The Coming of the Third Reich (68 page)

II

The policy of co-ordination that was affecting musical life as it was almost every other area of German society and culture was not just designed to eliminate alternatives to Nazism and impose surveillance and control on every aspect of German society. At the same time as the stormtroopers were pulverizing Nazism’s opponents, Hitler and Goebbels were putting in place the means by which passive supporters would be won over to become active participants in the ‘National Socialist revolution’, and waverers and the sceptical would be brought round to a more co-operative frame of mind. The new government, declared Goebbels at a press conference on 15 March 1933,

will not be satisfied for long with the knowledge that it has 52 per cent behind it while terrorising the other 48 per cent but will, by contrast, see its next task as winning over that other 48 per cent for itself ... It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime, to move them towards a position of neutrality towards us, we want rather to work on people until they have become addicted to us ...
⁹

Goebbels’s statement was as interesting for its admission that nearly half the population was being terrorized as it was for its declared ambition of winning the hearts and minds of those people who had not voted for the coalition in the election of 5 March. There would be a ‘spiritual mobilization’ comparable to the massive military mobilization of 1914. And in order to bring this mobilization about, Hitler’s government put into effect its most original institutional creation, the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, established by a special decree on 13 March. The post of Minister, with a seat in the cabinet, was given to Joseph Goebbels. His unscrupulous and inventive propaganda campaigns in Berlin, where he was Regional Leader of the Nazi Party, had won the admiration of Hitler, above all during the election campaign that had culminated in the coalition’s victory on 5 March.
¹⁰

The new Ministry was set up in the teeth of opposition from cabinet conservatives like Alfred Hugenberg, who distrusted Goebbels’s ‘socialist’ radicalism.
¹¹
The new Minister’s propaganda campaigns over the previous few years had lacked nothing in invective against ‘reactionaries’ and Nationalists such as himself. Moreover, ‘propaganda’, as Goebbels himself admitted, was a ‘much-maligned’ word that ‘always has a bitter after-taste’. It was often employed as a term of abuse. Using the word in the title of the new Ministry was; therefore, a bold step. Goebbels justified it by defining propaganda as the art, not of lying or distorting, but of listening to ‘the soul of the people’ and ‘speaking to a person a language that this person understands’.
¹²
It was not necessarily clear, however, what areas of competence would be covered by ‘popular enlightenment and propaganda’. Originally, when the creation of such a ministry had first been discussed early in 1932, Hitler had intended it to cover education and culture, but by the time it came into being, education had been reserved, more traditionally, for a separate ministry, held by Bernhard Rust since 30 January 1933.
¹³
Nevertheless, the primary purpose of Goebbels’s new Ministry, as Hitler declared on 23 March 1933, was to centralize control of all aspects of cultural and intellectual life. ‘The government’, he declared, ‘will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation’s moral and material health. The whole educational system, theatre, film, literature, the press, and broadcasting- all these will be used as a means to this end. They will be harnessed to help preserve the eternal values which are part of the integral nature of our people.’
¹⁴

What those values were, of course, would be defined by the regime. The Nazis acted on the premise that they, and they alone, through Hitler, had an inner knowledge and understanding of the German soul. The millions of Germans who had refused to support the Nazi Party - a majority, as we have seen, even in the semi-democratic elections of
₅
March 1933 - had been seduced, they believed, by ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism and Marxism, the ‘Jewish‘-dominated press and media, the ‘Jewish’ art and entertainment of Weimar culture, and other similar, un-German forces which had alienated them from their inner German soul. The Ministry’s task was thus to return the German people to its true nature. The people, declared Goebbels, had to start ‘to think as one, to react as one, and to place itself in the service of the government with all its heart’.
¹⁵
The end justified the means, a principle that Goebbels was far from being the only Nazi leader to espouse:

We are not setting up here a Propaganda Ministry that somehow stands on its own and represents an end in itself, but this Propaganda Ministry is a means to an end. If now the end is attained by this means, then the means is good ... The new Ministry has no other aim than placing the nation unamimously behind the idea of the national revolution. If the aim is achieved, then one may condemn my methods out of hand; that would be a matter of complete indifference since by its labours the Ministry would by then have achieved its aims.
¹⁶

These methods, Goebbels went on, had to be the most modern ones available. ‘Technology must not be allowed to run ahead of the Reich: the Reich must keep up with technology. Only the latest thing is good enough.’
¹⁷

In order to fulfil these ambitions, Goebbels staffed his Ministry with young, highly educated Nazis who did not have to contend with the entrenched civil service conservatism that held sway in so many top-level organs of the state. The great majority were pre-1933 members of the Party; almost 100 of the Ministry’s 350 officials wore the Party’s golden badge of honour. Their average age was scarcely over 30. Many of them held the same, or similar positions in the Party Propaganda office, also run by Goebbels. By 22 March they were ensconced in a grandiose headquarters, the Leopold Palace on the Wilhelmsplatz. Built in 1737, it . had been refurbished by the famous Prussian state architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel early in the nineteenth century. The elaborate stucco and plasterwork decorations were not modern enough for Goebbels’s taste, however, and he requested that they be removed. Getting permission to do this proved too time-consuming for the new Minister, so he took a short cut, as he wrote in his diary on 13 March 1933:

Since everyone is placing obstacles in the way of the reconstruction and the furnishing even of my own room, without more ado I take some construction workers from the SA and during the night I get them to smash down the plasterwork and wooden facia work, and files that have been vegetating about on the shelves since the year dot are thrown down the stairs with a thunderous noise. Only murky dustclouds are left as witnesses to vanished bureaucratic pomp.

Soon after moving in, the Ministry established separate departments for propaganda, radio, the press, film, theatre, and ‘popular enlightenment’ and secured a blanket authority from Hitler, issued on 30 June 1933, declaring it responsible not only for all these spheres of activity but also for the general public relations representation of the regime as a whole, including to the foreign press. This gave Goebbels the power to override the objections of other departments of state which considered that the Propaganda Ministry was infringing on their own sphere of interest. This was a power that Goebbels was to need on more than one occasion in the coming months and years as he undertook what he grandly called the ‘spiritual mobilization of the nation’.
¹⁸

The most immediate aim of Nazi cultural politics was to dispose of the ‘cultural Bolshevism’ which various organs and representatives of the Nazi Party had declared was infesting the artistic, musical and literary world of the Weimar Republic. The way the Nazi authorities did this provided yet more examples, if any were needed, of the sheer breadth and depth of the process of co-ordination taking place in Germany as the fundamental basis of social, intellectual and cultural conformity on which the Third Reich was going to be created. As in other spheres of life, the process of co-ordination in the cultural sphere involved a general purging of Jews from cultural institutions, and a rapidly escalating offensive against Communists, Social Democrats, leftists, liberals, and anyone of an independent cast of mind. The removal of Jews from cultural life was a particular priority, since the Nazis asserted that they had been responsible for undermining German cultural values through such modernist inventions as atonal music and abstract painting. In practice, of course, these equations did not even remotely correspond to the truth. Modernist German culture was not sustained by the Jews, many of whom in practice were as culturally conservative as other middle-class Germans. But in the brutal power-politics of the first half of 1933, this hardly mattered. For the new Nazi government, backed by the Nationalists, ‘cultural Bolshevism’ was one of the most dangerous creations of Weimar Germany, and one of the most prominent. As Hitler had written in
My Struggle,
‘artistic Bolshevism is the only possible cultural form and spiritual expression of Bolshevism as a whole’. Chief amongst these cultural expressions were Cubism and Dadaism, which Hitler equated among other things with abstraction. The sooner these horrors were replaced by a truly German culture, the better. The Nazi revolution was not just about eliminating opposition, therefore; it was also about transforming German culture.
¹⁹

III

Purges and departures such as those that could be observed in the German musical scene in the early weeks of the Nazi seizure of power did not go without comment. On 1 April 1933 a group of musicians based in the United States cabled Hitler personally in protest. The Nazi regime responded in characteristic style. German state radio promptly banned the broadcasting of compositions, concerts and recordings involving the signatories, who included the conductors Serge Koussevitsky, Fritz Reiner and Arturo Toscanini.
²⁰
The most notable domestic critic of the purge was Wilhelm Furtwängler. In many respects, Furtwängler was a conservative. He thought, for instance, that Jews should not be given responsibilities in the cultural sphere, that most Jewish musicians lacked a genuine inner affinity with German music, and that Jewish journalists should be removed from their posts. No non-German, he once wrote, had ever written a genuine symphony. He distrusted democracy and what he called ‘Jewish-Bolshevist success’ under the Weimar Republic.
²¹
He had no principled objections to the coming to power of the Nazis, therefore, nor did he feel in any way threatened by it. His international fame was enormous. He had been conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic in the 1920S and had enjoyed two successful spells as guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic. His personal charisma was so overwhelming that he is recorded as having fathered no fewer than thirteen illegitimate children in the course of his career. Arrogant and self-confident, he was yet another conservative whose estimation of the Nazis turned out to be woefully inadequate.
²²

Unlike other orchestras, Furtwängler’s Berlin Philharmonic was not a state-owned corporation and so was not subject to the law of 7 April that forced the dismissal of Jewish state employees. On 11 April 1933 Furtwängler published an open letter to Goebbels in a liberal daily newspaper, declaring that he was not prepared to terminate the contracts of the Jewish players in his orchestra. The terms in which he wrote indicated not only his self-confidence and his courage but also the extent to which his views overlapped with those of the Nazis to whose policies he was now objecting:

If the struggle against Jewry is directed in the main against those artists who are rootless and destructive themselves, and seek to achieve an effect by kitsch, dry virtuosity and the like, then that’s just fine. The struggle against them and the spirit they embody, a spirit that incidentally also has its Germanic representatives, cannot be conducted emphatically or consistently enough. But if this struggle is directed against true artists, that is not in the interest of cultural life ... It must therefore be said clearly that men like Walter, Klemperer, Reinhardt etc. must be able to say their piece in Germany in future as well.

The dismissal of so many good Jewish musicians, he told Goebbels, was incompatible ‘with the restoration of our national dignity that all now welcome with such gratitude and joy’.
²³
With Olympian disdain, Furtwängler went on to ignore in practice a vociferous campaign in the Nazi press for the dismissal of Jewish musicians from his own orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, including Szymon Goldberg, its leader, and Joseph Schuster, its principal cellist.
²⁴

Goebbels was too subtle a politician to react to Furtwängler’s public protest with open anger. His lengthy public reply to the great conductor began by welcoming Furtwängler’s positive stance towards the ‘restoration of national dignity’ by the Hitler government. But he warned him that German music should form part of this process, and that art for art’s sake was not on the agenda any more. Certainly, Goebbels admitted, art and music had to be of the highest quality, but they also had to be ‘aware of their responsibility, accomplished, close to the people, and full of fighting spirit’. Twisting Furtwängler’s statement to his own purposes, Goebbels agreed that there should be no more ‘experiments’ in music - something the conductor had not said at all - then went on to warn him: