Censorship in Nazi Germany

Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced by the governing Nazi Party, but specifically by Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Similarly to many other police states both before and since, censorship within Nazi Germany included both domination and propaganda weaponization by the State of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film. ^[1] The Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature over the mass media which was solely devoted to furthering Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth.

With disturbingly close similarities to propaganda in the Soviet Union, crudely drawn caricatures intended to dehumanize and inflame hatred towards Jews and the single party state's both real and imagined political opponents lay at the core of the Ministry's output, especially in 1940 films such as Jud Süß and The Eternal Jew. Also, similarly to Stalinism, the Ministry also promoted a secular messianic cult of personality surrounding Adolf Hitler with early films such as Triumph of the Will of the 1934 rally and The Victory of Faith made in 1933, and which survives now only because a single copy was recently rediscovered in the UK. This is because The Victory of Faith was later banned by the Ministry owing to the prominent role played in the film by Ernst Roehm, who was later shot without trial during the 1934 political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.

The ministry also tightly controlled news media and whatever information was made available to their citizens. All innovation in art starting with Impressionism, especially Cubism and Expressionism, were ruled degenerate art and banned by the Ministry. All works by composers of popular or Classical music with Jewish ancestry like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned as degenerate music.

In a particularly egregious example, the Ministry banned and blacklisted legendary avante garde stage director Max Reinhardt, whom Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy have dubbed "one of the most picturesque actor-directors of modern times". Reinhardt, whose Max Reinhardt Seminar acting school was later refounded in post-World War II Vienna, eventually fled to the United States as a refugee from the imminent Nazi takeover of Austria. His arrival in America had followed a long and distinguished career, "inspired by the example of social participation in the ancient Greek and Medieval theatres", of seeking "to bridge the separation between actors and audiences". ^[2]

When Reinhardt's brief Hollywood career resulted in his acclaimed 1935 film adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream , the film was banned from German theatres by the Ministry, as well. This was due not only to Joseph Goebbels' belief that Reinhardt's filmmaking style, which drew heavily upon the pre-1933 tradition of German expressionist cinema, was degenerate art, but even more so due to the Jewish ancestry of Reinhardt, Classical music composer Felix Mendelsohn, and soundtrack arranger Erich Wolfgang Korngold. ^[3]

The black list

Amongst those authors and artists who were suppressed both during the Nazi book burnings and the attempt to destroy modernist fine art in the "degenerate" art exhibition were: ^[4]

• Bertolt Brecht
• Heinrich Heine
• Ernest Hemingway
• Thomas Mann
• John Dos Passos
• H. G. Wells

Artists banned include:

• Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
• Pablo Picasso
• Claude Monet
• Vincent van Gogh

Composers banned include:

• Erich Wolfgang Korngold
• Gustav Mahler
• Felix Mendelsohn
• Arnold Schoenberg

Dramatists banned include:

• Friedrich Forster
• Hugo von Hofmannsthal
• Max Reinhardt

Philosophers, scientists, and sociologists suppressed by Nazi Germany include:

• Albert Einstein
• Niels Bohr
• Edmund Husserl
• Karl Marx
• Friedrich Engels
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Sigmund Freud
• Max Scheler ^[5]
• Magnus Hirschfeld

Politicians suppressed by Nazi Germany include:

• Konrad Adenauer
• Theodor Heuss

Criticism and opposition

Even though the German people are traditionally stereotyped as blindly obedient to authority, it should not be pretended that Nazi censorship was left unchallenged.

Between 1933 and 1939, large numbers of German-speakers fled into exile. These included many dissident writers, poets, and artists, many of whom were either of Jewish ancestry or held anti-Nazi beliefs.

Prolific centers of anti-Nazi refugees who continued to write in the German language and Exilliteratur publishing firms catering to their readers emerged in several European cities, including Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Zürich, London, Prague, Moscow as well as across the Atlantic in New York City, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. Well known for their publications were the publishers Querido Verlag and Verlag Allert de Lange in Amsterdam, Berman-Fischer Verlag in Stockholm, and Oprecht in Zürich.

Like anti-communist Russian writers and publishing houses in Berlin, Paris, London, and New York after the October Revolution, anti-Nazi German writers and intellectuals saw themselves as the continuation of an older and better Germany, which had been perverted by the Nazi Party. ^[6]

With this in mind, they supplied the German diaspora with both banned literary works and with Alternative media critical of the regime, and, in defiance of Nazi censorship laws, their books, newspapers, and magazines were smuggled into the homeland and both read and distributed in secret by the German people.

Similarly, Jazz and Swing music, due to the vitally important role played by African American and Jewish American musicians in creating and performing both, were banned as Negermusik , but remained very popular among the Swingjugend counterculture anyway and were always in very high demand on Nazi Germany's thriving black market.

To similarly evade censorship, Exilliteratur and underground media sources often produced black market editions of banned books which were bound within innocent-looking covers with deliberately misleading titles printed on their covers. These illegal books were termed Tarnschriften .

In his 1938 essay "A Disturbing Exposition", Argentine author and anti-Nazi Germanophile Jorge Luis Borges had harsh words for how Johannes Rohr, in the service of the Ministry of Propaganda, had, "revised, rewritten, and Germanized the very Germanic Geschichte der deutschen National-Literatur [History of German Literature] by A.F.C. Vilmar. In editions previous to the Third Reich, Vilmar's book was decidedly mediocre; now it is alarming". Borges proceeded to harshly critique how, in this new edition of Vilmar's book and in many other books like it, everyone and everything in German history, literature, and culture which in any way contradicted Nazi ideology was either subjected to damnatio memoriae or carefully rewritten to conform. After listing many of the greatest writers in the German language who were no longer even mentioned in the new edition, an enraged Borges concluded: ^[7]

As if that were not enough, Goethe, Lessing, and Nietzsche have been distorted and mutilated. Fichte and Hegel appear, but there is no mention of Schopenhauer. Of Stefan George we are informed only of a lively preamble that advantageously prefigures Adolf Hitler. Things are worse in Russia, I hear people say. I infinitely agree, but Russia does not interest us as much as Germany. Germany - along with France, England, and the United States - is one of the essential nations of the western world. Hence we feel devastated by its chaotic descent into darkness, hence the symptomatic seriousness of books like this. I find it normal for the Germans to reject the Treaty of Versailles. (There is no good European who does not detest that ruthless contrivance.) I find it normal to detest the Republic, an opportunistic (and servile) scheme to appease Wilson. I find it normal to support with fervor a man who promises to defend their honor. I find it insane to sacrifice to that honor their culture, their past, and their honesty, and to perfect the criminal arts of barbarians.

Legacy

In a highly effective tool of deprogramming German prisoners of war in the United States from Nazi ideology after American entry into World War II, the lending libraries of POW camps included Berman-Fischer in Stockholm's cheap paperback editions of the great works of German literature that remained strictly illegal to acquire on the black market or be caught reading in Nazi Germany. Particularly in demand among POWs were works of Exilliteratur and other books by writers subjected to historical negationism such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front , Thomas Mann's Zauberberg , and Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette . In an article for the anti-Nazi POW literary journal Der Ruf , which represented a new beginning for German literature after more than a decade of strangulation by Government censorship, POW literary critic Curt Vinz opined, "Had we only had the opportunity to read these books before, our introduction to life, to war, and the expanse of politics would have been different." ^[8]

After the repatriation of German POWs following the end of the Second World War, two former writers for Der Ruf, Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter, first revived the journal in the American Zone of Occupied Germany and then helped found the hugely influential Group 47 literary movement in what became West Germany.

Furthermore, ever since its opening in 1980, the Memorial to the German Resistance in Berlin has included museum exhibits showing illegal Tarnschriften and anti-Nazi Samizdat literature, which were written and distributed by groups like the White Rose student movement in high risk defiance of Nazi censorship laws.

In popular culture

• The ironically named Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is simultaneously a satire of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels and of the disturbingly similar State-controlled propaganda and censorship in the Soviet Union at the height of Stalinism.
• In Robert Harris' 1992 alternate history novel Fatherland , which is set in a 1964 Berlin which is still under Nazi rule, there are multiple references to the continuing censorship of literature, music, and the arts. There are also references to a widespread dissident movement, similarly to the Sixtiers generation of young Soviet dissidents, among Nazi Germany's youth, who illegally listen to banned American radio stations, raise unwelcome questions about Nazi ideology, love jazz and rock and roll, and read and circulate crudely printed black market copies of banned books. It is further mentioned in the novel that particularly popular banned writers among the youth dissident movement are Graham Greene, George Orwell, J.D. Salinger and Günter Grass.
• The 1993 film Swing Kids , set in 1938 Hamburg and starring Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, and Kenneth Branagh, depicts the Swingjugend youth counterculture and their enthusiasm, in defiance of both Government censorship and an ultimate police state crackdown, for allegedly degenerate American Jazz and Swing music.
• The 2005 German language film Sophie Scholl – The Final Days , depicts the way the Nazi-controlled legal system treated dissident intellectuals like the White Rose student movement, who non-violently resisted government censorship laws by writing and distributing leaflets critical of Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. The film stars Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl, Alexander Held as Gestapo interrogator Robert Mohr, and André Hennicke as Volksgerichtshof Judge Roland Freisler.

See also

• Censorship in Germany
• Nazi propaganda
• Degenerate art
• Degenerate music
• List of authors banned in Nazi Germany
• Underground media in German-occupied Europe

References

1. "Control and opposition in Nazi Germany". BBC Bitesize.
2. Edited by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (1970), Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the World's Great Actors, Told in Their Own Words, Crown Publishers. Page 294.
3. "Max Reinhardt - music, theatre, circus". Forbidden Music. 18 August 2013. Retrieved 14 October 2023.
4. Adam, Peter (1992). Art of the Third Reich. New York:, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.., pp. 121-122
5. The Engineer as Ideologue: Reactionary Modernists in Weimar and Nazi Germany - J Herf - Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills …, 1984 –
6. Mews, Siegfried. “Exile Literature and Literary Exile: A Review Essay”. South Atlantic Review 57.1 (1992): 103–109. Web
7. Jorge Luis Borges (1999), Selected Nonfictions, Penguin Books. Pages 200-201.
8. Robert C. Doyle (1999), A Prisoner's Duty: Great Escapes in U.S. Military History, Bantam Books. Page 317.