The Coming of the Third Reich (24 page)

What was undermining the political press in the 1920s was, above all, the rise of the so-called ‘boulevard papers’, cheap, sensational tabloids that were sold on the streets, particularly in the afternoons and evenings, rather than depending on regular subscribers. Heavily illustrated, with massive coverage of sport, cinema, local news, crime, scandal and sensation, these papers placed the emphasis on entertainment rather than information. Yet they, too, could have a political orientation, like Hugenberg’s
Night Edition (Nachtausgabe),
whose circulation grew from 38,000 in 1925 to 202,000 in 1930, or Münzenberg’s
World in the Evening (Welt am Abend),
which boosted its sales from 12,000 in 1925 to 220,000 in 1930. By and large, the pro-Weimar press found it hard to keep up with such competition, though the liberal-oriented Ullstein press empire did produce the successful
Tempo
(145,000 in 1930) and
BZ at Midday (BZ am Mittag,
175,000 in the same year). The Social Democrats were unable to compete in this market.
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It was at this level that the politics of the press had a real impact. Scandal-sheets undermined the Republic with their sensational exposure of real or imagined financial wrongdoings on the part of pro-Republic politicians; illustrations could convey the contrast with Imperial days. The massive publicity the popular press gave to murder trials and police investigations created the impression of a society drowning in a wave of violent crime. Out in the provinces, ostensibly unpolitical local papers, often fed by right-wing press agencies, had a similar, if more muted effect. Hugenberg’s press empire might not have saved the Nationalists from decline; but its constant harping on the iniquities of the Republic was another factor in weakening Weimar’s legitimacy and convincing people that something else was needed in its stead. In the end, therefore, the press did have some effect in swaying the minds of voters, above all in influencing them in a general way against Weimar democracy.
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The emergence of the sensationalist popular press was only one among many new and, for some people, disquieting developments on the media and cultural scene in the 1920s and early 1930s. Experimental literature, the ‘concrete poetry’ of the Dadaists, the modernist novels of Alfred Döblin, the social-critical plays of Bertolt Brecht, the biting polemical journalism of Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky, all divided readers between a minority who rose to the challenge of the new, and the majority who regarded such work as ‘cultural Bolshevism’. Alongside the vibrant radical literary culture of Berlin there was another literary world, appealing to the conservative nationalist part of the middle classes, rooted in nostalgia for the lost Bismarckian past and prophesying its return with the longed-for collapse of the Weimar Republic. Particularly popular was Oswald Spengler’s
The Fall of the
West, which divided human history into natural cycles of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and located early twentieth-century Germany in the winter phase, characterized by ‘tendencies of an irreligious and unmetaphysical urban cosmopolitanism‘, in which art had suffered a ‘preponderance of foreign art-forms’.

In politics, according to Spengler, winter was recognizable by the rule of the inorganic, cosmopolitan masses and the collapse of established state forms. Spengler won many adherents with his claim that this heralded the beginning of an imminent transition to a new spring, that would be ‘agricultural-intuitive’ and ruled by an ‘organic structure of political existence‘, leading to the ’mighty creations of an awakening, dream-laden soul’.
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Other writers gave the coming period of revival a new name that was soon to be taken up with enthusiasm by the radical right: the Third Reich. This concept was popularized by the neo-conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book of this title was published in 1923. The ideal of the Reich had arisen, he proclaimed, with Charlemagne and been resurrected under Bismarck: it was the opposite of the government by party that characterized the Weimar Republic. At present, he wrote, the Third Reich was a dream: it would require a nationalist revolution to make it reality. The political parties that divided Germany would then be swept away. When the Third Reich finally came, it would encompass all political and social groupings in a national revival. It would restore the continuity of German history, recreating its medieval glory; it would be the ‘final Reich’ of all.
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Other writers, such as the jurist Edgar Jung, took up this concept and advocated a ‘conservative revolution’ that would bring about ‘the Third Reich’ in the near future.
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Below this level of somewhat rarified abstraction were many other writers who in one way or another glorified the alleged virtues that, in their view, the Weimar Republic negated. The ex-army officer Ernst Jünger propagated the myth of 1914, and in his popular book Storm of Steel exalted the image of the front-line troops who had found their true being only in the exercise of violence and the suffering, and inflicting, of pain.
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The Free Corps spawned a whole canon of novels celebrating the veterans’ hatred of revolutionaries, often expressed in blood-curdling terms, portraying murder and mayhem as the ultimate expression of a resentful masculinity in search of revenge for the collapse of 1918 and the coming of revolution and democracy.
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In place of the feeble compromises of parliamentary democracy, authors such as these, and many others, proclaimed the need for strong leadership, ruthless, uncompromising, hard, willing to strike down the enemies of the nation without compunction.
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Others looked back to an idyllic rural world in which the complexities and ‘decadence’ of modern urban life were wholly absent, as in Adolf Bartels’s novel The
Dithmarshers,
which had sold over 200,000 copies by 1928.
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All of this expressed a widespread sense of cultural crisis, and not just among conservative elites. Of course, many aspects of modernist culture and the media had already been in evidence before the war. Avant-garde art had impinged on the public consciousness with the work of Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke or Emil Nolde, and abstract painters such as the Russian-born but Munich-based Wassily Kandinsky. Atonal and expressionist music was emanating from the Second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Zemlinsky, while sexually explicit drama in the form of plays such as
Spring’s Awakening
by Frank Wedekind had already caused a major furore. There had been constant disputes under the Wilhelmine Reich about the limits of propriety in literature and the threat posed by allegedly unpatriotic and subversive, or pornographic and immoral books, many of which were subject to bans imposed by the police.
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The sense of cultural crisis which the emergence of modernist art and culture generated amongst the middle classes after the turn of the century was held in check under the Wilhelmine regime, and in its more extreme forms remained confined to a small minority. After 1918, however, it became far more widespread. The ending, or at least the scaling-down, of the censorship that had been so harsh during the war and always active during the Wilhelmine period, encouraged the media to venture into areas that had previously been taboo. The theatre became the vehicle for radical experimentation and left-wing agitprop.
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Cheaper reproduction and printing techniques made it easier to publish inexpensive illustrated papers and magazines for the mass market. Controversy swirled in particular around Weimar’s Bauhaus, created by the architect Walter Gropius in a merger of the Weimar Art Academy and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. An educational centre that sought to join high art with practical design, its staff included Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, Theo van Doesberg, and László Moholy-Nagy. Its bohemian students, both male and female, were unpopular with the townspeople, and its radically simple, clean and ultra-modern designs were condemned by local politicians as owing more to the art-forms of primitive races than to anything German. State funding was withdrawn in 1924 and the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, but it continued to be dogged by controversy, especially under its new director, Hannes Meyer, whose Communist sympathies led in 1930 to his replacement by the architect Mies van der Rohe. Mies expelled the Communist students and replaced the Bauhaus’s earlier communitarian ethos with a more structured, even authoritarian regime. But the Nazi majority elected to the town council in November 1931 closed it down following an official inspection by Paul Schulze-Naumburg, the ultra-conservative author of a book on Art and Race. It then moved to a factory site in Berlin, but from this time on was no more than a shadow of its former self. The fate of the Bauhaus illustrated how difficult it was for avant-garde culture to receive official acceptance even in the culturally relaxed atmosphere of the Weimar Republic.
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New means of communication added to the sense of old cultural values under threat. Radio first began to make a real mark as a popular cultural institution during this period: a million listeners had registered by 1926, and another 3 million by 1932, and the airwaves were open to a wide variety of opinion, including the left. Cinemas had already opened in the larger towns before 1914, and by the late 1920s films were attracting mass audiences which increased still further with the coming of the talkies at the end of the decade. A sense of aesthetic disorientation was prompted amongst many cultural conservatives by Expressionist films such as
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari,
with its famously odd-angled sets, and by erotically charged movies like
Pandora’s
Box, starring the American actress Louise Brooks. A sharp satire on bourgeois convention such as
The Blue Angel,
based on a book by Heinrich Mann and starring Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich, ran into trouble with its production company, Hugenberg’s UFA, not least for its portrayal of the cynical and manipulative eroticism of its central female character.
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The film of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel
All Quiet on the Western Front
aroused a furious campaign on the part of ultra-nationalists who thought its pacifist message unpatriotic.
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Bourgeois culture had held up bland ideals of beauty, spiritual elevation and artistic purity that seemed mocked by the manifestations of Dada, while the ‘New Objectivity’
(Neue Sachlichkeit,
literally ‘new matter-offactness’) placed everyday events and objects at the centre in an attempt to aestheticize modern urban life. This was not to everyone’s taste. Instead of losing themselves in portentous thoughts inspired by the mythical world of Wagner’s Ring cycle or the ritual religious music-drama of
Parsifal,
dress-suited bourgeois opera-goers were now confronted with the Kroll Opera’s production of Paul Hindemith’s
News of the Day,
in which a naked diva sang an aria sitting in a bathtub. Alongside the mellifluous Late Romanticism of Germany’s leading establishment composer, Richard Strauss, formerly an
enfant terrible but now
the composer of slight and emotionally undemanding operas such as
Intermezzo
and
The Egyptian Helena,
audiences were now treated to Alban Berg’s Expressionist masterpiece
Wozzeck,
set among the poor and downtrodden of the early nineteenth century and incorporating atonal music and everyday speech patterns. The conservative composer Hans Pfitzner struck a chord when he denounced such tendencies as symptoms of national degeneracy, and ascribed them to Jewish influences and cultural Bolshevism. The German musical tradition, he thundered, had to be protected from such threats, which were made more acute by the Prussian government’s appointment in 1925 of the Austrian-Jewish atonalist Arnold Schoenberg to teach composition at the state music academy in Berlin. Musical life was central to bourgeois identity in Germany, more, probably, than in any other European country: such developments struck at its very core.
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An even greater threat, in this view, was posed by the American influence of jazz, which found its way into works such as
The Threepenny Opera,
with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. A caustic denunciation of exploitation set in a world of thieves and criminals, it sent shock waves through the cultural world on its first performance in 1928; a similar effect was produced by Ernst Krenek’s
Jonny Strikes
Up, which was premiered in February 1927 and featured a black musician as its protagonist. Many modernist composers found jazz a stimulus to renewing their art. It was, of course, principally a popular art form, played in various styles at myriad night-clubs and bars, above all in Berlin, shading off into dance-halls, revue theatres and hotels. Visiting big bands and chorus lines such as the Tiller Girls enlivened the Berlin scene, while the more daring could spend an evening at a club such as the Eldorado, ‘a supermarket of eroticism’, as the popular composer Friedrich Hollaender called it, and watch Anita Berber perform pornographic dances with names such as ‘Cocaine’ and ‘Morphium’ to an audience liberally sprinkled with transvestites and homosexuals, until her early death in 1928 from drug abuse. Cabaret shows added to all this an element of biting, anti-authoritarian political satire and aroused pompous conservatives to anger with their jokes about the ‘nationalist and religious sentiments and practices of Christians and Germans’, as one of them angrily complained. The wrath of conventional moralists was aroused by dances such as the tango, the foxtrot and the charleston, while racist rhetoric was directed against black musicians (though there were very few of them and most were employed mainly as drummers or dancers, to lend a flavour of the exotic to the performance).