Control Agencies and Control Mechanisms

THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST culture policies centered around Adolf Hitler's remarks on cultural policies in his governmental declaration of March 23, 1933. In that declaration, he demanded the “elimination of the destructive heritage of cultural decline” and the “preparation of the soil and clearing of the path for creative cultural development in the future.” From these statements emerged the two main functions of National Socialist culture policies: cleansing and support; culture policies became culture policies (Strothmann, 258). The Nazis attempted to justify their cleansings with the assertion that the Jews in the Weimar Republic dominated in all areas of culture. As Strothmann shows, this assertion in no way corresponds to the facts, for in the area of literature alone völkisch books were already among the most frequently purchased books in the period from 1918 to 1933. In the top spots in 1932 were not, for example, Franz Werfel or Alfred Döblin but Werner Beumelburg, Edwin Erich Dwinger, and Hans Grimm (Strothmann, 92). Likewise, in the publishing business, Jews owned by no means all the publishing houses. Known publishing houses like Westermann, Insel, List, Diederichs, and others did not have any difficulty producing and selling völkisch national literature (Strothmann, 93). “The thesis of Jewish and at the same time ‘red dominance’ of the German literature operation was pure invention to provide a rationale for the control power as an obligation of the state and party and to justify that power to the public” (Strothmann, 94). The following chapter presents some of the control agencies and control mechanisms of the state and party that served these purposes and often had overlapping functions. Likewise, the effects of the intervention of these agencies on the literature of the past and the present are illuminated briefly. A look at representative literary histories and the state of German studies in the Third Reich also illustrates those effects.