scholarly journals Yrjö Kilpinen: Finnish Composer and German Lieder in the 1930s

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
James Deaville

The Lieder of Finnish composer Yrjö Kilpinen (1892-1959) provide an interesting opportunity to study the interaction of national identity and musical aesthetics in National Socialist Germany. His German-language songs, above all to texts by Christian Morgenstern, enjoyed considerable success in Germany of the 1930s. Kilpinen's own political sympathies made him a model for Nazi ideologists, even as a non-German composing in the quintessentially German musical genre of the Lied. Reviews of his Lieder in the German-language press expound on the "Nordic" qualities of the work of this "Aryan" composer. Closer examination of the Lieder urn den Tod reveals a stark, at times heavy-handed compositional technique, which well suited the political ideology of the Third Reich.

2021 ◽  
pp. 160-181
Author(s):  
Jay Lockenour

This chapter outlines Erich Ludendorff’s attacks, written in his paper, Ludendorffs Volkswarte, on Adolf Hitler, the National Socialists, and their new cabinet allies after the political party consolidated their power in the summer of 1933. It discusses the relations between Hitler and Ludendorff throughout the first two years of the Third Reich. Despite the many ideological similarities with Nazism, the chapter reveals how Ludendorff’s followers experienced persecution, including their lectures being banned at the last minute or disrupted by Sturmabteilung (SA) rowdies. Some Ludendorffers lost their jobs or chances for promotion because of their championing the Feldherr’s cause. Some spent time in jail or concentration camps because of their “subversive” belief in Deutsche Gotterkenntnis. The chapter then discusses Ludendorff’s Volkswarte as a “purely religious” journal after the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) banned his paper and the Tannenbergbund. The chapter also mentions Ludendorff’s refusal to attend the festivities commemorating the Battle of Tannenberg. Ultimately, the chapter assesses the impact of Hitler and Ludendorff’s reconciliation on Germany.


Author(s):  
Reggie L. Williams

The political ideology of the Third Reich was the culmination of years of lingering hope for an ideal German ethnic community populated with ideal German humanity. The theology of the German Christian movement turned Jesus into a divine representation of the racially pure Aryan, enabling race-hatred to become a core part of German religious life. That social reality was also the context in which Bonhoeffer was raised, and trained as a theologian and a pastor. Bonhoeffer had to confront that ideology within himself, and to grow beyond what he had received as a child growing up in Germany in order to come to see racism as a defining problem for genuine Christianity in Nazi Germany.


Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press

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.


2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Brothers

The rise of neo-Nazism in the capital of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not inspired by a desire to recreate Hitler's Reich, but by youthful rebellion against the political and social culture of the GDR's Communist regime. This is detailed in Fuehrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Naxi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss (Random House, New York, 1996). This movement, however, eventually worked towards returning Germany to its former 'glory' under the Third Reich under the guidance of 'professional' Nazis.


Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich

This chapter turns to the gestation of the first, German-language manuscript of The Dual State, known as the Urdoppelstaat of 1938. I then chart the transformation of this unpublished manuscript into the 1941 book. To lay the foundation for this detailed reconstruction, I trace in some depth the gradual destruction of the German Rechtsstaat, presenting in an accessible manner several decades worth of material culled from the historiography of Nazi law. This illustrates the enormity—and danger—of the task that Fraenkel set himself: to serve as a participant observer in the courts of the “Third Reich.” Drawing on a series of primary documents, I piece together the incredible and untold story of the gestation of The Dual State, a tale of rare courage, acumen, and insight. I pay detailed attention to similarities and differences in recently discovered manuscript drafts.


Author(s):  
Michael I. Shevell

Abstract: It is commonly thought that the horrific medical abuses occurring during the era of the Third Reich were limited to fringe physicians acting in extreme locales such as the concentration camps. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there was a widespread perversion of medical practice and science that extended to mainstream academic physicians. Scientific thought, specifically the theories of racial hygiene, and the political conditions of a totalitarian dictatorship, acted symbiotically to devalue the intrinsic worth to society of those individuals with mental and physical disabilities. This devaluation served to foster the medical abuses which occurred. Neurosciences in the Third Reich serves as a backdrop to highlight what was the slippery slope of medical practice during that era. Points on this slippery slope included the “dejudification” of medicine, unethical experimentation in university clinics, systematic attempts to sterilize and euthanasize targeted populations, the academic use of specimens obtained through such programs and the experimental atrocities within the camps.


Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan

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.


Author(s):  
Eric Kurlander

This chapter illustrates how the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) appropriated supernatural ideas in order to appeal to ordinary Germans, enlisting the help of occultists and horror writers in shaping propaganda and political campaigning. By exploiting the supernatural imaginary, Hitler tied his political mission into something out of the Book of Revelation, as one ‘divinely chosen’ to create the Third Reich. The chapter then looks at three case studies. The first assesses Hitler's approach to politics through his reading of Ernst Schertel's 1923 occult treatise, Magic: History, Theory, Practice. The second considers the NSDAP's propaganda collaboration with the horror writer, Hanns Heinz Ewers. The third delves into the relationship between the NSDAP and Weimar's most popular ‘magician’, Erik Hanussen. In coopting Schertel's magic, enlisting Ewers, and forming an alliance with Hanussen, the Nazis diverted the masses from objective reality and toward the coming Third Reich.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schneider

Abstract The history of Egyptology in the Third Reich has never been the subject of academic analysis. This article gives a detailed overview of the biographies of Egyptologists in National Socialist Germany and their later careers after the Second World War. It scrutinizes their attitude towards the ideology of the Third Reich and their involvement in the political and intellectual Gleichschaltung of German Higher Education, as well as the impact National Socialism had on the discourse within the discipline. A letter written in 1946 by Georg Steindorff, one of the emigrated German Egyptologists, to John Wilson, Professor at the Oriental Institute Chicago, which incriminated former colleagues and exonerated others, is first published here and used as a framework for the debate.


Author(s):  
John P. McCormick

This chapter traces Carl Schmitt’s attempt, in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, to quell the near civil war circumstances of the late Weimar Republic and to reinvigorate the sovereignty of the German state through a reappropriation of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy. The chapter then examines Schmitt’s reconsideration of the Hobbesian state, and his own recent reformulation of it, in light of the rise of the “Third Reich,” with particular reference to Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.


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