THE CHARACTERISTIC FORM for National Socialist poetry was the march song or community song that was derived from the folk song. The Storm Trooper Oberführer Gerhard Schumann, one of the main representatives of Nazi poetry, recognized the simple folk song as the suitable vehicle in which “the primal sounds of the human German soul” could take on a “contemporary form.” “Restrained toughness and trusting sincerity,” as well as “leave-taking, separation, horror, staying the course, upswing, and victory” could be best expressed in this form, as Schumann explained in a speech about war poetry that he held in 1942 on the occasion of the “Pan-German and European Poets’ Conference in Weimar.” Accordingly, the poetry of the Third Reich consisted mostly of purposeful occasional poetry with a direct political reference point, “political” being used in the broadest sense. However, as Gerhard Schumann proclaimed in his “lead article” in SA-Mann (Storm Trooper) in 1937, National Socialist poetry should be more than a Party program transferred into poetry:

Schumann's statement provides a pretty good framework for National Socialist poetry that could also include the poetry of poets who did not produce pronounced National Socialist propaganda and who had little or nothing to do with National Socialism. Among National Socialist themes in the narrower sense are poems about the flag and Führer, drums and loyalty, belief and obedience, duty, honor and sacrifice, as well as blood, soil and fire. But poems about the German landscape, the German homeland, German history, and German people could also be used or called into service, even against the will or better judgment of the authors.