficial body of representatives from industry and the state. Because the Propaganda Ministry, which had authority over the Ad Council, wanted to share the costs of these widespread campaigns, the RVA also worked closely with partners from the private sector. The messages, therefore, that were aimed at German consumers, particularly housewives, were multivalent. In addition, as will be demonstrated through the example of the campaign to conserve soaps and detergents (and household textiles), consumers’ voices were also evident, making the state and industry the audience in return. Fats were among the first resources to be rationed by the regime, a decision that began affecting the production of soap as early as fall 1934. One major manufacturer, the Düsseldorf-based Henkel company, the maker of Persil among other cleaning products, told its sales staff not to mention the changes to retailers or customers, following orders from officials. Those in charge of rationing, who believed that individual consumers would not notice the cutbacks to the fat content of detergents, did not want to draw attention to them. The problem was that those using soaps and detergents noticed immediately and complained that higher priced brands like Persil were no longer as effective.48 They felt cheated. Intermittent shortages of fats continued throughout the 1930s; consumers, manufacturers, retailers, and state officials each blamed the others. It was no surprise, then, that the major firms (Henkel, Sunlicht, and Chemnitz-based Böhme Fettchemie) happily agreed to work with the RVA, starting in

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1938, in an attempt to improve the situation.49 The companies were motivated by two desires: to show their support for the regime’s economic policies and thereby stay in the conversation moving forward and to participate in any efforts that promoted their products to consumers. The campaign had two goals: to teach women to use less of the soaps and detergents that contained fat and to convince them that the ersatz cleaners were effective alternatives. Both goals were based on a rejection of the tried and true cleaning methods of generations of German housewives, which meant the campaigners had a tough task ahead of them. Of the three audiences considered in this chapter—the state, advertisers as representatives of business owners, and individual consumers—the advertisers and those who employed them were the campaign’s clear winners. Individual consumers faced shortages, inferior replacement cleaners, and a barrage of messaging that their methods for cleaning were damaging to their household linens and families’ clothing and therefore to the nation’s ability to respond to the crisis of war. The consumer audience, however, did not take all of this to heart. Women pushed back against the message that the ersatz products were just as good, and they resisted moving away from habits that had proven effective in maintaining a clean home. The state, too, was a loser in some ways. The campaign did not improve morale. Rather, women blamed the state and the Party’s organizations that disseminated the promotional materials for being out of touch and for offering false information about the quality of replacements and the ease of following the new recommendations. As one woman asked bitterly in 1942, “How are we supposed to follow soap-saving tips, when we have no soap to start with?”50 The chief winners of the campaign were the three firms that partnered on the project. Henkel’s advertising team, led by Paul Mundhenke, was put in charge. Henkel was the largest of the companies and had the most sophisticated brand image already in place. The RVA brought in Hanns Brose, whom we heard from earlier, to coordinate on its behalf. When the campaign began, Brose was sure to emphasize the “neutral and independent” status of the RVA, already conscious of the hesitation many felt toward the propaganda ministry and party messaging. More importantly, the RVA depended on the three companies involved in the project to finance the campaign. As a result, despite the RVA’s insistence that the brochures, posters, magazine inserts, and presentations remained “neutral,” the companies consistently worked their brand names into the campaign materials through 1940. For example, a poster might have as its heading ‘Sunlicht will show you how to save soap. Follow these easy tips.’ This was an important victory for firms that could not advertise directly for products that were no longer available to customers. The RVA tried to rein in the three firms by declaring in 1941 that the campaign’s propaganda must henceforth be “neutral and anonymous,” but the new limit did little to change the companies’ behavior.51 In this way, they were able to stay in touch with their audiences throughout the war, even when Persil and Sunlicht were long gone from store shelves.52 As one Henkel-designed piece of “neutral” propaganda put it, “So it has been since then [the start of the war], nevertheless, don’t forget housewives, Persil again in peacetime.”53 While

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this earned Henkel a strong rebuff from authorities and a demand that the firm repay the public funds that had been invested in the publication, the criticism was well worth the plug for Persil. Crucially, Henkel was able to disassociate its brand from the less effective alternatives that were available. The company was, in effect, creating a comparison advertisement, one in which the high quality of Henkel products shined in relation to the state’s ersatz cleaners.

Conclusion In 1941, Hanns Kropff weighed in again, this time lamenting the fact that, despite “the developments in recent years in Germany,” it was still critical when conducting market research that the interviewer be of the same “class, cultural level, and regional dialect” as the consumers being studied in order to avoid “mistrust” and resistance.54 As Kropff indicated, attempts to overcome shoppers’ suspicions of the commercial sector and the regime’s policies related to consumer goods did not seem to have succeeded, despite the efforts of the Ad Council and the messaging of the RVA and other offices related to the Four-Year Plan and the war economy. I suspect, in fact, they may have backfired, that as consumers became better educated and had more information with which to make decisions, they became more cautious, not less, of images and text meant to sway them to purchase in certain ways. To what extent were these developments peculiar to Nazi Germany? Except for the purging of Jews and the men and women considered to be politically unreliable from advertising professions, the industry was largely left to its own devices by the regime. The Propaganda Ministry did have the final say over content, but Goebbels and those below him did not seek radical change and rarely censored ads. Rather, in advertising there seems to have been more continuity than rupture with the Weimar era and developments beyond Germany’s borders. The German audience for ads was coming into its own, albeit with far less purchasing and political power than in Western Europe and North America. And yet the writing was on the wall that this audience could not be ignored nor could it be easily manipulated. I would go a step further on the issue of trust. While it is true that ‘Vertrauen’ was a catchword that held pride of place in the dictatorship and shaped the conversations between advertisers, consumers, and the regime, it was only the regime that ultimately failed to live up to its end of the bargain. Promises made to shoppers by consumer goods firms that their beloved, trustworthy products would return in peacetime were upheld in most cases, strengthening those relationships moving into the postwar years. Pamela E. Swett is Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University in Canada. She is the author of Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford University

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Press, 2014); Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929– 1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and coeditor of Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (Palgrave, 2011), and Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Duke University Press, 2007).

Notes Many thanks go to Ulrike Weckel for helping me think through the topic more than once and to Ryan Heyden for his crack research skills. 1. Joseph Goebbels prohibited advertising on radio in 1935 because he believed commercial advertisements cheapened radio broadcasts, which he wanted to preserve for political purposes, including the education and entertainment of the Volk. P. E. Swett, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 93–95. See Neil Gregor’s chapter (Chapter 7) in this volume for more on concert programs. 2. Among those who would play important roles in this regard, particularly in the postwar American context, are Ernest Dichter and Paul Lazarsfeld, both of whom had fled Vienna. S. Schwarzkopf and R. Gries, eds., Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of the Post-War Consumer Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Introduction. 3. D. Schindelbeck, “The ‘Depth Boy’—Ernest Dichter and the Post-War German Advertising Elite,” in ibid., 236–65. 4. On the pre-1918 period, see C. Lamberty, Reklame in Deutschland, 1890–1914 (Berlin: Dunker und Humblot, 2000); D. Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung in Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993); and D. Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 5. P. Lerner, “Konsumkrankheiten: Kleptomanie, Magazinitis und Frauen als Konsumentinnen im Kaiserreich und der Weimarer Republik,” WerkstattGeschichte 42 (2006): 45–56. 6. V. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011); L. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004). 7. J. Sneeringer, “The Shopper as Voter: Women, Advertising and Politics in Post-Inflation Germany,” German Studies Review 27/3 (2004): 476–501, here 493. 8. For examples of how the state and Party sought to shape consumer behavior, see R. N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); N.  R. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially chapters 4 and 5; and N. Petrick-Felber, Kriegswichtiger Genuss: Tabak und Kaffee im “Dritten Reich” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015). 9. P. E. Swett, “Preparing for Victory: Heinrich Hunke, the Werberat, and West German Prosperity,” Central European History 42 (2009): 675–707, here 690. 10. Swett, Selling under the Swastika, chapter 2. 11. The Law for the Protection of National Symbols was passed on 19 May 1933 and applied to unsanctioned, noncommercial uses of national symbols as well.

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12. H. W. Brose, “Die Königin unter den Werbeträgern,” Die Reklame, 2 December 1929, 908. 13. C. Ross, “Visions of Prosperity: The Americanization of Advertising in Interwar Germany‚” in Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany, ed. P. E. Swett, J. Wiesen, and J. Zatlin, 52–77 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); A. Schug, “Innovation und Kundenorientierung: Erfolgsfaktoren Amerikanischer Advertising Agencies auf dem deutschen Werbemarkt der 1920er Jahren,” in Moments of Consistency: Eine Geschichte der Werbung, ed. A. Schug and H. Sack, 66–71 (Berlin: Dorland Werbeagentur, 2004). On the role of the American J. Walter Thompson agency in shifting the discourse and practice, see P. J. Kreshel, “John B. Watson at J. Walter Thompson: The Legitimation of ‘Science’ in Advertising,” Journal of Advertising 19, no. 2 (1990): 49–59. 14. R. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 13–14. 15. Brose, “Die Königin unter den Werbeträgern,” 908. 16. Ibid. 17. H. Sakowski, “Amerikanisches—allzuamerikanisches,” Die Reklame, 2 October 1930, 640–42. 18. H. Auspitz, “Überall Propaganda für Nationalpropaganda,” Die Reklame, 2 November 1930, 730. 19. E. J. Maecker, “Heute—die Werbung von morgen für den Erfolg von übermorgen,” Seidels Reklame, April 1933, no. 4, 115. 20. See, for example, the rejection of this idea by the Nuremberg circle even in 1939, as discussed in O. Bickel, “Über das Markterlebnis in der gebundenen Wirtschaft,” in Marktwirtschaft und Wirtschaftswissenschaft, ed. G. Bergler and L. Erhard, 120–21 (Berlin: Deutscher Betriebswirte Verlag, 1939). 21. H. F. J. Kropff, “Suggestion, Glaube und Überzeugung in der Reklame,” Seidels Reklame, July 1934, no. 7, 227–30, here 230. 22. Ibid. For more on Kropff, see Schindelbeck, “‘The Depth Boy,’” 241–42. 23. For some examples of hoarding, or what the SPD in exile liked to call ‘shopping strikes,’ see Deutschland-Bericht der Sopade, May/June 1934, 104–5, and 2 January 1935, 30–31. The Sopade’s reports are online at http://fes.imageware.de/fes/web/. 24. S. J. Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 127. 25. And as Vershofen himself pointed out, the group was less interested in conducting experiments to find constants about behavior and motivation and more interested in the qualitative and quantitative aspects of gathering sociological data. W. Vershofen, Handbuch der Verbrauchsforschung, vol. 1 (Berlin: Carl Heymanns, 1940), 66. On early marketing practice in the German pharmaceutical industry, see U. Thoms, “Standardizing Selling, Pharmaceutical Marketing: The Pharmaceutical Company and the Marketing Expert, 1900–1980,” History and Technology 29, no. 2 (2013): 169–87. 26. L. Hülf, “Der Verbraucherforschung im Dienste der Werbeerfolgsmessung,” in Marktwirtschaft und Wirtschaftswissenschaft, ed. G. Bergler and L. Erhardt, 285–310 (Berlin: Deutscher Betriebswirte Verlag, 1939), 296–98. The following year, Vershofen noted that examining the influences on Kaufakt, including ads and gender, region, class, and other markers of difference, was important to the field of market research. Vershofen, Handbuch der Verbrauchsforschung, 86. 27. Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace, 178. 28. Mitteilungsblatt der GfK 5 (January 1937): 59 and 63.

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29. KFD, Kaffee Hag, customer letters in Hag-Post 2 (12 May 1931). Similar reprinted letters can be found in Hag-Post throughout the 1930s. 30. Archiv Unilever Deutschland, “Was Hausfrauen fragen,” Sunlicht Post 3, no. 4 (April 1933). Sunlicht Post was the internal company newsletter. 31. Die Sunlicht Freundin appeared three times per year, starting in 1936. 32. Archiv Unilever Deutschland, “. . . und was hat Ihnen gefallen,” Die Sunlicht Freundin 4 (August 1937). This article surveyed the readership about whether past articles had struck a chord. Many of the titles listed referenced contemporary political issues related to individual consumption and the domestic sphere. 33. Archiv Unilever Deutschland, “Kosmetik ist kein Luxus,” Die Sunlicht Freundin 5 (December 1937): 12, and “Das erste graue Haar,” Die Sunlicht Freundin 10 (August 1939): 7. 34. O. F. Döbbelin, “Vom Neubau der Markenartikel-Werbung,” in Archiv für MarkenartikelPropaganda (Berlin: Kurt Elsner Verlag, 1935), 5. 35. E. H., “Die Seelen-Partitur,” Seidels Reklame, February 1933, no. 2, 46f. 36. H.  F.  J. Kropff, Die psychologische Seite der Verbrauchsforschung (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1941), 91–92. Vershofen made his case for continuing to study markets during the war and emphasized that Germany was particularly well positioned to do so because the advertising sector had developed more independently from private economic interests than anywhere else in the world. Vershofen, Handbuch der Verbrauchsforschung, 174. Vershofen also believed women made the best correspondents for his Institute. They made up a majority of the 700, 120–23. 37. Offizielle Nachrichten aus dem Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft, “Zweite Bekanntmachung des Werberates vom 1 November 1933,” Die Reklame, Die Deutsche Werbung 26, no 18 (October 1933): 566–67. 38. However, companies that could show a long history of using words like ‘Germania’ in their slogans were usually exempt from this restriction under the Law for the Protection of National Symbols. See H. Hunke, Der Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft im Jahre 1940 (Berlin: Erasmusdruck, 1941), 61. 39. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 159. 40. Bundesarchiv Berlin, R5002, no. 26, RVA memo, “Aufklärungs-Aktion WaschmittelEinzelhandel,” 18 June 1939, here 223, 226. 41. Landesarchiv Berlin, A. Rep 231, no. 1218, Osram Werbung, 1935/36, 1 August 1935. 42. LAB, A. Rep 231, no. 1223, Werbe-Rundbrief 33/72, 15 December 1933. 43. LAB, A. Rep 231, no. 1224, “Besseres Licht—Schöneres Leben,” 1934. 44. LAB, A. Rep 231, no. 1218, Werbeplan für Deutschland, 7 February 1935. 45. LAB, A. Rep 231, no. 1218, Diskussionsvorschlag für den Werbeplan 1937/38 for Osram Directors Jensen, Brocke, and Rothweiler, 6 February 1937. 46. Ibid. 47. Hunke, Der Werberat der Deutschen, 9–10. 48. Henkel, G11, Rundschreiben no 12, 12 September 1934. 49. Later the Viennese firm Schicht was put in charge of the campaign in the Ostmark. 50. Swett, Selling under the Swastika, 213. Similar criticism was reported by the SS Security Service (SD), whose officers listened to the reactions of cinema audiences to propaganda and commercial films that offered advice about products no longer available during the war. See, for example, H. Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich, 1938–1945. Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, vol. 8 (Herrsching: Pawlak, 1984), no. 225, 2 October 1941. See also Gerhard Stahr’s discussion of such reports in G. Stahr, Volks-

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gemeinschaft vor der Leinwand? Der nationalsozialistiche Film und sein Publikum (Berlin: Hans Theissen, 2011), 197–201. BAB, R5002, no. 22, RVA to Dobmann at Sunlicht, 5 November 1942. BAB, R5002, no. 17, RVA Aktennotiz, 17 February 1941. Ibid. Kropff, Die psychologische Seite der Verbrauchsforschung, 91–92.

Selected Bibliography Petrick-Felber, N. Kriegswichtiger Genuss: Tabak und Kaffee im “Dritten Reich.” Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. Reagin, N.  R. Sweeping the German Nation: Domisticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Swett, P. E. Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Swett, P. E., J. Wiesen, and J. Zatlin, eds. Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Wiesen, S. J. Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

7 Concert Programs, Ideology, and the Search for Subjectivity in National Socialist Germany Neil Gregor

In January 1940, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra performed a symphony concert in the Leipzig Gewandhaus concert hall, an image of which survives in the archive (figure 7.1). The concert formed part of a tour that took the orchestra to venues across Germany during the first winter of the war. In the words of the Munich City Culture Office, “nothing is more indicative of German character and of German leadership that while in foreign enemy territory cultural events are being closed down, precisely in the Greater German Reich the best and most beautiful of all the arts is being presented, so that the spiritual burdens that the war brings to people are compensated for.”1 Ordinary symphony concerts were not usually photographed. The daily and weekly practice of provincial concert-giving and concertgoing was generally a routine affair, visually predictable and repetitive, and correspondingly unworthy of documentation as far as creating a photographic record was concerned. The governing ethos of the concert hall, with its emphasis on seriousness, aesthetic immersion, and the absence of distraction, argued implicitly against the unwanted intrusions of the camera too.2 The unusually rich photographic record of this tour reflects, then, the self-interested desire of the orchestra and its management to document the extent and range of the musicians’ travels and the orchestra’s appearance in some of the country’s most prestigious venues at a time of war. The wider series of photographs of which this image was part eventually formed the basis for a souvenir picture book of the tour that simultaneously documented the specific set of events on which it was focused, projected civic

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Figure 7.1. The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra performing in the Gewandhaus Leipzig concert hall (January 1940). Stadtarchiv München, Historisches Bildarchiv, Münchener Philharmoniker 3, KR 367–68 / II 8. Reproduced with permission of the Stadtarchiv München.

prestige on behalf of the city with which the orchestra was associated, asserted an implied claim for the quality and status of the orchestra itself, and articulated a broader argument about the necessity of culture at a time of war.3 The book is freighted with iterations of ideology that are hard to miss, be they claims of the superiority of German culture, of the cohesiveness of the “people’s community,” of the “comradeship” of the orchestra’s members, or of many similar such tropes that allow the reader to place the volume immediately within the wider context of National Socialist rule. The image itself, however, poses a challenge for those accustomed to reading the cultural life of National Socialist Germany within the inherited frames that still dominate—and constrain—many accounts of the period, for overt signs of the presence of the National Socialist regime are entirely absent from it.4 The image captures something of the conventions and practices of bourgeois concertgoing, most obviously in the rows of listeners apparently focused on the sights and sounds emanating from the performance on the stage, sitting still in accordance with the norms of concert hall behavior. The presence of many fur stoles in the audience is the most obvious indicator of the social demographic that inhabits the hall, while the sumptuous decoration also communicates something of the economically privileged quality of the milieu whose activities are recorded. But the image offers little, beyond the general fashions in clothing and grooming on

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display, that would help to place the event in the 1930s or 1940s and nothing that would locate it as taking place under the conditions of dictatorship. The sporadic presence of military uniforms between the overwhelmingly civilian-clad listeners hints at the presence of war, but the fact that the audience is photographed from the back of the hall means that these uniforms offer all but the most confident of observer little help in placing the scene in Germany. Unless one happens to recognize the interior of the concert hall itself, one would ultimately be at a loss to pronounce where and when this quite generic image of the European art-musicking tradition is set. Generic as the scene it captures largely is, the composition of this particular photograph is notable for how it draws the viewer’s eye to the presence, along the balcony, of a large number of loose paper objects that sit, distributed evenly and approximately one for every two audience members, in front of the occupants of the first row of seats. These concert programs, for this is what they are, constituted an integral part of the paraphernalia of concertgoing—flimsy, disposable items of at most a few sides, and often rather less, which served the purpose of giving concertgoers the basic details of the concert they were attending and varying, but limited amounts of additional material besides. The routines of producing and purchasing them were part of the wider set of conventions that the photograph documents, and they form an equally integral part of the material, visual, and textual archive that the social practice of concertgoing has bequeathed to historians of this subject. Few aspects of the study of Nazi Germany have remained as stubbornly beholden to the unspoken assumptions about “how dictatorships work” that are embedded in the quotidian language we use to describe the regime as the topic of everyday media. This is particularly so when one moves from the careful, subtle scholarly arguments found in articles and monographs to the claims that continue to bedevil the general or synoptic account. For all that a range of studies have examined the production and consumption of everyday visual culture in fields as diverse as advertising and amateur photography, transforming our understanding of how citizenship and subjectivity were constituted in Nazi Germany and of how diverse forms of ideology were appropriated, adapted, performed, and enacted under conditions of National Socialist rule, the vocabulary of “propaganda” continues to exert a significant, regressive pull on our capacity to understand what everyday media products might have meant for those who made, circulated, read, or used them.5 Thus, stubbornly ingrained scholarly habits of ascribing all agency simply to “the Nazis,” the “Nazi regime,” or “Nazi propaganda” and of seeking to assess the impact of the latter on “the people” or “ordinary Germans”—or, at best, on broad demographic categories such as “the workers” or “youth”—have continued to transport a crudely top-down understanding of how power functioned in the period, reinscribing assumptions about the homogenizing dynamics of National Socialist rule that betray their origins in the redundant theory of totalitarianism.6 Even where scholars in this field acknowledge the turn toward emphasizing the consensual, voluntarist dimensions of Nazi rule that has dominated the histo-

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riography of the past thirty years and recognize—in the words of one exponent of the traditional approach—that “propaganda is as much about confirming, rather than converting, public opinion,” those assumptions about the fundamental distinction between the agency and voice of “the regime” and those of “the people” remain.7 The result is an analytical dead end that can do little more than accumulate indicators that the regime was, broadly speaking, popular in order to justify an argument that its propaganda was, equally broadly speaking, effective—a claim that is ultimately no more possible to prove than it is to gainsay. The methodological conservatism of so many historians’ accounts of “Nazi propaganda” is perhaps best exemplified by Jeffrey Herf ’s contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, in which “Nazi propaganda” remains a singular thing, authored by the state, i.e., its key offices—the Propaganda Ministry and the Reich Press Office—and anonymous “Nazi propagandists”; handed down to local journalists in the form of directives; and possessed of a persuasive agency that—not by itself but as an essential element—resulted directly in the regime’s implementation of the Holocaust.8 The claim that “Nazi propaganda” represented an authentically held set of commitments for its authors, rather than a cynical, instrumental means of manipulative deception, is entirely in tune with how most recent scholarship treats questions of Nazi ideology. Yet, for all its eloquence, Herf ’s argument reproduces what is essentially an old-fashioned “intentionalist” account of the functioning of the Nazi polity and the unfolding of the genocide. What is still missing—as questions, let alone as answers—are the issues of how manifestations of everyday culture (material, visual, literary, and sonic) reflected ordinary Germans’ capacity to embrace, appropriate, adapt, and express the beliefs, arguments, feelings, and dispositions that such ideology represented, and to suture these to whatever situational, institutional, commercial, or other logics were in operation in the particular fields in which they and their texts moved and acted.9 This chapter suggests ways in which that study might be pursued, taking everyday concert hall literature, such as concert programs and brochures, as its example. Following a brief account of the general characteristics and functions of this genre of text in the early twentieth century, it analyses some of the ways in which the National Socialist takeover of power in 1933 manifested itself in them. In many respects, as the chapter argues, the story is one of substantial continuity, as the preexisting cultural nationalism that governed concert hall culture provided a key underlying bass note to the genre before, as after, 1933. However, the clearly discernible shifts in the visual and verbal content of these everyday texts demonstrate how small but highly significant changes worked both to reposition the institutions and practices of which they were part and to offer concertgoers ways of reimagining their own listening experiences. They did so, moreover, as part of a wider set of processes whereby the public sphere was transformed in line with the broad precepts of National Socialist ideology. However, the chapter cautions against the temptation to read changed listening habits or experiences of concertgoers directly from the changing “contents”

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of the texts concerned. To do so would be to ignore the great variety of ways in which people attended and consumed concert hall events and the variety of functions programs may have served. It would also fail to acknowledge the variety of nationalist and (usually implicitly) racist languages that coursed through such texts, a variety compounded by the polysemous quality of much of the language itself. At the same time, acknowledging the capacious qualities of National Socialist ideology opens up analytical possibilities of its own, especially once one recognizes those qualities as having been amplified by the multivocal characteristics of the texts themselves. As multiauthored texts, concert programs simultaneously channeled a large number of (often anonymous) voices, appropriating languages that were offered to them by others and reformulating them in implicit dialogue with imagined readers in turn.10 It is in these appropriations of the languages of others and their rearticulations in the text concerned that we can observe the emergence of a variety of National Socialist subjectivities in everyday media such as concert programs.

Concert Programs between Democracy and Dictatorship As with almost all genres of mass media production that were not called forth by the needs of overt, explicit politicking, concert programs were shaped by conventions of content and design that had nothing, in themselves, to do with National Socialism. Indeed, for all of the ways they could vary slightly from country to country, their design, content, and intended function reflected the practice of a set of generically European, rather than specifically German, institutions and ways of seeing, thinking about, curating, and consuming art music that were similarly the “common sense” of a tradition that was as European as it was German too. Indeed, much suggests that, if anything, it had become more “European,” and less possessed of any obvious national distinctiveness, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 Typically, programs consisted of a mixture of graphics, symbols, images, photographs, and text. But their composition varied, and differences between those produced in Hamburg, Freiburg, or Regensburg were just as great as between these and programs created in other countries. On a basic level, they served to inform audiences of what was being performed, in what order, by whom, where, and when.12 However, the blandly informational content also served, even when at its most simple and ostensibly factual, as the start of a process of constituting the “informed” listener. Simple listings of the structure of a piece and the tempi of its successive movements, along with the birth and death dates of the composer concerned, served to familiarize the listener with the piece, center his or her attention on “the work,” and communicate the idea of the composer as the sole creative force (the “master”).13 From here it was but a small segue to notions of “genius,” which could easily take on a more overtly ideological inflection under certain circumstances. While informing the listener of the tempo of each movement guided the expectations

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of the listener as she or he listened, the curation of the repertoire and its presentation in a particular constellation or order formed part of the silent process of canonization through everyday performing practice. The informational function of such programs simultaneously represented an act of framing that acquired, cumulatively, a socializing function as concertgoers were gradually assimilated to the conceits that governed the art-musical milieu of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decades. This socialization was not confined to the acquisition of the correct disposition toward the music itself but extended to the wider behavioral codes institutions sought to impose on their publics, as is exemplified by instances of programs instructing audiences members when to clap and of programs informing visitors of the consequences of late arrival. That socializing function could acquire an overtly didactic quality when programs included program notes, which became an increasingly widespread feature that aimed to introduce listeners to a piece by means of a short elucidatory text that explained its structure or suggested what the music was “about.” On the one hand, the gradual embrace of such notes reflected social reformist attempts to educate new, less “knowing” publics—often those imagined as aspirational or as seekers after “improvement”—in the basics of art music and its history, rendering sometimes “difficult” music more “accessible” and offering neophytes a way into the culture.14 These attempts reflected, in turn, the widely held conceit within the cultivated bourgeois milieu that learning was the precondition for heightened (or correct) enjoyment and that this learnedness had to be acquired through the concertgoer’s own work. On the other hand, it reflected the needs of financially fragile musical institutions increasingly perceived to be in crisis and under commercial pressure to reproduce their own audiences. These audiences were widely perceived to be “dying” in the face of the siren attractions of other forms of leisure—radio, cinema, and sport were the most often cited examples.15 The more such written text concert programs carried the more overtly didactic they could potentially be and the greater their capacity to encourage the audience to “listen through reading,” as one influential commentator has put it.16 The possibilities they offered those seeking radically to reshape the subjectivities of the citizenry, here in the form of the encouragement of a new “listening subject,” were thus potentially there. Yet the aesthetic positions they communicated, in however boiled down or vulgarized a form, mostly cut across conventional ideological divides and resisted attribution to political concerns in a narrower sense.17 Rather, they carried a set of arguments within a particular milieu that was governed by a broad sensibility concerning art music and reflected the conceits and concerns of that musical habitus. ‘Should one listen hermeneutically, or is music absolute?’ was a question that could be answered very differently by commentators with otherwise very similar political outlooks. If anything, the evolution of program design and content in the early twentieth century reflected evolving technical possibilities (e.g., the integration of photography and color graphics), the commercial dynamics of the wider economy (e.g., advertising), and aesthetic trends that were visual (e.g., the change from decorative motifs to

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minimalism and from traditionalism to visual modernism) as much as anything centered directly on changing notions of correct musical listening. If we are nonetheless to ask about straightforward elements of the “Nazification” of concert programs from 1933 onward, the obvious starting point is to ascertain what they looked like before. A series of programs produced to accompany various concerts in the Volkstümliche Konzerte, the “Popular Concerts” series of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra between 1931 and 1934, are used here to illustrate how they looked, starting with the program for a concert given on 25 January 1931 (figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2. Program for the 40th Popular Concert of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, 25 January 1931. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Winter 1930–31. 40. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

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The front covers of programs printed for the 1930–31 season foregrounded, as they had since the eve of World War I, an image of the Laeiszhalle, the concert hall in which the orchestra performed. This auratic piece of late-Wilhelmine neo-Baroque concert hall architecture had been built with a philanthropic donation from the Laeisz family, members of the liberal merchant patriciate that dominated political and social life in the city.18 The reference to the “Philharmonic Society” likewise registered that the concerts were mounted by a private concert association rather than the public authorities (as was usually the case in other cities by this point). The program informed guests of the details of the concert itself, giving its time, date, place, and the names of the conductor and soloist; the announcement that “during the concert the hall doors remain closed” signaled the desire to avoid disruption of the performance once underway and, thus, introduced concertgoers to behavioral codes geared toward the ideal of concentrated, attentive listening.19 The frontispiece was enclosed in a simple frame reminiscent of simple marquetry but otherwise devoid of decorative motifs. Inside, the program carried commercial advertisements (mainly for music shops, instrument makers, and repairers) in a variety of graphic idioms and listed the repertoire to be performed. As a concert organized within the orchestra’s “popular” series rather than its more “serious” Philharmonic or Symphony concerts, the program for 25 January 1931, for example, was organized around the theme of “a Viennese evening”; the evening featured a series of overtures, selected movements from a Haydn symphony, three pieces for cello and piano, and a military march in a medley reminiscent of the miscellany tradition more familiar from the nineteenth century.20 There was an implied reader, or listener, discernible in the addressee for the advertisements and the “entertainment” focus of the program, but, notably, and quite typical of many concert programs still, there was no elucidatory text to introduce the novice audience member to each piece or suggest how they might listen to it. Initially, nothing changed with the National Socialist takeover of power. The program for the first concert in the “popular” series that fell after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor (figure 7.3), which was given on 12 February 1933, embodied an almost identical layout, save for inconsequential changes in graphic design, as that of 1931; overwhelmingly, it communicated a sense of “business as usual.” Such continuity reflected the rhythms of the concert season, all aspects of which had been planned in the previous summer, and the desire to maintain visual coherence through the year, consistent with the projection of a particular institutional identity on the part of the orchestra. It also reflected the timelines and lags inherent in the process of redesign and reprinting even the most simple and banal of texts. But it also demonstrates that, as the National Socialist takeover of power unfolded in real time in early 1933, not all private associations thought immediately that adapting their visual self-presentation was necessarily a priority. It reminds one, in other words, how the proclivity to read shifts in the visual culture in that year in terms of “propaganda” can easily bulldoze over the complex and varied logics that shaped the production of such material and underlines the

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Figure 7.3. Program for the 23rd Popular Concert of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, 12 February 1933. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Winter 1932–33. 23. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

equally complex and varied horizons of expectation that governed diverse actors’ choices in the open and fluid situation that 1933 represented. Perhaps more interestingly, the initial programs for the following concert season exhibited the same element of visual and textual continuity as before. The program for the twelfth “popular” concert of the 1933–34 season was given on 26 November 1933, and themed around the occasion of Totensonntag (figure 7.4). It consisted of Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture, three songs and the Unfinished Symphony by Schubert, Wagner’s Faust Overture and Good Friday music

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Figure 7.4. Program for the 12th Popular Concert of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, 26 November 1933. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Winter 1933–34. 12. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

from Parsifal, and Richard Strauss’s tone poem Tod und Verklärung. The program reproduced the texts of the poems by Klopstock, Pope, and Lappe that Schubert had set to music in his songs, a short extract from Goethe’s Faust to accompany Wagner’s overture, and a poem by Alexander Ritter conventionally associated with Strauss’s tone poem.21 The latter had been written in response to the music at the time of its composition and was published in the program not as an elucidation of the work but as an imaginative prompt for the listener. In doing so, the program repeated

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the ingrained, almost automatic gesture of note creators for this work in the decades since the piece had been composed—Ritter’s poem was frequently reproduced when this piece was performed—exemplifying the strongly habitual, selfreferential, and circular characteristics of this quotidian genre and its capacity to transport and recycle such associations across the caesuras of successive political ruptures with impunity. The Germanocentric repertoire, similarly, was fully in keeping with the default cultural nationalism that governed the musical milieu in the early twentieth century but carried no obvious specifically National Socialist inflections. Indeed, neither Faust’s death yearnings (captured in the extract) nor Ritter’s fin-de-siècle sensibilities sat easily with the vitalism of most National Socialist cultural criticism. The tendency to embrace more overtly Germanocentric programming choices in the first full concert season following the National Socialist takeover of power often reflected the self-defensive adaptation of socially elite institutions, such as the Philharmonic Society, whose rarefied tone rendered them vulnerable in the face of the populist agendas of the new regime as much as it signaled an enthusiastic commitment to aligning the performing repertoire with its ebullient nationalist vision. This is not to reassert the old myth of a resistant liberal bourgeoisie, either in Hamburg or elsewhere.22 Rather, it acknowledges the ways in which the registration of social distinction fed the anti-elitist rhetoric of many National Socialist actors during the takeover of power, and, conversely, how across the multiple fields of public life ordinary Germans hastily repositioned themselves in response to such language.23 In early 1934, however, things changed. The modern font that dominated visually in the previous programs was partly replaced by an overtly archaic one, encoded at the time as nationalist and immediately decodable by contemporaries as such. The reason such a change was pushed through in the middle of a season was equally legible, if only for more knowing aficionados of the local musical world, from the additional subtle but crucial change at the head of the program. Whereas previously the impresario had been noted as the ‘Philharmonische Gesellschaft,’ it was described on the program for the “Popular Concert” of 11 February 1934 as the ‘Philharmonisches Staatsorchester. Philharmonische Gesellschaft’ (figure 7.5). This seemingly arcane name change reflected the forced merger and socialization of the hitherto independent and private orchestra with the city’s theatre orchestra in January 1934.24 The measure was rationalized publicly—and not without some justification—through reference to the debilitating financial impact of the Depression.25 However, it was clearly driven in part by National Socialist hostility to an institution whose strong associations with the local commercial patriciate had rendered it politically suspect to some of the new power holders in the city.26 This same act of municipal socialization was reflected in the fact that the programs started to carry advertisements for other civic cultural institutions. Thus, advertisements for current productions at the Hamburg State Theatre quoted from favorable reviews with individual phrases such as “stormy enthusiasm” (“stürmische Begeisterung”) and “stormy ovations”

Concert Programs, Ideology, and the Search for Subjectivity in National Socialist Germany

Figure 7.5. Program for the 5th Popular Concert of the Philharmonic State Orchestra of Hamburg, 11 February 1934. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 63a, Philharmonisches Staatsorchester. Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Reproduced with permission of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

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(“stürmische Ovationen”), bringing a further intermittent National Socialist inflection to the tone. Such changes were limited but simultaneously obvious. These small shifts reflected fundamental changes in the distribution and exercise of power within the city and were only legible by contemporaries as such. Such changes found their corollaries elsewhere as concert administrators silently renamed the Francophone ‘abonnement’ to the German ‘Dauerkarte’ or ‘Stammplatz’ as they listed the terms and conditions of subscriptions in their brochures, for example. Similarly, the trumpetings of “significantly reduced” prices for subscriptions from 1933–34 signaled a willingness to open up the socially exclusive world of the concert hall to new, more modestly situated music lovers in the spirit of the “people’s community.”27 Such small but telling linguistic and visual shifts were thus part of the wider transformation of the public sphere in Germany in the years after 1933 and were geared toward communicating the embrace of the new politics by the institutions concerned.

Concert Programs and the Contained Plurality of Musical Discourse in the National Socialist Era The presence of National Socialist rule was more obvious yet where individual concert programs or brochures advertising the forthcoming season as a whole either carried more extensive prose text that elucidated the supposed meanings of individual pieces for their audiences or sought to locate the activities of the orchestra concerned within the wider agendas of the regime. Thus, the brochure announcing the forthcoming 1936–37 “Concert Events of the City of Essen” eschewed, as was almost always the case, the use of the swastika to adorn its front cover, but its combination of the city’s coat of arms with a solid, archaic fraktur font for the text sutured the civic aspects of the staging of concerts to the national ones in a manner that left little room for doubt as to the wider context and future purpose of Essen’s public musical institutions.28 Inside, an anonymous text, penned in the voice of the orchestra, claimed: “[T]he city of Essen has occupied a leading position for many years in the musical life of the German west. Far beyond her borders people know of her exemplary, lively musical culture, of her powerful willingness to act on behalf of the creations of the present, of her excellent local artists, and—by no means least—of her alert concert public, which is always open to the challenges of contemporary music-making.” Such observations combined a regionalized ethnic essentialism and local patriotism with a language of leadership, vitalism, and creativity that drew on a number of the various semantic fields out of which National Socialist ideology was constituted.29 It continued: “[T]he powerful expansion of the core concert public in recent years proves most clearly the ever stronger need for artistic experiences among all sections of the population, and it is precisely the close bond between a permanent circle of visitors that is as great as possible with the artistic goals of the perform-

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ers that creates a true community of music experience [eine wahre Gemeinschaft des Musik-Erlebens], and is the precondition for the purposefulness of all artistic activity.” Here the same vocabulary of force and power (‘tatkräftig,’ ‘gewaltig’) was entwined further with language that sought to construct the concert public as a “listening community” analogous to and constitutive of the wider “people’s community,” and thus to emphasize the embrace of the new egalitarianism on the part of once elite institutions. It also through its emphasis on the public’s needs and experience (‘Erlebnis’) sought to model new forms of listening anchored in instinct rather than the intellect or distanced contemplation. Similarly, program notes aimed at introducing listeners to the music performed in individual concerts acquired a variety of nationalist inflections that undertook clear political and cultural work on behalf of the regime and demanded comparatively little interpretative effort. As part of its 1940–41 season, for example, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra gave a concert consisting of the overture from Weber’s Der Freischütz, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4. The local music journalist Wilhelm Zentner obliged with framing observations that noted: “German being is inseparable from its innate feeling for nature. None of the many fields of nature has taken the German heart captive in such a direct and magical manner, however, as the German forest. . . . In short, the forest is a primeval home of the German soul.”30 Such an account, which drew in equal measure on nineteenth-century Romanticism, a generic national mythology, and more stridently racialized essentialism, formed the backdrop for Zentner’s insistence that the concert showed “without wishing to be confined by a fixed programmatic thought, the reflection of the German feeling for nature and the forest in our music.” As was always the case, Jews were not explicitly mentioned. However, the emphasis on nature, feeling, and mystery worked, through the presence of implied antonyms anchored in semantic fields that were encoded as “Jewish”—artificiality, rationalism, intellectualism—to define lines of inclusion and exclusion that were easily understood by the contemporary reader. And if Zentner was far from the most strident of nationalist music writers, the wartime inflections of his language, with the persistent vocabulary of heroism, struggle, and victory, still left little doubt as to the purpose of musical listening in his view.31 Such examples can be reproduced at will from the endless piles of concert programs and brochures that sit in the extended archive of provincial musical life during the National Socialist era. Insofar as the term ‘propaganda’ functions as an operable shorthand for the processes whereby the public sphere was colonized by a repertoire of images, symbols, arguments, and claims that were compatible with the broad precepts of National Socialist ideology, and to the extent that publications such as these worked to help establish a set of frames within which concertgoers might reimagine the meanings of the music to which they listened, there may be some limited value in describing such everyday texts using that terminology. Yet, ultimately, this brings us no further if we are seeking clear evidence of the possible transformations of ordinary Germans’ subjectivity that took place in concert halls after 1933.

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In the first place, what is striking is the continued diversity and variety of the texts concerned. These not only channeled a wide range of culturally nationalist, ethnocentric and racially essentialist discourses but blended these in an equally varied manner with aesthetic positions that drew upon a multitude of different interpretative traditions.32 While an older literature on National Socialist cultural criticism was content to interpret it as simply picking up on a simple set of conservative, nationalist, and racist arguments that coalesced and circulated in the Weimar era, closing down the presence of competing aesthetic arguments that were easily discernible as modernist and progressive (the two being assumed to be largely coterminous), much recent work has pointed to the complexities of conservative critical thought. It has underlined the multiple ways in which it was contested, co-opted, and creatively adapted in the National Socialist period and the ways in which selective affirmations of modernism cut across the divides of progressive, liberal, conservative, and nationalist thought.33 After 1933, the languages of nationalism upon which cultural criticism in the National Socialist era drew continued to be cross-fertilized with a variety of other habits of argument. They remained correspondingly polysemous and open to a variety of readings.34 So did the broader semantic fields upon which the various languages of nationalism drew—vocabularies of spaciousness, timelessness, forcefulness and power, organicism, and heroism could all be co-opted and read in a number of ways.35 When refracted through a wider set of unresolved arguments about music, musical form, and musical meaning, they attained a yet greater level of multivalency. The essential point is that in National Socialist Germany aesthetics remained a field of open argument, not a fixed or limited set of officially sanctioned positions, and the scope for finding varied meaning in any given composer, piece of music, or style remained substantial. Second, for all that the conventions of historians’ writing on both “public opinion” in general and the characteristics of “the audience” or “the public” in the theatre more specifically encourage the assumption that listeners read or heard in unison, and for all that the invocation of a new “listening community” betrayed an ambition on the part of cultural activists at the time to engineer a new ideal listening type, audiences were anything but homogeneous. In broad terms, they were constituted out of the “middling sort.” The price of tickets constituted a prosaic but thoroughly real barrier to entry for most working-class people, and the forms of cultural capital needed to move through the concert hall space with ease also rendered it alien for many, though clearly not all, workers. But audiences still greatly varied internally, from the well-heeled haute-bourgeois subscription public who congregated in the front seats of prestigious concert halls to hear major orchestras in Berlin, Munich, or Cologne to the occasional purchasers of standing tickets for the symphony concerts of thoroughly mediocre theatre orchestras located in small provincial towns, to say nothing of the stratifications of age or the distinctions embodied in gender. A concert audience could thus contain everyone from a professor of musicology to a first-time concertgoer. Not only could it consist of a full range of

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listeners from aficionado to neophyte, but within the more “expert” element of the audience there might be people who knew an individual piece well and those who were hearing it for the first time. There might be those attending the concert out of interest in the piece concerned and those who were simply sitting through it for the sake of getting to the next piece. There were also those whose interest in any of the pieces was minimal compared to the excitement of seeing a particular performer. For others still, hearing or seeing the performers was secondary to the opportunity to see each other, and to be seen by them. The concert was an institution of sociability as well as aesthetic immersion.36 There were those attending the concert as either a special occasion or an occasional pleasure; those there because they had purchased a subscription for the season and might as well come along although the particular repertoire did not appeal; and those who had been dragged, reluctantly, by their parents.37 Depending on where they sat within this range of visitor types, the program might be a useful source of basic information, a means of study and self-education, a souvenir or collectible, or something to stare at vacantly as one willed the endless tedium to stop.38 To read the meanings attributed by “the audience” to a piece of music from the program notes on their laps is a correspondingly dubious undertaking.

Locating Subjectivity in Everyday Media Yet if the multivocal quality of concert programs militates against locating the “trace of subjectivity” among a diverse set of musical listeners in one respect, it opens possibilities for finding it in others.39 For the multivocality of concert programs lays not only in the range of nationalist languages and aesthetic discourses that coursed through them but, more immediately, in the multiauthored quality of the texts themselves. They were the products of the collected efforts of graphic designers, anonymous copywriters, photographers, music journalists, conductors, advertisers, and others who were responding to the needs and decisions of concert planners, ticket agents, soloists, commercial enterprises, and yet others again. As programs and brochures were “informing” their audiences, curating civic identity, organizing bourgeois social routine, responding to commercial necessity, and fostering star culture, they were co-opting a wide variety of voices and actors in the process, each of whom inflected one element of the text with a version of National Socialist verbal and visual language, and in widely varying permutations. The programs also had a strongly intertextual quality. As noted above, programs for the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra started to reproduce reviews published in other media organs, transporting the words of third-party journalists into the text as they did. In Düsseldorf, in similar fashion, the program for the first concert of the 1933–34 subscription season carried an advertisement in the back entreating concertgoers to: “Visit the City Culture Film Theatre in the Rheinhalle. On Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays at 8 p.m. you have the opportunity to see the cultural film program, newly restructured in the spirit of

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the national uprising. German people, German national culture, German landscape and economy, and no less so those contemporary questions and events affecting our fatherland, are shown in film.”40 The same intertextual element was there in the presence of commercial advertising, whereby anonymous designers, copywriters, and advertising sales agents brought text into these programs that tied the economic activities of the advertiser concerned to the wider agendas of the “national uprising,” e.g., when a department store projected itself as proudly “German” in its approach. Such capacious language was, again, simultaneously capable of sustaining a large variety of readings—the meaning of ‘Germanness’ was a matter for the reader’s intuitive knowledge—and of silently defining an equally intuitively recognizable “other,” i.e., Jews. The insertion of such advertisements, which were simultaneously reproduced in other everyday publications, such as newspapers, most obviously, thus embedded these concert programs in a wider set of nationalist discourses and bound the flimsy pamphlet in the concertgoer’s hand to the workings of a wider world that was being remade outside the hall. Similar points might be made about the portrait photographs of conductors and performers that increasingly graced the brochures that sought to persuade potential subscribers that it was worth buying tickets for the entire season. These photos added an additional layer of variety to the number of authors whose work fed into the text, since each was taken by a different photographer and, thus, had a slightly different visual signature. Moreover, the nature of the provided photograph told as much about how the star concerned wished to project himself or herself as it did about the subjectivity of the photographer.41 When viewed alongside one another in the pages of a brochure, the capacity of such material to transport a variety of arguments through the National Socialist era is again made clear. Some might capture the figure of a singer in a state of aesthetic transfiguration or transcendence, drawing upon deep-seated romantic notions of the artist in the process; others appear to foreground ideals of individualism, excellence, and achievement that could easily mesh with a more overtly fascist vision of the artist; in others, the steeliness of the subject’s gaze into the distance rendered that fascist vision more obvious yet. In others, the element of glamour embodied in the fine clothes, make-up, and posture of the subject communicated the priorities of a star culture that was unfolding unabated in the 1930s. In yet others again, an unmistakably louche aspect that gestured toward the unconventional habits and lifestyles of the artistic milieu is hard to miss. Viewers, again, could see what they wanted, and connect to whatever appealed to them, in the same sets of images. In the course of producing such material, anonymous designers and copywriters not only appropriated the words of their contemporaries, they also cited affirmatively the words of canonical figures in the national patrimony for their purpose. Thus, in Bonn the words of Beethoven were regularly integrated into brochure literature, while in Munich the words of Schopenhauer could be coopted in the construction of Bruckner as a musical “mystic.”42 The point here is not to construct either Beethoven or Schopenhauer as a proto-Nazi.43 The

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point is that they were being cited affirmatively by those contemporary actors who wished to co-opt these historical voices for their own vision of what a new musical imaginary might consist of in the nascent “people’s community.” The act of inserting quotations from such historical figures thus represented an appropriation of the national patrimony in which the subjectivity and agency of anonymous cultural activists and authors seeking to define a place for this music in the National Socialist period itself can be observed in operation. The “trace of subjectivity,” therefore, is to be found in the graphic designer who reproduced the city’s name in a solid fraktur font, in the copywriter who rewrote ‘abonnement’ as ‘Dauerkarte,’ in the advertising artist who projected a department store as a “Deutsches Kaufhaus,” in the photographer who portrayed a singer with a steely visage, and in the program note author who co-opted the historical voices of Germany’s cultural pantheon in the construction of myths of national superiority rather than in the imagined reader whose mind was allegedly rewritten through the mere fact of their exposure to such texts. Such mostly anonymous authors were variously responding to commissions, adjusting to expectations, proposing alterations, or embracing new opportunities, and they were doing so within an awareness that the political rules were shifting rapidly. It is impossible to know the precise configuration of motivations in each individual case. But it was nonetheless through their collective acts that the culture shifted, and it was also through such moves that they began to act out their obligations and commitments as citizens of a new Germany in the making. It is also in the variety of such texts and the multitude of languages they channeled, however, that we can think about how they worked in a manner that recognizes that the processes of communication in National Socialist Germany were far more complex than the one-way and top-down story the conventional language of “propaganda” still implies. The absence of linguistic and visual homogeneity acting on concertgoers did not necessarily limit their capacity to imagine their listening in new, or more overtly “national,” ways. Rather, it offered multiple points of connection for readers and listeners, who themselves brought a variety of preexisting beliefs and dispositions to the text and who could appropriate its contents in correspondingly different ways.44 Neither the comparative openness of the languages of National Socialism nor the fact that banal texts such as concert programs sutured together existing bourgeois conventions and practices; inherited aesthetic vocabularies; and a wide range of conservative, nationalist, and essentialist tropes is an argument against the reach and purchase of the regime and its ideological offer—quite the opposite. For, if anything, it was precisely the wide variety of nationalist cultural rhetorics and their anchorings in different regional and civic traditions of imagining art music and its canons that allowed musical institutions, their actors, and their audiences to adapt to the presence of National Socialism, to embrace it, identify with it, and navigate it with comparative ease, moments of friction notwithstanding.45 It was that same comparative openness that enabled so much of the language of these texts to feel familiar to audiences and allowed for the relatively swift

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naturalization of the overtly and recognizably more strident “Nazi” formulations within the wider discourse of the concert hall. In this context, rather than look for the transformative power of radically new forms of language being imposed from on high, the answer may lie more in recognizing the traction of those many strands of discourse that were comparatively familiar. Insofar as we are looking for a dynamic of transformation in relation to these concert programs, that story is not to be found directly among audience members who were simply internalizing the language of didactic texts and adjusting their listening accordingly. Rather, insofar as banal texts such as concert programs can help document an element of transformation, it is through careful listening for the voices of the everyday actors of provincial concert life who were responsible for their production, actors who not only shifted their speech as they wrote but gradually transformed their own subjectivity in the process. Put another way, rather than see “Germans” as responding to a world being remade by the “propaganda” of the “Nazis,” we should examine whatever diverse forms of everyday media we are interested in for what they might tell us about how ordinary Germans remade both the world and themselves. Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton, UK. He is the author of Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1998) and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (Yale University Press, 2009). Most recently, he coedited with the musicologist Thomas Irvine Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor (Berghahn Books, 2019). He is currently completing a study of the symphony concert in Nazi Germany.

Notes 1. Kulturamt der Hauptstadt der Bewegung, ed., Philharmoniker auf Reisen. Das Orchester der Hauptstadt der Bewegung auf seinen Winterfahrten im Kriegsjahr 1940. Ein zwangloser Bericht (Munich: Kulturamt der Hauptstadt der Bewegung, 1940), 5. 2. For an overview of the emergence of these codes, see S.  O. Müller, “Die Politik des Schweigens. Veränderungen im Publikumsverhalten in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38, no. 1 (2012): 48–85. 3. Kulturamt der Hauptstadt der Bewegung, Philharmoniker auf Reisen. 4. My argument here draws on the general arguments about writing the cultural history of the National Socialist period that I articulated in N. Gregor, “Die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus und der Cultural-Historical Turn,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 65, no. 2 (2017): 229–41. 5. For particularly insightful accounts of advertising, see S.  J. Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); P. E. Swett, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). For amateur

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

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photography, see M. Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology in German Photo Albums, 1933–1945,” Central European History 48, no. 3 (2015): 335–65. For a particularly egregious recent example, see M. H. Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). D. Welch, “Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 213–38. J. Herf, “Narrative and Mendacity: Anti-semitic Propaganda in Nazi Germany,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. J. Auerbach and R. Castronovo, 91–108 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The greater promise of such an approach is suggested by the recent synoptic account offered in M. Föllmer, Culture in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Here I am drawing on the insights contained in K. Passmore, “‘Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism’: Women’s Social Action in the Croix de feu and Parti social français,” Journal of Modern History 71, no. 4 (2019): 814–51, 818–19. W. Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); S. O. Mueller, Das Publikum macht die Musik. Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). For an account that places more emphasis on the specifically German qualities of this musical culture, see S. Mecking and Y. Wasserloos, eds., Inklusion & Exklusion. “Deutsche” Musik in Europa und Nordamerika 1848–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). The literature on concert programs as a genre of text is limited. See, however, C. Bashford, “Not just ‘G’: Towards a History of the Programme Note,” in George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, ed. M. Musgrave (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), and “Concert Listening the British Way? Program Notes and Victorian Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. C. Thorau and H. Ziemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 187–206; C. Thorau, “Werk, Wissen und touristisches Hören: Popularisierende Kanonbildung in Programmheften und Konzertführen,” in Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte. Ein Handbuch, ed. K. Pietschmann and M. Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–61 (Munich: Text und Kritik, 2013); A. Lanzendörfer, Name— Nummer—Titel: Ankündigungsformen im Konzertprogramm und bürgerliche Musikrezeption im 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Olms, 2017). On the emergence of notions of the “work” and the attendant ideology of creativity, see L. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay on the Philosophy of Music, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Bashford, “Concert Listening the British Way?,” 194. For an excellent account of the evolution of early twentieth-century concertgoing in the context of these challenges, see H. Ziemer, Die Moderne Hören. Das Konzert als urbanes Forum 1890–1940 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2008). See also A. T. Thelen-Frölich, Die Institution Konzert zwischen 1918 und 1945 am Beispiel der Stadt Düsseldorf. Der Konzertsaal als Politikum (Düsseldorf: Merseburger, 2000); F. Trümpi, The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics During the Third Reich (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016). L. Botstein, “Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience,” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 2 (1992): 129–45. This point is underlined in H. Ziemer, “Der Mengelbergskandal. Kommunikation, Emotion und Konflikt im Konzertsaal vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Kommunikation im

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

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Musikleben. Harmonien und Dissonanzen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. S. O. Müller, J. Osterhammel, and M. Rempe, 139–53 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). On the history of the Laeiszhalle, see Laeiszhalle-Musikhalle Hamburg, ed., 100 Jahre Laeiszhalle—Musikhalle Hamburg. Geschichte, Menschen, Sternstunden (Hamburg: Laeiszhalle-Musikhalle, 2008). The ongoing struggles of concert houses to enforce these norms are documented in K. Ellis, “Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening, ed. Thorau and Ziemer, 37–54. On the “miscellany” tradition and its alleged disappearance over the course of the nineteenth century, see Weber, Great Transformation. D. Larkin, “The First Cycle of Tone Poems,” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. C. Youmans, 59–77 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71. Such a myth has been comprehensively dismantled. See, e.g., F. Bajohr and J. Szodrzynski, eds., Hamburg in der NS-Zeit. Ergebnisse neuer Forschungen (Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1995). P. Fritzsche, Hitler’s First One Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (New York: Basic Books, 2020). Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614/1–26 9t, Philharmonische Gesellschaft in Hamburg an die Mitglieder und Freunde der Philharmonischen Gesellschaft, 13.12.33. See, e.g., “Erstes Konzert des Philharmonischen Staatsorchesters: Eugen Jochums Dienstantritt,” Hamburger Tageblatt, 9 January 1934. The presence of such tensions in the initial period of the regime has been teased out in biographical form in the person of Karl Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg. See F. Bajohr, “Hamburgs ‘Führer’. Zur Person und Tätigkeit des Hamburger NSDAP-Gauleiters Karl Kaufmann (1900–1969),” in Hamburg in der NS-Zeit, ed. Bajohr and Szodrzynski, 59–91, here 77–79. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, 01–4–382, Konzert der Stadt Düsseldorf unter Mitwirkung d. Städtischen Musikvereins zu Düsseldorf e.V. 1933–1934. Stadtarchiv Essen, Sammlung Felden, 615/84, 1936/37. Die Konzertveranstaltungen der Stadt Essen. I draw my understanding of ideology in this context from L. Raphael, “Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. M. Steber and B. Gotto, 73–86 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Konzertverein München e.V., ed., Konzert-Anzeiger Münchener Philharmoniker XVII, no. 1 (1940–41). I have discussed the figure of Wilhelm Zentner at greater length in N. Gregor, “Siegmund von Hausegger, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and Civic Musical Culture in the Third Reich,” German History 36, no. 4 (2018): 544–73. The extent to which musicological writing changed during the National Socialist era has been the subject of much discussion. For key accounts, see F. R. Lovisa, Musikkritik im Nationalsozialismus. Die Rolle deutschsprachiger Musikzeitschriften 1920–1945 (Lilienthal: Laaber-Verlag, 1993); P. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The differing emphases placed on continuity and change in the literature reflect in part the wide diversity of genres of musical writing in the period and make their own case for emphasizing the relative openness of musicological argument even under conditions of dictatorship.

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33. Typical of the older way of constructing the relationship between Weimar- and Nazi-era cultural politics are E. Levi, Music in the Third Reich (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); M.  H. Kater, “The Revenge of the Fathers: The Demise of Modern Music at the End of the Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 15, no. 2 (1992): 295–315. For more subtle and differentiated recent accounts, see N. Attfield, Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); B. Fay, Classical Music in Weimar Germany: Culture and Politics before the Third Reich (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 34. I have argued this at greater length and in greater detail in N. Gregor, “Bruckner, Munich, and the Longue Durée of Musical Listening between the Imperial and Postwar Eras,” in Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor, ed. N. Gregor and T. Irvine, 99–122 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). 35. The emergence of such tropes in the critical language of the period is explored in K. Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 36. See, e.g., the characterization of audiences in Hamburg in the early twentieth century by one contemporary observer offered in G. Schiefler, Eine Hamburgische Kulturgeschichte 1890–1920. Beobachtungen eines Zeitgenossen (Kiel: Wachholtz, 1985), 166–67. 37. The varieties of listener types were categorized most famously by Theodor Adorno in T. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1962). For all that the ascription of a hierarchy of value grates against contemporary sensibilities about the equal legitimacy of multiple ways of listening, the fundamental point about audience diversity and its implications for the sense we make of paraphernalia such as program notes and their texts holds true. 38. C. Tewinkel, Bin ich normal, wenn ich mich im Konzert langweile? Eine musikalische Betriebsanleitung (Cologne: Dumont, 2011), 18–24. 39. I borrow the term from E. A. Papazian, “Literacy or Legibility: The Trace of Subjectivity in Soviet Socialist Realism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. Auerbach and Castronovo, 67–90, though Papazian is concerned to seek that trace in the citizens represented in the text (in her case film) whereas my argument here concerns the producers of the text itself. 40. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, 01–4–382, Städt. Konzerte Düsseldorf. Konzertwinter 1933–34. Donnerstag den 5. Oktober 1933. 1. Konzert. 41. See, e.g., the brochure “Düsseldorf. Die Kunststadt des Westens. Konzerte 1936/37,” in Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, 04–385. 42. For the invocation of Beethoven in Bonn, see, e.g., the flyer “Konzerte der Stadt Bonn im Winter 1937–1938,” in Stadtarchiv Bonn, P42/743; for the invocation of Schopenhauer in Munich, see Konzertverein München e.V., ed., Konzert-Anzeiger Münchener Philharmoniker XVII, no. 5 (1940–41). 43. On the appropriation of Beethoven in the National Socialist era, see D. B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 142–74; on National Socialist appropriations of Western culture more generally, see D. B. Dennis, Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2012). 44. For a more thoroughgoing account in this vein, see U. Weckel, “Plädoyer für Rekonstruktionen der Stimmenvielfalt: Rezeptionsforschung als Kulturgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45, no. 1 (2019): 120–50.

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45. For a compelling recent case study that makes a similar case, see M. Steber, “Katholischer Kulturkonservatismus im Nationalsozialismus. Artur Piechler und die Antinomien der Musikalischen Moderne,” in Was glaubten die Deutschen zwischen 1933 und 1945? Religion und Politik im Nationalsozialismus, ed. O. Blaschke and T. Großbölting, 197–233 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2020).

Selected Bibliography Gregor, N. “Bruckner, Munich, and the Longue Durée of Musical Listening between the Imperial and Postwar Eras.” In Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor, ed. N. Gregor and T. Irvine, 99–122. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. –——. “Die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus und der Cultural-Historical Turn.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 65, no. 2 (2017): 229–41. Painter, K. Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Raphael, L. “Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. M. Steber and B. Gotto, 73–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Trümpi, F. The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. Ziemer, H. Die Moderne Hören. Das Konzert als urbanes Forum 1890–1940. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2008.

8 The “Entartete Kunst” Exhibitions and Their Audiences Bernhard Fulda

The various Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibitions were arguably the most successful and popular propaganda campaign the Third Reich ever orchestrated. A massive media campaign accompanied the Munich art exhibition in 1937, which drew an unprecedented two million visitors, followed by another 1.2 million who attended the subsequent traveling exhibitions.1 Together they were, at least statistically, the most successful art exhibition ever organized in Europe.2 Most importantly, the binary emplotment that the exhibitions espoused was accepted, if in inverted form, after 1945: the Nazis’ “Degenerate Art” became the “Great German Art” of the Federal Republic, and vice versa. Despite this propaganda campaign’s high visibility and long-term impact, there has been surprisingly little research on the effects it had on and responses it generated among contemporary audiences. This chapter hopes to contribute to filling this gap. Three points need emphasizing at the outset, which also explain the complexity of researching audience responses to the “Degenerate Art” campaign. First, it was not just one show but a considerable number of extremely popular exhibitions, in a variety of very different venues and with changing art works on display, which post-1945 narratives have mostly conflated. Second, we cannot analyze audiences and their reactions without looking at the various representations of them, which leaves us with a great range of often contradictory sources. Finally, some of these sources significantly complicate the “persecution” narrative that started to dominate soon after 1945. Essentially, after the end of World War II those contemporaries eager to promote modern art were happy to make use of the recognition value of the “Degenerate Art” propaganda and presented a rather one-dimensional view of art production and consumption in the Third Reich.

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As is well known, Degenerate Art was organized on relatively short notice as the counterpart to the exhibition Great German Art that opened in Munich on 18 July 1937. Joseph Goebbels’s commission to the President of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Adolf Ziegler, to organize the collection and confiscation of suitable art works was dated 30 June.3 The exhibition opened on 19 July and showed some 700 works by about 120 artists. When it closed after four and a half months, on 30 November 1937, it had attracted two million visitors, the greatest number of contemporaries to have come face-to-face with avantgarde art up to that time. The Propaganda Ministry then organized a traveling exhibition, which toured at least another sixteen German cities.4 The initial exhibition in Munich and the subsequent show in Berlin are the best documented of these propaganda exhibitions. Largely based on surviving photographs and lists of confiscated works, it has been possible to reconstruct quite minutely the works on display.5 In contrast, there are very few photos of the exhibitions in Düsseldorf and Salzburg and none from Leipzig and Vienna, to mention just a few of the exhibition’s later stops.6 Still, it has been possible on the basis of the surviving documentation to work out some important differences between these various shows. In Munich, for example, defamation had focused on expressionism, but when the exhibition reopened in Berlin, the New Objectivity movement and the social-critical works of artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz were given more prominence.7 Some artists whose status had been controversial in Munich had their artworks removed from the exhibition completely.8 The notorious exhibition guide was only published in time for the Berlin exhibition and underwent at least two slight revisions over subsequent months.9 From Salzburg on, the exhibition was much smaller and mostly included less prominent artists, since the organizers withdrew all of those art works they thought could be turned into foreign exchange; the famous Luzern auction at Galerie Fischer eventually took place in June 1939. All exhibition activities were curtailed with the beginning of the war, though 1941 saw a short resumption at various venues, primarily in Silesia.10 When the art works were returned to the Propaganda Ministry in 1941, the size of the collection was only one-third of that of the Munich show, and it included less than 10 percent of those art works that had formed the original exhibition.11 In other words, if we are to talk about audiences of the Degenerate Art exhibition, we need to remember that there were significant changes in the medium, if not in the official message. The key characteristic of these various Degenerate Art exhibitions, however, relates to audience numbers: they were immensely popular. The two million visitors in Munich overshadow the half million in Berlin, and the others attracted only between 40,000 and 150,000 visitors.12 Obviously, total visitor numbers are also a function of total exhibition days; so, the pertinent figure is the average number of visitors per exhibition day. But the chart for average daily visitor numbers gives us a very similar picture. Munich with 15,000 visitors per day is in a league of its own; Berlin managed almost 7,000; and the others ranged between 1,000 and 3,500 (figure 8.1). One of the organizers of the Munich show later

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Figure 8.1. Daily visitor numbers at Degenerate Art exhibitions, 1937–39. Created by the author.

published a table of daily attendance figures from the opening until 30 August 1937.13 These figures, which seem accurate and correspond with those communicated to Goebbels at the time,14 record even higher visitor numbers during the holiday season, an average of approximately 24,000 visitors per day. Obviously, the size of the metropolitan area mattered as did the fact that Munich was Germany’s most popular tourist destination at that time.15 Also, the first Degenerate Art spectacle was attractive because the show in Munich, unlike in other cities, was free.16 The chronological and geographical coincidence with other Nazi mass spectacles helped: attendants of the German Sängerbund gathering in Breslau and the Nuremberg party rally used the Munich stop-over for some light-hearted group entertainment.17 Organizers also played to contemporaries’ voyeuristic instincts by banning minors. According to the widow of Karl Ernst Osthaus, her daughter had to wait outside the exhibition “because no access to under-sixteenyear-olds!”18 At the same time, the extension of opening hours to 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week, made attendance easier for the working population.19 The most important driver of audience numbers was undoubtedly the press coverage devoted to the exhibitions. Right from the start, Propaganda Ministry officials emphasized at the daily press briefings that coverage was to be extensive:

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“The entire thing is meant to be turned into a big event that can be covered even on the front page.”20 Not only did the accompanying press campaign provide free publicity. Within a few weeks of the Munich opening, officials instructed newspaper editors to focus on the popularity of the show and to emphasize the steady rise of record visitor numbers.21 Popular participation thus became a newsworthy event in its own right and thereby triggered further audience interest. Some seventy years later, the organizers of the blockbuster MoMA in Berlin exhibition were to turn this media dynamic to their advantage by moving visitor queues into the center of their marketing campaign.22 Press reports of the Degenerate Art show regularly mentioned that access to the exhibition had to be temporarily suspended because of over-crowding.23 This was not just propagandistic hyperbole. Surviving photos of visitors waiting in front of the closed doors of the Munich exhibition correspond with private communications, like one that Emil Nolde received from a friend in mid-August 1937: “At 9 a.m. sharp the exhibition opened, we were there at 9 a.m. sharp and already fifty people were excitedly waiting at the barrier. The crush increased every quarter hour and . . . at 11 a.m. there was almost no chance of escaping from the awful room.”24 The exceptional audience numbers of not just the show in Munich but also the following traveling exhibitions become clear if one takes a broad and diachronic comparative perspective. The biggest and most successful exhibitions organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the 1930s, of van Gogh and Picasso, saw around 2,000 daily visitors.25 Some forty years later, Treasures of Tutankhamun, often referred to as the first blockbuster exhibition, drew just over 7,000 visitors per day.26 The most successful art exhibition in postwar Germany, the Nationalgalerie’s MoMA in Berlin show, had approximately 6,500 daily visitors; its recent blockbuster show, ImEx—Impressionismus—Expressionismus. Kunstwende, had around 2,300.27 It is the average daily attendance numbers, and not just photos of queuing visitors on the rainy streets in Hamburg, that allow us to appreciate that the Degenerate Art exhibitions were really the first of the twentieth century’s so-called block-buster exhibitions (figure 8.2). In fact, there is no evidence to suggest that there has ever been an art exhibition more popular than the Munich propaganda show.28 Yet, popularity is far from a straightforward concept when dealing with a “Mobilisierungsdiktatur” (“mobilization dictatorship”) like the Third Reich.29 It is therefore worth having a closer look at a range of surviving representations of audiences and their reactions. After all, whenever historians try to approach the question of audiences, we rely on someone’s representations or observations of whatever is constructed as an audience, what system theory would describe as a “second-order observation.”30 What kinds of audiences were observed at the time, and by whom? Almost all the data we have on audience numbers, for example, are from contemporary press reports. We know that the Propaganda Ministry instructed editors to emphasize the “continuing mass visits” to the exhibitions, as is evident in the press directive of 5 August 1937.31 Clearly, ministry officials were convinced that attendance at the propaganda show could be read as a kind

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Figure 8.2. Daily visitor numbers—diachronic comparison. Created by the author.

of daily plebiscite in which people were voting with their feet and expressing their support for the framing of avantgarde art offered by the regime. However, such propaganda provoked counterpropaganda. The New York Times gleefully reported that the exhibition of so-called degenerate art was three times as popular as the official “German art” exhibition—a fact organizers were trying to conceal from the public—and that audiences at the former included “many German art students for whom this exhibit is presumably their last opportunity to study modern art.”32 This narrative proved to be very attractive and can be found in numerous post-1945 accounts of the exhibition, according to which the popularity of the show was to some extent the result of people saying goodbye to beloved art, the opposite of the regime’s intentions.33 These accounts did not mention the propagandistic source of this narrative. In fact, most Germans did not see the article in the New York Times but only the refutation published in the German press, for example, an article in the Hamburger Neueste Zeitung commenting on the mass attendance in Munich: “It need not be emphasized that we are certainly not dealing with visitors who are wishing to make use here of the final opportunity to see ‘modern art,’ as malicious foreign papers are trying to make their readers believe.”34 This propagandistic discourse around mass attendance also explains another characteristic of the German media coverage of this media event, namely, its emphasizing that many visitors in Munich were foreigners.35 The subtext was evident: non-Germans’ first-hand experience of the exhibition revealed the foreign press coverage as a lie, for foreigners were as shocked by the exhibits as Germans. Indeed, their presence and their remarks showed their sympathy for the Nazis’ “generous cleansing action . . . which could serve all other countries

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as a model,” as the Deutsche Nachrichtenbüro (DNB) suggested in mid-August 1937.36 After the end of the Munich exhibition, the DNB’s final news report mentioned a Belgian visitor who, it said, had commented in an “Antwerp newspaper” that “One has to be grateful to Hitler.”37 Nazi propagandists observed only those audiences that fit their wider worldview, but the same was true of anti-Nazis, as is evident in a lengthy report from November 1937 for the exiled Social Democratic Party leadership that covered the Munich show and its visitors. High visitor numbers were portrayed as a product of mass mobilization of organizations: “Attendance is incredible. It is noticeable that people did not come on their own initiative. All sections of the Party, schools, DAF, KdF, have called on [members] to attend the exhibition, and there are special tours being organized for those from outside [Munich].”38 The Social Democratic correspondent explained visitors’ reactions largely by reference to their social class: “When I visited the exhibition, the majority of fellow visitors were lower-middle class, of whom one can safely assume that they are not attending art exhibitions regularly. Reactions were therefore naive and devoid of any artistic criticism.”39 Fitting this dismissive view of an uneducated mass audience, the observer thought that the majority of visitors were women.40 Popular outrage was primarily produced by the manipulative posting of how much museums had paid for the pieces, prices which, according to the report, were mostly from the period of high inflation.41 It is instructive to compare this report to the surviving film footage of the Munich exhibition shot by the American cameraman and documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan.42 Much of the approximately five minutes of film is taken up with shots of individual art works and the polemical texts, written on the walls, framing them. But there are also a sufficient number of shots of viewers in different rooms of the exhibition to cast some doubt on the Sopade report, for while there are many women among the mass of visitors, they are far from the majority of the crowd. Whether or not audience members were mostly lower-middle class is difficult to tell; what is noticeable, however, is that most of the men wear jackets and ties and the women have apparently dressed up for the occasion. There is no visible evidence of visitors’ outrage at or overt mockery of the works on display; rather, it is interesting to note how much time individuals seem to be spending in front of individual art works. Also, hardly any of the purchase dates and prices shown in the film are from the period of inflation. This comparison is not meant to dismiss the validity of the Sopade report’s observations. But the interpretation it offered contained many wellknown Social Democratic tropes on which the rapporteur relied when trying to explain the evident popularity of the show, namely, that the majority were lowermiddle class (female) bourgeois contemporaries who could easily be swayed by the confirmation of their preference for, and resentment of anything but, naturalistic representations and by appealing to their instincts as taxpayers. A similar kind of confirmation bias, though one with very different interpretations of the evidence, is apparent in many of the private communications that have survived from the late 1930s, mostly those from admirers of modern art or

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artists themselves. Hannah Höch, for example, visited the Munich exhibition in September 1937 and afterward recorded her impressions in her diary. “After the public rabble-rousing it is surprising how disciplined the audience is behaving. Many faces are closed and one can also read off quite a lot of opposition. Hardly anybody says a word.”43 She was not the only one to comment on the silence of the crowds.44 Like Höch, many beholders of this silent audience projected all kinds of assumptions regarding the impact of the exhibition. Gertrud Stickforth, for example, the widow of the reformist museum founder Karl Ernst Osthaus, wrote an encouraging letter to Emil Nolde in which she reported the impressions of her second husband who had visited the Munich exhibition in late September: “now that the human maelstrom has subsided, there are an infinite number of people in the exhibition who stand totally still and view painting after painting— with eyes that can see the essence!”45 This was just one of many letters Nolde received from friends and strangers who emphasized the extent to which, in their view, the artist’s works overcame the exhibition’s polemical framework. His art dealer, Rudolf Probst, assured Nolde that he knew of many people who, despite the intentions of the exhibition’s organizers and the unfortunate hanging of art works, had gotten something from the exhibition that they would never want to give up again.46 The young teacher Luise Rinser reported that of the hundreds of people who came face-to-face with Nolde’s paintings, hardly anyone uttered a derogatory word: “Many faces are mute and moved and captivated.”47 And there was further good news. In Leipzig, the presentation of art works differed so greatly from that in Munich and Berlin that Ernst Gosebruch—ousted as Director of Essen’s Folkwang Museum in 1933—wrote, full of enthusiasm: “the exhibition ‘Ent. K.’ in the Grassi-Museum is truly wonderful, everything hung with utmost love at eye level, a very big show in impeccable, low-ceiling rooms. Obviously arranged by a museum professional. . . . Now, if only they had hung it like this in Munich and Berlin! You really should go to Leipzig.”48 This art lover also attended the Düsseldorf show, where he thought the art works had been presented “very skillfully, with great effect,” and concluded that the exhibition organizers’ intentions had been counteracted, since “a good number of master works of new German art have toured the country and have won their creators new friends.”49 In fact, this was not just wishful thinking. There were indeed visitors who started taking note of Nolde only because of the traveling Degenerate Art exhibition, like Bernhard Sprengel, the owner of a big chocolate business in Hanover, who became one of Nolde’s most important patrons in subsequent years.50 For some visitors who had a prior affinity for some of the modern art displayed, the experience even took on a quasi-religious dimension. Klara Rhekev, a young museum assistant from Witten who had helped organize a big Nolde exhibition there in 1935, wrote the artist a long letter after her two visits to the Düsseldorf version of the Degenerate Art show: I saw paintings that I had long yearned to get to know. But first there was a lot to overcome in view of the people, the words that came to my ear, in view of the entire occasion.

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Mournful, I walked from one room to the next and could find no peace. But among all the shuffle and turmoil, among all the half-cooked and unsatisfactory and the truly awful and bad, your paintings hung like shining suns and vanquished my distress and my heart burned. Oh, why did nobody come and call to the many: “Come and see, and let yourselves be seized and rocked and shaken and feel the violent wind of the Holy Ghost! Even if you have to lie sleeplessly on your bed at night! Drink from this strong spring, and let go of the sugar water, which does not even have real sweetness!” Hour upon hour I stood with burning heart and often I felt like spreading my arms because my eyes, my senses were unable to embrace the richness. And the pictures hung so beautifully that it was possible to believe that a loving hand was silently taking care of them.51

Telling the artist of this experience, Rhekev explained, felt “like a duty, like a debt that is owed. Because even if you and your oeuvre stand sky-high above all opinions and praise of people, still every human who has been seized by your art and is ravished by the greatness and glory of your world should let their thanks reach you.”52 Like Rhekev, many other admirers of modern art felt the urge to express their solidarity with the artists. The “painful echo” that the exhibition had triggered “will only deepen true relationships,” a Swiss friend wrote to Nolde. “Per aspera ad astra: by way of adversity toward the stars, that is the path for all of us.”53 Julius Vogel, a professor at the City School for Arts and Crafts in Kiel, informed Nolde that he was composing a letter to the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Adolf Ziegler, to protest against the inclusion in the show of his “three great fellow-countrymen, Nolde, Barlach, Rohlfs.”54 The most prominent of Nolde’s supporters was Eberhard Hanfstaengl, the director of Berlin’s National Gallery. In a letter in early August 1937, in which he congratulated Nolde on his seventieth birthday, he referred to the oil painting Ripe Sunflowers, which he had acquired for the Berlin Museum in 1935 and which he had just encountered in the Munich exhibition: “Behind your sunflowers, which carry their crowns sadly but as proudly as ever in Munich, a dark sky has arisen. They have been locked up with rabble and riffraff in order to make them wilt. [But] [a]s long as they exist, they will be flowering, whatever the surroundings and regardless of whose eyes are beholding them. That should be our consolation.”55 Hanfstaengl’s “rabble and riffraff” (“Gesindel und Lumpenpack”) surrounding Nolde’s artworks in Munich did not refer to the audience but to other artworks on display, those that Rhekev in her letter had described as “the half-cooked and unsatisfactory and the truly awful and bad.” Interestingly, many of the letters of solidarity Nolde received contained evidence that, in terms of agenda-setting, the exhibition’s National Socialist organizers actually did manage to carry the day. Many admirers of modern art were ready to admit that the exhibition did not just contain many inferior artworks but that the label ‘degenerate’ made sense. Rinser reported that Nolde’s were not the only great works; there were “also other very beautiful paintings (but also some truly ‘degenerate’!).”56 Likewise, Gosebruch, who raved to Nolde about the beautiful arrangement of the works in Leipzig, felt compelled to acknowledge the presence of many poor works: “The repulsive

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naturally remained so here.”57 Nolde thought this was good, as he confided to a friend: “Only the repulsive has its effect there [Leipzig] too. This is strange and pleasant. It is very desirable that a separation of the good from the bad should happen.”58 A few months later, he repeated this view in a letter to Otto Dietrich, Press Chief of the Reich Government, through whom he hoped to bring about his rehabilitation in the German press: “That my paintings have been brought together for the degenerate exhibition in Munich and that they were thrown together with those often frivolous and unacceptable works has appalled many an art friend within and outside the Party.”59 Thanks to the interventions of numerous influential friends, Nolde managed to have his artworks removed from the traveling exhibition and the accompanying exhibition brochure; his name was no longer to be mentioned in connection to the Degenerate Art exhibition, his wife proudly announced to friends in spring 1939.60 For some art lovers, the removal of Nolde’s works from the traveling exhibition made a huge difference. “It is hardly worth going,” complained the widow of Max Sauerlandt after visiting the show in Hamburg. “It is hung awfully like in Berlin (and Düsseldorf ), but it is almost worse because mediocre and bad works dominate as for example in the many hideous and uncomely works on paper by Georg Groß [sic] and Dix.—It makes one sad to see all this.”61 Nolde was also willing to use the label ‘degenerate’ even after he was evicted from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in 1941. Five years after the opening of the show in Munich, he jotted down some reflections on the composition of the exhibition inferred from the reports he had received over the years: “The exhibitions of so-called ‘Degenerate Art’ held in Germany in 1937, with recent paintings and sculptures from all German museums, contained in my opinion: one-third truly degenerate art; one-third indifferent, not good and not bad art; one-third good and in some cases particularly good art.”62 What are we to make of all this? Clearly, the curious crowds at the Degenerate Art exhibitions and their reactions to the art works displayed were difficult to read and, thus, left room for all kinds of interpretations. In all likelihood, all of the various contemporary observations of exhibition visitors contained a kernel of truth because of the coexistence of a whole variety of audience reactions. The shocked and scandalized viewer probably stood next to a silent admirer, and even the latter most likely considered some of the art on display “truly degenerate,” as Nolde put it. This multifaceted configuration allowed a whole range of strategic interpretations and generalizations about the art on display and about “the public’s” reactions to this propaganda show. This is also true of later historians trying to “read” these propaganda shows and speculate about their wider public impact. Even the observation above—that many contemporaries were ready to accept the cultural “lexicon” of National Socialist art discourse and consider the art on display through the lens of the “degenerate”—does not allow easy generalizations about the short-term impact of these exhibitions. Thanks to Peter Fritzsche, we know of one exhibition visitor who did not communicate his observations to a wider public or a specific correspondence partner but simply entrusted his reactions to his diary. Franz Göll, an “ordinary,” lower-middle-class

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German who visited the Berlin show in March 1938, was fully conscious of the show’s propagandistic function: “To arouse the regime’s abhorrence of the premises [of modern art] in the broad masses and to justify, substantiate, and strengthen the required opposition,” he recorded in his diary.63 Otto Dix’s triptych Der Krieg, painted in 1929–32, made a lasting impression on him. It was a “horror-inducing” picture, he recorded after his visit; but the “repulsion” he felt was not “because of the representation” but the subject matter, “war with its ruination and destruction of property, blood and soul.” His concluding statement proves it was possible for ordinary visitors to leave the exhibition with the opposite impression of what propagandists had hoped to achieve: “The picture is not a bloody-minded depiction of the degenerate, war is.”64 It was not just on visitors that the propaganda exhibitions could have an unintended impact. Even for the modernist artist whose work was included, the short-term impact of the exhibitions was far from clear-cut. For Nolde, 1937 turned out to be his most successful year in terms of art sales up to that point with an income of over 77,000 RM; the 1938 set-back (with sales amounting to 37,024 RM) was only temporary; and by 1940, Nolde achieved his career record of nearly 80,000 RM.65 It was the extraordinary height of his income that eventually sealed his fate. Once it had been brought to the attention of Reinhard Heydrich, his eviction from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in 1941—and the imposition of a professional ban—was a mere formality.66 Even if Nolde was an exceptional case, he was certainly not the only modernist to see his income increase after 1937. After the war, Karl Hofer (wrongly) claimed that he too had faced a professional ban, but, thanks to the courageous action of art dealers, his work continued to be sold in secrecy, and, ironically, he “never sold as much as during this period.”67 Indeed, in the early 1950s, when undertaking an enquiry into Hofer’s position during the Third Reich, the US Department of Justice stumbled upon a letter from the Berlin-Schöneberg tax office from July 1944 that put Hofer’s income for 1942 at 25,190 RM—roughly ten times the average income in Germany at that time.68 This struck US authorities as incongruent with Hofer’s account of having suffered from official persecution. In fact, the position of “degenerate” artists like Hofer was unclear even to functionaries of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts at the time. When Hofer’s Berlin home and studio were destroyed in an air raid in 1943, officials had to decide whether he was entitled to compensation, and the final recommendation revealed the paradox of Nazi art politics. All of Hofer’s early works that had been destroyed were considered degenerate and “would therefore hardly qualify for a compensation claim,” but “in view that these included some works (landscapes) which could be considered worthy of confiscation, and that it is possible to assume that his works are still in demand abroad,” the Reich Chamber concluded that Hofer was entitled to compensation of 120,000 RM.69 Like Hofer, the overwhelming majority of “degenerate” artists remained members of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts until the end of the war and were allowed to continue to work. As recent studies have demonstrated, most artistic production and reception during the

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Nazi dictatorship did not conform to the binary emplotment that the Degenerate Art exhibition employed.70 Yet, if we look at postwar accounts of art politics and artistic production in the Third Reich, we can see how contemporaries were operating within the narrative and visual parameters set by Degenerate Art’s propaganda campaign. Paul Ortwin Rave’s hugely influential Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich of 1949 provided a firsthand account of museum politics with the “Entartete Kunst” campaign as the narrative’s end, the final triumph of banality over modernism.71 Uwe M. Schneede observed that for many museum officials at the time Rave’s reconstruction was a kind of “substitute memorial work; colleagues could breathe freely again—they were acquitted.”72 Thanks to the Nazis’ success in popularizing the concept of “degenerate art,” modernist artists, collectors, and curators could all buy into the overly simplistic persecution narrative, which killed two birds with one stone: it helped them to distance themselves from the Nazi dictatorship, and it helped their rhetorical efforts to win over the largely skeptical wider public to the cause of modernist art. Media dynamics continued to play a role. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Munich exhibition in 1962 occasioned a counter-exhibition (Entartete Kunst. Bilderstum vor 25 Jahren) in the same place in Munich where in July 1937 the Great German Art exhibition had opened: the Haus der deutschen Kunst, which was renamed the Haus der Kunst.73 In his speech at the opening of this exhibition, Carl Georg Heise located the Nazi campaign within the context of a “situation . . . which continues to survive in sufficiently threatening form even in our days: the misjudgment of contemporary art at the time of its genesis.”74 At the same time, Heise was eager to defend the artistic quality of the works displayed in the propaganda show and therefore claimed that for some of its younger visitors, the Degenerate Art exhibition had been an important caesura in their education: “there a part of German youth gained their first substantially positive impression of the then modern art; the exhibition—intended to be repulsive—had opened their eyes for those artistic values which were consistent with their own revolutionary worldview.”75 Once again, audiences were represented to suit a particular rhetorical purpose, in this case the “auratization” of the artworks displayed in both the late 1930s and 1962. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Degenerate Art exhibition also occasioned the publication of three important early studies of Nazi art politics by Franz Roh, Hildegard Brenner, and Joseph Wulf.76 While these added significantly to historians’ understanding of the heated debates about the nature of “German art” in the early years of the regime, especially the debate over whether or not expressionism was a “Nordic revolutionary art,” it is only a slight exaggeration to say that they presented the Degenerate Art campaign as a kind of “Final Solution” to the early 1930s so-called Expressionismusstreit. This persecution narrative was still accepted on the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich Degenerate Art exhibition in 1987. The volumes edited by Peter-Klaus Schuster and Stephanie Barron in particular provided important empirical insights into the exhibition and its origins, but they were part of art exhibitions

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that celebrated the artistic qualities of the works and were therefore silent about the artists’ politics and their willingness to put their works at the service of the regime. This discourse started to change only in the mid-1990s. Peter-Klaus Schuster rightly observed that the persecution experienced during the Nazi dictatorship “saved” German modernists “from the disgrace and the almost irredeemable stigma of making common cause with the National Socialists.” Being without “blame,” it was possible to consider them part of the resistance against Hitler, and they could thus acquire after 1945 their exemplary role in the cultural reconstruction of West Germany: “Nothing illustrated more vividly that Hitler had been overcome than the recourse to the art that he had hated so much.”77 But such reflections about the lasting influence of Nazi propaganda on postwar ideas about artists and art production as well as art circulation and reception in the Third Reich are still the exception rather than the norm. Instead, representations of audiences at one of the various Degenerate Art exhibitions continue to be used as documentary evidence of the essence of Nazi art politics and as a foil against which the art of Klassische Moderne (classical modernity) can shine brightly. Of the many campaigns of the National Socialist mobilization dictatorship that rallied thousands of contemporaries, very few continue to enjoy such a vibrant afterlife. Bernhard Fulda is the Chatong So Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University. He has published widely on media, political, and cultural history of the early twentieth century. He cocurated the exhibition Emil Nolde: Eine deutsche Legende. Der Künstler im Nationalsozialismus in Berlin’s National Gallery in 2019, and coauthored its prize-winning catalogue (Emil Nolde: The Artist During the Third Reich, Prestel: 2019). He is currently completing a biography of Emil Nolde.

Notes 1. Still the most comprehensive analysis is C. Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst.” Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), 204, 235. See also P.-K. Schuster, ed., Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst.” Die ‘Kunststadt’ München 1937, 5th ed. (Munich: Prestel, 1998); S. Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991); U. Fleckner, ed., Angriff auf die Avantgarde. Kunst und Kunstpolitik im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Akademieverlag, 2007); O. Peters, ed., Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937 (Munich: Prestel, 2014). 2. This point was already made by A. Hentzen in Die Berliner National-Galerie im Bildersturm (Cologne: Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1971), 33, and it is still true today. 3. Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 177. 4. After Munich, the show opened in five cities in 1938 (Berlin, 26 February–8 May; Leipzig, 13 May–6 June; Düsseldorf, 18 June–7 August; Salzburg, 4 September–2 Octo-

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

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14.

15.

16. 17.

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ber; Hamburg, 11 November–30 December) and another five in 1939 (Stettin, 11 January–5 February; Weimar, 23 March–24 April; Vienna, 6 May–18 June; Frankfurt/M., 30 June–30 July; Chemnitz, 11–26 August). In 1941, it opened in Waldenburg (18 June– 2 February), Görlitz (25 January– 8 February), Liegnitz (15 February– 2 March), Oppeln (22 February– 9 March), Beuthen (1–16 March) and Halle (5–20 April). For the most recent overview, see C. Zuschlag, “Von ‘Schreckenskammern,’ ‘Horrorkabinetten’ und ‘Schandausstellungen.’ Die NS-Kampagne gegen ‘Entartete Kunst,’” in Moderne am Pranger. Die NS-Aktion “Entartete Kunst” vor 75 Jahren. Werke aus der Sammlung Gerhard Schneider, ed. C. Ladleif and G. Schneider, 21–31 (Aschaffenburg: Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche, 2012). Cf. M.-A. von Lüttichau, “Rekonstruktion der Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst,’” in Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst,” ed. Schuster, 120–82; K. Engelhardt, “Die Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ in Berlin 1938. Rekonstruktion und Analyse,” in Angriff auf die Avantgarde, ed. Fleckner, 89–187. For Leipzig and Vienna, see Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 249, 282. Ibid., 26. Works by Franz Marc, Lovis Corinth, and Wilhelm Lehmbruck were among those taken out of the show for the Berlin exhibition; see Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 240. For Emil Nolde’s success in convincing authorities in spring 1939 to remove his artworks from the exhibition, see A. Soika, “The Long Dispute over Expressionism around Nolde,” in Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich, ed. B. Fulda, 39–64 (Munich: Prestel, 2019), 60–62. Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 235–36. Zuschlag, “Von ‘Schreckenskammern,’ ‘Horrorkabinetten’ und ‘Schandausstellungen,’” 26–28. Ibid., 29. Zuschlag gives the following numbers: Munich: 2,009,899; Berlin: 500,000; Leipzig: 60,000; Düsseldorf: 150,000; Salzburg: 40,000; Hamburg: 136,000; Stettin: 82,000; Weimar: 50,000; Vienna: 147,000; Frankfurt/M.: 40.000 in first twenty-two days (i.e., approximately 56,000 over thirty-one days). Cf. Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 204, 247, 250, 256, 261, 273, 276, 280, 283, 287. W. Hansen, Judenkunst in Deutschland (Berlin: Nordland Verlag, 1942), 197. Available online at https://germanpropaganda.org/judenkunst-in-deutschland-walter-hansen-nord land-verlag1942/, accessed 1 July 2019. See Goebbels’s notes on attendance figures in his diary entries for 20 August and 1 September 1937 in E. Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, vol. 1: Aufzeichnungen 1924–1941 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1987), 241, 251. The Bavarian Statistical State Office registered 750,000 visitors for 1937 (of whom 162,731 were foreigners). See K.-H. Meißner, “‘München ist ein heißer Boden. Aber wir gewinnen ihn allmählich doch.’ Münchner Akademien, Galerien und Museen im Ausstellungsjahr 1937,” in Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst,” ed. Schuster, 37–55, here 53. Cf. Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 245n36. Cf. Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 1090, 12 August 1937: “Eine halbe Million in der Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst.’” The reviewer for the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten noted on 20 August 1937: “Many come to have a laugh.” Quoted in Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 203. Letter from Gertrud Stickforth to Emil and Ada Nolde, 1 October 1937, Archiv der Stiftung Seebüll Ada und Emil Nolde (ANS). Cf. Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 250, and

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21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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Paul Ortwin Rave’s report on his visit of the Munich exhibition in P. O. Rave, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, ed. U. M. Schneede (1949; reprint, Berlin: Argon, 1987), 146. These opening hours applied to all exhibitions from Berlin onward. See Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 246. Press directive 1773, 19 July 1937, in H. Bohrmann and G. Toepser-Ziegert, eds., NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit: Edition und Dokumentation, vol. 5: 1937. 2. Quellentexte Mai bis August (Munich: Saur, 1998), 590. Cf. O. Thomae, Die PropagandaMaschinerie. Bildende Kunst und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1978), 339–42. Thomae, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie, 340–41. Cf. S. Lüddemann, Blockbuster. Besichtigung eines Ausstellungsformats (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 36–37. For Munich, see W. P. Heyd, Gottfried Graf und die “entartete Kunst” (Stuttgart: Staatliche Akademie der Künste, 1987), 76; for Düsseldorf, see Der Mittag, 19 July 1938 (quoted in J. Wulf, Die Bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation [1963; reprint, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966], 365); for Hamburg, see Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst,” 273. Letter from Hans Fehr to Emil Nolde, 20 August 1937, ANS: “Punkt 9 ging die Ausstellung auf, Punkt 9 Uhr waren wir da und schon standen 50 Leute mit heißen Köpfen an der Sperre. Der Andrang nahm alle Viertelstunde zu und . . . um 11 Uhr fand man kaum eine Möglichkeit dem furchtbaren Raum zu entrinnen.” MoMA’s Vincent van Gogh exhibition ran from 4 November 1935 to 5 January 1936 and drew 123,339 visitors. See MoMA press release 92136–20, https://www.moma.org/ documents/moma_press-release_333034.pdf, accessed 7 June 2019. Its legendary Picasso exhibition in 1939, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, drew a total of 100,670 visitors (i.e., 1,864 per day for the 54 days it was open). See MoMA press release 401111–3 (early 1940), https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325141.pdf, accessed 7 June 2019. For visitor numbers and dates at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, see https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/1976/tutankhamun_treasures.html, accessed 7 June 2019. Cf. R. E. Spear, “Art History and the ‘Blockbuster Exhibition,’” The Art Bulletin 68, no. 3 (1986): 358–59; Smithsonian Institution, Office of Policy & Analysis, Audience Building: Marketing Art Museums (2001): 19, available online at https://soar.si.edu/sites/ default/files/reports/01.10.marketingart.final.pdf, accessed 7 June 2019. Das MoMA in Berlin drew 1,200,000 visitors during its run in Berlin’s Nationalgalerie from 20 February to 19 September 2004. See K. von Chlebowski and A. Odier, eds., Erinnerungen. Das MoMa in Berlin (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 142–43. The Alte Nationalgalerie’s show ImEx. Kunstwende ran for seventeen weeks (from 22 May to 20 September 2015) and drew 245,694 visitors. See https://www.smb.museum/nach richten/detail/rund-eine-viertelmillion-besucher-imex-schliesst-mit-rekordergebnis.html, accessed 7 June 2019. Only Edward Steichen’s 1955 photography exhibition, The Family of Man, in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which toured the world for almost a decade and drew over nine million visitors, dwarfs the Degenerate Art exhibition in total numbers (though not on a per-day basis). Cf. G. Hurm, A. Reitz, and S. Zamir, eds., The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). Mass attendance at public events was one of the propagandistic hallmarks of the Nazi dictatorship and included a range of different types of mobilization processes: voluntary, organized, and compulsory. For the concept of “mobilization dictatorship,” see J. Möckl,

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32. 33.

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35. 36.

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“Review of Mobilisierung im Nationalsozialismus,” H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews (May 2010), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30435, last accessed 1 March 2023; M. Wildt, Die Ambivalenz des Volkes. Der Nationalsozialismus als Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019). Cf. C. Reinecke and M. Zierenberg, “Vermessungen der Mediengesellschaft im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Einleitung,” Comparativ 4 (2011): 7–12. The instruction was given out at press briefings on 5 August 1937. See Bohrmann and Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen, 631: “Die DNB-Meldung über den Rekordbesuch der Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ soll gut herausgebracht werden. Wahrscheinlich kommen nunmehr jeweils Donnerstag früh ähnliche Meldungen über den fortdauernden Massenbesuch.” New York Times, 6 August 1937, 15. Cf. New York Times, 1 September 1937, 5. The first published reference to this phenomenon, which admitted that it was probably the case for only a small minority, can be found in Rave, Kunstdiktatur, 105. For an example of a naive adoption of this trope, see H. Möller, Malerinnen und Musen des “Blauen Reiters” (Munich: Piper, 2009), 106–7. Ulrich Wilmes, curator of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, told a journalist in 2017 that some visitors had certainly gone to the show “in order to see all these works one final time.” Quoted in Nadine Wojcik, “NaziAusstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’: Als moderne Kunst nur im Museum hing, um bespuckt zu werden,” Deutsche Welle, 19 July 2017, https://p.dw.com/p/2gXyp, last accessed 7 June 2019. Hamburger Neueste Zeitung, 13 August 1937, 2: “Schon eine halbe Million!”: “Daß es sich dabei keineswegs, wie böswillige ausländische Blätter ihren Lesern weismachen möchten, um Besucher handelt, die hier zum letzten Male die Möglichkeit ausnutzen wollen, ‘moderne Kunst’ zu sehen, braucht wohl nicht erst betont zu werden.” E.g., Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 12 August 1937, 1090: “Eine halbe Million in der Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’”; Hamburger Neueste Zeitung, 27 August 1937, 2. Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 12 August 1937, 1090: “Eine halbe Million in der Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’”: “von denen man immer wieder Aeußerungen der Anerkennung darüber hören kann, daß Deutschland auf dem Gebiete der Kunst eine großzügige Säuberungsaktion durch geführt hat, die allen anderen Ländern als Beispiel dienen könne.” Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 1 December 1937, 1634: “Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ geschlossen.” Reports of an eyewitness to the Party Executive of the Social Democratic Party in Prague, in K. Behnken, ed., Deutschlandberichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, vol. 4: 1937 (Frankfurt/M.: Petra Nettelbeck, 1989), 1534: “Der Besuch ist ungeheuer. Man merkt es den Leuten an, dass sie nicht aus eigener Initiative hergekommen sind. Alle Gliederungen der Partei, Schulen, DAF, KdF, haben zum Besuch dieser Ausstellung aufgerufen und von auswärts sind eigene Sonderfahrten nach München organisiert worden.” Ibid.: “Als ich in der Ausstellung war, stammte die Mehrzahl der Mitanwesenden aus dem kleineren Mittelstand, von denen man mit Sicherheit annehmen kann, dass sie nicht allzu viele Kunstausstellungen besuchen. Die Reaktion war dementsprechend naiv und ohne jegliche künstlerische Kritik.” Ibid.: “Die Mehrzahl der Besucher besteht aus Frauen.” Ibid., 1535: “Über die hohen Summen (Inflationszahlen), die von den Vergangenen für solche Bilder bezahlt wurden, regt man sich am meisten auf.” In fact, the vast majority of purchase prices, which were posted next to many of the art works on display, were

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46. 47.

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50. 51.

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accurate and not from the period of inflation. Cf. M.-A. Lüttichau, “‘Entartete Kunst,’ Munich 1937: A Reconstruction,” in “Degenerate Art,” ed. Barron, 45–81. Bryan shot several hours of film in Germany in summer 1937. He then sold it to the American newsreel The March of Time, which used it for its issue Inside Nazi Germany, 1938, though none of the “Degenerate Art” footage appeared in the issue. Cf. K. Stamm, “‘Degenerate Art’ on the Screen,” in Degenerate Art, ed. Peters, 196–205, here 200–201. The original footage can be watched on the webpage of Agentur Karl Höffkes Film+Foto-Archiv, http://www.archiv-akh.de/filme?utf-8= percentE2 percent9 C percent93&q=bryan#1, last accessed 15 July 2019. Diary entry for 11 September 1937, quoted in Künstlerarchiv der Berlinischen Galerie, Ralf Burmeister, eds., Hannah Höch, eine Lebenscollage, vol. 2 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1995), 309: “Nach der öffentlichen Hetze ist es erstaunlich, wie sich das Publikum diszipliniert benimmt. Viele Gesichter sind verschlossen, und auch ziemlich viel Opposition ist abzulesen. Gesagt wird kaum ein Wort.” Paul Ortwin Rave noted in his report on his visit on 22 and 23 July 1937 that the “dense crowds remained persistently silent.” See Rave, Kunstdiktatur, 146. Fifty years later, Peter Guenther recalled a similar phenomenon in his recollection of his second visit to the exhibition in Munich. See P. Guenther, “Three days in Munich: July 1937,” in “Degenerate Art,” ed. Barron, 33–43. Letter from Gertrud Stickforth to Ada and Emil Nolde, 1 October 1937, ANS: “es stehen in der Ausstellung, jetzt nachdem sich der Mannstrom [sic] gelegt hat, unendlich viel Leute ganz still und sehen Bild um Bild an—mit Blicken, die in das Wesen schauen!” Also quoted in A. Soika, “Emil Nolde und die Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst,’” in Emil Nolde in seiner Zeit. Im Nationalsozialismus, ed. C. Ring, 30–53 (Munich: Prestel, 2019), 38. Letter from Rudolf Probst to Emil Nolde, 14 October 1937, private archive. Letter from Luise Rinser to Emil Nolde, 22 August 1937, ANS: “Von all den Hunderten von Menschen, die Ihre Bilder sehen, hört man kaum ein abfälliges Wort. Viele Gesichter sind stumm und bewegt und ergriffen.” Letter from Ernst Gosebruch to Emil Nolde, 24 May 1938, transcript, ANS.: “die Ausstellung ‘Ent. K.’ im Grassimuseum ist ganz wundervoll, mit der größten Liebe Alles in Augenhöhe gehängt, eine sehr große Schau in tadellosen, ganz niedrigen Räumen. Offenbar hat ein Museumsmann gehängt. . . . Ja, wenn man so in München und Berlin gehängt hätte! Sie sollten wirklich mal nach Leipzig fahren!” Letter from Ernst Gosebruch to Ada Nolde, 5 November 1938, transcript, ANS: “In dieser Ausstellung, die nicht nur in Leipzig, sondern, wie ich hörte, auch in Düsseldorf sehr geschickt, wirkungsvoll aufgemacht war, ist doch manches Meisterwerk der neuen deutschen Kunst durch die Lande gezogen, das ihren Schöpfern sicherlich noch neue Freunde gewonnen hat.” Cf. Sprengel Museum, ed., Emil Nolde und die Sammlung Sprengel 1937 bis 1956. Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 1999). Letter from Klara Rhekev to Emil Nolde, 12 January 1939, ANS: “Bilder sah ich, die kennen zu lernen ich mich lange gesehnt hatte. Aber viel war erst zu überwinden angesichts der Menschen, der Worte, die an mein Ohr drangen, angesichts des Anlasses überhaupt. Traurig ging ich von einem Raum zum andern und konnte nicht zur Ruhe kommen. Aber in all dem Wust und Trubel, unter all dem Halben und Unzulänglichen und auch dem wirklich Furchtbaren und Schlechten hingen Ihre Bilder wie strahlende Sonnen und besiegten meine Not und mein Herz brannte. Ach, warum kam kein Mensch und rief den

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53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

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Vielen zu: ‘Kommt und sehet, und laßt Euch packen und rütteln und schütteln und spürt das Brausen des Heiligen Geistes! Und wenn Ihr auch nachts schlaflos auf Eurem Lager liegen müsst! Trinkt aus diesem starken Quell und lasst das Zuckerwasser, das nicht einmal echte Süsse hat!’ Stunden und Stunden habe ich mit brennendem Herzen gestanden und oft war mir, als müsste ich die Hände ausbreiten, weil meine Augen, meine Sinne den Reichtum nicht zu fassen vermochten. Und die Bilder hingen so schön, daß man glauben konnte, eine liebende Hand hätte sich still um sie bemüht.” Ibid.: “es hat mich oft bedrängt, wie eine zu erfüllende Pflicht, wie eine abzutragende Schuld. Denn wenn Sie und Ihr Werk auch himmelhoch über allen Meinungen und allem Lob der Menschen stehen, so sollte doch jeder Mensch, der von Ihrer Kunst gepackt und hingerissen wurde in die Grösse und Herrlichkeit Ihrer Welt, seinen Dank zu Ihnen gelangen lassen.” Letter from Eugen Hallauer to Emil and Ada Nolde, 6 August 1937, ANS: “dass der schmerzliche Widerhall, den [illegibile] Dinge ausgelöst haben, echte Beziehung nur vertiefen kann. Per aspera ad astra: durch Ungemach zu den Sternen, das ist unser aller Weg.” Letter from Julius Vogel to Emil Nolde, 10 September 1937, ANS: “für meine drei großen Landsleute Barlach, Nolde, Rohlfs.” Letter from Eberhard Hanfstaengl to Emil Nolde, 6 August 1937, ANS: “Hinter Ihren Sonnenblumen, die in München traurig und doch stolz wie je ihre Kronen tragen, ist ein dunkler Himmel aufgezogen—von dem schönen Blau sieht man nichts mehr vor Wehmut und Bitterkeit. Mit Gesindel und Lumpenpack hat man sie zusammengesperrt, um sie zum Welken zu bringen. Solange sie da sind, werden sie blühen, wie immer die Umgebung ist, und welche Augen immer sie anschauen. Damit wollen wir uns trösten.” Letter from Luise Rinser to Emil Nolde, 22 August 1937, ANS: “Es hängen auch sonst sehr schöne Bilder dort (allerdings auch manches wirklich ‘Entartete’!).” Letter from Ernst Gosebruch to Emil Nolde, 24 May 1938, transcript, ANS: “Das Abschreckende wirkt natürlich auch hier als solches.” Letter from Emil Nolde to Hans Fehr, 27 May 1938, ANS: “Nur das Abscheuliche wirkt auch dort [Leipzig] als solches. Merkwürdig u. erfreulich ist dies. Es ist sehr wünschenswert daß eine Teilung vom Guten u. Schlechten kommen möge.” Letter from Emil Nolde to Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich, 6 December 1938, copy (draft) to Hans Fehr, ANS. Reprinted in B. Fulda and A. Soika, eds., Emil Nolde—eine deutsche Legende. Der Künstler im Nationalsozialismus. Chronik und Dokumente (Munich: Prestel, 2019), document 48, 137–39: “Dass meine Bilder zu der entarteten Ausstellung in München herangeholt wurden und damit zu den vielfach leichtfertigen und indiskutablen Arbeiten geworfen wurden, ist manchem in- und ausserhalb der Partei stehenden Kunstfreund entsetzlich gewesen.” Cf. Soika, “Long Dispute Over Expressionism,” 60–62. Letter from Alice Sauerlandt to Emil and Ada Nolde, 25 November 1938, ANS: “Es ist so schrecklich gehängt wie in Berlin (und Düsseldorf ), aber es ist fast noch schlimmer, weil das mittelmäßige und schlechte überwiegt z.B. in vielen häßlichen und unschönen Blättern von Georg Groß und Dix.—Es macht einen traurig, das alles zu sehen.” Emil Nolde, “Worte am Rande,” 9 December 1942, ANS. Quoted in Fulda and Soika, Nolde, 194: “Die 1937 in Deutschland veranstalteten Ausstellungen von sogenannter ‘Entarteter Kunst,’ mit Bildern und Plastiken neueren Datums aus allen deutschen Museen, enthielten nach meiner Meinung: ein Drittel wirklich entartete Kunst[;] ein Drittel indifferente, nicht gute und nicht schlechte Kunst[;] ein Drittel gute und zum Teil besonders gute Kunst.”

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63. Franz Göll, diary entry for 12 March 1938, quoted in P. Fritzsche, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 162. 64. Ibid., 163. 65. Cf. Fulda, Nolde, 140, Fig. 03. 66. Ibid., 141–46. 67. K. Hofer, Erinnerungen eines Malers (Berlin: F. A. Herbig, 1953), 222: “Ich habe nie soviel verkauft als zu jener Zeit.” While it is true that Hofer had been evicted from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in October 1938, he failed to mention after the war that he had appealed against this, and that it had been Goebbels himself who had decided to readmit him in February 1939. Cf. B. Fulda, “Emil Noldes Berufsverbot. Eine Spurensuche,” in Die Kammer schreibt schon wieder. Das Reglement für den Handel mit moderner Kunst im Nationalsozialismus, ed. A. Tiedemann, 127–45 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 138–39. 68. The letter and figure are mentioned in Paul Ortwin Rave, Erklärung (Gutachten zu Karl Hofer), 10 September 1951, in Nachlass Paul Ortwin Rave, Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, SMB-ZA, IV/NL Rave, 99. 69. This sum was to be paid in three instalments: 50,000 RM on the occasion of the reconstruction of the studio; 20,000 RM after the end of the war; and the final 50,000 RM only after another confirmation from the Reich Chamber, which would depend on Hofer’s “successful participation in an exhibition.” See the letter from Reichskammer der bildenden Künste to District Mayor of Berlin-Schöneberg, 26 July 1944, in Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep. 243–04, Nr. 3581. There is no evidence that Hofer ever received any of this money: “In Anbetracht, daß auch Arbeiten (Landschaften) darunter sind, die als beschlagnahmereif erachtet werden können und daß die Möglichkeit angenommen werden kann, daß seine Werke auch heute noch im Ausland gefragt sind.” 70. For a nuanced account of the various Brücke artists during the Third Reich, see A. Soika and M. Hoffmann, Escape into Art? The Brücke Painters in the Nazi Period (Munich: Hirmer, 2019). 71. Rave, Kunstdiktatur. 72. Rave, Kunstdiktatur, 149: “hat stellvertretende Erinnerungsarbeit geleistet; die Kollegen atmen auf—sie sind entlastet.” 73. Cf. J. Claus/Haus der Kunst, ed., Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1962). 74. Carl George Heise, manuscript of speech at the opening of the exhibition Bildersturm, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 24 October 1962, in Nachlass Paul Ortwin Rave, SMB–ZA, IV/NL Rave, 99: “Situation . . . die auch heute noch bedrohlich genug weiterlebt: die Verkennung der Gegenwartskunst zur Zeit ihrer Entstehung.” 75. Ibid.: “da hat ein Teil der deutschen Jugend dort auch seine ersten nachhaltig-positiven Eindrücke von der damals modernen deutschen Kunst gewonnen; die als Abschreckung gedachte Ausstellung hat ihnen die Augen geöffnet für die künstlerischen Werte, die im Einklang standen mit ihrem eigenen revolutionären Weltverhalten.” 76. F. Roh, Entartete Kunst. Kunstbarbarei im Dritten Reich (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1962); H. Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1963); Wulf, Die Bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich. 77. P.-K. Schuster, “Die doppelte ‘Rettung’ der modernen Kunst durch die Nationalsozialisten,” in Überbrückt. Ästhetische Moderne und Nationalsozialismus 1925–1937, ed. E. Blume and D. Scholz, 40–47 (Cologne: König, 1999), 45. For the GDR’s ambivalent relationship with formerly “degnerate” art, see M. Steinkamp, Das unerwünschte Erbe. Die

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Rezeption “entarteter” Kunst in Kunstkritik, Ausstellungen und Museen der SBZ und frühen DDR (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008).

Selected Bibliography Barron, S., ed. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991. Fleckner, U., ed. Angriff auf die Avantgarde. Kunst und Kunstpolitik im Nationalsozialismus. Berlin: Akademieverlag, 2007. Fulda, B. Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich. Munich: Prestel, 2019. Peters, O., ed. Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937. Munich: Prestel, 2014. Schuster, P. K., ed. Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst.” Die ‘Kunststadt’ München 1937, 5th ed. Munich: Prestel, 1998. Zuschlag, C. “Entartete Kunst.” Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland. Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995.

9 Amateur Films from National Socialist Austria as Visual Responses to Nazi Propaganda Michaela Scharf

In pursuing questions pertinent to the fields of everyday and cultural history, historians of National Socialism, like others, began to focus on ego-documents, such as letters, diaries, autobiographical reports, and photographs.1 Interested in individuals’ experiences and memory practices, i.e., the subjective dimension of Nazism, these scholars set out to consider reactions to Nazi propaganda in these private documents. In this chapter, I focus on such reactions. I discuss amateur films from the era as visual responses to Nazi visual propaganda, focusing on a subject that was both a frequent topic of Nazi media and especially popular with amateur filmmakers: the Reichsautobahn.2 The many amateur travel and holiday films from the Nazi period featuring the German freeway show how much it attracted amateurs.3 They also show how people enjoyed themselves in a time when the regime promised the “Volksgemeinschaft” a better life, one of individual and collective enjoyment.4 So, amateur films are valuable sources for examining the relationship between recreation and politics in the Third Reich, and one may ask if they are political in the sense that filmmakers showed that promise fulfilled—that is, if they portrayed their amusements as the result of the regime’s policies. In accord with the principles of the pictorial turn, we can understand the meaning of amateur images only by going beyond the events they portray or the “facts” they “reveal” and focusing on an amateur’s mode of representing them.5 Consequently, to learn something about how amateur filmmakers responded to Nazi propaganda we must not rely on content analysis, which informs us whether they included typical propaganda subjects, such as the Reichsautobahn, but ex-

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amine how they included them, i.e., the motifs and forms of representation they chose. Only in this way can we exploit amateur film to illuminate how people “engaged with the political world around them, as well as how they pulled that world—its phrases, images, and objects—into their own.”6 In this chapter, I analyze two 9.5 mm films produced by Viennese amateurs after the German annexation of Austria that feature the Reichsautobahn. I argue on the basis of their modes of representing motifs familiar from Nazi propaganda that these amateurs embraced the National Socialist visual discourse about the freeway. I chose these films for three reasons. First, together they include many amateur filmmakers’ typical motifs of the German freeway system. I base this claim on my study of sixty-six German and Austrian amateur films from the Nazi period depicting the freeway.7 Second, for both films there is contextual material: the filmmakers’ notebooks or personnel files (Gauakten), interviews with their descendants, and all of the other films they produced. Third, neither filmmaker was a high-ranking Nazi. I believe that this is essential. If we want amateur films to inform us about how “ordinary” people responded to Nazi propaganda, then we must study the films “ordinary” people made. In examining how these Viennese amateurs incorporated motifs from visual propaganda about the Reichsautobahn, I consider official films (newsreels, documentaries, Kulturfilme, and short feature films), professional photographs, advertising posters, and paintings that proclaimed the freeway system’s supposed benefits. To determine if amateur films of the Reichsautobahn were in any way unique, I consider Austrian amateur films from the 1920s to the 1940s depicting various roads and car rides.8 I also discuss how contemporary audiences may have interpreted amateur films about the Reichsautobahn. My thesis presupposes that these Viennese amateurs had consumed freeway propaganda in the Nazi media, but, in accord with Stuart Hall’s model of communication, I do not assume that they interpreted them as the regime intended.9 Hall argued in his influential essay on encoding and decoding that the coding of a message determines the parameters of its reception but there is “no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding.”10 My study of these two films shows that in visually documenting their travel experiences these “ordinary” people appropriated elements of Nazi propaganda about the Reichsautobahn, but they did so selectively, adopting certain motifs while ignoring others. To explore the distinct forms people’s appropriations took, one must reject the common notion that Nazi propaganda was so effective that it prevented audiences from interpreting its messages individualistically. So, this study supports the view that propaganda offered themes and motifs that people chose and used for their own ends.11 Moreover, my study shows that filmmakers’ appropriations of Nazi propaganda, i.e., their selection of motifs and modes of representing them, depended on a variety of factors, and, therefore, one cannot infer their political attitudes directly from them. In addition to their social and cultural backgrounds and their preferences and interests, the possibilities of the cinematic medium and its social

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and cultural functions influenced amateurs’ appropriations. In her remarkable analysis of the amateur photographs and films that German perpetrators and bystanders shot during World War II, Frances Guerin argued that to avoid interpreting them only as expressions of their makers’ political attitudes, historians should focus on the fact that they were products of an amateur image practice.12

Social and Cultural Functions of Early Amateur Film Practice Amateur cinematography emerged at the beginning of the last century. By the 1930s, it had become popular in the upper and upper-middle classes, whose members alone could afford cameras and projectors.13 In 1938, one of the cheapest systems cost 125 Reichsmarks (RM), and four minutes’ worth of film cost at least 5 RM.14 Since the average monthly income in 1938 was about 160 RM, filmmaking was an exclusive hobby.15 It differed from photography in this respect. Millions could afford still cameras by this time. Because of the expense, we can assume that less wealthy amateur filmmakers did not shoot the equivalent of snapshots but put quite some thought into selecting the subjects they filmed.16 While some amateurs primarily used the technology to capture memorable events in home movies, others had more serious ambitions and made films to inform or entertain their intended audience. These filmmakers invested much effort in composing their shots and in editing and creating intertitles, credits, and graphics for title scenes. Early how-to literature on amateur filmmaking emphasized the supposed ability of the technology to, in the words of a manual published in 1939, “preserve the . . . joys of one’s existence” and “produce a living chronicle of one’s personal life,” for “[h]e who films his life lives twice.”17 Although some amateurs might have intended to preserve what they experienced, their films are not simple reproductions but meaningful representations. They did not record events as they “really” were but as they wanted to portray or remember them. According to the anthropologist Sol Worth, amateur films are “statements about the world,” a perspective that allows historians to treat them as ego-documents and, so, reconstruct from them certain aspects of their creators’ selves.18 From the beginning, amateur films pertained to pleasures and amusements. Most of them showed happy occasions with family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Despite the variety of possible motifs, they depicted only the enjoyable aspects of life. For example, holiday filmmakers usually selected what was most enjoyable during their vacation. The film scholar Karl Sierek considers such idealized filmic representation an expression of its maker’s desires, a “fiction of reality” and “document of the imaginary.”19 Since the movie camera was invented to capture movement, it is not surprising that car trips and rides on trains, trams, cable cars, and carriages were popular motifs of amateur cinematography from the start.20 Amateurs especially liked filming from the moving car. The car trip was also a favored motif in amateur

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films featuring the Reichsautobahn. However, the meaning of images shot from a moving automobile varied according to a film’s cultural context and its maker’s social background as well as his or her ideas for the film.

The Reichsautobahn: More than Just a Freeway An outstanding prestige project of National Socialism, the Reichsautobahn was one of the most popular media topics, promoted on the radio and in newspapers, magazines, photography, film, literature, and paintings and the subject of exhibitions, coffee-table books, stamps, posters, board games, and puzzles. Propagandists made use of the fact that construction sites were spread all over the country by making the opening of each new section an opportunity for both celebration and press attention.21 Scholars agree that the decisive reason for building the freeway was its representative power.22 In fact, most of the regime’s claims to justify the gigantic project were untrue. News reports about the large number of people employed in its construction portrayed it as an important job-creation program.23 The argument that building it reduced the high level of unemployment was often put forward after 1945 to justify the claim that “not everything was bad in the Nazi era.”24 But the construction did not significantly reduce the unemployment rate.25 Though various advocates cited the freeway system’s possible military uses, scholars agree that it played no direct military role in World War II.26 Furthermore, neither the volume of traffic nor the speed of vehicles at the time made the system necessary, as government propaganda implied.27 The young John F. Kennedy wrote in his diary that the German Autobahnen were the “finest roads in the world. Really unnecessary though, in Germany, as the traffic is small, but they would be great in the U.S. as the speed is unlimited.”28 The regime promoted the Reichsautobahn in various ways. Although plans for a national highway system had been drawn up and partially realized during the Weimar Republic, government propaganda presented the Reichsautobahn as Hitler’s idea.29 According to the sociologist Michael Makropoulos, the Reichsautobahn was to be the “constitutive medium of the national community,” for Nazi propaganda claimed that it would connect the country’s regions and integrate the German people.30 Moreover, the regime was determined to use the Reichsautobahn to redesign the landscape by bringing technological progress to undeveloped areas. Thus, its propaganda made the system a symbol of Nazism’s conquest of the land and, thereby, of national strength.31 But it attributed conflicting ideas to the new freeway by promoting it not only as an achievement and expression of modern technology but also as a possibility to experience the German landscape and the untouched nature it would make accessible.32 National Socialism’s attitude toward modernity is still controversial, but historians agree that many of its aspects were modern.33 One was its embrace of technological progress, which was exemplified by its ambitious use of modern media, leaders’ enthusiastic endorsements of airplanes and automobiles, and the

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construction of a nationwide freeway system. Another modern aspect was artistic. With its Degenerate Art exhibitions, National Socialism seemed to reject aesthetic modernism, but it did not banish modernist, that is, functionalist and industrial, aesthetics from the fine arts, applied arts, or popular culture.34 Official paintings (Autobahnmalerei), photographs, and films of the freeway system and its monumental overpasses exemplify the modernist aesthetics of Nazism’s visual culture.35 Many of these works, especially those showing automobiles driving toward the horizon, also express a “sense of a beginning.”36 The Nazi movement was driven by its desire to inaugurate a new era,37 and in such representations “the autobahn project as a whole stood for a drive toward a modern, fast and visually attractive future.”38 A third fundamentally modernist aspect of National Socialism that the Reichsautobahn expressed was its promise of mass motorization and individual mobility. Various media products promoted the freeway as a symbol of modern tourism and leisure travel. It not only allowed people to travel quickly from one place to another; driving the Reichsautobahn was intended to be fun, for one could enjoy both the experience of driving fast and a new view of the countryside.39 The Reichsautobahn’s amusements were even accessible to those who could not afford an automobile. One could join one of the excursions offered by the Nazi leisure-time organization Kraft durch Freude (KdF). Or one could ride a motorbike. During the holiday season in the prewar years, 79.2 percent of travelers on the segment from Munich to Salzburg were motorcyclists.40 However, Kulturfilme about the freeway promoted driving one’s own car, which few people could afford. As is well known, the Volkswagen never reached the market. So, in 1938 just 1 in 148 Germans owned a car (as compared to 1 in 24 British, 1 in 23 French, and 1 in 5 Americans).41 Thus, despite the Nazis’ promises, automobility remained the privilege of the middle and upper classes.42 But while the regime failed to motorize its people, it did make other consumer goods, such as radio, cinema, and tourism, affordable.43 Though Germans faced a scarcity of everyday goods, access to such consumer goods and the “virtual consumption” of others, i.e., the prospect of affording them in the near future, including driving the Reichsautobahn in one’s own car, might have induced people to support the regime.44 The Nazis considered film the best way to promote the Reichsautobahn.45 As the lifestyle magazine die neue linie pointed out in 1939, seeing the landscape pass while driving on the freeway was like watching a film.46 The regime put a lot of effort into producing documentaries and feature films that highlighted the freeway’s benefits and the pleasures it offered.47 According to Edward Dimendberg, these films were “a technique for acclimating the sensorium of the average German to new experiences of speed, time, and mobility.”48 For example, Straßen ohne Hindernisse (1935), Schnelle Straßen (1937), Die Straßen der Zukunft (1938), and Straßen machen Freude (1939), which were also shown in Viennese cinemas, featured driving on the Reichsautobahn and promoted both the adventure of speed and the new activity of Autowandern (car hiking), driving for plea-

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sure at a moderate speed without a schedule, which let one enjoy spectacular panoramas of the idyllic countryside.49 Following Austria’s annexation, the new newsreel Ostmark-Wochenschau, produced by the Austrian firm Selenophon GmbH, also promoted the Reichsautobahn. One episode from April 1938 shows the groundbreaking ceremony for the section from Salzburg to Vienna.50 The ceremony was also included in the sixth edition of the Schmalfilm-Monatsschau, a newsreel in small gauge format produced for home cinema.51 In addition, the flourishing how-to literature discussed filming the Reichsautobahn. One manual from 1939 included instructions for making such a film, which outlined the motifs of official media coverage: construction, opening ceremonies, roadhouses, interchanges, a map of the freeway network, driving the freeway, and panoramas of the road and surrounding landscape.52 Such features show that literature for amateurs encouraged them to make films about the Reichsautobahn along the lines of Nazi propaganda. By taking such advice, they could be sure of fulfilling the regime’s wishes.

Urlaub 1938 (Franz Hohenberger, 1938) In the summer of 1938, just a few months after Austria’s annexation, the newly married Franz and Maria Hohenberger took a road trip through western Austria and Bavaria, and they captured it on 9.5 mm film. Franz (1908–88), the owner of a chimney sweeping company in Vienna, and Maria (1911–73) shot some remarkable scenes of the Reichsautobahn and included them in their approximately eighteen-minute travelogue entitled Urlaub 1938.53 As the film starts with “Franz Hohenberger zeigt: Urlaub 1938,” we can assume that he was responsible for it. However, according to the opening credits Maria also operated the camera.54 Franz probably instructed her, for she was a neophyte and filmmaking was his passion.55 Since we cannot tell which scenes Maria shot, apart from those in which Franz appears or drives the car, I refer to the Hohenbergers’ decisions regarding the selection and representation of freeway motifs. The intertitle “Eine Fahrt mit dem Steyr 50 durch die Ostmark und Bayern” and the opening images introduce their car: a Steyr 50 (figure 9.1). The SteyrDaimler-Puch company had launched this compact and aerodynamic model in 1936.56 It was lovingly called ‘Steyr-Baby’ in the advertising. Nevertheless, it was quite expensive, and owning one was a clear “mark of distinction.”57 Their Steyr 50 flew a small swastika flag over the right front wheel, demonstrating the Hohenbergers’ support of the regime that now ruled Austria.58 In that intertitle, Franz used the name ‘Ostmark,’ the National Socialist designation for Austria, indicating its new status as part of the Third Reich. Another intertitle, “Die ehemalige deutsche Reichsgrenze Hangenden Stein,” introduces a shot of Maria walking by the customs office without interacting with the official standing in front of it. This scene shows that the border was no longer valid

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Figure 9.1. Still from Urlaub 1938. Maria posing next to the Hohenbergers’ car. Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH).

and can be interpreted as another filmic reference to the political changes after Austria’s annexation. Following a sequence shot at the Königssee in Berchtesgaden, the film presents various images of the freeway announced by the intertitle “Die Reichsautobahn Salzburg München.” First, we see the broad, almost empty lanes filmed from the grass median as a single car travels down the seemingly endless freeway running through the open country toward the horizon (figure 9.2). These shots from outside of the car remind one of similar images in professional films and the many photographs, paintings, and advertising posters that portrayed the regime’s self-claimed success at seamlessly inserting the freeway into the landscape as “second nature.”59 The next scene of the freeway is about one minute long and was shot from the passenger seat while in motion. We briefly see the road through the back window before the film cuts to the view through the windshield (figure 9.3). Since Maria could not have been driving, she must have been the one shooting the scene.60 The perspective through the windshield and over the hood ornament transforms the lanes into an abstraction of lines (figure 9.4). Sometimes the lanes, black center line, and median completely fill the frame. Such abstract images were common in official depictions of the Reichsautobahn.61 They employed vanishing or unusual perspectives, compositions organized around diagonals, and

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Figure 9.2. Still from Urlaub 1938. The almost empty lanes of the Reichsautobahn. LBIDH.

Figure 9.3. Still from Urlaub 1938. The view through the windshield. LBIDH.

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Figure 9.4. Still from Urlaub 1938. The Reichsautobahn as an ensemble of lines. LBIDH.

close-ups of surfaces or isolated features, all of which referred to the modernist aesthetic of the Neue Sachlichkeit.62 Unlike typical amateur footage of car rides, Maria’s moving shots are not shaky or out of focus; they convey that driving the freeway, unlike driving on country roads or city streets, required little activity on the part of the driver (for example, no braking or changing gears). To the contrary, they make it seem as if the road itself was the active entity, carrying the car along. Thus, they visually represent the thrill of speed and the bodily sensation of suction as the automobile accelerated. These images portray the new visual and tactile experiences the freeway made possible.63 Following the road scene is an equally long one of the Mangfall Bridge in Upper Bavaria introduced by the intertitle “Zwischen Salzburg und München führt die Reichsautobahn über die gigantische Mangfallbrücke” (figure 9.5). The Hohenbergers again got out of the car and shot the overpass, which was opened to traffic in 1936 and had since been a popular motif of Nazi propaganda. They filmed from below the bridge, which allowed them to pan slowly along it, showing features of its construction. Like the intertitle, these images reveal the Hohenbergers’ fascination with this bridge. They also recall official films, photographs, and Autobahnmalerei.64 The shots of the bridge’s massive piers depict them abstractly as ensembles of lines (figure 9.6). The scene’s final images, announced by the intertitle “Blick von der 66m hohen Mangfallbrücke in’s Tal,” portray the bridge’s enormous height and the fantastic view from it.

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Figure 9.5. Still from Urlaub 1938. The Mangfall Bridge in Upper Bavaria. LBIDH.

Figure 9.6. Still from Urlaub 1938. The Mangfall Bridge’s massive piers. LBIDH.

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I suggest that when thinking about amateur films one consider the amount of time dedicated to motifs of interest. The Hohenbergers devoted more than two minutes of their approximately eighteen-minute film to the Reichsautobahn and the Mangfall Bridge. The freeway sequence is Urlaub 1938’s longest, longer than the cityscape of Munich or Innsbruck. Like official motion-picture cinematographers and still photographers, they presented the freeway and bridge as tourist attractions, showcasing them as more interesting than the other sights on their trip. It is noteworthy that half of the freeway scenes were shot while driving. The images mostly show the road and hardly capture the passing landscape. That is, the Hohenbergers presented the Reichsautobahn as an especially interesting place where one could experience speed, progress, and individual mobility and celebrate the “modernization of life” under National Socialism.65 However, one grasps the meaning of the Hohenbergers’ representations of the Reichsautobahn only by paying attention to the entire film and its function. According to their son Manfred, they showed Urlaub 1938 to close family and friends. At first sight, it seems to be just a typical amateur travel or vacation film. Its intertitles’ announcements of destinations indicate that the newlyweds made it to document the itinerary of their first road trip together. Moreover, it shows them posing in front of tourist sights to testify to their having seen them. The cultural function of such images is to appropriate visually the places visited.66 The Hohenbergers also filmed the view from various lookout points and each other looking through binoculars and the viewfinder of a still camera. Sierek has argued that the function of such images is “to make one’s own seeing visible,” that is, to capture one’s own gaze so “one can see oneself see” when watching one’s film.67 Along with idyllic landscapes and tourist attractions, the automobile has always been a popular motif in amateur travel and holiday films. It demonstrates one’s privileged social status and ability to participate in modern tourism. As Dirk van Laak has argued, from the very beginning the automobile was a symbol of “modern individuality,” providing freedom and flexibility by allowing people to travel without being dependent on railways and timetables.68 But Urlaub 1938 is more than an average amateur travelogue or vacation film. It portrays the Hohenbergers’ honeymoon—the start of their new life together. This “sense of a beginning,” which Roger Griffin argues was central to both modernism and Nazism, manifested itself in their film’s content and aesthetics.69 Its depiction of the pleasure of driving along the Reichsautobahn visually conveys the feeling of heading into a new era and links the couple’s new life together to the sense of “Aufbruch” that characterized the Nazi movement in general and Germany’s annexation of Austria in particular.70

Städtefahrt (Friedrich and Herbert Apfelthaler, 1939) In 1939, Friedrich Apfelthaler (1889–1946), the owner of a tire retreading company, and his son Herbert (1925–2008) made the 9.5 mm film Städtefahrt about a series of trips Friedrich took to German cities, Budapest, and Prague.71 Frie-

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drich filmed and Herbert, who went with the family when they accompanied Friedrich, edited the footage. The first part of the approximately seventeen-minute film contains some remarkable images of the Reichsautobahn. Like Urlaub 1938, its three freeway sequences, which include shots of the Mangfall Bridge and the roadhouse at the Chiemsee,72 are together, at two minutes, longer than most of the city sequences.73 Its Reichsautobahn images also resemble those of official media. Friedrich shot the lanes and traffic from the roadside and through the windshield while driving, which gives the viewer the sensation of riding in the car. As in Urlaub 1938, Städefahrt’s steady and focused shots show how smooth driving on the freeway was. However, in contrast to the Hohenbergers’ behind-the-wheel shots, Friedrich’s do not represent the experience of speed. But they do show the surrounding scenery in a scene that portrays the panoramic views and experience of moving through a vast open space that are the pleasures of Autowandern, as the Reichsautobahn’s planners had intended.74 From a train, one saw the passing scenery only from the side, but looking through the windshield of an automobile gave one the impression of driving into the landscape.75 Friedrich’s driving scenes portray the freeway as a work of art integrated into the landscape. His route was a particularly scenic section of the Reichsautobahn through hilly forest that offered a view of the Bavarian Alps and the Chiemsee (figures 9.7 and 9.8). These scenes resemble professional productions, such as

Figure 9.7. Still from Städtefahrt. View of the Bavarian Alps. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum.

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Figure 9.8. Still from Städtefahrt. View of the Chiemsee. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum.

Straßen ohne Hindernisse (1935), that present the section between Salzburg and Munich as the most beautiful. Friedrich also recorded the view of the Reichsautobahn gently rising up the Irschenberg in Upper Bavaria (figure 9.9), referring to official photographs of this motif and a stamp commemorating the Winterhilfswerk in 1936 (figure 9.10).76 Thus, Städtefahrt verified the regime’s claims about the beautiful landscapes that Reichsautobahn drivers would enjoy. Friedrich’s driving scenes show the hood ornament of his Mercedes through the windshield; in other shots, his wife or the whole family poses with the Mercedes on the roadside (figure 9.11). By filming his Mercedes, one of the era’s most expensive cars, Friedrich indicated his social status.77 Like the Hohenbergers’ images of their car, Friedrich’s point to one function of amateur filmmaking at the time: reassuring oneself of one’s privileged social status by watching the impressive images on the screen and showing them to one’s audience. Urlaub 1938 and Städtefahrt also perform another common function of professional and amateur travel films: showing their viewers places they do not know.78 Friedrich and the Hohenbergers depicted regions of Germany that many Austrians had not seen for themselves, for travel was still a privilege of the wellto-do; that is, they showed their audience the beauties of their new “homeland.” However, Städtefahrt’s portrayals of Munich, Nuremberg, Cologne, and Aachen are atypical of amateur travel or holiday films in that no one poses in front of

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Figure 9.9. Still from Städtefahrt. The Reichsautobahn rising up the Irschenberg. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum.

Figure 9.10. Stamp showing the Reichsautobahn at the Irschenberg. Private archive of the author. Photographed by Anna-Lena Neese.

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Figure 9.11. Still from Städtefahrt. Mrs. Apfelthaler poses with the Mercedes. Collection of the Austrian Film Museum

tourist attractions or happily waves at the camera. There is no record of whether Friedrich took such shots, but, either way, Herbert did not edit any into the film. Herbert, who became interested in film when he was in high school, was an ambitious amateur. He put a lot of effort into postproduction and created his own trademark, ‘Hera-Film,’ a combination of the first three letters of his first name and the first letter of his last name. In 1943 he started working as a filmmaker for the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD).79 Between 1939 and 1945, he made over twenty amateur films, many of which expressed his support of the regime.80 Städtefahrt was one of his first. Herbert’s editing added another meaning to his father’s images. The first intertitle announces “München,” but a long sequence of the Reichsautobahn precedes the footage of Bavaria’s capital. The montage suggests a trip from Austria to Munich, but Friedrich’s records show that he took some of the shots on a trip in the opposite direction, from Nuremberg via Munich to Austria.81 The images that follow the cityscapes of Munich once again show the Reichsautobahn succeeded by a long sequence of the city of Nuremberg and the Nazi Party’s rally grounds. That is followed by another scene of the freeway and images of Cologne and Aachen, which Friedrich most likely shot on a separate trip, for Städtefahrt shows that he went to Aachen by train. Herbert spliced the footage of Munich, Nuremberg, and Cologne with images of the Reichsautobahn, most of which

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Friedrich had shot in the winter and spring of 1939, though he had taken some in 1937.82 Herbert cut the first part of Städtefahrt as a single car trip along the Reichsautobahn from Austria to Cologne by way of Munich and Nuremberg, but such a trip never took place. So, Herbert’s montage was obviously not meant to document any of Friedrich’s actual routes. Thus, Städtefahrt is more like a professional documentary than were typical amateur travel or vacation films. Herbert’s montage interweaving images of historical sites in different German cities with images of the freeway aligns with propaganda that celebrated the Reichsautobahn as connecting all of the country’s regions.

Conclusions My analyses show the potential of amateur films as sources in the study of audience reception of Nazi propaganda, in these cases about the Reichsautobahn. I have demonstrated how these Viennese filmmakers appropriated motifs and compositions from Nazi media, that is, how they responded to it. Franz and Maria Hohenberger portrayed the experience of speed and the sense of freedom in driving the freeway; Friedrich Apfelthaler focused on the beautiful landscape along it; and both Urlaub 1938 and Städtefahrt present the aesthetics of the freeway’s overpasses and its lanes running toward the horizon. Following Elizabeth Harvey, we may consider such images as “forms of ‘emotional management’ that tried to tie the notion of space to pleasurable feelings associated with the Nazi New Order in Europe.”83 While the length of the freeway, the height of its overpasses, and the beauty of the landscape were also recorded in photographs, only film could represent the sensations of driving the Reichsautobahn. That is, in this case only film could make visual what Gudrun Brockhaus called fascism’s “offer of experience.”84 Driving was a popular subject in early amateur cinematography. And I can say on the basis of my study of sixty-six German and Austrian amateur films pertaining to the Reichsautobahn that many present car rides on the freeway, although not usually in such detail as Urlaub 1938 and Städtefahrt. But Reichsautobahn films are distinctive. My study of more than 200 Austrian amateur films from the 1920s to the 1940s found that Reichsautobahn films are exceptional in two ways. First, most other films shot from cars or motorcycles present the passing landscape whereas many of those about driving on the freeway focus on its lanes. That is, the road itself was the subject of interest. Second, other filmmakers usually did not specify the road they were on. However, many freeway filmmakers were explicit in their intertitles that they were driving on the Reichsautobahn, which indicates that filmmakers expected their audiences to know about and be interested in it. Another Viennese amateur was so convinced of his viewers’ familiarity with the Reichsautobahn that he introduced his freeway scene with “ein kleiner Abstecher auf die . . . ,” believing that no more was needed to inform his audience that the images to follow were of the freeway.85

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Like many other amateur freeway films, Urlaub 1938 and Städtefahrt presented the Reichsautobahn as a tourist attraction, where one could experience aesthetic pleasure and visceral excitement. My study of amateur films found that the freeway was a continually popular subject of amateur travel and holiday films. Such films were usually shot from the tourist’s perspective and, so, featured the freeway’s enjoyable aspects. They ignored the potential stresses of driving the Reichsautobahn, like breakdowns and having to get around its unfinished sections. By presenting the Reichsautobahn as a tourist attraction, these films confirmed the regime’s claims that it was a source of amusement and recreation and, thus, a key element of Nazi consumer culture. However, they were silent on the regime’s claims about the freeway’s sociopolitical functions. They did not portray it as a job-creation program or as integrating the German people into a national community. Amateurs selected and adapted only those themes that suited their purpose, namely, making a film about their lives. Thus, these films are not mere imitations but rather appropriations of Nazi propaganda, a conclusion that supports Martina Roepke’s argument that amateur filmmaking is a “practice of bricolage.”86 As I mentioned above, I understand amateur films as filmmakers’ visual statements about their experiences, not just as recordings of what happened. However, I have learned through screenings with filmmakers or their descendants that most consider their films to be documents of “how things were.” In explaining this attitude, Roland Barthes argues that every photographic image refers to its “photographic referent,” the “necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.”87 Since filmic images also have photographic referents, they too refer to the past events they present.88 Early how-to literature on amateur filmmaking saw great potential in the medium’s proximity to reality and promoted it’s alleged ability to re-present what was “really” there.89 Consequently, it is very likely that audiences in the Nazi era considered amateur films to be trustworthy documents of their makers’ past experiences and not, in contrast to the regime’s professional productions, propaganda. Thus, we can assume that amateur films portraying the visual and bodily pleasures their makers experienced on the Reichsautobahn convinced the family members, friends, and colleagues who watched them that the freeway really did provide such pleasures and, thus, would satisfy those who wanted to enjoy modern tourism. If so, then such films may have persuaded their audiences that the Nazis had kept their promise to provide Germans with recreation and amusement. That is, they may have accomplished what Nazi media products, which audiences probably knew were propaganda, could not. Michaela Scharf is Lecturer in the Department of History at Justus Liebig University Giessen. She is also a member of the academic staff at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History in Vienna, where she contributed to the EU project “Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital

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Age.” From 2016 to 2019, she worked in the DOC-team project “Doing Amateur Film” funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In her dissertation, she explores Austrian amateur films made in the National Socialist era. On the basis of that research, she has published “Filmen als Selbstbehauptung. Ellen Illichs Familienfilme im Kontext nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 1 (2022).

Notes 1. See N. Gregor, “Die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus und der Cultural-Historical Turn,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 65, no. 2 (2017): 233–45; E. Harvey et al., eds., Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); N. Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939–1945 (London: Bodley Head, 2015); J. Steuwer, “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse.” Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017); M. Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology in German Photo Albums, 1933–1945,” Central European History 48 (2015): 335–65; L. Conze, “Filling the Frame: Photography of May Day Crowds during the Early Nazi Era,” Journal of Modern European History 16, no. 4 (2018): 463–86; C. Meyer, (K)eine Grenze. Das Private und das Politische im Nationalsozialismus 1933–1940 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020). 2. The term ‘amateur film’ covers a variety of topics, uses, and aesthetic formations of noncommercial film production, including home movies, travel films, films of public events, and little feature films produced for the private enjoyment of family and friends or the wider semipublic audience of different associations and organizations. See V. Öhner, “Einleitung,” in Abenteuer Alltag. Zur Archäologie des Amateurfilms, ed. S. Mattl et al., 5–16 (Vienna: Synema, 2015), 6. 3. See note 7. 4. See P. E. Swett, C. Ross, and F. d’Almeida, “Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany: An Introduction,” in Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany, ed. Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, 1–15 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 5. See E. Harvey and M. Umbach, “Introduction: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History,” Central European History 48 (2015): 287–99, 289; W. J. T. Mitchell, Bildtheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 101–35. 6. Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology,” 337. 7. This is a random sample of amateur films about the German freeway I came across during my research. Forty of these films are travel or holiday films; ten were produced in a military context; and only two covered opening ceremonies of completed road segments. I could not determine the context of the others. Most of the films are in the private Film + Foto-Archiv Agentur Karl Höffkes. The rest belong to the Austrian Film Museum. 8. The films are part of the amateur film collection of the Austrian Film Museum and the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 9. See S. Livingstone, “Media audiences, interpreters and users,” in Media Audiences, ed. M. Gillespie, 9–50 (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2005), 42. 10. S. Hall, “Encoding, decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. S. During, 507–17 (1980; reprint, London: Routledge, 1999), 515.

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11. See Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, “Pleasure and Power,” 3. 12. See F. Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1–35. 13. See A. Schneider, Die Stars sind wir. Heimkino als filmische Praxis (Marburg: Schüren, 2004), 58; M. Roepke, Privat-Vorstellung. Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2006), 53. 14. See the price list of Herlango Photo-Gesellschaft m.b.H. in Photo und Kino Sport 28, no. 5 (1938): 100. 15. See Sozialgesetzbuch (SGB VI) with details of the average annual salary, available online at https://www.sozialgesetzbuch-sgb.de/sgbvi/anlage-1.html, accessed 29 August 2022. 16. Most analogue amateur films are silent. Synchronized sound became standard only with the popularization of home video in the 1980s. See Schneider, Die Stars sind wir, 61. 17. P. Gross-Talmon, Filmrezepte für den Hausgebrauch. Kleine Drehbücher für Jedermann (Halle/Saale: Wilhelm Knapp, 1939), 7, 16, 17. All translations from German are mine. 18. S. Worth, “Doing the Anthropology of Visual Communication,” Working Papers in Culture and Communication 1, no. 2 (1976): 2–20, 18, quoted from R. Chalfen, Snapshot: Versions of Life (Bowling Green: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 6. The people appearing in amateur films tend to cooperate with filmmakers, but it is also true that they may not always behave exactly as filmmakers want. So, amateur films are not pure ego-documents (like diaries and letters). Nevertheless, filmmakers have tremendous control of their images and their meaning. They decide what to film and how to depict their subject, first, by choosing camera angles, distance, etc. and, then, by editing the footage. Therefore, we may consider their films ego-documents. 19. K. Sierek, “‘Hier ist es schön.’ Sich sehen im Familienkino,” in Sprung im Spiegel. Filmisches Wahrnehmen zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit, ed. C. Blümlinger, 147–67 (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1990), 150. 20. These findings are based on my study of more than 200 Austrian amateur films from the 1920s to the 1940s. See note 8. See also M. Neumann, “Amateur Film, Automobility and the Cinematic Aesthetics of Leisure,” in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. L. Rascaroli, G. Young, and B. Monahan, 51–64 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 21. See T. Zeller, Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 58. 22. See K. Hofmann, “‘Straßen der Zukunft.’ Die Reichsautobahnen,” in Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, vol. 3: “Drittes Reich” 1933–1945, ed. P. Zimmermann and K. Hoffmann, 276–86 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 276. 23. See also the official films Auf Deutschlands neuen Straßen (Richard Scheinpflug, 1937), Bundesarchiv, Film: 40859-1; Straßen machen Freude (Richard Scheinpflug, 1939), Bundesarchiv, Film: 12790-1; Die Straßen Adolf Hitlers: Vierhundert bauen eine Brücke. Ein Film vom Werden der Reichsautobahnen (Johannes Fritze, 1936–37), Filmarchiv Austria, 04978/0121; Die Straßen Adolf Hitlers: Eröffnung der ersten Reichsautobahnstrecke, Frankfurt (Main)—Darmstadt durch den Führer am 19.5.1935 (1935), Bundesarchiv, Film: B 139535-1. 24. See E. Schütz and E. Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn. Bau und Inszenierung der “Straßen des Führers” 1933–1941 (Berlin: Links, 1996), 7. 25. See E. Schütz, “‘. . . eine glückliche Zeitlosigkeit . . .’ Zeitreise zu den ‘Straßen des Führers,’” in Reisekultur in Deutschland. Von der Weimarer Republik zum “Dritten Reich,” ed. P. J. Brenner, 73–99 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997), 79.

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26. See Zeller, Driving Germany, 54, 56; A. Dossmann, Begrenzte Mobilität. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Autobahnen in der DDR (Essen: Klartext, 2003), 34. 27. See Schütz, “eine glückliche Zeitlosigkeit,” 82; Zeller, Driving Germany, 52. 28. Quoted from N. Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992), 194. 29. See the regime’s official film productions, such as Bilder vom Bau der Reichsautobahnen (1937), Bundesarchiv, Film: B 133947-1; Die Straßen Adolf Hitlers: Die Straßen der Zukunft (Johannes Fritze, 1938), Bundesarchiv, Film: 35442-1; and the first film about the Reichsautobahn, Straßen ohne Hindernisse! Ein Film über die Reichsautobahnen (Martin Rikli, 1935), Bundesarchiv, Film: B 122547-1. 30. M. Makropoulos, “Die infrastrukturelle Konstruktion der ‘Volksgemeinschaft.’ Aspekte des Autobahnbaus im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland‚” in Vernunft—Entwicklung—Leben, Schlüsselbegriffe der Moderne, ed. U. Bröckling, S. Kaufmann, and A.  T. Paul, 185–203 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), 190. See also Schütz and Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn, 134. 31. See Zeller, Driving Germany, 66–69; Die Straßen Adolf Hitlers: Bahn frei! (Wilhelm Marzahn, 1935), Bundesarchiv, Film: 33266-1; and Schnelle Straßen (Richard Scheinpflug, 1937), Bundesarchiv, Film: 35821-1. 32. See E. Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity,” October 73 (1995): 90–137, 104–6. To deal with the mixture of modernity and reaction characteristic of National Socialism, scholars have proposed various concepts such as “reactionary modernism” (Jeffrey Herf ), “alternative modernism” (Roger Griffin), and “organic modernity” (Konrad Jarausch). See J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984); R. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); K. Jarausch, “Organic Modernity: National Socialism as Alternative Modernism,” in A Companion to Nazi Germany, ed. S. Baranowski, A. Nolzen, and C. W. Szejnmann, 33–46 (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2018). 33. For an overview of the academic debate, see P. Betts, “The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 541–58; M. Roseman, “National Socialism and the End of Modernity,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2001): 688–701. 34. See Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 289–94; Betts, “Nazi Modernism,” 549; and Bernhard Fulda’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 8). 35. See Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization,” 110. 36. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 31. 37. See ibid. and P. Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernity/Modernism 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–22. 38. Zeller, Driving Germany, 64. 39. See Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization,” 106–8. 40. See R. Hachtmann, Tourismus-Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 130. 41. See T. Kühne, “Massenmotorisierung und Verkehrspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert: Technikgeschichte als politische Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte,” Neue Politische Literatur 41 (1996): 196–229, 199. 42. See R. Koshar, “Germans at the Wheel: Cars and Leisure Travel in Interwar Germany,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. R. Koshar, 215–30 (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 216. 43. See H. Berghoff, “Gefälligkeitsdiktatur oder Tyrannei des Mangels? Neue Kontroversen zur Konsumgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht

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50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

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58, no. 9 (2007): 502–18, 515. Commercial tourism thrived under Hitler, and KdF’s tourism and leisure programs were very popular, though most working people could afford only short outings. Longer vacation tours, especially prestigious sea cruises, were not affordable for the working class. See K. Semmens, Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); S. Baranowski, “Radical Nationalism in an International Context: Strength through Joy and the Paradoxes of Nazi Tourism,” in Histories of Tourism. Representation, Identity and Conflict, ed. J. K. Walton, 125–43 (Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2005), 134. See Berghoff, “Gefälligkeitsdiktatur,” 505, 518. See also Baranowski, “Radical Nationalism,” 136. See Hofmann, “Straßen der Zukunft,” 280. See H. Pflug, “Das neue Land,” die neue linie 9 (1939): 23–27, 23, quoted from Schütz, “eine glückliche Zeitlosigkeit,” 89. See Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization,” 99. Ibid., 103. See Koshar, “Germans at the Wheel,” 220; for the screening of Schnelle Straßen, see Das kleine Volksblatt, 13 February 1938, 11; for Straßen ohne Hindernisse, see Der gute Film. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Filmkultur 118 (1935): 8; for Die Straßen der Zukunft, see Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 19 June 1938, 17; for Straßen machen Freude, see Kleine VolksZeitung, 25 February 1940, 14. 33. Ostmark-Wochenschau (No.16A/1938), 15 April 1938, 3.4. Erster Spatenstich für die Reichsautobahn Salzburg-Wien, Filmarchiv Austria, 4421. For further episodes highlighting the Reichsautobahn, see H. Miloslavic, “Der Ostmark-Wochenschau-Bestand des Filmarchiv Austria,” in Die Ostmark-Wochenschau. Ein Propagandamedium des Nationalsozialismus, ed. H. Miloslavic, 247–71 (Vienna: verlag filmarchiv austria, 2008). See advertising for Schmalfilm-Monatsschau by Agfa-Ozaphan-Film, Film für Alle. Monatsschrift des Amateurfilmwesens. Organ des Bundes deutscher Filmamateure 12, no. 8 (1938): 228. See Gross-Talmon, Filmrezepte für den Hausgebrauch, 75. Urlaub 1938 (Franz Hohenberger, 1938), 9.5 mm, b/w, silent, 16fps, 17:50 minutes, Austrian Film Museum, 0901–09–0254. The opening credits also reveal that Franz edited the footage with his fellow film enthusiast Adolf Schickel. He started filming in the late 1920s and continued until the 1970s, making over twenty films. See T. Karny and M. Marschik, Autos, Helden und Mythen. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Automobils in Österreich (Vienna: Hernals, 2015), 72. F. d’Almeida, “Luxury and Distinction under National Socialism,” in Pleasure and Power, ed. Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, 67–83, 67. While the price of an Opel Kadett was 1,800 RM, the 55 model of the Steyr-Baby, launched in 1938, cost 2,950 RM. However, the company stopped production of the Steyr-Baby in 1940 because of competition from the Volkswagen. See Karny and Marschik, Autos, Helden und Mythen, 74–75. It is unlikely that Franz Hohenberger joined the Nazi Party. Also Manfred Hohenberger, his son, stated that Franz was not a party member, but he joined the National Socialist Motorist Corps. Interview with Manfred Hohenberger on 9 October 2018. Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH). Examples are the photographs of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen and Robert Zinner’s poster from 1937 showing the bridge over the Saale near Hirschenberg. See E. Lendvai-Dircksen,

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60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

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Reichsautobahn. Mensch und Werk (Bayreuth: Gauverlag, 1937). For a reproduction of Zinner’s poster, see Hofmann, “Straßen der Zukunft,” 279. Manfred Hohenberger stated that his mother did not drive a car. Examples are Schnelle Straßen (1937) and Die Straßen der Zukunft (1938). See also Lendvai-Dircksen, Reichsautobahn. See Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization,” 110. See Makropoulos, “Konstruktion der Volksgemeinschaft,” 197. See Zeller, Driving Germany, 64. E. Harvey, “Seeing the World: Photography, Photojournalism and Visual Pleasure in the Third Reich,” in Pleasure and Power, ed. Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, 177–204, 189. See D. Orgeron, “Mobile Home Movies: Travel and le Politique des Amateurs,” The Moving Image 6, no. 2 (2006): 74–100. Sierek, “‘Hier ist es schön,’” 159. D. van Laak, Alles im Fluss. Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft—Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2018), 99. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 31. Ibid., 9. Städtefahrt (Friedrich and Herbert Apfelthaler, 1939), 9.5 mm., b/w, silent, 16fps, 16:45 minutes, Austrian Film Museum, 0901–09–0434. The film can be watched on the website of the Ephemeral Films Project. National Socialism in Austria: https://efilms.at/explore, accessed 29 August 2022. The earliest film in Friedrich Apfelthaler’s collection is dated 1928. Overall, he made more than fifty amateur films. He did not join the Nazi Party. See the personnel files (Gauakten) of Friedrich Apfelthaler in the Austrian State Archives (AT-OeStA/AdR ZNsZ GA, 102816). Neither did his son Herbert. See the personnel files of Herbert Apfelthaler in the Austrian State Archives (AT-OeStA/AdR ZNsZ GA, 216044). Built in 1937–38 in the Alpine style, the roadhouse at the Chiemsee was itself a popular destination. In addition to a gas station and restaurant, it had a hotel, a lake terrace, an outdoor swimming pool, and a souvenir shop, thus contributing to the Reichsautobahn’s recreational character. See A. Schumacher, “‘Vor uns die endlosen Straßen, vor uns die lockende, erregende Ferne . . .’ ‘Vom Tanken und Rasten auf Entdeckerfahrt durch deutsche Lande,’” in Reichsautobahn. Pyramiden des Dritten Reichs. Analyse zur Ästhetik eines unbewältigten Mythos, ed. R. Stommer, 77–90 (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1982), 85. Only the shots of Nuremberg, which include images of the Nazi Party’s rally grounds, are longer. See Makropoulos, “Konstruktion der Volksgemeinschaft,” 196, see also note 31. See ibid., 195. See Jugend-Tagblatt—Beilage des Neuen Wiener Tagblatts, 16 April 1938, 2. See d’Almeida, “Luxury and Distinction,” 72. See Harvey, “Seeing the World,” 178. See the films by Herbert Apfelthaler about the RAD, such as Der große Tag (1943), 9.5mm, b/w, silent, 16fps, 14:39 minutes, Austrian Film Museum, 0901–09–0455. The film can be watched online at https://efilms.at/explore, accessed 29 August 2022; see also “Correspondence with Angelika Apfelthaler,” former wife of H. Apfelthaler, on 18 October 2009. Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH). Herbert Apfelthaler was an outstanding amateur filmmaker. Over more than five decades, he made over 150 films for both private and semipublic viewing. See his film collection in the Austrian Film Museum.

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81. Friedrich Apfelthaler recorded information about the footage he shot and the films he and his son edited. See the notebook of F. Apfelthaler, Austrian Film Museum. 82. See ibid. The vegetation indicates that Apfelthaler shot the footage from 1939 in the first third of the year. 83. Harvey, “Seeing the World,” 178. 84. G. Brockhaus, Schauder und Idylle. Faschismus als Erlebnisangebot (Munich: Antje Kunstmann, 1997). 85. Königsee, Millstatt 1938 (Harry and Paul Jirschik, 1938), 16 mm, b/w and color, silent, 18fps, 7:39 minutes, Austrian Film Museum, 0202–09–0174. 86. Roepke, Privat-Vorstellung, 216. 87. R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (French, 1980; English version, New Work: Hill and Wang, 2010), 76. 88. According to Barthes, the photographic referent in cinema “does not make a claim in favor of its reality” (ibid., 89). However, Barthes was referring to feature films. His remarks do not apply to the filmic medium per se and especially not to amateur films intended to document filmmakers’ experiences. 89. See Gross-Talmon, Filmrezepte für den Hausgebrauch, 17.

Selected Bibliography Dimendberg, E. “The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity,” October 73 (1995): 90–137. Guerin, F. Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Roepke, M. Privat-Vorstellung. Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945. Hildesheim: Olms, 2006. Schneider, A. Die Stars sind wir. Heimkino als filmische Praxis. Marburg: Schüren, 2004. Swett, P. E., C. Ross, and F. d’Almeida, eds. Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Zeller, T. Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.

10 The Media of Occupation German Books and Photographs in France, 1940–44 Julia S. Torrie

In January 1941, a newspaper for German soldiers in France reported that a Feldbuchhandlung (soldiers’ bookstore) had opened in Paris. Along with classics of German literature and regime-friendly general works, the store offered a selection of Frankreich-Bücher (France books), publications that answered soldiers’ desire to learn about the country they now occupied. Guides to France and its capital were finding eager readers, but as one German newspaper put it, books on France “would sell more if there were additional suitable works available. For the time being, these are lacking.”1 Publishers rushed to respond to the high demand for France books. Especially in 1941 and 1942, and continuing through early 1944, many Germanlanguage books on France appeared. The first were translations of existing French works or lightly edited reprints of prewar material for visitors from the Reich. Some were written by collaborationist French authors, but most, whose authorship is discussed below, were published by the occupation regime itself. The ready availability of paper and printing facilities, as well as the relative “peacefulness” of occupied Western Europe, encouraged the preparation and dissemination of these works to soldiers and the civilian personnel who accompanied them to France. For Hitler’s regime, publishing books about France furthered objectives that went well beyond answering the desire for reading material identified by the soldiers’ newspaper mentioned above. Examining these publications underlines, first, that books retained their importance in the Third Reich, despite the growth of newer media like radio, film, and television.2 Second, it highlights the extent to which media in the Third Reich relied on popular participation. These

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occupation-era publications addressed frontline soldiers and military administrators, and their publishers drew on such individuals’ own texts and photographs to develop their content. Finally, in a context where it may be difficult to apply traditional means of judging media reception, we can use the interplay of audience and book producers as evidence of positive popular responses to regime-sanctioned media. Books about France highlight the reciprocal dynamic that was a key part of National Socialist propaganda-making, and they confirm that wartime media products were, for the most part, well received. Gauging reactions to media in the Third Reich, especially in wartime, is challenging but not impossible. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Harvey, Corey Ross has pointed out with regard to cinema and mass culture in the Weimar Republic that to understand the “social impact of commercial entertainments” historians must go beyond the “discourse surrounding them” to examine “their patterns of availability and uptake, their potential to exert any socially unifying effect, as well as the wider social and economic context in which they were embedded.”3 In this chapter, I argue that we can gain a better understanding of how media were received in wartime Germany by examining the uptake of France books among occupying soldiers. As evidence of this uptake, I draw attention to a dynamic of reciprocity in which the regime solicited soldiers’ amateur writing and photography, which then found their way into the France books soldiers read and bought. In circular fashion, themes from France books then moved back into soldiers’ amateur literary and photographic productions. Positive audience reception is discernable in both directions of this exchange. Klaus Latzel has traced the extent to which themes from National Socialist propaganda permeated soldiers’ letters and photographs. Comparing evidence from soldiers’ letters from World War I and World War II, Latzel reveals that the language used to describe the population of Russia became harsher and more racially oriented as the Third Reich intensified older rhetoric about “Asiatic hordes” in the USSR’s east.4 Along similar lines with photography, both the special exhibition Foto-Feldpost: geknipste Kriegserlebnisse at the DeutschRussisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst and the traveling exhibit Fremde im Visier offer examples of how soldiers took up themes from official propaganda, personalized and adapted them, and reproduced them visually.5 The differences between photographs of France and the Soviet Union, especially, underline that soldiers came to both places expecting to see things they had been taught were typical of the locations. In France, they saw cultural monuments, pretty women, food, wine, and attractive rural landscapes, and they photographed them. In the Soviet Union, in contrast, they took pictures of wide-open “empty” landscapes, simple peasant huts, snow, mud, and Soviets who looked poor, dirty, and “Mongolian.”6 Like all photographs, these images were made by selecting what to include and what to omit from the frame. They were constructions rather than reflections of reality. Writing of photography in the Third Reich more broadly, Maiken Umbach has argued, “private and professional photographs—images made for

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personal consumption, as well as those intended for political propaganda or commercial advertising—existed in a relationship with one another.” She adds, “But this relationship was not a straightforward story of ‘influence’; rather, it involved multiple appropriations and reappropriations of visual templates, even overtly propagandistic ones, which, in turn, were constructed from older conventions and pictorial precedents.”7 Frances Guerin, for her part, has pointed out, “when amateur photographs demonstrated a commitment to [the] ideals [of National Socialism] . . . it was common for the unofficial image to be appropriated, manipulated, and reproduced as official propaganda.”8 Umbach noted that many empty photo albums designed for soldiers and other citizens were commercially available, which suggests the regime was confident that private photography would be productive, rather than damaging, to propaganda efforts.9 German soldiers on all fronts were encouraged to take snapshots, something that contrasted with the Soviet armed forces, in which, despite the vigorous photography of propagandists, Red Army soldiers themselves were forbidden to take pictures.10 In both letters and photographs, then, it is possible to discern a reciprocal dynamic of “appropriations and reappropriations,” reception and production, that was also influenced by older tropes. Books about France offer opportunities to trace how this dynamic played out in print, and they show how it can be used to gauge qualitatively how National Socialist media was received by soldiers.

France Books: Tools to Manage Occupiers’ Attitudes toward France Because radio and film became more common in the interwar period, it might be tempting to assume that the role of books in the media landscape declined. Certainly, scholars of media have tended to focus on newer technologies while historians of culture and the arts in the twentieth century have concentrated on branches other than literature.11 At the same time, Stephan Füssel suggests that though there was talk of a “book crisis” (“Bücherkrise”) in the 1920s, in fact books remained popular.12 Far from disappearing, the role of books changed, and book publishers adapted. Literature was broadcast on the radio, and stories found their way into films. Books continued to be an important source of entertainment and leisure, not to mention information. They were relatively portable, could be used and shared at any time, and had a lasting materiality that made them pleasing gifts and souvenirs. During the Third Reich, an average of 20,000 new books appeared in Germany each year, more than in any other country in Europe. Germany enjoyed a nearly 100 percent literacy rate, and the National Socialist regime considered literature, along with other media, “a vital form of propaganda.”13 After 1939, propaganda was deployed to encourage participation in the war effort, celebrate victories, and frame and give meaning to the conflict.14 The many similarities between France and Germany, as well as France’s status as one of the most cultured nations of Europe, meant Germans felt a strong need to

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legitimize their presence on French soil. They used books, alongside other media, to further this goal. Who wrote the many books about France that appeared during the German occupation, and how did they come to be published? Some were prepared for Nazi Party organizations, like Kraft durch Freude, and others were written by collaborationist French citizens.15 The largest group of these books, however, was published with the direct support of the Wehrmacht and prepared either by the propaganda companies; their individual members; or members of the troops, apparently on their own initiative. These wartime publications were designed for both present and future use. In the same way the Afrikabücher about Germany’s former colonies produced in the interwar period offered a specific view of colonialism, France books offered soldiers (and through them, their families) a set of lenses through which to interpret wartime experiences.16 Entertaining and educative on the surface, they justified the 1940 invasion and outlined specific approaches to France and the project of occupation. Africa books memorialized colonies since lost while France books accompanied a new imperialism still underway, but both were pervaded by a similar sense of Germany’s world-historical importance and role. In contrast to Eastern Europe, where Germans felt culturally superior, in France many occupiers found the local culture attractive. Though Moritz Föllmer rightly states that many Germans exhibited “cultural arrogance” in France, and the official line was that German culture was superior, he underestimates the attraction French culture simultaneously exercised upon occupiers.17 Working along two potentially conflicting tracks at once, France books suggested, on the one hand, that French culture was degenerate and any valuable elements, such as Gothic cathedrals or Burgundian fortresses, were in fact German in their origins. On the other hand, recognizing that many occupiers were fascinated by France and wanted to admire French landscapes and historical monuments and consume them as tourists, they also developed an image of Germans as culturally sensitive conquerors who were uniquely placed to appreciate France’s treasures.18 Similar books existed for other occupied areas with messages that varied according to the area’s position in the constellation of wartime German dependencies. Relatively little has been written about them, although a thoughtful essay by Jane Caplan traces how the 1943 Baedeker guide to the Generalgouvernement used silence about the persecution of Jews and others to elide present and future National Socialist visions of this territory.19 Across Europe, from Norway to Italy, France to the Baltic states, books were deployed to downplay or render invisible German atrocities and shape occupiers’ understanding of the land they controlled.20 Most of the thirty-one France books examined for this chapter were prepared by propaganda company members at the behest of the German army.21 Although they were distributed from the top down, France books were shaped by a process of mutual exchange and influence involving occupation soldiers’ own written and photographic documents. There was a deliberate blurring of the line between

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official and unofficial authorship, as works originating with propaganda companies were designed to look like the products of ordinary soldiers, and those prepared by individual occupiers carried the same messages as official propaganda. Together, official and occupier-generated sources formed soldiers’ perceptions during the war and aimed to consolidate specific memories of occupation for future generations. There is little scholarship on either propaganda directed at soldiers in German-occupied territories more generally or on France books.22 Daniel Uziel’s discussion of the propaganda that accompanied soldiers’ labor on the so-called Westwall during the Phony War indicates how important it was to show German troops hard at work, well cared for, and not bored as they carried out defense tasks, themes that recurred in later occupation propaganda.23 Specific France books appear in scholarship on soldier tourism and images of France in Nazi Germany, but the role of these books in promoting morale among soldiers and consent for the Nazi regime remains to be explored.24 Although morale mattered enormously to the prosecution of the war, most analyses focus on soldiers’ combat behavior and violence.25 Questions about occupiers’ attitudes are significant because occupation duty in France, often while recovering from fighting elsewhere, was one of Wehrmacht soldiers’ most common experiences. Moreover, propaganda for soldiers in France draws particular attention to the participatory quality of media in the Third Reich. Hitler’s regime was both highly responsive to popular opinion and permanently thirsty for civic engagement among members of the putative “Volksgemeinschaft.”26 Citizens became involved in an ongoing series of community-reinforcing activities, and the authorities used plebiscites in the early years, and the reports of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) during the war, to check on the popular mood.27 In wartime, when many of the festivities that had marked the Nazi year ground to a halt, propaganda’s role in reinforcing popular engagement in national projects grew. Books for soldiers in France addressed them at eye-level, explaining and legitimizing the regime’s activities in simple terms. Not only did propagandists use motifs from amateur works, but soldiers picked up themes from official propaganda and themselves became involved in making propaganda. Contributing to publications about France for soldiers became, like other forms of civic engagement, a way to demonstrate enthusiasm for and commitment to the regime and its goals. Together, propaganda developed for and by soldiers underlines the Third Reich’s ongoing ability to mobilize Germans well into the war years.

Reading and Writing Publications for Occupiers in France Almost as soon as the 1940 armistice was signed, propagandists began making publications about France available to occupying soldiers. The glossy biweekly magazine Der deutsche Wegleiter was printed from 15 July 1940 right through to mid-August 1944. Sold for just six francs, it listed entertainment options and

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attractions and included short stories and articles about events and sights in Paris. The German embassy in Paris considered the print run of 6,000 copies, limited by paper restrictions, to be “far from sufficient.”28 The Wegleiter was an up-to-the minute publication with a short shelf life. High hopes for Franco-German collaboration during the first half of the occupation favored the printing of more extensive guides to Paris; books about other cities, like Rouen, Dijon, and Nîmes; and regional works on Normandy, Brittany, and the Southwest.29 The high demand for such books is suggested by an anecdote that claimed in 1940, when the men of an air force base in Wiesbaden heard that they were being posted to France, “suddenly there were no Baedeker guides to France to be had in the whole of Wiesbaden.”30 In addition to books narrowly focused on tourism, lavishly illustrated publications about landscape and architecture were joined by autobiographical accounts of the 1940 invasion and the experience of being an occupier in France. Even as they entertained and informed, France books exploited seemingly innocuous formats to transmit regime-friendly ideas. They might include an account of French history that emphasized the aggressions of the Anglo-Saxon enemy, highlighted the flaws of past French regimes, and lingered lovingly over previous periods of German domination and occupation. Treating French culture with a mixture of admiration for anything linked to a shared classical, medieval, or “Nordic” heritage and stark denigration of the rest, the books imparted a simulacrum of cultural literacy that helped occupying soldiers appear, and believe themselves to be, an informed and educated group. Turning the former “Grande Nation” into a foil to display German achievements, France books constructed Germany’s victory and the occupation as events of world-historical significance and encouraged positive memories of the conflict. Soldiers were meant to keep these books and share them with their families, developing and maintaining long-lasting individual and familial memories of the war.31 Therefore, as France books legitimized the occupation, they also nourished overall consent for the war and reinforced the participatory quality of Nazi dictatorship. Bretagne: Ein Buch für die Deutsche Kriegsmarine, which appeared in 1941, was published by the Fifth Company of Naval Propaganda Detachment West. The book was a collection of short essays interspersed with watercolors of local landscapes and sights. A foreword explained that the volume was intended to help soldiers get to know Brittany. Producing it had not interfered with the company’s duties, for “all the essays were written alongside daily work and without specific source material.”32 Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a member of Naval Propaganda Detachment West and future author of the book that became the feature film Das Boot, contributed an essay on Saint-Nazaire.33 Bretagne was typical in that it combined informative texts with overtly propagandistic messages that underlined the heroic work of the German Navy impeding British shipping in the Atlantic. Bretagne collected essays from several members of propaganda companies. Other books written by individual members of propaganda companies ran along similar lines in terms of content and message. Perhaps the most interesting pub-

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lications were those that were, or purported to be, the work of occupiers who were not members of propaganda companies. In 1941, Die Niedernormandie: Führer für deutsche Soldaten appeared. Written by Leutnant Andreas Reindl with drawings by Feldwebel Karl Gossner, the book included nothing to suggest that these men were anything but regular occupation troops. In style, it was more of a guidebook than Bretagne, containing short descriptions of sites a soldier might wish to visit near his quarters. At the end of the book, the author apologized for its incompleteness, citing a lack of time and lack of access to sources due to wartime. He referred readers to a list of reference works comprised entirely of books in French and ended with a quotation from Napoleon I about the emperor’s love of Normandy, a region that “is the truest of France.”34 Along with its Francophilia (a feature of such publications that by 1943 was raising questions at the German embassy in Paris), Reindl’s book was marked by its friendly, personal tone. Like Bretagne, it offered information in an approachable, comradely way that reinforced regime-sanctioned messages.35 We cannot confirm that Reindl and Gossner really were the ordinary soldiers they purported to be, and the book may have been as much a compilation of translated French sources as an original work. It carried no official endorsements, and part of its appeal clearly stemmed from the fact that it was not highly propagandistic and seemed to come from normal occupation soldiers. If, in fact, it did not, its authors made considerable efforts to make it appear that it did. Other publications also established credibility by purporting to be the work of ordinary soldiers, including the 1941 book Im Westen: Aufzeichnungen eines Landsers aus dem Feldzug in Frankreich, whose author was listed as Bernd Hardeweg. The volume collected short narratives about soldiers serving in Germany’s western fortifications during the Phony War and then participating in the invasion of France and the subsequent occupation. Establishing an intimate authorial voice, the book began, “In the late summer of 1939 we headed out westward . . . you and me and Hans, Ernst and Otto and all the others,” to take up positions on Germany’s western border.36 Subsequent vignettes described the toil and terrors of battle, the sorrow of losing a comrade, homesickness, and the glorious death of a fighter pilot destined for “Valhalla.”37 These portrayals of common experiences seemed to express a soldier’s private thoughts and longings, yet the book also contained political messages. In a story about the joy of seeing the ocean for the first time, the narrator seamlessly recounted that as the advancing soldiers crossed Western Europe, they “carried the yearning of millions of German soldiers of the [First] World War with them until they realized them in a single dash.”38 Reaching the sea, completing the unfinished conquest of France, and revising the outcome of World War I were important propaganda themes, and the story, the core of which was a soldier’s amazement at the ocean’s haunting sounds and scents, ended with the roar of aircraft flying toward England. The book’s attraction lay in its apparent authenticity. Its short, evocative stories made the work’s underlying messages less blatant and, thus, perhaps easier for soldiers to digest.

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Part of the appeal of such books lay in how they formulated thoughts and desires for soldiers incapable of writing about their own, or at least incapable of doing so as eloquently. Most privates did not have the literary skills displayed in Im Westen. Perhaps, therefore, it is unsurprising to discover that ‘Bernd Hardeweg’ was a pseudonym of Bernhard Schulz, an infantryman in his late twenties who had worked as a journalist and was a published author before he went to war. Schulz served until the war’s end and continued his successful career as a journalist and writer afterward.39 Although he did not join a propaganda company, neither was he an entirely everyday soldier. While he served in France, on the Eastern Front, and later in military clerical roles in Norway and Germany, he prepared five full-length publications.40 He also appeared on the radio. In March 1941, he wrote to his future wife, Gerda, that he had just received an award from his divisional commander. When Gerda pressed him for details, Schulz explained that he had received the prize for the best “report from first-hand experience” (Erlebnisbericht) in a “divisional contest, that was carried out in a unified way in the occupied area, in all of the ‘arts.’”41 The prize was 150 Reichsmarks, which, he reported to Gerda, “we turned into sparkling red wine at the canteen the other day.”42 “The prize was not worth any more than that either,” he added, drily.43 It is quite possible the prize was awarded for writing what became Im Westen, which was published in December of the same year. Schulz noted, moreover, that the contest invited soldiers to enter “writing, drawing, composing, inventing, photography, etc.”44 Schulz’s overall stance toward the regime is difficult to decipher. The fact that, despite his obvious talent, he never joined a propaganda company suggests he was not a convinced National Socialist, yet the tone and style of Im Westen aligned well with what the regime expected of its authors. Schulz’s correspondence from the war years gives clues to his attitude and, above all, suggests the extent to which soldiers’ work was solicited and then reframed by National Socialist censors and propagandists. In a letter from France written just before he was transferred to the Eastern Front, Schulz told Gerda that his volume of short stories, which must have been Im Westen, had just appeared. He said he liked the way it looked: [O]nly I dislike the contents. One after the other so many military offices and propaganda bureaus have marked it up, improved it, turned it around and bent it back again that my head is spinning and I do not recognize my own children. . . . I do not use words like struggle, duty, fidelity, honor, immortality, glory, etc. and certainly not ‘Valhalla,’ but there they are standing peacefully side by side in my book, and precisely where I least wanted to see them. This is how one is powerfully put off even writing.45

Schulz went on to say how relieved he was that he had chosen a “pseudonym” (Deckname) for this book, rather than his own “good honest name Schulz.”46 He added that he hoped the book might at least earn some money, for his goal was to make a little nest egg for himself and Gerda for when the war was over. Clearly, then, Schulz believed that his work had been tampered with, and he had reservations about it being rewritten and instrumentalized for propaganda

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purposes. In his postwar writing, Schulz exhibited a somewhat conflicted attitude toward Im Westen. On the one hand, he was proud enough of it to emphasize its authenticity by referring to it as “diary notations” and to claim that he had written it “always while on duty, my weapon ready to grab between my knees.”47 On the other hand, he reiterated his complaints that the censors had run rough-shod over his prose. The book of Bernhard Schulz, alias Bernd Hardeweg, underlines the caution required in establishing the authorship of wartime works. It shows, too, that such works might have been rewritten and sculpted by official censors to the dismay of their authors. In the end, however, it probably did not matter that Hardeweg was not exactly the commonplace soldier he purported to be. The fact that his book appeared to come from an ordinary occupation soldier gave it credibility, and the comradely tone to the average soldier he was able to develop made his stories ideal vehicles for propaganda messages, whether he had put those messages there himself, or not. Administrators in charge of propaganda and morale in France recognized the value of material that came, or appeared to come, from ordinary soldiers. If we can take Schulz’s complaint at face value, his book demonstrates these authorities’ skill at modifying material from soldier-contributors to suit official purposes. At the same time, motifs soldiers encountered in official propaganda found their way into stories they wrote themselves. Both created a cycle of appropriation and reappropriation that reinforced the propaganda’s messages. Equally, Schulz’s story suggests the skepticism with which occupiers might have approached official texts. Knowing how his words had been altered, Schulz might not have believed everything he read or saw.

Amateur Photography and Reciprocal Propaganda Production The reciprocal dynamic we see at work with Schulz’s book can also be observed in occupiers’ photography. Propaganda photographers constructed the meaning of the French campaign visually with images that depicted Germany’s 1940 invasion as glorious and the occupiers’ treatment of the defeated enemy as chivalrous.48 To counter notions left over from World War I that Germans were barbaric, these images underlined occupiers’ appreciation of France’s cultural monuments and their supposed gentility and generosity toward the population. Soldiers took amateur photographs that reiterated these themes.49 The best known photograph of Hitler’s whirlwind tour of Paris in 1940 was the image of the Führer standing in front of the Eiffel tower that appeared on the cover of a popular book about the visit (figure 10.1).50 Having seen the book cover, occupation soldiers shot photos that recreated the composition countless times, taking some trouble to place their subjects at the same spot, standing in the same way, hands folded in front, looking straight at the camera, the Eiffel Tower in the background (figure 10.2). Although it may have reflected a slightly

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Figure 10.1. Cover of a commemorative book of images by Hitler’s official photographer. Heinrich Hoffmann, Mit Hitler im Westen (Munich: Zeitgeschichte Verlag, 1940).

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Figure 10.2. Soldiers standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Photograph in an anonymous album, “Ehren-Chronik,” courtesy of the Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, album number KH 206542.

cheeky attitude rather than a serious commitment to the regime, this popular imitation showed how much propaganda permeated occupiers’ consciousness, and it revealed how they contributed to propaganda-making by reenacting iconic images and reiterating the tropes of official photography in their own snapshots. Apparently not satisfied with occupiers’ casual participation in propagandamaking, the German authorities in France sought to encourage soldiers’ photography and harness it to control and amplify the propaganda’s effects. The contest in which Schulz had participated was clearly part of these efforts. In spring 1942, Heinz Lorenz, an administrator in charge of “Truppenbetreuung” (“troop well-being”), organized an exhibition of soldiers’ photography in Paris.51 The number of such photographers in France was “legion,” Lorenz wrote in a fore-

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word to the exhibition’s companion volume, Soldaten fotografieren Frankreich. He added, “everyone would like to hold onto what he has seen and experienced in this surely most meaningful phase of his life and to take it home as a visible memento for later.”52 Appealing to occupiers’ desire to remember their experiences from a period framed as the most meaningful of their lives, Lorenz promised a collection of the “best” photographs submitted by German soldiers in France. Although the photographs in Lorenz’s book seemed to have been shot spontaneously by ordinary soldiers, like in Bernhard Schulz’s book, the images were in fact carefully selected and curated to highlight certain positive aspects of occupiers’ experience and leave out other, less positive or desirable ones. In the fall of 1941, the authorities had already staged an exhibition of paintings and drawings that led to the book Frankreich: Ein Erlebnis des deutschen Soldaten.53 Both this and the next year’s photography exhibition were organized by Lorenz in order to collect the work of talented members of the military and display it for occupation soldiers visiting Paris. Both were accompanied by catalogues that widened the exhibitions’ reach and valorized their participants by publicizing their names and works. Better still, these volumes were attractive souvenirs for soldiers. They might also send copies home; relatives and friends would then share in an occupation project depicted as meaningful and glorious. In the first of the two exhibition volumes, watercolors and pencil sketches alternated with short texts. As in the case of Schulz, the authors were not quite the average soldiers that the book’s foreword implied.54 They included the famous author Ernst Jünger as well as lesser-known writers like Gerhard Nebel, Gert Buchheit, and Kurt Kölsch, all of whom had already published work before the war and would do so again after 1945.55 Their texts recalled moments of combat; recounted the history of Burgundy as a German story; and further followed propaganda lines by describing France as beautiful but degenerate, attractive on the surface yet rotten within. The accompanying paintings, whose artists are harder to trace because only their last names and first initials are provided, portrayed French landscapes, churches, and historical monuments interspersed with paintings of everyday, light-hearted military themes. In the photography volume, images of tourist sites like Mont Saint-Michel alternated with shots of picturesque Parisian streets, idyllic landscapes, and rural people engaged in pastoral activities like fishing (figure 10.3). They depicted France as charming but behind the times and passive to the point of somnolence. Contrasting pictures showed German soldiers marching across a Parisian square and walking in orderly rows down a flight of stairs (figure 10.4), only they, and not the French, seemingly capable of attending to the serious, masculine business of war.56 According to the detailed credits at the back of the book, the photographs were taken by occupiers from all branches of service, occasional civilian support personnel, and two female auxiliaries.57 Interestingly, the accompanying texts, a series of light-hearted short stories about occupiers, were anonymous. They may have been written by the editor, Lorenz, or others responsible for Truppenbetreu-

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Figure 10.3. “Fishermen on the Seine” (“Angler an der Seine”). Photograph by Air Communications Auxiliary Zwanowetz, in H. Lorenz, ed., Soldaten fotografieren Frankreich, ein Bilderbuch mit Erzählungen (Paris: Wegleiter Verlag, 1943), 28.

ung in Paris. The decision to list the photographers by name and rank but make the written material anonymous suggests that the authorities wanted to reinforce the reciprocal dynamic of National Socialist propaganda-making while avoiding the impression, which the earlier volume may have given, that the contributors were members of the elite. The photography book, like both earlier exhibitions, consciously addressed the full range of occupying forces, as well as those who were in France to support and assist them.

Conclusions Together, the art and photography exhibitions and their accompanying volumes underlined the degree to which German occupation troops were willing to participate in propaganda projects. As with the contest Bernhard Schulz won in 1941, military authorities invited occupation soldiers to send in their writing, artwork, and photography, and many accepted. Such contests were an important part of Truppenbetreuung in France.58 In Italy, as late as January 1945, the regime solicited soldiers’ photography and reprinted a selection of shots in a publication

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Figure 10.4. “Troops and Stairs” (“Truppen und Treppen”). Photograph by Lance Corporal (Gefreiter) O. Lewe, in Lorenz, Soldaten fotografieren Frankreich, 47.

for the troops.59 Such contests kept soldiers busy, reassured them and their families that the regime valued artistic abilities as well as military ones, and reinforced Germans’ sense of themselves as cultured individuals. Rather than simply duplicating propaganda themes, soldiers adapted, modified, and personalized them according to their circumstances. Exhibitions and contests allowed the regime

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to develop a corpus of purportedly authentic texts and images that could be displayed in public and later compiled into commemorative books. Propaganda experts like Lorenz organized exhibitions, selected images, and prepared and massaged stories to ensure the right messages were communicated to occupation soldiers. Soldiers’ voluntary participation in this reciprocal dynamic is strong evidence of the positive reception of at least some types of National Socialist media production well into the war. During World War I, Peter Fritzsche has pointed out, Germany saw a tremendous outpouring of written accounts, scrapbooks, poems, and letters by ordinary citizens. Every day, “some ten million letters, postcards, telegrams, and packages reached the front, and every day nearly seven million were sent back home.”60 The population valued such material, which constituted a “people’s archive” that contrasted with the elite, government-focused archives of the past. Soldiers’ letters, specifically, were so prized that “by the end of the war, over ninety-seven separate editions of war letters had been assembled, published and purchased.”61 The fact that the letters offered the population “their own vernacular knowledge of the war” that contrasted with heavily censored official news, Fritzsche argues, made them especially attractive and convincing. Recognizing that civilian morale was weakening during World War I, the German government established a “national network of observation stations” to track public opinion, but the authorities lacked the means to do very much with the information they collected.62 The Nazi dictatorship, for its part, left very little to chance. Its focus on propaganda was linked to the desire not to repeat what the authorities saw as the government’s mistakes in World War I. Instead of allowing soldiers’ everyday writing, photography, and artwork to emerge organically and then be collected and published, as the government had in World War I, Nazi authorities actively solicited soldiers’ creative work. Selecting images and stories and making ideological interventions, they developed propaganda whose effectiveness relied on masquerading as the same “vernacular knowledge” that Germans during World War I, in the absence of trustworthy official information, had valued so highly. Thus, France books give insights into media directed at soldiers in wartime. They underline the lasting importance of books as sources of information and entertainment even in an era of new media like radio and film. The reciprocal dynamic apparent in these works was a key feature of Nazi media production more generally. Though difficult to quantify, this dynamic itself suggests the significant breadth and depth of media permeation, and it confirms that soldiers generally responded positively to the regime-sanctioned publications they consumed. The fact that Bernhard Schulz and his comrades entered their work in contests testifies to the soldiers’ willingness to participate in propaganda projects. If soldiers photographed each other in the same posture as the Führer in front of the Eiffel Tower, it was because they chose to demonstrate their loyalty, and perhaps their enthusiasm for an expansionist war, this way. Like Hitler, they also wanted to portray themselves in front of Paris’s most iconic monument, and perhaps to

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be later remembered as conquerors. They saw photographs, read France books, and took in propaganda that underlined the legitimacy of a German presence in Western Europe. They then personalized and reproduced this propaganda in their own photography and writing, which, in turn, were inputs to the next round of propaganda. Soldiers’ participation was both a marker of positive media reception and a key ingredient in the regime’s media production. Certainly, as the newspaper article cited at the outset suggested, occupiers wanted to read more France books; in fact, they wanted to help write France books themselves. Julia S. Torrie holds an A.M and Ph.D. from Harvard University and is Professor of History at St. Thomas University (Canada). Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Europe and the world. She is the author of German Soldiers and the Occupation of France (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the occupation of France through soldiers’ diaries, letters, and photographs. A previous monograph, “For Their Own Good”: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945 (Berghahn Books, 2010), compared civilian evacuations in the two countries. Torrie is a 2022–23 fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study in Freiburg, Germany, and a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes, France. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Humboldt Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). While continuing to research and publish on the era of World War II, she is preparing a history of the intersection of industrial freezing and imperialism.

Notes 1. “Ein Stück geistiger Heimat in Paris,” Der Durchbruch: Soldatenzeitung an der Westfront, 22 January 1941, Bundesarchiv (BArch): RHD 69/80. All translations are mine. 2. The roles of film and television in occupied France have been explored in B. Bowles, “German Newsreel Propaganda in France, 1940–1944,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24, no. 1 (2004): 45–67; C. Graham, “‘Sieg Im Westen’ (1941): Interservice and Bureaucratic Propaganda Rivalries in Nazi Germany,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 9, no. 1 (1989): 19–45; K. Winker, Fernsehen unterm Hakenkreuz: Organisation, Programm, Personal (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), 371–414. 3. C. Ross, “Mass Culture and Divided Audiences: Cinema and Social Change in Inter-War Germany,” Past & Present 193, no. 1 (2006): 157–95, 159. 4. K. Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten—nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis—Kriegserfahrung, 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998). 5. Catalogues for these exhibits are in P. Jahn and U. Schmiegelt, eds., Foto-Feldpost: geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939–1945 (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 2000); P. Bopp, Fremde im Visier: Fotoalben aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2009). 6. Jahn and Schmiegelt, Foto-Feldpost. See also J. Torrie, German Soldiers and the Occupation of France, 1940–1944 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 198–201.

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7. M. Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology in German Photo Albums, 1933–1945,” Central European History 48, Special Issue 03 (2015): 335–65, 364. 8. F. Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 75. 9. Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology,” 348. 10. P. Jahn, “Vorwort,” in Foto-Feldpost, ed. Jahn and Schmiegelt, 7. This Soviet rule appears to have been widely disregarded. On the regulations surrounding German soldiers’ photography, see Torrie, German Soldiers, 135–36. 11. J. Petropoulos has pointed out with regard to the Third Reich that literature “has sometimes seemed to exist in the shadows of other art forms during the period.” J. Petropoulos, “Architecture and the Arts,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. R. Gellately, 119–56 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 146. The focus on new technology among media scholars is apparent, e.g., in D. Gethmann, “Radiophone Stimminszenierungen im Nationalsozialismus: eine medienwissenschaftliche Perspektive,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 8 (2011): 277–85; C. Zimmermann, “From Propaganda to Modernization: Media Policy and Media Audiences under National Socialism,” German History 24, no. 3 (2006): 431–54; C. Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 12. S. Füssel, “Das Buch in der Medienkonkurrenz der Zwanziger Jahre,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 71 (1996): 322–40, 322. 13. Petropoulos, “Architecture and the Arts,” 146. 14. This was especially important at the beginning of a relatively unpopular war, since the Nazis thought that a key lesson of World War I was that popular support was essential to avoid defeat. 15. The latter works tended to focus more narrowly on facilitating tourism, or they made photographs of France available to occupiers in a German-language volume. Examples include D. Ogrizek, ed., Pariser Nächte (Paris: Odé Verlag, 1941); D. Ogrizek, Paris, Frankreich Nord und West (Paris: Odé Verlag, 1941); R. Schall and J. Baugé, Frankreich: ein Bilderbuch (Paris: Imprimerie E. Desfossés-Néogravure, 1942). See also H.-E. Bühler, Der Frontbuchhandel 1939–1945: Organisationen, Kompetenzen, Verlage, Bücher. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 223–28. 16. B. Schilling, Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 17. M. Föllmer, “Ein Leben wie im Traum”: Kultur im Dritten Reich (Munich: Beck, 2016), 164–66. 18. On occupiers’ tourism and consumption, see J. Torrie, “‘Our Rear Area Probably Lived Too Well:’ Tourism and the German Occupation of France, 1940–1944,’ Journal of Tourism History 3, no. 3 (2011): 309–30; Torrie, German Soldiers, chs. 2–3. 19. J. Caplan, “Jetzt judenfrei.” Writing Tourism in Nazi-Occupied Poland (London: German Historical Institute, 2013). On issues of race in books for soldiers in Paris and elsewhere, see Torrie, German Soldiers, 118–24, 200. 20. Examples include H. Poll, Das Land der Mitternachtssonne: Erinnerungen an Norwegen 1940 (Oslo: Haraldsson, 1940); L. G., Kurzer Führer durch Rom (Florence: Cya, 1943); Hoffmeister, Riga: Ein Führer für deutsche Soldaten (Riga: n.p., 1941). See also R. Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Torrie, German Soldiers, ch. 3. 21. This research focuses on books about the occupation itself rather than the invasion of 1940. Seven of the thirty-one books were either direct translations or French-produced

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27. 28.

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works. Two were published by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Workers’ Front, DAF), one by the Organisation Todt, and at least sixteen were prepared by military propagandists. As discussed below, the exact authorship of some works is unclear. David Welch’s pioneering work focused primarily on the prewar period and on questions about workers, youth, and the cohesion of the “Volksgemeinschaft” (national community). D. Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (New York: Routledge, 1993). Subsequent scholars, too, often gave short shrift to the war years, emphasizing, like Clemens Zimmermann, production difficulties, censorship, and readers’ growing mistrust, rather than examining this era in detail. Zimmermann, “From Propaganda to Modernization,” 454. Even if it was directed primarily at the home front, this material nonetheless influenced soldiers due to the many connections between the two groups. Similarly, propaganda meant for occupiers also had an impact on their relatives at home. D. Uziel, “Propaganda, Kriegsberichterstattung und die Wehrmacht: Stellenwert und Funktion der Propagandatruppen im NS-Staat,” in Die Kamera als Waffe: Propagandabilder des Zweiten Weltkrieges, ed. R. Rother and J. Prokasky, 13–36 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2010); D. Uziel, The Propaganda Warriors: The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). W. Geiger, L’image de la France dans l’Allemagne nazie 1933–1945 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999), 191–205, 358–85; B. Gordon, “Ist Gott Französisch? Germans, Tourism and Occupied France 1940–1944,” Modern and Contemporary France NS 4, no. 3 (1996): 287–98; B. Gordon, “Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II,” Annals of Tourism Research 25, no. 3 (1998): 616–38. S. Neitzel and H. Welzer, Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2012); F. Römer, Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht von Innen (Munich: Piper, 2012). Historians who have asked questions about popular responses to Nazism and queried the strength and cohesion of the “Volksgemeinschaft” during the war have typically focused on the popular mood on the home front and the extent to which Germans in the Reich continued to support the war effort—e.g., N. Gregor, “A Schicksalsgemeinschaft? Allied Bombing, Civilian Morale, and Social Dissolution in Nuremberg, 1942–45,” The Historical Journal 43, no. 4 (2000): 1051–70. On the issue of consent more generally, see R. Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Like the German Democratic Republic as analyzed by M. Fulbrook, Hitler’s regime also might be described as a “participatory dictatorship.” M. Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 12. Robert Gellately calls it a “plebiscitary dictatorship.” R. Gellately, “Introduction: The Third Reich,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, 7. The contributions to this volume by Bernhard Fulda (Chapter 8) and Peter Fritzsche (Chapter 5) also explore the regime’s reliance on popular mobilization. H. Richter and R. Jessen, “Elections, Plebiscites, and Festivals,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, 85–117. At ninety-six pages per issue, the Wegleiter generated monthly revenues of between 80,000 and 100,000 francs, probably mainly from advertising. Embassy staff noted in 1943 that this amount had been twice as high before paper allotments were cut. Note, G. Hibbelen, “Aufzeichnung für Herrn Gesandten Schleier,” 20 November 1943, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes: DBP/1141b.

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29. See, e.g., Armee Oberkommando Bordeaux, Kleiner Wegweiser für die Soldaten der deutschen Südwestarmee an der Atlantikküste (Bordeaux: Delmas, 1940); F. Medicus and H. Hörmann, Kathedralen in Frankreich unter deutschem Schutz (Paris: Wegleiter, 1942); F. Medicus and H. Hörmann, Schlösser in Frankreich (Paris: Wegleiter 1944). Additional works are cited below. 30. H. Malberg and W. von Niebelschütz, eds., Stabsquartier Etampes: ein Erinnerungsbuch (Paris: Imprimeries Parisiennes Réunies, 1942), 5. On Baedeker guides, compare Caplan, “Jetzt judenfrei,” 11–15. 31. Schilling writes, “every time Afrikabücher were read, every time children and adults leafed through the illustrated pages or gazed at the colorful covers, the memory of the German colonial past was ‘recharged’ through the cultural framework of the present, and the memory of colonialism kept alive.” Schilling, Postcolonial Germany, 40. Similarly, France books survived the war and perhaps formed part of private familial archives long after 1945. 32. Anon., “Vorwort,” in Bretagne: ein Buch für die deutsche Kriegsmarine, ed. H. Droege (Marine Propaganda Abteilung West, 1941), 1. 33. Buchheim described Saint-Nazaire’s rise in less than a century from a small fishing village to a major shipbuilding center and concluded, “Her face is not beautiful, it is black, dark, tormented by difficult and arduous work, and still it grabs you with its unvarnished truthfulness.” L.-G. Buchheim, “St. Nazaire,” in Bretagne, ed. Droege, 18; Das Boot (1982, Bavaria Film, dir. W. Petersen). On Buchheim, see also A. Holzer, “Die oben, wir unten: Das Boot, der Krieg, die Fotografie: Der U-Boot-Krieg als deutsche Heldengeschichte?,” in Mit der Kamera bewaffnet: Krieg und Fotografie, ed. A. Holzer, 118–45 (Marburg: Jonas, 2003); Torrie, German Soldiers, 122–23, 160–63; Uziel, The Propaganda Warriors, 401–18. 34. “[D]ie echtestes Frankreich ist.” A. Reindl, Die Nieder-Normandie: Führer für deutsche Soldaten (Caen: Imprimerie Centrale de Basse-Normandie, Caron et Cie., 1941), 67. 35. Hedwig Richter and Ralph Jessen have pointed to the National Socialist state’s strategic use of the informal ‘du,’ e.g., on the ballot for the 1933 German elections. Richter and Jessen, “Elections, Plebiscites, and Festivals,” 98. 36. B. Hardeweg [Bernhard Schulz], “Einleitung,” in Im Westen: Aufzeichnungen eines Landsers aus dem Feldzug in Frankreich (Berlin: Verlag Die Wehrmacht, 1941), 5–7. 37. B. Hardeweg [Bernhard Schulz], “Des Fliegers Einzug in Walhall,” in Im Westen, 120–33. 38. The German original reads, “in einem einzigen Lauf.” B. Hardeweg [Bernhard Schulz], “Das Meer,” in Im Westen, 111. 39. Schulz died in 2003. His website, with samples of his writing, remains available online at http://bernhardschulz.de/, accessed 14 June 2023. The pseudonym Bernd Hardeweg is mentioned at http://bernhardschulz.de/pseudonyme.html, accessed 14 June 2023. 40. Along with Im Westen, Schulz’s 1944 novel Die Straße der Väter has survived. Three other works were destroyed by aerial bombing, including a 1943 novel and a film script lost during filming at Babelsberg. See http://www.bernhardschulz.de/publikationen.html, accessed 14 June 2023. 41. “Divisionswettbewerb, der einheitlich in der gesamten Wehrmacht im besetzten Gebiet durchgeführt wurde, in allen ‘Künsten.’” Letter to Gerda, 29 March 1941, available at http://bernhardschulz.de/29.03.1941.html, accessed 14 June 2023 and in Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Emmendingen, 2033. 42. Letter to Gerda, 29 March 1941.

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43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. “Nur der Inhalt mißfällt mir. Daran haben der Reihe nach soviele Dienststellen und Propagandastellen herumgestrichen und verbessert, umgedreht, und wieder zurechtgebogen, dass es mir vor Augen schwindelt und ich meine eigenen Kinder nicht wiedererkenne. . . . Vokabeln wie Kampf, Pflicht, Treue, Ehre, Unsterblichkeit, Ruhm usw. gibt es bei mir nicht, ‘Walhall’ schon garnicht, aber in meinem Büchlein steht alles einträchtig beieinander und just da, wo ich es am wenigsten stehen haben wollte. So wird einem auch das Schreiben mächtig verleidet.” Letter to Gerda, 19 December 1941, available at http:// bernhardschulz.de/19.12.1941.html, accessed 14 June 2023 and in Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Emmendingen, 2033. 46. Ibid. 47. One might read this as a somewhat ironic comment. Available online at http://bernhard schulz.de/publikationen.html; http://www.bernhardschultz.de/im_westen.html, accessed 14 June 2023. 48. Torrie, German Soldiers, ch. 4. 49. Timm Starl has determined that some seven million Germans had cameras at the beginning of World War II, and since young men were among the most enthusiastic photographers, Bernd Boll estimates that more than 10 percent of soldiers probably carried a camera with them. Those who did not initially own one often acquired one through plunder. T. Starl, Knipser: die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980 (Munich: Koehler & Amelang, 1995), 98; B. Boll, “Vom Album ins Archiv: zur Überlieferung privater Fotografien aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Mit der Kamera bewaffnet, ed. Holzer, 167–78, 167. 50. H. Hoffmann, Mit Hitler im Westen (Munich: Zeitgeschichte Verlag, 1940). 51. According to Lorenz, the exhibition’s objective was “to collect the best photos that have been taken by members of the military during the occupation of France, to make a careful section among them and to present them in a unified enlargement size.” H. Lorenz, “Vorwort,” in Soldaten fotografieren Frankreich, ein Bilderbuch mit Erzählungen (Paris: Wegleiter, 1943), 8. 52. Ibid. 53. H. Lorenz, ed., Frankreich, ein Erlebnis des deutschen Soldaten (Paris: Odé Verlag, 1942). 54. The foreword spoke of this book as “the visible expression of the feelings and thoughts of every German soldier,” E. Schaumburg, “Vorwort,” in Frankreich, ein Erlebnis, ed. Lorenz. 55. E. Jünger, “Tagebuchblätter 1940,” in Frankreich, ein Erlebnis, ed. Lorenz . Nebel, listed as a Gefreiter (lance corporal), was a conservative cultural critic and writer who corresponded with Jünger from the late 1930s to the 1970s. Obergefreiter (senior lance corporal) Buchheit’s work as a historian after 1945 was marred by his close association with the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Information Agency). He helped cover up the activities of its members during the Third Reich. Kölsch, listed as a war reporter, led several cultural agencies during the Third Reich and published works of local interest after 1945. Other authors included in this volume had similar profiles. E. Klee, “Kurt Kölsch,” in Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 322; R. Vollmann, “Bei den Käfern beginnt die Metaphysik: Ernst Jünger wieder gelesen—zum Briefwechsel mit Gerhard Nebel,” Die Zeit, 27 November 2003; K. Wiegrefe, “Geheimdienste: Gekaufte Geschichte,” Der Spiegel, 14 January 2013, https://magazin. spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/90535606, accessed 14 June 2023.

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56. France was often depicted as passive and female while Germans were represented as vigorous and male. Cf. Torrie, German Soldiers, 50. 57. By the time this volume was published, due to growing manpower shortages, women made up as much as a third of military administrative staff under the Militärbefehlshaber Frankreich. Lorenz, Soldaten fotografieren Frankreich, 200–202; J. Torrie, “Women of the Reich: German Military Auxiliaries and the Occupation of Europe,” in German-Occupied Europe in the Second World War, ed. R. Scheck, F. Théofilakis, and J. Torrie (New York: Routledge, 2019), 166. 58. See also the correspondence about a contest held in Spring 1942 in BArch: RH 36/143. 59. Jahn and Schmiegelt, Foto-Feldpost, 76. 60. P. Fritzsche, “The Archive and the Case of the German Nation,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. A.  M. Burton, 184–208 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 192. 61. Ibid. 62. D. Welch, “Mobilizing the Masses: The Organization of German Propaganda During World War One,” in War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003, ed. M. Connelly and D. Welch, 19–46 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 40.

Selected Bibliography Bopp, P. Fremde im Visier: Fotoalben aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Bielefeld: Kerber, 2009. Jahn, P., and U. Schmiegelt, eds. Foto-Feldpost: geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939–1945. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 2000. Latzel, K. Deutsche Soldaten—nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis—Kriegserfahrung, 1939–1945. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998. Torrie, J. German Soldiers and the Occupation of France, 1940–1944. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ———. “‘Our Rear Area Probably Lived Too Well’: Tourism and the German Occupation of France, 1940–1944,” Journal of Tourism History 3, no. 3 (2011): 309–30. Uziel, D. The Propaganda Warriors: The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

11 The Migration of Topoi from Atrocity Films to Their Heirs Modes of Addressing the Audience in German Postwar Cinema Bernhard Gross

It might seem strange to write about German postwar cinema audiences in a book entitled Audiences of Nazism. But what does ‘audiences of Nazism’ mean for cinema? It could refer to audiences of films shown in Germany between 1933 and 1945; or films made by the National Socialist culture industry; or films about Nazism, for example, documentaries about the Nazis’ crimes. The third is my subject in this chapter. Specifically, I analyze the modes of addressing the audience of postwar German films about Nazism. I begin with Die Todesmühlen (D/ USA 1945),1 the twenty-minute-long US-American documentary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.2 This and other atrocity films made by the Allies showed the public the traces of Nazi crimes for the first time. Primarily educational, legal, and historical documents, these films shocked hundreds of thousands of viewers in Western countries immediately after the war. Ulrike Weckel argues in her book Beschämende Bilder that in the Allies’ reeducation programs in the first ten months after the war atrocity films (and photographs3) were the most important method to shock Germans and through their shock shame them into repudiating National Socialism.4 Methodologically, Weckel examines different German audiences’ responses to the atrocity films on the basis of various primary sources on audience reactions during and immediately after screenings and relates audience members’ historical statements to the films’ audiovisual contents. I also consider some atrocity film audiences, but as a film scholar I follow a different methodology. My approach, which I believe provides valuable new insights, adds to the methods of historians in this field and neither relativizes nor

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contradicts their results. Instead of examining their historical audiences, I analyze how the atrocity films themselves thought, that is, addressed, their audiences and the conclusions we can draw from their modes of address. My approach follows neo-phenomenological film theory,5 whose fundamental idea is not to distinguish spectator and film as two different entities but to conceive of them together as constituting an act of perception that unfolds only in the process of spectatorship. In other words, each film offers its unique array of perceptions that structures how the spectator perceives the film, “so that the world of the film becomes fused with a spectator’s world as though the audience participated with the film in a shared reality.”6 In this talk of “a shared reality,” the spectator and the film are theoretical posits, the first distinct from any empirical audience and the second a thing whose meaning does not reduce to the intentions of the filmmaker. One reason for the latter is that a professional film is always a result of a collective process, so that no one person can completely control the result.7 In the first half of the twentieth century, aesthetic film theory began to consider it impossible to distinguish the collective effects on a film’s aesthetic structure and, so, spoke of the “optical unconscious.”8 In light of this, my discussion concerns the unconscious aesthetical structure of atrocity films. I argue that a film’s aesthetic structure does not represent anyone’s everyday perception; rather, it is one constituent, with the spectator, of a perception of reality that unfolds in the process of the constituents interacting. In film-analytic terms, this interaction implies that a film’s audiovisual content is the vehicle of its narrative but also that the narrative is only one aspect of a film’s modulations, i.e., alterations in its audiovisual content. Accordingly, there is much more in a film to analyze than the narrative and its message. The spectator’s perceptions of a film, how he sees and hears it, are also shaped by its dramaturgy and its rhythm, that is, the changes in shapes, colors, lighting, musical tempi, sounds, and silences. These features envelop the spectator in the film’s world and affect his perceptions of it even though he does not belong to it. The ways these features shape spectators’ perceptions are not timeless; they are historical processes. Therefore, films have their specific historicity. Analyzing a film’s audiovisual space or, to be more exact, its image space reveals its historicity.9 The concept of image space develops the notions of audiovisual composition and its modulations. Just as modulations in music are transitions between keys, modulations in audiovisual composition are transitions between the visual and the audio. Audiovisual composition and its modulations constitute a unique filmic mode of thought.10 The ways in which the early postwar atrocity films addressed the spectator were historical paradigms of the filmic mode of thought. We can see this in the very different ways the atrocity films used the same camp-liberation footage, which analysis of their aesthetic and dramaturgic structure clearly reveals. I examine how the films structured their audiovisual material, i.e., the scenes they included and their lengths and order, and the dramaturgical concepts they

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embodied. In so doing, I explain how the atrocity films structured, and still structure, audiences’ perceptions of them, i.e., how they addressed, and continue to address, the audience. The prolific research into the atrocity films (see note 2) has concentrated on their narratives’ messages, how adequately the films illustrated the reality of the camps, the filmmakers’ intentions, and the circumstances of their production. However, I analyze the aesthetics of their audiovisual structures to propose a new and fruitful perspective on the ways in which certain atrocity films influenced German postwar cinema. I first identify three of their central topoi: their address of the individual, their representation of perception, and their structuring of order and disorder. I then examine how German postwar feature films and documentaries manipulated these aesthetic topoi. I argue that the ambivalence of the atrocity films’ topoi permitted their migration to and reconfiguration in German postwar films, and this gave rise to a postwar struggle over the use of images of the war and the Holocaust to further different political interests and for control of their interpretation. They also migrated to certain films of the 1950s and 1960s, primarily Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard (F 1955) and Erwin Leisers’s Mein Kampf (BRD 1960) and Deutschland Erwache! (BRD 1968).

The First Topos: Addressing the Individual Siegfried Kracauer claimed that understanding mass society in the twentieth century overwhelmed the individual.11 If so, then the individual was more than overwhelmed by World War II and the Nazis’ crimes. In my opinion, the explicit depictions in the atrocity films, in the US-American films in particular, expressed outraged incomprehension over Nazi crimes. Whether or not that is true, the films’ audiovisual rhetoric forced the spectator to experience the incomprehensible. The US-American films did this through how they addressed individuals in them. The final sequence of Die Todesmühlen—the most widely distributed US-American atrocity film in postwar Germany—is a good example of the then much discussed accusation of Germans as collectively guilty or responsible. Weckel speaks of the sequence’s staging of a “Mitläufer’s self-criticism.”12 First, the narration changes from the third-person plural to the first-person singular.13 Next, the sequence’s footage of cheering masses giving the Hitler salute emphasizes how easily the individual can disappear into the crowd. But according to the narration, each individual bore responsibility for the decision to join the masses and its consequences. Accordingly, the sequence then superimposes over the previous scene of a cheering crowd a scene of German civilians, ashamed and with heads bowed, compelled by American soldiers to walk past the corpses of forced laborers (see figure 11.1).14 The sequence’s audiovisual structure addresses the individual as such by using ‘I’ while presenting individuals’ faces, implying that the individual made decisions and is therefore responsible for her actions.15

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Figure 11.1. Die Todesmühlen (D/USA 1945). Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration.

So, the sequence makes clear that it is an individual’s choice whether to remain a Nazi and continue to serve an inhuman ideology or to embark on the laborious path of reeducation and return, eventually, to the human family.16 The sequence’s sustained address of the individual as the essence of a group (the human family)17 is not only auditory in the narrator’s voice; it is also visual in the superimposition of ashamed Germans over the rejoicing crowd.

The Second Topos: The Individual’s Perception A central motif that appears repeatedly in the atrocity films is the documentation of different aspects of individuals’ perception. They depict soldiers and civilians perceiving traces of atrocities: concentration camp facilities, instruments of torture, corpses, and survivors. These images also address the subject of eyewitness testimony, including their confirmation of their own authenticity, which is central to their importance.18 And they construe perception as an act of the individual. These scenes of eyewitnesses perceiving traces were usually shot with the camera at eye level, i.e., from the perspective of an individual, thus simulating perceptual experience,19 a rhetorical convention called “perceived perception.”20 As a result, the spectator perceives the eyewitnessing as an act of individuals, i.e.,

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he perceives the eyewitnesses perceiving. And he is aware of his own individual perceiving. The ways in which the atrocity films represented the individual and individuals’ perception and gave the latter meaning were central to their significance for German postwar film aesthetics. Specifically, because of the frequently discussed impossibility of capturing the full concentration camp phenomenon on film—the images were always too specific and too general at the same time21— the atrocity films created an image space in which the spectator experienced this impossibility.

The Third Topos: Order and Disorder The description of their representation of the individual and her perception leads me to the atrocity films’ dramaturgy, i.e., how they organize their footage and how they represent the organization and disorganization of the camps.

Dramaturgical Order The films organize their presentations of camp locations differently.22 Welt im Film Nr. 5: KZ (USA 1945) and Les Camps de la Mort (F 1945) mostly organize their presentations geographically. Their frequent cuts among different locations suggest that the camps were situated and the crimes occurred everywhere, even in audiences’ neighborhoods. Die Todesmühlen rhetorically organized its presentation around the Gardelegen massacre.23 In the opening scene, we see civilian men marching in formation, each shouldering a wooden cross; the narrator says, “On a day in April in the year 1945, eleven hundred crosses were carried to the barn in Gardelegen” but does not explain why.24 Only toward the middle, when the narrator again mentions Gardelegen and we see the victims in the barn, does the film reveal their connection to the massacre. The last sequence returns to the crosses. Again, we see the men marching with them; the narrator says, “millions of crosses for the victims of the German death mills.”25 They have become a symbol for the German people’s responsibility for the Nazis’ crimes. Die Todesmühlen’s references to Gardelegen frame what have become today’s iconic images of concentration camp architecture: electrified barbed-wire fences, watch towers, huts, entrance gates, and so on. They also frame the dead and survivors in various camps and reenactments of liberators opening their main gates. The editing is fast-paced and rhythmic, which contrasts with the calm and steady pronouncements of the narrator. These motifs repeat, with slight variations, as a kind of chorus during different camp visitations: by the military, foreign politicians, journalists, clergy, and German civilians. In the first half, the film (like the two mentioned above) organizes the locations of this chorus geographically, using inserts with the names of the camps. In the second half, the use of repetition is

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particularly striking in the narrator’s insistent reiteration, with some variation, of the ways victims were killed: “burnt, gassed, starved to death, shot.” His repetition of the methods of killing replaces the geographical organization of visitations as the film’s organizing principle and supports Die Todesmühlen’s driving rhythm. The second half of the film is marked by frequent motion in single shots, many fast cuts, and visual and acoustic variations in the repeated motifs (the methods of killing). The key to understanding these different kinds of movement is to realize that filmic movement is not always represented movement. The film’s montage, cadrage, recadrage, and other forms of filmic movement support not only its narrative but also its changes in filmic time and space and the emotional movement of the spectator.26 Die Todesmühlen’s filmic movement does not end with the film, for its last sequence returns to the opening sequence’s motif of men carrying crosses. Therefore, its movement is circular and, like the movement of the eponymous mills, potentially endless. In stark contrast to the Soviet films (e.g., Majdanek [SU 1945] and Todeslager Sachsenhausen [SU/D 1946]), Die Todesmühlen does not provide the audience with a conclusion to the depicted events, which would be the funeral for the victims of the Gardelegen massacre; instead, its aesthetic temporality consists in the circular structure of ending where it began. We can draw conclusions from this circular structure. First, by rejecting any narrative closure Die Todesmühlen’s structure expresses that one film is inadequate to portray the Nazis’ crimes. Next, by putting the spectator into its circular temporality the film refers to what was later called “coming to terms with the Nazi past.” For that process includes the same circularity: one must return to the past again and again.

Representing Order in the Camps The atrocity films also visually portray forms of order in the camps before their liberation. The films show the chaos in the camps after their liberation, but they wanted to depict how the camps functioned, i.e., as “death mills,” before liberation as well. This depiction of former order is achieved through both the principles of dramaturgical order that I analyzed above (the geographical order and the order of killing methods) and what is documented in their shots. The films also show the results of allied liberators’ attempts to bring some order to the camps, for example, corpses efficiently stacked in rows in alternating directions, though not who did the work. So, the spectator sees some kind of order and wonders who was responsible for it, the SS or the Allies, and what its purpose was. They also document burials, in which bodies that were lying on the ground or exhumed are buried in neat rows. In general, though, the films’ image spaces do not distinguish the SS’s and liberators’ efforts to establish order. In addition, the Western Allies’ atrocity films include footage of Germans from adjacent neighborhoods forced to walk in file along rows of coffins and graves and of liberators or captured perpetrators standing in circles around the dead. These scenes of peo-

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ple ordered into files and circles portray them as recognizable individuals. Soviet cameramen in Majdanek and Auschwitz filmed order in the form of countless heaps of clothing, eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and so on, but Western filmmakers also showed orderly arranged individuals, and their films gave this order the same weight as they did the consequences of industrial mass murder.

Representing Disorder in the Camps The atrocity films also portrayed disorder in the no longer functioning camps— the Western films more frequently than the Soviet ones.27 The former emphasized a metaphorical wasteland of emptiness, devastation, and abandonment. Such scenes became a topos of disorder because of the power of their aesthetical disorganization: the shallow depth of field, and the impressionistic portrayal of the dullness and lack of direction of life in the liberated camps. We are made aware of this emphasis in, for example, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (GB 1945 [incomplete]/2014), where such scenes are much longer than similar scenes in Die Todesmühlen. These long scenes portraying activities such as showering, dressing, cooking, conversing, and a “promenade” through the camp convey an impression of everyday life in the liberated camps, Bergen Belsen in particular. The composition of these scenes is structured by spaces that seem empty because of the lack of contrast (high key lighting) and, so, shallow depth of field and because they often contain only wasteland, smoke, isolated figures, or huts. Seeming to exist only in the devastated present, with no past or future, they are like places out of time. The film puts the spectator into a world that is the result of inhuman crimes and, at the same time, one of everyday experience, an emotional shock that is hard to bear. The Western atrocity films also featured representations of disorder to undo, so to speak, the former order of the camps. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt spoke of the camps as “holes of a double oblivion,” by which she meant both prisoners’ disappearance from the world outside the camps and their having to forget that world.28 She also meant the Nazis’ goal of eradicating the memory of their victims. The Western films give viewers the shock of this triple oblivion through their juxtapositions of proximity and distance. A repeated technique is the abrupt transition between a camp and its idyllic surroundings. Examples are the camera’s downward motion from scenic mountains to emaciated prisoners in Ebensee in Concentration Camp Ebensee, Austria (USA 1945) and German Concentrations Camps Factual Survey and Samuel Fuller’s panoramic pan from Falkenau to a nearby village.29 His pan also reestablishes the connection between the camp and the outside world, or, more accurately, it shows that the connection between them was never severed. Thus, it illuminates the postwar state of affairs, i.e., the continuing need to confront the Nazi past. By juxtaposing the different forms of order and disorder I have mentioned, the films let viewers audiovisually experience the incomprehensible as such.

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The Dilemma of Portraying Order and Disorder The concentration camp was “a spatialized permanent state of emergency . . . an order that is directed towards mere survival as an administrative act (or rather towards a dissolution of the willfully living among the countable masses).”30 So, the atrocity films tried not to represent the masses of victims as “countable masses.” At the same time, their subject was the mass atrocities in the camps and the responsibility of German society en masse. This created a dilemma for filmmakers. On the one hand, documenting only the forms of order that liberators discovered in the camps would in some way prolong the status described in the quotation (an order that reduces individuals to a countable mass is a prerequisite for mass annihilation); on the other hand, documenting only the discovered forms of disorder (by, e.g., depicting individuals in a wasteland) would be ahistorical because it would ignore how the camps functioned.31 The films’ lasting power can be partly explained by filmmakers’ inability to resolve this dilemma. Their portrayals of both forms of discovered order and disorder, which inadequately represented the circumstances, made the viewer experience a tension that both actualized the historical (by showing the order that suggested how the camps had functioned) and historicized the contemporary (by showing the disorder the camps had produced).32

Migration: The Use of Perceived Perception So far, I have identified three topoi that the atrocity films shared: the address of the individual, the use of perceived perception, and the representation and dramaturgical organization of order and disorder. The task now is to show that, and explain how and why, variations of these topoi, and atrocity film images more generally, migrated to German postwar feature films and documentaries. As I shall explain, the migration began soon after the atrocity films were shown in Germany, and the topoi’s motifs and other images became stereotypes that occurred with increasing frequency. In the immediate postwar period, they generated image spaces that explain how viewers were able to orient themselves in a world destroyed by war and, so, relate historical events to their own lives.33 Audiovisual modulations in postwar cinema made use of perceived perception more than the other two topoi. Cinema, in turn, employed it in both the rejection of National Socialism’s ideology of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” which had suppressed the individual, and the stylization of the perpetrators, that is, the German masses, as victims themselves. These themes made postwar films ambivalent. The rubble film Zwischen Gestern und Morgen (D 1947), whose main characters come together in a bombed-out hotel in postwar Munich, is an example of both the rejection and the stylization. Its individualistic, anthropomorphic eyelevel view of the ruins of Munich embodies the point of view of the protagonist, Michael Rott, who sees but can do nothing about what he sees. In this way, the

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film stages the perspective of the victims of the Allied bombing. Thus, it differs from the exclusively US-American perspective in feature films, such as Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (USA 1948), that add to the anthropomorphic perspective on rubble the bird’s eye view called the ‘Airplane Eye.’34 (Though, as Kirchmann points out, German documentaries, such as München 1945 [D 1945],35 tried to simulate the Airplane Eye by filming from elevated camera positions.36) Zwischen Gestern und Morgen’s individualistic perspective is on a city in rubble, which makes Munich seem empty. That is, it aesthetizes the rubble as a wasteland, though a staged one, in which the rubble’s uniformity makes everything appear monochrome, just as cities were often staged in contemporary Italian neorealist films. Zwischen Gestern und Morgen counters this depiction with flashbacks of Munich between 1937 and 1943 (produced in the studio). They define spaces similar to those in the fully developed style of the Universum Film AG (Ufa) studio’s filmed chamber plays during the Third Reich. These featured fully illuminated scenery; spot lit characters; fully articulated spaces, for instance, through clearly contoured lines and surfaces; and the staging of action within the camera’s frame. In Zwischen Gestern und Morgen, the same style and a neutral camera perspective characterize the past while it employs empty neorealistic aesthetics and an individualistic point of view to depict the postwar present. This heterogeneous style makes spectators aware of their own perceiving of the characters’ perceivings and thereby of the film, as did the atrocity films. German postwar cinema also employed similar sorts of stylistic heterogeneity to rework the atrocity films’ addressing of the individual and depiction of order and disorder.

Migration: Addressing the Individual Postwar cinema’s frequent staging of characters in such ways that the spectator sees them perceiving involved both the aesthetical practice and concept of perceived perception.37 Through its use, German postwar cinema addressed the spectator as a self-consciously perceiving individual. Thus, it placed the responsibility on the audience to navigate the stylistic heterogeneity of a film just as Die Todesmühlen’s closing sequence expressed the expectation that the audience see itself as responsible for the Nazis’ crimes. This assignment of responsibility relied on the fact that many features and documentaries produced in both the Western and Soviet occupation zones highlighted the individual in their representations of the community, that is, the individual did not disappear into the community as he did in Die Todesmühlen’s crowd sequence (see figure 11.1). One example of this sustained address of the individual is Freies Land (D 1946). In this feature film–documentary hybrid about the first land reform in the Soviet zone, amateur actors reenact the story of their own lives as they went from refugees to smallholders in what was to become the GDR. Like Die Todesmühlen, Freies Land has a scene that repeats, chorus-like—a gathering of farmers surren-

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der their land deeds—which it uses to introduce the characters as individuals in flashbacks. Once the characters have been introduced, their individual stories end, and they interact with each other as members of a community. The staging of recognizable individuals, like the use of perceived perception, migrated from the atrocity films to more or less the whole of German postwar cinema. And this migration suggests the development of a new conception of the spectator whom films addressed as a self-conscious perceiver, that is, as an individual. However, there was another side to postwar cinema’s address of the individual; it began with humanizing Germany’s destroyed cities but then appropriated images of victimhood for Germans.38 The Allies were accused of dehumanizing the victims because of their descriptions of what they had found in the camps, e.g., the nauseating stench and their difficulty recognizing the survivors as human.39 Similarly, a tension in the atrocity films I have analyzed was that they stressed the individuality of victims, but by portraying them as alien beings they also gave the impression that the liberators dehumanized them. The rubble films’ set their humanization of the destruction of German cities in contrast to that accusation. Critics repeatedly described the destruction in terms that could have been applied to what the atrocity films depicted. “One passes through street after street of houses whose windows look hollow and blackened—like the open mouth of a charred corpse.”40 And: “Facades with empty windows, black like the eye sockets in a skull. . . . From a gate that stands under green trees comes a frozen cascade of rubble; it is a charming baroque gate, seen like a mouth opening to vomit, that vomits out of the middle of the blue sky, that vomits out the inside of the palace.”41 The atrocity films show actual skulls, and skeletons and mutilated corpses,42 and they show the physical reactions, which included retching and vomiting, of the inhabitants of neighboring towns who the Allies compelled to witness the liberated camps.43 One can also see the filmic humanization of bombed out cities in the expressive staging of rubble, for example, in Die Mörder sind unter uns (D 1946), the first German postwar feature film to revive the idea of the liveliness of objects from the Weimar cinema of the 1920s and the German dark romanticism of the nineteenth century. The aesthetical humanization of these rubble films treated things like human beings whereas the victims of the concentration camps were human beings who had been treated like things. Thus, German cinema immediately after the war adapted the atrocity films’ images to express German experiences of suffering.44 This adaptation detached the images of the atrocity films from their historical context. It also highlighted a gap atrocity films could not fill, namely, they documented the camps only during and shortly after their liberation. That is, it is part of their contradictory nature that they could only suggest the function of the camps and the years of exploitation, torture, and murder during Nazi rule. But trying to close that gap with narration, as Soviet films (e.g., Todeslager Sachsenhausen) did, or dramaturgical framing, as in Die Todesmühlen and Deutschland Erwache! (D 1945) (see the discussion of figure 11.1), did not lessen their intended shock effect. This is

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why many German postwar feature films jumped aesthetically into this gap. They staged Germans’ knowledge of the camps, but their stories, for example, about the fate of German refugees, had nothing to do with the camps. Stereotypes of German victims appear again and again: crowds waiting for transportation (figure 11.2), people traveling in freight cars (figure 11.3), and displaced persons on their way to a DP camp (figure 11.4) and behind a fence (figure 11.5). Unlike in the atrocity films, however, these are not empty or deserted spaces but saturated ones, i.e., they and their inhabitants have a dramaturgical future. It is well known that such depictions were historically accurate. Germans were displaced from the formerly occupied territories; the few trains that still ran were overcrowded; and refugee camps were the only shelter for many of the homeless. Nevertheless, two facts are astonishing. First, the atrocity films’ staging of people behind wire fencing is often repeated in postwar feature films. Second, scenes of Germans waiting for transportation or under way occurred much more frequently than they did in newsreels and documentaries. With these and similar topoi, feature films used motifs from atrocity film images, which anonymized victims, to tell stories of individualized German victims. Thus, they employed the atrocity films’ manner of addressing the individual as a dramaturgical device to replace the Nazis’ victims with individualized German victims in aesthetically humanized rubble stagings. This change offered the audience a way to maintain its practice of using National Socialism’s distinction between “Gemeinschaftsfremde” and “Volksgenossen.”

Figure 11.2. Wege im Zwielicht (D 1948). Accessed at Schorcht International Filmproduktion.

The Migration of Topoi from Atrocity Films to Their Heirs

Figure 11.3. DEFA-Wochenschau Der Augenzeuge, Nr. 32/2 (D 1946). Accessed at DEFA-Stiftung.

Figure 11.4. Die Brücke (D 1949). Accessed at DEFA-Stiftung.

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Figure 11.5. Menschen in Gottes Hand (D 1948). Accessed at Schorcht International Filmproduktion.

Migration: Displaced Individuals However, other films, for example, Morituri (D 1948) and Lang ist der Weg (D 1948), reworked these appropriations of victimhood to tell stories about the victims of the Nazi regime. And their staging of individuals changed what other feature films portrayed as strange and what as familiar. Morituri was the first German feature film about the inmates of a concentration camp. It is about a handful of prisoners from different nations in a camp in Poland who escape with the help of a camp doctor and find refuge in the forest with other victims of the Nazis, persecuted civilians from the area who have set up a defensive camp. Lang ist der Weg mixes documentary and fictional scenes to tell the story of the Jelin family: father, mother, and son. They live in Warsaw before the war and then in the city’s ghetto. On the transport to Auschwitz, the son escapes, and after hiding in the forest he joins the partisans. The father is murdered upon arrival. The mother survives to the end of the war and hopes to emigrate to Palestine. The son marries, has a child, and after a long search finds his mother. Finally, the four of them live together in a DP camp. Thus, both films overcome the atrocity films’ problems of the impossibility of depicting a functioning camp and the anonymity of victims. They also individualize knowledge of the camps by integrating images that other films appro-

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priated for German victims, as I explain below. And both films employ topoi of victims of National Socialism that the Allies had previously, especially in early postwar cinema, prohibited Germans from producing and seeing, for instance, the suffering of German soldiers at Stalingrad. For example, Morituri portrays camp inmates in two soldierly ways. In the camp, they are subjected to military discipline, which obliterates the individual. In the forest, they live according to the necessities of defense, concealment, and security, though because they are civilians, they don’t allow the military order to obliterate the individual.45 Morituri and Lang ist der Weg both set their displaced individuals in a particularly meaningful environment: the forest. Their depictions of it were familiar from German Heimatfilme. But the forest, which was a topos for the safety and security of the German Heimat, now protects the Nazis’ victims (Jews, Poles, and anti-Nazis). Comparing their forest scenes with those in, for example, Ewiger Wald (D 1936) and Grün ist die Heide (FRG 1950), one finds almost identical stagings, for example, rays of sunlight penetrate dense canopies of leaves; sharp contrasts and deep focus make the scenery seem alive; framings of arboreal abundance (which make the forest invisible through the trees); and motifs of hunting, hiding, and love. But there are no foresters or hunters in Morituri or Lang ist der Weg, only those who have escaped the Nazis. Lang ist der Weg rejects city life in favor of living in nature. The son’s gradual development into a partisan goes hand in hand with his transformation from a helpless urbanite into a forest dweller who, like the hunters and foresters of the Heimatfilme, knows how to read nature’s signs. And in the final scene, we find the new configuration of the Jelin family (mother, son, his wife, and their child) in a field (see figure 11.6), with a background of pasture and forest, a landscape that appears again and again in postwar feature films (see figure 11.7), which the son plows as his family waits for him under a tree with lunch. In this rural idyll, which adapts the topos of hard-working farmers found in numerous Nazi documentaries, live recently displaced persons who the Nazis had tried to kill. Thus, a portrayal of a new and precarious community replaces Nazi cinema’s iconography of the “Volksgemeinschaft” in order to overcome that notion of society. This reconfiguration of the perpetrators’ iconography to portray the lives of Jews who survived may explain why the German versions of Lang ist der Weg repeatedly shortened the final scene.46 A final example of both films’ portrayal of displaced individuals involves the atrocity films’ paradox of individualization, which they created with their use of perceived perception and portrayals of groups in a historical context, the concentration camp, that obliterated the individual. The paradox appears in Morituri and Lang ist der Weg through the former’s similar depictions of camp inmates, the latter’s depictions of a family designated for annihilation, and both films’ re-individualization of displaced persons in nature, forest (Morituri), and farm (Lang ist der Weg), which were German genre film stereotypes. In light of this paradox, it is no wonder audiences were hostile to both, and they were completely ignored soon after their releases until they were rediscovered in the 1990s.47

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Figure 11.6. Lang ist der Weg (D 1948). Courtesy of the National Center of Jewish Film.

Figure 11.7. Menschen in Gottes Hand (D 1948). Accessed at Schorcht International Filmproduktion.

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Migration: Order and Disorder The atrocity films’ topoi of order and disorder also migrated to German postwar cinema. It employed these topoi in the form of images that media archaeology, as Thomas Elsaesser understood it, can explain: “The location of these images [of the Holocaust] is indefinite in relation to past and future. Their cultural presence becomes a kind of ‘virtual’ dimension in which the images emerge as in a kind of suspended animation, able to actively redefine their meaning, to shock the viewer or unexpectedly open a completely different path into the past.”48 It is in this virtual mode that the topoi of order and disorder occur in the atrocity films as well as in early German postwar documentaries and feature films—films in both groups oscillate between saturated image spaces (e.g., illuminated ruins in Zwischen Gestern und Morgen) and empty ones (e.g., Bergen-Belsen in German Concentration Camp Factual Survey). The topoi of order and disorder also oscillate at a phenomenological level in postwar films, for example, their interiors oscillate between disordered spaces filled with furniture, whose overabundance makes them dysfunctional, and ordered spaces of emptiness, and exterior spaces oscillate between disorderly ruins and orderly rubble. In many postwar films, antique furniture, sculpture, and other decorations fill rooms that are much too small for them;49 other rooms are only sparsely furnished. The furnishings in the latter are in accord with the rooms’ functions; the excess in the former deprives the furniture, which cannot be used because of the lack of space, of its function. The frequency of their occurrence makes both types of rooms topoi. One finds these topoi in both feature films and documentaries, but the feature film Die Kuckucks (D 1949) works with them in the most differentiated way. In this film, orphaned children and the eldest sister who takes care of them must move again and again because they are too many, too loud, or too strange for their landlords. In one sequence, they move into a room overly filled with all the furniture of the landlord’s son, who is missing in action in the Soviet Union. Since the mother treats the room as a mausoleum, the children are not allowed to touch anything, which leads to absurd situations. In another sequence, the family moves into a half-destroyed house. It is completely empty, and they furnish it with only the bare necessities, but they make it livable and for the first time they have enough space. So, the film contrasts the mother’s life frozen in her son’s furniture with the movement of the young orphans in empty spaces.50 And it changes the aesthetic emptiness of a liberated camp by conjoining it with youth and functionality. This conjunction occurs in postwar films like Die Kuckucks through their characters cleaning up and repairing abandoned and destroyed places, making them functional, and thus distinguishing them from old, outdated locations and their own past. In this way, such films energize the atrocity films’ representations of concentration camps after liberation by giving spaces a future. The empty spaces in the liberated camps are like the overly furnished rooms. Each has a well-organized

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but cruel past; its present is difficult to bear; and the future is invisible: smoke in the camps and obstructed views in the overly furnished rooms. In contrast to the atrocity films, postwar films feature characters who want to be together and need empty spaces to do so. Thus, wasteland becomes a tabula rasa, whose temporal counterpart is the topos of Zero Hour. German filmmakers still rework the relation between empty and filled spaces. In his last film about postwar Germany, Phoenix (D 2014), Christian Petzold provides a variation of the theme of the irreconcilable antagonism between victims and perpetrators by depicting each in different spaces. His young but immobile victims, camp survivors, appear in brightly lit, well-defined, empty rooms (see figure 11.8); the young and mobile perpetrators appear in small, dark rooms filled with furniture (see figure 11.9). Their different spaces express that living together is impossible. In postwar cinema, furniture is for interiors what ruins are for exteriors. This eventually leads to a distinction between rubble and ruins, though they are rarely distinguished in German postwar cinema discourse. Like too much antique furniture depriving itself of its function, ruins refer to useless things from the past; rubble refers to what is not, or not yet, used but has the potential for use. Though not often distinguished, rubble and ruins are both important structural elements of postwar films. Here, too, we find the contrast between saturated and empty spaces. Artistically lit ruins articulate an image space as completely as did UFA’s stagings of chamber plays and remind one of interiors filled with unusable furniture. In contrast, rubble landscapes are empty spaces. They seem like featureless wastelands, which are first perceived (as in Zwischen Gestern und Morgen) and then cleared (as in Die Kuckucks), just as in the atrocity films the Allies cleared away the debris from the camps. The distinction between rubble and ruins also represents a temporal difference. Rubble represents what is not yet; ruins stand for what is no longer. The number of scenes in documentaries and feature films in which stones are salvaged from the rubble and reused, i.e., move from an “antiquarian to a historical state,”51 is enormous. And through an analogous change of state, characters become morally responsible individuals, as in Lang ist der Weg and Morituri.

Figures 11.8 and 11.9. Phoenix (D 2014). Accessed at Schramm Film, Florian Koerner von Gustorf.

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Conclusions Addressing the individual by employing perceived perception and portraying full and empty spaces as the prerequisite of depicting the ordering of disorder (clearing rubble) and the disordering of order (relocating displaced figures) as historical processes are the most important structures in early postwar German cinema. It was above all the atrocity films that established these structures in early postwar German cinema, which made its heterogeneousness audiovisually experienceable. And the possibility in the early postwar period in Germany to experience through film what came to be called the Holocaust involved a lively appropriation and rejection of images and their iconographies, connotations, and stylistic traditions. If the Holocaust provides the founding narrative of the European Union after 1945, as Elsaesser suggested,52 then if we imagine this narrative as a tapestry, Germany’s postwar films represent its pattern, and the atrocity films are the knots that fix its threads into that pattern. Thus, they made it possible for audiences to experience the Nazi crimes as the Holocaust and understand the Holocaust as history. Bernhard Gross has been Professor of Film Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena since 2018. Among his publications are Die Filme sind unter uns. Zur Geschichtlichkeit des frühen deutschen Nachkriegskinos: Trümmer-, Genre- und Dokumentarfilm [The Films are Among Us: Historicity in Early German Postwar Cinema; Rubble, Genre, and Documentary Films] (Vorwerk 8, 2015); “The Relationship between Film and History in Early German Postwar Cinema,” Research in Film and History (2018); and “Building Figurations of Contingent and Substantial Communities: Differences between Italian and German Postwar Cinema Aesthetics,” in Cinema as a Political Media (Heidelberg University Publishing, 2021).

Notes 1. I also consider Deutschland Erwache! (D/USA 1945); Welt im Film Nr. 5: KZ (USA 1945); Concentration Camp Ebensee, Austria (USA 1945); German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (GB 1945/2014); Les Camps de la Mort (F 1945); Majdanek (SU 1945); and Todeslager Sachsenhausen (SU/D 1946). 2. For more on the discussion of the Allies’ atrocity films in film and cultural studies, see, for example, I. Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); T. Haggith and J. Newman, eds., Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933 (London: Wallflower, 2005); D. Bathrick, B. Prager, and M. Richardson, eds., Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, and Memory (Rochester: Camden House, 2008); T. Ebbrecht, Geschichts-

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

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bilder im medialen Gedächtnis. Filmische Narrationen des Holocaust (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011). See, e.g., the recently published J. Evans, P. Betts, and S.-L. Hoffmann, eds., The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), particularly 1–22 and 37–56. See U. Weckel, “‘People Who Once were Human Beings Like You and Me’: Why Allied Atrocity Films of Liberated Nazi Concentration Camps in 1944–1946 Maximized the Horror and Universalized the Victims,” in Humanitarianism & Media: 1900 to the Present, ed. J. Paulmann, 107–25 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019); and U. Weckel, Beschämende Bilder. Deutsche Reaktionen auf alliierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012). V. Sobchak, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). H. Kappelhoff, The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), X. For example, with the atrocity films the cameramen had nothing to do with the editing, which was done by teams in government offices. See W. Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography [1931],” Screen 13, no. 1 (1972): 17–34. I understand films’ image spaces as distinct from their plot spaces. In plot spaces, all cinematographic operations serve the narrative, but according to the concept of an image space, narrative is only one of the aims of filmic operations. An image space includes complex audiovisual processes that occur within the spectator as her or his experience of a film’s aesthetic projection of a world. Walter Benjamin first conceived the concept, and Hermann Kappelhoff developed it into a film-analytical concept based on Stanley Cavell’s work. See Kappelhoff, Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism; and S. Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); and G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Kracauer argued that optical media first made it possible for the spectator to experience the historical processes of the twentieth century. Photography and film were the first visual media to enable access to a previous reality instead of reproducing it. He described film’s central aesthetic operation as enabling the audience to experience the ambiguity of reality. See S. Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). This idea is highlighted in J. von Moltke and G. Gemünden, “Introduction: Kracauer’s Legacies,” in Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, ed. Moltke and Gemünden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 4. Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 172n403 (my translation). See the transcription of the narration of Die Todesmühlen in Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 611–15. M. Köster discusses the sequence (see figure 11.1) in “Umerziehung durch Schock-Bilder? Zu Entstehung und Einsatz alliierter Filmaufnahmen der NS-Verbrechen in Westfalen 1945,” Geschichte im Westen. Zeitschrift für Landes- und Zeitgeschichte 33 (2018): 201–26. The narrator in this “Mitläufer” passage (Weckel) says, “Ja, das war damals. Beim Siegeszug der SA durchs Brandenburger Tor, da marschierte ich mit. Ja, ich erinnere mich. Beim

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18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

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Nürnberger Parteitag habe ich ‘Heil’ geschrien, und dann, an einem anderen Tag, als die Gestapo meinen Nachbarn holte, habe ich mich abgewendet und gefragt: Was geht’s mich an? Erinnert Ihr Euch noch? 1933, 1936, 1939 war ich dabei. Was habe ich dagegen getan? Millionen Deutsche, die dem Bösen zujubelten.” The “I” is part of a “we,” but it is never subsumed by the “we.” In one of its central sequences, Deutschland Erwache! (D/USA 1945) confronts the audience with the same choice. The narrator says “we” and “you” (plural), but he addresses the individual as responsible. See the transcription of the narration of Deutschland Erwache! in Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 579–84. See C. Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung. Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998). I refer not to the concrete situation of the cameramen during the liberation but to the aesthetical rhetoric. We recognize in this mode of staging perception the concept that is the basis of neophenomenological film theory, namely, perceived perception, that is, the relation between a film and a nonempirical spectator, which was conceived immediately after the war by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Phenomenology of Perception, he explicitly described film as the medium of “perceived perception.” I discuss this correlation in B. Gross, Die Filme sind unter uns. Zur Geschichtlichkeit des frühen deutschen Nachkriegskinos. Trümmer-, Genre- und Dokumentarfilm (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2015), 96–103. See also M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-Sense, ed. Merleau-Ponty, 48–59 (1948; English reprint; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). See, for example, the debate over G. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 178. See D. Gring, “Das Massaker von Gardelegen,” Dachauer Hefte 20: Das Ende der Konzentrationslager (2004): 112–26. Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 611. The translation is my own, as the German version has a different narration than the English version Death Mills, produced for American GIs who would join the occupation force. See Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 164. Part of my approach to film analysis is to understand these different kinds of movement as the results of complex interactions between the film and the audience. So, I posit a theoretical spectator in addition to a physical or empirical one and understand audiovisual modulations as elements that institute a film’s own space and time, which unfold within the spectator’s aesthetic experience. This comparative difference is misleading. The historical facts behind it are that the extermination camps in Eastern Europe, which the Soviets liberated, looked more orderly in comparison to the camps in Germany because the vast majority of their inmates had been murdered and most of the rest forced on death marches westward. The concentration camps on German soil were more disordered because the SS had left the sick and starving inmates to their own devices and left the corpses of those they had killed unburied before fleeing. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 459. See Emil Weiss’s documentary Falkenau, Vision de l’Impossible. Samuel Fuller témoigne (F 1988). I am aware that the instructions to the cameramen were to show the proximity

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of the camps to the surrounding villages and the connections between them. But I am analyzing the aesthetical impact of the footage. L. Schwarte, “Auszug aus dem Lager,” in Auszug aus dem Lager. Zur Überwindung des modernen Raumparadigmas in der politischen Philosophie, ed. Schwarte (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), 165. Arendt also described this problem in Origins of Totalitarianism, 446n138. This expresses the idea that the modernity of film consists in its specific sort of historicity. One of the most influential philosophers of film, Gilles Deleuze, calls this realization of a pure temporality in modern cinema the “crystal-image”: “What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.” Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81. I discuss this concept in Gross, Die Filme sind unter uns. For an explanation of this simulation of the US-American perspective as political, see K. Kirchmann, “Blicke auf Trümmer. Anmerkungen zur filmischen Wahrnehmungsorganisation der Ruinenlandschaften nach 1945,” in Die zerstörte Stadt: mediale Repräsentationen urbaner Räume von Troja bis SimCity, ed. A. Böhn and C. Mielke, 273–88 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007). The film is a silent collection of documentary footage shot in the first few months after the fall of Munich. See Kirchmann, “Blicke auf Trümmer,” 278. See note 21. I use the stereotypical victim/perpetrator dichotomy here to mark the stereotypical use of topoi and iconography about the victims of the Nazi regime to depict ordinary Germans as victims and thus to highlight the struggle for interpretative control over images of the events between 1933 and 1945, which began immediately after 1945. See, for example, M. Gellhorn, The Face of War (1945; reprint, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002), 191, 195. See also O. White, Conquerors’ Road: An Eyewitness Report of Germany 1945 (1946; reprint, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 158. Arendt also discussed this difficulty. See Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. S. Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1946; reprint, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 133. M. Frisch, Tagebuch 1946–1949 (1950; reprint, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1964), 30, translation mine. See Die Todesmühlen: Scenes of the “Massacre of Gardelegen,” Timecode: 00:09:12– 00:09:31 h. Bonus material of the double-DVD of D. Reifarth, Wie werde ich Demokrat? Re-education durch Film nach 1945 (Berlin: absolut Medien, 2014). See Die Todesmühlen, Timecode: 00:17:19 h. The US-American war reporter Lee Miller also described this. See L. Miller, “Germany—The War is Won,” Vogue, June 1945; reprinted in A. Penrose, ed., Lee Miller’s War (London: Condé Nast, 1992). See Gross, Die Filme sind unter uns, 143–47 and 361–456. See also D. F. Crew, Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). As I do, Crew presents visual representations of German mourning, German denial, and the meaning of ruins. I am grateful to Ulrike Weckel for this reference.

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45. I discuss this type of community in B. Gross, “Morituri te salutant—Besetzung und Austausch von Gemeinplätzen im Nachkriegsdeutschland,” in Das Nachkriegskino in Deutschland. Reflexionen des beschädigten Lebens?, ed. B. Blachut et al., 89–118 (Munich: edition text+kritik, 2015). 46. The film was also dubbed into English, French, and Yiddish. Jan-Christopher Horak pointed out to me the use of the film in the Zionist context of promoting emigration to Palestine. C. Kugelmann examines the film’s genesis in “Lang ist der Weg. Eine jüdischdeutsche Film-Kooperation,” in Auschwitz. Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung (Jahrbuch 1996 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust) (Frankfurt/M.: Fritz-Bauer-Institut, 1996), 353–70. 47. See ibid. and B. Greffrath, Gesellschaftsbilder der Nachkriegszeit. Deutsche Spielfilme 1945– 1949 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995), 103–4. 48. T. Elsaesser, “Diagonale Erinnerung. Geschichte als Palimpsest in Sterne,” in Demokratisierung der Wahrnehmung? Das westeuropäische Nachkriegskino, ed. H. Kappelhoff et al., 95–114 (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2010), 107, translation mine. 49. One finds this topos in rubble, genre, and documentary films, for example, the rubble film Die Mörder sind unter uns (D 1946), the crime thriller Razzia (D 1947), the romantic comedy Kein Platz für Liebe (D 1947), the rubble film Arche Nora (D 1948), and the documentary Ein Jahr später (D 1946). 50. Variations of this in relation to gender can be found in many other films, for example, the romantic comedy Kein Platz für Liebe (D 1947), the rubble film Arche Nora (D 1948), and the documentary Ein Jahr später (D 1946). 51. See A. Esch, “Die Wiederverwendung von Antike im Mittelalter. Die Sicht des Archäologen und die Sicht des Historikers,” Hans-Lietzmann-Vorlesungen 7 (Berlin, 2005), no page numbers. 52. T. Elsaesser, German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 263–305.

Selected Bibliography Elsaesser, T. German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945. New York: Routledge, 2014. Gross, B. Die Filme sind unter uns. Zur Geschichtlichkeit des frühen deutschen Nachkriegskinos: Trümmer-, Genre- und Dokumentarfilm. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2015. ———. “Morituri te salutant—Besetzung und Austausch von Gemeinplätzen im Nachkriegsdeutschland,” in Das Nachkriegskino in Deutschland. Reflexionen des beschädigten Lebens?, ed. B. Blachut et al., 89–118. Munich: edition text+kritik, 2015. Kappelhoff, H. The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Weckel, U. Beschämende Bilder. Deutsche Reaktionen auf alliierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012.

12 Finding an Unintended Audience An SS Photo Album and Its Postwar Editions Ulrike Koppermann

Photographs, film footage, press coverage, and television and radio broadcasts produced by Nazi officials have outlived their producers and their intended audiences. But this wide range of media products has found its way into today’s exhibitions, documentaries, and textbooks. The resulting reliance of the visual representation of the Holocaust on perpetrators’ images has been widely criticized in recent years.1 Rather than join in the criticism, I analyze certain reinterpretations of one of the most iconic visual sources on the Holocaust in postwar memory practices. The photograph album entitled Umsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn (“Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary”) was produced by two SS photographers— Bernhard Walter, who headed the Erkennungsdienst (Identification Service) in Auschwitz, and his underling Ernst Hofmann—in the summer of 1944, when more than 434,000 Jews were deported to the camp from Hungary.2 To recap why and how the album came to serve commemorative purposes, I discuss the four editions of it that were published in the United States and Germany between 1980 and 2005, highlighting editors’ and publishers’ choices about layout and commentary, and their reviews in the press. In effect, each edition constituted an interpretive framework within which it conveyed the photographs to the public. Their reviews, however, indicate how readers responded to, either adopting or rejecting, the interpretations editors offered. Together they document some of the different voices participating in the evolving appropriation of the SS’s photographs and in the discussion of their role in communicating and commemorating the Jewish catastrophe. We have no definite information on the two photographers’ assignment. Most likely, Rudolf Höss, who oversaw the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau,

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ordered them to compile the album, for which he would have needed special permission from his superiors at the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt.3 Reportedly, fifteen copies were made and distributed to leading SS officials and government ministries as a record of what had been achieved with the transports from Hungary.4 Postwar editors based their editions on the only known surviving copy, which probably belonged to Walter.5 In that copy, headings structure its 197 photographs into five chapters, some with subchapters: “Arrival of a transport,” “Sorting” (“Men upon arrival,” “Women upon arrival”), “After the sorting” (“Still able-bodied men,” “Still able-bodied women,” “No longer able-bodied men,” “No longer able-bodied women and children”), “After delousing” (“Assignment to the work camp”), and “Effects.”6 The chapter titles follow the steps of the selection process and refer to preparatory procedures leading up to exploitation, plunder, and mass murder.7 They aim to make clear that these procedures were part of the process of sustaining a slave-labor force, and hence they ostensibly provided reasons for the selection and the murder of those deemed unfit for labor. Thus, they imposed a sequential order on the photographs and gave the album’s portrayal of events a narrative structure.8 Serge Klarsfeld edited the first published edition, entitled The Auschwitz Album: Lili Jacob’s Album, in 1980. Peter Hellman’s edition, The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based on an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, followed in 1981. The first German edition, by Hans-Jürgen Hahn and Peter MosesKrause, appeared in 1995 under the title Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz. Lili Meiers Album (“Faces of the Jews in Auschwitz: Lili Meier’s Album”).9 In 2005, Yad Vashem in cooperation with the State Memorial Museum AuschwitzBirkenau brought out Das Auschwitz Album. Die Geschichte eines Transports (“The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport”), edited by Israel Gutman and Bela Gutterman.10 Understanding the challenge of editing the album demands analysis in at least three regards. First, it combined two inherently different media, a mass-produced book and a handmade album. One must therefore determine how the properties of the two media interacted. Second, and more importantly, as the editions had a different purpose than the original they had to change the terms in which the album was discussed. The album that was their subject was most likely produced to illustrate the expertise of those who collaborated in the murder of the hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hungary.11 However, the editions were intended to guide readers toward a different understanding of the album. Third, the editing transformed a unique and fragile historical document into a mass-produced commercial commodity. In virtue of these three aspects, the album found a new audience. As long as the original was in the SS’s hands, it was most likely viewed only by its owner and his colleagues. It was addressed to viewers who were only too familiar with events,12 while the editions attracted an anonymous mass audience in American and German postwar society. My analysis of the four editions starts on the outside, with their titles and covers, and proceeds to the inside, their essays, layouts, and captions.13 I consider the reviews when I discuss the features to which they refer.14

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Figure 12.1. Cover: Serge Klarsfeld, ed., The Auschwitz Album: Lili Jacob’s Album (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1980). © Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. Used with permission.

Figure 12.2. Cover: P. Hellman, ed., The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based on an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor (New York: Random House, 1981). The damage is unintended and due to wearing. © Random House. Used with permission.

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Figure 12.3. Cover: H.-J. Hahn, ed., Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz. Lili Meiers Album (Berlin: Arsenal, 1995). © Arsenal Verlag. Used with permission.

Figure 12.4. Cover: I. Gutman and B. Gutterman, eds., Das Auschwitz Album. Die Geschichte eines Transports (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). © Wallstein Verlag. Used with permission.

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Editing Photographs of Mass Murder and Reframing Its Visual Traces Long before the album was published in its entirety, some of its photographs were reproduced, distributed, and became publicly known.15 The first time was in 1949, when some appeared in Tragedy of the Slovak Jewry.16 The album also featured in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1963–65).17 In April 1964, Erich Kulka, a Jewish Czech Auschwitz survivor, presented copies of the photographs to the court. He also testified to the identity of one of the defendants, the former guard (Blockführer) Stefan Baretzki, in one of them.18 The court found Baretzki guilty, though in its verdict it ruled that he could not be clearly identified in the photograph, which, hence, did not assume a probative role.19 In August, Bernhard Walter was shown the photographs on the witness stand and eventually admitted that he had taken some of them.20 In December, another witness, Lili Zelmanovic, the Jewish Slovakian survivor of Auschwitz who had the album in her possession, brought it to the court. She testified that she recognized herself in a photograph as well as members of her family with whom she was deported from the ghetto of Berehovo in Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Birkenau on 24 May 1944.21 Despite the circulation of some of the photographs and the public status of Lili Jacob and the album, its unique historical value was not fully recognized until 1980. That year, the historian and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld received seventy reprints of photographs in the album from a research assistant who was working in the Jewish Museum in Prague.22 Once Klarsfeld realized their uniqueness and interrelation, he was determined to make the full collection public, and he traced Lili Jacob to Miami. When Jacob donated the album to Yad Vashem, it was covered by the American press. These articles already used the term ‘Auschwitz Album,’23 which journalists probably got from Klarsfeld’s interviews and his edition, which the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation had published one week before the donation ceremony at Yad Vashem.24 Each edition’s title condensed its editor’s interpretation of the album and tried to interest potential readers.25 None of their covers reuse or display the album’s original title, Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary. Presumably, the euphemism ‘resettlement’ was one reason why editors chose new titles. Hellman (1981) and Gutman and Gutterman (2005) followed Klarsfeld (1980) in using ‘The Auschwitz Album.’ That title conveys two suggestions. First, as one reviewer observed, it suggests that it is the only, or the only known, album from the Auschwitz concentration camp.26 However, in 1975, even before Lili Jacob donated her album, the Jewish community of Berlin had donated to Yad Vashem an album of 398 photographs compiled by the camp’s construction division.27 Moreover, we now know that at least two other albums from Auschwitz exist.28 Second, ‘The Auschwitz Album’ does not specify any date or particular aspect of or incident at the camp and therefore gives the impression that the album’s portrayal encompasses the essence of Auschwitz. Objecting to the overly general

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title, some reviewers pointed out that most of the photographs were taken in Birkenau, not the main camp.29 Klarsfeld’s use of the possessive in his subtitle, Lili Jacob’s Album, characterized the album as Jacob’s possession and thus linked it closely to her.30 His book is in landscape format with a white soft cover. On the front, a black and white photograph of the original album is reproduced. Thus, the cover signals the double nature of this publication: it is an album in a book. Hellman’s subtitle, A Book Based on an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, hinted at the book’s relation to the original and distinguished the two media. His edition’s outer appearance, however, imitated a photo album with a landscape format and a brown cloth cover, and the dust jacket reproduced the original’s front cover and the beige string along the spine, visually blending it and the original album. Moses-Krause and Hahn chose yet a different concept for their edition, as is evident from its title, Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz. Lili Meiers Album (“Faces of the Jews in Auschwitz: Lili Meier’s Album”), and appearance. Since they wanted their book to be distinct from the original, not a facsimile, they decided on a portrait format.31 Its soft cover is bright yellow and undecorated. The main title counters the SS’s racist denial of the humanity of its Jewish victims, for they intended the photographs to remind readers of the victims’ personhood.32 Their subtitle, like Klarsfeld’s, attributes the album to Lili Jacob, for “it belongs to her.”33 Reviewers adopted their interpretation.34 Gutman’s and Gutterman’s hardcover edition resembled an up-scale exhibition catalogue or photo book, and they emphasized the quality of the photographs and the design.35 The cover photograph depicts a group of women in front of a railcar shielding some children, among whom Jacob had identified her aunt and cousins. Its right and lower edges were cropped, which shifted the focus to the children, making them the cover’s visual subject. Though the title (Das Auschwitz Album) does not mention Lili Jacob, the subtitle Die Geschichte eines Transports (“The Story of a Transport”) refers to the deportation transport that brought her and her family to Birkenau. Since she had identified her family in the photographs, the editors assumed that they portrayed only her transport.36 A reviewer criticizing the title argued that the photographs depict more wagons than would have made up a single transport and, therefore, the album could not depict just that one.37 Interestingly, Hellman and Moses-Krause both suggested that the pictures could have been taken on several days.38 In 2015, Christoph Kreutzmüller, Stefan Hördler, and Tal Bruttmann began to decipher the order in which the photographs were taken.39 Eventually, they demonstrated that those taken at the ramp depict at least four different transports.40 As a result, the album’s construction belatedly became a matter of interest. In their introductions, editors elaborated on the importance of the album that their titles hinted at. They emphasized the emotional value the album had for Lili Jacob as a “strange yet authentic family album in lieu of a real family”41 that she kept “next to her heart.”42 Moses-Krause also understood its meaning for Jacob as a form of Kaddish, a “testimony of grief of the generation of Shoah

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survivors.”43 At the same time, as indicated by the generic use of ‘Auschwitz’ in all of their titles, the value with which they imbued the album went far beyond Jacob’s personal attachment to it. Klarsfeld emphasized that it is “the only known visual record of the arrival of a convoy to Auschwitz. . . . The value of these photos is inestimable to the Jewish people.”44 For Hellman, “They [the photographs] alone must stand as the visual record of those who were obliterated.”45 For Moses-Krause, it is “a reminder of the human faces of the Jewish martyrs.”46 Gutman and Gutterman “wrestled at length with the question of how best to commemorate one transport that reflects the fate of hundreds of similar transports.”47 Avner Shalev, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, wrote in his foreword to Gutman’s and Gutterman’s edition: “The singular power of this documentary record resides in its ability to draw us closer to these suffering individuals and identify with their agony. We are thus spurred to delve more deeply into the phenomenon and even to contemplate the meaning of our own existence and our obligation to the future. The sum total of the photographs, therefore, takes on universal human significance.”48 Because of its singular depiction of arriving transports, its meaning was not restricted to the individuals and events in the pictures but embraces the fate of all Jews who were deported to Auschwitz. All the editions’ introductory essays cover Lili Jacob’s biography from her childhood until she donated the album, the Frankfurt trial, and Klarsfeld’s research. They also describe the oppression of the Jewish population in Hungary, the subsequent deportations to Birkenau, and the events upon arrival. Hellman, Moses-Krause, and Springer-Aharoni who contributed an essay to Gutman’s and Gutterman’s edition, all devoted a paragraph to reconstructing the photographer’s movements through the camp.49 Although they greatly vary in length and detail, the essays provide comparable information about the context of the album. Despite these similarities, each introductory essay has a different style and tone. Klarsfeld’s is a comparatively brief personal narrative in the plural first person. He recounts his research across Europe and the United States that eventually led him to what he saw as his duty: to find the album, publish it, and convince Jacob to donate it to Yad Vashem.50 He was transparent about his sources, often providing full references, and his quotations and translations make his introduction a valuable account of the album’s postwar history. Hellman’s vivid descriptions and quotations intimately acquaint readers with Jacob’s experiences. Reviewers valued his empathetic narration of events: a “powerful, sickening and spellbinding”51 and “magnificently evocative text”;52 “a fascinating annotation”;53 and a writer who provides the “historical and human contexts.”54 Occasionally, though, his emotional style went too far, for example: “Pointed to the south, the camera caught the great portal of the main watchtower looming against the gray sky,” in which he attributes the emotionally laden color gray to the sky though its true color is difficult to determine from the photograph.55 In his introduction, Moses-Krause used information from Hellman’s essay,56 but he replaced some anecdotes and dialogue with literary quotations, his own thoughts on the course of events in Hungary and on Birkenau, and references to

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the scholarly literature. His informative, thoughtful, and sensitive essay won the approval of reviewers.57 Reviewers generally considered Gutman’s and Gutterman’s introduction and their edition’s four additional essays—on the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the annihilation of the Jews from Hungary, Lili Jacob’s biography, and photographs as historical documents—to be a careful and informative prologue to the album.58 One reviewer, though, criticized the lack of citations and references.59 In all four editions the background information outweighed an examination of the photographs. Of course, the photographs are the heart of each edition. All of the editors included a brief note on how their arrangements compared to the original’s.60 Each editor’s understanding of the photographs is implicit in the edition’s layout and its individual and serial captioning of them. Editors commented on individual photographs almost only in the captions or, in Klarsfeld’s case, in a separate list of brief comments. Reviewers of all four editions rarely thought about the active interpreting involved in the editing process. They seemed to assume that the editing was neutral and so considered the original album and the later editions interchangeable. Klarsfeld’s edition was a facsimile of the original album; each page was a full-scale photographic copy of the corresponding page of the original, for which he commissioned a professional photographer.61 At the back, he added fifty enlargements of photographs he found “particularly impressive.”62 Klarsfeld’s decision to duplicate the original underscored his attitude that the album was a historical document and his desire to make it available to readers interested in it as a historical source. However, keeping the photographs’ original order risked conveying the SS’s constructed narrative of efficiently and expertly executing a rational and standardized process of mass murder. In a list of “[r]emarks on certain photographs,” he explained some of their details and gave the names of people identified by Jacob. In his comments on photograph 31a, he said it “was used as evidence to convict Baretzki and sentence him to life imprisonment” in the Frankfurt trial.63 The testimony of Erich Kulka and Alex Rosenstock did suggest that the photograph played a decisive role in the case against Baretzki, but the court’s finding that it was inconclusive was clear in the final verdict.64 In 1998, Cornelia Brink convincingly explained that the court and the survivors participating in the trial viewed the photographs from different perspectives and why the court found them insufficient for unambiguously identifying defendants and establishing individual guilt.65 Nevertheless, the later editions also overstated the photograph’s judicial use.66 Those reviewers of Hellman who did reflect on his process of editing criticized it. According to one, “It is at once a valuable historical document and perhaps one of the more insidious of recent publishing events. . . . [T]he book’s format and elaborate design take the genre of coffee-table book to a new nadir.”67 The reviewer for The Nation argued in a similar vein: “I have three coffee-table books. They are on the Holocaust. . . . Of course the question is one of taste. . . .

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The real question is what are we doing to the Holocaust, and why. . . . These photographs do not belong in the ease and comfort of home. They belong in Yad Vashem . . . . When we bind these photographs for our coffee tables, we alter them. . . . We replace horror with sentimentality.”68 However, a reviewer for The Philadelphia Inquirer called this position “extreme,” and Hellman also objected.69 More cautiously, a reviewer for The Pittsburgh Press recounted a Jewish friend’s revulsion at the sight of the book and wrote, “[a] cocktail table, perhaps, is no place for a tombstone.”70 According to these critics of Hellman, editing the album in the format of a coffee-table book brought the photographs into the domestic, rather than the academic and historical, sphere, and they did not approve of this profound change in meaning. The edition embodied what one reviewer for The New York Times called a “fuzzy-headed conception.”71 It was not a reproduction of the original, but it did include the SS’s chapter and subchapter titles with English translations. The photograph on each chapter’s title page appeared in a decorative frame, which the same reviewer denounced as “frilly ornaments.”72 The edition did not acknowledge the recent authorship of its final chapter, “Birkenau.” This featured photographs from the original’s “No longer able-bodied” subchapters of men, women, and children in front of crematoria IV and V.73 Consequently, it was impossible for readers to envision the original layout. One perceptive reviewer objected, “the photographs have been presented in a manner that urges the poignancy of particular images at the expense of seeing the album as an integrated whole of peculiar horror.”74 His review was by far the most detailed and included a sharp analysis critical of Hellman’s captioning: “[The] text treats the photographs as occasions for recounting specific Birkenau horrors: they function for him almost as mnemonic devices for calling up atrocities, but they do so in a regrettably anachronistic way.”75 A vivid illustration, additional to the reviewer’s examples, of his captions’ references to horrors occurs under a picture of a pregnant woman: “Sometimes, when the doors of the gas chamber were opened following a gassing, women were found to have given birth in the act of dying.”76 Another reviewer for The New York Times, referring to the analysis of his fellow critic, suggested that Hellman wanted his captions to counter the “photographs’ inadequacy to the task of rousing the viewer’s revulsion.”77 Others found them inadequate, and thoughtless.78 However, he also cross-referenced some photographs and commented on their details in his captions.79 In designing his and Hahn’s edition, Moses-Krause was concerned not to fascinate readers or lend aesthetic appeal to the photographs.80 In his introduction, he informed readers that the photographs were presented in their original order and were not retouched but were resized.81 To prevent the photographs from evoking sentimentality in readers, he chose a small format for pictures that were widely known, for example, one of an elderly woman leading three children by the hand.82 However, he was not consistent as a well-known picture of an elderly woman in a headscarf with a Star of David clearly visible on her coat filled an entire page.83 Moses-Krause added captions only where he considered them

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necessary for understanding the context; otherwise, he wanted the pictures “to speak for themselves.” However, does his very editing of an SS album not testify to the fact that they “spoke” to viewers in 1995 differently than to their viewers in 1944 and, thus, that what they “say” may be in the eye of the beholder? In his review, Hanno Loewy, an expert on the cultural history of the Holocaust, argued that Moses-Krause’s attempt to dissociate his edition from the original was ambivalent. That is, in spite of Moses-Krause’s ambition to wrest the album from the perpetrators and dedicate it to their victims, the SS’s cynical principles for organizing the photographs had prevailed because he maintained their original order and reproduced the chapter titles. Accordingly, Loewy wished that the edition had been transparent about “the original character” of the document and had complemented it with a selection of enlargements emphasizing victims’ faces, which would urge a commemorative reading focused on individuals.84 Neither reviewers of Hellman nor of Hahn and Moses-Krause commented on the trimming of photographs. For one thing, both editions eliminated the photographs’ white borders, which would have conveyed no relevant information for most readers. However, their different widths would have signaled readers well versed in analogue photography that the prints were made at different times.85 For another, both editions cropped some of their reproductions, probably where the sizes of reproductions determined by the chosen layout were not proportional to the originals.86 Gutman’s and Gutterman’s design incorporated a dual presentation of the photographs. They included small reproductions of the album’s original pages in the essays and enlarged the photographs in seven chapters:87 “Arrival,” “Selection,” “Selected for slave-labor: still able-bodied men and women,” “Doomed to death: no longer able-bodied men, women and children,” “Assignment to slave-labor,” “Canada,” and “Last moments before the gas chamber.” They also explained the SS’s euphemisms: “no longer able-bodied” indicated murder; “still able-bodied” meant forced labor.88 But the use of chapter titles so close to the originals prevented them from organizing the photographs in a substantially new way. In their introduction, the editors say that they restored the photographs’ “chronological” order;89 one of the subsequent essays says, more accurately, that they are thematically arranged.90 The editing team sought to “return their names” to the murdered, and captions identified as many people as possible.91 Reviewers lauded this innovation, which is almost the only aspect of the edition’s conception that received any critical attention.92 Had the edition included biographical notes, the names would have had a meaning beyond the powerful gesture of identifying individuals who had perished. As one reviewer pointed out, the names were also a stepping stone for further research, but he thought that a name index would have been helpful.93 He also criticized the “superficial” captions for their lack of information about the depicted events, which has the effect of blinding the viewer to the photographs’ details. As an illustration, he quotes, “Jews who just arrived in Auschwitz are taking care of their property.”94

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“Family Album,” “Evidence,” or “Nazi Propaganda Memorabilia”: The Spectrum of Assessments Reviewers’ descriptions of the album’s content and the meaning with which they imbued it provide insights into their understanding of how the album visually mediated the events depicted for postwar readers. In the 1980s, reviewers of Hellman agreed that the album had been Lili Jacob’s personal treasure, for “it was all she had of her family.”95 They often used highly symbolic terms, like “act of providence” and “talisman,” which they probably adopted from Hellman’s introduction and Jacob’s interviews, to describe its significance for her.96 Writing under the influence of her interviews and talks on her book tours and Hellman’s intimate essay, both of which they often quoted extensively, they repeated Jacob’s exceptional story. These American reviewers also frequently referred to the US Army’s having freed Jacob in its liberation of the Mittelbau concentration camp and her immigration to the United States. Presumably, they covered these facts to make her story even more interesting to their readers by linking it to the United States’s role as liberator and new home for Holocaust survivors.97 In 1995, German reviewers of Hahn and Moses-Krause also frequently implicated Jacob’s story by following the editors in calling the book a “family album.”98 A decade later in 2005, almost every reviewer of Gutman and Gutterman mentioned her. In line with the editors’ introduction, Avner Shalev’s foreword, and Gideon Greif ’s essay on Jacob’s life and the album’s history, reviewers described the album as “documenting” and “reporting” the fate of her transport and the SS’s routine of murder, which expressed their attitude toward the photographs as documentation.99 Despite its different focus, this understanding still built on Jacob’s story. Reviewers of every edition emphasized the album’s uniqueness, which many explained in terms of the general ban on photography in concentration camps that all the editors mentioned.100 Other reviewers quoted Klarsfeld: “Without that album, . . . [y]ou wouldn’t have a visual sense of the selection process, of the separation of families, of the way to the gas chambers.”101 In fact, Klarsfeld and Hellman published their editions not only to commemorate the victims but also to silence Holocaust revisionists with evidence, in spite of Hellman’s observation that the photographers “seem to have avoided recording acts of violence.”102 Some reviewers of Hellman agreed with him about its evidential value,103 but more observed that it contained no “scenes of violence,” “physical violence,” “panicky Jews being beaten, shot or whipped,” “overt violence,” “overt brutality or death,” or “scenes of horror.”104 Some speculated that the SS had taken the photographs as deceptive proof “for posterity of the humane treatment their prisoners received at Auschwitz.”105 One reviewer for the Detroit Free Press had an even darker suspicion: “I hated this book. . . . It is a fine piece of Nazi propaganda memorabilia.”106 Others feared that the book would be exploited “by those so disposed, as proving that ‘Auschwitz was not so bad.’”107 Thus, they argued that Hellman failed to put

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the photographs’ “source into perspective”108 and “much more should have been done to emphasize the very limited coverage of these photographs, taken (as they must have been) by someone whose purpose was not to reveal the full truth.”109 Some reviewers of Hahn and Moses-Krause repeated the latter’s observation that the album depicted neither violence nor panic,110 but, unlike in 1981, none discussed how revisionists could use that. In trying to decode and describe the cruelty in the photographs, many of Hellman’s reviewers referred to previously known images of concentration camps and pointed out that in “‘The Auschwitz Album,’ one is not confronted with the expected portraits of atrocity.”111 For example, some compared it to the Allies’ photographs “taken after the fact,” which depicted “the victims as grotesque piles of bodies lying in open trenches, or cadaverous looking survivors.”112 As one critic put it, “While the photos to which we are accustomed are horrible to look at, those in ‘The Auschwitz Album’ are horrible to contemplate.”113 And they acknowledged their own discomfort in knowing that the photographs depicted the last moments of their subjects’ lives.114 They also emphasized the photographers’ membership in the SS, freedom of movement, and knowledge of the victims’ fate.115 Given their assessment of the album as documentary, most reviewers of Gutman and Gutterman did not question its evidential value. However, several did point out, following Shalev’s foreword,116 that its portrayal was “through the eyes of the perpetrators” and “from the perspective of the perpetrators,”117 as illustrated by the “anti-Semitic elements” and pictures of disabled and elderly deportees in orthodox attire.118 Some of these also referred to what they thought was the photographers’ “brutal professionalism,”119 “shameless gaze” at the victims,120 “ideological hatred,”121 and “emotionless manner,”122 though none gave examples. That is to say, some reviewers who acknowledged that the SS had taken the photographs overstated how visible that perspective was in individual photographs. Reviewers of every edition discussed the deportees’ faces, and many felt, understandably, that the faces of people about to be murdered were what was most powerful. They searched the photographs for faces whose expressions revealed what victims were feeling. Some were “thick and sullen,” their eyes “ringed like those of raccoons,”123 or helpless and scared;124 others “show confusion, but a basic calm, belief that each would see his family after the ‘processing’”;125 some showed “not fear, but a kind of silent grief ”;126 others were “dignified and brave, but utterly exhausted, and unsuspecting of the savagery awaiting them”;127 some eyes were full of “fear” and “despair”;128 others were full of “incredulous amazement” and showed “signs of hope that nothing is yet decided”;129 they looked “flabbergasted”;130 and they were “heartbreakingly handsome.”131 It is likely that each of these descriptions was true of some or other of the victims in the photographs. But they were also clearly inspired by knowledge of postwar accounts and reveal reviewers’ imagination and empathy.

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Conclusions: From Unique to Concrete When I began this research, I was interested in tracing the interpretative steps that had eventually integrated the SS’s photographic portrayal of imminent mass murder into the public’s understanding of the Shoah and commemoration of its victims. My analysis of the album’s postwar editions and their reviews shows that editors based their reinterpretations of the album on its uniqueness in showing Jewish deportees arriving in the Birkenau camp and Lili Jacob’s exceptional story. Her account, popularized by the media, gave the album a trajectory from 1944. She, a survivor, delivered it to its postwar audience. The album’s singularity made it an invaluable visual record that had to stand in for all Jewish victims deported to Auschwitz. Its provenance was acknowledged but not to the extent that it undermined or interfered with the album’s commemorative and evidential value. As Springer-Aharoni writes in her essay on photographs as historical sources, “From the Nazi perspective the ‘Auschwitz Album’ is a summary of a chapter known in the Nazi lexicon as the ‘resettlement of the Hungarian Jews.’ For Jewish history it is evidence summing up the extermination of close to half a million Hungarian Jews.”132 Editors’ interpretations left little room for ambiguities and did not foreground a critical analysis of the photographs as historical sources. This both limited the range of valid interpretations their books presented to readers and minimized the ambiguities in the album’s postwar role as a historical document and conduit for memory and commemoration. One such issue was whose story the album told. All of the editors presented it as telling Jacob’s story. But her fate as both a survivor and the finder of the album was not representative of those depicted in the photographs; so, hundreds of other stories remained in darkness.133 Another was the album’s verisimilitude. Editors underlined its documentary and evidential value and neglected its constructed narrative containing pictures of several transports. A third was its juridical role in the Frankfurt trial. Focusing on witnesses’ testimony, the editors did not engage with the court’s inability to exploit its probative value.134 Though each interpretation is true, it is only by discussing them and their dissonances equally that we can evaluate the album’s role in today’s commemorative and historical discourse. My analysis also shows that the editors were aware of one another’s books, for they referred to them, which reinforced their largely shared reading of the album. However, the themes of reviewers’ criticisms varied over time and, so, are more indicative of the zeitgeist in which they were written. Reviewers’ awareness of the interpretive issues I mentioned above diminished over the years, with some exceptions. In the early 1980s, a minority articulated staunch criticisms challenging Klarsfeld’s and Hellman’s aim of editing the album to fight revisionists and Hellman’s presentation of the photographs. In 1995 and 2005, reviewers of Hahn and Moses-Krause and Gutman and Gutterman rarely challenged their work. As a review in Rheinische Post concluded, Gutman’s and Gutterman’s book could not be judged because Auschwitz had wiped away all standards for evalu-

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ating it.135 Since it was published in January 2005 for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, half of the reviews were written as acknowledgments of that year’s National Remembrance Day on 27 January. Perhaps the occasion prompted reviewers to give the edition a commemorative reading, rather than a critical examination, and prevented them from discussing the significance of the photographs more deeply. In the past ten years, research on the album has focused more on its provenance, source value, and constructed narrative. Its iconic status is increasingly considered an obstruction to an analysis of its value as a historical source.136 Given the growing criticism of symbolic uses of photographs taken by Nazi perpetrators, I found it worthwhile to adopt a historical perspective on this approach and to explore its motivations, omissions, and imperative. Ulrike Koppermann received her B.A. in German and English language and literature from the University of Potsdam and her M.A. in literary studies from the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt on the Oder. From 2019 to 2022, she was a research associate for the EU project “Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age” (Horizon, 2020). In her Ph.D. project at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, she analyzes the use of iconic Holocaust photographs in exhibitions since the 1990s.

Notes 1. J. Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: Tauris, 2004), 211–16; S. Foster and A. Burgess, “Problematic Portrayals and Contentious Content: Representations of the Holocaust in English History Textbooks,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 2 (2013): 20–38; H. Holtschneider, The Holocaust and Representation of Jews: History and Identity in the Museum (London: Routledge, 2011). 2. For details about the photographers and deportations, see Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 102–19; T. Bruttmann, S. Hördler, and C. Kreutzmüller, Die fotografische Inszenierung des Verbrechens. Ein Album aus Auschwitz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2019), 37–43, 59–65. 3. Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Die fotografische Inszenierung, 66. 4. C. Brink, “Das Auschwitz-Album vor Gericht,” in Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/63 Frankfurt am Main, ed. I. Wojak, 148–59 (Cologne: Snoeck, 2004), 149; Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Die fotografische Inszenierung, 68. 5. Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Die fotografische Inszenierung, 68. 6. Translation from the German original. 7. S. Hördler, C. Kreutzmüller, and T. Bruttmann, “Auschwitz im Bild. Zur kritischen Analyse der Auschwitz-Alben,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 63, no. 7–8 (2015): 609–32, 617. 8. U. Koppermann, “Challenging the Perpetrators’ Narrative: A Critical Reading of the Photo Album ‘Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary,’” Journal of Perpetrator Research 2 (2019): 101–29, 106–7.

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9. I explain the eponyms “Lili Jacob” and “Lili Meier” in the following section. 10. S. Klarsfeld, ed., The Auschwitz Album: Lili Jacob’s Album (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1980); P. Hellman, ed., The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based on an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor (New York: Random House, 1981); H.-J. Hahn, ed., Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz. Lili Meiers Album (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1995); I. Gutman and B. Gutterman, eds., Das Auschwitz Album. Die Geschichte eines Transports (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). The last-mentioned edition was published in English in 2002 as I. Gutman and B. Gutterman, eds., The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002). My corpus of reviews includes twenty-three reviews of Hellman, fourteen of Moses-Krause and Hahn, and twenty-seven of Gutman and Gutterman. There were no reviews of Klarsfeld because it was not a commercial publication. I am indebted to Arsenal and Wallstein Publishers for sharing their press reviews and helping me with my research. All translations from the German reviews and Moses-Krause’s introduction are my own. In 2019, Tal Bruttman, Christoph Kreutzmüller, and Stefan Hördler published an extensive book on the album that proposes a new interpretation and analytical methodology and can be regarded as the latest edition (see note 2). Due to the limitations of space, I do not discuss it. On how interest in the album has shifted from commemoration to analyzing it as a historical source, see L. Meisel, “SS-Fotoalben als visuelle Leistungsnachweise und Legitimationsberichte,” Zeitgeschichte 2 (2022): 185–207, 187–190. 11. Hördler, Kreutzmüller, and Bruttmann, “Auschwitz im Bild,” 621–22. 12. T. Bruttmann, C. Kreutzmüller, and S. Hördler, “L’ ‘Album d’Auschwitz.’ Entre objet et source d’histoire,” Vingtième Siècle 3 (2018): 22–44, 29. 13. I loosely follow Gerard Genette’s analysis of paratexts, but I do not discuss all the aspects he considers. See G. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3. 14. For simplicity, I use the editors’ names to refer to the editions. However, they are the results of collaborative decision-making and efforts. Thus, the editors may not have been responsible for all the aspects I discuss. 15. For previous publications, see Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album; Brink, “Das AuschwitzAlbum”; H. Knoch, Die Tat als Bild. Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), 830–32. In his introduction, Klarsfeld reproduced the headlines of some of the articles that had appeared in the United States decades before he published the first edition. 16. B. Steiner, Tragedy of the Slovak Jewry (Bratislava: Documentation Centre of the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities, 1949). 17. See Brink, “Das Auschwitz-Album”; C. Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung. Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Munich: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 124–42. I would like to thank Werner Renz, the former archivist at the Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt a.M.), for sharing his valuable insights into the album’s use in the trial. 18. Protokoll der Hauptverhandlung vom 16. April 1964 in Frankfurt a.M., HHStAW, 461, 37638/110, Hauptakten Bd. 97: Hauptverhandlungsprotokolle Bd. 3, 293–6. The witness and survivor Alex Rosenstock also identified Baretzki in the photograph: Testimony of Alex Rosenstock on 2 October 1964 in Frankfurt a.M. Available online at https://www .auschwitz-prozess.de/resources/transcripts/pdf/Rosenstock-Alex.pdf, accessed 3 September 2022, 29–32. Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung, 126–28; Brink, “Das AuschwitzAlbum,” 150–53.

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19. Judgement against Stefan Baretzki from 19–20 August 1965 in Frankfurt a.M., HHStAW, 461, 37638/130, Hauptakten Bd. 116: Urteil, Bl. 562–615, 610; Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung, 134, 138; Brink, “Das Auschwitz-Album,” 152–53. 20. Testimony of Bernhard Walter on 13–14 August 1964 in Frankfurt a.M., available online at http://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/download.php?file=Walter-Bernhard_1.pdf, accessed 20 November 2018, 51–56; Anlage 3 zum Protokoll vom 14. August 1964, HHStAW, 461, 37638/114, Hauptakten Bd. 101: Hauptverhandlungsprotokolle Bd. 7; Brink, “Das Auschwitz-Album,” 149, 157n11; Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Die fotografische Inszenierung, 137. 21. Testimony of Lili Zelmanovic on 3 December 1964 in Frankfurt a.M., available online at https://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/zeugenaussagen/Zelmanovic-Lili/, accessed 11 November 2020. Jacob was her maiden name, Zelmanovic that of her first husband, and Meier that of her second. I refer to her as Lili Jacob. 22. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album. 23. Anonymous, “Auschwitz Album Going to Museum,” Florida Today, 15 August 1980, 6B; Anonymous, “Auschwitz Album Saved,” The Dispatch, 27 August 1980, 21; E. Bumiller, “The ‘Miracle’ Album of Auschwitz,” The Washington Post, 25 August 1980, B1; Anonymous, “Auschwitz Album Given to Museum,” The Tampa Tribune, 27 August 1980, 31. 24. Just over 1,000 copies were published and distributed to libraries free of charge. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album. 25. Genette, Paratexts, 76. 26. A. Kilian, “Das Antlitz von Auschwitz. ‘Das Auschwitz-Album. Die Geschichte eines Transports’. Über den Wert des Albums und den Unwert der neuesten Edition,” Lagergemeinschaft Auschwitz – Freundeskreis der Auschwitzer. Mitteilungsblatt 25 (2005): 29–33, 29; Bruttmann, Kreutzmüller, and Hördler, “L’ ‘Album d’Auschwitz,’” 25. 27. Album of the Bauleitung d. Waffen-SS u. Polizei K.  L. Auschwitz, Yad Vashem Photo Archive, FA157. According to the entry in Yad Vashem’s online photo archive, Erich Kulka donated the album in 1975. T. Świebocka and J. Webber, Auschwitz: A History in Photographs (Oświęcim/Bloomington/Warsaw: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial/ Indiana University Press/Ksiazka i Wiedza, 1993), 40–42; U. Wrocklage, “Architektur zur ‘Vernichtung durch Arbeit.’ Das Album der ‘Bauleitung d. Waffen-SS u. Polizei K. L. Auschwitz,’” Fotogeschichte 54 (1994): 31–43. 28. The two more recent discoveries are USHMM, SS Auschwitz Album, Accession Number: 2007.24; and Eduard Wirths Collection, Accession Number 2015.66.1. Bruttmann, Kreutzmüller, and Hördler, “L’ ‘Album d’Auschwitz,’” 25. 29. Anonymous, “The Auschwitz Album,” Nanaimo Daily Free Press, 2 March 1982, 1. According to another reviewer, “‘The Birkenau Album’ would have been accurate, though it lacks the alliterative ring.” S. Bolotin, “Odd Album of Horror,” The New York Times, 26 December 1981, 21. 30. Y. Doosry, “Vom Dokument zur Ikone: Zur Rezeption des Auschwitz-Albums,” in Representations of Auschwitz, ed. Y. Doosry, 95–103 (Oświęcim: State Museum AuschwitzBirkenau, 1995), 100. 31. P. Moses-Krause, “Bericht über das Auschwitz-Album der Lili Jacob Meier,” in Gesichter der Juden, ed. Hahn, 7–28, 28. 32. Ibid., 7. 33. Ibid., 8. 34. J.-H. Kirsch, “Ikonen der Erinnerung,” Die Grundschulzeitschrift 97 (1996): 59; C. Oellers, “Ein Fotoalbum aus Auschwitz,” Die Tageszeitung, 23 January 1996, 12.

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35. I. Gutman and B. Gutterman, “Einführung,” in Das Auschwitz Album, ed. Gutman and Gutterman, 12–13, 12. 36. This is reflected in several references to the transport: A. Shalev, “Vorwort,” in Das Auschwitz Album, ed. Gutman and Gutterman, 7–9, 8; Gutman and Gutterman, “Einführung,” 12–13; G. Greif, “Das ‘Auschwitz-Album.’ Die Geschichte von Lili Jacob,” in Das Auschwitz Album, ed. Gutman and Gutterman, 71–86, 72; M. Springer-Aharoni, “Fotografien als historische Dokumente,” in Das Auschwitz Album, ed. Gutman and Gutterman, 87–97, 93, 96. 37. Kilian, “Das Antlitz von Auschwitz,” 30. 38. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, viii; Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 13–14. 39. Hördler, Kreutzmüller, and Bruttmann, “Auschwitz im Bild.” 40. Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Die fotografische Inszenierung, 180–228. 41. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, xx; Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 23. 42. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album. Also Greif, “Das ‘Auschwitz-Album,’” 78. 43. Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 8. 44. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album; similarly, Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, xxvi. 45. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, x. 46. Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 7. 47. Gutman and Gutterman, “Einführung,” 12. 48. Shalev, “Vorwort,” 8. 49. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, viii–x; Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 13; Springer-Aharoni, “Fotografien als historische Dokumente,” 93. 50. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album. 51. D. Lyon, “The Auschwitz Album,” Aperture 89 (1982): 6–9, 7. 52. B. Hodge Hall, “Photos Evoke the Tragedy of Auschwitz,” The Anniston Star, 2 July 1982, 59. 53. Anonymous, “The Auschwitz Album.” 54. C. Lauerman, “A Ghastly Glimpse of Auschwitz,” Chicago Tribune, 11 January 1982, 31. 55. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, ix. 56. Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 28. 57. A. Hess, “Kein Entsetzen, keine Angst,” Die Kirche. Sonntagsblatt für Anhalt und die Kirchenprovinz Sachsen, 26 January 1997, 3; I. Gutschke, “Lili Meiers Album,” Neues Deutschland, 21 July 1995, 12; B. Preisendörfer, No title, Zitty Berlin, 1 August 1996, 53; H. Loewy, “Bilder von Auschwitz,” Newsletter zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust: Informationen des Fritz Bauer Institut 10 (1995): 22–24, 23. 58. S. Tegtmeier, “Das Auschwitz-Album,” Die Tageszeitung, 27 January 2005, 4–5; ks, No title, Das Parlament 5–6 (2005): 17; H. Loch, “Augenblicke in der Todeszone,” Kölner Stadt Anzeiger, 27 January 2005, 26; C. Schaden, “Das Auschwitz-Album,” Photonews 6 (2005): 23; A. Müller, “Ein Tag im Mai 1944,” Darmstädter Echo, 26 January 2005, 8; I. Schiweck, “Eine SS-Dokumentation gibt Auschwitz-Opfern ein Gesicht,” Hellweger Anzeiger, 9 March 2005, 27; A. Gerstl, “Das Auschwitz-Album,” David. Jüdische Kulturzeitschrift 68 (2005): 49; S. Hardick, “Bilder aus dem Schlund der Hölle,” Berliner Literaturkritik, 4 October 2005, available online at http://www.berlinerliteraturkritik.de/ index.cfm?id=10513, accessed 3 November 2005. 59. Kilian, “Das Antlitz von Auschwitz,” 30. 60. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album; Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 8, 28; Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, xxxiii; Greif, “Das ‘Auschwitz-Album.’ Die Geschichte von Lili Jacob,” 86; Gutman and Gutterman, “Einführung,” 12.

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61. S. Klarsfeld, “Vorwort,” in Die fotografische Inszenierung, ed. Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, 7–9, 7; Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album. 62. Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album. 63. Ibid. 64. See note 18. 65. Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung, 134–42; Brink, “Das Auschwitz-Album,” 151–56. Brink quotes the judgement from I. Sagel-Grande, H. H. Fuchs, and C. F. Rüter, eds., Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, vol. 21 (Amsterdam: University Press Amsterdam, 1979), 601. 66. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, xxiv; Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 14, 60; Gutman and Gutterman, Das Auschwitz Album, 146. Gutman’s and Gutterman’s misunderstanding of the court’s treatment of the photograph was pointed out in R. Gross and W. Renz, eds., Der Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963–1965). Kommentierte Quellenedition, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2013), 1227. 67. Bolotin, “Odd Album.” 68. L. Hazleton, “The Esthetic View of Death,” The Nation, 21 November 1981, 529–31, 529–30. 69. R. Leiter, “Painful Chronicle of Death Camp,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 February 1982, 7; P. Hellman, “Photographic Witness,” The Nation, 16 January 1982, 34. 70. L. Hotz, “No Smiles in This Album,” The Pittsburgh Press, 21 February 1982, 241. 71. Bolotin, “Odd Album.” 72. Ibid. 73. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, 148–67. 74. J. Z. Grover, “The Banality of Photography,” Afterimage, April 1982, 5–7, 5. 75. Ibid., 6. 76. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, 102. 77. A. Grundberg, “Why the Holocaust Defies Pictorialization,” The New York Times, 2 May 1982, section 2, 31. 78. L. Hotz, “No Smiles”; T. Taylor, “Picturing the Holocaust,” The New York Times, 24 January 1982, section 7, 8; Bolotin, “Odd Album.” 79. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, 40, 50, 88, 98, 112. 80. The following is based on my interview with the founder of Arsenal Publishers, Peter Moses-Krause, in Berlin, 10 December 2018. 81. Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 28. 82. Hahn, Gesichter der Juden, 146. 83. Ibid., 145. The photo was also the cover illustration of the paperback edition of the immensely influential photo book G. Schoenberner, Der Gelbe Stern. Die Judenvernichtung in Europa 1993–1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1991); Meisel, “SS-Fotoalben,” 189. 84. Loewy, “Bilder von Auschwitz,” 23. 85. Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Die fotografische Inszenierung, 68. 86. See, e.g., Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, 65, 115, 117, 119, 121, 125, 150; Hahn, Gesichter der Juden, 39, 43, 47, 49, 51, 53, 57, 61, 63. Hellman’s edition used reproductions individually made from the originals at Yad Vashem. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, xxxiii. Hahn and Moses-Krause used reproductions made from copies Lili Jacob provided. Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 8. In both cases, it is possible that the cropping occurred prior to their layout. 87. H. Frübis, “Die Evidenz der Fotografie und die fotografischen Erzählweisen des Judenmordes,” in Darstellen, Vermitteln, Aneignen. Gegenwärtige Reflexionen des Holocaust, ed.

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88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95.

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B. Bannasch and H.-J. Hahn, 257–89 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2018), 267–68. I. Wollaston, “The absent, the partial and the iconic in archival photographs of the Holocaust,” Jewish Culture and History 3 (2010): 439–62, 453. Gutman and Gutterman, “Einführung,” 12. Greif, “Das ‘Auschwitz-Album,’” 86; Kilian, “Das Antlitz von Auschwitz,” 29. Gutman and Gutterman, “Einführung,” 13. D. Walter, “Das Album der Judenvernichtung,” Münchner Merkur, 26 January 2005, 3; Schiweck, “Eine SS-Dokumentation”; Schaden, “Das Auschwitz-Album”; M. Kalitschke, “Dokumente des Grauens,” Westfälische Nachrichten, 22 September 2005, FLM9; Gerstl, “Das Auschwitz-Album”; D.  M. Hoffmann, “Mörderische Perspektive,” Programmzeitung. Kultur im Raum Basel 3 (2005): 14; C. Richard, “Ein Album gegen das Vergessen,” Basler Zeitung, 27 January 2005, 5; C. Esch, “Familie Mermelstein muss warten,” Berliner Zeitung, 31 January 2005, available online at www.berliner-zeitung.de/fami lie-mermelstein-muss-warten-15866274, accessed 19 January 2019; V. Ullrich, “Aktuelle Bibliografie Auschwitz,” Die Zeit, 27 January 2005, available online at https://www.zeit .de/2005/05/L-Akt_Bioblio_, accessed 16 January 2018; H. Helwig, “Fotos der Nazis als einzige Erinnerung,” Gießener Anzeiger, 27 January 2005, 9. Kilian, “Das Antlitz von Auschwitz,” 31. Ibid. B. Frank, “Change of Heart on Two Carols,” The Morning News, 30 December 1981, A8. See also Lauerman, “A Ghastly Glimpse”; I. Flores, “Photo Album Recalls Concentration Camp,” Rocky Mount Telegram, 2 May 1982, 27; A. Handelman, “‘Lili Meier’s Album’: The Story Behind ‘The Auschwitz Album,’” St. Louis Jewish Light, 24 February 1982, 15; C. E. O., “Auschwitz Album,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 7 February 1982, 4E; L. Kavesh, “The Auschwitz Album: A Survivor Shares Photographs of the Horrors of Holocaust,” The Orlando Sentinel, 21 February 1982, F1, F4. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, xx; Lauerman, “A Ghastly Glimpse”; Hodge Hall, “Photos Evoke the Tragedy”; Kavesh, “The Auschwitz Album”; Handelman, “Lili Meier’s Album.” J. Yardley “Lest We Forget: Images of Humanity and Horror,” The Washington Post, 27 December 1981, 3, 8; L. Kaufman, “Three Books on Religion Deserve a Look,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 26 December 1981, A9; B. Peschel, “Album Proves the Reality of Holocaust Horrors,” The Daily Tar Heel, 18 February 1982, 11; Bolotin, “Odd Album”; Frank, “Change of Hearts”; Hodge Hall, “Photos Evoke the Tragedy”; C.  E.  O., “Auschwitz Album”; Kavesh, “The Auschwitz Album”; Leiter, “Painful Chronicle”; Anonymous, “The Auschwitz Album”; Handelman, “Lili Meier’s Album.” Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 23, 27; J. Schnurer, No title, Schulverwaltungsblatt für Niedersachsen 8 (1995): 212; Anonymous, “Sie erkannte ihre Familie wieder,” Berliner Morgenpost, 23 July 1995, 69; Preisendörfer, No title; Anonymous, “Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz,” Sächsische Zeitung, 6–7 May 1995, 18. See also Hess, “Kein Entsetzen”; Kirsch, “Ikonen der Erinnerung”; Gutschke, “Lili Meiers Album”; ebl, “Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz,” Badische Zeitung, 6–7 May 1995, Magazin: Bücher, 4; Anonymous, “Lili Meiers Fotoalbum des Grauens,” Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, 4 May 1995, 15; mey, “Fotografien aus dem KZ,” Reutlinger General-Anzeiger, 1 June 1995, 28; mk., No title, Main-Echo, 18 September 1995, 24; Anonymous, “Bilder aus dem Vernichtungslager Auschwitz,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 February 1996, 9; Oellers, “Ein Fotoalbum.”

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99. Gutman and Gutterman, “Einführung,” 13; Shalev, “Vorwort,” 8; Greif, “Das ‘AuschwitzAlbum,’” 72; Walter, “Das Album der Judenvernichtung”; Müller, “Ein Tag im Mai 1944”; M. Schäfer, “Wenn das Grauen zu sprechen beginnt,” Göttinger Tageblatt, 26 January 2005, 15; N. Copray, “Wem Gerechtigkeitssinn und Mut abgekauft werden,” Publik-Forum 8 (2005): 76; ks., No title; K. Schneider, “Der fotografierte Todesweg ungarischer Juden,” Leipzigs Neue, 11 March 2005, 12; E. Rathgeb, “Ankunft im Konzentrationslager am Morgen des 26. Mai 1944,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 July 2005, 38; Richard, “Ein Album gegen das Vergessen”; T. Bickelhaupt, “Augenblicke vor der Vernichtung,” Thüringer Landeszeitung, 7 July 2005, KU1; Hardick, “Bilder aus dem Schlund der Hölle”; nbr., “Lili Jacobs singulärer Fund rüttelt auf,” Schwäbische Donauzeitung, 3 May 2005, 13. 100. N. Gendler, “Auschwitz: An Album of Photos,” Star Tribune, 31 August 1982, 92; L. Schröder, “Von der Rampe,” Rheinische Post, 27 January 2005, A8; Schaden, “Das Auschwitz Album”; augf., “Der Weg in die Gaskammer: Fotos aus Auschwitz,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 27 January 2005, 15; Loch, “Augenblicke.” 101. Klarsfeld quoted in Bumiller, “The ‘Miracle Album’”; similarly, and also quoting Klarsfeld: Anonymous, “Auschwitz Album Going to Museum.” 102. Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, ix, xxviii; Hellman, “Photographic Witness.” 103. Peschel, “Album Proves the Reality.” 104. Ibid.; Hotz, “No Smiles”; Kaufman, “Three Books”; Hodge Hall, “Photos Evoke the Tragedy”; Flores, “Photo Album”; Taylor, “Picturing the Holocaust.” 105. Yardley, “Lest We Forget,” 8. Also I. Rosenberg, “Two Books on Auschwitz that Fail,” Detroit Free Press, 2 May 1982, 17. 106. Rosenberg, “Two Books on Auschwitz that Fail,” 17. 107. Taylor, “Picturing the Holocaust.” Also Leiter, “Painful Chronicle.” 108. Bolotin, “Odd Album.” 109. Taylor, “Picturing the Holocaust.” Also Grover, “The Banality,” 7; Bolotin, “Odd Album.” 110. Moses-Krause, “Bericht,” 13; mey, “Fotografien aus dem KZ”; Hess, “Kein Entsetzen.” 111. Hotz, “No Smiles,” emphasis mine. 112. Flores, “Photo Album Recalls Concentration Camp.” Also Gendler, “Auschwitz”; Peschel, “Album Proves the Reality”; Kaufman, “Three Books.” 113. Gendler, “Auschwitz.” 114. Hotz, “No Smiles”; Hodge Hall, “Photos Evoke the Tragedy of Auschwitz”; Peschel, “Album Proves the Reality”; Hazleton, “The Esthetic View,” 529; Lyon, “The Auschwitz Album,” 8. 115. Lyon, “The Auschwitz Album,” 8; Bolotin, “Odd Album”; Hazleton, “The Esthetic View”; Hotz, “No Smiles.” 116. Shalev, “Vorwort,” 8. 117. Gerstl, “Das Auschwitz-Album”; Hardick, “Bilder aus dem Schlund”; S. Egbers, “Empfohlene Literatur” Geschichte Betrifft uns (2005): 2, book jacket; Hoffmann, “Mörderische Perspektive”; Müller, “Ein Tag”; sb., “Holocaust-Synonyme,” Main-Echo, 23 August 2005; Schneider, “Der fotografierte Todesweg.” 118. Bickelhaupt, “Augenblicke.” See also Hardick, “Bilder aus dem Schlund”; Hoffmann, “Mörderische Perspektive”; Schröder, “Von der Rampe”; Walter, “Das Album.” In her essay, Nina Springer-Aharoni describes the photographs of disabled men and the elderly as typical examples of antisemitic Nazi photography; thus, it seems that reviewers picked this up from her. Springer-Aharoni, “Fotografien als historische Dokumente,” 95–96.

282

119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

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Schröder, “Von der Rampe.” Müller, “Ein Tag im Mai 1944.” Loch, “Augenblicke.” sb, “Holocaust-Synonyme.” Bumiller, “The ‘Miracle Album.’” Müller, “Ein Tag im Mai 1944.” B. Harris, “Beth Looks at Books,” The Desert Sun, 15 January 1982, A16. Schäfer, “Wenn das Grauen zu sprechen beginnt.” T. Crespi, “The Auschwitz Album,” The Jackson Sun, 14 February 1982, 58. Kalitschke, “Dokumente des Grauens”; G. Randecker, “Lili Jacobs [sic] fand Fotos ihrer Familie,” Reutlinger General-Anzeiger, 8 March 2005, 24; Kirsch, “Ikonen der Erinnerung.” Schröder, “Von der Rampe.” Hoffmann, “Mörderische Perspektive.” Bolotin, “Odd Album.” Springer-Aharoni, “Fotografien als historische Dokumente,” 97. Even before Gutman’s and Gutterman’s edition appeared, this limited interpretive focus was criticized by Doosry, “Vom Dokument zur Ikone,” 100. Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung, 124–42; Brink, “Das Auschwitz-Album.” Schröder, “Von der Rampe.” Hördler, Kreutzmüller, and Bruttmann, “Auschwitz im Bild,” 631–32.

Selected Bibliography Brink, C. Ikonen der Vernichtung. Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945. Munich: Akademie Verlag, 1998. Bruttmann, T., S. Hördler, and C. Kreutzmüller. Die fotografische Inszenierung des Verbrechens. Ein Album aus Auschwitz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2019. Koppermann, U. “Challenging the Perpetrators’ Narrative: A Critical Reading of the Photo Album ‘Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary.’” Journal of Perpetrator Research 2 (2019): 101–29. Meisel, L. “SS-Fotoalben als visuelle Leistungsnachweise und Legitimationsberichte.” Zeitgeschichte 2 (2022): 185–207. Struk, J. Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. London: Tauris, 2004.

Postscript Jane Caplan

This collection neatly captures the state of research into the media in National Socialist Germany at a moment of significant renovation in both paradigms and themes. The scope of this shift is signaled by my use of the word “media” itself in this sentence and its occurrence in the book’s title: until recently, the more likely term would have been “propaganda” or perhaps “cultural policy.” There are several dimensions to this lexical shift and several reasons for it, and these are discussed in admirable detail in Ulrike Weckel’s wide-ranging introduction to the historiography. Looking back in this postscript, I want to highlight in particular three innovatory expansions of the horizons of research since the 1980s that have enabled the themes and perspectives adopted in this volume. It is the interactions, the overlaps, and feedback among these departures that have been so productive for rethinking a model of domination that juxtaposed the “hard” power of terror and coercion with the “soft” power of propaganda and performance. That binary was encapsulated in two iconic public images from the period: the immobile ranks of steel-helmeted NSDAP squads staring toward the podium in photographs of the Nuremberg rally parade ground; and the multigenerational farm family gathered raptly around the “people’s radio,” the Volksempfänger, in Paul Mathias Padua’s schmaltzy painting The Führer Speaks. With the proliferation of scholarship on the history of Nazi Germany since the 1980s, this paradigm was eroded, first, by research that shifted attention from the dictatorial power structure of the regime to its unstable internal dynamics. Second, the meaning of ideology underwent reformulation: from being seen as a driver of policy and a vehicle of public instruction it began to be understood as a more diffused apparatus of meaning production. Third, a population long seen collectively in the regime’s own terms as the regimented and atomized object of propaganda and policy was restored to the disseminated identities and social relations produced, at least in part, by the transactions of everyday life (Alltag) as well as the domination of the Nazi regime.

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These changed historiographical perspectives have not gone unchallenged over the years, but they have had a sustained impact on core questions about the organization of power and the dictatorial reach of the regime. Together they produced a measurable drift toward the scale of microhistory, the terrain of networked power, and the political periphery. The first move loosened and dispersed the model of monolithic leadership and monopolistic power in the Nazi regime. It generated instead the concept of polycracy to characterize the institutionally fragmented and administratively erratic exercise of power in Nazi Germany, and it drew attention away from the center toward the peripheries of power generation and exercise. The second proposed a kind of parallel polysemy in communicative relations: the coexistence of multiple meanings and subjective strategies of meaning production grasped as more than just messaging from on high to a passive audience. Finally, tugging at the suffocating ideological embrace of the Volksgemeinschaft has released new energies in microhistorical research and new attention to the more marginal reaches of political and social behaviors and relations. The chapters in this volume exemplify and amplify these generic shifts. Of course, this loosening of older models of Nazi domination must not be exaggerated. The traffic in ideological ascription and signification between regime and populace took place on massively unequal and far from reciprocal terms; it was tightly constrained by the regime’s domination of the public sphere and its monopoly of terror. But even if media outputs were ultimately subject to the violence and caprice of the Nazi power apparatus, the latter was not a single entity speaking with one voice. Nor could it automatically guarantee the dictation of one received meaning alone to the exclusion of possible alternatives generated in the active processes of seeing, hearing, and making sense. The familiar imagery of spellbound communal attention—whether in the anonymous ranks of the Nazi squads animated by carefully orchestrated bursts of acclamation or in the sentimental silence of the family—is just that: imagery. What this imagery meant in practice and how it was generated and received is another story. Applying the analytical and interpretive tools offered by media studies, often to previously neglected sources (diaries and letters, photographs, amateur films, concert programs, advertisements), the chapters in this volume have demonstrated how the enlargement of propaganda to embrace media not only expands the field of vision beyond the polarity of coercion and consent but also suggests fresh perspectives and questions and brings older ones into sharper focus. This move might be summarized as the shift from “agency” to “subjectivity” as the focus of interest. Historians—for well-founded reasons—had been primarily interested in agency: to what extent and how did individuals or groups refuse to believe or comply with the political messages they were exposed to and resist acting on them? By contrast, media studies focused on the positioning of the audience as subjects in the first place through the technology of spectatorship and “audiovisual rhetoric” (Bernhard Gross’s term). If there is one lesson to be drawn from this revisionary perspective, it is that the parameters of communication in Nazi

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Germany were less a matter of one-sided, top-down dictation than—with all the caveats mentioned above—a dialectical process of coproduction, circulation, and dialogue. And even regime-sponsored dialogue could bite back, as Peter Fritzsche argues in his chapter on the orchestration of a literal call-and-response exchange between orator and audience in Goebbels’s Total War speech. Almost all the authors herein discuss these contests to generate and contain meaning in different spheres and levels: not just between regime and people but within the consciousness of audiences bringing their own experiences and memories into the encounter. This could be an exercise in a kind of ideological dilution: making unpalatable new values more acceptable and flattering bourgeois aspirations to intellectual self-determination, as Neil Gregor’s chapter on concert programs shows, or borrowing and domesticating Nazi tropes, as in Michaela Scharf ’s account of amateur autobahn films. At the same time, as Janosch Steuwer’s chapter shows, memories were themselves unstable, subject to ongoing revision under the impact of new and changing terms of interpretation. To sum up, these chapters move readers from the bounded terrain of regime propaganda to the wider landscape of official and popular media, from dictatorship to exchange, from force-feeding to consumption, and they provide readers with the analytical tools to follow these interpretive moves. They contribute to a wholesale reimagining of media production and consumption in Nazi Germany. An ostensible literal dictatorship of words, beliefs, and signs is subverted by paying close attention to the everyday situations, practices, and psychologies that underwrote how Germans consumed, produced, and interacted with the widest range of written and visual media. Jane Caplan is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the University of Oxford. She specializes in the history of Nazi Germany and the history of technologies of identity and identification in modern Europe. Her most recent publication is Nazi Germany: A Very Short History (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is a longtime editor of Britain’s leading radical history journal, History Workshop Journal, and a contributor to its companion website, History Workshop Online.

Index advertisements, 6, 13, 18, 22, 29, 30, 136–49, 156, 159, 161, 164, 169, 170, 171, 197, 201, 202, 284 air war, 17, 27, 32, 127, 130, 248 All Quiet on the Western Front, 22 Allies, 5, 16, 32, 127, 130, 131–32, 245, 249, 253, 256 amateur films, 27–28, 196–213, 284, 285 See also film Anderson, Lale, 130 Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth, 131 annexation of Austria, 15, 197, 201–2, 206 anti-German protest, 127 anti-Jewish violence, 9, 26–27, 30, 31, 61–62, 68, 77, 222, 272–73 See also Holocaust anti-Nazi papers, 2, 3, 10, 11, 49 antisemitic boycotts, 63, 68, 73, 128 antisemitism, 8, 9, 12, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 61–78, 121, 128, 145, 167 Apfelthaler, Friedrich, 206–11 Apfelthaler, Herbert, 206–11 Arendt, Hannah, 246 art music. See under music artworks, 25–26, 28, 138, 177–88, 197, 199, 202, 225, 230 atrocity films, 32, 240–57 Auschwitz, 30–31, 246, 252, 262–75 Baarová, Lída, 22 Barlach, Ernst, 184 Baschwitz, Kurt, 52 Baseler Zeitung, 95 battle of Stalingrad. See under defeat at Stalingrad Bergen-Belsen, 246, 255 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 48 Berliner Tageblatt, 11, 51 Berliner Volkszeitung, 52, 54

Bernhard, Georg, 50–51 bombings. See under air war books, 2, 4, 28, 219–34 bourgeoisie, 155, 159, 164, 168, 169, 171 Die Brennessel, 12 Briske, Rudolf, 96 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 16, 126 broadcasts. See under radio Brose, Hanns, 140, 148 Bryan, Julien, 182 Buchheim, Lothar-Günther, 224 Buchheit, Gert, 230 Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), 109 B.Z. am Mittag, 54–55 camp inmates 246, 252–53 Les Camps de la Mort, 244 Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV), 74–78 Churchill, Winston, 127 cinema. See under film citizenship, 156 collaboration, 219, 222, 224 colonies, 222 Communist papers. See under anti-Nazi papers (German) Communists, 3, 122, 128, 132 concentration camps, 30, 32, 128, 243–44, 247, 252–53, 266, 269, 272–73 concerts, 11, 17, 30, 154–69 concert hall, 154–58, 161, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172 concert programs, 30, 156–72, 284, 285 concertgoers, 30, 154–71 cultural criticism, 164, 168 “Day of Potsdam”, 34n6, 125, 128 death camps. See under concentration camps

Index

defeat at Stalingrad, 16, 126, 131, 132, 253 “Degenerate Art” exhibitions, 25–26, 177–88, 200 denazification, 6 denunciation, 12, 16, 20, 25, 26, 27, 29, 69, 78 department store, 122, 170, 171 deportation, 30, 32, 129, 130, 267–68 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), 71, 146, 182 Die Deutsche Wochenschau, 21 Deutschland Erwache! (film, 1968), 242, 249 Deutschlandsender, 13 Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB), 182 diaries, 2, 4, 14, 15, 19, 23–25, 84, 88, 90–98, 105–15, 124, 131, 183, 185–86, 196, 199, 227, 234, 284 Dietrich, Otto, 56–57, 87, 185 DP camp, 250, 252 displaced persons (DP), 250, 253, 257 Dix, Otto, 178, 185, 186 Dovifat, Emil, 30 Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 52 Ebensee, 246 election of 5 March 1933, 5, 14, 122, 125 election of 12 November 1933, 5, 14, 125–26 enforced coordination. See under Gleichschaltung entertainment, 7, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 161, 221, 223, 233 Der ewige Jude, 21 Ewiger Wald, 253 exile, 3, 15, 16, 24 Expressionism, 178, 187 eyewitness testimony, 243–44 families, 65, 66, 71, 75, 77, 131, 283, 284 female shoppers, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144–45 festivals. See under spectacles Fernsehstuben (television parlors), 2, 22–23 film, 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 17–23, 25, 26–27, 32, 159, 169, 197, 200, 202, 204, 207–8, 240–57 See also amateur films, foreign films, Kulturfilm, and atrocity films flags, 7, 123, 124, 128 forced labor, 31, 132, 242, 271 A Foreign Affair, 248 foreign broadcasts, 3, 7, 13, 15–17, 92 foreign films, 20

287

foreign newspapers, 3, 11, 85, 92, 95, 181 forest, 167, 252–53 Four Year Plan, 29, 136, 143, 145–47, 149 Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 Freies Land, 248 Frauenwerk, 145 Gardelegen massacre, 244–45 Gauleiter (NSDAP), 61, 69 Gemeinschaftsempfang (communal reception), 2, 7, 14 genocide. See under Holocaust German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, 246, 255 German Labor Front. See under Deutsche Arbeitsfront Gestapo, 10, 38, 71 ghetto, 252, 266 Gleichschaltung (enforced coordination), 1, 4, 5, 10, 12, 84 Goebbels, Joseph, 4, 5, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 27, 35n15, 92, 122, 123–24, 126–28, 130, 131, 132, 139, 141, 145, 149, 178, 179 speeches, 5, 6, 123, 126–27, 130, 132, 284 Göring, Hermann, 22, 113, 132 Göttinger Tageblatt, 91 Graf, Oskar, Maria, 123 Great Depression, 10, 17, 53, 137–38, 140, 164 “Great German Art” exhibition, 25, 178, 187 Die große Liebe, 21, 130 Grosz, George, 185 Grün ist die Heide, 253 Gürtner, Franz, 16 Hadamovsky, Eugen, 89 Hamburger Anzeiger, 51, 56 Hamburger Neueste Zeitung, 181 Hans Westmar, 19, 122 Heimat, 21 Heimkehr, 2 Henderson, Neville, 105 Heß, Rudolf, 87, 90, 113 Hindenburg, Paul von, 95, 128 Hitler, Adolf, 2, 4, 5, 11, 12, 14–15, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 57, 84–88, 92–98, 104, 111, 112, 113, 114, 121, 123–25, 128, 129, 161, 188, 199, 219, 223, 227, 233 speeches, 2, 4, 14–15, 27, 92, 94, 96, 112, 123, 124–25, 129

288

Hitler putsch, 129 Hitler Youth, 19, 67, 96, 104, 105, 108 Hitlerjunge Quex, 2, 122 Hofmann, Ernst, 262 Höllering, Franz, 54–55 Höß, Rudolf, 31, 262 Hohenberger, Franz, 201–6 Hohenberger, Maria, 201–6 Holocaust, 30–32, 129–33, 157, 242, 255, 257, 262, 271, 272, 261, 263, 266–75 See also anti-Jewish violence Hosenfeld, Wilm, 108, 113, 114 Hugenberg, Alfred, 51, 52, 53 (Nazi) ideology, 4, 6, 18, 19–20, 21, 30, 155–58, 166, 167, 243, 247, 283, 284 independent bourgois press. See under nonNazi papers International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 5, 63 Jacob, Lili (later Zelmanovic, later Meier), 31, 262–75 Jannings, Emil, 20 Jewish owned shops, 74–78, 145 Jews, 9, 12, 20, 22, 26, 29, 30–31, 63, 67, 71, 73, 74, 76–78, 167, 170 journalists, 2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 29, 49–58, 97, 157, 169, 226 Jud Süß, 2, 21 Jüdischer Kulturbund, 20 Jünger, Ernst, 230 Kapp, Wilhelm, 53–54 Kennedy, John F., 199 Kershaw, Ian, 8–9, 24, 85–89, 93, 97–98, 114–15 Klemperer, Victor, 14, 93–94 Knickerbocker, Hubert Renfro, 121 Kölsch, Karl, 230 Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), 108, 131, 182, 200, 222 Kramp, Werner, 92 Kropff, Hanns, 141, 149 Die Kuckucks, 255–56 Kulturfilm, 2, 18, 21, 197, 200 See also film Labor Service. See under Reichsarbeitsdienst Lang ist der Weg, 252, 253, 256 leftist press. See under anti-Nazi papers League of Nations, 125

Index

Leander, Zarah, 130 letters, 12, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 61–78, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 130, 183–86, 196, 210, 221, 226, 233–34, 284 liberation of the camps, 31, 32, 240, 241, 245, 249, 255, 272, 275 liberators, 244–45, 247, 249 listeners, 2, 6–7, 14–17, 26, 27, 89–90, 92, 98, 112, 113–14, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 129, 155–72 Lorenz, Heinz, 229–30, 233 Majdanek, 245 Mann, Thomas, 24, 84–86, 88, 92, 97 mass events. See under spectacles mass murder. See under Holocaust “the masses”, 4, 6, 49, 51, 53 Mein Kampf (Hitler’s book), 4, 34n14 Mein Kampf (film, 1960), 242 modern art. See under artworks modernism, 160, 168 Die Mörder sind unter uns, 249 Morituri, 252–53, 256 moviegoers, 2, 7, 18, 20–21, 32, 207–8, 211 movies. See under film movie theaters, 2, 6, 7, 11, 17–22, 33, 61, 78, 136 Mosse (publishing company), 28, 48, 51, 52, 53 music, 15, 17, 18, 21, 30, 74, 89–90, 122–24, 130, 154, 156, 158–64, 166–71, 241 Mussolini, Benito, 131 “national community”. See under “Volksgemeinschaft” nationalism, 30, 157–58, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171 Nazi crimes, 30, 132, 242, 244, 245, 246, 248, 257 See also Holocaust Nazi-party newspapers, 10–12, 28, 53, 122 Nebel, Gerhard, 230 neighbors/neighborhood, 2, 63, 68, 73, 77, 124, 244, 245 Neue Züricher Zeitung, 84 New York Times, 181, 270 newspapers, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10–12, 14, 21, 25, 28–30, 86, 88–93, 95–97, 105, 126, 128, 136–37, 141, 170, 179, 180, 181, 199, 219, 234

Index

newsreels, 2, 7, 17, 21–23, 105, 126, 197, 201, 250 Nolde, Emil, 26, 180–86 non-Nazi papers, 2, 11, 12, 28, 48–58 November pogrom 1938, 27, 30, 128, 130 Nuit et Brouillard, 242 Nuremberg Laws, 67, 73 occupation, 219, 223 occupation troops, 28, 220–25, 227, 230–31 occupation zones, 6, 248 Ohm Krüger, 21 Olympic Games, 23, 62 opinion research, 16, 23 Ossietzky, Carl von, 55, 57 Padua, Paul Mathias, 283 partisans, 252, 253 party rallies (Reichsparteitage), 7, 23, 24–25, 104–15, 121, 128, 179, 283 perpetrators (Nazi/German), 30, 198, 262, 271, 273, 275 persecution of the Jews. See under antiJewish violence Phoenix, 256 photographs, 7, 26, 27, 28, 30–32, 61–78, 106, 111, 113, 142, 154–56, 159, 170, 178, 180, 198–99, 219, 220–21, 222, 226, 227, 229–31, 233, 234, 262–75, 283, 284 police, 111 polls. See under opinion research popular magazines, 48, 136, 139, 199 Pour le Mérite, 21 press. See under newspapers Presseanweisungen (press regulations), 10, 38n55 propaganda, 2, 3–10, 12, 15, 18–30, 48–49, 51, 57, 71, 85, 87–91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 104–7, 109, 112, 114–15, 128, 132–33, 139, 147, 148, 156–57, 161, 167, 171, 172, 181, 177–81, 185–88, 196–98, 199, 201, 211–12, 220, 223, 227, 229, 231, 272, 283–85 propaganda company, 28, 222–26 propaganda ministry (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 29, 139, 149, 157, 178, 179, 180 political arena. See under public sphere public opinion, 5, 6, 10–11, 30, 87–88, 233

289

public sphere, 4, 62, 63, 67, 69, 73, 76, 77, 122, 157, 166, 167, 284 publishers, 1, 6, 11, 49–57, 219 racial policy, 9, 12, 27, 167, 168 radio, 2–3, 5, 6–7, 9, 10, 12–17, 22, 23, 27, 85, 87, 88, 89–92, 94, 112, 122–25, 136, 159, 199–200, 219, 221, 226, 233 Radio Luxembourg. See under foreign broadcasts Radio Moscow. See under foreign broadcasts “Rassenschande”, 12, 71 readers, 2, 3, 10–12, 25, 26, 28–29, 31, 48–58, 61, 62, 65, 68, 77, 85–86, 98, 143, 155, 159, 161, 167, 171, 210, 225, 262, 263, 266–72, 274 reeducation, 240, 243 Das Reich, 130, 131–32 Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) (Labor Service), 65, 96, 104, 108, 112, 113, 210 Reichssender, 13 Reichswehr, 84 See also Wehrmacht reviews, 31, 169 Riefenstahl, Leni, 104 Röhm, Ernst, 23–24, 84–98 “Röhm putsch”/June murders, 23–24, 84–98 Rosenberg, Alfred, 131 ruins, 247, 248–50, 255–57 Rundfunkverbrechen (broadcasting crime), 15–16 SA, 23, 84–86, 92–97, 105, 108, 110, 122, 123, 125 SA-Mann Brand, 19 Schacht, Hjalmar, 113 Schall, Franz Albrecht, 96 Schenzinger, Karl Aloys, 122 Scherl (publishing company), 53 Schleicher, Kurt von, 84, 95 schools, 61, 62, 64, 182 Schulz, Bernhard, 226–27, 230–31, 233 Das Schwarze Korps, 12, 27 SD (Sicherheitsdienst), 10, 16, 17, 21–22, 23, 223 shame, shaming, 240, 242, 243 Shoah. See under Holocaust slogans, 63, 72, 74, 75, 121, 123, 128, 129 Social Democrats (SPD), 3, 122, 123, 128, 132, 182

290

Social Democratic papers. See under antiNazi papers soldiers, 2, 22, 27, 28, 30, 219, 221, 224, 225, 227, 230, 233–34 Solmitz, Luise, 15, 124 Sonnemann (publishing company), 48 songs. See under music Sopade’s Deutschland-Berichte, 3, 10, 16, 23, 88, 182 souvenir, 154, 169, 230 spectacles, 2, 7, 21, 24–25, 26–27, 51, 106, 122 See also party rallies Speer, Albert, 5, 14 sports, 2, 21, 159 SS, 12, 23, 30–31, 96, 110–11, 114, 245, 262–63, 271–73 stab-in-the-back legend, 4–5, 16 Stampfer, Eduard, 53 star decree/“Judenstern”, 129, 130 stars/star culture, 18, 169–70 Stresemann, Gustav, 51 Streicher, Julius, 61, 63 Der Stürmer, 12, 26, 27, 61–78 Stürmerkästen, 26 subjectivity, 156, 158, 159, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 284 subscribers, 1–2, 10–11, 166, 168, 169, 170 survivors, 31, 243, 244, 249, 256, 266, 268, 269, 272–74 television, 2, 9, 22–23, 219 Tempo, 51, 53 theory of totalitarianism, 6–8, 156 Todeslager Sachsenhausen (film), 245, 249 Die Todesmühlen, 240, 242–49 travel/tourism, 27–28, 69, 154, 179, 200, 206, 210, 212, 222, 223–24, 230 Trenker, Luis, 25, 108 Tucholsky, Kurt, 14–15 Triumph des Willens, 2, 21, 104, 114 Ullstein (publishing company), 28, 48–58 Ullstein, Hermann, 48, 57

Index

viewers. See under moviegoers violence, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35n19, 61–62, 68, 71, 77, 106, 110–11, 114, 127, 132, 133, 223, 272, 273, 284 See also anti-Jewish violence Völkischer Beobachter, 11 Volksempfänger (“people’s receiver”), 2, 12–13, 283 “Volksgemeinschaft” (“people’s community”) 7, 9, 14, 29, 65, 66, 67, 78, 85, 107, 108, 112, 139, 145, 155, 166, 167, 171, 196, 199, 212, 223, 247, 253, 284 Volkssturm, 125 “Volkszorn”, 72, 73, 128 Vorwärts, 53 Vossische Zeitung, 48, 50, 52, 54 Waldkirch, Wilhelm, 56 Walter, Bernhard, 262, 263, 266 Wehrmacht, 2, 21, 107, 108, 110, 113, 125, 146, 222–23 Welt im Film Nr. 5: KZ, 244 Die Weltbühne, 55 Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft, 139, 145–47, 149 Wille und Macht, 19 workers, 13, 14, 168 world economic crisis. See under Great Depression World War I, 5, 28, 51, 125, 126, 128, 161, 220, 225–26, 227, 233 World War II, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 15–16, 17–18, 20–22, 23, 27, 29, 32, 49, 114, 121, 125–32, 138, 139, 141, 143–46, 147, 148, 149, 154–56, 178, 186, 198–99, 220–27, 230, 233, 242, 247, 252, 285 Wunschkonzert, 21 Zentner, Wilhelm, 167 Ziegler, Adolf, 178, 184 Zwischen Gestern und Morgen, 247–48, 255–56