The Third Reich at War (94 page)

Escapist literature of various kinds became more important than ever after the war began. Goebbels encouraged the publication of erotic literature and soft pornography, especially for the troops, while humorous fiction and collections of jokes also sold well. The Wild West novels of Karl May - widely known to be Hitler’s own favourite author - enjoyed a revival, prompting in some military readers the reflection that they had taught them a lot about how to fight Soviet partisans behind the Eastern Front. In this situation, literary writers increasingly took refuge in ‘inner emigration’, either lapsing into silence or producing historical romances. Werner Bergengruen, whose work before 1939 had been taken by the reading public as a veiled criticism of the Nazi regime, sold 60,000 copies of his 1940 novel
Heaven as It Is on Earth
before it was banned the following year. Deprived of the opportunity to reach his public in the conventional way, he wrote poems anonymously and had them distributed privately and, in effect, illegally.
The Realm of Demons
, by Frank Thiess, was also banned after its first edition had sold out in 1941. His next novel,
The Neapolitan Legend
, published the following year, met with more toleration because of its less obvious applicability to the present. The problem with these works of ‘inner emigration’ was that their message for the present could only be discovered by the most assiduous reading between the lines, often indeed reading into them things that the reader wanted to see rather than the author wanted to be understood. After the war was over, Thiess was to claim in an angry exchange with the exiled Thomas Mann that only writers who had stayed in Germany to oppose the regime could lay claim to be the spiritual founders of postwar democracy. But their works, like that of other tolerated writers, had as much effect in distracting readers from the realities of wartime life in the Third Reich as they did in expressing a widely held desire to acquire an inner distance from it.
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II

Of all the mass media used by the Propaganda Ministry, it was, perhaps surprisingly, the theatre to which it devoted the most money, steering towards it more than 26 per cent of the subsidies it issued to the arts, in comparison, for example, to under 12 per cent for the cinema. In the early part of the war, there were no fewer than 240 theatres in Germany run by the state or regional, local or municipal authorities, with a total of 222,000 seats, together with another 120 or so privately funded theatres of one kind or another. In 1940 some 40 million tickets were sold; roughly a quarter of the tickets were block bookings for groups of soldiers or munitions workers. Demand was high, buoyed up by the closure of many other sources of amusement and relaxation.
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Although private and individual tourism continued to a degree during the war, the Labour Front’s ‘Strength Through Joy’ programme was drastically curtailed, its foreign and domestic tourism operations cut back, its ships and transport facilities converted for use by troops and its funding of entertainment directed towards catering for members of the armed forces.
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Theatre became an important substitute.

The Security Service of the SS noted early in 1942 that ‘during the war, very many theatres can report visitors in numbers that have scarcely been experienced before. In the big cities it is hardly possible any more to obtain theatre tickets through regular box-office sales.’
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Goebbels declared at the beginning of the war that the repertoire must now avoid ‘exaggeration and stylelessness that go against the seriousness of the times and the national feeling of the people’.
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However, he was aware that most theatre-goers, especially new ones, were in search above all of entertainment. Theatre directors were told that pessimistic or depressing plays were not to be put on. There was also a ban on performances of plays by authors belonging to enemy states (though occasional exceptions were made for Shakespeare). Chekhov was allowed before 22 June 1941, but not thereafter. Theatre directors did their best to get round such regulations. They mounted new productions of German classics, including tragedies, and thereby created, so many of them later claimed, a theatrical oasis in the Nazi cultural desert. None of this could disguise the fact that the ban on many foreign authors impoverished the repertoire. Responding to public demand for comedies and light entertainment further depressed the standard of what the German stage offered in these years. And of course, as in other areas of culture in wartime Germany, what was found in the theatre was above all escape from reality.
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From 1943 onwards escape in this form became progressively more difficult, as one theatre after another was destroyed by bombing, not infrequently leading to the actors and stagehands being drafted into the armed forces or munitions work. In August 1944, when, in his new capacity as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, Goebbels ordered the closure of all theatres, music halls and cabarets, he was doing little more than making a virtue of necessity.
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As with the theatre, cinema increased dramatically in popularity in the early part of the war.
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In 1942 over a billion tickets were sold, more than five times more than in 1933. Every German went to the movies on average some thirteen to fourteen times a year. Young people’s attendance was particularly high - in 1943 a sample survey reported that over 70 per cent of ten-to-seventeen-year-olds went to the cinema at least once a month, and 22 per cent at least once a week. Cinema-goers were catered for not only by more than 7,000 picture-houses but also large numbers of mobile cinemas that toured country areas and also found their way to the battle-front to entertain the troops. Every year from 1939 to 1944, German studios produced some sixty to seventy new films, shown in every country in Europe where German troops were stationed.
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The studios were state-owned, centrally organized from 1942, and equipped to use the most modern techniques. In the cinema, each programme had by order of the Propaganda Ministry to contain an educational ‘cultural film’, dealing with natural history, showing German ‘cultural work’ in Poland, or, from 1943, giving instructions on air-raid protection.
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Audiences were said to have found these rather boring. What they really wanted to see was the latest newsreel. From 7 September 1940 all existing newsreels were merged into one, entitled from November 1940 onwards the ‘German Weekly Review’ (
Deutsche Wochenschau
), which formed a compulsory part of every movie programme. The producers were able to show a forty-minute newsreel within two weeks of the film being taken by cameramen and journalists ‘embedded’ in regiments serving at the front. This gave newsreels an immediacy and an authenticity that made them very popular. Up to 3,000 copies were made of each issue, and each issue was seen by some 20 million people in Germany alone. The newsreels satisfied public demand for first-hand information about the progress of the war, and many people went to the cinema mainly to see them rather than the feature film. Skilful use of music, a focus on images rather than words and careful editing gave them a powerful and to some degree aesthetic appeal. Of course, soldiers always appeared in a heroic light, fighting off demonic enemies hell-bent on Germany’s destruction, the descriptions of the strategic situation were generally vague and always optimistic, and blood and guts, dead bodies and anything likely to produce horror or revulsion were banished from the screen. Hitler’s personal request to the Propaganda Ministry on 10 July 1942 for shots of Russian atrocities to be included in the newsreel (‘He specifically asks that such atrocities should include genitals being cut off and the placing of hand-grenades in the trousers of prisoners’)
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does not seem to have been followed, perhaps fortunately for cinema audiences. Nevertheless, the viewers were drawn into the action almost as virtual participants, often breaking out into spontaneous applause and shouts of ‘Hail!’ during the reports of victories in the first two years of the war.
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Goebbels buttressed the informative and propaganda impact of the newsreel with a series of major feature films aimed at popularizing key elements of Nazi ideology. In 1941 he commissioned four anti-Bolshevik films, including
GPU
, premièred on 14 August the following year. Its title was already out of date: the Russian political police by this time was known by the initials NKVD. Predictably, the emphasis in the film was on the machinations of the supposed Jewish conspiracy behind the murderous activities of the Soviet police. Goebbels attempted to win over audiences by having a love-story put at the centre of the drama, but the film was not a success: its portrayal of the Russians as sadistic torturers was simply too cliche’-ridden and too crude, and after it was released Goebbels put a stop to further anti-Soviet feature films. Just as mixed were the fortunes met by the films he commissioned that were directed against the British, whom he wanted shown as controlled by Jews and ruled by plutocrats. In 1940
The Rothschilds’ Shares in Waterloo
pilloried the imaginary financial manipulations of a Jewish bank during the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (which it showed, of course, as being won by the Prussians, under General Blücher). The film was a failure with the public, since it was not clear whether it was intended to be anti-British or antisemitic, and it was withdrawn in 1940 and re-edited. Other films, like
My Life for Ireland
,
Carl Peters
and
Uncle Kruger
, all released in 1941, attacked the British colonial record.
Uncle Kruger
was particularly impressive. A film about the Boer War, it was well acted (it starred Emil Jannings) and had high production values. However, a good many of the figures in the film were crude caricatures - Queen Victoria was shown as addicted to medicinal whisky, Cecil Rhodes as decadent, waited on by slaves and obsessed with gold, the monocled Austen Chamberlain as hypocritical and effete, General Kitchener as ruthless and inhumane, and the young Winston Churchill, a concentration camp commandant, as a sadistic murderer who feeds his bulldog on beef steaks and shoots starving inmates if they complain about their lack of food. Uncle Kruger, the Boer leader, was depicted as an honest, simple national hero who leads successful resistance against overwhelming odds - a lesson Goebbels considered made it worth ordering the film to be re-released in 1944.
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Critics of the original showing were indeed in a minority, and those who felt that some scenes were ‘not historically genuine’ were outnumbered by those who saw it as ‘a kind of historical document’. The more knowledgeable amongst the audience wondered, however, whether it was wise to portray the ‘Boer people’ in such a heroic light. ‘The character of this hybrid people is ambiguous and cannot be presented as an ideal image of the Germanic race if only in view of the colonial tasks that will face Great Germany after the final victory.’
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Almost as soon as the war began, Goebbels ordered the preparation of two major antisemitic films:
Jew Süss
and
The Eternal Jew
, both designed to win the support of the German public for the Nazi leadership’s stepping up of anti-Jewish measures as soon as the war began, particularly in Poland.
Jew Süss
, directed by Veit Harlan and released on 24 September 1940, was a historical film based on a novel of the same name by the (now exiled) Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger. While Feuchtwanger had wanted to highlight the role of the Jew as scapegoat, Harlan turned the character of Süss, an eighteenth-century moneylender hanged for his alleged crimes, into a villain who not only extorted money from honest Germans but also abducted and raped a beautiful young German girl. Harlan contrasted the civilized-looking, socially integrated character of Süss not only with fair-haired Germans but also with all the other Jewish characters in the film, who were depicted as ugly and dirty. Süss’s hanging at the end of the film conveyed the clearest possible message as to the fate the Jews merited in the present. The much-praised performances of the principal actors were so powerful that one of them actually got Goebbels to announce in public that he was not Jewish because many cinema-goers were convinced that he was. Himmler was so enthusiastic about the film that he ordered all SS men to watch it, and it was also specially shown to non-Jewish audiences in Eastern Europe in the vicinity of concentration and extermination camps, and in Germany in towns where a new deportation was scheduled.
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The Eternal Jew
, directed by Fritz Hippler under Goebbels’s personal supervision, was a feature-length documentary that also purported to show how Jews really were. Pictures of Jews on the streets of Polish towns were intercut with film sequences of ‘rats, which,’ the synopsis said, ‘are the parasites and bacillus-carriers among animals, just as the Jews occupy the same position among mankind’. Film of kosher butchering, taken in Poland shortly after the invasion of 1939, was edited to suggest the brutality of the Jews, while mock-up sets of Jewish homes showed dirt, neglect and infestation with vermin. Just like rats, Jews had migrated across the world, and everywhere, the film claimed, citing a whole series of invented statistics, the Jews committed crimes, spread revolution and subversion, and undermined cultural values and standards. So radical was the film’s antisemitism that the Propaganda Ministry had doubts about showing it to the public, and certainly it was most successful among Party activists; the general public was less impressed. Many were reported to have walked out half-way through the screening, and others were recorded as thinking it ‘boring’. Most people preferred the subtler and dramatically more interesting images portrayed in a drama such as
Jew Süss
, which was so powerful in its effect on audiences that people spontaneously sprang to their feet during performances, especially in the rape scene, and shouted curses at the screen. In Berlin, there were shouts from the audience of ‘Get the last Jews out of Germany!’
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