Goebbels: A Biography (38 page)

The lavish festivities, mass meetings, and propaganda drives continuously staged by the regime were designed to demonstrate the high degree of enthusiasm allegedly felt by the great majority of the population for the regime’s policies. Moreover, by its second year in power the regime had succeeded to a large extent in making the everyday scene in the Third Reich systematically conform to Nazi precepts.

In particular, the Nazis had very largely managed to impose their rituals and symbols on the public sphere. We might think of the ubiquitous posters and banners; the showcases in which were displayed
the Party’s “saying of the week” and copies of
Der Stürmer;
the decorating of entire streets for big events; the renaming of roads and squares; the infiltrating of stereotypical Nazi terms into everyday language, which was so acutely described by Victor Klemperer;
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the “managing” of large masses of people into marching columns and serried ranks for roll calls and parades; but also the complete makeover of public spaces by means of imposing and dominating architecture, designed to form a suitable “thousand-year” backdrop for the molding of the masses.
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This dominance over the public sphere can also be seen in relatively nonpolitical areas, for example in the Nazi motifs permeating advertising, ordinary window displays, and graphic art.
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Efforts were also made—albeit relatively unsuccessfully—to promote a fashion for “aryanizing”—that is, removing all “un-German” influences.
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The great majority of the public had grown used to manifesting their support for the regime—as was expected of them—in their everyday behavior. This happened, for example, through the officially encouraged “Heil Hitler!” greeting;
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the wearing of uniforms by a large part of the population, or at least the wearing of insignia to signal their support for the regime; the public display of flags at home; attendance at Party events and mass rallies; donations to street collectors; listening en masse to broadcasts in public squares; the gradual exclusion of Jews, labeled enemies of the state, from normal daily life; and many other ways.

However, it would be completely wrong to assume that between 1933 and 1945 the Germans lived in a kind of totalitarian uniformity. A mass of research has shown that there was plenty of dissatisfaction, divergent behavior, and dissent under National Socialism. Admittedly, critical sentiments were most likely to be heard in private or semi-public areas, for example among colleagues and friends, or in the pub: in the immediate neighborhood, in other words. It is true that criticism was also heard within the traditional social milieus still untouched by the Nazis, such as parish congregations, village communities, conservative elite circles, bourgeois groups, or the socialist underground. But the regime did its utmost to ensure that these deviant views were never given a public airing.

As a result of the regime’s domination of the public sphere, German society under National Socialism was very largely atomized,
lacking the sites of communication and discursive mechanisms needed to establish an alternative public opinion independent of the regime.

For Goebbels’s propaganda it was an easy matter to represent as broad support for the regime two conditions it had itself created: on the one hand control of the public and widespread adjustment to Nazi norms of behavior, and on the other the silence of oppositional tendencies. The many reports on the public mood commissioned by the regime primarily served the same purpose: They recorded the success of its propaganda and were meant to further promote the unity of the “national community.” In fact, however, this material often showed the limits of the conformity imposed by the regime, although it was not the intention of the reports’ authors to calibrate precisely oppositional tendencies or dissatisfaction.
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Only against this background of far-reaching domination of the public sphere could Nazi control of the mass media become fully effective.

Once the top SA leadership had been removed and the Party’s monopoly of political power established in the summer of 1934, the regime was poised to close some of the remaining gaps in its management of the media along National Socialist lines. Whereas before June 30 the regime had occasionally tolerated (or purported to tolerate) some alternative opinions, those days were now over.

After Goebbels’s public altercation with the bourgeois press in the spring of 1934, he made another attempt that autumn to control news reporting. He sent out some general guidelines, containing fifteen points in all, to every German editorial office. On closer inspection, the point of the document was to let journalists know what areas were out of bounds for critical, or even just independent, reporting.
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There should never, for example (stated Point 1 on the list of guidelines), be any broad-brush description of “official ceremonial occasions”: This took Goebbels back to one of his favorite themes, the avoidance of “pomp” in the Third Reich.
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Another rule was that any controversial discussion of proposed legislation was incompatible
with the idea of a “Führer state.”
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Likewise, to discuss the form of government was “intolerable.”
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When reporting political trials it was undesirable to “discuss in detail false assertions that are the subject of the trial.”
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One of Goebbels’s guidelines stated succinctly: “Today, the church question has been settled.” With regard to ecclesiastical affairs, in order to avoid confusion as well as adverse reactions from foreign propaganda, only reports from the German News Service should be used.
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And as far as the much-lamented monotony of the German press was concerned, Goebbels forbade any discussion of press uniformity outright.
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Karl Silex, editor-in-chief of the conservative
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
, brought this move to regulate the German press, communicated in confidence, a little more out into the open by presenting and commenting on it in an editorial. It was a rare instance of readers learning from a newspaper something about the mechanisms of press control under the Nazi dictatorship. When Silex stated that journalists had become “civil servants,”
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he was summing up the emasculation of the press. Goebbels reacted directly to this provocation.

On November 18 he gave a talk to the Reich press managers in which, with profound irony, he characterized the attitude now taken by German journalists toward the Nazi regime as “neue Sachlichkeit.”
*
As a positive example he mentioned the situation after the death of Hindenburg: “The merest hint sufficed to let the press know that ‘we’re not having any discussion at this point about constitutional law!’ […] When it comes to things that affect the national existence of a people and must therefore be solved by the government, the job of the press is just to take note. Discussion changes nothing, in any case.”
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Two days later he recorded cynically that his remarks had prompted “very decent editorials.” “The press is now all mine.”
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There is no doubt he was right.

At a press convention in Cologne a year later, at the end of November 1935, Goebbels addressed once more—in conclusion, so to speak—the problem of press freedom. When and where, Goebbels asked his audience, had there ever been a right to freedom of expression in earlier times? Goebbels continued: “We have removed the journalist from his humiliating and demeaning dependence on parties
and business interests, thereby placing him in a position of honorable and loyal dependence on the state. For we see the freedom of Germans not in the opportunity to do or not do what one wants, but in the opportunity to integrate freely and responsibly into the higher laws and higher moral commandments of a state.”
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Although Goebbels’s ministry possessed the powers necessary to make journalists comply, as far as the structure of the press estate was concerned he was obliged to leave the field to a rival. In April 1935 Max Amann, a Reich leader of the NSDAP and as such responsible for the press, issued, in his capacity as president of the Reich Press Chamber, several edicts that were to bring lasting changes. In future Amann would be entitled to close down newspaper publishers in order to “obviate unhealthy conditions of competition” or for sundry other reasons. In particular, Catholic papers and the “Generalanzeigerpresse” (popular commercial newspapers without religious or political affiliation) could now be shut down or their publishers forced to sell to holding companies controlled by the Party-owned Eher Verlag.
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By the end of 1936 between 500 and 600 newspapers were closed, and by 1944 the number of papers overall had dropped from more than 3,000 in 1933 to 975. By then, 80 percent of papers in print came from the Eher Verlag.
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Not only was Goebbels not involved in formulating the edicts issued in 1935 by Amann, with their rationale for suppressing or acquiring newspapers; he was actually opposed to promulgating them. In his diary he held that Amann’s decrees amounted to the “destruction of the bourgeois press.” In subsequent negotiations with Amann, he thought he had at least secured the involvement of the Propaganda Ministry in applying the edicts.
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From the diaries in following years it does seem that such participation (but nothing more) did indeed occur when he negotiated with Amann over the fate of individual newspapers; we will return to this in more detail later. There was a solid underlying reason for his relatively weak position as regards the press landscape. Because of various extremely lucrative publishing contracts, Goebbels was financially dependent on Amann.
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In the second half of the year, with the “revolutionary” forces within the Nazi movement eliminated, Goebbels’s political rival in the cultural field, Alfred Rosenberg, thought the time was right to use his role as “overseer” of Nazi ideology to launch an all-out campaign against the propaganda minister.

Having complained in July about Goebbels’s “unsuitable” speech on the subject of June 30, 1934,
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in August Rosenberg (in Goebbels’s opinion an “unbending, obstinate dogmatist”) had Goebbels in his sights because of his allegedly excessive cultural permissiveness.
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Rosenberg sent Goebbels a letter sharply attacking Richard Strauss, probably the most renowned personality in German musical life, whom Goebbels had appointed president of the Reich Music Chamber, and for whose seventieth birthday lavish celebrations had been staged.
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Rosenberg accused Strauss of having let the “Jew Zweig” write the libretto of his opera
Die schweigsame Frau
(The Silent Woman); “Zweig” was said to be in contact with émigrés.

In his response, which he himself described as “harsh,” Goebbels pointed out that the Zweig in question was not the “émigré Arnold Zweig” (which Rosenberg had never asserted) but Stefan Zweig, who was living in Austria, and he condescendingly advised Rosenberg to be more careful about his information in future.
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Incidentally, a performance of the opera, which Goebbels had initially wanted to prevent, took place in June 1935, now explicitly sanctioned by Goebbels.
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At the end of August, Rosenberg sent the propaganda minister another letter, accusing him of being too receptive to Jewish personalities such as Arnold Zweig, Bruno Walter, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He also attacked him on account of an exhibition of Italian Futurists that had taken place with Goebbels’s support in Berlin in March 1934. Rosenberg alleged that under the cover of the Italians he had smuggled harmful modern elements into the German art scene through the back door.
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Rosenberg’s attacks raised fundamental questions about the future direction of Nazi cultural politics. Hitler himself was to use the Party rally in September 1934 to state his views. Surprisingly, in his cultural address the dictator not only condemned the “vandals” of modern art but also spoke out against “backward-looking people” and their
“old-world Teutonic art”—those of Rosenberg’s persuasion, in other words.
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After Hitler had shown his hand, Goebbels found himself much better placed in his dispute with Rosenberg. The fact was that Rosenberg’s influence on German cultural life was based on a dogmatism which Hitler clearly wanted to circumscribe, while Goebbels, who actually had no clear concept of art, needed only to refrain from his occasionally expressed support for “modern” artistic tendencies in order to assume a leading role in cultural politics. So it was that at the end of 1934 he felt able to spell out, once and for all, a zero-tolerance policy for the remnants of artistic “depravity” still extant in German cultural life. This unyielding policy immediately claimed an eminent victim in Germany’s star conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler. As recently as 1933 Goebbels—apparently prepared to make concessions—had engaged with him in public discussions about the freedom of art.

In an article of November 25, 1934, published in the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
, Furtwängler, who was among other things deputy director of the Reich Music Chamber, had come to the defense of the composer Paul Hindemith when he came under attack by Rosenberg’s Nazi cultural organization. Hindemith was charged with having “non-Aryan relatives” as well as unacceptable politics. Furtwängler had conducted the premiere of Hindemith’s latest work,
Mathis der Maler
(Matthew the Painter) in March and planned to stage the first performance of the composer’s opera on the same subject—the life of the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald—at the Berlin State Opera, until he was informed that Hitler disapproved of the premiere.
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The Nazi press hit back hard at Furtwängler for his attempts to defend Hindemith.
Der Angriff
, for example, wanted to know why the “opportunist musician” Hindemith should be “praised prematurely.”
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According to the diaries, the affair kept Goebbels and the Nazi leadership very busy for some days, with Goebbels—who had initially been eager to retain Hindemith in German musical life
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—advocating an uncompromising line. The affair ended with Furtwängler’s resignation as deputy director of the Reich Music Chamber and as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
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Goebbels now followed through with a sharp attack on the conductor (although without mentioning him by name) in a speech to the Reich Culture Chamber on December 16, 1934.
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At the end of February 1935 he had a meeting with Furtwängler at the latter’s request.
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After a lengthy discussion, they agreed on an explanation whereby Furtwängler’s Hindemith article of the previous November would be presented as written “from the musical point of view”: He had no intention of interfering in the “arts policy” of the Reich. This explanation, together with a few other gestures on Furtwängler’s part toward the regime, was the prerequisite for Furtwängler’s resumption of his conducting activities in April, all of which was accounted a “great moral success” by Goebbels.
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Actually, however, Furtwängler’s reinstatement amounted to an obvious admission by the regime that the gap created in German musical life by his enforced temporary absence could not be filled by anyone else.
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On the other hand, Furtwängler’s resignation gave the Propaganda Ministry the opportunity substantially to increase its influence over the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, which had been taken over by the Propaganda Ministry on behalf of the Reich in 1933. The “Reich orchestra” was supposed to demonstrate by its many guest appearances abroad that National Socialist Germany was as much the home of culture as ever.
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Furtwängler, whose concerts were conspicuously attended by Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels in the spring of 1935, agreed to conduct a performance of
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
in Nuremberg on the eve of the Party rally in September. But it was a step too far when he was asked to present Beethoven’s Fifth during the NSDAP cultural conference at the rally.
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If Goebbels’s intention was that Furtwängler’s reinstatement should prepare the way for Hindemith’s return to musical life in the Third Reich, then in this respect he was to be disappointed. Rosenberg successfully intervened with Rust to ensure that Hindemith was not allowed to resume his position as professor at the Berlin Music Academy—from which he had been suspended at the end of 1934—despite a positive recommendation to that effect from the Propaganda Ministry. The composer emigrated soon afterward.
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It was hard for Goebbels to gain any ground in the battle with Rosenberg. Alongside the altercation over the musicians, Rosenberg had written what Goebbels considered an “impudent article” for the
Völkischer Beobachter
in December 1934. Here Rosenberg self-confidently underlined his leading position in cultural politics and complained about “personalities” who previously had had little or
nothing to do with National Socialist cultural politics and art, rendering more difficult the work of the “National Socialist Cultural Community” established by himself, Rosenberg.
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Goebbels was particularly hard hit by the further negative comments in the
Völkischer Beobachter
about the cultural endeavors he was promoting; he suspected Rosenberg of being behind these comments.
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In June 1935, Rosenberg used the occasion of a Reich conference of his National Socialist Cultural Community to launch further attacks on Goebbels.
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The latter responded a few days later with a speech to the Reich Theater Chamber, albeit “only to a specialist audience,” where he criticized the influence (represented by Rosenberg as beneficial) of the Cultural Community on German theaters’ repertoire for producing results that were not national-socialist enough.
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But then, in July 1935, he was forced to drop the second greatest figure—after Furtwängler—in German musical life, Richard Strauss, from the presidency of the Reich Music Chamber, after Rosenberg produced a letter addressed to the émigré Stefan Zweig, which had been intercepted by the Gestapo. Strauss’s remark that he was just “acting the part” of president of the Music Chamber seemed to render him completely unsuitable.
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After a handful of performances, Strauss’s opera
Die schweigsame Frau
vanished from the stage of the Dresden Opera.

At the same time, Goebbels was setting a clear antimodern course in the visual arts as well. In April 1935 he gathered several prominent artists around him, including his old friend Hans Herbert Schweitzer, Albert Speer, the painter Adolf Ziegler, and the sculptor Kurt Schmidt-Ehm, exhorting them “to assert themselves against the Cubists.”
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These examples show that in 1934–35 Goebbels was by no means the unconstrained sole master and expert helmsman of Germany’s culture and media he liked to claim he was: He had to share control and management with others.

A further case will highlight this. In the spring of 1935, the Gestapo drew his attention to the Berlin cabaret venues “Katakombe” and “Tingel-tangel,” where, behind a front of entertainment, “propaganda harmful and occasionally even hostile to the state was being put out.”
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With Goebbels’s acquiesence, the venues were closed by the Gestapo, although Goebbels gives the impression in his diary that the shutdown had been on his orders.
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For his part, Goebbels called
on the Gestapo to send six members of the cabaret casts who in the meantime had been arrested to a concentration camp for an initial stint of six weeks.
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The
Völkischer Beobachter
made much of the shutdown on May 11, 1935, under the headline “Jewish Insolence at Berlin Cabarets”: “As some of the participants […] are only superficially informed, if at all, about important arrangements in the new state, against which they have vented their wrath, they will now have the opportunity through decent and solid work in a camp to catch up on what they have neglected for far too long.”

As it turned out, the trial of five of the performers from the two theaters ended in October 1936 with an acquittal in all cases.
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But the regime had demonstrated that it was serious when it came to open expressions of criticism of its policies. Goebbels was to keep to this line in subsequent years too, although he made sure the Gestapo never again got the better of him, as it had in this case.

Thus in spring 1936 he procured a Führer edict that strengthened his position enormously. The decree stipulated that the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda possessed full policing rights for all matters that fell within its jurisdiction, so that it could, for example, issue bans accompanied by threats of punishment.
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In addition, in June, the Propaganda Ministry produced at its regular press conference an internal directive prohibiting all authorities, organizations, and associations from giving the press any instructions or orders. Likewise, no one was entitled to exercise criticism of the press.
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In April 1937 the Propaganda Ministry explicitly informed the press again that it possessed the sole right to control the press; all other attempts “to put pressure on the press by means of influence or threats” would be rejected.
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