By the spring of 1933 Gleischschaltung of radio broadcasting was largely completed; both staff and subject matter had been “co-ordinated.” The press followed. There had been approximately 3,000 newspapers in Germany. A large number of these, chiefly local papers, were eliminated by economic pressure backed by all the powers of the state. Others were confiscated. Only a few of the major newspapers, whose prestige might make them useful tools, were allowed to survive. Some of these, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung, continued on into the war years. But drastic restrictions were placed upon them even in the initial phase of the seizure of power. A shower of instructions and “language rules,” usually handed down at the daily Reich press conference, established political regimentation and banished freedom of the press to whatever small space it could find between the lines. At the same time, however, Goebbels looked kindly upon all differences in form and style. In general he tried to conceal the governmental monopoly of opinion by stressing journalistic variety. He put it in a pithy slogan : the press, like culture in general, was to be “monoform in will, polyform in the outward trappings of that will.”
If we survey the whole scene, we must grant that in the cultural realm as well, “co-ordination” proceeded without a protest, without a sign of effective opposition. Only the Protestant Church was able to resist the open seizure of power in its ranks, although at the price of fission. The Catholic bishops had hitherto attacked Nazism in a series of strongly militant statements and had officially condemned it. But their will to resist was undermined by the negotiations for a concordat, already begun during the Weimar years and eagerly resumed by Hitler. Nazi promises and sham concessions knocked the ground from under their feet. Belatedly, they would find their way back to opposition, but by then they did not see clearly how to proceed. In the universities, too, what feeble resistance came to the fore was soon subdued by the tried-and-true combination of “spontaneous expressions of the people’s will” from below followed by an administrative act from above.
The point has often been made that the corps of high-ranking military officers or big business proved to be the weakest spot in the country’s defenses against Nazism. But that thesis becomes somewhat questionable when we consider how swiftly and easily the regime succeeded in overwhelming the intellectuals, the professors, the artists and writers, the universities and academies. There were only scattered acts of rebellion here and there. During the early months, when the regime was courting recognition and decorative names, testimonials of loyalty rained down upon it unrequested. As early as the beginning of March, and again in May, several hundred university teachers of all political persuasions publicly declared their adherence to Hitler and the new regime. A “pledge of loyalty by German writers to the People’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler” was signed by such distinguished names as Rudolf Binding, Walter von Molo, and Joseph Ponten; another such document bore the names of noted people like Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the great surgeon, and Martin Heidegger, the philosopher. Alongside these lists of signatures, there was a great deal of applause from individuals. Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel prize winner, whom Goebbels had mocked for years as a “unionized Goethe,” published an article titled “I Say Yes!” It turned out later that the editors had added the title—which nevertheless accurately summed up the content. Hans Friedrich Blunck, president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer, the writers’ organization, described the attitude appropriate to the new era with the formula: “Humility before God, honor to the Reich, flowering of the arts.” The critic Ernst Bertram composed a “fire song” for the book burning, in which the works of his friend Thomas Mann were consumed:
Even Theodor W. Adorno noticed in the composition of a poetry cycle by Baldur von Schirach “the strongest conceivable effects” of the “romantic realism” proclaimed by Goebbels.
Meanwhile, in the early weeks of the regime, 250 notable writers and professors left the country. Many others were harassed, relieved of their posts, or otherwise made aware of their vulnerability. Soon the spokesmen for a regime with cultural ambitions had to acknowledge that the first “summer of art” in Germany looked more like a battlefield than a field of ripening grain. The Minister of the Interior announced the expatriation of writers and scholars, one after another, among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Theodor Plievier, Anna Seghers, and Albert Einstein. But those who remained were not averse to taking the evacuated seats in the academies and at banquets, insensitive to the tragedies of the expelled and the outlawed.
Those who were asked placed themselves at the regime’s disposaclass="underline" the composer Richard Strauss, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the actors Werner Krauss and Gustaf Gründgens. Such actions surely cannot always be ascribed to weakness or opportunism. A great many were sucked in by the emotional surge of the national rising, wanting to take their place in the ranks and “co-ordinate” themselves. Others felt it their mission to strengthen the affirmative forces within the “great idealistic popular movement” called National Socialism. They meant to take those honest but primitive Nazi ruffians under their wings, to sublimate those unthinking energies, to refine the “well-meant but still clumsy ideas of Adolf Hitler, the ‘man of the people,’ ” and in this way “show the National Socialists what really is contained within their dim strivings and thus make possible a ‘better’ National Socialism.”21 This was the hope, so frequently found in revolutionary eras, of averting something worse—oddly coupled with the notion that under the banner of the new fraternity idealism could be introduced into “dirty politics.” Cowardice and conformism were certainly present and widespread; but in such intellectual illusions can be found the specifically German continuity within Nazism.
But we would still have only a partial understanding of the phenomenon if we failed to consider the dominant feeling of the age. The eternally unsettled question of how the blatantly anti-intellectual Hitler movement could have enjoyed such success among writers, professors, and intellectuals in general may to some extent be answered in terms of the antiintellectual tendency of the age. Even Max Scheler, the philosopher, gave a certain sanction to the irrationalist movements of the period—although he indicated that he did not subscribe to the modish denigration of the intellect. In a lecture toward the end of the twenties he spoke of a “systematic instinctual revolt in men of the new epoch… against the exaggerated intellectuality of our fathers” and called it a “healing process.” The victory of the Hitler movement was widely seen as the political form of this healing process. Certainly Nazism embodied, in political terms, all those pseudoreligious tendencies to escapism, that hatred of civilization, and revulsion against the intellect with which the period was rife. This will explain why Nazism exerted a seductive influence upon many intellectuals who, isolated within their disciplines, longed for fraternization with the masses, for sharing in the vitality of the common people, for mental torpor and historical effectiveness. Again, this mood was an all-European phenomenon. Not only Edgar Jung, the nationalist-conservative writer, affirmed his “respect for the primitivity of a popular movement, for the militant vitality of victorious gauleiters and storm troop leaders…”; Paul Valéry, too, found it “charming that the Nazis despise the intellect so much.”22 We can find the whole catalogue of motivations—the illusions, the hopes, the self-delusions—spelled out in the famous letter the poet Gottfried Benn sent to Klaus Mann in exile: