Censorship in Nazi Germany

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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. Crudely drawn caricatures intended to dehumanize the Party's political opponents and to inflame Antisemitism lay at the core of the Ministry's propaganda, especially in 1940 films such as Jud Süß and The Eternal Jew. 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 after a single copy recently discovered in the UK. It was later banned by the Ministry owing to the prominent role in the film of Ernst Roehm, who was later murdered in the political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

The ministry tightly controlled information available to their citizens. Almost all recent innovation in art, including Impressionism, Cubism, and Expressionism, were ruled degenerate art and banned by the Ministry. All works by composers of 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 eventually fled to the United States as a refugee from the imminent Nazi takeover of Austria. His arrival in America 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]

Reinhardt's brief Hollywood career resulted in his acclaimed 1935 film adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was banned by the Ministry, as well. This was due not only to Joseph Goebbels' belief that Reinhardt's filmmaking style, which drew heavily upon 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]

Artists banned include:

Composers banned include:

Dramatists banned include:

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

Politicians suppressed by Nazi Germany include:

Criticism and opposition

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, black market copies of banned books were bound within innocent-looking covers and were called 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:[6]

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.

In a highly effective tool of deprogramming from Nazi ideology after American entry into World War II, the lending libraries of the camps used to intern German prisoners of war in the United States included Berman-Fischer in Stockholm's cheap paperback editions of the great works of German literature that remained strictly banned in Nazi Germany. Particularly in demand among POWs were banned works of Exilliteratur by anti-Nazi refugees and other 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 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."[7] After the repatriation of German POWs following the end of the Second World War, two former writers for Der Ruf helped to found the hugely influential Group 47 literary movement in the new Federal Republic of Germany.

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

In popular culture

See also

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 – [1]
  6. ^ Jorge Luis Borges (1999), Selected Nonfictions, Penguin Books. Pages 200-201.
  7. ^ Robert C. Doyle (1999), A Prisoner's Duty: Great Escapes in U.S. Military History, Bantam Books. Page 317.