The Nazis graphically demonstrated their attitude toward “un-German” and “Jewish-Bolshevik” literature by organizing book-burnings in university towns around the country. The one in Berlin, which took place on May 10, 1933, was the largest, befitting the city’s status as a center of “literary subversion.” In the middle of the Opernplatz, just a few meters from the statues of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, storm troopers and students built a pile of 20,000 books that they had pillaged from libraries and stores around town. The authors honored in this anti-canon included Marx, Brecht, Feuchtwanger, the Mann brothers, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Kastner, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, H. G. Wells, Sig-mund Freud, Emile Zola, Upton Sinclair, Andre Gide, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, and Helen Keller. Also tossed on the pyre was the entire library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research, which the Nazis had recently smashed up and closed. As their fire blazed, the students (and, even more revoltingly, a few professors) chanted the dim-witted dogmas of Nazi cultural politics: “Against decadence and moral decay! For discipline and decency in the family and state!” “Against impudence and arrogance, for respect and reverence toward the immortal German soul!” At midnight Goebbels showed up to address the crowd. He had been somewhat reluctant to attend, fearing that some might recall that he had studied literature with Jewish professors and had once even praised some of the authors now being pilloried. Nonetheless, he managed to bring forth the expected slogans, denouncing the works on the smoldering pile as “the intellectual foundation of the November Republic,” now vanquished along with the “era of Jewish hyper-intellectualism.”
Aware that such demonstrations and proclamations, however unsubtle, were not enough to ensure conformity, the Nazis established an elaborate bureaucracy to control the nation’s cultural life—the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), based in Berlin. It contained seven departments individually responsible for radio, theater, film, music, the visual arts, the press, and literature.
Like the other departments, the Reichsschriftumskammer, which dealt with literature, was a kind of government union; writers who did not belong to it were unlikely to get published, at least in Germany. The agency kept publishers and booksellers informed as to which authors were acceptable and which were on its index. Since its writ extended across the entire Reich, it brought a degree of centralization never experienced before (or since) in German literary history. Berlin might be the center of German “decadence,” but in culture as in politics it wielded unprecedented authority during the Third Reich.
A few nonconformist writers who were unwilling to flee the country tried to survive by restricting themselves to producing esoteric or specialized works or by writing in a kind of code, which they hoped the Nazi censors were too dim to decipher. This tactic, known as “inner emigration,” was hard to pull off in Berlin because the censorship bureaucracy was headquartered there. Thus some writers chose to retreat to the countryside, where they hoped to be left in peace. A prime example was Hans Fallada, whose novel Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Little Man, What Now?) chronicles the plight of Germany’s petite bourgeoisie squeezed between big labor and big capital. Fallada had thought that as a “nonpolitical man” he had nothing to fear from the Nazis, but they temporarily arrested him in 1933, which convinced him to go to ground in a north German village far from the capital. There he played it safe by writing a novel, Der Eiserne Gustav (Iron Gustav), which celebrates a Berlin coachman who refuses to switch to taxicabs. It was not until after the war that he explored antifascist themes in his novel of the Berlin resistance, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Everyone Dies His Own Death). The physician and poet Gottfried Benn, who had initially heralded the triumph of Nazism, was expelled from the Reichs-schriftumskammer in 1936 for writing verse with “un-German” imagery. For the rest of the Third Reich he found his own inner immigration as an army doctor in Hanover and on the front. The novelist Ernst Jünger, whose works celebrating trench warfare as a spiritual epiphany had won the admiration of Goebbels, refused to put his talent at the service of the Nazis and abandoned Berlin for the little town of Goslar shortly after Hitler came to power.
The majority of the writers who published actively in Berlin during the Nazi era were hacks or opportunists, grateful for the drop-off in competition. The former bastion of “asphalt literature” was now crawling with Blut-und-Boden (blood and soil) writers who celebrated the virtues of race and rootedness. This group included such figures as Hans-Friedrich Blunck, Hans Grimm, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Isolde Kurz, Agnes Miegel, and Hanns Johst (who became head of the Reichs-274 schriftumskammer). Unlike the writers whom they helped to drive away, most of these stars in the Nazi firmament faded from view as soon as the Third Reich collapsed.
While some independent-thinking novelists and poets could continue to do productive work in inner emigration, often in the provinces, playwrights, by dint of the public nature of their craft, found this sort of partial hibernation much harder. They wanted to remain where the action was, and that was Berlin. The Nazis, for their part, were conscious of the Berlin theater’s traditional role as conscience and educator of the nation, and they were determined to bend this tradition to their purposes.
The central figure here was Hermann Göring, titular head of all the Prussian state theaters. He once declared that when he heard the word “culture” he got out his gun, but this was just bravado; in reality, he considered himself a connoisseur of the arts. He loved the theater and was himself quite histrionic, a center-stage performer with the girth of Falstaff and the character of Iago. Sometimes he laid aside his beribboned uniforms to dress up in a Robin Hood outfit with leather jerkin and thigh-length boots, or in a Roman toga with jewel-studded sandals. His passion for the theater was also reflected in his choice of a second wife, the actress Emmy Son-nemann, whom he married in 1935 in an elaborate ceremony at the Berlin Cathedral. As chief of the Berlin stage, Göring was no purist: he was prepared to cultivate talented non-Nazi actors and directors as long as they did not try to rewrite the script they had been handed. “It is easier to turn a great artist into a decent National Socialist than to make a great artist out of a humble Party member,” he observed.
Göring’s chief rival for control over Berlin’s theaters was Goebbels, who as head of the Reich Chamber of Culture and minister of propaganda and enlightenment had authority over all the Reich-administered theaters, which in Berlin included the Volksbühne, the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, and the Deutsche Oper (Charlot-tenburg). It irritated Goebbels that Göring held sway over the Prussian state theaters, for they were far more prestigious than his lot. He tried repeatedly to wrest Göring’s “treasure” from him, but to no avail. The Goebbels-Göring feud was typical of the Third Reich’s neofeudal structure, its endless battles between rival fief-doms with overlapping borders.
Göring’s prize theater-man was Gustav Gründgens, who became director of the Schauspielhaus in 1934. He had made his reputation in the 1920s in Hamburg, where he had dazzled audiences with his versatility as an actor. In those days he had embraced communism, but only as another role, one he could conveniently drop when he moved to Berlin in the early 1930s to star at the Deutsches Theater. According to Klaus Mann, who had known him in Hamburg (and whose sister, Erika, was briefly married to him), Grlindgens won over Göring with a virtuoso performance of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Mann wrote in his memoir, The Turning Point: “Göring, completely bedeviled by such a breathtaking display of bold depravity, presently forgave him for all his former slips, including his objectionable marriage. . . . I visualize my ex-brother-in-law as the traitor par excellence, the macabre embodiment of corruption and cynicism.” Klaus Mann was so obsessed with Gründgens that he made him the antihero of his novel Mephisto, a meditation on the “prostitution of talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.”