scholarly journals Forbidden Words, Banished Voices: Jewish Refugees at the Service of BBC Propaganda to Wartime Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-119
Author(s):  
Sheer Ganor
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
German Society ◽  
Radio Waves ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German People

During the Second World War, the BBC operated a German Service, which was tasked with broadcasting propaganda programs into Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. Psychological warfare was transmitted through radio waves to spread defeatism on the fighting front and amongst civilians, and to convince the German people that there was no future for the Third Reich. Dozens of German-speaking Jews who fled Central Europe and arrived in England as refugees found employment in the German Service. Many of these individuals worked as journalists, actors, comedians or authors in their previous homelands, some had even earned a degree of fame and recognition before the persecutory policies of National Socialism restricted their lives and forced them into exile. From the perspective of BBC officials, these refugees’ experience in the press and in the performing arts, as well as their intimate knowledge of German society and culture, set them in a unique position to create effective and powerful propaganda. This paper explores how, branded as unwelcome outsiders by their native societies, it was precisely their familiarity as ‘insiders’ that paradoxically primed them to perform the task.

Rituals of Humiliation

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-64
Author(s):  
Edward B. Westermann
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
German Society ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Abusive Behavior ◽  
The Third ◽  
Killing Fields ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifestation of power under National Socialism. It underlines the importance of practices such as the mammoth party rallies at Nuremberg, the universal displays of the swastika on flags, pins, and armbands and the ubiquitous use of “Heil Hitler” as the standard greeting of the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. The chapter also contends that the creation of Nazi power was accomplished in no small measure by the use of ritual, and, in fact, ritual in the Third Reich served as an expression of “social power” that extended into virtually all aspects of German society. These celebratory events of Nazi power involved daily acts of verbal or physical humiliation of Jews, communists, and socialists, as well as organized and exemplary episodes of abusive behavior. Ultimately, the chapter studies the symbiotic relationship between violence, competition, and male comradeship and how it became manifest in the actions, rituals, and celebratory practices of Nazi paramilitary organizations through acts of humiliation by SS and policemen on the streets, in the concentration camps, and in the killing fields.

Der Schatten der Kierkegaard-Renaissance. Eine rezeptionsgeschichtliche Studie über die dezisionistisch-irrationalistischen Kierkegaard-Interpretationen zwischen den Weltkriegen in Deutschland

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keisuke Yoshida
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The Third Reich

AbstractDuring the first half of the 20th century, especially between the two world wars, the German-speaking countries experienced the so-called Kierkegaard Renaissance. Although at that time a wide range of thinkers engaged with Kierkegaard’s writings, Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno argue that Kierkegaard exercised a particularly strong influence on fascist thought. Furthermore, Wilfried Greve claims that Kierkegaard was widely interpreted in the decisionist-irrationalist fashion during the Third Reich, which resulted in the appropriation of Kierkegaard by the ideologues of National Socialism, particularly by Alfred Baeumler, a leading intellectual of National Socialism, and by Emanuel Hirsch, a leading theologian of the “German Christians” movement at the time. In the present article I examine historical examples of the decisionist-irrationalist Kierkegaard interpretation. Then I discuss Carl Schmitt’s appropriation of Kierkegaard and the critical responses to it from Karl Löwith and Norbert Bolz. This discussion leads to the conclusion that the decisionist-irrationalist Kierkegaard interpretation takes on an “occasionalistic” character and thereby willy nilly renders the arbitrary or accidental content of the decision absolute. It can be maintained that this “occasionalistic” character of the decisionistirrationalist interpretation paved the way for a Kierkegaard appropriation favored by fascist ideologues in the interwar period

The Search for the “Other Germany”: Refugee Historians from Nazi Germany and the Contested Historical Legacy of the Resistance to Hitler

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-429
Author(s):  
Marjorie Lamberti
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German People ◽  
Sense Of Shame

During his visit to the Federal Republic of Germany in the summer of 1954, Fritz Stern, a young history professor at Columbia University, witnessed in Berlin the memorial service for the victims of the July 20, 1944, revolt against Hitler. His feelings were stirred at the sight of the sorrowful faces of the widows and children of the conspirators who were executed in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, and by President Theodor Heuss's speech, recalling the anguish and courage of the Germans who made the decision to rebel in an act of atonement. Born in Germany in 1926 to Protestant parents of Jewish ancestry, Stern experienced racist antisemitism in the Third Reich firsthand before his family emigrated in 1938. He returned to Germany with conflicted emotions. During World War II, when the magnitude of the annihilation of European Jewry was uncovered, he felt intense hatred toward National Socialism. The distinction between German and Nazi became blurred. And yet, he could not bring himself to hold the German people collectively guilty for such crimes and to reject his native land. At the ceremony he struggled with his own feelings, saying to himself at first that “their purposes had not been ours.” Then a sense of shame for his indiscriminate hatred overwhelmed him. He left Germany in August “purged of hatred—though not disloyal to the feelings of the past, and full of forebodings about the future.”

scholarly journals Modalidades del mal durante el nacionalsocialismo

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Leiva Bustos
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Radical Evil ◽  
The Third ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Singular Theory ◽  
German People

Modalities of Evil during National Socialism   Resumen: Considerando que los diversos actos y atrocidades perpetrados por el nacionalsocialismo no pueden reducirse a una única teoría, a una única causa o a una única raíz, el presente artículo se propone analizar las diferentes expresiones que el mal adoptó durante el III Reich. Para ello, analizaremos los términos arendtianos de “banalidad del mal” y “mal radical”; presentaremos nuestra propuesta de lo que hemos denominado “espontaneidad del mal”; expondremos el mal que se veían obligados a realizar los prisioneros de los campos de concentración; y, finalmente, atenderemos tanto a la complicidad activa como pasiva por parte del pueblo alemán. Palabras clave: banalidad del mal, complicidad, espontaneidad del mal, mal concentracionario, mal radical.    Abstract: Considering that several acts and atrocities perpetrated by National Socialism cannot be reduced to a singular theory, to a singular cause nor to a singular root, the purpose of this essay is to analyze the different expressions that evil adopted in the Third Reich. In order to do that, we will analyse the Arendtian terms “banality of evil” and “radical evil”; we will introduce the term “spontaneity of evil”; we will show the evil that prisoners of concentration camps were forced to perform; and, finally, we will pay as much attention to active as to passive collusion carried out by German people. Keywords: banality of evil, collusion, spontaneity of evil, concentracionary evil, radical evil.

The Language of Ideology: Lingual Manipulation of Readers in German Literature of the Third Reich

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press
Keyword(s):  
German Literature ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Underlying Basis ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
German People

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.

Il rumore delle onde

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-86
Author(s):  
Camilla Tenaglia
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Neutral Position ◽  
Holy See ◽  
Radio Broadcasting ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract This essay addresses the relations between Pius XII and Germany at the beginning of his pontificate through the role of Vatican Media, especially Vatican Radio. During the interwar period, the Vatican media system (media ensemble) underwent major transformations, including the creation of a radio broadcasting station in 1931. Pacelli was one of the main agents of these improvements: as Secretary of State supporting Guglielmo Marconi’s project, as Pope through his extensive use of the mass media at his disposal, from radio to cinema. At the end of the 30s the difficult diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Third Reich also had an impact on mass media, as shown by the election of Pacelli in March 1939. The role of Vatican Radio in Vatican diplomacy towards Nazi Germany was already clear during the events surrounding the Anschluss in 1938 and it became a tool for unofficial communication to convey more explicit stances on the regime during World War II. The same strategy was employed during the Option in Südtirol in 1939, when Catholics were able to deliver anti-Nazi propaganda thanks in part to radio in the attempt to avoid the voluntary resettlement of German-speaking Italian citizens from the area. The Holy See maintained a neutral position throughout the events, but at the same time Vatican Radio broadcast programmes in German about the condition of the Catholic Church under the Nazi regime. These broadcasts supported the efforts especially of the Archbishop of Trento Celestino Endrici and his clergy, who opposed the resettlement. Once again Vatican Radio proved a crucial tool for conveying unofficial communications while maintaining the neutral stance typical of the Holy See‘s foreign policy.

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

scholarly journals Commentary: Masculinity and the Racial State

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-522
Author(s):  
Christopher Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Relationship

In their 1991 monograph on Nazi Germany,The Racial State, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann asked why it was “acceptable to use anthropological categories in the case of youth or women, and apparently unacceptable to employ them in the case of men?” The expansive historiography of Nazism, they complained, offered nothing “beyond an isolated venture into the realm of male fantasies, or a few studies of homosexuals.” The answer, in fact, had a lot more to do with scholarly motivation than acceptability. Put starkly, there was no intellectualfrissonin recovering the history of “men” as a social category in Nazi Germany. Influential asThe Racial Stateproved to be in driving the research agenda for historians of National Socialism, the authors’ ensuing chapter, “Men in the Third Reich,” merely confirmed as much. It presented a dry, empirical overview of Nazi racial and economic policies, excised of those specifically directed at women and children. The termsgender,masculine, ormasculinitydo not appear once in thirty-six dense pages of text. To be sure, this reflected the wider state of knowledge in the academy. Now, almost three decades later, historians can draw on a sociology of gender relations that was still in its infancy when Burleigh and Wippermann were writing. They study “men” to decode historical configurations of power. They no longer conceive of women, children, and men as discrete actor groups, but as protagonists in systems of gender relations. A sophisticated interdisciplinary literature has rendered men legible as gendered subjects, rather than as an unmarked norm. This scholarship stresses the plurality of masculine identities. It advises that a racial state, like all known states, will be a patriarchal institution, and that the gendering of oppressed ethnic minorities plays a key role in the construction of majority femininities and masculinities. By pondering the relationship between racial and social identities in Nazi Germany, Burleigh and Wippermann nevertheless raised questions with which historians continue to grapple. Each of the contributors to this special issue ofCentral European Historyfocuses productively on the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and power in the “racial state.”

“The Chords of the German Soul are Tuned to Nature”: The Movement to Preserve the Natural Heimat from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alexander Williams
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Conservation Law ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Natural Community ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German People ◽  
State Protection

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.

scholarly journals Et manifest på dansk må omhandle modersmålet og angribe fædrelandet: Litteraturhistoriske forstudier om kunst og sprog

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (107) ◽  
pp. 138-162
Author(s):  
Carsten Juhl
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Third ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Danish School

A Manifesto in Danish has to deal with the Mother tongue and attack the Fatherland: Some preliminary studies about art and language presented from the point of view of the history of literature:The study follows five lines of reasoning: The first deals with the impossibility of formulating a manifesto in general; the impossibility of advocating the use of violence and on the other hand the impossibility of using dialogue. So the system of prescriptions and promises normally used in a manifesto no longer have sense.The next line of reasoning concerns the impossibility of presenting fictional preoccupations in the mass media and explaining why literature in Danish has to deal with its contents and form outside the current commentary and celebration hosted by the mass media. In this second line the Vico legacy is introduced to explain a conflict in Danish literature concerning its lack of an epic centre of historical and aesthetical understanding. Benjamin’s defence of the epicity in the work of Brecht is similarly discussed in this second part of the study. The third line of reasoning is presenting some older investigations on Danish prose into this question of what an epic dimension in the residual Danish culture might have been about in the last century. But all the investigations presented failed to get to the point. The point of dissidence was too weak and the point of national-socialism too clever to be manifest: It could easily hide behind the general cover up of theological aesthetics dominating Lutheran Denmark.So the fourth line of reasoning deals with political theology as a sort of interiorised state of mind in Denmark.The fifth line of reasoning presents two examples of something radically different and rather excluded in the political culture of Denmark: The Danish Council of Freedom (Danmarks Frihedsråd) during WWII which failed when it came to attacking the collaboration between Danish democracy and the Third Reich; and the Danish School of Writing (Forfatterskolen) which has been attacked by the local establishment since it was born 25 years ago.

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