Blood-thinking

U. S. readers hear more about concentration camps than they do about literary life in Hitler's Naziland. Nazi publishing facts at first glance look startling indeed. The Third Reich publishes 25,000 books annually (U. S. total is 11,000; Britain's 16,000). Scores of new writers, unheard-of before Hitler, have popped into the best-seller class. U. S. Writers Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner are favorites of the Nazi Napoleons.

Nazis call their literary brand "steel romanticism" to distinguish it from the foggy fervors of the traditional German romantics. Pet bugbear of Nazi writers is "Jewish realism and intellectualism." Their pet ideal is an Aryan hero who does not yet exist. On paper he is: 1) an individual only in the sense that he is one of a blood community; 2) close to the soil, because his blood community has lived close to it for generations; 3) perfectly poised between these poles of blood and soil, so that his actions are always determined by them, but appear to be instinctive and unreasoned, like the actions of a healthy animal. When Nazi theoreticians sound off about the German folk-soul, they mean to refer to this somewhat vague balance of blood, soil, race.

But Nazi writers have succeeded little better than Nazi drill sergeants in filling rush orders for the model Nazi hero. In real life he might be a nuisance; in a book he is a bore.

Leading literary pluggers for the Nazi folk-soul are: Harms Johst, Germany's foremost dramatist by default, and since 1935 head of the Reich Chamber of Literature. His Schlageter was for years almost the only presentable Nazi drama. In 1934 Johst's play Prophets was so violently anti-Semitic that it frightened even Field Marshal Goring into banning it. Johst is author of the Nazi crack: "Whenever I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver!"

Hans Friederich Blunck's ice-age novel, Power Over Fire, shows Nordic man as he emerged from the primitive state. In Struggle of the Constellations (Stone Age), and Struggle Against the Gods (Bronze Age), Blunck advanced the Nordics by archeological progression toward the Third Reich. His heroes "get their strength from the soil in which they are rooted, and from their ancestors' blood which flows in their veins."

Herman Stehr, a kind of German Knut Hamsun, writes about peasants. Hans Grimm is the author of a novel whose enormous length (1,300 pages) belies its title: People Without Room. A Nazi classic, it is often contrasted with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, to Mann's disadvantage.

Hans Fallada (Little Man, What Now?), though not a Nazi, is still popular in Germany. But his Iron Gustav has been quietly blacklisted. Joseph Ponten's seven-volume historical novel will trace the emigrations of German minorities abroad, especially in Russia. Edwin Erich Dwinger's The Last Horsemen describes the futile attempt of a gang of German frontier soldiers to invade Courland and make it a German province.

Friedrich Ekkehard is the author of Storm-Breed, whose down-at-the-mouth hero is revived by hearing Hitler speak "beautiful words, splendid words." Gottfried Rothacker's Frontier Village told of the pre-Munich yearnings of a Sudeten German to be reunited with the Reich. The book sold 60,000 copies in 1936.

Along with these big little names, there are a hundred littler writers who hew much closer to the Nazi Party Line and whose books and pamphlets, simply written and well printed, are creating a National Socialist popular literature. Nazi poets write in fervid, ABC language. Sample verse:

Not! . . . Not! . . . Not! . . .

Hunger, und kein Brot,

Herd, und kein Brand,

Und kein Vaterland!-

For adult Germans, war literature (biographies of military heroes, Frederick the Great, old German warriors) has almost replaced the detective story; for young people, the exploits of aviators and submarine commanders have almost ousted the oldtime thriller.

The Nazis early realized that direct control over writers was troublesome and unwise, preferred to make non-Nazi editors and publishers responsible for what they print. Seldom is an attempt made to tell writers what to write or not to write. But worried publishers are quick to submit any doubtful work to the local party official. This gives the Nazis all the control they need. Book News (published in Berlin) now prints a green flimsy supplement headed "Expert Opinion." In one section are listed books to push, and in the other books to soft-pedal.

Hitler, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg (Naziland's cultural Fuhrer) have long looked for a literary renaissance in Germany. They shout their complete confidence that one is on the way. Nazi Cultural Pundit Wilfred Bade declares: "The new Germany must have authors; but we need not be afraid that they will not appear."

Nazis of lesser faith find it a long wait. Dr. Hellmuth Langenbucher, Director in Chief of Literature, in Nazi Book News of April 1939 grumbled: "a plethora of translations," "a flood of historical novels, more than 100 in 1938, many of them 1) bad, 2) unnecessary, 3) irrelevant, 4) mediocre, 5) 'more or less average." He found too "an extraordinary number of books" in which non-German personalities were stressed, Roman Generals, Russian composers, French painters. Other shortcomings : "No new peasant novels, soldier novels, glorification-of-the-Fuehrer novels, sport novels, strength-through-joy novels, no conquest-of-unemployment novels, no good race, blood and soil novels, no go jd poetry." Long ago, Hitler told Germans to "think with their blood," but so far "blood-thinking" has produced almost no good books. Hitler himself is the best seller (Mem Kampf with a total sale of over 4,000,000 copies is still tops), yet, despite the 25,000 books a year, the Nazis are continuing to bottle-feed an undersized body of literature that should long ago have outgrown official diapers.

* Need! Need! Need!

Hunger, and no bread,

A hearth and no fire,

And no fatherland.

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