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New German
Review

il of Germanic Studies

The Intersection of
Politics

AND

German Literature

A Festschrift in honor of

Professor Emeritus

Ehrhard Bohr

te&f. ^> --'«

Vol. 1 9 : Special Issue

2003-2004

New German
Review

A Journal of Germanic Studies

Vol. 19: Special Issue
2003 - 2004

Tischbein, J.H.W. Goetl'ie m clei Cairiiu.
164x206 cm. Ol auf Leinwand. 1786/87.
Frankfurt a. M., Stadelsches Kunstinstitut.

Professor Ehrhard Bahr

PT
1

The Intersection of Politics

and

German Literature:

A Festschrift in honor of

Professor Emeritus

Ehrhard Bahr

UCLA Department of Germanic Languages

Papers presented at a conference in honor of Professor Ehrhard Bahr spon-
sored by the UCLA Center for for 1 7"'- and 1 8"'-Century Studies, the Will-
iam Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and the Department of Gennanic
Languages, UCLA

Conference arranged by Professor Andrew Hewitt

Friday, May 1 7, 2003 at the Clark Library, 2520 Cimarron St., Los Angeles

New German
Review

Volume 1 9: Special Issue, 2003 - 2004

Guest Editor

Thomas P. Saine
University of California. Irvine

Executive Editors

Victor Fusilero Claire Whitner

Assistant Editor

Corina Lacatus

Anita Polkinhom

Teut Deese

Copy Editor

Susanne Kelley

Cover Art

Tisciibein, J. H.W. Goethe in der Campagna.
Frankfurt a. M. Stadelsches Kunstinstitut.
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Table of Contents

Preface

Thomas p. Saine 9

University of California, Irvine

Articles

The Political Uses of "Goethe" during the Nazi Period:
Goethe Fictions between 1933 and 1945

JensKruse 12

We I /es ley College

Vom Essen und von Zionismus: Sammy Gronemanns National-
Jiidisches Anekdotenbuch "Schalet. Beitrage zur
Philosophic des 'Wenn schon'"

HaNNI MlTTELMANN 30

Hebrew University

National Socialist Realism: The Politics of Popular Cinema
in the Third Reich

Mary Beth O'Brien 40

Skidmore College

Goethe as a Catalyst for Germauistik at Harvard

Michael P. Olson 66

Han'ard University

Composing for the Films: Adomo and Schoenberg in Hollywood

LisaParkes 90

University of California. Los Angeles

The Wagner Industry and the Politics of German Culture

Nicholas Vazsonvi 103

University of South Carolina

Keynote Address

The Historians' Mann and Mann's Historian:
Thomas Mann and Erich Kahler

HansR. Vaget 117

Smith College

Appendices

Works by Professor Ehrhard Bahr 142

Books 142

Editorships 143

Articles 144

Abstracts 159

Translations 159

Published Works Translated by Others 159

Bibliographies 159

Dissertations Supervised 160

Introduction

Thomas P. Saine

University of California, Irvine

It is an honor to be asked to contribute a preface to this volume
of papers celebrating Ehrhard Bahr's retirement; and it is a very special
pleasure to express my own appreciation for the role Ted has played as a
friend and colleague for nearly thirty years, sometimes even, I am sure,
without my knowledge, and beginning already before I arrived in
California in 1975. Of course I have no monopoly on Ted's friendship: I
am only one of many whose lives and careers have been touched by this
superb teacher, mentor, and colleague, and for them too 1 offer this
Laudatio.

The field of German Studies in America was stimulated and
broadened in the 1930s and 1 940s by the large influx of European scholars
who were transplanted to universities in the New World by the upheavals
of the Nazi era and World War II. It is no secret that they — like many
other exile writers, thinkers, and artists who were not positioned in
universities and had to struggle even more for lack of opportunities and
support — often found it difficult to acclimate and to act as though they
were fully at home in America. Many, especially of the non-university
folks, and some of them after unpleasant experiences of the political
climate after the war, returned to Europe at the earliest opportunity. Ted
belongs to a post-war generation of scholars and intellectuals who,
surveying what the world had to offer in the 1950s and 1960s, after
studying both here and in Europe, chose to take their degrees and embark
on their careers in this country. As a result of this twofold grounding he
has developed and maintained many interests and connections on both
sides of the water, while acting primarily as an American-based scholar
and participating fully in American scholarly and university life. He has
supported students and colleagues generously, far beyond the call of duty,
and also devoted a great deal of time and energy to administrative and
community-building activities, i.e., being a good citizen of the university.
(It is only fair to mention my good friend Hans R. Vaget, the keynote
speaker at the symposium, as another outstanding example of this
phenomenon, whose career is similar to Ted's in many respects.)

The breadth of Ted's scholarly interests from the Enlightenment

and the Goethezeit to twentieth-century and contemporary literature, from
Lessing and Goethe to exile writers and Thomas Mann, Jewish authors,
and the Holocaust, is truly remarkable, and he is rightly admired for the
comprehensiveness and mastery which he displays throughout his work.
The papers published here in his honor reflect many of the issues and
problems that have occupied him (and his students) over the years, but
they hardly do justice to the full range of his achievements. Just as
impressive as the scope of his knowledge and the range of his interests is
the diversity of publishing venues and scholarly genres with which Ted
has involved himself over the course of his career. He has published widely
in both English and German; in addition to the regular production of
"research" articles and treatises through the years, he has published
monographs on twentieth-century authors such as Georg Lukacs, Ernst
Bloch, and Nelly Sachs. He has been a prolific producer of encyclopedia
and handbook articles — even including one on German literature from
Enlightenment to Post-Classicism for the on-line Encyclopedia
Britannica — and has found the time also to bring forth a multitude of
book reviews (many people cannot be bothered to review books at all!).

Ted has also not shied away from the often laborious task of
editing important and useflil volumes, such as his collection of eighteenth-
century essays debating the question Was ist Anjklariing? and the texts of
Goethe's Wilhehn Mew/er novels, along with commentaries, documents,
and bibliographies of the literature devoted to them (for the Reclam
Verlag). He collaborated with Walter K. Stewart to produce first an
international bibliography of dissertations on Goethe, and then a North
American bibliography in several installments for the Goethe Yearbook.
He has served on the executive and editorial boards and as an officer of
numerous scholarly organizations, including the Lessing Society and the
Gemian Studies Association. He has never lost sight of the political,
cultural, and social contexts in which literary life and production take
place, and while remaining on good temis with the more theoretically
inclined, he has also worked to further understanding, collaboration, and
mixing between literary and historical scholars (those who still go to the
archives) and has been a prime mover (along with Peter Reill of UCLA
and Thomas Brady of Berkeley) of the ongoing system-wide UC
Colloquium on Early Modern Central Europe from which both faculty
and students have profited over the years.

All of this by itself would suffice to make Ted's a remarkable
record, but of course 1 have to now barely mentioned what at least by my
reckoning has to be considered his most lasting contribution: his work on
and for Goethe. His very first articles were published in the Weimar and
Vienna Goethe yearbooks, and his published dissertation on Die Ironic

im Spdtwerk Goethes of 1972 has long since established itself as a
foundational work of modem Goethe studies. He has never "finished"
Goethe and has come back to him again and again in his research while
initiating generations of students into the work of this most important
"modem" German writer and advocate of "Weltliteratur." Ted has not
just "presented" Goethe but has "represented" him superbly as well; this
is the part of his career which has most impacted my own and for which
I am especially thankful. He was a co-founder (along with Hans Vaget
and a handful of others) of the Goethe Society of North America in 1979,
lending informed and enthusiastic support to a goal which had until then
never been realized in North America. As the GSNA's first Executive
Secretary he worked indefatigably to establish the Society's viability and
its communications with the rest of the North American scholarly world,
while at the same time maintaining its uniqueness and independence vis-
a-vis the established Goethe societies in Europe (especially in those days
before reunification when Goethe was still an important political/
propaganda object for the Germans). After ten years as Executive
Secretary (1979-1989) he rested, then came back to serve first as Vice
President, then as President of the GSN A from 1 995- 1 997, and continues
to take an active role in its efforts. I am proud to celebrate Ted Bahr's
career by awarding it a summa cum laiuie, and to wish him well in his
retirement, which will be as active as he wishes.

The Political Uses of "Goethe"

during the Nazi Period:

Goethe Fictions between

1933 and 1945

Jens Kruse, Wellesley College

Let us say you are a writer remaining — for whatever reason: by
choice, by necessity, or something in between — in Nazi Germany after
the Machtergreifung in 1933 and stay there until the end in 1945. What
does Goethe have to offer you? Do you find him useful if you want to
co-opt him for literature affimiing Nazi rule? Does he provide a haven
for aesthetic retreat? Can he be a kindred spirit in internal exile? Does he
offer opportunities for camouflaged critique of the regime?

In order to seek answers to these and similar questions, 1 would
like to examine a peculiar sub-genre of novels and novellas in which
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the protagonist or a significant supporting
character. Such "Goethe fictions" are not peculiar to the Nazi period.
They develop soon after Goethe's death and are still thriving today. During
these 171 years, more than 100 Goethe narratives were published and
many of them were issued several times. Therefore, it seems safe to assume
that their readership was much larger than that of, say, most scholarly
articles and books on Goethe. These novels and novellas thus have had a
significant influence on the broader cultural image of "Goethe" among
the educated German reading public. And yet, the burgeoning sub-field
of Goethe reception studies, which has explored the history of the
scholarly treatment of Goethe, theater productions, Goethe parodies,
literary adaptations and re-creations, Goethe celebrations, and much more,
has largely ignored these texts.'

This is regrettable because an examinadon of Goethe fictions
may provide us with a prism through which to observe trends in the cultural
and political uses of Goethe. In this essay, I therefore would like to
examine the Goethe fictions published inside Nazi-Gennany in the period
from 1933-1945. It is with some regret that I exclude from our
consideration Goethe fictions written in exile, if only because doing so
banishes Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar, the most well-known of all
Goethe fictions. But my aim here is to examine how writers within Nazi
Germany interacted with the figure of Goethe under the conditions of
dictatorship.

Given the fact that Nazi cultural politics — especially initially —
found Goethe difficult to assimilate to its purposes,- it is of some interest
that there is no noticeable diminution in the production of Goethe fictions
from 1933 to 1945.^At least ten ofthem are published during the 12 years
of the 1000-year Reich. Many of these texts are continuations and
precursors of the relatively routine business of Goethe fictions: such titles
as Eduard Dansky's Des Heirn Geheunrats letzte Liebe; Goethe und
Ulrike and Joseph Lux's Goethe: Roman ewer Dichterliebe are curious
mixtures of love stories and hagiographic tracts that rehash episodes of
Goethe's life as commercial potboilers.'' One of the consistent and enduring
features of the sub-genre of Goethe fictions is that a sub-set of these
novels are authors' and publishers' attempts to ride the wave of Goethe's
fame to healthy bottom lines. This phenomenon is, of course, particularly
pronounced during Goethe celebration years.

But some of the Goethe fictions of the Nazi period bear its marks
in interesting and revealing ways. These can be viewed as a curious sub-
group of the genre of historical novels, which flourished during this time.''
Authors of such novels usually had one or more of the following
motivations for embracing their material: to cobble together a historical
tradition leading to Nazi rule, particularly in the co-optation of previous
leader figures; to elaborate alternative forms of rule under the cover of
historical periods and personages; and to re-imagine historical epochs as
a way of escaping the pressures of the time.'' Here, I would like to examine
three Goethe fictions more closely in order to trace the political uses of
"Goethe" during the Nazi period.

(i)

Robert Hohlbaum's Hewische Rheiureise — a novella published
by Cotta in 1 94 1 and later integrated into Hohlbaum's large Goethe novel
Sonnenspektnim (1951) — is the clearest example among these texts of
an attempt to instrumentalize Goethe in the service of the Nazi regime.
Hohlbaum ( 1 886- 1 955 ) held positions as the director of important libraries
in Vienna, Diisseldorf, and Weimar, and was a prolific writer and publicist.
He was one of the most widely read authors of the period between the
two world wars.^ During his lifetime, his 28 novels, 26 collections of
shorter prose fictions, 1 1 volumes of poetry, four monographs and four
plays sold more than a million copies.**

In 1933 and 1934 Hohlbaum published two "Fiihrer-Romane":
First, Der Mann aus dem Chaos: Bin Napoleon Roman and then Stein:
Der Roman eines Fiihrers, which was printed in its entirety in the Berlin
edition of the Volkischer Beohachter. His Hewische Rheinreise must

very much be seen as an attempt to integrate Goethe into the mythical
construction of the historical inevitability of Hitler as leader of the Gemian
Reich. The novella imagines the chance encounter of Goethe with Stein
and their spontaneous joint journey along the Rhine to Cologne during
July of 1815. It starts by portraying Goethe and Stein as contrasting
geniuses: the poet and the politician, the dreamer and the practical man,
the idealistic seeker and the visionary realist. These polarities are
encapsulated in the following dialogue:

(Stein) "Ich will nicht suchen, nicht ewig suchen

mussen, ich will endlich finden!"

(Goethe) "Suchen ist Leben. Ertiillung kann Tod sein."

(Stein) "FiirSie! Fiirmich nicht! Ich bin kein Traumer!

Wenn ich das Ziel sehe, will ich gerne vergehen."

(Goethe) "Ihr Ziel ist das Reich. Das Deutsche Reich.

Nur in seiner festen, irdischen Gestalt?"

(Stein) "In welcher sonst? Jeder romantische Nebel

ist mir verhasst. Das Reich im realen Sinne. Sollen

wir Deutsche allein es entbehren? Sollen wir allein

unfruchtbar sein, wahrend alle emten?" (47-8)

Once they have amved in Cologne, Stein sits in his room and
sketches out the broad outline of the German Reich while Goethe
meanders through the streets and encounters the Dom as a momentous
manifestation of aesthetic power:

Jene Kraft, die Mittler war zwischen Erde und Himmel.
Die den Menschen hob, dass er ohne Furcht aufsteigen
durfte, von lieber, enger Besinnung gewannt, in die
kiihle Hohe. Was er ersehnt hatte, hier war es, aus Stein
geweckt und geworden, groB und beherrschend, aus
tiefer Erde wachsend, die Erde erschuttemd mit einer
Kraft, die hoch und fern war wie der Himmel; hier war
die Tat. (70)

Finally, when Stein, too, has been drawn to the center of Cologne by this
power and encounters first the Dom and then Goethe, we read:

Vor Steins Seele, vor Steins Blick wuchs der Bau. [ . . . ]
Aus der tiefen Erdkraft der Grundmauem strebte er in
uberreicher, verzweigter. alle Buntheit der Erde
tragender Fiille zur Hohe. Aus schwerer Tat, durch die
Vielfalt reicher Gedanken in den kronenden Traum.
14

Musste nicht auch sein Werk vom Traum gekront
werden, musste nicht Traum segnend iiber der Tat
schweben, als Mittler zwischen Erde und Evvigkeit?
Damit das Reich fest in der Erde ruhe, aber den
Widerschein des Ewigen trage in die kuhnsten Hohen
seines Aufstiegs?!

Nun erst sah er den Andern. der wie er im Bann des
steinemen Wunders stand und aufsah wie er. Und Stein
war es, als konne er das Gliick des letzten Erkennens
nicht allein tragen, als miisse er die Halfte der herrlichen
Last auf helfende Schultern laden, in schoner
Gemeinsamkeit.

Langsam ging er auf den Andern zu. Wie leise
Glockenschlage hallten die Schritte. Stumm griisste
ihn Goethe, als hatte er ihn erwartet. Gemeinsam
stiegen ihre Blicke zur Hohe.

"An Ihrem Faust", sagte Stein endlich leise, "bauen Sie
ein ganzes reiches Leben lang. Es war Traum. Aber
am Ende wird es Tat sein."

"An Ihrem Werk", sagte Goethe noch leiser, "bauen die
Jahrhunderte, von Tat zu Tat. Moge es am Ziel, in der
letzten Vollendung, sich auch den Traum bewahren!"
Der Sichelmond senkte sich. Aber in seinem Lichte
ruhten noch einmal in sicherer Form die beiden
Menschen und der ewige Dom. (74-77)

Thus Goethe's unfinished Faust and the unfinished Cologne cathedral
are merged into a synthetic manifestation of the unfinished business of
German national aspirations which — as this novella so obtrusively
suggests — have finally come to triumphant completion in the form of
Hitler's Third Reich.

(ii)

Gertrud Baumer ( 1 878- 1 954) — together with Helene Lange one
of the giants of the Gennan women's movement of the early 20"" century —
had a distinguished career as a politician during the Weimar Republic.
She was a member of the constitutional assembly and later of the
Reichstag. As the first German Ministerialratin, she worked on issues of
education and youth in the Interior Ministry and was delegate to the League
of Nations. Even though the Nazis removed her from her position in the

Interior Ministry and in spite of the GJeichschaltimg, she continued as
editor of the major Gemian women's magazine Die Fran. But after her
removal from this position in 1936, and particularly after the beginning
of World War II. she devoted her energies to a career as a writer of cultural
and historical novels and essays."*

This is neither the place nor is there the space to adequately
present Baumer's ambivalent and problematic position during the Nazi
period. In spite of her unceremonial dismissal and her at times courageous
critique of the ruthlessness of the Nazis' methods, she generally supported
their goals in foreign policy and approved their nationalist agenda. Given
the complexity and ambivalence of her political position during the Nazi
years it should not come as a surprise that her writings, too, display a
complex mixture of all the possible types of writing under the Nazi
dictatorship: historical contextualization of Nazi rule, alternative models
of leadership, escapism and camouflaged critique seem to co-exist,
overlap, and at times appear indistinguishably mixed.

This is certainly the case for Gertrud Baumer's Goethe novel
Eine Woche im May, published in 1944. On the one hand, the context of
the publication of this novel suggests that it can easily be understood as
a vehicle of escapism and as such at least in part of support for the
regime. One of her publishers, Hermann Leins, nominates the book (prior
to its publication) to a prize competition of the Werhe- imd Beratimgsaint
fur das deutsche Schrifttum. He argues that the manuscript is an exemplary
instance of what the competition attempted to attract and support: books
which would give the reader joy and relaxation, escape from the "Sorgen
und Note des AUtags."'" And clearly Baumer does conceive of the novel
as a kind of "Trostbuch," even in a very specific individual and personal
sense. In her dedication, Baumer makes clear that the novel was:

Geschrieben fur den
Schwerverwundeten Gefreiten
Eckart Ulich,
gestorben im Lazarett
am 28. April 1943
an seiner vor El Alamein
am 1 . September 1 942
empfangenen Wunde.

Eckart Ulich was the son of a close friend. Baumer casts her vivid account

of an important week in Goethe's life shortly after his arrival in Weimar
in May of 1776 — recollected by the old Goethe in May of 1827 — as a

monument to Ulich. The young vivacious energetic Goethe is held up as
a shining exemplar of all that is good about young German men.

To this extent Eiue Woche im May not only offers light
entertainment and escapism but also works to make the novel's fictional
image of Goethe congruent with the predilections of the regime. This is
further underscored when Goethe is portrayed as preferring his Gotz (a
text commonly singled out favorably in the Nazi reception of Goethe) to
Werther. We find him musing about:

Caesar, Mahomet. Prometheus, Egmont, Faust — Was
alles hatte er begonnen? Eine neue. die heldische Welt
der Menschheit war in ihm aufgestiegen: der
Staatsmann, der Prophet, der Gotter stiirzende Titan,
der Held, der Obennensch — unermessene Tiefen. kaum
geahnte riesige Umrisse der menschlichen
Daseinsformen. Wurde er ihnen Gestalt geben? (99)

Here, Goethe, the writer and poet becomes part creator, part soul brother
of heroes, gods, and super-humans, both singer and precursor of the leader.
And as the friend, educator and guiding spirit of his Duke Karl August he
is pointedly portrayed as a mentor not just in intellectual and cultural but
also in military matters:

Er nimmt [...] ein militarisches Werk vom Tisch, das
ihm der Herzog gegeben hat [...] Er fiihlt die
Verpflichtung. den jungen Herzog auf alien seinen
Wegen zu begleiten, um unmerklich seine vielseitigen
Begabungen in die Bahnen der Arbeit zu lenken. Seine
lebhaften militarischen Neigungen bergen die Gefahr
in sich, dass er den gegebenen Rahmen des kleinen
Landes aus den Augen verliert. Das groBe Beispiel
Friedrichs von PreuBen stachelt ihn. [...] Er ist eine
soldatische Natur, soldatisch und musisch neben
einander. (192-3)

in this passage, affirmation of the mythologies of the regime and subtle
critique of it seem to be curiously mixed. On the one hand, Karl August
(and indirectly Goethe) is strongly associated with Frederick II; on the
other hand the young Duke's military proclivities are mentioned with the
clear concern that he would lose sight of the "gegebenen Rahmen des
kleinen Landes."

Given these aspects of the novel. Baumer's own ambivalence
and contradictory relationship to the regime, and the limited openings a
controlled publishing situation could afford, we need to be triply careful
about wanting to see camouflaged criticism of the regime in this text.
However, it should be noted that Baumer chooses as one of the climactic
episodes of her novel Goethe's and the Duke's actions during a
catastrophic fire in Neckeroda. One does wonder how readers in 1944,
having suffered and still suffering some of the most devastating
bombardments of the war, would have reacted to the following description
of the results of the Neckeroda fire:

Aus den schwarzen Umrissen seiner Mauerreste schaut
das vemichtete Dorf wie aus gliihenden Geisteraugen.
Ein unruhiger Wind treibt iiber die Brandstatte. Unter
seinem Anhauch fahren immer von neuem Flammen
aus der Glut oder brechen aus scheinbar erloschenen
Balken hervor. [...] In dem MaB, in dem das Knattem
der Flammen. das Prasseln zusammenstiirzender
Mauern aufliort, dringen andere Gerausche zu ihm
hinauf Das Briillen des Viehs, [...] dann und wann ein
Schreckensruf, das Weinen von Frauen und Kindem.
Gibt es ein groBeres Ungliick als solch ein Feuer? [...]
das Schicksal der kleinen Bauem, denen hier Haus und
Hof abgebrannt ist, [nimmt] seine Gedanken immer mehr
gefangen. Was bedeuten die Sorgen der Grossen gegen
ein solches Ungliick ! (3 1 0- 1 1 )

One wonders what might be more (at least potentially) subversive in this
description: the vivid account of the devastating destruction which in
some of its intensity and painfulness may owe more to Baumer 's and her
readers' recent experience than to the well-known episode of Goethe lore;
or Goethe's reflection on the existential separateness — no
Volksgemeimchaft here — of the peasant victims of this fire and their great
masters, like Goethe and Karl August. Ironically, even to the extent that
Karl August is portrayed as one with his people in this section of the
novel the implicit comparison to top Nazi leaders, particularly Hitler, is
not flattering. Here is Goethe's impression of the Landesherr:

Fur einen Augenblick fullt sich Goethes Herz ganz mit
dem einen ergreifenden Eindmck: der Landesherr —
eins mit seinen Untertanen — der im Ungliick, ob er
helfen kann oder nicht, zu ihnen gehort. Dieser Trost

seiner Anwesenheit, der den geschwarzten,
verschwitzten Mannem mit den versengten Haaren und
den Brandblasen in Gesicht und Handen aus den Augen
leuchtet! (308-9)

Here is a ruler who is one with his subjects, but he is one with them in
practical activity not in a mythical Volksgemeinschaft . And he is with
them, among them, in the moment of catastrophe, this in stark contrast to
Hitler and other top Nazi leaders who usually kept their distance from
the people in bombed out cities.

(iii)

Georg Schwarz's Geheinwis in Weimar: Roman uni Goethe unci
Napoleon is perhaps — pardon the pun — the most mysterious of these
Goethe fictions. Georg Schwarz (1896-1943) worked as editor of the
workers' paper Der Abend in Essen. He then moved to Berlin to work as
an employee for Biichergilde Gutenberg and as a journalist for a nuinber
of different publications, for which he authored articles about the Ruhr
worker's and vagabond's literature." He published KohJenpott: Ein Buch
von der Ruhr in 1931. While his activities up to this point suggest that he
at least sympathized with the Communist Party his Volker, horet die
Zentrale: KPD bankrott. printed in 1933 by a nationalist publishing house,
is a devastating critique of the failings of the German Communist Party
and seems to signal his rapprochement with right-wing politics. '-

Schwarz's subsequent publications under the conditions of Nazi
rule are: Der Diamantenherzog. Geschichte eines Prdtendenten ( 1935),
Geheimnis in Weimar: Roman um Goethe und Napoleon (1937), Die
Karawaue nach Santa Fe (1939), and Ernst Schweninger. Bismarck's
Leiharzt (1941). It is hard to escape the impression that here an author
whose political roots, regardless of how much he may have changed his
views in 1933, make his position in Nazi Germany highly precarious, is
trying to eke out a living by writing relatively safe things: a historical
novel, a Goethe fiction in the guise of a detective novel, an adventure
story for young readers, and the biography of the personal physician of
the hero of Germany's national aspirations, the founder of the second
German Reich.

In Geheimnis in Weimar (1937), two Englishmen on a routine
educational tour of Europe visit Weimar in the early fall of 1808. Mr.
Woodwick who is interested in all things criminal and his younger
companion Doug Bartles visit Goethe and encounter a mystery'. Goethe
tells them that the manuscript of his Trinklied "Rechenschaft" has

disappeared. The Englishmen's investigations reveal a convoluted plot
involving both an intrigue at the Ho/theater and a plan to assassinate the
emperor Napoleon during his visit to Weimar on October 6. It turns out
that the interest of the conspiratorial thieves in the manuscript was not
the Trinklied as such but the fact that Goethe had outlined the program
for Napoleon's visit in Weimar on the back of the manuscript page. The
Trinklied itself, however, also plays a role in the conspiratorial plot: a
characteristically altered whistling of the melody of the refrain serves as
a kind of code, a password of sorts for the conspirators.

Shortly before the plot to assassinate Napoleon reaches the
moment of decision, the conspirators are overheard in heated debate:

"Es sind ja auch Menschen, sterbliche Menschen, nur
viel kleiner als er, ohne GliJck und ohne Genie. Und
darum zielen wir auf ihn."

"Nein, weil er uns ins Ungliick gebracht hat, weil er
uns hohnt und knechtet! Was geht mich seine Grosse
und sein Genie an? Er ist ein Teufel, ein Fluch fiir alle
Lander. Weil er nicht Ruhe geben kann, weil er krank
ist nach Macht, darum muss er fort."
"Was wissen wir denn? Wenn euer PreuBen nicht so
lahm und morsch gewesen ware, hatte ihm auch sein
Ehrgeiz nichts geniitzt. Er verachtet euch. Aber haben
Sie vergessen, wie eure Festungen fielen ohne
Kanonenschuss, wie man ihn in Berlin empfmg, wie
alles floh oder kroch?"
"Nicht alle! Bliicher nicht, Stein nicht!"
"Gewiss. Ein paar waren da, es musste ja noch ein paar
Manner geben in Friedrichs Staat. Wir alle in
Deutschland hatten ja auf PreuBen gehofft. Aber
Bliicher wurde gefangen und Stein musste gehen.
Hofmtrigen. Ranke der Beamten. Ein schwacher,
verratener Konig. Ein geschlagenes, verschrecktes
Volk, das 'Vive I'Empereur!' schreit, weil es leben muss
und endlich einen Starken sieht, der in dem kranken
Europa wieder Ordnung schafft. Wie konnten die
wenigen Manner dagegen an? Wem ist damit gedient,
wenn wir jetzt Europa den Kopf abschlagen? Die
Verwirrung wird nur noch groBer. Und PreuBen?"
(257-8)

It is difficult to determine how this dialogue would have been read in
1937. However, at least some readers must have sat up and paid puzzled
attention when conft"onted with a discussion of the reasons for the
assassination of an all-powerful leader. More specifically, the analysis
that a weak Prussia had perhaps as much to do with its catastrophic defeat
as a strong Napoleon might cause suggestive reverberations in the minds
of readers who remember a weak Weimar as just as responsible for the
catastrophe of German democracy as a strong Hitler. Further, a sentence
like: "Ein geschlagenes, verschrecktes Volk, das 'Vive TEmpereur!' schreit,
weil es leben muss und endlich einen Starken sieht, der in dem kranken
Europa wieder Ordnung schafft" would not be difficult for any reader to
mentally transform into; "Ein geschlagenes, verschrecktes Volk. das ['Heil
Hitler'] schreit, weil es leben muss und endlich einen Starken sieht, der in
dem kranken [Deutschland] wieder Ordnung schafft."

Whether or not Schwarz intended such readings, how was it
possible that such a discussion could appear in a novel in Nazi Gennany
when it was impossible to stage Schiller's WilheJm Tell'V- The answer
appears to me to be twofold. On the one hand the fact that the target of
this plot is Napoleon inoculates author and reader from suspicion. Schwarz
can rely on that thanks, in part, to Hohlbaum's Napoleon novel, which
successfully built up the myth of the vast differences between the Romanic
and the Germanic leader. The censors and cultural politicians of the
regime might have been sufficiently convinced of their own propaganda
of the stark differences between Napoleon and Hitler to be unconcerned
about allowing an assassination plot in a piece of popular fiction. The
fact that Stein is mentioned as the example of a heroic Gernian in the
same breath again follows in the footsteps of Hohlbaum's contrastive
figure of the exemplary German leader.

But maybe even more powerful is the nimbus of Goethe that
extends around and pemieates the action of the novel, it tends to render
even this potentially risky and subversive plot line unthreatening and
hamiless. Goethe is mostly portrayed as a genius operating in spheres far
above the everyday, even the political and historical:

Da stand Goethe, hn langen, blauen Rock, ein gesticktes
Tuch um den Hals gebunden, das ergrauende Haar leicht
gepudert und mit seinen groBen, gewaltig strahlenden
Augen, die seinen Besuchem kurz entgegenblickten,
um dann noch einmal zu den Papieren zuriickzukehren,
die auf dem Stehpult vor ihm lagen. [ ... ] Als gabe es
keinen Napoleon und kein politisches Spiel, das hinter
Prunk und Festen mit Gewalt und Kriegslarm drohte,

als gabe es kein Theater und keinen Klatsch, stand er
friedlich versunken da und begriiBte sie dann hoflich.

(275)

That this image of Goethe tends to minimize the importance of the
assassination plot and thus renders it harmless, is, after all, borne out in
the way he views the specific event triggering the narrative. Goethe (at
least purportedly) was interested in a detective investigation of the
purloined manuscript not because he was concerned about the loss of
highly classified plans for the program of Napoleon's visit, but because
it was the manuscript of a poem that is important to him even though it
might seem to us as only a minor occasional piece: the Trinklied
"Rechenschaft" that Goethe composed — at Zelter's request — for the
celebration of Konigin Luise's birthday in 1810.

But maybe Goethe's insistence on the importance of the poem
does not just provide simple contextual cover for the assassination plot
but is, in fact, a double camouflage. Maybe we should take the plot device
of the song and melody as code seriously, should see Goethe's insistence
on the importance of the text as a sign and actually read the poem which
is — interestingly enough — declaimed from memory by Goethe early in
the novel but nowhere provided as printed text.

Zelter had asked Goethe for a "joyful song" and complained
that during these times (after Prussia's catastrophic defeat by Napoleon
and before the liberation of the Befreiiingskriege) one heard nothing but
groaning and moaning from poets and others. Accordingly, Goethe's song
alternates the refrain:

Sollst uns nicht nach Weine lechzen!
Gleich das voile Glas heran!
Denn das Achzsen und das Krachzen
Hast du heut schon abgetan.

with stanzas in which various speakers give an account (Rechenschaft)
of how they rejected such moaning, groaning, and generally negative
attitudes. If one of Schwarz's readers felt sufficiently motivated by the
hints of the song's importance to open a volume of Goethe and read the
text he/she would have found among these stanzas the following:

Einer wollte mich emeuen.
Macht' es schlecht: verzeih mir Gott!
Achselzucken, Kiimmereien!
Und er hiel3 ein Patriot.

Ich vertliichte das Gewasche,
Rannte meinen alten Lauf.
Narre, wenn es brennt, so losche.
Hats gebrannt, ban wieder auf!

This skeptical attitude toward patriotic renewal, fairly indicative of
Goethe's position at the time, takes on a diiferent resonance in the context
of the Nazi "renewal" of Gennany. if Schwarz intended a hidden critique
here, he was ever so careful to open it only to the detective's skill. After
all, this text makes its appearance only in an oddly reduced and truncated
form. The manuscript's back page seems more important than the front,
the melody is more prominent than the text, and even the melody is twisted
and reduced to a mere code. And yet this camouflaged rejection of a
nationalist Gennan renewal might indeed be the Geheimnis in Gehehnuis
in Weimar.

(iv)

Seen in its totality, the corpus of Goethe fictions written in
Germany during the Nazi period confronts us with a fascinating picture.
Most of the texts that I have not presented in detail here illustrate that the
100-year-long cultural wave of Goethe adoration rolls on nearly
unimpeded through Fascist dictatorship and war. The three texts I have
analyzed at greater length here share and continue some aspects of that
trend, but differ from the others in that they interact with the conditions
of the Third Reich in interesting and illuminating ways.

Robert Hohlbaum's Heroische Rheinreise conforms to the topos
of the great and good genius Goethe and works with the traditional
elements of Goethe worship in many ways. But its desire to co-opt Goethe
for the Nazi cause compels it to do so in the context of an explicit
conjunction of the poetic with the political, of Goethe's worldview with
a national idea transmogrified into nationalism, of Goethe with Stein,
Goethe with the Fuhrer. Goethe is thus robbed of the uniqueness and
singularity that is normally part of his mythology and cast as a collaborator
in the cause of the Gennan, and hence in 1941, the Third Reich.

In Gertmd Baumer 's Eine Woche im May; much more of the Goethe
fictions' longstanding tradition of Goethe admiration is retained. Goethe's
genius, all-encompassing creativity and productivity, and humanizing
force are lovingly portrayed and celebrated in a text very much written by
a member of the educated middle class for members of the educated
middle class. Substantively, and even formally, this novel very much
places Goethe back at the center of the action and the world. The week in
May of 1 776 is framed by and presented as the recollections of the older

Goethe in May of 1 827. Goethe is thus not only at the center of that week,
but is also portrayed as the controlling recollector of and reflector on his
life. It is not least this restoration of Goethe to a position of central and
masterful presence in the narrative that allows Baumer to shape her novel
into a wistfully consoling, protective, supportive and at times cautiously
critical mirror of more humane times.

By contrast, Georg Schwarz's Geheimnis in Weimar: Roman
inn Goethe und Napoleon places Goethe on the periphery of a narrative
that centers on a political plot contemplating the assassination of a
powerful leader. "Goethe" — who is, for the most part, portrayed in this
novel by an indirect and reflective method curiously pre-figurative of
Thomas Mann's technique in Lotte in Weimar — frames and contains the
potentially risky story of a political assassination with the legitimizing
aura of his figure that renders moot any concerns censors or readers might
have felt. And yet, while the figure of "Goethe" thus both makes possible

and blunts any critique of the Nazi regime, Goethe's writing resonates
through Schwarz's text. Written but not printed, declaimed but not read,
whistled in the dark of night but not sung, Goethe's poetry functions as a
potential instrument of liberation in a country subjected to tyranny.

Endnotes

' One might argue that the modem phase of Goethe reception studies
began with the path-breaking exhibit Klassiker infmsteren Zeiten 1933-
1945 prepared by the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach in 1983 and
its accompanying symposium recorded in Beschddigtes Erbe. Beitrdge
ziir Klassikerrezeption injinsterer Zeit. At the symposium, Karl Robert
Mandelkow opened a fascinating discussion by his Rezeptionstheoretische
Reflexionen; at about the same time. Erich Kleinschmidt made an
important contribution to the topic with his "Der vereinnahmte Goethe.
Irrwege im Umgang mit einem Klassiker, 1932-1949." Mandelkow 's Goethe
im Urteil seiner Kritiker and his subsequent Goethe in Deutschland.
Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers remain themselves classics of
the study of Goethe reception. Since then, a voluminous literature has
sprung up on various aspects of Goethe reception. A recent example is
Drews, Jorg (ed.). Mitwelt^Nachwelt— Internet. But the subgenre of
"Goethe fictions" seems to have received almost no attention. See Kruse
1988.

^ See Mandelkow 1989: 88-108 and Kemper, among others.
24

-' During the period from 1933 to 1 945, the following Goethe fictions were
published in Nazi Gemiany: Kolbenhever, E. G. Karlshader Novelle
(1786). Munich: A. Langen, G. Mueller, 1934 (1st edition 1929); Servaes,
Franz. Jahr der Wandlung. Goethes Schicksalswende 1775.
Braunschweig: Friedrich Vievveg & Sohn. 1935; Dansky. Eduard. Des
Herrn Geheimrats letzte Liebe; Goethe imd Ulrike. Novelle. Berlin: P.
Zsolnay, \93)l;Franck,Hans. Letzte Liebe: Goethe und Ulrike. Hannover:
Adolf Sponholtz Verlag, 1937: Lux. .Joseph A. Goethe: Roman einer
Dichteiilebe. Wien: F. SpeideFsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937; Schvvarz,
Georg. Geheinmls in Weimar: Roman urn Goethe und Napoleon. Berlin:
Frundsberg Verlag Foellmer & Esser. 1937; Bauer, Walter. Abschied imd
Wanderiing: Orel Erzdhlungen urn Goethe, Hoelderlin iind Hebbel.
Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, 1 939; Hohlbaum, Robert. Heroische Rheinreise.
Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1 94 1 : Huelsen. Hans von. August undOttille: Roman
einer Ehe imter Goethes Dach. Miinchen: Piper. 1941; Hohlbaum, Robert.
Symphonie in Drei Sdtzen. Novellen. Wien: Wiener Verlagsgesellschaft,
1 943; Baumer. GertRid. Eine IVoche im May. Tubingen: Rainer Wunderlich
Verlag, 1944.

"* One of the consistent and enduring features of the sub-genre of Goethe
fictions is that a sub-set of these novels are authors' and publishers'
attempts to ride the wave of Goethe's fame to healthy bottom lines. This
phenomenon is, of course, particularly pronounced during Goethe
celebration years.

■ The database section of the Projekt Historischer Roman web site (http:/
/histrom. literature. at ) documents an enonnous upsurge in the number of
historical novels published in Nazi Germany, particularly in the immediate
pre-war years and the first years of the war. In the period from 1935 to
1941, the output of such novels more than doubles in comparison to the
period of the Weimar Republic.

'' See: Riegel, Paul, Rinsum, Wolfgang (eds.). Drittes Reich und Exil
1933-1945. (Deutsche Literaturgeschichte, Band 10). Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag. 2000: 99-100.

^ See: Sonnleiter, Johann. Die Geschdfte des Herrn Robert Hohlbaum:
Die Schriftstellerkarriere eines Osterreichers in der Zwischenkriegszeit
und im dritten Reich. Vienna: Boehlau Verlag, 1989.

"^ Sonnleitner characterizes Hohlbaum's role during the Nazi regime as
follows: "Als Schrifsteller und Literaturstratege war Hohlbaum ein

Erfiillungsgehilfe par excellence nationalsozialistischer Politik und
Kulturpolitik, die ihn erst mit groBem publizistischen Aufwand zu groBerer
Bekanntheit und hoheren Auflagenzahlen verhalf. Seine negative
Einstellung zur parlamentarischen Demokratie und Sozialismus, sein
radikaler Bruch mit der humanistisch-aufklarerischen Tradition, sein
ausgepragter Rassismus und Ethnozentrismus (...) [veranlaBten ihn], den
historischen Roman als unverfanglichen Ort ideologischer Indoktrination
zu wahlen ( . . . )" 254.

" See: Angelika Schaser, Helena Lange und Gertnid Bdinner. Eine
politische Lebensgemeinschaft {Koln, Weimar, Wien: Bohlau, 2000) and:
Werner Huber, Gertnid Bdiimer. Eine politische Biographie. Dissertation:
Munchen, 1970. (Dissertationsdruck W. Blasaditsch, Augsburg.)

'" Borsenblatt fiir den deutschen Buchhandel 109 (1942), Nr. 163: 145;
quoted by Schaser 324.

' ' See: Erhard Schutz, "Nachwort." in Georg Schwarz: Kohlenpott. Fulda:
KlartextVerlag, 1986, 183-88.

'- A contemporary reviewer ofKPD Bankrott notes: "Man spiirt, daB hier
(...) [ein] einfacher Deutscher, der wahrscheinlich selbst einmal an die
kommunistische Begluckungsformel glaubte, aus eigenem Sehen und
Denken zu einer neuen Uberzeugung kam." Quoted by Schutz 1 88.

'' See: Riegel/Rinsum 44.

Works Cited

Primary texts:

Servaes, Franz. Jahr der Wandhmg. Goethes Schicksalswende 1775.
Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1935.

Dansky, Eduard. Des Herrn Geheimrats letzte Liebe; Goethe und Ulrike,
Novelle. Berlin: R Zsolnay, 1937.

Franck, Hans. Letzte Liebe: Goethe und Ulrike. Hannover: Adolf
Sponholtz Verlag, 1937.

Lux, Joseph A. Goethe: Roman einer Dichterliebe. WiQn: F. Speidel'sche
26

Verlagsbuchhandlung. 1937.

Schwarz, Georg. Geheinwis in Weimar: Roman um Goethe imd Napoleon.
Berlin: Frundsberg Verlag Foellmer & Esser, 1937.

Bauer, Walter. Ahschied und IVandening: Drei Erzdhlungen um Goethe,
Holderlin iind Hehbel. Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, 1939.

Hohlbaum, Robert. Hewische Rheinreise. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1941.

Huelsen. Hans von. August und Ottilie: Roman einer Ehe unter Goethes
Dach. Miinchen: Piper, 1941.

Hohlbaum. Robert. Symphonie in Drei Sdt~en. Novellen. Wien: Wiener
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1943.

Baumer, Gertrud. Eine Woche im hday. Tubingen: Rainer Wunderiich
Verlag, 1944.

Secondary Literature:

Bahr, Ehrhard (ed.). Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: 3. I bm Realismus
biszurGegenwartsliteratur. Tubingen: A. Francke Verlag, 1988.

Berghahn, Klaus. "Das Andere der Klassik: von der 'Klassik-Legende'
zurjiingsten Klassik-Diskussion." Goethe Yearbook. 6 (1992):
1-28.

Buck. Theo et al. Von der Weimarer Republik bis 1945. Joachim Bork,
Dietrich Steinbach and Hildegard Wittenberg (eds.). Stuttgart:
Ernst Klett Verlag, 1985.

Claussen. Horst and Norbert Oellers (eds. ). Beschddigtes Erbe; Beitrdge
zur Klassikerrezeption in/insfererZeit. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag,
1984.

Drews, Jorg (ed.). Mitwelt — Nachwelt — Internet. Vortrdge und
Material ien zur Rezeption Goethes zwischen 1800 und 2000.
Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2000.

Huber, Werner. Gertrud Baumer Eine politische Biographie. Dissertation:
Munchen, 1970. (Dissertationsdruck W. Blasaditsch, Augsburg.)

Kemper, Dirk. "Goethes Individualitatsbegriff als Rezeptionshindemis
im Nationalsozialismus." Goethe J ahrhuch. 116(1999): 129-43.

Kleinschmidt, Erich. "Der vereinnahmte Goethe. Irrwege im Umgang mit
einem Klassiker 1932-1949." Jahrbiich der deutschen
SchillergeseUschaft. 28(1984): 461-482.

Kruse, Jens. "Goethe und Adenauer als Dioskuren: die Goethe-Fiktionen
der Fiinfziger Jahre." Germanic Review 63 ( 1 988) 1 89-96.

Mandelkow, Karl Robert (ed.). Goethe im Vrteil seiner Khtiker. Vol.4.
Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1984.

— -. "Klassiker in fmsteren Zeiten: Rezeptionstheoretische Reflexionen."
Beschddigtes Erbe; Beitrdge zur Klassikerrezeption infinsterer
Zeit. (1984): 103-18.

— (ed.). Goethe in Deiitschland. Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers.
Vol.2. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1989.

Riegel, Paul, Rinsum, Wolfgang (eds.). Drittes Reich und Ex i I 1933-
1945. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000.

Schaser, Angelika. Helena Lange und Gertrud Bdumer Eine politische
Lebensgemeinschaft. Koln, Weimar, Wien: Bohlau, 2000.

Schiitz, Erhard. "Nachwort" in Georg Schwarz. Kohlenpott. Fulda:
Klartext Verlag, 1986. 183-88.

Sonnleiter, Johann. Die Geschdfte des Herrn Robert Hohlbaum: Die
Schriftstellerkarriere eines Osterreichers in der
Zw'ischenkriegszeit und im dritten Reich. Vienna: Boehlau
Verlag, 1989.

Zabka, Thomas. "Vom 'deutschen Mythos' zum 'Kriegshilfsdienst':
'Faust' — Aneignungen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland."
Faust: Anndherung an einen Mythos. ( 1 995 ): 3 1 3-42.

Zeller, Bemhard(ed.). Klassiker in finsteren Zeiten 1933-1945 . Vols. 1-
2. Marbach: Deutsche SchillergeseUschaft, 1983.

— . "Die Deutschen und ihre Klassiker 1 933- 1 945." Beschddigtes Erbe;
28

Beitrage zur Klassikerrezeption infinsterer Zeit. ( 1 984): 9-28.

Vom Essen und von Zionismus:

Sammy Gronemanns National-Judisches

Anekdotenbuch Schalet. Beitriige zur

Philosophic des * Wenn schon '

Hanni Mittelmann, Hebrew University

Fi'ir Ted. meinen Dokton^ater, der mir den Weg von Los Angeles nach
Jerusalem erst ermoglicht hat.

„Schalet" (west Jiddisch), Schulet (Tschechoslowakei,
Boehmen) oder Cholent (Polen. ostjiddisch) ist das bekannte warme
judische Mischgericht, das man, wenn auch unter verschiedenen Namen
und in verschiedenen Zusammensetzungen sowohl in Osteuropa wie auch
in Zentraleuropa am Schabbath Mittag aB. Es war und bleibt ein
universales judisches Gericht, das glaubige Juden, die den Schabbath
nicht durch Kochen entheiHgen wollen, zu sich nehmen, das aber auch
von den weniger traditionsbewussten Juden nicht ungem gegessen wird —
obwohl um den Tscholent oder Schalet und seine schwere Verdaulichkeit
natiirlich Myriaden von jiidischen Witzen entstanden sind.

Urkundlich zum ersten Mai erwahnt wird der Schalet im 13.
Jahrhundert von Rabbi Isaac ben Mose aus Wien (1180-1250), dem
Verfasser von „Or Zarua", dem umfangreichen Kompendium des
Brauchlums und der Lebensweise der judischen Gemeinden in Europa
im Mittelalter. Die Schiiler von Rabbi Israel Isserlein (1390-1460)
beschreiben, wie im Osterreich des 15. Jahrhunderts die Juden den
Cholent am Freitag Nachmittag in die Backerei brachten, wo er in einem
Ofen langsam gekocht wurde bis er dann am Schabbath Mittag von einem
Kind oder einer Dienstmagd abgeholt wurde. So entwickelte sich
allmahlich ein Muster des kommunalen Lebens rund um den Schalet,
das sich bis zum Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts erhalten hat.

Sammy Gronemann, der im Deutschland der 20er Jahre bekannte
zionistische Propagandist und humoristische Schriftsteller orthodoxer
Oberzeugung, lieB sich nicht von ungefahr inspirieren vom Schalet, das
er zum Titel wahlte fiir sein 1 927 erschienenes Buch unterhaltsamer und
humorvoUer Anekdoten aus dem judischen Leben in Deutschland vor
dem zweiten Weltkrieg. Wie dieses Mischgericht prasentiert auch

Gronemann sein Buch als eine Mischung aus kleinen Geschichten und
Anekdoten — es soil eine schmackhafte Speise werden. in der, wie er
schreibt, ,.die Rosinen das Wesentliche sind" (11). Doch dieses Buch ist
auch im Kontext der grossen Auseinandersetzung zwischen Zionisten
und dem Assimilationsjudentum zu verstehen, die in Jener Zeit das
Judentum beherrschte. Gronemann macht in seinem Buch den Schalet,
dieses „jiidische Nationalgericht", zu einer Metapher fiir eine universale
jiidische Kultur, aus der er seinem jiidischen Publikum die Logik der
zionistischen Losung und die Folgerichtigkeit eines tradilionsbevvussten
nationalen jiidischen Lebens in einem eigenen jiidischen Land in Palastina
zu entwickeln sucht. wie er es schon in. seinen vorausgegangenen
Btichem, dem Roman Tohuwabohu und Hawdoloh iinJ Zapfenstreich.
Erinneningen an die ostjiidische Etappe 1916-1918 untemommen hatte.
Als Motto des Buches vvahlte Gronemann Strophen aus Heinrich
Heines bekanntem Gedicht „Prinzessin Sabbat" aus den „Hebraischen
Melodien". Sie beziehen sich auf den Schalet:

Schalet, schoner Gotterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium!
Also klange Schillers Hochlied,
Hatt er Schalet je gekostet.

Schalet ist die Himmelspeise.
Die der liebe Herrgott selber
Einst den Moses kochen lehrte
Auf dem Berge Sinai,

Wo der Allerhochste gleichfalls
All die guten Glaubenslehren
Und die heilgen zehn Gebote
Wetterleuchtend offenbarte.

Schalet ist des wahren Gottes
Koscheres Ambrosia —

Mit dem Heineschen Gedicht als Motto sind bereits wesentliche
inhaltliche Momente von Gronemanns Buch umrissen. Wie im Gedicht
wird auch hier die Identifikation mit judischem Brauchtum
hervorgehoben. Heine zeichnet — zumindest in diesem Gedicht — den
jiidischen Gott nicht als den Gott der strengen und unnahbaren Halacha,
sondern eher als einen liebevollen, der seinen Kindern das Kochen der
besten Lebensrezepte beibringt. Es ist gerade die Halacha — „A11 die

gulen Glaubenslehren/ Und die heilgen zehn Gebote" — , die der wichtigste
Beslandteil des schmackhaften Mischgerichts ist, welches zur Metapher
fiir die jiidische Kiiltur wird. Gronemann mochte seinen Lesem, und
zwar hauptsachlich den assimilierten, das jiidische Brauchtum als eine
schmackhafte Hausmannskost nahebringen. Die amiisanten Anekdoten
seines Buches stellen die Halacha als Grundlage der Freuden des rituellen
jiidischen Lebens und als unversiegbaren Quell einer jiidischen Folklore
dar — und damit als Grundlage einer gemeinsamen Identitat, an der selbst
die der Halacha fernstehenden Juden teilhaben.

Wie Heine mit seinem Gedicht, so mochte auch Gronemann
mit seinem unterhaltsamen Eintopf von Anekdoten und Geschichten aus
dem jiidischen Leben sowohl Erinnerungen an die Zeit der jiidischen
Wiirde und Selbststandigkeit im biblischen Herkunftsland
herautbeschworen als auch das Elend der Galutexistenz vor Augen fiihren:

Speist der Prinz von solcher Speise,
Glanzt sein Auge wie verklaret,
Und er knopfet auf die Weste,
Und er spricht mit selgem Lacheln:

„H6r ich nicht den Jordan rauschen?
Sind das nicht die BriiBelbrunnen
In dem Palmental von Beth-El,
Wo gelagert die Kamele?

Hor ich nicht die Herdenglockchen?
Sind das nicht die fetten Hammel,
Die vom Gileathgebirge
Abendlich der Hirt herabtreibt?"

Doch der schone Tag verflittert;
Wie mit langen Schattenbeinen
Kommt geschritten der Verwiinschung
Bose Stund — Es seufzt der Prinz.

1st ihm doch als griffen eiskalt
Hexenfmger in sein Herze.
Schon durchrieseln ihn die Schauer
Hiindischer Metamorphose.

Fiir Gronemann ist der Schabbatjude der wahre Jude, dessen tagliche
„hundische" Galutexistenz, in der er den „Gassenbuben zum Gespotte"

dient, einem Hexenspruch zii verdanken ist. Diesen „Hexenspruch"
enttamt Gronemann als die Glorifizierung der Diaspora durch assimilierte
wie orthodoxe Juden. Beide verschlieBen sich der vom Zionismus
propagierten Riickkehr und verlangem so die „verhexte" Doppelexistenz
des Juden ins Unendliche.

Hannah Arendt zitiert dieses Gedicht Heinrich Heines als ein
Beispiel seiner gelungenen Assimilation. Heine sei als einziger deutscher
Jude beides geblieben, Jude und Deutscher. Er habe in einem rein
deutschen Gedicht, einer Schillerschen Ode, ein rein jiidisches Gericht
gepriesen (74). Wenn Heine jedoch in parodistischer Anlehnung der
„Prinzessin Sabbat" an Schillers Ode „An die Freude" den Schalet zur
Metapher fiir den „Mischaspekt" der jiidischen Kultur macht, in der sich
angeblich das Deutsche, das Griechische und das Judische mischen, so
distanziert er sich doch zugleich ironisch von dieser Mischung. In der
Fortsetzung des Gedichts wird namlich „Das Ambrosia der falschen/
Heidengotter Griechenlands,/ Die verkappte Teufel waren," als ,.nur eitel
Teufelsdreck" bezeichnet. wahrend das deutsche Element — deutlich —
als verantwortlich gezeigt wird fiir das Elend der „hiindischen" jiidischen
Existenz. Gronemann kniipft hier an einen Heine an, der den
assimilatorischen Gedanken vom Weltbiirgertum ironisch relativiert und
dagegen die Identitat des jiidischen Volkes zelebriert: „Schalet ist des
wahren Gottes/ Koscheres Ambrosia — ". Auch in den Anekdoten und
Geschichten von Gronemanns Buch vennischen sich die Welten des
Jiidischen und des Deutschen. Aber diese Mischung priisentiert sich eher
als „ZusammenstoB heterogener Welten und von Missverstandnissen"
(Gronemann 30). Die Mischung von Heiterkeit und Ernst verdeckt nicht
die „Botschaft des Bedrohtseins" (Schlor 230). Schliesslich ist der Kontext
nicht zu vergessen, in dem dieses Buch 1927 veroffentlicht wurde.
Schienen die ersten Jahre der Weimarer Republik in der Tat die Hoffnung
der deutschen Juden auf Integration und ihre Fortschrittsglaubigkeit emeut
zu bestarken, so gab es doch auch geniigend wamende Vorzeichen, dass
dies eine Illusion sein konnte.

Gelingt es Gronemann auch, der volkischen Hakenkreuz-
bewegung und ihren „Rassenschniifflern" (229) komische Seiten
abzugevvinnen und die Damonisierung von „Judas Stamm", der angeblich
immer „auf der Lauer" (232) sitzt, ad absurdum zu tuhren, so enthiillen
seine Anekdoten doch den Ernst der Lage und enthalten den
uniibersehbaren Hinweis, dass es sich hier um keine harmonische
Mischung handelt. Angesichts der bedrohlichen politischen Lage in
Deutschland erschien es Gronemann dringlicher denn je, den Juden die
Absurditaten der Galutexistenz vor Augen zu fiihren, sie mit Ernst und
Humor von der zionistischen Losung zu iiberzeugen.

Gegliickt scheint die Mischung im Hinblick auf die jiidischen
Elemente. Gronemann macht das Schalet-Gericht zur Metapher auch
fur das judische Volk, das trotz und wegen aller scheinbaren
Unvereinbarkeiten sich zu einem „schmackhaften Gericht"
zusammenfiigt. Diese „sonderbare Gemeinschaft von Menschen" (24),
besteht nach Gronemann aus:

[...] soignierten Propheten und schmierigen
Weltmannem, Alleweltsversorger und Eigenbrotler,
Narren und Weise jeder Art, Vereinsgewaltige,
Parteifanatiker, Vorsanger, Reisende in Textil und
Mikosch-Witzen, orthodoxe Lebemanner, freigeistige
Bethausbesucher, Chauvinisten aller Lander, Zeloten
und Zyniker, Manteltrager, Martyrer des Alltags,
Filmhelden, Schlemihle, Dichter und Mitglieder des
Verbandes nationaldeutscher Juden, die samt und
senders in einem fort sich um ihre Selbstanalyse
bemiihen [...] und damit „den babylonischen Turm zu
einem Wolkenkratzer ausbauen" (25).

Doch dieses Volk von Individualisten und Parteien gehort eben doch
zusammen, und das will Gronemann seinen judischen Lesem kenntlich
machen. Es ist, wie Herzl in seinem Judenstaat schrieb, „ein Volk, ein
Volk".

SchlieBlich, trotz aller Selbstanalysen, durch die die zahlreichen
Individualisten dieses Volkes sich voneinander abheben mochten, kommt
„Alles in einen Sack!" (25), was Gronemann gleich am Anfang mit einer
hiibschen Anekdote illustriert:

Auf dem Postamt in der DorotheenstraBe zu
Berlin sieht ein guter Freund eines Tages mit Erstaunen
abends um sieben Uhr, kurz vor SchalterschluB, wie
ein Postbeamter mit einem groBen Sack an den
Briefkasten herantritt, auf dem mit groBen Lettem
geschrieben steht: „Sendungen nur fiir Berlin und
Umgegend", die Briefe aus diesem Kasten darein leert
und dann sich dem anderen Kasten zuwendet, der
verkiindet, daB in ihn nur „Sendungen nach auswarts"
geworfen werden sollen. Den Inhalt auch dieses Kastens
fiillt er in denselben Sack, schiittelt ihn tiichtig, damit
der Inhalt der beiden Kasten sich gehorig durchmischt,
und schickt sich an, den Schalterraum zu verlassen.

„Hallo!" schreit mein Freund. „ Was macht er denn
da?! — WozLi sind denn da die Inschriften angebracht,
vvenn alles in einen Sack kommt?"

Mit der hohnlachelnden Uberlegenheit des
wohlbestallten und pensionsberechtigten. seiner
Dienstinstruktion sicheren preuBischen Beamten sieht
der Gefragte ihn an, wirft einen Blick auf die groBen,
schon schwarz auf weiB aufgetragenen Inschriften und
spricht vemichtend: „Die Aufschriften sind nur furs
Publikum da. Das soil zur Ordnung erzogen werden."

Was Gronemann hier ausdriicken will ist das zionistische Credo, dass
das Judentum eine kulturelle und nationale Gemeinschaft ist.

Zugleich demonstriert Gronemann, dass die jiidische Tradition
die eigentliche Grundlage dieser Gemeinschaft und ihrer Kontinuitat ist
und dass selbst Versuche, mit dieser Tradition zu brechen, noch Teil dieser
Tradition sind. Dass sie lediglich zu komischen Widerspriichlichkeiten
tuhren, wird hier auf das unterhaltsamste dargestellt. Die Paradoxien
der judischen Galutexistenz in Deutschland finden ihren wohl
pragnantesten Ausdruck in der Geschichte, die Gronemann ,.in einem
einzigen Satz ohne Parenthesen und Einschachtelungen", die er sonst so
schatzt, wiedergibt: „Harold Cohn fand unter dem Weihnachtsbaum den
Chanukahleuchter. den er sich so sehr gewiinscht hatte" (35).

Ober alle Verwirrungen und Bedrohungen, denen die jiidische
Galutexistenz ausgesetzt ist, hilft jene Philosophic des „Wenn schon"
hinweg. der dieses Buch auch gevvidmet ist. Diese leichte. aber niemals
leichtfertige Lebensphilosophie, die weder das Leben noch den Tod zu
emst nimmt, zeigt Gronemann als die Grundlage jiidischer Existenz. Sie
leitet sich aus dem jiidischen Geschichtsverstandnis her, das die temporale
Existenz dem ewigen Leben in den kommenden messianischen Zeiten
unterordnet. Der Optimismus des messianischen Erlosungsversprechens,
dem Gronemann als glaubiger Jude vertraute. half ihm auch personlich,
die schweren Zeiten des Krieges, der Emigration und des Neuanfangs in
Palastina zu iiberstehen: „Es mag manch Peinliches, Retardierendes,
Dummheit Fordemdes geben — wenn schon! Es geht vorwarts — es ist
alles nicht so vvichtig! Das Schopfungsstadium des Tohuvvabohus, in
dem wir uns befmden, wird eines Tages iiberu'unden sein, es wird Licht
werden und vielleicht nahem wir uns merklich der Zeit der Offenbarung"
(69).

Dieser Philosophic des „Wenn schon" stellt Gronemann die
Philosophic des „Als ob nicht" zur Seite, mit der das gesetzestreue
Judentum das vorlaufige Ende seiner staatlichen Existenz ignorierl und

in seinen Gebrauchen und Gebeten weiter so tut, „als ob" dieser Staat
nicht zerstort worden sei. sondem noch existiert. Doch wenn auch diese
typisch judischen Philosophien immer iiber das Elend einer heimatlosen,
ungeschiltzten Existenz hinvveggeholfen haben — Gronemanns Botschaft
lautet: ,.Aber so geht's nicht weiter!'" (34). Und init seinen Geschichten
und Anekdoten beweist Gronemann den Lesern, dass die exilische
Existenz des jiidischen Volkes — entgegen alien Wunschvorstellungen —
doch noch kein Ende gefunden hat. Die Flucht geht weiter: ,. So war's
von den Zeiten Josephs von Agypten bis zu den Tagen Rathenaus" (33).
Die Juden haben noch nicht zu sich gefunden. „und es wird noch eine
gute Weile dauem, bis man sie kennenlemen wird. bis sie sich zeigen
konnen. in eigener Art und auf eigenem Boden, w ie alle anderen" (228).
Gronemann bemiihtesich darum. die Diskussionder judischen
Problematik in der Galut in Gang zu setzen und fiir sie hellhorig zu
machen, damit man der richtigen Losung auf die Spur kommt. Er schreibt:

Wer dieses Buch etwa erstanden hat, um endlich einmal
die Losung alier Weltratsel zu erfahren, mag es getrost
aus der Hand legen. Da seien ihm die systematischen
Handbiicher der Philosophic des ,Nu wenn schon' und
die grundlegende Darstellung der Philosophic des , Als
ob nicht' anempfohlen. deren Erscheinen ich mit
Interesse entgegensehe. Bis dahin mag er sich mit der
Lekture der judischen Geschichte begnUgen, der
Geschichte des Volkes, das sich diese Philosophic seit
Jahrtausenden zur Richtschnur genommen hat. (11)

Auch dieses Buch Gronemanns war, wie schon seine friiheren
Biicher, den Angritfen des assimilierten deutschen Judentums ausgesetzt.
Der Hauptvorwurf bestand darin, dass seine „Witzeleien" den Antisemiten
das Wort redeten. Sollte heiBen. er ,.machte Risches", lieferte den
Judenfeinden Stofif. So fomiulierle Gronemann es im Buch. denn er hatte
den Vorwurf schon vorweggenommen und Stellung bezogen. Aus der
Position eines selbstbewussten Judentums verwahrte er sich dagegen,
aus Angst vor BloBstellung eigene Schwachen bzw. objektive jiidische
Probleme nicht in der Offentlichkeit zu behandeln: Die Antisemiten
„warten namlich gar nicht auf den Stoff. Und der Antisemitismus griindet
sich weit eher auf Tugenden als auf Laster der Juden" (53). Denn, so
argufnentiert er weiter:

[...] womit macht der Jude nicht Risches? 1st er sparsam,
heiBt er geizig — ist er freigebig, gilt er als Protz — halt

er sich zuriick. ist er feige — tritt er kiihn auf, ist er
aufdringlich oder frech. Ist er im Handelsstand. na ja,
der Schacherjude — vvird er Landwirt, miissen die
Bauern ihr heiliges Land vor dem Eindringling
schiitzen — kurz, er kann machen, was er will und wie
er's will — er macht stets Risches. (53)

Ziigleich benutzt Gronemann gerade die jiidische Angst vor der
BloBslellung dazu, auf die prekare Lage der .luden in der Well hinzuweisen
und die „Gleichstellung" der Juden in Deutschland als Selbstbetrug
kenntlich zu machen;

Und wir Juden haben das gleiche Recht auf Verbrecher,
Idioten und Narren wie alie Volker. Wenn wir von
diesem Recht nur einen sehr beschrankten Gebrauch
machen, mag's angehen, aber von Gleichberechtigung
kann man nicht reden, solange allenfalls ein Einstein
oder Schnitzler, ein Disraeli oder Liebermann akzeptiert
werden, solange aber man uns das Recht, auch
widerwartige Leute zu produzieren, abspricht. (52)

SchlieBlich, so meint Gronemann.

[...] denkt man die Sache recht durch, wird man am
Ende einsehen, daB es nicht die jiidische Art an sich
ist, welche unangenehme und absonderliche
Erscheinungen fordert, sondem die unnatiirliche Lage,
in der sich die jiidische Gesamtheit befmdet. Der
Chronist kiinftiger Tage wird vielleicht keine solchen
Kuriosa zu berichten haben. (228)

Das betont jiidische Geschichts- und Kulturbewusstsein. das aus
Gronemanns Schalet sprach, brachte ihm heftige Kritik auch von deutsch-
national gesinnter jiidischer Seite ein. Ein Rezensent der Zeitschrift Der
Nalionaldeutsche Jitde schrieb:

Es ist gerade die Philosophic des ,Wenn schon\ die
Gronemann in seinem Buch propagiert, die den Juden
an seiner langst verjahrten Ausgewahltheit festhallen
laBt, die den Zom und HaB seiner Umgebung erweckt.
Deshalb muB Ahasver, der ewige Jude. immer wieder
sein Zelt abbrechen und den Wanderstab weitersetzen.

Allein wenn der deutsche Jude sich von der Sippe des
Ahasverus trennt, jenem Sinnbild, nicht des Juden an
sich, sondern des Juden, der nicht vergessen kann und
der nicht wahrhaben will, daB der Traum von der alt-
neuen Heimat des ,judischen Volkes' langst
ausgetraumt ist, wird jener HaB gegen den Juden
verschwinden und der ewig wandernde Jude wird
endlich seine Ruhe finden." ^

Welch tragische Ironie, dass den Juden Deutschlands schon bald
die Sippschaft mit Ahasverus aufgezwungen und der Wanderstab wieder
in die Hand gedriickt wurde. Gronemann hat seine enge Verbundenheit
mit Deutschland niemals in Abrede gestellt, aber auch seine Distanz nicht.
Eben jenes von dem Rezensenten kritisierte, dem Judentum eigentiimliche
Gebol des Erinnems, welches das Geschichtsbewusstsein des Judentums
bestimmt und das innere Zentrum seiner Existenz ausmacht, war es, das
Gronemann die Lektionen der jiidischen Geschichte nicht vergessen lieB.
Er verfolgte den Traum von der alt-neuen Heimat weiter, seine
Verwirklichung erschien ihm angesichts der Zeitumstande immer
dringlicher. Schalet war die letzte Buchveroffentlichung Sammy
Gronemanns in Deutschland.

Endnote

' Es handelt sich hier um einen uberarbeiteten Auszug aus meiner
Monographic iiber Sammy Gronemann, die im Friihjahr 2004 in der Reihe
Campus Judaica im Campus Verlag, Frankfurt a. Main erscheinen wird.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Jew as Pariah. Jewish Identity and Politics in the
Modern Age. Ed. Ron. H. Feldman. New York: Grove Press,
1978.

Gronemann, Sammy. Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich. Erinnerungen an
die ostjiidische Etappe 1916-1918. Berlin: Jiidischer Verlag,
1924.

— . Schalet. Beitrdge ziir Philosophic des , Wenn schon '. Ed. Joachim
Schlor. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Reclam, 1998.

— . Tolunvabohu.lVelt-Verlag. Ed ioach'im SchloT. 2nd ed. Leipzig:
Reclam, 2000.

Schlor, Joachim. Nachwort. Schalet. Beitrage ziir Philosophie des , Wenn
schon '. By Sammy Gronemann. Ed. Joachim Schlor. Leipzig:
Reclam, 1998.

National Socialist Realism: The Politics of Popular

Cinema in the Third Reich

Mary Beth O'Brien, Skidmore College

In May 1 939, Der deutsche Film, the official journal of the Reich
Film Chamber, published a special issue devoted to the question of what
the public wanted from cinema, "a dream world or reality?" Two mottos
framed the discussion and imparted the highest authority in the Third
Reich. The Fiihrer was cited first: "Theater, film, literature, press, radio,
they all have to serve the maintenance of universal values living in the
spirit of our folk."' The second motto stemmed from Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels: "Film should not escape from daily hardship and lose
itself in a dreamland that only exists in the minds of starry-eyed directors
and scriptwriters but nowhere else on earth."- This special issue also
contained surveys and scholarly articles, in which moviegoers, actors,
directors, and critics all agreed that the film industry should make
exemplary films about contemporary life in Nazi Germany. Critics
lamented that "problem films," serious dramas dealing with social issues,
seldom graced the screen. What the German public needed, they argued,
was riveting stories about ordinary people with typical conflicts. Normal
problems in everyday life were not supposed to be covered up with the
fairy tales of pure fantasy or depressing stories drenched in hopelessness
and despair. Viewers needed positive films about daily hardships to learn
how to form realistic expectations and deal with disappointment. The
consensus was clear: cinema should reflect reality.

It is surprising that the trade press would argue so adamantly in
favor of the problem film because the genre demands an honest discussion
of society's ills in a way that National Socialism routinely rejected. With
its emphasis on how "the individual confronts social contradictions (class
difference, moral conventions, poverty) beyond his/her control and/or
comprehension," the problem film casts a critical look at the world as it
is and explicitly calls for change (Elsaesser 120). Although the public
wanted serious movies about everyday life, the propaganda ministry
required that Ihey demonstrate optimism and conflict resolution at any
price, a prescription contrary to the very definition of the problem film.

Thus Hitler and Goebbels were often disappointed with problem films
they had originally promoted and were compelled to censor them exactly
because they depicted the present all too realistically.^

Two films stand out as well-made movies that expose social
problems National Socialism did not want to address openly or could not
solve satisfactorily: Das Leben kann so schon sein {Life Can Be So
Wonderful, 1938) and Der verzanberte Tag {The Enchanted Day, 1944).
Both films were banned for presenting the national community in an
unfavorable light, but it is not their status as censored films per se that
makes them so interesting. Rather it is their ability as problem tllms to
capture the spirit of the time and reveal its dilemmas in haunting images
of unfulfilled passions, senseless brutality, and dissatisfaction with the
status quo. Attached to these stories of wasted lives is an unconvincing
happy end, an incongruity that beckons the viewer to contemplate
alternatives. Das Leben kann so schon sein and Der verzanberte Tag are
stylistically innovative, provocative in content, and illustrate particularly
well both the aspirations and the limitations of cinema in the Third Reich.
In this essay I explore how these problem films reflect a growing
desperation with everyday life and lend insights into the debates over
cinematic realism in Nazi Germany."*

(I) Consumerist Fantasies

Das Leben kann so schon sein is a serious film about a young
couple whose marriage is nearly destroyed by financial troubles.
Lighthearted moments and the casting of comedian Rudi Godden and
girl-next-door Use Werner as the sympathetic couple helped to mitigate
the film's critique of modern marriage, housing, and employment. The
film initially passed the censor and premiered in Vienna on December
23, 1 938.'^ When shown the film privately. Hitler broke off the screening
and banned the film. He was reportedly enraged by the depiction of a
housing shortage and the film's potential to sabotage population growth
policies (Wetzel 90).

The film opens in a hospital, where the salesman Hannes Kolb
awaits word on the condition of his pregnant wife Nora. In a series of
flashbacks, Hannes recounts their courtship and troubled marriage. The
young lovers dream of owning their own home on a quiet lake, but their
hopes are shattered by economic reality. Hannes convinces Nora that
she will have to be a working wife and take a job as a seamstress in a
clothing factory. Despite her wish for a modem apartment, he insists
they rent a single room in a dreary boardinghouse. When Nora tells
Hannes she is pregnant, he becomes paralyzed with fear. He neglects her

to the point that she plans to leave him but falls down a flight of stairs.
After the final flashback, Nora delivers a healthy baby boy, and Hannes
agrees that she can quit her job and stay home with the baby in a bright
new apartment filled with her own furniture.

Director Rolf Hansen cautioned that Das Leben kann so schon
sein would be a daring experiment in both form and content. The film
would challenge viewers with its complex narrative told in flashbacks
and with characters who suffered from daily hardship. Hansen recognized
that his film might be a hard sell because it did not ofier the typical escapist
fare:

It is always a difficult matter to show the public a film
which leads them back into their own everyday life.
And then so plainly and realistically as we are planning
to do. After all, people want to be distracted and find
some illusions when they go to the movies in the
evening. [...] This film does not gloss over or
romanticize life, let alone trivialize it, and its success
can only depend on its realism and truthfulness.''

In striking contrast to contemporaneous films, Das Leben kann
so schon sein deals frankly with the controversial themes of married
working-women and the under-employment of men. ^ The main characters,
a factory worker and a white-collar employee, are ordinary people with a
typical problem: they cannot make ends meet. Their story represents the
plight of many couples in the Great Depression trying to get by without a
marriage loan, interest-free loans of 1 ,000 RM granted to couples on the
condition that the wife quit her job.**

Nora's job as a seamstress in a clothing factory is highly
representative of female employment patterns in peacetime Germany.
Working in the textile industry where women comprised about half the
labor force, Nora only takes on a job because her husband's income is
insufficient to cover living expenses.'' Despite Nazi propaganda
trumpeting motherhood, the number of married working women actually
rose from 35% in 1933 to 41% in 1939, with the vast majority taking on
low-paid factory work (Weslennieder 71).'" As an insurance salesman,
Hannes is a white-collar employee without sufficient financial security
to start a family. His frantic concerns about money reflect the real-life
adversity facing many workers. Despite the government's efforts to
maintain stable wages and prices, the cost of living index rose by 6%
between 1933 and 1938 (Barkai 256).

Along with its critical look at employment, Hansen's film
addresses the problem of housing. The film describes two radically
different social environments: a single-family home in a suburban
settlement and a boardinghouse in a downtown apartment building. The
former is a cheerful private space beyond the economic means of the
average worker, while the latter is a dismal communal space where the
lower middle class must abide. The problem of suitable housing
challenged the government's ability to balance between two apparently
opposite domestic agendas, what Hans-Dieter Schafer has called "the
divided consciousness" of the Third Reich. On the one hand, National
Socialism presented itself as a meticulously organized system, which
offered the masses a sense of wholeness through participation in communal
rituals and threatened violent retribution against non-conformity. On the
other hand, it promoted itself as an agent of continuity, which guaranteed
the masses a private sphere in which to enjoy some degree of individualism
and a wide assortment of consumer goods (Schafer 1 14-62).

The construction of single-family homes in model settlements,
like the one featured in Das Lehen kcvm so schou sein, was widely
publicized but only comprised about one-tenth of all new housing."
Despite this, the regime continuously promised that it would provide more
and more Gemians with a detached house in a village setting.'- The Nazi
government argued that settlement construction (Siedlungsbau) would
raise the average worker's social status, level class differences, and
dislodge the long-standing prejudice against the urban poor." The desire
to own a home was not only a response to material necessity; it was also
the need to retreat from a highly structured public sphere, a life centered
on unifonns, party insignia, political organizations, social responsibilities,
and the watchful eye of the Gestapo. While the Nazi regime refashioned
German cities using massive architectural stmctures to reflect the state's
hegemony, private individuals increasingly chose to decorate their homes
in Biedermeier and traditional folk interior designs to gain a sense of
homeliness and intimacy (Reichel 308-12; Peukert 190). An important
aspect of the retreat into the home was the government's promise of
affordable, high-quality household goods and a better standard of living
(Schafer 122).'"* The government took full credit for Germany's rapid
economic recovery and continually publicized that German industries
were manufacturing everything from washing machines to vacuum
cleaners. Despite periodic shortages and the high price of household
appliances, the return to a pre-depression standard of living and the
prospect of acquiring durable goods did much to bolster Hitler's popularity
(Schafer 11 7).

Das Leben kann so schon sein prominently features popular
consumerist fantasies. Nora spends her days working in a factory and
dreaming about decorating her home. She takes her husband window-
shopping, because she longs for simple, well-made modem furniture.
But this too is out of their reach, and Hannes convinces Nora that they
must settle for less. His only concession is to give her a sewing box, a
piece of furniture that symbolizes the domestication of her labor, her
dream of sewing clothes for her family at home and not for strangers in a
factory. The Ufa studio proposed an advertising campaign that would tie
in consumer culture with the movie's plot. The studio advised theater
owners to "make a deal with a furniture company to carry out an effective,
reciprocal advertising campaign."'" In this early form of product
placement, the Ufa studio hoped that it could channel the public's
consumerist fantasies into interest in its own product.

Hansen's film was intended to be a realistic tale of modem
marriage but its male protagonist is so far from a positive role model that
the film was doomed from the start. The depiction of a frightened young
man, unable to accept financial or emotional responsibility for his wife
and child, is a criticism that goes to the core of the carefully fashioned
masculine identity in Nazi Germany. The triad hero image of the soldier-
worker-farmer is a man of action and resolve. Hannes recognizes that he
does not fit the mold and retorts, "We men only exist in your illusions! If
you need them, go to the movies.""' In this striking moment of self-
refiectivity, the film effectively illustrates how the media disseminate
unrealistic images.

The film concludes with a happy end so neat and clean that it
stretches the limits of believability. When Hannes hears the news that
Nora has given birth to a son, he becomes a changed man. Beaming with
confidence and joy he marches off to see his wife and child. This happy
end echoes the outlawed Social Democratic Party's assessment of the
working class in Nazi Germany: "Strength through Joy seems to prove
that the solution to social problems can be avoided, if one gives the worker
more 'honor' instead of more wages, more 'joy' instead of more free
time, more petty bourgeois self-esteem instead of better working and
living conditions."'''

(ii) Female Desire and the Gaze

Peter Pewas's film Der verzaiiherte Tag tells the story of a young
girl who wants to break free and experience life to its fullest. The film
was shot at the Ufa studios in Babelsberg between June and October
1943 and completed in the summer of 1944. The propaganda ministry

repeatedly slated Der verzauberte Tag for changes, but it was never
sufficiently edited and did not premiere in Nazi Germany."*

Peter Pewas was considered a talented newcomer who could
develop an innovative visual style and treat contemporary issues with the
realism Goebbels wanted from the problem film. The young director
was eager to create a new type of fiilm, one that would challenge viewers
by demanding a critical distance reminiscent of Brechtian aesthetics.
Pewas argued in favor of objective and analytical observation over the
classical cinema's reliance on identification and its erasure of all evidence
testifying to its status as constructed reality. He saw his film as pioneering
work: ''Der verzauberte Tag should not distract but rather collect and
stimulate. [. . .] We are creating a film here, which will bring a new view
to scenery and photography. We should avoid glamorous delusions and
love play. I resolutely want to steer away from any superficiality [. . .] It
is a matter of illustrating the actions of a young person who has to be
transported out of a petty bourgeois atmosphere."'*^

Der verzauberte Tag begins in a hospital where the young
Christine Schweiger (Winnie Markus) lies unconscious with the artist
Albrecht Gotz (Hans Stiiwe) at her side. A narrator sets the stage for her
story, which is told in a single flashback. Christine works at a newspaper
stand in the train station but dreams of having a more exciting life. She
yearns for change and breaks off her engagement to the narrow-minded
accountant Krummholz. One day she sees Albrecht Gotz staring at her
from a train and their mutual gaze is so intense, she believes they are
destined to fall in love. When she sees Gotz again the next day, she
agrees to spend an enchanted day with him in the country and they make
love that night. Afterwards Christine is devastated to learn that Gotz did
not see her that first day at the train station; he was actually reading the
letters on the newsstand to gauge the extent of an eye injury. Believing
that fate has played a cruel trick on her, she runs away into the night,
where she is accosted by a one-eyed man and then shot by Krummholz in
a jealous rage. Returning to the present, Christine awakens and Gotz
professes his love in a dramatic, if unconvincing, happy end.

Startling images, remarkable lighting, and the skillful use of space
dominate this film and take precedent over plot and dialogue. The film is
both a fairy tale of desire and a sober tale of harsh reality. The characters
live in their own world and rarely, if ever, connect with their fellow human
beings. Like the numerous train tracks pictured in this film, there are
many parallel realities that seldom intersect. The men and women need
from each other exactly what the other is not willing or able to give. One
man wants a sweet and innocent virgin, another wants a passionate carefree
lover, and a third wants a faithful servant, but they all want a woman who

meets their needs without making any demands of her own. The women
worry about money and how to make ends meet, but they also crave
romance and passion. Thus they waver between waiting for Prince
Charming and settling for Mr. Right-Now.

The young salesgirl Christine is caught in a restrictive social
environment. Contained in her newsstand but surrounded by the allure
of travel, she watches the trains go by and imagines being whisked away
to another realm. Christine looks to the artist Albrecht Gotz for hope,
but ironically, he is a man with distorted vision. His eyesight was nearly
destroyed when a fonner lover threw acid in his face after he jilted her.
Gotz, whose name is derived from Gotze meaning "idol," is the object of
extreme devotion but a man who operates under fallacies. He needs to
possess women both physically and as images, because for him "a woman
is like nature, unfathomable, unpredictable, and full of secrets."-"

Considering the emphasis placed on flawed male vision and
image making, it is not surprising that Der verzaiiberte Tag also
problematizes the female gaze. In a significant exchange of glances,
Christine upsets the traditional gender-specific roles in the visual economy
structuring sexual desire. In classical narrative cinema, as Laura Mulvey
has argued, "pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the
female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist
role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their
appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be
said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness'' (Mulvey 19). Mary Ann Doane
has demonstrated that when this order is reverted, when woman assumes
agency of the look and its corresponding subjectivity, she "poses a threat
to an entire system of representation." Doane maintains: "There is always
a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with women who
appropriate the gaze, who insist upon looking." Classical cinema often
solves this dilemma by punishing the display of excessive female desire
with violence and even death, because "the woman as subject of the gaze
is clearly an impossible sign" ( Doane 50-5 1 ).

At the train station, Christine is transformed from the enthralled
viewer of a romantic spectacle to the active pursuer of her own desire.
After watching a couple kissing passionately, Christine notices that a
man (Gotz) is looking in her direction. She misreads the situation and
thinks he is staring at her, so she returns his unwavering gaze. However,
several shots from his point of view reveal that he does not see her at all
and is reading an advertisement. The next day, the scene is repeated and
again gendered ways of seeing cause confusion. This time Gotz sees
Christine staring at him and believes she is openly seducing him. However,

his first remark, "Have you ever been painted before?" highlights that
Christine represents an untenable position, the subject of the gaze and
the object of desire, the spectator and the image.-' Eventually disaster
strikes because Christine fails to remain a passive image and refuses to
accept her role as Fraulein Schvveiger, or Miss Silent One as her name
means in English. Ultimately she will pay for her assertiveness by
becoming the victim of a violent crime.

Christine is swept away by Gotz's polished seduction and even
flattered when he remarks that she will be his first "Christine." They make
love off-screen to the sound of her breathing while the camera pans over
his numerous artworks idealizing love and feminine beauty until it stops
at a broken blossom on the glass table in front of her limp wrist. When
Christine realizes that Gotz considers her a sexual aggressor, she takes
flight into the rainy night, where her shame is narrated with a montage of
falling trees, roaring waves, and trains superimposed upon a bleak and
nearly suicidal scene. As Christine walks alone, a one-eyed man accosts
her. When she defends herself, he retorts that a woman alone on the
street at night must know what a man wants from her.-- Again marked a
whore by a man with flawed vision, Christine runs home only to find
Krummholz waiting for her. He orders her to stand still and when she
refuses to be a captive image, he shoots her. Krummholz staggers
backwards and breaks a window, smashing the portrait of a woman etched
into the glass. Both Christine and the shattered image fall to the floor in
ruins. However, tragedy is averted and all the loose ends are resolved.
Krummholz is led off to prison. Christine awakens and says to Gotz: "the
eyes," to which he replies: "Don't speak. I was blind, but now I see you
as you are, as I love you."-^ Although the last shot shows the couple
kissing, their relationship is predicated on the controlling male gaze and
the silent woman.

Unlike Das Lehen kann so schon sein, Der verzauherte Tag
does not portray everyday life with the same type of details. Pewas' film
does not cite exact wages, prices, or consumer products, nor does it refer
to government programs like inarriage loans and settlement housing. The
economic hardship of working women so typical of life in 1944 Gennany
is presented in universal terms as part of the feminine condition. Christine
learns from her widowed mother what it means to be the working poor,
but there is no mention of such wartime burdens as ration stamps,
shortages, or the conscription of women into the Reich Labor Service.
Der verzauherte Tag depicts a different type of reality that is equally
valid: the problem of living with unfulfilled desires in a period of scarcity
with few outlets beyond daydreaming. In its proposed advertising
campaign, the Ufa studio emphasized that Der verzauherte Tag presented

ordinary people with ordinary problems but in a way that made the familiar
seem extraordinary. Der verzauberte Tag was praised because it portrayed
"people of our time, with our joys and troubles. And yet this film shows
things that we do not see in everyday life. Here the mask falls from the
faces as it were. The most subtle psychological stirrings are made visible
and force us to participate in this destiny so gripping exactly because it is
so commonplace."-^ The Ufa press package asserted that Pewas' film
could help viewers to come to terms with a pressing, if elusive, social
problem:

It is fine and useful that this film examines a problem
whose occurrence cannot be denied simply because it
does not appear visible in the everyday world. And it
is equally fine that the young director Peter Pewas,
who is presenting with Der verzauberte Tag his first
major work, develops the problem of dangerous
daydreaming to the last consequence and generates
the solution in a natural way through the power of real
life.--^

In a post-war interview, Pewas maintained that Der verzauberte
Tag was censored because of his directorial style and realism: "In those
days when all the fronts were shaky, people did not want a collapse on
the cultural front. They did not want any formal experiments. They
wanted something tangible, people spoke of cultural bolshevism."-''
Ironically, the sophisticated visual style Goebbels routinely promoted
transfomied a film with potential propaganda value into a subversive text
that the National Socialists could not allow audiences to see.

(iii) A Happy End?

In May 1 939, Der deutsche Film posed the question: "What do
you want to see in film: problems or entertainment without problems,
destinies from real everyday life or from an improbable world in which
all wishes are fulfilled, idle loafers in a rich milieu or working people in
a working world?"-^ When faced with such a rigid either/or, dream world
or reality, the vast majority of readers voted for reality. The public wanted
to see movies about contemporary life, engaging stories with sympathetic
characters that shed light on the times and offered strong identification
opportunities. Moviegoers and critics generally agreed that great films
were not made on the either/or principle; they needed equal parts of
reality and fantasy. A faithful rendering of everyday circumstances

without some measure of imagination could be journalism but ne\ er art.
Popular actor Heinz Riihmann suggested an approach that offered a middle
ground: "Reality as dream world! Film should show real life but in a more
relaxed form."^* One viewer summarized the prevailing outlook: "Film
should not be a pale imitation of reality but rather should idealize e\er}'day
life, demonstrate the meaning of daily work, show our neighbors and
ourselves in those moments in which we possess universal validity and
become types. Accentuate stronger than reality does! Show our world
very small and very great, heroism and brutality! But always our world:
how it is and how it could be."-'^

While there was a general consensus that cinema should focus
on reality, there was no consensus on what "reality" meant. Most writers
wanted movies about the present, but they also demanded a highly
optimistic approach to a difficult, if not grim, existence. One writer argued
that the following story line reflected everyday reality in 1939 Germany:
"An honest worker, who earns his daily bread with hard labor, is always
satisfied and retires at seventy-five with a paltr>' old-age pension. He is
nevertheless thankful to God or fate and certainly isn't naive but rather a
philosopher of life, who is above wealth and the good life and is happy
with what remains: forest, field, military, art. maybe even his laughter."^"

The scenario of a happy worker struggling all his life to survive
but content with his meager lot is a prescription for National Socialist
Realism that may well have gained favor from both Hitler and Goebbels —
if not Stalin. The Filhrer and the propaganda minister repeatedly called
for films about the present, but they were by no means issuing an open
invitation to criticize party ideology or social institutions. They wanted
a selective form of realism, similar in many ways to the tenets of Socialist
Realism articulated by Andrei Shdanov in 1934 and widely debated
throughout the 1930s by such notable thinkers as Georg Lukacs and Bertolt
Brecht." During the Congress of Soviet Writers. Shdanov declared that
Socialist Realism "demanded from the artist a truthful, historically
concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionar>' de\ elopment. At the
same time this truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic
depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideological molding
and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism" (Bahr and
Kunzer 41). Like its unacknowledged predecessor. National Socialist
Realism would include positive heroes, an optimistic portrayal of the
working world, an innovative but easily understood style
{Volkstiimlichkeit), tendentiousness, and films infused with the values
inherent in a specific political agenda {Parteilichkeit).

A comparison of various fonnulas for realism advanced in Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union would undoubtedly produce some

surprising results. For example, although Joseph Goebbels and Georg
Lukacs were committed to competing political ideologies, neither fully
embraced (National) Socialist Realism as an unassailable cultural policy
and they shared some fundamental ideas on the relationship between art
and politics. Both the Nazi propaganda minister and the Marxist exiled
literary critic recognized that their respective parties could benefit greatly
from presenting themselves as the inheritor and guardian of bourgeois
cultural traditions. Whereas Lukacs favored Shakespeare, Goethe, and
Balzac as models for an emerging proletarian culture, Goebbels appreciated
that National Socialism could win the hearts of the middle class by
presenting itself as the torchbearer of the classical German heritage
exemplified in the works of such luminaries as Goethe and Beethoven. ^-
Most importantly, Goebbels and Lukacs questioned the notion that
privileged partisanship over artistry in the appraisal of a masterpiece.
Lukacs valued the royalist Balzac more than the radical Zola, because
despite his political affiliations and beliefs, Balzac was a great realist who
objectively reflected his times in a "portrayal of the overall process as a
synthetically grasped totality of its true driving forces." (Lukacs,
'Tendency ' or Partisanship? 42) In this "triumph of realism," the writer's
sympathies were less important than his accurate depiction of society.
Goebbels, in turn, praised Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) as an
unparalleled work of genius with a powerful hold on viewers. He warned:
"Whoever is ideologically uncertain, could become a Bolshevik by
watching this film. This proves that a work of art truly can be tendentious,
and also that even the worst tendency can be propagated, if it is done
through the medium of an exceptional work of art. "^^ Lukacs and Goebbels
agreed that partisanship had to evolve from the narrative itself, from keen
observation and character development, and was never completely
successful if it were added on like a veneer. Goebbels remarked:

I do not want an art that proves its National Socialist
character merely by displaying National Socialist
emblems and symbols; rather 1 want an art that
expresses its attitude through National Socialist
character and by addressing National Socialist
problems energetically.. .The moment that propaganda
becomes conscious, it is ineffective. At the moment,
however, when it remains in the background as
propaganda, as tendency, as character, as attitude and
only appears through action, through time, through
events, through contrasts between people, it becomes
effective in every respect.^^

Despite Goebbels' caveats about the invisible nature of
partisanship and his desire to promote motion pictures with artistic
integrity, in the end a fihn's function within the totalitarian state was his
primary concern. Along with providing light entertainment that distracted
from the rigors of work and life's daily struggles, the propaganda minister
wanted to give the German public films that taught coping strategies and
"fulfilled a special mission: to steel our folk." Although the hardship of
living in the midst of world war was clearly a motivating factor in
Goebbels' push for serious tllms set in the present, adversity was at the
core of the National Socialist worldview. The coordinated motion picture
industry responded to the notion of life as an eternal battle for existence.
An article in the fan magazine Filmwelt outlined the vital role cinema
played in fulfilling the regime's ideological agenda: "Film no longer passes
life by, it does not conjure up false pipe-dreams, nor does it avail itself of
a magic lamp of false illusions. Hard und relentless like the present-day,
aggressive and powerful like the courage and spirit of our folk, in its
depiction of all true-to-life and contemporary questions the German film
points to the future, to victory and the annihilation of the enemy.'"^ As
Ehrhard Bahr has argued so convincingly, "the same principles operative
in Nazi racial politics also determined their cultural politics" (Bahr, Nazi
Cultural Politics 5-6). Cinema would contribute to the unified political
agenda of supporting all that was defined as German and eliminating all
that posed a threat to the Utopian ideal of homogeneity.

It is this formula for realism that dominated Nazi cinema and
explains why the problem films under discussion failed to reach a mass
audience in the Third Reich. Das Lehen kann so schori seiu and Der
verzaiiberte Tag do not present positive role models and a rosy, optimistic
world where everyone is satisfied with their fate. Despite their different
approaches and styles, these films showcase people who are desperate
for a better life. The female characters are ordinary young women with
ordinary jobs, but they display a restlessness and determination seldom
seen in German motion pictures of the 1930s and 1940s. Above all their
quest for autonomy, economic independence, sexual pleasure, and spiritual
comfort, define them and capture the spirit of the times. These women
express desires that are most often left unspoken in the cinema because
they contradict the notion of a nation gladly sacrificing individual
fulfillment for the good of the whole. The male characters also deviate
from the standard role models found in feature films of the Third Reich.
Rarely did viewers encounter young men who had lost all faith in the
future and were paralyzed with fear or who lashed out and became vicious
criminals. These men and women struggle against the monotony,
conformity, and violence of everyday life in Nazi Germany, a struggle

that does not easily comply with the state's ideological agenda or the
popular image of social hannony found in so many motion pictures.

Conflicts in these films are not resolved by any structural changes
in society but by the sudden conversion of a single man who comes to his
senses in the nick of time. In the last minute, Hannes recognizes his own
foolishness and vows to start anew, Gotz sees Christine as if for the first
time and falls madly in love with her. The contrived narrative closure
contradicted the basic project of the problem film: to expose those areas
of a failed social contract that required a collective far-reaching solution.
The very concept of a happy end was widely debated in the trade press
and closely linked to the consumer-driven Hollywood film industry.
Writing for Licht-Bild-Buhne in March 1939, Hans Joachim Neitzke
summarized the dominant critical stance:

The term originally comes from America where it
developed in film production from a catch phrase for
the cheap concession to public taste to a business
principle. For the Gemian public it became a measure
of worth that contained a specific meaning: '"happy end"
at all costs, even if it demonstrates the absurdity in the
inner logic of the film events: the optimism of "keep
smiling," even if the theme is serious and tragic. [...]
The Gemian has never cherished a preference for such
optimism, which transfigures everything in a rosy light,
and today he is less likely to cherish it than ever before.
Not because he is inherently a pessimist, but rather
because he is actually an optimist. But an optimist
based on a heart that remains intact, an unbroken
vitality. He looks things straight in the eye, not to
make conciliatory compliments but to discuss them
seriously. He acknowledges the ethical battle
conditions of life. -"^

The critics wanted well-crafted stories and argued that a
harmonious resolution had to evolve out of the circumstances rather than
be tacked onto the end of the film. However, they seemed to agree with
the propaganda ministry's censors that motion pictures should provide
positive role models, so that viewers could develop further their innate
steely optimism and triumph over the "ethical battle conditions of life."
Das Lehen kann so schon sein and Der verzauberte Tag failed on both
accounts. The happy endings attached to these films are so incongruous
with the main plot that they actually call attention to unresolved problems.

Moreover, these films display a deeply rooted pessimism and portray
men and women who are all too human, weak, desperate, obsessed, and
violent.

The problem films discussed here reveal compelling social
fantasies that were deemed too unruly to explore in their current form. In
essence, they delivered the honest assessment of contemporary society
that the genre promised. In 1938 the sense of impending disaster was
overshadowed by an equally pow erful belief that with sufficient economic
resources the individual could protect himself and his family from the
outside world. Das Leben katm so schon seiti shows just how compelling
National Socialism's promises were to the ordinary' man. The dream of a
good job, consumer goods, and a home, was the reward for conformity.
In exchange for the ability to retreat inward, the ordinary citizen implicitly
promised to retreat from political engagement. By 1944 the effects of
world war had left their mark on the cinematic imagination. Der
verzauherte Tag expresses the longing for a world beyond the here and
now. a place w here one can enjoy independence, freedom, and romance.
This Utopian fantasy is nearly devoid of any specific references to life in
the bombed-out cities of war-torn Gennany. The reality of 1 944 seemed
to hold so little promise that it could only be accommodated by an urban
fairytale. Both films voice the ardent wish to retreat into a private sphere,
and as contemporary problems impinged more and more on the lives of
individuals, the social fantasies became less and less anchored in a specific
reality. As German cities were bombed and its armies were retreating on
all fronts, the cinema of the Third Reich encouraged viewers to conjure
up their own private world. The concluding remarks in Die
Feiierzaugeubowie {The Punch Bowl, 1944) encapsulate the successful
formula for popular cinema and for survival as the National Socialist
world crumbled: "Truth is only in the memories we carry with us. the
dreams we spin, and the desires that drive us. Let us be content with
that.""

Endnotes

' "Theater, Film, Literatur, Presse, Rundfunk, sie haben alle der Erhaltung
der im Wesen unseres Volkstums lebenden Ewigkeitswerte zu dienen."
Adolf Hitler, March 23, 1933, mono, Der deutsche Film 3.1 1 (May 1939):
305.

- "Der Film darf also nicht vor der Harte des Tages entweichen und sich
in einem Traiimland verlieren, das nur in den Gehirnen
wirklichkeitsfremder Regisseure und Manuskriptschreiber, sonst aber
nirgendwo in der Welt liegt." Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels,
motto, Der deutsche Film 3.1 1 (May 1939): 305.

' Goebbels instituted a system of pre-censorship requiring the approval
of treatments and scripts before shooting and careful oversight during
the shooting and editing to avoid censorship after the completion of a
film. These efforts, combined with post-censorship of the final product,
a vigilant advertising campaign, and an orchestrated critical response,
insured that only around two dozen completed films were banned between
1933 and 1945. For an overview of censorship, see Felix Moeller, Der
Filmminister: Goebbels imd der Film im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Henschel,
1 998); and Kraft Wetzel and Peter Hagemann, Zensur: Verbotene deutsche
Filme 1933-1945 (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1978).

■* This essay is based on a lecture presented at "The Intersection of Politics
and German Literature, 1750-2000" (May 17, 2003), a conference in
honor of Professor Ehrhard Bahr. It is a revised version of my study on
the problem film in Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of
Entertainment in the Third Reich forthcoming with Camden House.

** Das Leben kann so schon sein, Censor-Card 501 15, Bundesarchiv-
Filmarchiv, Berlin. These censor cards provide a description of each
scene but not the dialogues. In a chart listing the premieres outside the
capital of Berlin, Licht-Bild-Biihne notes that Das Leben kann so schon
sein premiered in Vienna at the Opemkino on December 23, 1938, but it
leaves a conspicuously empty space for the date of the Berlin premiere.
See "Voranlauf in der Provinz: Erstes Halbjahr der Spielzeit 1 938/39," I/W?^
Bild-Biihne 24, 2Hian. 1939. In 1949 director RolfHansen and screenwriter
Jochen Huth reconstructed the film, which premiered in Hamburg on
February 9, 1 950 under the title Fine Fraufiirs Leben (A Wife for Life), but
which has not been commercially released in video format. My analysis
is based on the reconstructed version Fine Fraufiirs Leben available in

videocassette at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin. All dialogues are
taken from the original filmscript available at the Hochschule flir Film und
Femsehen "Konrad Wolf Potsdam-Babelsberg library. See Jochen Huth,
Ein Mensch wird geboren: Ein Film von Jochen Huth nach Motiven aus
seiner Komodie des AUtags Ultimo! (Filmscript, Berlin, [c. 1938,] n. pag.).

^"Es ist immer eineproblematische Angelegenheit, dem Publikum einen
Film zu zeigen, in dem es in seinen eigenen Alltag zuruckgefuhrt wird.
Und dann so deutlich und wirklichkeitsnah, wie wir es vorhaben.
SchlieBlich wollen die Menschen abends im Kino abgelenkt werden und
einige Illusionen vorfinden." "Ein Film iiber dich und mich: Ultimo
[Das Lehen kann so schon sein],"" Filmspiegel 31, 9 Sept. 1938. "[D]er
wahre Erfolg eines solchen Films, der das Leben nicht beschonigt oder
romantisiert. um nicht zu sagen verkitscht, [kann] nur von seiner
Wirklichkeitsnahe und seiner Wahrhaftigkeit abhangen." "Sprung von
der Reichsautobahn nach Brasilien: Drei neue Filme - Mannfiir Mann,
Gh'ick aiifRaten [Das Lehen kann so schon sein^. Kaufschiik." Filmweh
41, 7 Oct. 1938.

'' Eine Fran wie dii (1939, Tourjansky), for example, features a factory
social worker (Brigitte Horney) who with a few encouraging words can
help workers and their families resolve conflicts. For a brief discussion
of working women in Gernian films after 1938. see Boguslaw Drewniak,
Der deutsche Film 1938-1945: Ein Gesamtiiberblick {Dusseldorf: Droste,
1987)261-66.

** The Law to Decrease Unemployment from June of 1933 introduced
marriage loans as a way to raise the birth rate and fight against "double-
earners," families with both spouses working. Loans were not paid out
in cash but in vouchers for household goods and automatically repaid
with the birth of four children. By 1936 when the country reached full
employment, women were not required to quit their job to qualify for a
marriage loan. See Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1975) 84-89, 99-100; and Annemarie Troger, "The
Creation of a Female Assembly-Line Proletariat," When Biology Became
Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, eds. Renate Bridenthal,
Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1984)241.

"About half of the workers in the Bavarian textile industry were women
and consumer goods industries in general employed a high percentage of
female labor. In a large clothing factor>' in Upper Bavaria, seamstresses

enjoyed a good wage, earning on the average 20-26 RM a week. Ian
Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich:
Bavaria 1933-1945 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983) 15-16, 92. See also
Norbert Westennieder, "Deutsche Frauen und Mddchen!" Vom
Alltagsleben 1933-1945 (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1990) 66, 70.

'" Whereas by 1 936 married women were encouraged to seek employment,
in 1938 all single women under the age of twenty-five were required to
fulfill a year of service in the agricultural sector or as domestic help.
This year of duty {Pflichtjahr), instituted for men as early as 1935 and
women after 1938, was administered by the Reichsarbeitsdienst .

" In 1938-39 the housing shortage in Augsburg was estimated at 20%
with similar shortages in Munich and Nuremberg. Kershaw, Popular
Opinion 99; and Westennieder, "Deutsche Frauen und Mddchen! " 63.

'- See Peter Reichel, Derschone Schein des Dritten Reiches: Fascination
und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich: Hanser, 1 99 1 ) 309. For a discussion
of the discrepancy between Nazi propaganda and the actual housing
construction, see also Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in
Germany, 1918-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1968) 205-12.

" For a detailed examination of National Socialist policy on settlements
as well as extensive photographs and tloorplans, see Ute Peltz-Dreckmann,
Nationalsozialistischer Siedlungsbau: Versuch einer Analyse der die
Siedlungspolitik bestimmenden Faktoren am Beispiel des
Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Minerva, 1978).

'■* See also Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippemiann, The Racial
State 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 288; and David
Schoenbaum, Die braune Revolution: Fine Sozialgeschichte des Dritten
Reiches, trans. Tamara Schoenbaum-Holtemiann (Berlin: Ullstein, 1999)
126.

^- "Mobelbesichtigung und Mobelkauf - das sind Dinge, die im Leben
aller Heiratslustigen eine groBe Rolle spielen! Der Film schildert in einer
ganzen Reihe von Szenen die Plane von Hannes und Nora, die immer
wieder gerade um diese Dinge kreisen. Unter Beriicksichtigung dieser
Tatsache durfte man mit einer groBen Mobelfirma bestimmt eine
wirkungsvoUe Gegenseitigkeits-Werbung vereinbaren und durchfiihren
konnen." "Praktische Werbe-Vorschlage," Das Leben kann so schon
sein, Advertising materials (Berlin: August Scherl Verlag, n. d.) 6, Das

Leben kann so schon sein. Document File 9596, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv
Berlin.

'^ Ellen: "Mit euch Mannem zusammenleben, ich danke. Die ganzen
Illusionen gehen einem zu Teufel." Hannes: "Wir Manner bestehen
iiberhaupt nur aus euren Illusionen! Wenn Sie die brauchen, gehen Sie
doch ins Kino." Huth. Ein Mensch wird geboren.

'^ "KdF scheinl zu beweisen. daB die Losung der sozialen Fragen
umgangen werden kann, wenn man dem Arbeiter statt mehr Lohn mehr
'Ehre\ statt mehr Freizeit mehr "Freude'. statt bessere Arbeits- und
Lebensbedingungen mehr kleinbiirgerliches Selbstgeflihl verschafft," qtd.
in Ralf Wolz. "'Mobilmachung," Heimatjront: Kriegsalltag in Deutschland
1939-1945. ed. Jurgen Engert (Berlin: Nicolai, 1999) 25.

'* Der verzauberte Tog premiered in Zurich in 1947 and was shown in a
limited nm in West Germany in 1951. It was also featured at the Berlin
Film Festival retrospectives "Forbidden German Films. 1933-1945"
(1978) and "The Director Peter Pewas," (1981), both organized by the
Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, and at the film series "Filmic
Nonconformity in the Nazi State" (1997). organized by the Freunde der
Deutschen Kinemathek in Berlin. My analysis is based on the 35-mm
film print of Der verzauberte Tag available at Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv,
Berlin.

" Peter Pewas (pseudonym for Walter Schulz. 1904-1984): ''Der
verzauberte Tag soil nicht zerstreuen. sondem sammeln und anregen.
[. . .] [Es] soil hier ein Film gestaltet werden, der in gewisser Hinsicht
einen neuen AufriB in der Szenerie und in der Fototechnik bringen wird.
Vermieden werden soil - und das mochte ich vorweg betonen -
gleisnerisches Gaukel- und Liebesspiel. Ich will gegen jegliche
Verflachung energisch ansteuem. [. . .] Es gilt, die Handlung eines jungen
Menschen aufzuzeigen. dereiner spieBbiirgerlichen Atmosphare entriickt
werden muB." W. B., "Fine Rechnung, die nicht aufgeht: Dreck oder
Gold, sagt Peter Pewas zu seinem ersten Film." Newspaper article, 1 943.
Peter Pewas. Personal File, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv. Berlin.

'" "Fur den Kunstler ist die Frau das interessanteste Objekt. Sie ist wie
die Natur, unergriindlich. unberechenbar und voller Geheimnisse." Gotz
describes women further as "Spekulanten auf ein moglichst bequemes
Leben" and himself as "ein begehrtes Objekt." Viewing himself as the
object of desire is another forewarning that the established system of

sexual desire is overturned, indicating potential disaster. Der verzauherte
Tag film dialogue.

-' "Sind Sie mal gemalt worden?" Der verzauherte Tag film dialogue.

-- "Wenn du dich nachts hier auf der StraBe herumtreibst, dann wirst du
wohl auch wissen, was man von dir will." Der verzauherte Tag film
dialogue.

-' Christine: "Die Augen." Gotz: "Nicht sprechen. Ich war blind, aber
jetzt sehen sie dich so wie du bist, so wie ich dich liebe." Der verzauherte
Tag film dialogue.

-^ "Menschen unserer Tage, mit unseren Freuden und Sorgen stehen vor
uns. Und doch zeigl dieser Film Dinge, die wir im Alltag nicht sehen.
Hier fallt gleichsam die Maske von den Gesichtern. Feinste seelische
Regungen werden sichtbar und zwingen zum Miterleben dieses in seiner
Alltaglichkeit so ergreifenden Schicksals." Giinther Dietrich, "Hinter
der Wirklichkeit: Ein Film aus dem Alltag - kein alltaglicher Film," Der
verzauherte Tag: Presse-Heft (Berlin; Inland-Pressedienst bei der
deutschen Filmvertriebs-GmbH, n. d.) 7, Der verzauherte Tag, Document
File 18397, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.

-^ "Es ist schon und niitzlich, daB sich dieser Film mit einem Problem
auseinandersetzt, dessen Vorkommen nicht damit abgestritten werden
kann, daB es in der Welt des Alltags nicht sichtbar in Erscheinung trete.
Und ebenso schon ist es, daB der junge Regisseur Peter Pewas, der mit
dem 'Verzauberten Tag' seine erste groBe Arbeit vorlegen wird, dies
Problem des gefahrlichen Wunschtraumes bis zur letzten Konsequenz
entwickelt und die Losung auf natiirliche Weise durch die Macht des
wirklichen Lebens herbeifiihrt." Hennann Hacker, "Der gefahrliche
Wunschtraum: Zu dem Terra-Film Der verzauherte Tag,'" Der verzauherte
Tag: Presse-Heft (Berlin: Inland-Pressedienst bei der deutschen
Filmvertriebs-GmbH, n. d.) 11, Der verzauherte Tag, Document File
18397, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.

-'' "Es war nur die Machart, denn der Stotf war absolut genehmigt, war
befiirwortet worden von oben. Ich hatte immer das Gefuhl, die Leute
woUten seinerzeit, wo die ganzen Fronten ins Wanken geraten waren,
keinen Einbruch an der Kulturfront. Sie wollten keine Formversuche,
keine akustischen Versuche, sie wollten Handfestigkeit, da fiel auch das
Wort Kulturbolschewismus." Interview with Peter Pewas on January 6,

1978, qtd. in Wetzel Ze?isiir 40.

-'' "Was wollen Sie im Film sehen: Probleme oder problemlose
Unterhaltung, Schicksale aus dem wirklichen Alltag oder aus einer
imwahrscheinlichen, alle Wiinsche erftillenden Welt; MiiBigganger in
einem reichen Milieu oder arbeitende Menschen in einer Welt der Arbeit?"
Hans Spielhofer, "Wunschtraum oder Wirklichkeit: Eine Belrachtung iiber
Notwendigkeit and Problematik ihrer Abgrenzung," Der deutsche Film
3.11 (May 1939): 317. Seealso Walter Panofsky, "Was will das Publikum
auf der Leinwand sehen?" FUm-Kitrier 224, 24 Sept. 1 938; and Theodor
Riegler, "Traumbild iind Wirklichkeit," Fihmvelt 6, 9 Feb. 1 940. For an
excellent in-depth analysis ot the realism debates in the Nazi film industry,
see Sabine Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: U of Texas
P, 2001) 172-88.

-^ "Die Wirklichkeit als Wunschtraum! - der Film soil das wirkliche Leben
zeigen, aber in einer aufgelockerten Form." Heinz Riihmann, "Kurz und
biindig," Der deutsche Fihn 3.1 1 (May 1939): 314.

-" These anonymous viewer remarks were considered so significant that
they were quoted twice in the same issue oi Der deutsche Fihn: "Der
Film soil kein Abklatsch der Wirklichkeit sein, sondern den Alltag
idealisieren. den Sinn der taglichen Arbeit aufzeigen. unsere Nachbarn
und uns selbst zeigen in Augenblicken, in denen wir Allgemeingiiltigkeit
haben und Typen werden. Starker akzentuieren also, als es die
Wirklichkeit tut! Unsere Welt ganz klein zeigen und ganz groB, Heroismus
und Brutalitat! Aber immer unsere Welt: wie sie ist, wie sie sein konnte."
Spielhofer, "Wunschtraum oder Wirklichkeit" 319; and also Frank
Maraun, "Das Ergebnis: Wirklichkeit bevorzugt! Eine Untersuchung iiber
den 'Publikumsgeschmack',"!)^/'*:/^///^^/??^///;/ 3.1 1 (May 1939): 308.

^" "[Ein Zuschauer] wiinscht sich als Helden mal einen braven Arbeiter,
der durch tagliche schwere Arbeit sein bescheidenes Brot verdient, immer
zufrieden ist und mit 75 Jahren mil 60 RM Invalidenrente davon
weiterlebt, trotzdem dankbar ist, Gott oder dem Schicksal, dabei durchaus
nicht einfaltig zu sein braucht, sondern ein Lebensphilosoph, der iiber
Reichtum und Wohlleben erhaben ist und sich iiber das freut, was
iibrigbleibt: Wald, Feld, Militar, Kunst, vielleicht auch sein Lachen."
Spielhofer, "Wunschtraum oder Wirklichkeit," 318.

" See especially Lukacs's essays " 'Tendency' or Partisanship?" and
"Reportage or Portrayal?" first published in 1 932 in Linkskurve, and

"Expressionism: its Significance and Decline," first published in
Internationale Literatur in 1 934. Georg Lukacs, Essays on Realism, ed.
Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fembach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1981) 33-44, 45-75, 76-113. See also Brecht's essays "Uber den
formalistischen Charakter der Realismustheorie" and "Volkstiimlichkeit
und Realismus," both written in 1938. Bertolt Brecht, Werke, V^ ed., 5
vols. (Berlin: Auftiau, 1981)5: 156-65, 176-85.

" Ehrhard Bahr examines Lukacs's admiration of Goethe as a pivotal
component in the realism and expressionism debates, "Georg Lukacs's
'Goetheanism'": Its Relevance for His Literary Theory," Georg Lukacs:
Theory, Culture, and Politics, eds. Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tarr (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989) 89-96. Bahr also evaluates
the role of German classicism in Nazi Germany, reviewing the careers of
George Kolbe, Wilhelm Furtwangler, and Gustaf Griindgens. He
concludes: "performing Goethe's Fa?/5/ or conducting Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony were not acts of resistance, but played into the hands of the
Nazis who wanted to preserve this fagade of cultural respectability."
Ehrhard Bahr, "Nazi Classicism: The Last Chapter of The Tyranny of
Greece over Germany,'' unpublished essay.

^3 "Wer weltanschaulich nicht fest ist, konnte durch diesen Film zum
Bolschewisten werden. Dies beweist, daB Tendenz sehr wohl in einem
Kunstwerk enthalten sein kann, und auch die schlechteste Tendenz ist zu
propagieren, wenn es eben mit den Mitteln eines hervorragenden
Kunstwerkes geschieht." Joseph Goebbels, speech in the Kaiserhof from
March 28, 1933. Qtd. in Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische
Filmpolitik: Eine soziologische Untersuchimg ilber die Spieljilme des
Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1969) 439.

'^ "Ich wiinsche nicht etwa eine Kunst, die ihren nationalsozialistischen
Charakter lediglich durch Zurschaustellung nationalsozialistischer
Embleme und Symbole beweist, sondem eine Kunst, die ihre Haltung
durch nationalsozialistischen Charakter und durch Aufraffen
nationalsozialistischer Probleme zum Ausdruck bringt. [. . .] In dem
Augenblick, da eine Propaganda bewuBt wird, ist sie unwirksam. Mit
dem Augenblick aber, in dem sie als Propaganda, als Tendenz, als
Charakter, als Haltung im Hintergrund bleibt und nur durch Handlung,
durch Ablauf, durch Vorgange, durch Kontrastierung von Menschen in
Erscheinung tritt, wird sie in jeder Hinsicht wirksam." Joseph Goebbels,
speech on the first anniversary of the Reich Film Chamber from March
5, 1937, (Albrecht 456).

^^ "[Der zeitnahe Film] erfiillt damit eine hohe Sendung: unser Volk zii
stahlen [. . .] Der Film lauft nicht mehr am Leben vorbei, zaubert keine
falschen Wunschtraume hervor, bedient sich nicht einer Wunderlampe
der falschen Illusion. Hart und unerbittlich wie die Gegenwart,
kampferisch und kraftvoll wie der Mut und Sinn unseres Volkes, so richtet
der deutsche Film in seinem Erfassen aller lebensnahen und zeitnahen
Fragen den Blick auf die Zukunft, auf den Sieg und die Vernichtung des
Gegners." Hemiann Wanderscheck, "Der Film erobert die Gegenwart:
Zeitnahe deutsche Spielfilme in Front," Filmwelt 22, 30 May 1 94 1 .

''' "Aus Amerika iibemommen, wo er einst durch die Filmproduktion vom
Schlagwort fiir die billige Konzession an dem 'Publikumsgeschmack'zum
Geschaftsprinzip avancierte, wurde er beim deutschen Publikum zu einem
Wertmesser, der eine bestimmte Bedeutung enthielt: 'gliickliches Ende'
um jeden Preis, mochte es auch die innere Logik der Filmereignisse ad
absurdum flihren: Optimismus des 'keep smiling', mochte die Thematik
noch so emst und tragisch sein. Der deutsche Mensch hat fiir einen
solchen, alle Dinge rosarot verklarende Optimismus noch niemals eine
Vorliebe gehegt, und er hegt sie heute weniger denn je. Nicht weil er im
Gmndzug ein Pessimist ware, sondem weil er selbst - Optimist ist. Optimist
aber aus heil gebliebenem Herzen, aus ungebrochener Lebenskraft. Er
blickt den Dingen ins Auge, nicht um ihnen konziliante Komplimente zu
machen, sondem um sich emsthaft mit ihnen auseinanderzusetzen. Er
erkennt die ethischen Kampfhedingimgen des Lebeus an."' Hans Joachim
Neitzke, "Riickzug vor der Entscheidung: Happy end - ja oder nein?"
Licht-BiJd-Bi'ihne 65, 17 Mar. 1939, emphasis in original. For further
contemporaneous articles on the problem film and the happy end, see
L.E.D. "Gibt der Film ein falsches Weltbild?" Licht-Bild-Biilme Beilage
zur Nr. 25/26, 29 Jan. 1 938); "Problem-Filme? Ja!" Licht-Bild-Biilme 24, 29
Jan. 1940; Walter Panofsky, "Die Sache mit dem happy end: Historische
Beispiele zu einem oftdiskutierten Thema," FZ/w-A^i/r/er 108, 11 May 1942;
and "Ein Grundproblem der Filmgestaltung: Uber den hannonischen
AusklangeinesFilms,"F/7w-A^;//7t'/'9, 12 Jan. 1943.

^^ "Wahr sind nur die Erinnerungen, die wir mit uns tragen. die Traume,
die wir spinnen und die Sehnsuchte, die uns treiben. Damit woUen wir
uns bescheiden." Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944, Helmut Weifi) film
dialogue.

Works Cited

Albrecht, Gerd. Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik: Eine soziologische
Untersiichimg iiber die Spielfilme des Dritten Reiches. Stuttgart:
Ferdinand Enke, 1 969.

Bahr, Ehrhard. "Georg Lukacs's 'Goetheanism'": Its Relevance for His
Literary Theory." GeorgLnkdcs: Theory, Culture, and Politics.
Eds. Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tarr. New Brunswick: Transaction,
1989.

— . "Nazi Classicism: The Last Chapter of The Tyranny of Greece over
Germany.'" Unpublished essay.

— . "Nazi Cultural Politics: Intentionalism vs. Functionalism." A^^/Zowcr/
Socialist Cultural Policy. Ed. Glenn R. Cuomo. New York: St.
Martin's, 1995.

Bahr, Ehrhard and Ruth Goldschmidt Kunzer. GeorgLukdcs. New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1972.

Barkai, Avraham . Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theoiy, and Policy Trans.
Ruth Hadass-Vashitz. New Haven: Yale, 1 990.

Brecht, Bertolt. "Ober den formalistischen Charakter der
Realismustheorie." lVerke,3"^Ed.5Vo\s. Berlin: Aufbau, 1981. 5:
156-65.

— . "Volkstiimlichkeit und Realismus." Werke, 3"' Ed. 5 Vols. Berlin: Aufbau,
1981.5:176-85.

Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State 1933-
1945. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Das Leben kann so schon sein. Document File 9596. Bundesarchiv-
Fihnarchiv Berlin.

Der verzauberte Tag. Document File 18397. Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv,
Berlin.

Dietrich, Gunther. "Hinter der Wirklichkeit: Ein Film aus dem Alltag - kein
62

alltaglicher Film." Der verzanberte Tag: Presse-Heft. Berlin;
Inland-Pressedienst bei der deutschen Filmvertriebs-GmbH, n.

d. 7.

Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female
Spectator." Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Patricia Erens.
Bloomington: Indiana, 1990.

Drewniak, Boguslaw. Der deutsche Film 1938-1945: Ein
Gesamtiiberblick. Diisseldorf: Droste, 1987.

"Ein Film iiber dich und mich: Ultimo [Das Leben kanu so schon sein],"'
Filmspiegel 31,9 Sept 1938.

Elsaesser, Thomas and Michael Wedel, Eds. The BFI Companion to
German Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

Hacker, Hermann. "Der gefahrliche Wunschtraum: Zu dem Terra-Film Der
verzauberte Tag."" Der verzauberte Tag: Presse-Heft. Berlin:
Inland-Pressedienst bei der deutschen Filmvertriebs-GmbH, n.
d. 11.

Hake, Sabine. Popular Cinema of the Third Reich. Austin: U of Texas,
2001.

Huth. Jochen. Ein Mensch wird geboren: Ein Film von Jochen Hiith
nach Motiven aus seiner Komodie des Alltags Ultimo! Filmscript,
Berlin, c. 1938.

Kershaw, Ian. Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich:
Bavaria 1933-1945. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.

Lane, Barbara Miller. Architecture and Politics in Germany, J 91 8-] 934.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1968.

L.E.D. "Gibt der Film ein falsches Weltbild?" Licht-Bild-Biihne. Beilage
zurNr. 25/26. 29 Jan. 1938.

Lukacs, Georg. Essays on Realism. Ed. Rodney Livingstone. Trans.
David Fembach. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1981 .

— . " 'Tendency' or Partisanship?" Essays on Realism. Ed. Rodney
Livingstone. Trans. David Fembach. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1981.

Maraun, Frank. "Das Ergebnis: Wirklichkeit bevorzugt! Eine
UntersLichung iiber den Publikumsgeschmack." Der deutsche

Film 3.\\. May \939.

Moeller, Felix. Der Filmminister: Goebheh iind der Film im Dritten
Reich. Berlin: Henschel, 1998.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana, 1989.

Neitzke, Hans Joachim. "Riickzug vor der Entscheidung: Happy end - ja
odernein?" Licht-Bild-Biihne 65. 17 Mar. 1939.

Panofsky, Walter. "Ein Grundproblem der Filmgestaltung: Ober den
harmonischen Ausklang eines Films." Film-Kiirier 9. 12 Jan.
1943.

— . "Die Sache mit dem happy end: Historische Beispiele zu einem
oftdiskutiertenThema."F/7m-A^2//7e'/- 108, 11 May 1942.

— . "Was will das Publikum auf der Leinwand sehen?" Film-Kurier 224.
24 Sept. 1938.

Peltz-Dreckmann, Ute. Nationalsozialistischer Siedlungsbaii: Versiich
einer Analyse der die Siedlungspolitik bestimmenden Faktoren
am Beispiel des Nationalsozialismiis. Munich: Minerva, 1978.

Peukert, Detlev J. K. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and
Racism in Eveiyday Life. Trans. Richard Deveson. New Haven:
Yale, 1987.

"Praktische Werbe-Vorschlage." Das Leben kann so schon sein.
Advertising materials. Berlin: August Scherl, n. d. 6.

Reichel. Peter. Derschone Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination iind
Gewalt des Faschismiis. Munich: Hanser, 1991.

Riegler, Theodor. "Traumbild und Wirklichkeit." F/7/;7Uf// 6. 9 Feb. 1940.
64

Riihmann, Heinz. ^'Kurzundhundig.'^ Der deutsche Film 3.1 1 . May 1939:

314.

Schafer, Hans Dieter. Das gespaltene Bewufitsein: Deutsche Kiiltiir iiiid
Lebenswirklichkeif. 3rd ed. Munich: Hanser, 1983.

Schoenbaum, Da\ id. Die braune Revolution: Eine Sozialgeschichte des
Dritten Reiches. Trans. Tamara Schoenbaum-Holtermann.
Berlin: Ullstein, 1999.

Spielhofer, Hans. "Wunschtraum oder Wirklichkeit: Eine Betrachtung liber
Notwendigkeit und Probleniatik ihrer Abgrenzung." Der deutsche
Film3.\\. May 1939.

"Spmng von der Reichsautobahn nach Brasilien: Drei neue Filme - Mann
fur Mann, Gliick auf Raten [Das Leben kann so schon sein],
Kautschukr Fihmvelt 41.7 Oct. 1 938.

Stephenson. Jill. Women in Nazi Germany. New York: Barnes & Noble,
1975.

Troger, Annemarie. "The Creation of a Female Assembly-Line Proletariat."
When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi
Germany. Eds. Renate Bridenthal. Atina Grossmann, and Marion
Kaplan. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1984.

"VoranlaufinderProvinz: Erstes Halbjahrder Spielzeit 1 938/39." I/W/r-
Bild-Biihne 24, 28 Jan. 1 939.

Wanderdcheck, Hermann. "Der Film erobert die Gegenwart: Zeitnahe
deutsche Spielfilme in Front." Filmwelt 22. 30 May 1941.

Westennieder, Norbert. "Deutsche Frauen und Mddchen! " Vom
Alltagsleben 1933-1945. Dusseldorf: Droste, 1990.

Wetzel, Kraft and Peter Hagemann. Zensur: Verbotene deutsche Filme
1933-1945. Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1978.

Wolz, Ralf "Mobilmachung." Heimatfront: Kriegsalltag in Deutschland
1939-1945. Ed. Jurgen Engert. Berlin: Nicolai, 1999.

Goethe as a Catalyst

for Germanistik at Harvard, 1825-1945

Michael P. Olson, Harvard University

Harvard, as much as any other American university, was the starting
point for Germanistik. This was not predetennined, however. In fact, early
on, Germanistik at Harvard resembled the meals served to the College's
students. If we look at the situation at Harvard approximately 250 years ago,
Germanistik in New England, like the phrase student food, was rather a
contradiction in tenns. Students could neither study Gentian systematically
250 years ago, nor could they enjoy what was meant to be food. As one
unfortunate student said:

The Provisions were badly cooked ... the Soups were
dreadflil we frequently had Puddings made of flower and
Water and boiled them so hard as not to bee eatable we
frequently threw them out and kicked them about.
(Morison, Three Centinies 1 1 7)

Some forty years later, in 1 788, further displeasure was reported at the breakfast
hall: "Bisket, tea cups, saucers, and a KNIFE thrown at the tutors" ( 1 75).

Who knows today whether bad meals drove the Harvard students
to such mischief or, on the other hand, the relative lack of Lernfreiheitl
Whatever the reason, by the middle of the 1 9"' century dining at Hai^vard had
obviously improved the students' spirits. For example, the annual supper for
the class of 1 860 featured Bremen goose and Bremen ducks (Morisoa Three
Centuries 318). Was it just a coincidence that Gemianistikal Harvard gained
in prominence during the same period?

Goethe's interest in Harvard launched the discipline of Germanistik
in North America. Conditions 200 years ago were right for the transfer of
Gemian models and influences to American education. John Quincy Adams
was not only a Harvard alumnus and the sixth American president, but
America's first ambassador to Prussia (Harding). From 1806 to 1813 the
Continental Blockade made it difficult for books and letters from England to
reach Gemiany. The defeat of Napoleon and the lifting of the Continental

Blockade coincided with Madame de Stael's De I'Allemagne published in
1813. Overseas travehng became safe and was prized by a number of American
students.

Before the Gottingen Seven — the seven professors who. in 1 837,
were dismissed from the University of Gottingen for protesting the abrogation
of the constitution of Hannover — Harvard had its own Gottingen Four:
Edward Everett (class of 1 8 1 1 ), George Ticknor, Joseph G Cogswell (class
of 1806) and George Bancroft (class of 1817). These men went abroad to
study at Gottingen. then the site of one of Europe's finest universities. Their
travels precipitated a gift to Harvard that, more than any other, jump-started
the study of Gennan in New England.

The Harvard-Goethe connection began when Goethe's friend
George Sartorius introduced in a letter "a couple of North Americans,
Mr. Ticknor and Professor Everett." The two Harvard men spoke "passable
Gennan" and knew Goethe's writings "better than many Germans" (Mackall
4). Goethe had had only one caller from America before, Aaron Burr, in
1810. The novelty of visiting North Americans was evidently apparent to
Ticknor and Everett during their meeting with Goethe on October 25,
1816: "We were taken in as a kind of raree-show, I suppose, and we are
considered ... with much the same curiosity that a tame monkey or a
dancing bear would be. We come from such an immense distance that it is
supposed we can hardly be civilized" (Long, Literary Pioneers 11). Everett
was the newly appointed professor of Greek at Harvard. His impressions
of Goethe were hardly charitable: "[Goethe was] very stiff and cold, not
to say gauche and awkward. His head was grey, some of his front teeth
gone, and his eyes watery with age." Goethe also "talked low and
anxiously" and "with no interest, on anything" (Long, Litermy Pioneers
69). Ticknor, soon to be appointed Harvard's first professor of French
and Spanish, too was disappointed, seeing little "of the lover of Margaret
and Charlotte, and still less of the author of Tasso, Werther, and Faiisr
(Long, Literary Pioneers 28). While still in Gottingen, Everett — who would
later become president of Harvard College — published a long review of
Goethe's Dichtung iind Wahrheit. The review was the first significant
contribution to Goethe scholarship in an American joumal (NAR 1121 7-62).
The same joumal later featured Bancroft's review of the Cotta edition (NAR
20303-25).

Everett introduced to Goethe Joseph Cogswell, who met Goethe
on March 27, 1817. If Goethe was a catalyst for Harvard. Cogswell was
a catalyst for Goethe to think about Harvard. Cogswell saw in Goethe "a
grand and graceful form, worthy of a knight of the days of chivalry ... a
real gentlemen ... in every respect agreeable and polite" (Long, Literaty
Pioneers 80-8 1 ). Cogswell and Goethe met not in Weimar but in Jena at

the Mineralogical Society, of which Goethe was president. They hit it off
immediately. In the spring of 1 8 1 9, Cogswell spent an evening with Goethe
in Weimar. Goethe was "in tine spirits and as familiar and playful with
me, as if 1 had been the friend of his youth" (Long, Literaiy Pioneers 88).
In July 1818, surely knowing of Everett's earlier attempt to acquire books
from Goethe for the Harvard library, Cogswell wrote to Goethe, repeating
the request for books. Goethe donated 39 of his own works, including the
20-volume Cotta edition of 1 8 1 5- 1 9 to the Harvard library. His accompanying
letter, likely translated by Cogswell, states: "The above poetical & scientific
works are presented to the library of the University of Cambridge in N.
England, as a mark of deep Interest in its high literary Character, & in the
successful Zeal it has displayed thro' so long a Course of Years for the
promotion of solid & elegant education. With the high regards of the
Author, J. W.V.Goethe. Weimar Aug. 11. 1819" (Mackall 17). In return.
Harvard's president wrote a fomial letter of thanks to the "celebrated writer,"
who possessed "so elevated a rank among the men of genius & literature in
Europe" (Walsh 52). The bookplate reads: "The Gift of the Author, John
W. von Goethe, of Gemiany, Dec. 8, 1819," while the Library catalog of
1830 lists the books as the gift of "the celebrated Goethe of Germany."
Goethe's books circulated. George Bancroft, who had also made the
pilgrimage to Weimar and studied at Gottingen, must have used the Cotta
edition while an instmctor at Harvard in 1822-23. Other borrowers included
Charies (Kari) Pollen and Frederic Hedge ( A.B. 1 825, graduate of Harvard
Divinity School 1828).

German was not taught formally in New England until 1 825, when
Harvard appointed Pollen instmctor of German. One student' described
Pollen's first class at Harvard: "There were no Gennan books in the
bookstore... r/je German Reader for Beginners, compiled by our teacher,
was furnished to the class in single sheets as it was needed, and was
printed in Roman type, there being no German type in easy reach. There
could not have been a happier introduction to German literature..."
(Hansen 38). By 1828, Pollen had 28 students in German. His handouts
promoted his favorite authors, who he felt were appropriate for American
students interested in political and social reform. His selections changed
the taste of many New Englanders interested in German writers. Pollen
favored Schiller's political engagement as superior to Goethe's
philosophical abstraction. Still, Pollen included Goethe in his lectures and
readings. Pollen's legacies remain the first German reader and the first Gennan
grammar published in the United States.-

The first Goethe course given at Harvard was a series of lectures on
Part 1 of Faust, delivered in 1837 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Longfellow noted in his journal dated June 3, 1 835, just prior to teaching

at Harvard, his question to Carlyle's wife in London: "I asked [Carlyle's]
wife if he considered Gothe the greatest man that ever lived. 'Oh yes, I
believe he does indeed. He thinks him the greatest man that ever lived,
excepting Jesus Christ'," (Long, Goethe and Longfellow 149). A student-
commented on Longfellow's first Faust lecture, which included a long
introduction, "very flowery and bombastical indeed," but the "regular
translation and explanation part of the lecture was very good" (Long,
Goethe and Longfellow 158). Faust, Part 1, according to Longfellow,
was not written for "weak and sickly minds, but for healthy, manly, and
strong minds." This quote is especially interesting for its ideation of manliness,
which would become a controversial issue at Harxard in the first years of the
20* century (more below). Longfellow considered Part 2 oi Faust "every
way inferior to the first. Notwithstanding the author's own opinions, you see
the wrinkled hand of age upon it. The continuous power and glowing
imagination of early manhood are no longer there" (Long, Goethe and
Longfellow 165). Longfellow's Faust courses were popular, as reflected in
the Har\ ard president's letter to Longfellow of March 1. 1 844: "Many, if not
all [of the juniors] w ish to attend your lectures on Faust" (Walsh 53).

With the influence of Carlyle's essays and the work of Longfellow
and others, especially the contributors to the New England periodical
Dial in the early 1 840s, Goethe became the central figure in German letters
among informed New Englanders. German culture was featured prominently
in the leading cultural journal of New England, the Boston Transcript,
from 1830 to 1880 (von Klenze 1-25). In 1838, Harvard's own Emerson
joked that "it produced some confusion when Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant,
Goethe. Herder. Schleiennacher and Jean Paul came sailing all at once into
Boston harbor and discharged their freight" (Walz. German Influence
59)." One of Goethe's enthusiastic admirers was Frederick Henry Hedge,
about v\ hom more below. Margaret Fuller was an unofficial member of the
class of 1829. She knew Hedge as a student, as well as her mentors
Everett, Ticknor, FoUen and the German instructor Beck. Fuller's 4 1 -page
essay on Goethe in Dial ( 1 84 1 ) used Goethe's female characters to shed
light on the role of \\ omen in society. Fuller then followed many of these
thoughts, especially that of Goethe's das ewig Weibliche, in her Woman
in the Nineteenth Centuiy ( 1 844) (Slochower 1 30-44; Schultz 1 69-82).

Goethe had taily served as a catalyst for a fomial Gennan studies
program at Harvard. In an address in 1831 Follen had noted: "There are
Gennan books and teachers in every place of importance in this country. In
Boston, particularly, where, 1 am assured, about fifty years ago, not a Gennan
grammar or dictionary was to be found, there are now a number of persons
who speak, and a large number who read, and enter into the sense of the
Gennan spirit. Many Gennan authors have already found a place in private

libraries" (Follen 146). By 1 850 several professors taught Gennan at Harvard
(although none full-time), and by the 1860s the study of German was
mandatory for all sophomores. Frederic Hedge spoke at Harvard's
Commencement in 1 866, calling on the graduates to use their new power
to make Harvard first "among the universities, properly so called, of
modem times" (Morison, Three Centuries 309). Hedge was speaking
about the founding of graduate schools. Adopting the German-style
seminar fonnat of Johns Hopkins University, Harvard's Department of
Germanic Languages and Literatures established its own graduate program
in the 1870s, and in 1880 the first Ph.D. in German was conferred.

By 1 900, Harvard had developed from a college into a university.
Its social elite became a cognitive elite, which fostered an intellectual
meritocracy. Harvard was not only increasingly the locus oi Germanistik;
it was drawing students and faculty whom Harvard alumnus David
Halberstam would later call, in another context, the best and the brightest.
The number of Gennan courses had increased to 30 by 1895, with a
combined enrollment of 750 (Goldman 2). The increased interest in Gennan
studies at Harvard was in keeping with the general growth of the discipline
in the U.S. in the first quarter of the 20"' century. During this time
Gerwanistik was, as Henry Schmidt carefully noted, "an apparently
healthy, self-confident profession" (204) — the operative word being
apparently. Nearly one quarter (24 percent) of high school students took
German in 1 9 1 5, as opposed to nine percent who learned French and two
percent Spanish (Schmidt 204). So in the usual manner of quantifying
growth in numbers and assessing quality of education. Harvard's
Department of Gennanic Languages and Literatures was unquestionably
flourishing. The Department was bolstered by several factors: its
personnel, innovative pedagogical models, and resources such as the
Germanic Museum and the Harvard Library's growing Germanic
collections.'

All seemed well for German studies at Harvard. Harvard's
professors influenced American Germanistik in the first half of 20"' century
like no others.'' An obituary in the Germanic Review maintained that
Hans Carl Giinther von Jagemann, president of MLA in 1 899 and a noted
German professor at Harvard, trained "hundreds of men now holding
academic positions all over the country" (Howard 279; Roedder 6-8) while
Kuno Francke's career "was, in many respects, unparalleled in the history
of our profession" (Burkhard 157; Fife 107-08). However, issues involving
Gennany at Harvard had already undergone some ambivalence in the
years leading up to 1914. In retrospect, it is not surprising that several
issues exploded into controversy in Harvard Yard when the U.S. entered
into the two world wars.

Harvard's professors and administrators did not have it easy
when the United States engaged Germany in two world wars. Harvard's
professors and students in the Department of Germanic Languages and
Literatures, like others at Harvard concerned with Germany, uneasily
walked at least four tightropes: first, external and transnational (Germany
"vs." the U.S.); second, internal and campus-wide (how to be a "man" at
Harvard); third, practical (how to Americanize, in a period requiring great
delicacy, the study of an intrinsically non-American culture); and fourth,
professional — that is, how the Department led American Germanistik by
providing scholarship and innovative pedagogical models. Each is worthy
of discussion below, not least because each traces back to Goethe.

In the quarter-century prior to 1914, the study of literature at
Harvard, though beginning to flourish, had to withstand certain tests of
what could only be termed "Harvard manhood." Proponents of this
concept included Theodore Roosevelt, 26* president of the U.S. and class
of 1880, who said of Henry James:

Thus it is for the undersized man of letters, who flees
his country because he, with his delicate, effeminate
sensitiveness, finds the conditions of life on this side of
the water crude and raw; in other words, because he
cannot play a man's part among men, and so goes where
he will be sheltered from the winds that harden stouter
souls. (Rosenbaum 49)

The Governor of Massachusetts, Curtis Guild, class of 1881, stated at
Harvard's commencement in 1908:

Whatever patriotism of American manhood comes to
the fore. Harvard memory. Harvard ideals, instinctively
rise, because Harvard is not merely Massachusetts,
Harvard is not merely New England, Harvard is the
ideal of America. (Townsend 9,16)^

Each Harvard professor — at that time there were no female professors —
faced the pressure of measuring up to Harvard "manhood," which was so
important at Harvard at that time.

Students, too, felt the pressure to fiit into the mold of "Harvard
men," who were more than likely to be relatively wealthy and to have a
name that one would not think of as "foreign." The study of foreign cultures
and civilizations was all well and good, yet the discipline of literature, and
hence Gennanistik, underwent special scrutiny. One French professor at

Harvard, Irving Babbitt, class of 1 889, opposed the elective system because
students, while choosing to take classes leading to lucrative careers after
graduation, were being encouraged to get on with the business of living
and earning too quickly. Babbitt also pointed to a dichotomization of
courses based on the stereotypes of men. In an age that honored the
athlete on the field and the specialist (not the general humanist) in the
classroom. Babbitt feared that young men would favor courses in the
hard sciences and be ashamed to take literature seriously: The literature
courses, indeed, are known in some of these institutions as "sissy" courses.
The man who took literature too seriously would be suspected of
effeminacy. The really virile thing is to be an electrical engineer. Babbitt
could already envisage "the time when the typical teacher of literature
will be some young dilettante who will interpret Keats and Shelley to a
class of girls" (Townsend 24).

Another Harvard professor. Hugo Miinsterberg, contrasted
masculine, productive scholars with their more passive, or feminine,
colleagues who merely "distributed the findings of others" (Townsend
127-29). Munsterberg's descriptions of his future Harvard colleague
George Santayana — "a strong and healthy man" and "a good, gay, fresh
companion" (Townsend 146) — were mutually consistent then, however
rich the ironies may be today (Munsterberg neither knew that "gay" would
later mean "homosexual" nor knew that Santayana was homosexual).

Amid these sentiments Harvard's Germanists already had two
strikes against them: they propagated a field of study which was said to
be effeminate (not manly) and foreign (not American). They faced not
only an internal resistance to the study of German literature. In addition,
important administrators at Harvard questioned and undervalued the
research and methodologies implemented at Gernian universities, no
matter what the discipline. Few administrators were closer to Harvard
during this time than LeBaron Briggs, class of 1 875. Briggs taught English
at Harvard for several decades, and was dean of the College from 1891
to 1902 and president of Radcliffe College. Briggs had gone to Germany
upon graduation from Harvard more because that was the thing to do
than from any desire to study there. Returning to Harvard, Briggs said of
the Gemians: "Of all scholarship theirs is the easiest to attain." According
to Briggs, the teacher's first business was to teach — writing was a
secondary affair (To wsend 136). Contemporaiy Harvard, it was implied —
the Harvard of 1910 — was a university which would look less frequently
to Europe for models; its own elite would provide them.

This, then, was the general situation of the Harvard community
at the outbreak of World War I — individual and collective ambiguity,
confusion, and conflict on one hand, a sense of endless possibility and
72

inevitable success on the other. The rhetoric of "the Harvard man"
resLirged between 1914 and 1918. Harvard's Germanists received many
mixed signals. What were they to think during the First World War (and
indeed until 1945)? The Harvard administration betrayed double standards
and inconsistencies, notably in its official and unofficial stance toward
academic freedom and anti-Semitism. The "wait and w eigh" Harvard, as it
was known, was a University that quite consciously chose not to take an
official position on potentially divisive issues, or chose to be slower than
its peers to do so. In the initial stages of World War I, Han. ard's w illingness
to continue to embrace the classical works of German literature, coupled
with its initial unwillingness to voice a standpoint relating to the First
World War, was condemned on campus as pro-Gennan.

Serving as a litmus test for the University was Kuno Francke.
who came to Harvard in 1 884 as an instructor of German and later became
Professor of the History of German Culture and Curator of the Germanic
Museum. Francke's resume had been impeccable prior to the outbreak of
the First World War: he contributed to the Moniimenta Germcmiae
Historica (beginning in 1882); became an American citizen in 1891;
authored Social Foixes in German Literature, later retitled A History of
German Literature as Determined t>y Social Forces ( 1 896). w hich enjoyed
12 printings; was editor-in-chief of Gerwow Classics of the XIX. and XX.
Centuries (1912 ff); and. something which is never frowned upon at
Harvard, he was an accomplished fund-raiser. The St. Louis brewer
Adolphus Busch introduced Francke to his friends thusly: "Here is the
professor. Every time he comes to see me. he wants a hundred thousand
dollars. But I like him all the same" (Francke. Deutsche Arbeit 55).

The Germanic Museum, founded in 1903 and to which Busch
donated generously, is Francke's lasting monument. By 1897, Francke
had persuaded his departmental colleagues to support the idea of a
Germanic Museum. At that time, as Francke later wrote in his
autobiography. New Englanders did not recognize e\ en the most major
works of German literature, let alone German art. And German politics
was more or less suspicious (Francke, Deutsche Arbeit 41).** Francke
would appear to be disingenuous here, a common feature among people
reaching to justify their requests by claiming a legitimate need (in Francke's
case, locating major donors for the would-be Museum). In fact, as we
have seen. German culture had not been unknown in New England. To
his credit, however, Francke made his remark not in 1897 but in 1930.
when his career was almost over and he had no reason to state anything
other than what he saw as the real state of affairs. And he correctly
differentiated the general public's relative ignorance of German culture
with a few intellectuals' deep knowledge thereof Whether the public's

ignorance was the fault of the academy or the public was not clear; but in
a case of deja vu, Henry Hatfield, who succeeded Francke as a professor
of Gernian at Harvard, wrote in 1948 that Gemianists in the U.S. had
"failed, broadly speaking, to establish contact with the cultivated public"
(392).

Francke's professional and personal mission was to bring
German culture to Harvard students and Americans. His letter to the
New York Times dated February 3, 1915 today reads like a manifesto:

We have every opportunity in this country to make felt
what is best in German character and life. Let us
continue to do so; let us continue to have a prominent
part in all endeavors for political, civic and industrial
progress; let us stand for the Gennan ideals of honesty,
loyalty, truthfulness, devotion to work; let us cultivate
our language, our literature, and our art; let us fearlessly
defend the cause of our mother country against
prejudices and aspersions.

Francke's desires, when the U.S. was not at war or in potential conflict
with Germany, were agreeable to the Harvard community and many
Americans. But Francke was criticized when he appeared to waffle in his
support for the American cause. Germans living in America who
encouraged each other to "defend the cause of our mother country," as
Francke did in this letter to the New York Times, did not receive
unequivocal sympathy during wartime. Moreover, Francke published pro-
Gennan inspirational poetry in trade journals such as Monatshefte and
leading general newspapers.'' Such poetry was disruptive, isolating
Francke from longtime friends and neighbors (Francke, Deutsche Arbeit
67).

Francke embraced the American educational system and
Harvard's academic freedom. He disagreed with an article in the Vossische
Zeitimg\^h\ch criticized Harvard's treatment of Gennans (Meyer). Francke
countered by saying that his achievements at Harvard had been fully
supported by the administration, as had those of other Harvard professors
with ties to Gemiany. Harvard, according to Francke, did not lead the way
in promoting anti-German sentiment — quite the contrary. In fact, Germans
at Harvard were made to feel as welcome as those of other nationalities
(Francke, Deiitschamerikaner).

Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell felt that it was more
important to retain the principle of academic freedom than to dismiss
controversial professors or accept their resignations. In a famous speech

on academic freedom, Lowell said:

If a university or college censors what its professors
may say, if it restrains them from uttering something
that it does not approve, it thereby assumes
responsibility for that which it permits them to say. This
is logical and inevitable, but it is a responsibility which
an institution would be very unwise in assuming. (27 1 )

At around the same time, on February 13, Lowell wrote to Francke: "I am
glad to hear that your arm is better, but I cannot conceive why you
should have any thought of resigning. I hope it is not because you think
war with Germany would make any difference in your position here, or
in the respect and affection of your friends" (Papers ofKinio Francke). "'

Like Francke, his friend (and Harvard psychologist) Hugo
Miinsterberg viewed himself as a relayer of Gennan ideals to America (42-
43). They became embittered by hostile reactions to their standpoints.
Miinsterberg, bom and trained in Gennany, "was confessed by all to be
one of the most brilliant Harvard professors of his time" (Morison,
Development of Har\'ard 17). He enjoyed close ties to the Gennan-
American community but did not become an American citizen. As a
Gemian citizen Miinsterberg undertook (completely within his rights in
a then-supposedly neutral countr>') to present the German case to Harvard
and the American public. Rumors had it that he was in the German Secret
Service, and owned carrier pigeons which took messages to other spies;
these were nonsense. Certain students, collegaues, alumni and former
friends demanded that Miinsterberg be dismissed, as they considered him
to be a German propagandist, if not a spy; he was, they thought, a
poisonous pro-German influence on the students. The Corporation,
Harvard's governing body, steadfastly declined to do so. In London,
Clarence Wiener '00 had allegedly threatened to withdraw a bequest to
Harvard of S 10 million unless Harvard dismissed Munsterberg; his threat
was ignored (Morison, Three Centuries 45 1-53).

Miinsterberg differentiated the neutral stance of "official"
Harvard (Lowell's Harvard) and the "unofficial" Harvard, which was pro-
Allies and anti-German. He noted in the London Times dated April 8.
1915a two-column letter from Boston on the situation at Harvard. The
piece jubilantly reported that a census of Harvard would reveal anti-
German sentiment totaling 99 percent. Miinsterberg wrote:

I personally have worked incessantly for a quarter of a
century to make America well understood in Europe
and have spent all my energy to create European
sympathy and respect for American universities and in
particular for Harvard.... And yet in the passion of the
day I have been treated by the unofficial Harvard and
the upper layer of Boston Society as if I had been my
life long an abuser of America and an enemy of Harvard.

By April of 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, the two most
(in)famous Gemian professors at Harvard were no longer active: Francke
stopped teaching at Harvard in 1916 and Miinsterberg died in the same
year. ' '

By the 1920s the Department of Germanic Languages and
Literatures had distinguished itself pedagogically in five ways. First, it
emphasized things Germanic, not only German. Harvard students had
the choice of enrolling in basic language courses, as well as in two
advanced undergraduate courses, thirteen half-courses, one full graduate
course, ten half-courses, and interdisciplinary breadth courses. The
teaching was specialized: in academic year 1928-29, for example,
professors offered courses on Schiller, German literature in translation,
Gothic, Old High German, Middle High Gennan, Dutch, Old Norse,
modern Scandinavian languages. Old Saxon and Old Frisian. And the
professors were extremely versatile: Kuno Francke could speak about
Flemish painting of the 1 5"' century as well as about many other topics of
Germanic culture.

Second, Germanistik at Harvard was viewed as an organism, as
if the Gennan national development was a concept in which each course
offered by the Department was one element interlocking with other
courses. Only after amassing a number of courses — "Die deutsche
kirchliche Skulptur des Mittelalters," "Deutsche Mystik und Malerei des
15. Jahrhunderts," "Deutsche Kulturgeschichte von Luther bis zu Friedrich
dem GroBen," "Deutsche Kulturgeschichte von der franzosischen
Revolution bis zum Ende der Freiheitskriege" (courses all taught by
Francke) — and putting in the due rigor could the student expect to attain
comprehensive knowledge of the organism known as Gennanic culture
(Francke, Deutsche Arbeit 22).

Third, the Department sought to offer to its students modem,
socially relevant topics. The goal was not to de-Gemianize the content
being learned, but to bring to young Americans experiences with which
they could empathize. Arthur Burkhard, a German professor who wrote at
76

some length about the Department in 1929-30,'- found that "a student
would continue reading German for himself., if I selected works for him to
read that presented characters and problems with which he was able to
identify himself, in which he could see his own life in part portrayed, in
part revealed." Such works were "found most commonly among the
writings of modem and contemporary authors" (Burkhard, Course 1 18).
One of Burkhard's courses, "German Literature since 1900," featured
Dehmel, George, Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Rilke,
Wedekind, Werfel. and expressionist dramatists — although the writings
of the expressionists were "practically incomprehensible to American
undergraduates" (Co?//-^^ 133).

Fourth, the elective course system at Harvard v\as such that
students had a certain freedom in selecting their courses, while they
always had an end goal in mind: passing a general written exam lasting
seven hours. The exam, administered by the College, was a requirement
for graduation. By the 1 920s both the curriculum and the expectations of
the students were demanding indeed. The general written exam included
the following: discussing, for 90 minutes, ten books of the Bible; for
another 90 minutes, twelve plays of Shakespeare; for 60 minutes, the
works of tv\o of the following: Homer, Sophocles. Plato. Aristotle, Cicero,
Horace, Virgil; and for three hours, a special field of knowledge such as
German literature. Rather than merely take courses indiscriminately. Harvard
students now studied subjects systematically and rigorously. The
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures administered the
comprehensive exam covering German literature, which still approximates
today the comprehensive written M.A. exam at many Gennan departments
in the U.S.

Also in the 1920s Harvard introduced the tutorial system which
resembled the one in place at Oxford and Cambridge rather than at German
universities.'^ Individual conferences between students and tutors
(usually professors or full-time instructors) were held weekly, for 30 to 60
minutes. According to Burkhard, the ideal tutor did not supply information,
but told the student where to find it; he did not put ideas in the student's
head but encouraged the student to develop ideas of his own (her own, if
the student was from nearby Radcliffe College); he planted ambition where
it did not exist and cultivated it where it did. The results of the tutorial
system demonstrated that Harvard students knew their subjects
appreciably better than before the system was implemented. According
to Burkhard, the level of knowledge among Harvard's German
concentrators (or majors) exceeded even that of Ph.D. s in German from
other American universities. Similarly, the Harvard undergraduate theses
on German literature were reckoned to be superior to many non-Harvard

Ph.D. dissertations. Harvard had effectively raised the bar on itself: the
requirements for the M.A. were increased because of the tremendous
success of the tutorial system and the general written exams for
undergraduates.

Finally, Goethe tied everything neatly together at Harvard —
beginning, as already noted, with the Harvard students who visited Goethe
in the 181 Os and '20s, and continuing with the transcendentalists' interest
in Goethe in the mid- 19"" century. From 1914 to 1945,as well, Goethe was
the focus of Harvard's Germanists. A course first offered by Burkhard in
the late 1920s surveyed German civilization from the HUdebrandsIied Xo
the present day. This was a core class and well attended. According to
Burkhard, the history of German culture was replete with contrasts and
contradictions. The representative German was geographically northern,
historically modem, and temperamentally individualistic. The German
was torn between retaining these traits or becoming southern, ancient,
and social. The real masters among the Germans, Burkhard maintained,
achieved a compromise in these struggles. The "Gennan" Goethe ofGotz,
Werther, and Urfaustwas an emotional, romantic artist. Later, the "Greek"
Goethe returned from Italy and tried to become fomial and classic. Such
a synthesis was exemplary; Durer and Beethoven had also attained variant
forms. "Less sturdy" artists, in Burkhard's words, included Holderlin,
Kleist, Nietzsche, and Wagner. Grillparzer, Meyer, and Thomas Mann
stood somewhere in between.'"*

The Department of Gennanic Languages and Literatures did not
exist in a vacuum; all the while it needed to respond to events on campus
and in the world. To Harvard's critics, the University continued its pro-
German stance (sympathy to the Nazis) and anti-Semitism (enrollment
quotas).'^ Ofcourse one could hardly predict in the 1920s and early '30s
what would happen in the late '30s and '40s. Certainly no one would have
known that Harvard's president James B. Conant, beginning his tenure in
1933, would chip away at residual anti-Jewish practices at Harvard, to the
extent that, as one biographer has noted, they had largely collapsed by
the time Conant left Harvard in 1 953 (Hershberg 8 1 ).

Certain Gennan issues from 1933 to 1936 placed Conant and
Harvard directly in the spotlight (Tuttle 49-70). When an alumnus offered
in 1934 to endow a fellowship limited to Kentuckians "preferably of
predominantly white colonial descent, and necessarily of white
northwestern European descent," Conant insisted that any Harvard
fellowship must be awarded to "the most promising boys" regardless of
other considerations — a stance contrasting with Yale's acceptance in 1 936
of funds for a scholarship memorializing "the Anglo-Saxon race to which
the United States owes its culture" and restricted to "sons of white

Christian parents of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, or Teutonic descent,
both of whom were citizens of the United States and bom in America"
(Hershberg81).

At the time, two questions in particular tested Conant: ( 1 ) how
strongly would Harvard oppose the Nazi persecution of universities in
Germany, and (2) how fiercely would Harvard fight for its academic
freedom? Conant generally favored freedom of speech and the right to
widest differences of opinion, though this principle, when applied
practically, brought controversy once again to Harxard. The Harvard
Corporation did not have the University join the Emergency Committee
in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, a coalition publicly backed by the
presidents of Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, and other universities — viewed
by critics as an ostrich-like non-gesture (Hershberg 84).

Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein received honorary degrees
in 1935. A year later, during Harvard's 300"' anniversary. Harvard sent a
representative to Heidelberg University's SSO'*" anniversary, which to
Harvard's embarrassment was yet another Nazi spectacle. At Harvard's
Tercentenary, Conant conferred an honorary degree of Doctor of Science
upon Carl Jung, who, critics maintained, had condoned Nazi doctrines of
"Aryan" superiority in the Hitler purges. The citation read "a mental
physician whose wisdom and understanding have brought relief to many
in distress." Einstein declined his invitation to attend. As he said in 1 949:

The reason for me not to participate in the Harvard
Tercentenary celebration was not so much the presence
of Dr. Jung but the fact that representatives of German
universities had been invited, although it was generally
known that they were in full cooperation with Hitler's
acts of persecution against Jews and liberals, and
against cultural freedom in general. (Wagner 227-29)

Perhaps the most notorious incident of those years was the return
to Harvard of Hitler's press chief Ernst Hanfstaengl '09 for his 25"' class
day reunion. Hanfstaengl had earlier animated Hitler by composing a
march derived from a Harvard football cheer. 'That is what we need for
the movement, marvelous," Hitler said. As the story goes, "Fight, Fight.
Fight!" was converted into "Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil." Hitler had also hid
from the police in Hanfstaengl's house after the botched 1923 Munich
Beer Hall Putsch.

Hanfstaengl's trip to Harvard in 1934 was a Nazi-glorifying
publicity gambit. His visit divided Harvard. A right-wing faction of
students and the conservative student newspaper urged the

administration to confer an honorary degree on HanfstaengI in view of
his high government post. When HanfstaengI attended the 1934 Harvard
Commencement, police protected him. Protesters had placed anti-Hitler
stickers on the buildings in Harvard Yard. His hat was stolen and
readdressed to him "Care of Adolf Hitler, Berlin." On its crown, in Hebrew
letters, were inscribed the words "Thou shalt not kill." Two girls chained
themselves to a platform and, before they could be released, condemned
Hitler, HanfstaengI, and the Nazis to the multitude assembled in Harvard
Yard. Conant was criticized for allowing a man both mesmerized by Hitler
and engaging in the most venomous anti-Semitism in the pages oi Collier 's
to use Harvard for his purposes (HanfstaengI, My Leader 7-9).'^

This article would be remiss in not mentioning yet another
explanation of the meaning and origin of the Third Reich, this time
Hanfstaengl's inimitable definition as explained in 1934 to former
Harvard president Lowell:

You must realize how it started. We lost a war, had the
Communists in control of the streets and had to try and
build things up again. In the end the republic had thirty-
two parties, all of them too weak to do anything of
consequence and finally it was necessary to roll them
up into a State party, and that was Hitler. If a car gets
stuck in the mud and begins to sink deeper and deeper
and the engine stops, and then a man comes along and
pours something into the works which starts it up again,
you don't ask what it was he put in. You set to and get
the damned thing out. It may only have been
Begeisteningsschnapps, a kind of psychological
schnapps, but it is enough for the time being.

To which Lowell is said to have replied: "This whatever-you-called-it
may be all right to start with, but what happens when the driver gets
drunk on it?" (HanfstaengI, Unheard Witness 258). If nothing else,
HanfstaengI was a genius at dropping names, revising history, and being
self-serving — all the more reason for the reader to question the veracity
of this anecdote.

Amid all this Goethe served as balm and corrective. As a New
York Times editorial asked on April 11, 1938, one month after the
annexation of Austria and seven months before Kristallnacht: "What better
challenge to Hitlerism can there be than to get to know Lessing, Schiller
and Goethe?" Harvard's Gemian professors disseminated their message
on Goethe both internally, to their students, and externally, to their peers.

Karl Victor wrote two monographs, Derjimge Goethe ( 1 930) and Goethe:
DIchtung, Wissenschaft, We/thild (1949); Henry Hatfield wrote Goethe: A
Critical Introduction (1963). John Walz, president of the Modern
Language Association in 1941, admitted the Germanises difficulty in
working in America "while a large part of the world, including our own
Government, is demanding the destruction of [the German] government
and the curbing of [the German] people." Yet Walz delivered his
presidential address on what he called a suitable subject: the exemplary
Goethe, to whom the Association could turn for "guidance and comfort"
and "a guide to the future" (Walz, Guide 1 324). His 1 1 -page essay ends:
"I am fimily convinced that at least some of Goethe's ideas must be applied
in practice if the world is ever to attain a just balance."

The many complicated German issues at Harvard from 1 9 1 4 to
1945 indicate just how certain themes from that time and place remain
aktuell, in altered form, in the U.S. today. Harvard did not have its first
major student protests in the 1960s (Rosenblatt); Germany at war had
prompted vehement and sustained protests on campus decades earlier.
Harvard's study of the German national culture, founded at the Germanic
Museum, continues today in Harvard's Program for the Study of Germany
and Europe at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Several
similar programs and centers flourish today at other American universities.
In conclusion, many of Harvard's concerns in the first half of this century —
faculty to student ratio, patriotism, teaching vs. publishing, the canon,
academic freedom, political correctness, and sexuality — remain very much
a part of our national discourse.

Endnotes

' The student was Andrew Peabody, A.B. 1826.

- Deutsches Lesehuch fiir Anfdnger (Cambridge: Universitats Druckerei,
1826) and A Practical Reader Grammar of the German Language
(Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1 828). If that wasn't enough.
Pollen was said to have been the first to bring the decorated Christmas
tree to New England (see Ken Gewertz, "Professor Brought Christmas
Tree to New England," Harvard University Gazette (Dec. 12,1 996) 24).

^ The comment is Edward Everett Hale's.

^ Emerson, in an address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity at
Harvard on July 1 5, 1 838, mocked slightly the authors J. W. Alexander and
Albert B. Dod, whose 1 839 article in the Princeton Review, "Concerning
the Transcendental Philosophy of the Germans and of Cousin and Its
Influence on Opinion in This Country," discussed the "alarming symptom"
and influence of Gennan philosophy on the American transcendentalists.
See also Fred B. Wahr, "Emerson and the Germans," Monatshefle fiir
Deutschen Unterhcht 33.2 { 1 94 1 ) 49-63.

^ For a discussion of the Germanic Museum, see Goldman; Kuno Francke,
Handbook of the Germanic Museum, 7"' ed. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1929); Franziska von Ungem-Stemberg, Kidturpolitik
zwischen den Kontinenten: Deutschland iind Amerika: Das Germanische
Museum in Cambridge/ Mass., Beitrage zur Geschichte der Kulturpolitik,
Vol. 4 (Cologne: Bohlau, 1994). Foradiscussionof Harvard's Germanic
library collections, see Michael P. Olson, "Harvard's Germanic
Collections: Their History, Their Future," Harvard Library Bulletin new
series5.3(1994) 11-19.

^ For a discussion of the professors, see Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., "From
German to Germanic," The Development of Harvard University Since
the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869-1929 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1930)81-85.

^ See also Douglass Schand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard,
Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 2003); and Dinitia Smith, "American Culture's Debt to
Gay Sons of Harvard," A'evv York Tunes (May 29, 2003).

** "Die deutsche Literatur selbst in ihren groBten Vertretem blieb dem
durchschnittlichen Neuenglander schlieBlich doch etwas innerlich Femes;
von deutscher Kunst wuBte er iiberhaupt nichts; und deutsche Politik
erschien ihm mehr oder weniger verdachtig."

^ Selected poems are in Francke; see also Schmidt 2 1 2.

'" On July 14, 1915, the President of the U.S., Woodrow Wilson, had also
sent thanks and support to Francke via a typed letter and handwritten
signature (Papers of Kuno Francke, Harvard University Archives, HUG
1404.5, 1915-1917, folder T-Z).

" One postscript regarding Harvard's involvement in World War I: more
82

than 1 1 ,000 then-current and former Harvard men had enlisted in the war.
The walls of Memorial Chapel still list the names of some 375 causalities
in service of the Allied Forces, along with three (it is sometimes said four)
Harvard men who died in the German cause. This again created protest:
Gennans were honored in World War I. while a Civil War memorial
commemorated only Harvard's unionists, not its confederates (Morion,
Three Centuries of Harvard 460).

'- See Arthur Burkhard, "A Course in Contemporary German Literature,"
German Quarterly 3.4 (1930), p. 117-38; "An hitroductory Course in
the Histor>' of Gennan Civilization," Gennan Quarterly 2A (1929) 122-36;
and "The Harvard Tutorial System in German," Modern Language Journal
14.4(1930)269-84.

In today's colloquial tenns, Burkhard was a culture \ ulture par
excellence. He was thought to have set a record by attending 42
consecutive nights of theater in Munich and Salzburg. Burkhard
recuperated in Paris by going to the theater only 3-4 nights per week.
(See "Harvard Professor Sets Record — Sees 42 Plays Straight in
Gtrmonyr New York Herald Tribune JvmQ 14. 1936.)

A sports fan as well, Burkhard attended the Winter Olympic
Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Summer Olympics in Berlin
(both in 1 936). The New York World-Telegram related the following from
press headquarters in Garmisch-Partenkirchen:

Dr. Arthur Burkhard. an American who is a
professor at Harvard teaching Gennan culture to the
young, dropped into the room to compose a few deep
thoughts for the Christian Science Monitor and was
denounced by a yellow-haired youth as an enemy of
Germany. The young man told the Countess [von
BemstortT. who organized the press headquarters] that
on Thursday night at the hockey match, which Canada
won from Gemiany, the professor had spoken of the
German crowd as a mob. He seemed to think the
professor was a German, and a disloyal one at that.
and more or less put it up to the Countess to do
something about it. although he didn't say what.

The professor got sore and told the young
man he would either have to prove his charge or defend
himself in a suit for damages, and the squealer then
began to hedge, saying he hadn't heard the professor's
remark himself but that his girl friend had.

"Well, then, bring her in," the professor said.

The young man dragged in a not very
toothsome wench in a somewhat flea-bitten leopard skin
coat, who said she had not only heard this good Herr
Doktor Professor call the crowd a mob but refer to the
people as lowbrows and roughnecks as well.

The Countess was disposed to laugh it off as
a matter of no importance, but the professor seemed to
think if he didn't clear it up at once it might get worse
later on. The man and the woman eased out of the door
to the crowd on the sidewalk, but the professor chased
after them and renewed the fuss in public.

It then developed that both squealers were
German outlanders living in Czechoslovakia, who
merely wanted to receive credit for turning in a traitor.
That's all there was to it, and the Harvard professor
came through the incident all right, but it was an
interesting demonstration of the squeal, which seems
to make life interesting in a country where a casual
remark may assume the most solemn importance.
(Pegler, Westbrook. "Fair Enough," New York World-
Telegram, 18 Feb. 1936.)

'^ On the exams and the tutorial system, see "The Harvard Tutorial
System in German."

'"* See "An Introductory Course in the History of Gennan Civilization."

'-^ On the Jewish experience at Harvard in the early 20"' century, see Leo
W, Schwarz, Wolfson of Harvard: Portrait of a Scholar (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1978), especially 23-40; Morton
Rosenstock, "Are There Too Many Jews at Harvard?" Antisemitism in
the United States, ed. Leonard Dinnerstein (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1971) 102-08; and Nitza Rosovsky, The Jewish Experience
at Harvard and Radclijfe {Cambridge: Harvard Semitic Museum, 1986).

''' On Hanfstaengl at Harvard in 1934, see Wagner, p. 227-29; and Hershberg
85-88.

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— . "In Memoriam, Kuno Francke." German Quarterly 3.4 ( 1 930).

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Follen, Charles. "Inaugural Discourse Delivered before the University in
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Fallen s Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and
America ] 796-1840. By Edmund Spevack. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard, 1997.

Francke, Kuno. Deutsche Arbeit in Amerika: Erinnerungen. Leipzig:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 1 930.

— . "Die Deutschamerikaner, die Harvard Universitat und der Krieg." 4
Apr. 1915.4 unnumbered pages. Papers of Karl I letor. Harvard
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— . Handbook of the Germanic Museum. 7* Ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard,
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— . Letter New York Times. 3 Feb. 1915: 10.

Gewertz, Ken. "Professor Brought Christmas Tree to New England."
Harx'ard Universit}' Gazette. 1 2 Dec. 1 996: 24.

Goldman, Guido. A History of the Germanic Museum at Harvard
University. Cambridge, MA: Minda de Gunzburg Center for
European Studies, Harvard University, 1989.

Hanfstaengl. Ernst F.S. "My Leader." Collier's. 4 Aug. 1934.7-9.

— . Unheard Witness. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincotl, 1957.

Hansen, Thomas S. "Charles Pollen." Harvard Magazine. Sept. -Oct.
2002: 38.

Harding, Anneliese. John Qiiincy Adams: German-American Literary
Studies. Boston: Boston Public Library, 1979.

Hatfield, Henry C. and Joan Merrick. "Studies of German Literature in the
United States 1 939- 1 946." Modern Language Review 43.3 ( 1 948).

Hershberg, James G. James B. Conant: Han'ard to Hiroshima and the
Making of the Nuclear Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1 993.

Howard, William Guild. "In Memoriam: Hans Carl Giinther von Jagemann,
Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Harvard University." Germanic
Review \.?>.{\92()): 219.

von Klenze, Camillo. "Gernian Literature in the Boston Transcript.""
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Lowell, A. Lawrence. At War with Academic Traditions in America.
Cambridge: Harvard, 1934.

Mackall, Leonard L. "Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Amerikanem:
Goethes Geschenk an die Harvard University." Goethe-Jahrbuch
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Meyer, Eduard. "Der Geist von Harvard." Vossische Zeitung. 1 Mar.
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Morison, Samuel Eliot. Ed. "From German to Germanic." The Development
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— . Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636-1936. Cambridge, MA: Harvard,
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— . "Twenty-Five Years in America: The First Chapter of an Unfinished
Autobiography" Centwy 94. 1 ( 1 9 1 7): 42-43.

Olson, Michael P. "Harvard's Germanic Collections: Their History, Their
FulUTQ.^" Han'ard Libraiy Bulletin New Series 5.3 (1994): 11-19.

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The North American Review 20. ( 1 824): 303-25.

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1917, folder G-L.

A Practical Reader Grammar of the German Language. Boston: Hilliard,
Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1 828.

Roedder, Edwin C. "Hans Carl Giinther von Jagemann: Ein Gedenkblatt."
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Rosenbaum, David. "How Harvard Went Butch." Boston Magazine.
Dec. 1996.

Rosenblatt, Roger. Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harx'ard Wars of
1969. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.

Rosenstock, Morton. "Are There Too Many Jews at Harvard?"
Antisemitism in the United States. Ed. Leonard Dinnerstein.
New York: Holt, Rineharl and Winston, 1 97 1 .

Rosovsky, Nitza. The Jewish Experience at Harvard and RadcUffe.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Semitic Museum, 1986.

Schand-Tucci, Douglass. The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality,
and the Shaping of American Culture. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 2003.

Schmidt, Henry J. "The Rhetoric of Survival: The Germanist in America
from 1 900 to 1 925." America and the Germans: An Assessment of
a Three-Hundred Year Histoiy. Vol. 2. Ed. Frank Trommler and
Joseph McVeigh. 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 1985.

Schultz. Arthur R. "Margaret Fuller — Transcendentalist Interpreter of
German Literature." Monatshefte 34.4 (1942): 1 69-82.

Schwarz, Leo W. Wolfson ofHan'ard: Portrait of a Scholar Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1978.

Slochower, Harry. "Margaret Fuller and Goethe." Germanic Review 7.2
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Smith. Dinitia. "American Culture's Debt to Gay Sons of Harvard." New
York Times. 29 May 2003.

Townsend, Kim. Matihood at Harvard: William James and Others. New
York: W.W.Norton. 1996.

Tuttle, William M. "American Higher Education and the Nazis: The Case
of James B. Conant and Harvard University's 'Diplomatic
Relations' with Germany." American Studies 20. 1 { 1 979): 49-70.

Ungern-Sternberg, Franziska von. Kulturpolitik zwischen den
Kontinenten: Deutschland und Amerika: Das Germanische
Museum in Cambridge/Mass. Beitrage zur Geschichte der
Kulturpolitik. Vol. 4. Cologne: Bohlau, 1994.

Wagner, Charles Abraham. Harvard: Four Centuries and Freedoms.
NewYork:Dulton, 1950.

Wahr, Fred B. "Emerson and the Germans." Monatshefte fiir Deutschen
Vnteiricht 33.2 ( 1 94 1 ): 49-63.

Walsh, James E. and Eugene M. Weber. Goethe: An Exhibition at the
Houghton Librmy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library
and Goethe Institute of Boston, 1982.

Walz, John A. German Influence in American Education and Culture.
Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1936.

— . "A Guide to the Future." Publications of the Modern Language
Association 56 Supplement ( 1 94 1 ): 1324.

Permit me a personal note about Ehrhard Bahr. As a graduate
student in UCLA's Department of Gennanic Languages in the 1 980s, I took
several courses on Goethe with Ted. His courses were unifonnly brilliant
and constituted my very best experiences as a student. Ted was (and
remains) an excellent teacher: at all times fair, direct, organized, interactive,
and infomied.

Ted was an outstanding mentor in three other ways. First, he
monitored my own teaching perfomiance in Gemian classes at UCLA,
and offered welcome advice and suggestions for improvement. Second, I
assisted Ted in his course on 20"''-century Gemian culture and civilization.
His preparation and commitment were wonderful models. Third. Ted
supervised the writing of my Ph.D. dissertation on Heinrich Boll. Ted was
always accurate in telling me when certain passages of the dissertation
were good and others — many others — needed improvement.

As an editor of this journal in 1987, 1 had the happy occasion to
interview Martin Walser, who incidentally knows Goethe's works quite
well. Walser said to me that the American campus is the most privileged
terrain ever organized by humans {der amerikanische Campus ist das
priviligierteste Geldnde, das je von Menschen organisiert wurde). Walser
had studied at Harvard in the 1950s, at Henry Kissinger's International
Seminar, where he attended lectures by Eleanor Roosevelt, Thornton Wilder,
and David Riesman. Such an experience, it seems to me, represents the
best of the American university: the university as the locus of ideas.
Viewed in this light, being associated with Ted continues to be my great
privilege. My proudest professional moment was when "Professor Bahr"
and "Mr. Olson" became "Ted" and "Mike." I am greatly indebted to Ted,
who is without question the single most important person in my career in
Germanic studies. Ted's professionalism and his very humane qualities
continue to be my models.

Ted, as always, all best wishes and congratulations on your
magnificent career.

Composing for the Films:

Adorno and Schoenberg in Hollywood

Lisa Parkes, University of Caiifornia, Los Angeles

One of the more curious moments in musical history took place
in Hollywood in 1 935, when Arnold Schoenberg was approached by Irving
Thalberg at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studios to compose the music
for a film based on Pearl Buck's novel The Good Earth.' Schoenberg,
who had secured a professorship at the University of Southern California
upon arrival in Los Angeles in 1 933 and subsequently, in 1 936, at UCLA,
was financially more comfortable than many other exile composers, and
therefore not dependent on what was commonly referred to as
"Brotarbeiten," which was music for the films. All the more reason, then,
for the general bafflement among some of his contemporaries, as is
summed up nicely by one of his critics in 1935: "Only one thing more
fantastical than the thought of Arnold Schoenberg in Hollywood is
possible, and that thing has happened. Since arriving there about a year
ago, Schoenberg has composed in a melodic manner and in recognizable
keys. That is what Hollywood has done to Schoenberg. We may now
expect tonal fugues by Shirley Temple" (Feisst 107).' Negotiations with
the producer began, and Schoenberg started sketching some of the music.
But Schoenberg then committed the blunder of demanding not only fifty
thousand dollars — double what Thalberg had initially envisaged — but
also full control of the soundtrack, including the dialogue. Schoenberg's
terms were promptly rejected ( Vierlel 310-11).

Although this and a number of other film music projects
ultimately failed to materialize, the very juxtaposition of Schoenberg —
the quintessentially "difficult" modem composer — with the industry of
mass entertainment and its production demands encapsulates the peculiar
and contradictory position into which many exiled German composers
were thrown while in Los Angeles: namely, how to compose "bread-and-
butter" film music without compromising their artistic integrity, and how
to negotiate the tension between assimilation into and resistance to the
Hollywood entertainment culture. Schoenberg's failure and subsequent
disillusionment with the film industry is indicative of the

uncompromisingly stringent film production procedures that involved
much conflict between the competing divisions of labor. For even v\ ithin
the music departments themselves there was a division of labor — between
the composer, the arranger, the orchestrator, the performer, the recorder —
that potentially stymied individual creativity, reducing the composer to
just one more point on the assembly line of industrial film production.

Perhaps less unexpected, in view of Schoenberg's dilemma, was
Theodor Adomo's agreement nine years later to co-author with Hanns
Eisler — another composer in exile and a fonner student of Schoenberg —
a critical study on the composition and consumption of film music, which
was completed in Los Angeles in 1944. Adomo was Schoenberg's greatest
advocate, and the project promised to tackle precisely the kinds of
problems suffered by Schoenberg in his various encounters with film
producers. By investigating the relationship between the movie, music,
original and synthetic sound, Adomo and Eisler hoped to counter these
problems by suggesting new aesthetic possibilities for the film composer.
But from its very inception the project was fraught with political
complications. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1939, the project
first supported Eisler through his initial years in exile after having been
forced to leave Gennany in 1938 on account of his left-wing and anti-
fascist political activities (Schebera 64-102). Ironically, it was the
association of Eisler with the same political activities that would later
force him to leave the US, just after the book's publication in 1947, when
Eisler was summoned for investigation by the House Committee on Un-
American Activities. When the Committee tried to incriminate Eisler for
being "the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field," Eisler's
response, that he "would be flattered" by such a comparison, could hardly
have helped his case (Hearings 25). Nor could it have helped that the
Committee disliked his music [Hearings 59), and were not swayed by
Eisler's argument that it was Fascism, not he, that had "destroyed art"
(Hearings 36). Only after a considerable amount of protesting and
petitioning on the part of prominent figures such as Charlie Chaplin,
Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Albert Einstein, was Eisler in a position
to choose a "voluntary deportation" in 1948. when he left the US for
Prague.

What is significant for the project Composing for the Films- was
that this episode had prompted Adorno to withdraw his name as co-
author, and thus disentangle himself from such political implications.
Thus began what would remain a rather murky history of the book's
authorship. Adomo was not to be acknowledged as co-author until 1 969.
when it was published by Rogner and Bemhard in West Germany. The
subsequent quibbling on Adomo's part about who wrote how much of

what continues to blur our picture of the exact division of labor between
the authors; however, there is reason and evidence enough to assume
that Adomo took responsibility for the more theoretical, Eisler for the
more practical aspects of the project. Since arriving in the US in 1938,
Adomo had already completed a number of related projects in New York,
under the auspices of the Princeton Radio Research Program and the
Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, that delved into topics such as
'The Radio Symphony," "On Popular Music," and the "NBC Music
Appreciation Hour"; Eisler, since his arrival in the US in 1938, had already
started composing music for a couple of commercial and documentary
films (Schebera 78-85).'*

Nevertheless, the reader of Composing for the Films is still left
with the uneasy task of surmising a fully coherent argument from what is
the hybrid product of politically conflicting labors; indeed, Adomo's and
Eisler 's political discord made for a potentially rocky collaboration.
Relations between the two had become particularly strained ever since
Eisler had abruptly abandoned his teacher Schoenberg (despite the fact
that Schonberg waived his tuition fee!) along with his compositional
techniques in 1 927 in favor of a more radical, Brechtian kind of "political"
art. This move signaled a rebellion against what he regarded as the elitism
of "new music" in its neglect of social conflicts. Renouncing "bourgeois"
modernist art and its exponents, Eisler joined Bertolt Brecht in promoting
a more politically engaged style intended to transform society: by
synthesizing elements of "high" with popular genres and with modem
technological resources, Eisler intended to create a new musical idiom
that would speak to the aspirations of the working class. However, far
less convinced of such didactic forms of art ("Zur gesellschaftlichen
Lage" 730-1), Adomo argued that any art that does not enter into a
dialectical relation with its social function loses, indeed obscures, its
social-critical potential, as in the case with "Gebrauchsmusik," which
orients itself to market demands and, ultimately, affmns the status quo
(732-4). Genuinely "autonomous" art, he would argue, refuses easy
communicability (hence Schoenberg); moreover, the truest reflection of
our situation as alienated individuals within a late-industrial society is
the non-identity not only between society and the art work but, more
importantly, within the artwork itself and according to its own material
and formal laws (734). For this reason, Adorno was the greatest advocate
of Schoenberg's free atonality, which exemplified high modernism by
resisting commodification while reflecting within the musical material itself
the deterioration of the "organic" artwork. This also partly explains his
rejection of the later 12-tone school, whose systematized "technique" he
considered symptomatic of "commmodification." This skepticism about

the later Schoenberg reflected Adomo's growing wariness of an uncritical
endorsement of technological innovation in art because of its capacity
for mechanical reproduction and thus commodification, mass
dissemination and manipulation, the catastrophic results of which could
be witnessed in Hitler's Germany, from which he and Eisler had just
escaped. Indeed, much of what Adomo would write during his years in
exile was motivated by what he considered the disastrous culmination of
these tendencies in Nazi Germany, with its devotion to technological
progress, mass entertainment and consumption.

One work that lays much of the groundwork for his subsequent
critique of Hollywood mass entertainment as the logical extension of his
critique of fascism is his Versuch fiber Wagner of 1937-38. In this work,
Adorno locates the gerni of German fascism in Wagner's compositional
techniques, some of which manipulate and subordinate the individual to
the illusory whole, and in the means by which Wagner integrates "high
art" into popular culture. Wagner, so the argument goes, is the composer-
conductor who aspires to control all possible effects: by calculating the
effect of the music on its audience, Wagner subsumes the audience into
the effect of the work, thereby closing the gap between audience and
artwork and creating the illusion of totality and identity between audience
and artwork, individual and whole (28). The musical experience manages
to both whet and satisfy the listener's emotional appetite, thus endowing
each individual with a false sense of spontaneity, or, in Adomo's terms,
"pseudo-individuality." The audience is thus transformed into the
conformed and objectified consumer of the artist's calculation; indeed,
the audience derives pleasure from being beaten by Wagner's baton into
submission and conformity (28).

Adorno argues that Wagner's techniques realize their full
"potential" in Hollywood where aesthetic concerns are predicated on an
audience that has little to no critical or discriminating capacity. The present
audience's listening habits are every bit as acute as its ability to choose
from a standard restaurant menu: as long as items are recognizable, they
are consumable. "Atomized" listening, or the popular custom of
identifying a theme, was indicative of regressive listening and had now
become identical with "musical appreciation," even with "fun"
("Analytical" 352). "Commodity listening" ideally dispenses with all
intellectual activity and is content with "consuming and evaluating its
gustatory qualities— just as if the music which tasted best were also the
best music possible" ("A Social Critique" 211). Indeed, this is the very
ideal, Adorno continues, of "Aunt Jemima's ready-mix for pancakes
extended to the field of music" ("Analytical" 211). In short, commodity
and retrogressive listening, conformity, increasing standardization and

musical fetishism are some of the tendencies Adomo identifies in the
musical tradition ever since it had "gone to the market" at the end of the
eighteenth century.

It is in this context that Composing for the Films ought to be
considered, for it is here that echoes of his Wagner text can be clearly
heard. Furthermore, it picks up some important strains of Adorno's
argument that infonn two other works central to his critical project in
Los Angeles — Dialektik der Aujlkldrung (also of 1944) and his
Philosophie der neiien Musik (completed in 1 947). The pivotal categories
named above make their comeback in Composing for the Fihns, where
Adorno redirects critical fire at many of the exiled German composers,
such as Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, and Erich Korngold, whose
successes in Hollywood he attributes to their alleged realization of
Wagner's aesthetic program of the ''Gesamtkunstwerk" in an all-
consuming Hollywood dream-work.

Composing for the Fihns proposes that the most fundamental
contradiction in sound-film is its false claim to immediacy. By insisting
on its total, organic, singular and natural whole it masks the reality of its
mediation of disparate, contradictory and reproducible elements. Far from
a seamless and natural process, film production methods comprised a
heterogeneous and highly rationalized organization and division of labor
that illustrate its remoteness from the organic ideal. Commercial film
music underscored and promoted the film's illusion of totality and
immediate reality with a familiar musical idiom with which the audience
could easily identify. Music would thus "round off any rough edges" of
the mechanical reproduction and drown out consciousness of its mediated
construction. It interposes the "human coating," the "cement" that "holds
together elements that otherwise would oppose each other unrelated —
the mechanical product and the spectators, and also the spectators
themselves" (Eisler 59). Music, with its capacity to impress itself directly
on the passive listener, turns the picture into a close-up, bringing it even
closer to the public, "so as to mask the heartlessness of late-industrial
society by late-industrial techniques" (Eisler 59). Motion pictures are,
after all, "entirely divorced from that living contact with the audience ...
[and] the alleged will of the public is manifested only indirectly through
the box-office receipts, that is to say, in a completely reified fonn" (Eisler
58). Music serves to amplify, motivate, and justify the visual component,
endowing the action with so-called "spontaneity" by "supplying
momentum, muscular energy, a sense of corporeity, as it were" (Eisler
78). The ideological role of music, then, is to obscure the lack of humanity
of the film industry, whose rationalized and mechanized modes of
production indicate the irrelevance of the human individual.

Adomo and Eisler continue to dismantle those aspects of film-
scoring that enhance this ideological effect. First, they observe that the
dominant methods of film-scoring derive from the familiar expressive
idiom of late-nineteenth-century Romantic music, such as that of Wagner,
Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss, which is intensively and excessively
affective. But. in film, musical affect is rationalized as "cheap mood-
producing gadgets" that produce the "Aha! Nature!" effect (Eisler 13),
which is reminiscent of the popular practice of naming Wagner's various
leitmotifs (such as the "Nothungsmotif or "Liebestodmotif) common
in promotional and educational literature on Wagner. Repetition is the
key here. Of Wagner, Adorno observes that it is the easy-to-remember
leitmotiv that guarantees easy recognition and therefore intelligibility even
to the fatigued, probably forgetful, perhaps even unmusical individual
during re-creation time, who has no alternative but to capitulate ("Versuch"
29). But in cinema music, Adomo continues, the sole function of the
leitmotiv is to announce heroes or situations so as to help the audience
orient itself more easily (44). The potential function of the leitmotif is fully
audible in the Hollywood entertainment industry, where its commodity-
function resembles that of an advertisement (28-9). In cinema, however, it
loses any structural significance it might have had within the larger
framework of the Wagnerian musical work. The visual cue in film
rationalizes the musical motif by fixing its "meaning"; conversely, the
music becomes a sort of musical stage prop enabling the listener
instantaneously to understand the action. Thus, to the extent that music is
supposed to ensure continuity rather than contradict the motion picture,
music is at its best when it is unobtrusive. In short, the ideological effect
of dominant film-music is the rationalization and management of the
viewer's emotion.

Adorno and Eisler propose ways to undercut the ideological
effect of commercial film by employing music to expose rather than
obscure these contradictions. Rather than promoting identity between
the visual and aural, Adomo and Eisler v\ anted to direct attention to their
non-identity, and to explore the fruitful tensions between them (Eisler
122). This is what they called "genuine montage," according to which
music would make audible the incompatibilities of the different media
with techniques of musical interruption, counterpoint and affective
distancing. By promoting a dialectical montage of sound and vision that
complicates, rather than reafilmis, our understanding of the motion picture,
the audience can no longer passively identify with the visual element but
is forced to participate actively in the tensions of the film's construction.

Eisler and Adomo ultimately aimed at a critique of the very
mediated nature of the film and its reproducibility, which, for Adomo.

was the culmination of fascist tendencies within the cuUure industry of
late capitalism. How, then, was Eisler to put such theories of dialectical
music into practice? As Ehrhard Bahr has noted (40-6 1 ), Eisler presented
the results of the project at the Writers' Congress at UCLA in October
1943 and again in 1944 with musical examples from his experimental
and documentary film music. Most subsequent commentaries have
concentrated on Eisler's non-commercial, experimental and documentary
film scores, which seems beside the point. But what of his commercial
film music — the kind of music he took to task in Composing for the Films?
Eisler wrote the music for eight commercial films, two of which earned
him nominations for an Oscar. Given the peculiar situation of the composer
in exile who is critical of an entertainment industry that supposedly
replicates formulas of fascist entertainment, how does Eisler negotiate
commercial success with a critique of its methods from within the very
medium that is its exemplary manifestation?

This tension is best explored in the two commercial films for
which Eisler was nominated for an Oscar and which were written around
the same time as the project Composing for the Films: Fritz Lang's anti-
Nazi film Hangmen also Die of 1943, and Clifford Odets' None but the
Lonely Heart of \944.

Music in Hangmen also Die is curiously absent for approximately
130 of the film's total of 134 minutes. There is one moment of "genuine
montage," however, that deserves our brief attention, when Heydrich's
assassin makes his escape into a cinema run by their Nazi "protectors,"
in which the Czech citizens are enjoying some scenes from what is
probably the river "Vltava" to the sound of Smetana's "Vltava" from the
symphonic poem "Ma Vlast." This sequence frames a moment in which
the viewer is made aware of the mediated nature of the motion picture;
furthermore, the viewer is alerted to the fact that fundamental to this
medium as Nazi entertainment is the constancy of sound as a form of
distraction — another point that recalls Adomo's critique of Wagner. When
interrupted by the announcement of Heydrich's assassination, we see the
audience break out of their soporific state as the film and thus the music
is silenced. Thereupon follows an eerie silence — in stark contrast to this
frame within the film — that dominates much of the rest of the film. The
scene that follows shows Heydrich the Hangman in a hospital bed, after
the attempt on his life. Eisler takes the dripping of the blood as a point of
departure, marking its effects in the pizzicato in the strings, a piano figure
in a high register, and a playful figure on the piccolo to diminish sympathy
with Heydrich's death (Eisler 27-8).

Similar moments of "genuine montage" are audible in None hut
the Lonely Heart, in which the tensions between the commercial demands

of film music and a critique of such commercialism are played out within
the film itself The film can be interpreted on at least two levels. On one
level it is simply the story about Emie Motte, played by Gary Grant, who
returns to his miserable mother and the general misery of London's East
End, where he rekindles one fomier relationship with a cellist only to
start up another affair with another woman, with whom he falls in love.
His hopeful love affair, however, is doomed, as the woman in question
returns to her former husband, a gangster who has recently taken over the
local amusement park. Meanwhile, the strained relationship with his
mother takes a turn for the better once Emie learns of her fatal illness, to
which she eventually succumbs towards the end of the film. On this level,
then, the film reads like a rather tepid story about the tensions between a
mother and her son, accompanied by a standard sub-plot about a failed
romance. The music is for the most part fittingly predictable, consisting
of two love-themes, recurring on cue at moments of tenderness, verified
in the warm texture provided by the strings. Emie Motte himself is
endowed with a scherzando motif that suggests an almost mischievous
side to his character, which encourages sympathy with his fate. And each
time Ernie approaches his mother's house, he is accompanied by a
descending full-tone scale played on the clarinet, oboe, and bassoon,
underscored punctuated with violin pizzicato, that precedes a more serious
musical moment that suggests the tension between him and his mother.
This collection of motifs helps the viewer to understand the emotional
content of the story.

On a more subtle level, this movie offers a sharp social critique
that operates on the level of narration and that is replicated in the music.
First of all, the story is framed by a historical reference to the two World
Wars, which is introduced at the beginning by a narrator who comments
sardonically on the fate that lies behind and ahead of our "humble hero,"
Emie Motte. Musically, this scene is interesting in that it seems to carry
out exactly what Eisler prescribed for effective film-score writing, as it
negates the visual message. Ernie Motte is passing by a tombstone of an
"Unknown Warrior" of WWI, whose alleged heroic glory is undercut by
the bombastic and dissonant cacophony that inspires more fear than
sympathy for the war hero. This more critical musical moment is
subsequently inteirupted by the "Emie-Motte-retums-to-his-mother" motif
that effectively trivializes the previous narration. From this moment, we
can rely on the music to clarify, rather than complicate, our understanding
of the story by providing appropriate cues.

However, there is a crucial moment in the second half of the film
where the story and the narrative come to musical blows, hi this scene an
elderly woman tries to sell her bird, to which she is very attached, to Emie

Motte but discovers that it has in the meantime died. Within the cacophony
that accompanies her shock one hears a reference to the "Emie-Motte-
retiims-to-his-mother" motif, the descending full-tone scale. The music
thus attaches significance to the bird's death by relating it to his mother's
imminent death, which will now trouble Ernie greatly. What this moment
also does is refer us musically to the cacophony of the opening frame and
thus to the futility of human endeavor, indeed of humanity itself, during
the interwar years. Furthermore, there is a brief moment where diegetic
(which is a child's piano lesson) and non-diegetic music (equivalent to
narrative music) collide to produce a little more cacophony, alerting us
not only to the difference between the film's story and the narrative but
also to the mediated nature of the music. Again, this exemplifies the kind
of genuine montage that Eisler saw as a critical tool for exploring, rather
than concealing, the tensions between different media.

There is one further point of significance in this moment for the
story of Ernie Motte's struggle through the interwar years. Ernie Motte
has perfect pitch, and everything is out of tune; even the mechanical piano
in the amusement park is flat. Even more to the point, however, Ernie
himself is out of tune with the times, for there is little use for his talents
within a capitalist society that relies on mechanized techniques of
reproducibility and that renders the perfomier, even the human individual,
almost irrelevant. For this reason, Ernie chooses to fumble around in his
shabby clothes on the fringes of society, naming the pitch of any object
that can produce one. This movie is all about music — its title refers to a
piece of music by Tchaikovsky perfonned by his fonner girlfriend on the
cello — and articulates precisely the issues of stymied creativity within a
rationalized social system that bear directly on Eisler's own work as a
Hollywood film composer.

None hilt the Lonely Heart is full of the tensions between
performed and mechanized music. Most significantly, mechanized music
is associated with the well-dressed rogues who capitalize on it in their
amusement park, which is equipped with its own mechanical piano. If
human endeavor is barely relevant in music, then it comes as no surprise
that the main gangster refers to himself as a "machine" that kills whenever
necessary for material gain. Indeed, technology seems to have invaded
into all affairs of human existence, including the body: even Ernie Motte's
mother explains her illness in terms of her "machinery wearing down."
And when Ernie Motte's new beloved leaves him to return to her gangster
husband, Ernie is seen contemplating the music box that was a gift to her
from the gangster. Ernie loses out in both love and music to the capitalist
bullies.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the film, and one where

these points converge, is the car crash that kills one of the gangsters; the
new human "machines," in other words, fall victim to their own machinery.
The horn of the crashed car sounds, a policeman stands to the side and
blesses the victim, and Ernie Motte responds by simply naming the horn's
pitch as an E-flat. The juxtaposition of Ernie Motte 's pointed commentary
with the policeman's religious blessing serves to underscore once more
the irrelevance of humanity in a world of machines.

Here, it seems. None but the Lonely Heart visits the same
polemical avenues mapped out in Composing/or the Films, namely, those
surrounding the problem of modem human existence consumed by mass-
technological appeal and under the grip of late-capitalism. But the question
remains as to what extent Eisler reconciles his aesthetic and political
demands with the demands of the film industry that he is scrutinizing,
and how the political tensions between Adomo and Eisler pan out. That
is to say, to what extent is Eisler successful in his immanent critique of
the commercial film music? The box-otTice receipts would suggest that
he was not terribly successful. (Weber) despite the fact that the film was
voted "Best Picture of the Year" by the National Board of Review,
(Fetrow). and placed eighth on the "Ten Best Films" list in the New York
Times Film Reviews. The New York Times ( 1 6) commends Eisler for his
"magnificent musical score" that had been "worked, with sound and image,
into a symphonic entity" in what was "truly a specimen film, both in sight
and sound"; but the review concluded, without explaining why, that this
picture would "not be widely accepted just now." Possible reasons for its
non-popularity are suggested in a review in Theatre Arts, however,
according to which the soundtrack's contribution to the "total effect" of
the film is hampered by weaker moments of rather tenuous "dramatic
motivations of musical effects" — a complete reversal of Eisler 's and
Adomo's objection to dominant film scores. Moreover, Odets' script
reveals old "habits of theatre thought"; and, tellingly, "the natural
development of the story is further disturbed by several unmoti\ ated and
unnecessary attempts to relate the case of Ernie Motte to the larger
problems of a world on the verge of a second world war" (Rev. of None
but the Lonely Heart, 719-20). What this review reveals, in fact, is that
the critical moments of the film and musical score are lost not only on the
general public, but also on some of the critics themselves.

Not all critics, however, were unaware of the film's critical
design — albeit perhaps a less effective one. A review from Films in Review
explains that "there is a considerable discrepancy between what Odets
thinks he shows us — a hero unable to elude the too wary grip of the
tyrannous Mordoni (and that whole 'machine' of which Mordoni is a
part) — and what he really shows us, which is the human spirit ... on its

knees for quite another cause" (32-38). If this is the case, then perhaps
Adorno, and not Eisler, was on the right track after all when he suggested
that audience "taste" and "appreciation" depended on recognition, easy
comprehensibility, and self-identification with the "total effect" of the
film. Eisler and Odets, it seems, had been too subtle; the film's reception
indicates little patience for such subtleties. The social critique seemed to
have fallen on deaf ears, and while the music did assist in organizing the
audience's emotions to a certain extent, it failed to organize the right
ones: the love story founders, the mother dies, and Ernie Motte seems
destined to become another "Unknown Warrior" of the Second World
War.

But is it then necessary, even relevant, to infer from its lack of
box-office success a conflation of the American culture industry and
Gennan fascist ideology along the lines suggested by Adorno? And should
one extrapolate from this study of the role of art within capitalist society
an implicit critique of the German fascist culture? In other words, is
Adorno 's implicit and what might be construed as a reductive equation
of German fascism with the Hollywood film industry** adequate to the
task of understanding the film-composer's critical task? While some
Hollywood exiles might have had more success in exploring the musical
means to question such an unproblematic linkage between fascism and
the culture industry, as Koepnick has argued, Eisler's and Odets' project
seems to align the rationalized principles of film music with those of
fascism. Indeed, written during World War II, None but the Lonely Heart
may imply precisely this sort of complicity on Hollywood's part. And the
final scene that resumes the film's narrative frame seems to suggest just
that: Ernie Motte ponders the futility of all existence as fighter planes are
heard rumbling overhead towards the Second World War, in which the
human soul, Emie suggests, will be destroyed in a mass technological
spectacle.

Endnotes

' For more on this encounter, see Sabine M. Feisst, "Arnold Schoenberg
and the Cinematic Art," The Musical Quarterly 83: 1 ( 1 999): 93- 1 13. Salka
Viertel, who was working for MGM, and who arranged and attended their
meeting, recounts the negotiation between Thalberg and Schoenberg in
her Das unbelehrbare Herz: Em Leben in der Welt des Theaters, der
Literatur unddes Films (Hamburg: Claassen, 1 970) 309- 1 2.

^ Olin Downes, after a New York premier of the Suite for String Orchestra
100

inG in October 1935. Cited in Feisst 107.

^ I refer to its English title as it was first published in English by Oxford
University Press ( 1 947).

■* Between 1940-1941, for example, Eisler wrote music for documentary
films such as Kinderszeuen in eiriem Camp, for John Ford's Grapes of
Wrath, Herbert Kline's Foi-gotten Ullage, and Joris Ivens' Regen.

■ See Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler
and Hollywood (Berkeley: U. of California P., 2002), especially 1-19; and
Andreas Huyssen, "Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard
Wagner," in After the Great Divide: Modernism. Mass Culture.
Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 16-43.

Works Cited

Adomo, Theodor. "Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation
How\' The Musical Quarterly. Vol. 78:2 (summer 1994): 325-377.

— . "On Popular Music," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9.
(1941): 17-48.

— . "The Radio Symphony, an Experiment in Theory." Radio Research.
Ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton. New York: Duell,
Sloan and Pearce, 1 94 1 . 11 0-39.

— . "A Social Critique of Radio Music." ATe/n'ow^ev/evr. Vol. 7:2(1945):
208-17.

— . "Versuch iiber Wagner." Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 13. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970-. 20 vols.

— . "Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik." Gesammelte Schriften.
Vol. 18. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970-. 20 vols.

Bahr, Ehrhard. "Der Schriftstellerkongress 1943 an der Universitat von
Kalifomien." Deutsche Exilliteraturseit 1933. Vol. 1. California:
Bern, 1976.40-61. 3 vols.

Eisler, Hanns. Composing for the Films. London: Athlone Press, 1994.

101

Feisst. Sabine M. "Arnold Schoenberg and the Cinematic Art." The
Musical Quarterly 83:1(1 999): 93- 1 1 3 .

Fetrow, Alan. Feature Films 1940-49: A United States Fihnography.
Jefferson: McFarland, 1994.

Hearings Regarding Hanns Eisler Washington: U. S. Government
Printing Office, 1947.

Huyssen, Andreas. "Adomo in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard
Wagner." After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 16-43.

Koepnick. Lutz. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema bet^veen Hitler and
Hollym'ood. Berkeley: U. of California, 2002.

Rev. of None but the Lonely Heart, music Hanns Eisler. Theatre Arts 28,
Dec. 1944.

Schebera, Jurgen. Hanns Eisler im USA-Exil. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
1978.

Viertei. Salka. Das unbelehrbareHerz: Ein Leben in der Weltdes Tlieaters,
der Literatur und des Films. Hamburg: Claassen, 1970. 309-12.

Weber, Horst. "Eisler as Hollyw ood Film Composer, 1 942- 1 948." Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Oct. 1998.

102

The Wagner Industry

and
the Politics of German Culture

Nicholas Vazsonyl University of South Caroiina

The cover story from the August 26, 2002 edition of Der Spiegel
inadvertently illuminates much that is contained in the concept I refer to
as the "Wagner industry." The extensive article is actually devoted to a
comparison of Chancellor candidates Gerhard Schroder and Edmund
Stoiber (48-68). As such, it appears to offer a balanced view of the two
candidates, with pictures of them both as young men, with family, touring
recent flood damage in the East, both in their private jets even with similar
captions. The similarity ends with side-by-side photos of both the Schroder
and the Stoiber couples at celebrations during the summer of 2002. While
the Schroders are shown at Otto Schily's birthday party, the Stoibers are
pictured attending the Bayreuth Festival. No doubt the remainder of this
essay could be devoted to analyzing the meanings conveyed by these two
images, both in isolation and especially in their juxtaposition, especially
how identifying Stoiber with the Wagner festival works to situate him in
the politics of Gemian culture to say nothing of the culture of German
politics. This one image conjures up a realm of associations which by
inference put the chancellor candidate into questionable company. For
the average voter, Stoiber is the elitist enjoying high culture; for many
intellectuals (the elite, in other words), the picture implicates him with
the darkest images of German nationalism and demagoguery. The photo
also recalls the connection between Wagner and Bavaria — both Stoiber 's
home state and that of Bayreuth. This reminds us of Stoiber 's predecessor,
"mad" King Ludwig II, the then head of the Bavarian State,' who almost
bankrupted the treasury' because of his relationship with Wagner; early in
the 20th century Bayreuth itself, as the home of the Wagner circle, became
a hotbed of racist nationalist ideology; then there is Adolf Hitler, of course,
who idolized Wagner and whose national political career — like
Stoiber's — began in Munich.

I submit that no other photograph in a setting of Gennan "high
culture" could have been so rich in political signs, contradictory ones
especially. But my point here is not to belabor well-known points, which
represent only a microcosm of the epic and continuing story of Wagner,

103

Wagnerites, and Wagnerism, a story by no means confined to Gennany
alone. What interests me generally is why Wagner has for over 1 50 years
been such a persistent source of reference? He was surely not the greatest
(Gennan) composer ever. He was by no means the only anti-Semite nor
the only nationalist among nineteenth-century artists and intellectuals.
Many intellectuals have dismissed, if not ridiculed, his writings, arguing
that his essayistic style was mostly ponderous and unappealing, his
dramatic texts not up to literaiy standards of the time. He wasn't even the
only German icon appropriated by the Nazis: So why does the connection
between him and Hitler remain so ingrained? More specifically, I am
interested in how it is that Wagner functions simultaneously as a symbol
of elitism and populism. It is this quality, I think, which makes what I am
calling the "Wagner Industry" both an exemplary and a unique
phenomenon.

The simple answer, of course, is that Wagner created an
unprecedented and, to this day. unique forni of musical-dramatic artwork,
using an equally unprecedented mixture of sensuous sound and evocative
imagery, which for different reasons have appealed to astoundingly diverse
audiences, and not just in Gennany: There are currently 130 Wagner
Societies in six continents. He wrote extensively about his aesthetic
theories, also publishing essays on a range of political and ideological
issues, many of which were scandalous then and now. Arguably, many of
these essays would today be little more than a footnote, except that they
were written by Wagner, and rescued from journalistic oblivion by Wagner
himself, immortalized in his own Gesammelte Schriften imd Dichtimgen,
a project he began in 1873, ten years before his death. Here, I think we
come a little closer to understanding what I am calling the "Wagner
Industry." We could also call it the "Wagner business": The
commodification of Wagner, not just by those — fans and critics alike —
who would profit from his name posthumously, rather, and even more
significantly. Wagner's commodification of himself In the following, I
would like to explore an early, perhaps even the first, example of this
self-commodification, because it touches on Wagner's unusual position
in what Bourdieu has called the "field of cultural production," wherein
Wagner created a unique market niche for himself

It begins with Wagner's purportedly ill-fated trip to Paris between
1839 and 1842 when the composer was in his late twenties. Detennined
not be a "deutscher Philister" any more, as he put it, he went to Paris with
the purpose of "durchschlagen, und Ruf und Geld gewinnen."- In this
same letter from 1834, he makes no secret of his intention to compose
"eine franzosische Oper" for Paris. In other words, he found Germany
provincial and wanted to make a commercial success in the opera capital

104

of the world by conforming to the expectations of the Parisian audience.
Though it is plausible that Wagner underestimated the nature of the Paris
music scene, the respected Wagner biographer Ernest Newman goes
further, explaining that Wagner "forgot that there was a business side to
art" (269). This reflects a common tendency of scholars to categorize
Wagner as a member of the non-commercial, autonomous, "pure art"
movement, reflecting Wagner's own assertion of the same.

As his own correspondence reveals, however. Wagner's
moti\ ation to go to Paris had everything to do with career, success and
money: precisely the business side to art. It was also a business decision
which made him choose Paris in the first place. Whereas German opera
houses paid a one-time licensing fee for performance rights no matter
how successful the work turned out to be, the Paris Opera paid royalties
for each performance, which is why the luminaries of the Paris opera
scene like Meyerbeer made a fortune (Newman 258). Success in Paris
also guaranteed performance back in Germany. A secondary, and often
even more lucrati\e. market was controlled by music publishers, like
Wagner's sometime employer. Maurice Schlesinger. who sold scores of
playable hits to a growing middle class clientele of amateur music makers.
Piano transcriptions of operatic and symphonic exceipts together with
hit tunes became enormously popular commodities and represented
perhaps the first stages of today's mass media market. All of this led the
contemporary French composer Hector Berlioz to describe the
commercialized Paris music scene contemptuously as an "industry,""* a
tenn Wagner himself would come to use. There is little doubt that Wagner
was initially drawn to this "industry'." had ever>' intention of writing within
its parameters and looked forward to the day when he would be "w ie ich
keineswegs zweifele. erstaunlich beruhmt."^ Scholars have offered a
variety of reasons for Wagner's miserable failure to break into the music
scene, but there is no disagreement about the consequences: Wagner and
his wife Minna were desperately poor and in debt. Wagner narrowly
avoided debtor's jail and utterly debased himself doing menial
arrangements for publishers like Schlesinger and writing humiliatingly
obsequious letters to raise funds and find work (Spencer 95- 1 02). In stark
contrast to his dreams of success, one of Wagner's more shocking letters
to Meyerbeer reads as follows:

Ich bin auf dem Punkte. mich an jemand verkaufen zu
miissen, um Hulfe im substantiellsten Sinne zu erhalten.
Mein Kopf u. mein Herz gehoren aber schon nicht mehr
mir, — das ist Ihr Eigen. mein Meister; — mir bleiben
hochstens nur noch meine Hande iibrig; — wollen Sie

105

sie brauchen? — Ich sehe ein, Ihr Sclave mit Kopf und
Leib zu werden. . .Ich werde ein treuer, redlicher Sclave
sein, denn ich gestehe offen, daft ich Sclaven-Natur in
mir habe; mir ist unendlich wohl, wenn ich mich
unbedingt hingeben kann, riicksichtslos, mit blindem
Vertrauen. ("Letter to Meyerbeer, 3.V.1840" 385-9)

As Katharine Ellis and Matthias Brzoska point out, Wagner was not alone
amongst composers who were rejected by Paris, but they precisely
misunderstand his exceptional response when they write: "He remains
the only one who made a career by constructing his little Paris ("petit
Paris") outside of France but nevertheless peopled by the Parisian elite,"
(36).' Of course, Bayreuth was not at all a "petit Paris" but, instead, its
mirror image: a provincial Gennan town with almost no cultural tradition,
no civilization, no commercial scene, visited by no one, stuck in the middle
of nowhere.^' As an idea, Bayreuth thus became the model for today's
summer music festivals held all over Europe, the U.S. and Canada. Most
of these are located away from the city, hence in a more natural setting,
where an audience of the truly devoted can attend freed from the social
expectations and rituals characteristic of city-opera performances. In his
own singular way, Wagner triuinphed over Paris by fonning his own
counter-industry, an industry that appears not to be one. As yet, no one
has examined the components of this success, in part 1 suspect, because
we (even Wagner's most vituperous critics) continue to be manipulated
by Wagner's self-promotional strategies.

There is widespread agreement that Wagner's Paris experience
was seminal, that, as Robert Gutman remarks: "in Paris, the great Wagner
of history took his first steps" (70); Martin Gregor-Dellin concurs, though
his observation, like that of Gutman and others, is limited to the aesthetic
sphere. However, Wagner's initial failure in Paris was not an aesthetic
one, nor were his "first steps" aesthetic, as I will show. Instead, he initially
failed to understand how the market worked. Similarly, his "first steps"
were, to use market-oriented terminology, to launch a PR campaign,
exploiting his very failure as a selling-point. Since there was no
"profitable" alternative to the Paris music industry, Wagner ultimately
created his own autonomous business enterprise — he uses the word
"Untemehmung"^ at least as early as 1851 and then consistently — albeit
an enterprise devoted to an aesthetic "high art" concept ("Theater in
Zurich" 342).

Wagner profited from a modernist sentimentalization of the
purportedly pre-modern separation between "high art" and money,
characterized by aristocratic or church-sponsorship, where the exchange

106

of money for the art was more discreet than the more directly consumerist
payment characteristic of the modem economy. Even though connections
between art and the marketplace became ubiquitous and unavoidable in
modernity, we continue to be invested (to use a financial term) in the
disinterestedness of the so-called pure aesthetic, based on the intuition
that the aesthetic value of an artwork is diminished in proportion to its
commercial appeal. Wagner's counter-industry is in many ways
paradoxical, because it appears not as an industry but as its opposite,
adopting a Kantian veneer of disinterestedness and trading in the Tart
pour Part pose of the 19th-century avant-garde, to which Wagner belonged
and which Wagnerism did much to fuel.

Wagner's Paris years are crucial to understanding the Wagner
Industry, because the reviews, journalistic pieces, essays, and short stories
Wagner wrote and published there between 1840 and 1841. in order to
earn money, establish the narrative under which Wagner's persona and
subsequent dramatic works are to be consumed. These prose works, as
well as the theoretical treatises he would write almost a decade later,
function, in current advertising parlance, as part of a media blitz,
establishing both a personality and preparing the ground for a product
launch, for a product, that is, which as yet doesn't even exist. Elements
of the persona include: Wagner as the patriotic German, the starving,
misunderstood, embattled artist, with a distaste for money and a loathing
of commercialism and commodification, serving only music, presented
as consecrated artfonn. The product to be launched; The anti-opera, with
a variety of product labels — "Gesamtkunstwerk," "music drama,"
"Biihnenfestspiel."

Most of what Wagner wrote was not new; instead he exploited
and combined elements discursively well-established in German culture.
Wagner appropriated them, amalgamated them coherently and in a way
that, over the last one and a half centuries, has allowed the diverse
audiences I mentioned earlier to select elements of the image which
addressed them most directly while ignoring the rest. It is, by the way,
this selective attention to Wagnerian detail which plagues Wagner
scholarship to this day, and fuels the acrimony of its most active
combatants: Combat which is, of course, but another aspect of the Wagner
industry!

Perhaps the most astonishing and enduring transfomiation was
from Wagner the "deutscher Philister" to Wagner as "deutscher Musiker,"
where "deutsch" and "Musiker" carry independent import but, when fused,
become mutually reinforcing signifiers. Wagner exploited his time on
foreign soil to awaken and throw into relief his Germanness. This
Germanness, what it means to be German, is central to the Paris essays.

107

Thus in the aptly titled: "Pariser Fatalitaten fiir Deutsche" ( 1 84 1 ) he laments
"Es ist wohl wahr im ganzen ist es das Ennuyanteste, in Paris Deutsche}'
zu sein," (45-6). Wagner rehearses a number of tropes which, since the
mid-eighteenth century at least, had become part of the rhetorical effort
to construct a Gennan national identity. Chief among these were the
dichotomy of French superficiality, dishonesty and interest in money
versus German depth, sincerity, and disinterest in money:** for Wagner,
the French are generally wealthy and the Germans, especially those in
Paris, are poor: '\4nmit aber ist das groBte Laster in Paris," consequently:
"ein Deutscher und ein dummer. schlechter — namlich ehrlicher, armer —
Mensch [ist] zu einem. und demselben Begriffe geworden" ("Pariser
Fatalitaten" 47).

This purported disinterest in money — and the symbolic capital
that attends to it — lies at the intersection of multiple strands of thought
aesthetic, nationalist, and more broadly ideological and is the cornerstone
of Wagner's enterprise: the hugely profitable not-for-profit organization.

For those who associate Wagner more readily with extreme right-
wing movements of the twentieth century, it may come as some surprise
to understand how closely he and his project were tied to what then and
now continue to be the politics of the left, specifically the critique of
modernity, an ideological current running from Schiller to the Frankfurt
School and beyond. The anti-modem discourse — which is of course
deeply modem in that its ethics of "social justice" rest on certain aspects
of the Enlightenment — contains both conservative and progressive
elements, positing an idealized premodemity now ruptured through
alienation, fragmentation, isolation, specialization, to be healed in the
future through a variety of political, economic, sociological and aesthetic
ways. While the mpture has affected the totality of existence, a common
theme concems the impact of commerce, regulated by money and self-
interest, which has altered the human condition, and altered it for the
worse.

Disinterest in money also has a "German" nationalist component,
stemming from Tacitus's juxtaposition of Gennanic ignorance of gold
and silver with Roman decadence: national cultural stereotyping that can
be followed from Luther to the 20th century. The meeting point between
a national German distaste for money, and the left-wing intellectual
resistance to the crass commercialism of modemity results in one of the
most poignant and hard-to-unravel paradoxes. While many of the most
eloquent critics of the capitalist dimension of modemity were Jewish, this
anti-commercial anti-modem discourse also became central to the anti-
Semitic movement in Germany, where Jews became synonymous both
w ith the perceived evils of profit-making and its opposite, communism.

108

Wagner had his part to play in this emerging discourse, thus unwittingly
aligning himself with the anti-Semitic turn in German national politics.*^

It is fascinating how similar Wagner's definition of being Gemian
and being a "true" musician are, both relying on the trope of tlnancial
disinterestedness: "[...] was Deutsch sei, namlich: die Sache, die man
treibt, um ihrer selbst. . .willen treiben; wogegen das Niitzlichkeitswesen
[. . .] sich als undeutsch herausstellte" ("Deutsche Kunst" 320). hi "Uber
deutsches Musikwesen" ( 1 840), he writes: "Der Deutsche hat ein Recht,
ausschlieBlich mit 'Musiker' bezeichnet zu werden, — denn von ihm kann
man sagen, er liebt die Musik inn ihrer selbst willen, — nicht als Mittel zu
entziicken. Geld und Ansehen zu erlangen, sondem weil sie eine gottliche,
schone Kunst ist, die er anbetet, und die, wenn er sich ihr ergibt, sein ein
undalleswird"(153).'"

Music thus consecrated also serves to separate it from the world
of commerce and is of course reminiscent of Luther's (Gennan) campaign
to rid Christianity of (mainly Roman) profit-seekers. Again Wagner did
nothing new, but adopted a 50-year-old discourse in German culture,
reflected in the literary genre called the Musiknovelle starting at least as
early as the Berglinger-episode in Wackenroder's Herzensergiefiungen
eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders ( 1 797) and reaching its zenith with
E.T.A. Hoffmann's short stories." The Musiknovelle rehearses several
tropes: music as a religious experience, the starving artist living for his
art, resisting the commercial bourgeois world of philistine consumers,
the dichotomy of easy "enjoyable," popular thus superficial music, versus
the deep, complex, esoteric, accessible only to the select few, a dichotomy
which suggests always that the artist who writes "difficult" music
necessarily suffers financial ruin. This literary-musical discourse itself
borrowed concepts from the earlier "Geniekult" of the Stumi und Drang,
which saw the author as a "second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove,"
to use Shaftesbury's formulation from 1711 (Shaftesbury 1 36).

Nor did the ideals expressed in the Miisiknovellen remain
confined to the literary sphere, as the examples of Robert Schumann and
Franz Liszt — both slightly older contemporaries of Wagner — demonstrate.
Schumann founded the still-running Neiie Zeitschrift f'iir Musik and
penned articles and reviews, posing as different members of his imagined
"Davidsbund" against the philistines. Liszt amended the medieval concept
of ''noblesse oblige^' to ''genie oblige" thus participating in the elevated
status of art and its creators (Walker 290-91 ). Perhaps the first example of
a non-fictional composer raised to divine status during his lifetime is
Beethoven. Count Waldstein once wrote to the young composer that he
would "receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands" (De Nora 83-84).
This act of anticipatory canonization was later sealed in Grillparzer's famous

109

funeral oration where Beethoven was described as "der letzte Meister
des tonenden Liedes, derTonkunst holder Mund, der Erbe und Erweiterer
von Handels und Bachs, von Haydns und Mozarts unsterblichem
Ruhm."'-

Wagner's contribution to the cult of Beethoven was a little
Musiknovelle of his own titled: "Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven." This
short story is actually the first piece in a collection titled: Ein dentscher
Mitsiker in Paris. Novellen unci Aufsdtze (1840/41), produced, directed
and starring Richard Wagner: in other words, it is a marketing and PR
vehicle.'^ The narrator of this framed work, structurally reminiscent of
E.T. A. Hoffmann, happens to be a Gemian musician in Paris. The collection
is purportedly the narrator's way of memorializing a fictitious musician
named "R," also a German musician who meets his end in Paris, making
Wagner both the narrator and the described.'^

Hector Berlioz is famed for writing: "Ma vie est un roman qui
m'interesse beaucoup" (my life is a novel which greatly interests me).'^
Wagner, by contrast, appears to write a novel that becomes the blueprint
for his life or, as Eva Rieger recently suggested: "Fur ihn [Wagner] war
jedoch das Leben eine Biihne und die Biihne stellte sein Leben dar"
(Rieger 9). It is of course dangerous to use biographical details from the
author's life to interpret his fiction. But in the case of Wagner, the fiction
in many respects precedes the reality that followed. Nowhere is this more
pronounced than in "Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven." The narrator of the
novella is the now deceased "R" who comes from a "mittelmaBige Stadt
des mittleren Deutschlands" with first letter "L" (Wagner was bom in
Leipzig, by the way) ("Pilgerfahrt" 86- 1 1 2, 87, 92). This time, it is the poor,
unknown, "R" who must himself undertake the pilgrimage, though this is
nothing to be ashamed of since the divine Beethoven (like "R") was
"auch ein amier, deutscher Musiker!" ("Pilgerfahrt" 88).

"R's" journey to Beethoven is filled with all the tropes already
discussed: in order to raise the necessary funds, "R" must prostitute himself
and his ideals by composing hits - later in the novella, Beethoven even
refers to these kinds of pieces as "Ware" (111) - for the new music
industiy: "Ich schauderte; aber meine Sehnsucht Beethoven zu sehen,
siegte; ich komponierte Galopps und Potpurris, konnte aber in dieser
Zeit aus Scham mich nie iiberwinden, einen Blick auf Beethoven zu
werfen, denn ich fiirchtete ihn zu entweihen" (Wagner, "Pilgerfahrt" 88).
Once on the road, "R" happens on a group of traveling musicians, who
gather under a tree to play the Beethoven Septet. An Englishman passing
by throws them a gold coin, which none of the musicians take. Later that
evening, the Englishman turns up again at the inn where "R" is staying
and, again throwing him money, asks him to play some more. "Das verdroB

110

mich;" reports "R," "ich erklarte, daB ich nicht fiir Geld spielte" (Wagner,
'Tilgerfahrr91).

"R's" meeting with Beethoven forms the climax of the novella.
The conversation quickly turns to Beethoven's only opera Fidelio, which
"R" had seen performed the evening before. Beethoven quickly concedes
"Ich bin kein Opemkomponist," but adds this significant explanation:

Wenigstens kenne ich kein Theater in der Welt, tur das
ich gem wieder eine Oper schreiben mochte! Wenn ich
eine Oper machen wollte, die nach meinem Sinne ware,
wiirden die Leute davonlaufen; denn da wiirde nichts
von Arien, Duetten, Terzetten und all dem Zeuge zu
finden sein, womit sie heutzutage die Opern
zusammenflicken, und was ich daflir machte, wiirde
kein Sanger singen und kein Publikum horen wollen.
(Wagner, "Pilgerfahrt" 107)

Beethoven despairs that the composer of a real "musikalisches Drama"
would be considered a fool, but "R" eagerly picks up on this new term
and wants to know more. Although the theory is not yet worked out in
the kind of detail which characterizes Wagner's groundbreaking book-
length essay Oper und Drama written a decade later, the basic principles
are introduced here in a handful of sentences: the need for a new kind of
theater, the obsolescence of opera with its set pieces, and the necessity
to reconceptualize the genre thoroughly. It is a project for which there is
"today" (heutzutage) no audience, hence the need to create one: this, in a
nutshell, will become Wagner's project for the remainder of his life.
Nowadays we call this aspect of creating a consumer base "product
placement": James Bond drives a car conspicuously showing the
trademark BMW, maybe a model that isn't even available yet. In "Eine
Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven," Wagner creates the shelf-space and potential
demand for his new product, and even has none other than Beethoven
endorse it.

There would be more to say about this novella, but I would like
to close by mentioning another short story from the collection "Ein Ende
in Paris," where the play between narrator and "R" - between ego and
alter-ego - is at its most profound. The story ends with Wagner staging
his own death, but not before he utters the famous last words: "Ich glaube
an Gott, Mozart und Beethoven, in gleichem an ihre Jiinger und Apostel,"
an avowal Wagner then cites in his own "Autobiographische Skizze" of
1843 ("Ende in Paris" 136; "Autobiographische Skizze" 111). Wagner
sets up a new Holy Trinity of narrator, protagonist, with music as the

111

Holy Spirit. The martyr's death from poverty which "R" suffers in Paris is
suffused with Catholic imagery: "ich glaube an den heiligen Geist und an
die Wahrheit der einen, unteilbaren Kunst ... ich glaube, dafi alle durch
diese Kunst selig werden" ("Ende in Paris" 136). The moment of "R's"
death and transfiguration is described by text that suggestively prefigures
the musically sublime endings which would become a hallmark of
Wagner's mature work: "so himmlisch verklart glanzte sein Auge, so
entzuckt verblieb er in atemloser Stille." One can almost hear the final
chords of Gotterdammerung, Parsifal, and above all Tristan. "Ich schloB
seine Augen," the narrator adds, "und bat Gott um einen ahnlichen Tod"
(Wagner, "Ende in Paris" 136).

The irony, of course, is that the Wagner who died in Paris was, if
anything, the "deutscher Philister" who went there to become hugely
famous and make money, only to be reborn as Richard Wagner, the
"deutscher Musiker," the apostle of "die heil'ge Deutsche Kunst" (to
quote the last words from Meistersinger von Niirnberg) who used his
new-found religion to achieve the same goal. He would die four decades
later shortly after Parsifal, a "Biihnenweihfestspiel" consecrated by the
composer himself, was premiered in his theater built for the purpose.

Today, there are many Richard Wagners, from the emblem of
Nazi horror boycotted by Israelis, to the composer of the "wedding march"
played while American brides walk to the altar unaware of and
disinterested in the music's origin, to the idol of paying pilgrims, seeking
admittance to his hallowed Bayreuth theater which still stands, now with
an eight-year waiting list, tickets readily available only to the mega-elite.

Endnotes

' On the relationship between Wagner and Ludwig II, see most recently
Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandhmgen (Frankfurt/
M: Insel, 2002), especially 427.

^ Letter to Theodor Apel, 27. X. 1 834, Richard Wagner, Sdmtliche Briefe,
Bd. I, hrsg. Gertrud Strobel und Werner Wolf (Leipzig: Dt. Verlag fiir
Musik, 1967-) 167-8. See also Wagner's "AutobiographischeSkizze( 1843)"
in Ausgewdhlte Schriften, hrsg. Dietrich Mack (Frankfurt: Insel, 1974):
94-1 13,here 101.

^ Hector Berlioz, Memoires, Vol. 2, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Gamier-
Flammarion, 1969). Berlioz refers to "L'industrialismedel'art" (3 12). Robert
Gutman describes it as "bringing the Industrial Revolution to music," see

112

Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968): 69.

"• Letter to Meyerbeer, 18.1.1 840, in Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel imd
Tagebiicher, hrsg. Heinz und Gudrun Becker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975) 3:
229-32. Also in Sdmtliche Briefe 1: 378-79, though with extensive
omissions.

^ "II en restera le seul qui achevera sa carriere en se construisant son
'Petit Paris' hors de la France main neanmoins peuple par Telite parisienne."
They add, significantly, and quite rightly 1 believe: "11 est bien evident
que le discours Wagnerien aurait pu prendre tout autre chemin si Wagner
avait pu achever sa carriere comme tous ses contemporains; c'est a dire
sur le pave parisien" (36).

^ Wagner discusses Bayreuth's geographic and cultural-historical
significance, describing the town as "das kleine, abgelegene, unbeachtete
Bayreuth" (30), in his essay: "Das Biihnenfestspielhaus Bayreuth: Nebst
einem Berichte iiber die Grundsteinlegung desselben," Dichtungen und
Schriften. 10 Vols. Ed. Dieter Bore hmey er. Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1983. 10:
21-44.

'' Wagner uses both "Untemehmung" and "Untemehmer."

** This disinterest, a theme we can trace all the way back to Tacitus
{Germania Chapter 5), suggests a certain national purity and moral
superiority. After Tacitus, the boldest example of this German national
trait is surely Luther's protest against the Papal fusion of religion and
business and call to reform the faith, by ridding it of corruption.

"^ Marc Weiner talks about many of these same issues, but only as they
pertain to Wagner's anti-Semitism; see his Richard Wagner ctnd the Anti-
Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1 995):
46-54, 108-9, and 153-63.

'"Author's emphasis.

" There is a vast literature concerning this genre; for a good overview,
see Karl Prumm, "Berglinger und seine Schiiler: Musiknovellen von
Wackenroder bis Richard Wagner," Zeitschrift fiir deutsche Philologie
105.2 (1986): 186-212. The genre continues beyond Wagner with
Grillparzer's Armer Spielmann (1848), Moricke's Mozart aufder Reise

113

nach Prag (1855), and reaches its diabolical apotheosis with Thomas
Mann's full-scale novel Doktor Faustus (1947).

'^ "Grillparzer's Grabrede 29. Marz 1 827," Liidwig van Beethoven: In Briefen
imd Lebensdokumenten, ausgewahlt von Anton Wiirz und Reinhold
Schimkat (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1 96 1 ) 2 1 2- 1 4, here 212.

'^ Richard Wagner, Ein deutscher Mnsiker in Paris. Novel len nnd Aufsdtze,
57)5:86-193.

'"* Published in French translation in the Revue et Gazette musicale. Many
of them also appeared simultaneously in the Gemian original in the
Dresden Abend-Zeitimg.

'" Letter to Humbert Ferrand, 1 2. VI. 1 833, see Hector Berlioz: A Selection
from his Letters, selected and trans. Humphrey Searle (New York: Vienna
House, 1973)53.

Works Cited

Berlioz, Hector. Memoires. Vol. 2. Ed. Pierre Citron. Paris: Gamier-
Flammarion, 1969.

Bore hmeyer. Dieter. Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandlungen. Frankfurt:
Insel,2002.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary
Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

De Nora, Tia. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical
Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803. Berkeley: U of California, 1995.

Ellis, Katharine and Matthias Brzoska. "Avant-propos methodologique."
Von Wagner zwn Wagnerisme: Musik. Literatur, Kunst, Politik.
Ed. Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz. Leipzig: Leipziger
Universitatsverlag, 1999. 35-37.

114

Gregor-Dellin, Martin. Richard Wagner: His Life, His Works, His Century.
Trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn. London: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1983.

Gutman, Robert. Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music.
New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968.

Leinemann, Jurgen. "Das DuqW^ DerSpeigelTtS, 26 August 2002: 48-68.

Newman, Ernest. The Life of Richard Wagner. Vol. 1. London: Cassell,
1976.

Rieger, Eva. Minna iind Richard Wagner: Stationen einer Liebe.
Diisseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2003.

Shaftesbury, Anthony Earl of. ""Soliloquy or Advice to an Author."
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc. Ed.
John Robertson. 2 Vols. 1st ed. 1900. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith,
1963.1:136.

Spencer, Stewart. "Wagner behind bars?" Wagner 1 998, 3. 1 9: 95- 1 02.

Wagner, Richard. "Autobiographische Skizze {\'&A2)).'"' Aiisgewdhlte
Schriften. Ed. Dietrich Mack. Frankfurt: Insel, 1974. 94-1 13.

— . "Das Biihnenfestspielhaus Bayreuth: Nebst einem Berichte iiber die
Grundsteinlegung desselben." Dichtungen nnd Schriften. 10
Vols. Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer Frankflirt/M.: Insel, 1983. 10: 21-44.

— . "Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik." Dichtungen und Schriften.
10 Vols. Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer. Frankfurt/M.: hisel, 1983. 8: 217-
351.

— . Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris: Novellen undAufsatze. Dichtungen
und Schriften 5: S6-\93.

— . "Ein Ende in Paris." Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris. Novellen und
Aufsdtze, Dichtungen und Schriften 5: 112-137.

— . "Letter to Meyerbeer, \S.\.\S40.'' Briefwechsel undTagebiicher. By
Giacomo Meyerbeer. Ed. Heinz und Gudrun Becker. Berlin: de
Gmyter, 1975.

115

— . "Letter to Meyerbeer, 3.V. 1 840." ScimtUche Briefe, Bd I. Ed. Gertmd
Strobel and Werner Wolf. Leipzig: Dt. Verlag fiLir Miisik, 1967-:
385-89.

— . "Letter to Theodor Apel: 27.X.1834." Sdmtliche Briefe, Bd 1. Ed.
Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf. Leipzig: Dt. Verlag fur Musik,
1967-.

— . "Pariser Fatalitaten fur Deutsche." Dichtimgen iind Schriften. 1 0
Vols. Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer. Frankftirt/M.: Insel, 1983. 5: 45-66.

— . "Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven." Ein deutscher Miisiker in Paris.
Novellen iind Aiifsatze, Dichtimgen und Schriften 5.

— . "Ein Theater in Zurich." (1851) Dichtimgen und Schriften. 1 0 Vols.
Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer. Franktlirt/M.: Insel, 1983. 6: 342-77.

— . "iJber deutsches Musikwesen." Dichtimgen und Schriften. 10 Vols.
Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer. Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1983. 5: 151-70.

Walker, Alan. Franz Liszt. Vohnne One: The Virtuoso Years 1811-
1847. NewYork: Knopf, 1983.

Weiner, Marc. Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

The Historians' Mann and Mann's Historian:

Thomas Mann and Erich Kahler

Hans R. Vaget, Smith College

Thomas Mann has, on the whole, not fared well at the hands of
professional historians. To be sure, historians of all stripes are fond of
referring their readers to Mann's first novel, Budcienhrooks, as a key
document of nineteenth-century social history, but far too many prefer to
evade, or simply ignore, the historical importance of Mann's late novel.
Doctor Faustus, even though that book, arguably, represents the most
perspicacious attempt in all of German literature to focus on the hidden
cultural and psychological roots of what Friedrich Meinecke has famously
termed "die deutsche Katastrophe."

The picture only gets worse when we turn to Mann's non-
fictional comment and opinion. Mann produced a significant body of
political writing that covers the four most terrible decades of European
history, from 1914 to 1955, the year of his death. Mann had been drawn
into the public arena by World War I, the "Urkatastrophe" of the twentieth
century, and despite the unexpected outcome of the war, or perhaps
because of it, Mann felt it incumbent upon himself in the face of the
ensuing turbulent developments in Germany and Europe to remain in the
heat of the battle and to accept the writer's responsibility for the welfare
of the nation. From his notoriously nationalistic Kriegsschriften of 19 14'
and his massive but conflicted wartime essay. Reflections of a NonpoliticaJ
Man, through his speeches in support of the Weimar Republic, his
vociferous opposition to the Third Reich and his propaganda-making for
the Allies during his exile in the United States, all the way to his various
utterances about divided Germany and the Cold War — Mann's political
interventions have found surprisingly little favor with cultural and political
historians. Ironically, it was Golo Mann, Thomas Mann's son and himself
a professional historian, who provided the most damaging catch-phrase
for all those who, on whatever grounds, have some quarrel with one or
another of Mann's many political pronouncements. Writing in 1974 in
the prestigious Frankfurter AUgemeine Zeittmg, Golo characterized both
his father and his uncle, Heinrich Mann, as "unwissende Magier" —
ignorant magicians of the word. Joachim Fest, the distinguished
biographer of Hitler and historian of the Third Reich, used Golo's epithet

117

as the title of a widely admired book, in which he all but dismisses the
political writings of both Mann brothers as amateurish and unworthy of
serious consideration. This view is now widely held by historians and
Mann scholars as well. They argue that the author of Reflections of a
Nonpolitical Man remained to the end, at heart, just that — a nonpolitical
man; that he harbored a notion of democracy that was not tmly democratic;
and that he opposed the Nazis for reasons that are suspect, since for three
years he hesitated to declare himself, until, in 1936, he finally took a
stand against Nazi Germany and burned all bridges to his homeland.

What is generally missing from these snap judgments is balance.
Mann's understanding of democracy was indeed insufficient by today's
Western standards, but this deficiency is easily outweighed by his
courageous and badly needed support of the Weimar Republic in 1922,
at a time when virtually all intellectuals on both the Left and the Right
were expressing disdain, if not scorn, for the new, unloved German
Republic. Likewise, his admittedly tactical, but by no means
compromising silence during the first three years of the Nazi regime in
no way diminishes his impassioned opposition to and articulate critique
of National Socialism both before 1933 and after 1936. And his obvious
rootedness in the pre-World War I culture of the German
"Bildungsbiirgertum" in no way disqualifies him as an analyst of the
historical and psychological antecedents of the German catastrophe.

Implicit in the disparagement of Mann's political writings is
something more insidious and far-reaching — the denial of Mann's
relevance to the political culture that emerged in Gennany after the defeat
of the Third Reich. This, it appears, is the chief point in Aleida Assmann's
reading of Mann in her important 1999 essay, Geschichtsvergessenheit,
Geschichtsversessenheit, an analysis of the different ways in which
German intellectuals, after 1945, constructed the past and assessed
German guilt — an analysis that here requires careful consideration.
Assmann observes that this oppressive historical task was for a long time
hindered by two equally powerful, but conflicting psychological forces:
the desire to forget histoiy, on the one hand, and the obsessive compulsion
to return to it, on the other. Beginning with the 1998 debate between
Martin Walser, the novelist, and Ignatz Bubis, President of the Central
Council of Jews in Germany, Assmann retrospectively traces the various
stages in the slow formation of German memory after 1945. She argues
that in the waning years of the Bonn Republic and, after 1990, during the
Berlin Republic, these debates have laid the foundation for a new political
culture which is distinguished by an honest and complete accounting of
the past and by a post-national, or rather trans-national conception of
democracy. A decisive turning point was reached in 1 985 with President

118

Richard von Weizsacker's address before parliament, commemorating the
fortieth anniversary of the German capitulation — a speech Assmann
identifies as the most conspicuous marker of a momentous historical turn
when, according to the polls, a majority of Germans appeared ready to
acknowledge German guilt and accept responsibility for the crimes of
their fathers and grandfathers. Prior to that address to the German people,
the victims' assertion of "This is your guilt" was resented as a constant
reminder of German shame; after it, that assertion, according to Assmann,
began to be accepted and internalized by a majority of Gennans who are
now prepared to say "Yes, this is our guilt."

The distinction between shame and guilt is crucial to Assmann's
project, for it provides the decisive coordinates for German memory. In
fact, she distinguishes between a Schamkultur and a Schuldkultm\ with
the former, the culture of shame, favoring silence and forgetting, and the
latter, the culture of guilt, favoring acknowledgement and responsibility.
Since Schamkultur and Schuldkultur present two very different value
systems, their repercussions in German political culture have differed
greatly (Assmann 88).

Assmann places Thomas Mann firmly in the camp of
Schamkultur. Indeed, she views him as one of the decisive figures in the
post-war discourse on German shame that continued long after 1945 and
that surfaced again when Martin Walser, in his much debated Frankfurt
address of 1 1 October 1998, complained about the "instrumentalization
of our shame for present-day purposes" and confessed to an inner
resistance against the "continuous presentation of our shame in the
media."- Assmann's view of Mann is based on two texts: his famous
Library of Congress address of 20 May 1945, "Germany and the
Germans"; and an extended passage from chapter 46 of Doctor Faustus,
in which the narrator reports on the liberation of the Buchenwald
concentration camp and reflects on the incalculable implications of
German crimes for "all that is Gennan."

The latter passage speaks of "unsere Schmach" — "our
ignominy," which "lies naked before the eyes of the world" (Mann, Doktor
Faustus 505). Although the word "Scham" does not itself occur here,
Assmann quite reasonably infers that the writer of comments such as
these had to have been possessed of an overwhelming sense of shame.
Now, normally, shame is caused by the realization of a moral failure. For
the novel's citizens of Weimar, forced by an American general to march
through Buchenwald and file by the crematoria, shame is caused by the
coercion to look and to take note. Assmann believes that this fully applies
to Mann's view of the German people as a whole, who are said to feel
ashamed because in 1945 the whole world was watching them being forced

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to take note ot German crimes. (Here Assmann invokes Charles Darwin,
who held that shame is caused not by a true sense of guilt but rather by
the realization that others see one as guilty.) She then concludes that
Mann, too, lacked a sense of individual guilt and subscribed rather to the
convenient blanket notion of collective guilt, as did, apparently, the
American general who liberated Buchenwald. Assmann finds proof of
this in "Germany and the Gennans," and specifically in Mann's claim
that the "good Gennany" and "evil Gemiany" are identical; that the "evil
Germany" is merely the "good Germany" gone astray.

This has far-reaching implications for Assmann's larger
assessment of Mann's role in the emergence of a new political culture in
post-war Germany. As Assmann sees it, Mann's position was an obstacle
in Gennany's slow but in the end exemplary road from the post-war trauma
through the student revolts of 1968 to the various public debates about
recent German history in the 1980s and 1990s and, eventually, to the
cunent enlightened state of affairs. As an exemplar of Schamkultiit\ Mann
is deemed to have slowed the formation on both the individual and
collective level of a politically mature German identity, which, given the
model of cultural anthropology employed here, can be achieved only
through public acknowledgement of individual guilt (Assmann 90f ). With
his rhetoric of collecfive guilt, Mann is said to cling to that essentialist
mind-set which has been a fundamental feature of anti-Semitism (90f.)
Ultimately, Mann's attitude towards the Holocaust is here linked to an
anachronistic aristocratic code of behavior, in which the exposure of one's
Schande is experienced as a loss of honor and as a threat to one's fragile
sense of identity (84).

Assmann 's reading, it seems to me, largely echoes the arguments
of the 1960s and 1970s when ideologically motivated denigrations of
Mann from the Left had become routine, reaching a nadir in 1975, on the
centenary of Mann's birth. At present, however, these views have lost
what little plausibility they possessed at the time. In fact, in light of our
significantly broadened and deepened knowledge of Mann and his times,
they now ring downright false.

Golo Mann's uncharitable view of his father's political
pronouncements, while eagerly embraced by some, is by no means shared
by all Mann experts, for it is obvious to students of the Mann family that
Golo's relationship to his father was deeply conflicted (Reich-Ranicki;
Bitterli) — so much so that his own, eventually quite successful writing
career did not really take off until after his father's death. It is hardly

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surprising, then, that Golo should posthumously give in to a longstanding
and dark desire to undermine his father's authority in precisely the field
that he had chosen as his own: German history and political commentary.
In light of this tangled family atTair, several noted Mann experts — among
them T.J. Reed, Ehrhard Bahr, Martin Travers — have refused to take Golo
Mann at his word. On the contrary, they have regarded Thomas Mann's
political interventions as indispensable contributions to the new political
culture in Germany, and their views have been emphatically endorsed by
such political scientists as Kurt Sontheimer and Theo Stammen. To this
small, but growing number of voices appreciative of Mann's political
stances must now be added the name of Heinrich August Winkler, the
distinguished Berlin historian and author of a magisterial, two-volume
account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gennan history, Der lange
Weg nach Westeu, published in 2000, in which the author examines
German attitudes towards the political culture of the West and revisits
the much debated question of Germany's Sondenveg — its deviation from
the path followed by the West. Winkler argues that that deviation may be
attributed primarily to the spectral after-life of the Reich as a political
and, even more, as a meta-political idea. What Winkler terms the
Reichsniythos survived the actual demise in 1806 of the Holy Roman
Empire of the German nation by 139 years and served, after 1933, as a
bridge between the educated middle classes and Hitler (II: 647). Nothing
separated Germany from the West more decisively than her universalist
ambition to be something different from and greater than the other
European nations — to be a Reich, again, with all that notion's hallowed
connotations (1:114). The establishment of the Third Reich by Hitler,
therefore, marks the extreme point of Gennany's deviation from the
development of the West, regardless of the many extant social and cultural
ties connecting Gennany to that same West. Not until 1990 did Germany
become a sovereign, "democratic, post-classical nation state" (II: 655) —
a political entity like others in Europe; thus, the end of German
Zweistaatlichkeit and unification also meant, according to Winkler, a final
farewell to all German Sonderwege.

Particularly remarkable about Winkler's account of German
history are its affinities with the thinking of Thomas Mann, for central to
both is the thesis that a particular myth — that is to say, a meta-political
notion of far-reaching practical ramifications in the political realm — has
been a driving force in recent German history. In Winkler's reading, that
role was played by the Reichsmythos. For the author of Doctor Faiistus,
that force was the myth of "German" music, whose superiority and
uniqueness justified, in the minds of many educated and music-loving
Germans, the monstrous attempt to translate that perceived cultural

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supremacy into geopolitical hegemony. It can hardly come as a surprise,
then, that Winkler gives Mann's political writings the highest marks they
ever received from a professional historian.

Winkler favorably contrasts Mann's views on the "German
catastrophe" with those of Friedrich Meinecke, the venerable historian
who coined that questionable term. He shows how Meinecke tried but
failed to fit National Socialism into the mainstream course of German
history, and highlights the deficiencies of his historical understanding,
including his anti-Jewish bias, and the inadequacies of his prescriptions
for Gennany's renewal through a return to the values of Gennan classical
literature and music. For Winkler as for Mann, the notion of "German
catastrophe" denotes not merely something that the Germans had to
suffer — defeat, destruction, humiliation — but also and primarily what the
Gemians perpetrated. Accordingly, Winkler's entire account of the Third
Reich bears the chapter heading, "Die deutsche Katastrophe, 1933-1945,"
in which it is argued that of all the pundits at the time only Mann met the
intellectual challenge identified by Meinecke, namely the uncovering of
the deep layers of German thought that surfaced and culminated in Nazism.
Ever since the late 1940s, a standard charge has been that Mann
constructed too long an etiology of the "German catastrophe" by
suggesting that its psychic pre-conditions can be traced back to the
Reformation and to the Middle Ages. Winkler seems to be the first
historian to praise Mann for the historical depth and acuity of his vision.
It is precisely this deep-focus view of German history, he suggests, that
constitutes the superiority of Mann's historical understanding to
Meinecke's.

Mann's long- view approach enabled him to put his finger on
certain crucial factors that facilitated the rise of Hitler and the success of
National Socialism. Winkler singles out Mann's emphasis on the historical
circumstances that produced the peculiarly German notion of freedom:
freedom to reject outside interference and influence, freedom to differ
from the West, freedom to be authentically German. Unlike the Western
notion of freedom, however, the German notion never really encompassed
civil liberties. The fact that Germany never experienced a truly liberating
revolution was seen by Mann as indicative of a history that was shaped
solely by an outwardly directed notion of freedom. Mann offered a
psychological interpretation of this course of history, which Winkler
underlines, as Gennany's Faustian attempt to achieve world domination —
to Gennanize Europe, that is, rather than to Europeanize Germany.^ This
pathological inversion, for Mann, resulted from an historical process of
perversion: the attempted enslavement of the world by a people who
themselves lacked freedom. Likewise, the Germans' inborn universalist

122

and cosmopolitan proclivities — favored by geography and history, and
part of the nation's genetic make-up since the medieval Reich — were
transformed into their opposite, from something benign into something
aggressive. Germany's universalist proclivities in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries were seen by Mann as a perverted form of Germany's
old universalism. To Mann, that retrograde transformation of something
"good" into something "evil" seemed essentially diabolical, which is
precisely why he was inspired to use the Faust myth as a metaphor for
Gennany — an artistic decision for which he has frequently been criticized.^
Such criticism, however, is short-sighted, for it obscures Mann's crucial
point — that there are not two Germanys, one good, one evil, but only
one — whose ancient universalism was turned into a desire for world
domination as a result of a particular historical process. And it is that
process which Mann imaginatively reconstructed in Doctor Faustus. To
Winkler, Mann's essay, "Gennany and the Gennans," presents a plausible
psycho-historical sketch of the pre-histor>' of the Third Reich, and thus a
deep reading of Gennan history, which he finds more apt and enlightening
than those of Meinecke and of almost all the later historians.

When a person of Winkler's stature endorses Mann's conception
of Gennan history, then the detractors o^ Doctor Faustus would do well
to reconsider the question of Mann's competence as a historian. Any such
reconsideration must, however, be based on a firm grasp of the sources
of Mann's views of German history and of the intellectual milieu in which
these were fashioned. After all, Mann was an author who set very little
store in invention, preferring almost always to ground his literary
imagination in the work of reputable experts. The display in his novels of
a seemingly encyclopedic range of knowledge is indicative more of
Sitzfleisch than of genius. As he did in music and Egyptology, for example,
so too in history did he seek the company and the advice of reliable and
cooperative experts. With many of his works set in recent or distant history,
Mann, as a matter of course, perused a great deal of historical literature,
preferring the reading of biographies. At various points, he was planning
works on Frederick the Great, on King Philipp of Spain, and on Martin
Luther — all of them requiring deep immersion in the relevant historical
literature.

In one of his most channing novellas, Uuonhnmg umi friihes
Leid (\925), Mann even donned the mask of a professor of history. At
that time he already knew Erich von Kahler, the cultural historian and
polymath who later, when both men lived in Princeton, became his

123

confidante and tmsted authority on German history. Their correspondence,
aptly entitled An Exceptional Friendship, is testimony to a remarkable
intellectual afilnity, grounded in their common commitment to the kind
of Humanism that Mann had espoused in, among other works. The Magic
Mountain. In 1945, on the occasion of Kahler's sixtieth birthday, Mann
paid tribute to "his friend, his comrade, his brother"^ (Mann, "Erich
Kahler") — this at the time when he was writing Doctor Faustus. In that
tribute, he praises Kahler's monumental, though incomplete Der deiitsche
Charakter in der Geschichte Enropas, characterizing it as the standard
psychology of the Gennans and identifying it as the source to be consulted
if one wished to ground one's attitude towards Germany on the requisite
historical knowledge and understanding/'

Mann could not have been more explicit about the relevance of
Kahler's work to his own conception of Gennan histoiy in Doctor Faustus.
Yet the name of Kahler, who wrote several essays on Mann, including
two on Doctor Faustus J but who was too modest to draw attention to
himself, is hardly ever mentioned in the literature on Mann. Even Winkler
appears to be unaware of Kahler's pivotal role for Mann. It is, however,
not much of an exaggeration to say that as far as Doctor Faustus is
concerned Mann depended as much on Kahler in his construction of
ancient German history as he did on Theodor W. Adorno for his
construction of modem music.

Kahler's work comprises history, philosophy, and literary
criticism. In contrast to most German-trained intellectuals, however, his
conception of history and his understanding of historical processes owe
more to Vico's Scienza Nuova and Herder's Ideen zur Philosophic der
Geschichte der Menschheit than to Hegel's philosophy of history. Like
so many assimilated Jews of his generation, he embraced Humanism as a
secular religion, and like so many refugees who arrived on American
shores from Fascist Europe he had to adapt, at the advanced age of fifty-
three, to a new and very different intellectual environment. Kahler rose
to this challenge with more gusto than most of his fellow refugees,
including Mann. Greatly aided by the stimulating atmosphere of Princeton
University, he succeeded in a short time in making a name for himself
with a series of books that included Man the Measure, The Tower and
the Abyss, and The Meaning of History. By the time he died, however, in
1970, Kahler's brand of intuitive, speculative cultural history, like
Humanism itself, had become suspect among the advocates of the more
hard-nosed schools of historical scholarship, and his reputation had begun

124

to decline.

Reading Kahler today yields unexpected rewards. It brings us
into the presence of a mind of great breadth, subtlety and generosity. His
intellectual temper was of the rarest sort, as George Steiner saw it, being
free of both rancor and disdain. Writing in 1970, Steiner characterized
Kahler as a "genius for hope," which at the time, he felt, was perhaps
what was "needed most" (Steiner 193-95). The great theme of Kahler's
historical work, the problem that occupied him more than all others, was
the relationship of Germany to Europe. Today, several years into the
twenty-first century and a decade and a half after the reconstitution of
Germany as a one-nation state, Germany and Europe appear to be headed
for yet another crisis in their inherently strained, though substantially
transformed, relationship. In this context Kahler becomes a newly
fascinating figure.

Bom in 1885, Kahler** was the product of the vibrant and tmly
multicultural scene that was tum-of-the-century Prague — the city that gave
us Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Werfel, and more. For his
intellectual apprenticeship he went to Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg, and
Vienna, where in 1911 he earned his doctorate with a paper on the problem
of law and morality. The most productive years of his career were those
spent in Munich, where he settled in 1911 and reinained until 1933. In
fact he lived in Wolfrathshausen, a small town just south of Munich,
where he and his wife, Josephine, provided generous hospitality to their
many friends. Erich von Kahler, as he was known then — in America he
dropped the "von" — had the means to live as a "Privatgelehrter" and to
devote himself to the pursuit of Bi/dung, and to concentrate on what he
tenned philosophical cultural history — philosophische Kultwgeschichte.
In those Munich years, Kahler managed to maintain friendly
relations with three rival and, one would think, mutually exclusive
luminaries: the poet Stefan George with his circle of jealous disciples,
(Kiel); the sociologist Max Weber, to whom Kahler introduced himself
by way of a critique of Weber's celebrated treatise Wissemchaft als Beniff
and Thomas Mann, who found the young Kahler attractive both personally
and intellectually (Mann, Tagebiichei; 10 May 1919).'" An outspoken
opponent of the Nazis, Kahler left Gennany in 1933, and, like Mann, he
decided not to return to Gennany after Hitler had come to power. After
several years in Prague and Zurich, Kahler, again like Mann, came to the
United States, in 1 938, and began a new career of writing and teaching in
English, primarily at the New School for Social Research in New York, at
Princeton (both at the Institute of Advanced Study and the university)
and at Cornell.

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Given the crisis of all values that Kahler witnessed in his lifetime
it is not surprising to find his writings on history marked by the experience
of instability. His work is saturated with a keen sense of the porousness
of history. That the past and present are permeable in both directions is
seen with particular clarity in his most ambitious and original work of
historiography, Der deiitsche Charakter in der Geschichte Eiiropas. Here,
in a large-scale, two-volume portrait of Germany from the Roman empire
to the threshold of his own time, Kahler describes German history as one
arduous, frequently bungled and never completed project on the part of
the German "tribes" to achieve true nationhood. Such a conception reflects
the precarious sense of German identity in Kahler 's own time when after
the collapse of the old order in Europe the threat of nationalist, totalitarian
movements seemed to loom everywhere. Kahler wrote of his project in a
letter to Mann of March 1931: "Impelled by the psychic and political
distress I have seen all around me, 1 wanted to undertake an elemental
rethinking of the essence of Germanism. 1 don't mean a 'Gennan history,'
or a 'Psychology of the Germans,' but a graphic summary of what we can
call specifically German, what we can define as the German racial character"
(An Exceptional Friendship 3). Completed between 1926 and 1931, the
book was to appear in 1 932, but an all too vigilant editor, who considered
it to be un-Gennan and untimely, prevented its publication (Kiel 185f ).
Der deiitsche Charakter in der Geschichte Europas finally appeared in
Zurich in 1937. A companion piece, Israel iinter den Volkern, suffered
the same fate. Set to appear in 1933, its publication was canceled by the
Nazis; the book appeared in Zurich in 1 936, one year before his magnum
opus. ' '

Kahler was able to complete only the first part of Der deutsche
Charakter — a fragment comprising 680 pages that takes us to the end of
the Middle Ages {Der Deutsche Charakter 687). It is not clear whether
the decision not to write the second part was necessitated by external
factors, or whether Kahler began to have doubts about the viability of
some of his own assumptions concerning the question of national identity
and the interplay of national and trans-national forces in German history.
Some of his subsequent writings seem to suggest that the latter was the
case, among them Man the Measure, with its programmatic subtitle, "A
New Approach to History,"'- and the 1944 essay, "The Problem of
Germany," written at the height of German nationalist excess (Kahler,
"The German Problem" 454-65, 608- 15). The series of lectures published
posthumously in 1 974 under the title The Germans is said to have been
drawn from Der deutsche Charakter. But this posthumous publication
gives only a poor idea of the sweep and cogency of vision that

126

distinguishes the earlier work, which, regrettably, has remained largely
unknown.

When it appeared in 1937, Kahler's book had a poor critical
reception. Among the few reviews the book received, Golo Mann's wannly
appreciative review essay of 1 940, "Deutscher Historismus." stands out.
It may be taken as a measure of Kahler's untimeliness, which Werner
Vordtriede diagnosed in 1965, that the author of Der c/eiitsche Charakter
in der Geschichte Europas is ignored not only in the standard accounts
of German historiography but also in Gordon Craig's best selling The
Germans of 1982, even though Craig's book probes some of the same
layers of German national identity that concerned Kahler. In Gemiany,
Kahler's historical work remains an unknown quantity, and it is difficult
to detennine the degree to which this may be attributed to his being Jewish
and an exile. Still, two other factors come into play here. In the decades
after the war, the majority of German intellectuals looked to the Marxian
paradigm of historical interpretation as a remedy for their collective
hangover. On this score, Kahler has nothing to offer. It may also have
been that other panacea for Germany's historical ills, the widespread
euphoria about Europa that rendered German intellectuals unreceptive
to Kahler. His sober diagnosis of Germany's unpreparedness for a larger
union, his reminders of Germany's many failures vis-a-vis Europe, could
only be regarded as unwelcome, if not downright irritating.

We begin to get a better idea of the new timeliness of Kahler's
vision of Gennan history in the post-Maastricht era as soon as we grasp
its most distinctive premise regarding the interdependence of Gemiany
and Europe. To Kahler, Gemiany 's relation to Europe was not merely a
question of geography. "Europa," in the last analysis, served as a cipher
for the trans-national and universalist energies that actually had their
origins in the beginning of German history when the idea of "Europa"
was internalized and thus became part of the hereditary make-up of the
German peoples. German national identity thus encompasses these trans-
national elements; they form an indispensable and inalienable dimension
of it. Germany nonetheless failed repeatedly, as certain other nations of
Europe did not. to bring about the mature union of its national and
transnational potential; precisely this is the distinct achievement of several
other nations in Europe. Hence, as Kahler saw it, Germany's political
immaturity, her incompleteness as a nation, her status as a "Reich ohne
Nation" (Der deutsche Charakter 7). Hence also Germany's constant
temptation to compensate for this lack of nationhood at the expense of
her neighbors.

127

It would be tempting to assume that the convergence of Mann's
and Kahler's views resulted from the shared fate of exile. That
convergence reached its high point in 1940 when both men collaborated
with Hemiann Broch, Antonio Borgese, and other European and American
intellectuals on the ill-fated "City of Man" project — an idealistic
"Declaration on World Democracy" that in some respects prefigured the
founding of the United Nations five years later.'^ But the historical and
psychological roots of Mann's and Kahler's alliance reach back to the
outbreak of the Great War. Like Mann, Kahler was swept up in the great
wave of nationalism, and like Mann he defended and justified Germany's
cause for war. His pamphlet of 1914, Der vorige, der heutige imd der
zukiinftige Feind, belongs to the same register of emotional war literature
as Mann's "Gedanken im Kriege" and Rejlections of a Notipolitical Man.
Yet earlier and more resolutely than Mann, Kahler underwent a sort of
political conversion'^ that strengthened his resolve to defend the values
of humanism against the groundswell of voices then clamoring to awaken
Germany's darker instincts. Ideologically speaking, Mann and Kahler
had been traveling the same road since 1914. This, in Mann's eyes,
distinguished Kahler from the poet-philosopher Ernst Bertram and the
composer Hans Pfitzner, both of whom he had idolized during the war as
his spiritual brothers. When Bertram and Pfitzner declined to embrace
the Weimar Republic — thus continuing on the conservative, nationalist
course that soon merged with that of the National Socialists — it was Kahler
who emerged as a tried and true ally whose historical judgment Mann
was prepared to trust.

Of all the points of convergence between Mann and Kahler none
is more fundamental to the conception and design of Doctor Faiistus
than their notion of Deutschtiim. Both use the term in an old-fashioned,
essentialist sense, conceiving of Deutschtum as a quasi living, organic
entity with its own character and destiny. Kahler would apply this notion
to all of history, as becomes clear from his books on the House of Hapsburg
(Das Geschlecht Habsburg), on Israel, and on Germany. In contrast to
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West {\9\^), where the notion of
flourishing and floundering historical organisms serves as the
philosophical underpinning of a cynically cheerful pessimism about the
impending fate of the West, Kahler's sense of history, rather like that of
the philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, is inseparable from the idea of
Utopia. Both Mann and Kahler conceived of Deutschtum as very much a
mixed affair in the literal sense; neither had any use for the ideal of purity,
ethnic or otherwise; both considered seemingly non-German "other"
factors to be undeniable components of Deutschtum. Mann himself always

128

aspired, even at the time of his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, to
represent the trans-national and somewhat anti-German elements of
Deiitschtum that he so admired in Nietzsche, Wagner, and Goethe.

In Doctor Faustus, that trans-national element can be grasped
in the carefully enunciated European and universalist dimension of the
life and works of that modem Faust, the composer Adrian Leverkiihn.'''
Indeed, only with Mann's transnational notion of Deiitschtum in mind
can we begin to make sense of his striking and seemingly arbitrary
manipulation of historical fact. I refer in particular to the transfer of the
remains of emperor Otto III from Aachen (where he in fact lies buried) to
the cathedral church of Mann's fictitious German town of Kaisersaschem.
Otto III, who lived from 980 to 1002, must thus be regarded as the earliest
historical marker in this novel about Deiitschtum, of which Kaisersaschem
is the perfect emblem. What is the logic behind this manipulation of
historical fact? The narrator provides a clue when he describes this brilliant
young emperor as a "perfect model of Gemian self-contempt" (39), as an
early incarnation of the Gemian who yeams for Rome, for Greece, for
the South, for the Other — for what transcends the narrowly German. At
bottom then. Otto III embodied, no matter how fleetingly, the essence of
that trans-national dimension of the German character.

It was Kahler who had interpreted Otto III as an emblematic
figure of German history {Der deutsche Charakter 350-354), tracing the
trans-national strain of the Gemian character that he represented to that
murky historical moment known as the Age of the Great Migrations. It
was at that juncture, in the encounter between the Germanic tribes and
the Roman Empire, the most advanced civilization of the time, that "the
character and destiny of the German people originated [...] Everything
that has happened in Germany since may be viewed as a consequence of
this fateful encounter" ( The Germans 4). In "everything" Kahler includes,
of course, Nazi Germany. He makes this point in the introduction to Der
deutsche Charakter in der Geschichte Eiiropas by diagnosing the Third
Reich as a deliberate rejection of Europe, as a project, that is, for the
elimination — with "vengeful radicalism" — of all the European strains in
the hereditary make-up of the Gemian character (9).'^' In Doctor Faustus
as well as in Mann's political commentary of the war years, we encounter
many echoes of Kahler 's reading of Gennan history, distilled perhaps
most memorably into Mann's signature historical apercu, mentioned
above, that although her true calling was to make herself European,
Germany in its present National Socialist phase was hell-bent on making
Europe Gennan (Mann, Listen Germany! 1 10).

In Kahler's account, the German character appears de-centered
and unbalanced throughout history, a permanent work in progress.

129

Asserting this against the rising tide of nationalism was a palpable act of
detmnce since a large majority of Germans believed at the time, with
Hitler and the Nazis, that Gemiany's true identity was becoming manifest
in the Third Reich. Kahler later repeated his thesis in his introduction to
The Germans. At that time, the existence of two adversary states on
Gernian soil lent his contention an obvious plausibility. Today, however,
Kahler's proposition that the precise meaning of German identity is part
of history's unfinished business has a rather alarming ring. To Kahler,
however, were he still writing, the unfinished business would concern a
yet more honest and sober confrontation of the national and transnational
elements of the Gemian heritage than has been attempted since the
destruction of the Third Reich and even since the fall of the Berlin wall.
Under the surface of events Kahler detected continuous swings of the
pendulum between opposing aspirations: nationalist and transnational,
specifically German and essentially universalist. Ever since the unification
of Gennany under the aegis of Prussia in 1871 those fateful swings
appeared to Kahler to have gathered increased momentum (Der deutsche
Charakter 7).''' It is in this context that Kahler put forward what Mann
considered to be a particularly apt observation regarding Gennan history:
the mutual failure of Germany and Europe to connect — das gegenseitige
Verfehlen von Deutschtum imd Europa (9).

hi Doctor Faiistus, the idea of Germany's "mighty immaturity"
and eternal "becoming" is first associated with the pre-fascist overtones
of the political blather of some of Leverkiihn's fellow students, one of
whom is appropriately named Deutschlin (Doctor Faustus 123ff.). But in
fact the idea of Gennany's "becoming" extends far beyond this character,
for it imbues the novel as a whole with a fateful historical dynamic. And
despite the repeated intimations of finis Germaniae. Doctor Faustus is,
in the last analysis, an open-ended book. For example, Mann has his
fictitious narrator wonder: "What will it be like to belong to a nation
whose history bore this gruesome fiasco within it" (506). In a short article
of 1 945, Mann put this question in specifically Kahlerian ternis: "How will
it be to belong to a nation, to work in the spiritual tradition of a nation that
never knew how to become a nation, and under whose desperate,
megalomaniac efforts to become a nation the world has had to suffer so
much" ("The End" 18). Such sentiments, however, in no way preclude
thinking about German history beyond the catastrophe. If the novel
refrains from speculating about the future political fate of Germany, it
does, all appearances to the contrary, allow for the possibility of grace for
Leverkiihn, and by extension for Germany ( Vaget, "Amazing Grace").

What is implied in Doctor Faustus is articulated more openly in
Mann's public comments during the final stages of the war. "The hope

130

remains," he concluded in an essay with the appropriately Wagnerian
title of The End, "that [...] a form of government and of life may be
found for the German people that will encourage the development of its
best capabilities and educate it sincerely to work for a brighter future of
mankind."''** However, such hopes are predicated on the condition that
Germany renounce her striving for power and hegemony. "Power is lost,"
Mann reminded the Gennans in May of 1 945, "but power is not everything.
It is not even the main thing. And Gemian greatness was never a matter of
power" ("Address"; "Die Lager").

Mann's affinity to Kahler's historical vocabulary becomes fully
apparent when he urges the Germans to remember their European and
universalist heritage. At the conclusion of an article about the liberation
of the concentration camps, Mann issued this appeal to his former fellow
countrymen: "Do not [...] regard yourselves primarily as Gennans, but
as men and women returned to humanity, as Gennans who after twelve
years of Hitler want to be human beings again."''' This echoes the spirit
of Kahler's disquisitions on the "Gennan character," which also end on
an insistent note of hope. German culture, Kahler observes, has produced
not only the "Kleinbiirger" and the "Staatsbiirger" but also the
"Weltburger," and that "Weltbiirger" embodies the ideal of spiritual man
in its purest form; he is part of a secret aristocracy. And as such, the
Gennan "Weltburger" represents an eternal hope of Europa as a whole —
"eine ewige Hoffnung Europas" {Der deutsche Charakter 683).

Other aspects of Mann's Doctor Faiistiis shaped by Kahler's
interpretation of the "German character" can only be touched upon here.
One of man's most striking inventions in Mann's portrait of Germany
and the Germans is that of the fictitious community of Kaisersaschern,
where Zeitblom, the narrator, and Leverkiihn grow up. Leverkiihn's music
is the "music of Kaisersaschern"; he is convinced: "Where I am, there is
Kaisersaschern" (92; 242). Mann found the legitimation for this highly
effective metonymic device in Kahler's book on the "Gennan character,"
where the typical German small town, so different from small towns in
other cultures, is presented as the very emblem of Deii/schtum and as the
cradle of both the German "Kleinbiirger" and the German "Weltbiirger."
But that same Gennan small town also fostered the fateful turn of the
"German character" towards an inwardness which in its turn nourished
German music while it hindered the development of political maturity.
What is more, the German cult of music was itself politically suspect, in
Mann's view, in that it gave rise to a megalomaniac cast of mind, to a
striving for cultural supremacy that was to have disastrous political
ramifications.

131

One of the chief objections to Mann's construction of German
history has been to his apparent fixation — both in tlie novel and in the
Library of Congress address of 1 945 — on Martin Luther and on Luther's
heritage in the long period of incubation of National Socialism. Yet Kahler,
too, and no less obsessively, assigned to Luther an absolutely crucial role
in German history {Der deiitsche Charakter 184-213).-" Finally, the
controversial assertion of the fundamental affinity of Germans and Jews
that in the novel underlies the representation of Gennan-Jewish relations
was based on arguments in Kahler's Israel unter den Vdlkern.-'

There can no longer be any doubt, it seems to me, that the
conception of Doctor Faustus owes a considerable intellectual debt to
the work of Erich Kahler, and that when read in the light of Kahler's Der
deiitsche Charakter in der Geschichte Eiiropas, the design of the novel
appears less idiosyncratic and historically more infomied than critics
have allowed. Kahler's book indeed holds the key to an adequate
understanding of the historical shape of Mann's most ambitious novel,
as he himself had indicated long ago.

This reevaluation of the Mann-Kahler connection lends
significant support to Heinrich August Winkler's highly positive
assessment of Mann's acuity as a historian, while it challenges many of
Assmann's reservations, in the concluding chapter of his book, Winkler
shines an ironic light on certain trends in current German debates about
the "German catastrophe," in which he notes an unpleasant streak of
Siihnestolz — an implicitly nationalist pride in being the best even at the
painful business of atoning (Winkler IL 654). Indeed, there does seem to
be a growing tendency to tout the present political culture of Gemiany as
a model for Europe. Proponents of this idea, found in all bands of the
political spectrum of the Berlin Republic, argue that Germans have leamed
to speak about their past without exculpatory intent, that they have gone
farther than any other country in embracing a transnational political
outlook. Although he does not specifically mention Assmann, Winkler
appears to be thinking of her work as typical of the new German
phenomenon oi Siihnestolz.

Assmann's reading of Mann's attitude towards the "Gennan
catastrophe" is flawed in several respects, most glaringly in the
assumption that the author's own position can be equated with that of
his narrator, Zeitblom. Chapter 46 oi Doctor Faustus draws on an article
that Mann had written, at the request of the Office of War Information, in
response to a gruesome photo story in the 30 April 1 945 issue of Time that

132

documented the liberation of Buchenwald. Mann's article, simply entitled
"Die Lager"" (The Camps), appeared in the 12 May issue of The Nation
under the innocuous heading "Address to the German People." A few
days later, the piece was published in various American-controlled
newspapers in Germany under varying, unauthorized headlines, one of
which was "Thomas Mann iiber die deutsche Schuld."" Mann did
incorporate much but by no means all of the language of "Die Lager" into
Zeitblom"s gloomy ruminations at the beginning of chapter 46. He
attributed to Zeitblom, a figure of the so-called inner emigration, only
those passages that are congruent with this particular type. In the novel,
Zeitblom is a retired Classics professor who in World War 1 went with
the nationalist flow; his two sons have grown up to be ardent Nazis. Only
as the fortunes of the present war turn against Germany do Zeitblom's
deep-rooted, but unacknowledged inner affinities to Nazi thinking give
way to a more critical attitude. Throughout the novel, the figure of
Zeitblom serves as the medium of Mann's critique of his own nationalist
past. It is frankly impossible to miss the voice of a second narrator here,
who communicates with the reader as it were behind Zeitblom's back.
The two voices — the voice of inner emigration and the voice of political
exile — are quite distinct and must not be confused. Assmann chose not to
consider "Die Lager"; had she done so she could not possibly have
attributed Zeitblom's thoughts to Mann.

What Assmann terms Schamkultw may to some extent apply to
Zeitblom. Yet even he displays some sense of personal guilt, declaring
explicitly, for example, that in spirit he is joining the throng of citizens of
Weimar forced to look at the horror by the American General who has
pronounced them "mitschuldig" of the crimes of the regime {Doctor
Faiistus 505). Assmann concedes that Schamkidtur and Schuldkiiltur
are dialectically related (92). But she appears unwilling to acknowledge
such a dialectic in the case of Zeitblom, or of Mann. "Die Lager" also
contradicts Assmann's belief that Mann deemed the German people
incapable of spiritual renewal (122). Again, this may to some degree
describe the apocalyptic mood of so profoundly disoriented a humanist
as Zeitblom, who sees everything around him crumble and who comes to
believe that the original sixteenth-century version of the Faust myth got
it right. In that version, Faust suffers deserved death and eternal
damnation. But this view was not shared by Mann, who, as we have seen,
closed his article on the camps with the thought that Germany's true
greatness was never a matter of political power, and that the Germans of
1945 should think of themselves as having been returned to the human
family, free again at last to excel in the cultural and spiritual realms ("Das

133

Ende," 950). Such sentiments are far from the negative, essentialist views
of the Gemians' incorrigibility that Assmann ascribes to Mann.

At times Mann did waver between the notion of collective guilt
and of carefully differentiated condemnations of the Germans. Thus, in
his radio address of 1 6 January 1 945, he explained to his German listeners
that it was simply asking too much of the other countries to make fine
distinctions between Nazis and Germans. At the same time, however, he
stressed that the notion of collective guilt is a less appropriate category
than Verantwortlichkeit. What he meant by that tenn is clear from his
previous address of 14 January 1945, in which he commented on the
death camps in the East, recently liberated by the Red Army. On that
painful occasion, clearly speaking not on behalf of the American
government but addressing what he took to be the best long-term interests
of the German people, he said: "But one thing is necessary if there is to
be a new beginning — a precondition for any reconciliation with the rest
of the world [. . .] And that is the clear realization that what Germany has
inflicted on mankind — a Germany schooled by its abominable mentors
in every imaginable beastliness — is beyond the pale of atonement"
("Deutsche Horer," 1 106).

These observations and quite a number of similar comments
anticipate by several decades the insights of the German Holocaust debate;
they roundly refute Assmann's reading of Mann's position vis-a-vis the
"Gennan catastrophe." And they render untenable, it seems to me, her
decidedly ungenerous assessment of Thomas Mann's contribution to the
political culture of post-war Germany.

Endnotes

' They include three articles ("Gedanken im Kriege"; "Friedrich und die
groBe Koalition"; "An die Redaktion des Svenska Dagbladet,
Stockholm"), only one of which has been translated into English: "Frederick
the Great and the Grand Coalition," in Thomas Mann, Tlvee Essays, tr.
HelenT Lowe-Porter(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929) 143-215.

' Martin Walser, Erfahnmgen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede.
Friedenspreis des deutschen Biichhandels 1998 (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1998) 18. Cf Dieter Borchmeyer, Martin Walser und die
6)//e«///c//A'e/7 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). Borchmeyer reviews
Walser's statements about the Holocaust and the "German catastrophe"
and argues that despite Walser's well-publicized disdain for the author of

134

The Magic Mountain he essentially concurs with Mann's view of the
Holocaust: "Martin Walser ist in seinen Auschw itz Essays durchaus in
die FuBstapfen Thomas Manns getreten" (32). On the question of Walser's
and Giinter Grass's positions on Germany in relation to the views of
Mann cf Hans Rudolf Vaget, "Deutsche Einheit und nationale Identitat.
Zur Genealogie der gegenwartigen Deutschland-Debatte am Beispiel von
Thomas Mann," Literatnrwissenschaftliches Jahrhuch 33 (1992): 277-
98.

' This often quoted formula was first used by Mann in Deutsche Hover,
his radio address of August 1942. in which he denounced the Nazi
conception of Europe: "Nicht Deutschland soil europaisch werden.
sondem Europa soil deutsch werden," as the reverse of what ought to be
Germany's goal (Mann, Gesaninielte Werke XI: 1049). Variations of this
fomiula may be found in Doctor Faiistus, 183, and in "Ansprache vor
Hamburger Studenten," Gesaninielte Werke X: 402. — Cf Paul Michael
Lutzeler, "Neuer Humanismus."

"* Cf the classic essays by Ernst Fischer and Kate Hamburger.

^ Thomas Mann, "Erich Kahler," Gesammehe Werke X: 502-6, 502f "[...]
es ist mir eine wahre Freude. fiir den Wert des seltenen Mannes zu zeugen
und ihm auch offentlich [...] meine Gliickwunsche darzubringen. in die
ich alien Dank einschlieBe, den mein Leben seiner groBartigen Bemiihung
um das Wahre und Gute schuldet. und meinen ganzen Stolz darauf. ihn
Freund, Genossen, Bruder nennen zu diirfen." For an English version of
Mann's piece, see the Festschrift, ed. by Eleanor Wolff and Herbert Steiner,
Erich Kahler (New York: Van Vechten Press, 1951)37-41.

^ "Es ist die Standard-Psychologie des Deutschtums, ein Buch leidend
durchdringender und umfassend darstellender Erkenntnis, ein Buch der
Liebe im Gmnde: einer kritisch gebrochenen, verhangnisschweren Liebe,
in welcher das Negative und Positive in schmerzlicher Ambivalenz
verschwimmen [. . .] Es ist die Quelle, an die man gehen sollte, wenn man
sein Verhalten zu dem gefallenen Lande und die an ihm zu praktizierende
Politik mit dem zum Heile des Ganzen wohl unerlasslichen Wissen und
Verstehen zu unterbauen wiinscht." (504)

" The two essays on Doctor Fatistiis ("Secularization of the Devil: Thomas
Mann's 'Doctor Faustus'" 20-43; '"Doctor Fanstus from Adam to Sartre"
86-1 1 6) in The Orbit of Thomas Mann have no bearing on the topic I am
concerned with here.

135

** For the most detailed biographical sketch, see Eva J. Engel, "Erich Kahler."
Kahler's Prague background is illuminated with particular authority by
Johannes Urzidil, Prag als geistiger Ausgangspimkt. Ansprache ziim
SOsten Gebiirtstag von Erich von Kahler.

" On Kahler and Max Weber, cf. A. Kiel 59-86.

'"Cf.alsoA. Kiel 175-78.

" Thomas Mann wrote to the author, 19 March 1935, that his chapter on
the relationship ot "Deutschtum und Judentum" was "incontestably the
truest and the psychologically keenest statement ever made on the subject
[...]" (An Exceptional Friendship 1 0).

'- Cf. the new edition with an introduction by Eva J. Engel, Erich Kahler,
Man the Measure. Cf. Hemiann Broch. "History as Ethical Anthropology:
Erich Kahler's 'Scienza Nuova'."

" On the City-of-Man project, cf Paul Michael Liitzeler, Hermann Broch.
Eine Biographic; Erich Kahler, "The Case for World Government."

''' Cf especially "Ordnung," reprinted in Erich Kahler, Die Verantwortung
des Geistes.

'^ For a more detailed argument, cf H. R. Vaget, "'Gemian' Music and
German Catastrophe: A Re-Reading o^ Doctor Faiistns."'

'^ "Heute hat in Deutschland die gewalttatige Reaktion gegen die
Verfehlungen von innen und auBen die unumschrankte Macht, und was
im kaiserlichen Reich noch naiv und unbewuBt geschah, als ein
unwillkiirlicher Nebeneffekt des frischen Weltmachtstrebens, das ist im
dritten Reich eine bewuBte, prinzipielle Richtung gegen Europa geworden,
eine kaum verhiillte sknipellose Selbstsucht, die wenn es sein muB die
Zertriimmerung dieses Erdteils in Kauf nimmt. Alles europaische
Wesensgut wird als ein 'fremdes' mit einer rachsiichtigen Radikalitat
ausgemerzt — was aber nach dieser AusstoBung aller 'fremden'
Bestandteile an Gehalt des Deutschen i'lbrigbleibt, ist nicht viel anderes
mehr als die verworrene Unreife, das Garen und Werden, die 'Dynamik'
an sich selbst, aus der man sich einen Stolz macht, und wieder und jetzt
verhundertfacht jene auBeren Attribute, die nach dem romanischen Vorbild
unbedingt zur Nationalitat gehoren sollen: Imperium, politische

136

Hegemonie mit Waffengevvalt und standiger Waffendrohung, mit
nationalistischer Phrase und machiavellistischen Methoden."

'^ "Entweder war man auf reine, riicksichtslos selbstbefangene Nationalitat
Oder auf rein selbstvergessene Universalitat aus. Und auf solche Weise
erreichte man weder das eine noch das andere."

'** Thomas Mann. "The End."; "Das Ende". "Das Ende — das Ende," is all
that Wotan desires in his great monologue in Die Walkilre, Act II, scene
2.

'"Thomas Mann. "An Address to the German People." 535.

-" Cf also "Luther's Influence on the Gennan Character," The Germans
211-14.

-' Cf. Israel imter den Volkern; "The Jews and the Germans," in Erich
Kahler, The Jews Among the Nations. Cf. Eva J. Engel, "Kostbare
Erbschaft. Erich Kahler zum Judentum. Zum hundertsten Geburtstag Erich
von Kahlers."

Works Cited

Assmann, Aleida. "Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit"
in Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom
Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945. A.
Assmann and Ute Frevert. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1999. 19-147.

Bahr, Ehrhard. Geschichte der deutschen Literatiir Bd. 3: \bm Realismus
zur GegenwartsJiteratur. Tubingen: Francke, 1988.

Bitterli, Urs. Golo Mann — Instanz und Aussenseiter. Eine Biografie.
Hamburg: Kindler, 2004.

Borchmeyer, Dieter. Martin Walser und die Offentlichkeit. Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp, 2001.

Broch, Hermann. "History as Ethical Anthropology: Erich Kahler's
'Scienza Nuova.'" Erich Kahler Ed. Eleanor Wolff and Herbert
Steiner. New York: Van Vechten Press, 195 1 .

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Engel, Eva J. "Erich Kahler." Dentschsprachige Exilliteratur seit 1933.
Bd. 2: New York. Ed. John M Spalek and Joseph Strelka. Bern:
Francke, 1990. Teil 2, 1 644-68.

— . Erich Kahler, Man the Measure. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986.

— . "Kostbare Erbschaft. Erich Kahler zum Judentum. Zum hundertsten
Geburtstag Erich von Kahlers." Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts

72 (1985): 3 1-47.

Fest, Joachim. Die umvissenden Magier Ober Thomas und Heinrich
Mann. Berlin: Corsobei Siedler, 1985.

Fischer, Ernst. '"Doctor Faustus' und die deutsche Katastrophe. Eine
Auseinandersetzung mit Thomas Mann." Kunst und Mensch-
heit. Essays. Wien: Globus Verlag, 1949. 35-97.

Hamburger, Kate. "Anachronistische Symbolik. Fragen an Thomas Manns
Faustus-Roman." Gestaltungsgeschichte und Gesellschafts-
geschichte. Literatur-, kunst- und musikwissenschaftliche
Studien: Fritz Martini zum sechzigsten Geburtstag. Ed. Helmut
Kreutzer. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969. 529-53.

( von) Kahler, Erich. Der Bemfals Wissenschaft. Berlin: Bondi, 1920.

— . "The Case for World Government." Co/;;wo/7 Ct///5e. 1 (1947): 6-8.

— . Der deutsche Charakter in der Geschichte Europas. Zurich: Europa-
Verlag, 1937.

— . An Exceptional Friendship. The Correspondence of Thomas Mann
and Erich Kahler. Tr. Richard and Clara Winston. Ithaca and
London: Cornell UP, 1975.

— . "The Gennan Problem." Contemporary Jewish Record 1 (1944):
454-65,608-15.

— . The Germans. Ed. Robert and Rita Kimber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1974.

— . Das Geschlecht Habsburg. Miinchen: Verlag Der Neue Merkur,
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138

— . Israel unfer den Volkern. Zurich: Humanitas Verlag, 1936.

— . "The Jews and the Germans." The Jews Among the Nations.
Introduction by Harry Zohn. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1988. 95-119.

— . Man the Measure: A New Approach to History. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1943.

— . The Meaning of History. New York: G. Braziller, 1964.

— . The Orbit of Thomas Mann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1969.

— . The Tower and the Abyss. An Inqiiiiy into the Transformation of the
Individual. New York: G. Braziller, 1957.

— . Die Verantwortung des Geistes. Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1952.

— . Der vorige, der heutige iind der kiinftige Feind. Heidelberg:
Weiss'sche Universitatsbuchhandlung, 1914.

Kiel, Anna. Erich Kahler Ein "uomo universale " des zwanzigsten
Jahrhunderts — Seine Begegnung mit bedeutendeu Zeit-
genossen. Bern: Peter Lang, 1989.

Liitzeler, Paul Michael. Hermann Broch. Eine Biographic. Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp, 1985.

— . "Neuer Humanismus. Das Europa-Thema in E.xilromanen von Thomas
und Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger und Stefan Zweig."
Europdische Identitdt und Multikultur. Fallstudien zur
deutschsprachigen Literatur seit der Romantik. Tubingen:
Stauffenburg, 1997. 107-25.

Mann, Golo. "Der Bruder zur Linken. Zur Neuausgabe von Heinrich
Manns Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt,"' 21 September 1974,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25.

— . "Deutscher Historismus." Ma55 ?m^ ^Fer/. 1 (1938): 493-98.

:39

Mann, Thomas. "Address to the German People." A^fl//o/7 12 (May 1945):
535.

— . "Deutsche Horer." Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bdnden. Frankfurt/
Main: S. Fischer, 1990. XI: 983-1 123.

— . Doctor Faiistus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkiihn.
As Told by a Friend. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A
Knopf, 1997.

— . "The End." Free World. 9 (March 1945): 18.

— . "Das Ende." Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bdnden. Frankfurt/
Main: S. Fischer, 1990. XII: 950.

— . "Erich Kahler." Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bdnden. Frankfurt/
Main: S. Fischer, 1990. X: 502-6.

— . "Germany and the Gennans." Thomas Mann 's Addresses Delivered
at the Libra}-}' of Congress, 1942-1949. Washington: Library of
Congress, 1963.45-66.

— . Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bdnden. Frankfurt/Main: S.Fischer,
1990.

— . "Die Lager," Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bdnden. Frankfurt/
Main: S. Fischer, 1990. XII: 953.

— . Listen Germany! Twenty-Five Radio Messages to the German People
Over BBC. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

— . Tagebiicher 1918-1921. Ed. Peter de Mendelssohn. Frankfurt/
Main: S.Fischer, 1979.

— . Three Essays, tr. Helen T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1929), 143-215.

Meinecke, Friedrich. Die deutsche Katastrophe. Betrachtungen iind
Erinnerungen. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1946.

Reed, T. J. Thomas Mann. The Uses ofTradition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996.

140

Reich-Ranicki, Marcel. "Golo Mann: Die Befreiung eines Ungeliebten."
Thomas Mann unci die Seinen. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, 1987.222-36.

Sontheimer, Kurt. Thomas Mann iind die Deiitschen. Miinchen:
Nymphenburger Verlagsanstalt, 1961, 2nd. ed. 2002.

Stammen, Theo. "Thomas Mann und die politische Welt." Thomas-Mann-
Handbuch. Ed. Helmut Koopmann. Stuttgart: Kroner, 3rd. ed.
2001.18-53.

Steiner, George. "A Note in Tribute to Erich Kahler." Sahnagimdi 10/11
(1969/70): 193-95.

"Thomas Mann iiber die deutsche Schuld." Bayerische Landeszeitung,
18 May 1945.

Travers, Martin. " 'Doctor Faustus' and the Historians: The Function of
'Anachronistic Symbolism'." The Modern German Historical
Novel: Paradigms, Problems, Perspectives. Ed. David Roberts,
Philipp Thompson. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. 145-59.

Urzidil, Johannes. Prag als geistiger Aiisgangspunkt. Ansprache zimi
SOsten Gebiirtstag von Erich von Kahler New York: Leo Baeck
Institute, 1966.

Vaget, H. R. "Amazing Grace: Thomas Mann, Adomo, and the Faust
Myth." Our Faust? Roots and Ramifications of a Modern
German Myth. Ed. Reinhold Grimm, Jost Hermand. Madison,
WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1 987. 1 68-89.

— . "'German' Music and Gennan Catastrophe: A Re-Reading of Doctor
Faustus.'' A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann. Ed.
Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessel. Rochester, NY: Camden House,

2004.221-44.

Vordtriede, Werner. "Die Aktualitat eines UnzeitgemaBen." Merkur 9
(1965): 1003-10.

Walser, Martin. Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede.
Friedenspreis des deiitschen Buchhandels 1998. Frankfurt/
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141

Works by Ehrhard Bahr

This bibliography is organized as follows:

I. Books

II. Editorships

III. Articles

IIIA. Research Articles

III A 1. Book Chapters
IIIA2. Journal Articles
III A3. Festschrift Articles

IIIB. Reference Articles

inc. Book Reviews

HID. Miscellaneous Articles and Notes

IV. Abstracts

V. Translations

VI. Published Works Translated by Others

VII. Bibliographies

VIII. Dissertations Supervised

1. Books

Georg Liikacs . Kopfe des XX. Jahrhunderts 6 1 . Berlin: Colloquium, 1 970.

Die Ironie im Spatwerk Goethes: Diese sehr ernsten Scherze: Studien zii
Goethes ''West-ostUchem Divan'' zu den ''' Wander jahren' und
zu'^ Faust II y Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1972.

Georg Liikdcs. Trans. Ruth Goldschmidt Kunzer. Rev. and enl. ed. Modem
Literature Monographs. New York: Ungar, 1972.

Ernst Block. Kopfe des XX. Jahrhunderts 76. Berlin: Colloquium, 1974.

yVe?//)'5'ac/?5. Autorenbiicher 16. Miinchen: Beck, 1980.

142

The Novel as Archive: The Genesis, Reception, cmd Criticism of Goethe's
'"IVi/hehn Meisters Wanderjahre.'' Columbus, SC: Camden
House, 1998.

11. Editorships

Was ist Aiifklcining? Kant, Erhard, Hamann, Herder, Lessing,
Mendelssohn, Riem, Schiller, Wieland: Thesen iindDefinitionen.
1974. Rpt. with extended bibliog. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996.

With Walter K. Stuart. Internationales Verzeichnis der Goethe-
Dissertationen. Comp. and sponsored by the American Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms International, 1978.

With Edward P. Harris and Lawrence G. Lyon. Humanitdt und Dialog:
Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht: Beitrdge znm
internationalen Lessing-Mendelssohn-Symposiinn anldfilich
des250. Gebm-tstages von Lessing und Mendelssohn, Nov. 1979,
Los Angeles. Supp. to Lessing Yearbook. Detroit: Wayne State
UP; Miinchen: text&kritik, 1982.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe: '^Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.'" Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1982.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe: '"Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre."" Erlduterungen
und Dokinnente. 1982. Rev. andenl. ed. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe: ""Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre.'' 1982. Rev.
ed. with afterword and enl. bibliog. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe: '"Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre."" Reclams
Leseklassiker Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986.

Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: Kontinuitdt und Verdnderung vom
Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. 1: Vom Mittelalter zum
Barock. 1987. 2nd rev. ed. Tubingen: Francke, 1999.

Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: Kontinuitdt und Verdndermig vom
Mittelalter bis zur Gegemvart. Vol. 2: Von der Aufkldnuig bis
zwn Vormdrz. 1988. 2nd rev. ed. Tiibingen: Francke, 1998.

Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: Kontinuitdt und Verdnderung vom
Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. 3: Vom Realismus zur
Gegenwartsliteratur. 1988. 2nd rev. ed. Tubingen: Francke, 1998.

Thomas Mann. '"Der Tod in Venedig."' Dokumente und Erlduterungen.
1991. Rpt. with extended bibliog. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005.

With Thomas P. Saine. The Internalized Revolution: German Reactions
to the French Revolution, 1789-1989. New York and London:
Garland, 1992.

III. Articles

Articles are organized as follows:

III A. Research Articles

IlIAl. Book Chapters
II1A2. Journal Articles
HI A3. Festschrift Articles

IIIB. Reference Articles

inc. Book Reviews

HID. Miscellaneous Articles and Notes

HI A. Research Articles
IIIAI. Book Chapters

"Papageno: The Unenlightened Wild Man in Eighteenth-Century
Germany." The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought
from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Ed. Edward Dudley and
Maximilian E. Novak. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

1972.249-57.

"Kafka und der Prager Fruhling." Trans. Frank Schnur. Rev. and enl. ed.
Ehrhard Bahr. Franz Kafka. Ed. Heinz Politzer. Wege der
Forschung 322. Wiesbaden: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell-
schaft, 1973.516-38.

144

"Der SchriftstellerkongreB 1943 an der Universitat von Kalifornien."
Deutsche ExilUteratitr seit 1933. Vol. I: Kalifornien. Pt I. Ed.
John M. Spalek and Joseph Strelka. Bern: Francke, 1 976. 40-6 1 .

"Lessing: Ein konservativer Revolutionar? Zii Ernst imdFalk: Ge.^prdche
fiir Freimaurer."' Lessing in hetitiger Sicht: Beitrdge zur
Internationalen Lessing Konferenz, 1976, Cincinnati, OH. Ed.
Edward P. Harris and Richard E. Schade. Bremen: Jacobi. 1977.
299-306.

"Goethes Natiirliche Tochter. Weimarer Hofklassik und Franzosische
Revolution."' Deutsche Literatur zur Zeit der Klassik. Ed. Karl
Otto Conrady. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977. 226-42.

"Metaphysische Zeitdiagnose: Hermann Kasack, Elisabeth Langgasser
und Thomas Mann." Gegenwartsliteratiir und Drittes Reich.
Ed. Hans Wagener. Stuttgart: Reclam. 1977. 133-62.

"The Literature of Hope: Ernst Bloch's Philosophy and Its Impact on the
Literature of the Gemian Democratic Republic." Fiction and
Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and
Experiment in the Postwar Period. Proceedings of the 1978
UCLA Conference. UCLA Slavic Studies 1 . Ed. Henrik Bimbaum
and Thomas Eekman. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1980.
1 1-26.

"Flight and Metamorphosis: Nelly Sachs as a Poet of Exile." Exile: The
Writer s Experience, Ed. John M. Spalek and Robert F. Bell. Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 267-77.

'Das zweite Exil: Zur Rezeption der Exilliteratur in den westlichen
Besatzungszonen und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von
1945 bis 1959." Das Exilerlehnis: Verhandlungen des Vierten
Symposiums iiber deutsche und osterreichische Exilliteratur.
Ed. Donald G. Daviau and Ludwig M. Fischer. Columbia, S.C.:
Camden House, 1982. 353-66.

'Exildramatik." Deutsche Literatur: Fine Sozialgeschichte. Ed. Horst
Albert Glaser. Vol.9. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983.293-301.

'Revolutionary Realism in Goethe's Wanderjahre."'' Goethe 's Narrative
Fiction: The Irxine Goethe Symposium. Ed. William J. Lillyman.

145

Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1983. \6i-15.Rpl. in Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe. Ed. Harold Bloom. Bloom's Modem Critical
Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 3 1-48.

"Goethe and Romantic Irony." Deutsche Romantik and English
Romanticism: Papers from the University of Houston Third
Symposium on Literature and the Arts: English and German
Romanticism: Cross-currents and Controversy. Ed. Theodore
G Gish and Sandra Frieden. Houston Gemian Studies 5. Miinchen:
Fink, 1984. 1-5.

"Contemporary Theatre and Drama in West Germany." Comtemporary
Germany: Politics and Culture. Ed. Charles Burdick, Hans-Adolf
Jacobsen and Winfried Kudszus. Boulder and London: Westview
Press, 1984.298-311.

"Die Goethe-Renaissance nach 1945: Verspieltes Erbe oder verhinderte
Revolution?" Allerhand Goethe: Seine wissenschaftliche
Sendung aus Anlafi des 150. Todestages und des 50.
Namenstages der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitdt in
Frankfurt am Main. Ed. Dieter Kimpel and Jorg Pompetzki.
Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1985. 89-107.

"Brechts episches Theater als Exiltheater." Schreiben im Exil: Zur Asthetik
der deutschen Exilliteratur 1933 his 1945. Ed. Alexander
Stephan and Hans Wagener. Bonn: Bouvier, 1985. 109-22.

''Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden.^' Goethes
Erzdhlwerk: Interpretationen. Ed. Paul Michael Liitzeler and
James E. McLeod. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985. 363-93.

"Zur Problematik der Faschismustheorie in der Exilforschung." Exil:
Wirkung und Wertung: Ausge\vdhlte Beitrdge zum Fiinften
Symposium iiher deutsche und osterreichische Exilliteratur
Ed. Donald G. Daviau and Ludwig M. Fischer. Columbia, S.C:
Camden House, 1985. 17-24.

'Literary Weimar in Exile: German Literature in Los Angeles, 1 940- 1 958."
Literary Exiles and Refugees in Los Angeles. Los Angeles:
ClarkLibrary, 1988. 1-26.

146

"Lessing and the Utopian Tradition." Lessing and the Enlightenment.
Ed. Alexej Ugrinsky. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. 89-96.

"Der Mythos vom 'anderen' Deutschland in der Kontroverse zwischen
Bertolt Brecht und Thomas M?ixmr Kontroversen. ahe undnene:
Akten des VIII. Internationalen German is ten kongresses
Gottingen 1985. Vol. 9. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1986. 240-46.

"Sigrid BRink's Der Magier ( 1 979): Hommage a Max Brod in Content and
Structure: An Example of Max Brod's Reception in West
Gennany." Max Brod 1884-1984: Untersuchungen zii Max
Brods literarischen und philosophischen Schriften. Ed.
Margarita Pazi. New Yorker Studien zur Neueren Deutschen
Literaturgeschichte 8. New York and Bern: Lang, 1987. 11-25.

"Geschichtsrealismus in Schillers dramatischem Werk." Friedrich
Schiller: Angebot und Diskurs: Zugiinge, Dichtung. Zeit-
genossenschaft. Ed. Helmut Brandt. Berlin: Autbau-Verlag, 1987.
282-92.

"Aufklarung." Geschichte der deutschen Literatw. Vol. 2: Von der
Atifkldrung bis zum Vormdrz. Ed. Ehrhard Bahr with Franz H.
Bauml, Friedrich Gaede and Gerd Hillen. Tubingen: Francke. 1 987-
1988.1-128.

"Geld und Liebe im Armen Spiehnann: Versuch einer sozioliterarischen
Interpretation." Grillparzer's Der arme Spiehnann: New
Directions in Criticism. Ed. Clifford Bernd. Studies in Gernian
Literature, Linguistics, and Culture 25. Columbia, SC: Camden
House, 1988.300-10.

"Georg Lukacs 'Goetheanismus': Its Relevance for His Literary Theory."
GeorgLukdcs: Theory, Culture and Politics. Ed. Judith Marcus
and Zoltan Tarr. New Brunswick: Transactions, 1 989. 89-95.

'Goethe's Torquato Tasso and the Status of the Bourgeois Writer at the
Feudal Court." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Cenury.
Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University, 1989. 263-65,
1 140-1 142.

147

"Die Kontroverse um das 'Andere Deutschland'." Deittschsprachige
Exilliteratur seit 1933. Vol. 2: New York. Ed. John M. Spalek
and Joseph Strelka. Bern: Francke, 1 990. 1 493- 1513.

"Art Desires Non-Art: Thomas Mann's Dialectic of Art and Theodor
Adomo's Aesthetic Theory." Thomas Mann s Doctor Faitstus:
A Novel at the Margin of Modernism. Ed. Herbert Lehnert and
Peter C. Pfeiffer. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991 . 145-60.

" Wilhelm Meisters Wander] ahre oder Die Entsagenden ( 1 82 1 1 929) : From
Bildungsroman to Archival Novel." Reflection and Action:
Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed. James N. Hardin. Columbia,
SC: University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1991. 163-94.

"Dialektik van Klassik und Realismus: Zur Historizitat und Nonnativitat
des Klassikbegriffs bei Georg Lukacs." Klassik im Vergleich:
Normativitdt und Historizitat europdischer Klassik. DFG-
Symposion 1990. Ed. Wilhelm VoBkamp. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992.
121-38.

"Models of the French Revolution and Paradigm Change in Contemporary
Gemian Drama: Peter Weiss and Heiner Muller." The Internalized
Revolution: German Reactions to the French Revolution, 1 789-
1989. Ed. Ehrhard Bahr and Thomas P. Saine. New York: Garland,
1992.239-52.

"Autoritat und Name in Lessings Streitkultur." Streitkultur: Strategien
des Oberzeugens im Werk Lessings. Ed. Wolfram Mauser und
Gunter SaBe. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1993. 139-46.

"Deutsch-jiidische Exilliteratur und Literaturgeschichtsschreibung."
Deutsch-jiidische Exil-und Emigrationsliteratur im 20.
Jahrhundert. Ed. Itta Shedletzky and Hans Otto Horch.
Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1993. 29-42.

"Nazi Cultural Politics: Intentionalism vs. Functionalism." National
Socialist Cultural Policy. Ed. Glenn R. Cuomo. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1995.5-22.

"'My Metaphors Are My Wounds': Nelly Sachs and the Limits of Poetic
Metaphor." Jewish Writers. German Literature: The Uneasy

148

Examples oj Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin. Ed. Timothy
Baht and Marilyn Sibley Fries. Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1995. 43-58. Trans, of '"Meine Metaphern sind
meine Wunden': Nelly Sachs und die Grenzen der poetischen
Metapher." Nelly Sachs: Neiie Interpretationen, Mit Briefen
und Eridiiterungen der An tor in zu ihren Gedichten im An hang.
Ed. Michael Kessler and Jiirgen Wertheimer. Tubingen:
Stauffenburg, 1994.3-18.

"Max Brod as a Novelist: From the Jewish Zeitroman to the Zionist
Novel." Von Franzos zu Canetti: Jiidische Autoren aus
Osterreich: NeueStudien. Ed. Mark H. Gelber, Hans Otto Horch
and Sigurd Paul Scheichl. Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1996. 25-36.

"1959: Hilde Dom\np\.\h\\?\\e?, Nur eine Rose als Stiitze a.nd'HQXXy Sachs
publishes Fhicht und Verwandhwg, both of which deal with
flight and exile." Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought
in German Culture, 1 096- J 996. Ed. Sander L. Oilman and Jack
Zipes. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1 997. 710-15.

"Defensive Kompensation: Peter Bamm: Die unsichtbare Flagge ( 1 952)
und Heinz O. Konsalik: Der Arzt von Stalingrad (1956).'' Von
Boll bis Buchheim: Deutsche Kriegsprosa nach 1945. Ed. Hans
Wagener. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 199-211.

"Aufklarung." Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: Kontinuitdt und
Verdnderung vom Mittelalter his zur Gegenwart. Vol. 2: Von
der Aufklarung bis zum Vormdrz. 2nd rev. enl. ed. Tiibingen:
Francke, 1998. 1-128.

"Ooethe's Concept of ' Volk' and His Disagreement with the Contemporary
Discourse from Herder to Fichte." Searching for Common
Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identitdt 1750-1871 . Ed.
Nicholas Vazsonyi. Koln, Weimar: Bohlau, 2000. 127-40.

'Ooethe and the Concept of Bildung in Jewish Emancipation." Goethe in
German Jewish Culture. Ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost
Hennand. Columbus, SC: Camden House, 2001 . 1 6-28.

'Ooethes Volksbegriff und der deutsche Nationalismus um 1800."D/f
nationale Identitdt der Deutschen: Philosophische Imagi-

149

nationen imd historische Mentalitdten. Ed. Wolfgang Bialas.
Frankflirt/Main: Lang, 2002. 195-212.

"Goethe in Hollywood: Thomas Mann in Exile in Los Angeles." Goethe
ini E.xil: Deutsch-amerikanische Perspektiven. Ed. Gert
Sautenneister and Frank Baron. Bielefeld: Asthesis Verlag, 2002.
125-39.

'Imperialismuskritik und Orientalismus in Thomas Manns 'Tod in
Venedig'." Thomas Manns ^'Der Tod in Venedig'': Wirklichkeit,
Dichtimg. Mythos. Eds. Frank Baron and Gert Sautermeister.
Ltibeck: Schmidt-Rohmhild, 2003. 1-16.

'Thomas Manns Vortrag 'Deutschland und die Deutschen': Vergangen-
heitsbewaltigung und deutsche Einheit." Man erzdhlte
Geschichten, fonnt die Wahrheit: Thomas Mann — Deutscher,
Europaei; Weltbiirger. Ed. Michael Braun and Birgit Lermen.
Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2003. 65-80.

'Art and Society in Thomas Mann's Early Novellas." A Companion to
the Works of Thomas Mann. Ed. Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessel.
Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. 53-72.

11IA2. Journal Articles

"Diese sehr emsten Scherze: Zur rhetorischen Struktur und Funktion der
Ironie in Goethes Spatwerk." Goethe: NeueFolge desJahrbuchs
der Goethe-Gesellschaft 31(1 969): 1 57-73.

"Personenwechslung in Goethes West-ostlichem Divan.'" Chronik des
Wiener Goethe-Vereins 73 ( 1 969): 1 1 7-25.

"Kafka and the Prague Spring." Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative
Study of Literature and Ideas 3.4 { 1 970): 1 5-29.

"Um einen ironischen Goethe bittend." Germanic Notes 1 ( 1 970): 26-29,
36-37.

"Weimarer Dolchstofilegende." Aiifbau (New York) (2 January 1 970): 15-
16.

150

"Goethe's Wanderjahre as an Experimental Novel." Mosaic: AJounud
for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas 5.3 (1972):
61-71.

"Shoemaking as a Mystic Symbol in Nelly Sachs' Mystery Play Eli.'"
Germanic Quarterly 45 { 1 972): 480-83.

With Ruth Kunzer. "Culinary Marxism: Or Portrait of Hans Mayer as a
Goun-net. Diacritics 3.3 (Fall 1 973 ): 1 8-2 1 .

"Die angelsachsische Lukacs-Renaissance." Text und Kritik 39-40 ( 1 973):

70-75.

"Die Bild- und Sinnbereiche von Feuer und Wasser in Lessings Nathan
der Weiser Lessing Yearbook 6 ( 1 974): 80-93.

"Exilforschung an der University of California, Los Angeles.'" Jahrhuch
fiir Internationale Germanistik 6.2 (1974); 125-28.

"Roter Werther in Blue Jeans: Nachlese zum \Verther-Jahr."/'oc7//c Coast
Philology \0 (1975): 10-15.

"Thomas Mann und der kalifornische Untersuchungsausschufi fiir
unamerikanische Umtriebe." Rundschreiben III (Stockholmer
Koordinationsstelle zur Erforschung der deutschsprachigen Exil-
Literatur, 1975): 7-9.

"Geld und Liebe in Bolls Roman Und sagte kein einziges Wort." The
University of Dayton Review 12.2 (1976): 33-39.

"The Pursuit of Happiness in the Political Writings of Lessing and Kant."
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 151 (1976):
167-84.

"Fontanes Verhaltnis zu den Klassikem." Pacific Coast Philology 1 1

(1976): 15-22.

"The Anti-Semitism Studies of the Frankflirt School: The Failure of Critical
Theory." German Studies Review 1 (1978): 125-38. Rpt. in
Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Ed.

151

Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tarr. New Brunswick and London:
Transaction Books, 1 984. 311-21.

"Geschichte und Allegoric: Moglichkeiten des allegorischen Romans zur
Zeit des NS-Regimes: Elisabeth Langgasser und Thomas Mann."
Deutsche Exil-Uteratiir: Literatiir im Dritten Reich. Ed.
Wolfgang Elfe. Spec, issue of Jahrbuch fiir Internationale
Germanistik, ReiheA (Kongrefibehchte) 5 (1979): 103-1 1.

"Fortsetzung oder Ubergange: Deutsche Literatur zwischen 1933 und
1945. ZurKontinuitat und Gegen-Kontinuitat inderdeutschen
LitemlUTgeschichte." Jahrbuch fiir Internationale Germanistik,
ReiheA (Kongressberichte) 8.3 (1980): 382-87.

"Kant, Mendelssohn and the Problem of 'Enlightenment from Above'."
Eighteenth Centwy Life %(\9m: 1-12.

"Das Goethe-Jahr in den USA." Jahrbuch fur Internationale Germanistik
15(1984): 121-23.

"Paul Tillich und das Problem einer deutschen Exilregierung in den
Vereinigten Staaten." Exilforschung: Ein Internationales
Jfl/?/-^?/c/7 3 (1985): 31-42.

"Paul Tillich and the Problem of a Gennan Exile Government in the United
States." Yearbook oj German-American Studies 2\ (1986): 1-12.

"Paul Celan und Nelly Sachs: Ein Dialog in Gedichten." Datum imdZitat
bei Paul Celan. Ed. Chaim Shoham and Bemd Witte. Jahrbuch
fiir Internationale Germanistik, ReiheA 21 (1987): 183-94.

"In Defense of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas." German Studies
/?m"eul 1(1988): 97-109.

"Beyond Potsdam and Weimar: The Image of Contemporary Germany in
Book Reviews of Selected British and American Newspapers
and Joumals." Englisch-Amerikanische Studien 10.2 ( 1 988): 1 87-
94.

152

"'Identitat des Nichtidentischen': Zur Dialektik der Kunst in Thomas
Manns Doktor Faiistiis im Lichte von Theodor W. Adomos
Asthetischer Theorie."'' Thomas Mann Jahrhuch 2 (1989): 102-
20.

"Die Goethe-Renaissance nach 1945: Verspieltes Erbe oder verhinderte
Revolution?" Gof //ye Yearbook 5 {1990): 1-24.

"Geld and Liebe in Weifels Der Tod des Kleinbiirgers . " Modern Austrian
Literature 2A. 2 {\99\):1>7>-A9.

"Vaclav Havel's Faust Drama Temptation (1985): Or, The Challenge of
Influence." Goethe Yearbook 1 (1994): 194-209.

"Die Widersacher des spaten Goethe: die Jungdeutschen, die Nationalen
und die Orthodoxen." Goethe-Jahrbuch 1 1 2 ( 1 995 ): 227-4 1 .

"The Silver Age of Weimar: Franz Liszt as Goethe's Successor: A Study in
C\\\\\\x2i\ Kxc\\Qo\ogy r Goethe Yearbook 10(2001): 191-202.

"Los Angeles als Zentrum der Exilkultur und die Krise des Modemismus."
Exilforschung 20 (2002): 1 99-2 12.

"Exiltheater in Los Angeles: Max Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Bertolt
Brecht und Walter Wicclair." Exilforschung 2 1 (2003): 95- 1 1 1 .

"Ossian-Rezeption von Michael Denis bis Goethe: Ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte des Primitivismus in Deutschland." Goethe Yearbook
12(2004): 1-15.

IIIA3. Festschrift Articles

"Dezenz der Rede: Zum Problem der Sprache in Hofmannsthals Komodie
Der Schwierige."' Austraica: Beitrage zur osterreichischen
Literatur: Festschrift fiir Heinz Politzer. Ed. Winfried Kudszus
& Hinrich C. Seeba. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1975. 285-97.

"Das Theater als Erzahlthema im deutschen Bildungsroman." Ein
Theatermann: Theorie und Praxis: Festschrift zum 70.

153

Gebitrtstag von Rolf Badenhaiisen. Ed. Ingrid Nohl. Munchen:

Nohl, 1977.25-41.

"Realismus und Totalitat: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre als Roman des
19. Jahrhunderts."Forwe« realistischer Erzdhlkimst: Festschrift
for Charlotte JoUes. Ed. Jorg Thunecke. Nottingham: Sherwood
Press Agencies, 1979. 88-92.

"East is West, and West is East: The Synthesis of Near-Eastern and
Western Rhetoric and Imagination in Goethe's West-ostlicher
Divan.'' Aiifnahme — Weitergahe: Literarische Impulse urn
Lessing und Goethe: Festschrift fiir Heinz Moenkemeyer zum
68. Gehurtstag. Ed. John A. McCarthy and Albert A. Kipa.
Hamburger philologische Studien 56. Hamburg: Buske, 1982.
144-52.

"Neu-Weimar am Pazifik: Los Angeles als heimliche Hauptstadt der
deutschen Exilkultur." Weimar am Pazifik: Literarische Wege
zwischen den Kontinenten: Festschrift fiir Werner Vordtriede
zum 70. Gehurtstag. Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer and Till Heimeran.
Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1985. 126-36.

"Von Mimesis zu Poiesis: Die Evolution des modemen Dichters in Goethes
Tasso: Zur Interpretation der SchluBszene." Sinn imd Symbol:
Festschrift fiir Joseph P. Strelka zum 60. Gehurtstag. Ed. Karl
Konrad Polheim. Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1987. 87-
94.

"Geld und Liebe bei Thomas Mann und Bertolt Brecht." Horizonte:
Festschrift fiir Herbert Lehnert zum 65. Gehurtstag. Ed.
Hannelore Mundt, Egon Schwarz and William T. Lillyman.
Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1990. 142-60.

"Modernism and Antimodemism in WerfeLs Work between 1923 and
1933: A Reassessment." Turn of the Centuiy Vienna and Its
Legacy: Essays in Honor of Donald G. Daviau. Ed. Jeffrey B.
Berlin, Jorun B. Johns and Richard H. Lawson. [Riverside]: Edition
Atelier, 1993.413-24.

■'Dialektik des Nihilismus: Thomas Manns Benjamin - Lektiire und der
Fa?/5///5-Roman." Crisis and Culture in Enlightenment

154

Germany: Essays in Honour of Peter Heller Eds. Hans Schulte
and David Richards. Lanham/New York: University Press of
America, 1993.415-31.

"Dimensions of Literary Production in West Germany during the Late
\9^Q?,." Dimensions: A. Leslie WiUson& Contemporar\' German
Arts and Letters. Ed. Peter Pabisch and Ingo R. Stoehr. Krefeld:
van Acken. 1993.240-47.

"Der Rauber-Autor als Ehrenbiirger der Franzosischen Republik."^?/?/^:
und Asthetik: Werke und IVerte in der Literatiir vom 18. bis 20.
Jahrhundert: Festschrift fiir Wolfgang Wittkowski zum 70.
Gebiirtstag. Ed. Richard Fisher. Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 1995. 146-
52.

"Die ganze Kunst des hofischen Gewebes." Goethes Torquato Tasso
und seine Kritik an der Weimarer Hofklassik." Histotr and
Literature: Essays in Honor of Karl S. Giithke. Ed. William
Collins Donahue and Scott Denham. Tiibingen: Stauffenburg,
2000.1-17.

'Goethe and Oral Poetry." Varieties and Consequences of Literacy and
Orality/ Formen und Folgen von Schriftlichkeit und
Miindlichkeit: Franz H. Bciuml zum 75. Geburtstag. Ed. Ursula
Schafer and Edda Spielmann. Tubingen: Narr, 200 1.161 -72.

155

II IB. Reference Articles

Reference articles have appeared in the following journals:

Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature. Ed. Jean- William

B. Edgerton. 2nd ed. New York; Columbia UP, 1980.
Critical Survey of Drama: Foreign Language Series and Supplement.

Pasadena: Salem Press, 1986, 1987,2003.
Critical Survey of Literary Theoty. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1988.
Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction. Ed. Frank N. Magill.

Pasadena: Salem Press, 1988.
Dictionan- of Literaiy Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989, 1992.
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Brittanica. <http://

www.britannica.com/>.
Encyclopaedia Hebraica [ha-Entsiklopedyah ha-'Ivrit; kelalit, Yehudit,

ye-Eretsyisre'elit]. Yerushalayim [Jerusalem]: Hevrah le-hotsa'at

entsiklopedyot, 1977.
Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. Ed. Olive Class. New

York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000.
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Ed. Alan Charles Kors. 4 vols. New

York: Oxford UP, 2003. 135-39.
Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Centwy. Ed. Frederick

Ungarand Lina Mainiero. New York: Ungar, 1975, 1983.
Goethe Handbuch in vier Bcinden. Ed. Bemd Witte, Peter Schmidt. Regina

Otto and Hans-Dietrich Dahnke. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler,

1997-1998.
Great Lives from History : Renaissance to 1900 Series. Ed. Frank N. Magill.

Pasadena: Salem Press, 1989.
Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. Ed.

S. Lilian Kremer. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Internationales Germanistenlexikon. Ed. Christoph Konig. Berlin and

New York: de Gruyter, 2003.
Lexikon literaturtheoretischer Werke. Ed. Rolf Gunter Renner and

Engelbert Habekost. Stuttgart: Kroner, 1995.
Masterplots II: World Fiction Series; Nonfiction Series; Drama Series.

Pasadena: Salem Press, 1988-1990.
Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature. Ed. Thomas Riggs. Farmington

Hill, MI: St James Press, 2002.
Reference Guide to World Literature. Detroit: St. James Press, 1995.

156

inc. Book Reviews

Book reviews have appeared in the following journals:

Brecht Yearbook

Colloquia Germanica

Comparative Literature Studies

GDR-Bulletin

Germanistik

German Quarterly

German Studies Review

Goethe-Jahrhuch

Goethe Yearbook

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Lessing Yearbook

Michigan Germanic Studies

Modern Language Journal

Monatshefte fur deutschen Unterricht. deutsche Sprache und Literatur

New German Critique

Seminar

HID. Miscellaneous Articles and Notes

"Heinrich Mann zu ehren." Mitteilungsblatt 25.6 ( 1 97 1 ): 2; Neue Zeitimg
(Los Angeles) (11 June 1971): 2.

"Marta Mierendorffals Professor fiir Exil-Literaturbemfen."D/eM7/7w/wg
(Berlin) 1 (December 1971): 8.

"UCLA forderte Autoren und pflegt ihr Erhc. " Aiijbau (New York) (2 June
1972): 32.

"Marta Mierendorffals Professor fiir Exil-Literatur berufen." Bericht III
(Stockholmer Koordinationsstelle zur Erforschung der
deutschsprachigen Exil-Literatur, 1972): 14. [Reprint].

"Nachlese zum Heine-Jahr 1972: Heinrich Heine als Dichter der politischen
Verfolgten." D/eM(5r/7w//7g (Berlin) (1 August 1973): 10.

157

"Deutschsprachiges Theater im Exil." Rundschreiben V (Stockholmer
Koordinations-stelle zur Erforschung der deutschsprachigen Exil-
Literatur, 1973): 11-12.

"Dokumentation Exilliteratur: Sammlungen und Bestande der Bibliothek
der University of California, Los Angeles." Bericht 10
(Stockholmer Koordinationsstelle zur Erforschung der
deutschsprachigen Exil-Literatur, 1975): 78-79.

"Thomas Mann in Exile in America: An Exhibition." UCLA Librarian
28.11 (November 1975): 47.

"Richtigstellung zu Ernst Bloch." Rundschreiben III (Stockholmer
Kordinationsstelle zur Erforschung der deutschsprachigen Exil-
Literatur, 1975): 15.

"Nachwort." Die Utopie des weiblichen Gliicks in den Romanen Theodor
Fontanes. By Hanni Mittelmann. Gennanic Studies in America
36. Bern: Peter Lang, 1980. 125.

"Vorwort." Geschichte der detitschen Literatnr. Ed. Ehrhard Bahr. Vol. 1:
Vom Mittelaher bis zum Barock. Tubingen: Francke, 1987. vii-

"Introduction." 77?^ Internalized Revolution: German Reactions to the
French Revolution, 1789-1989. Ed. Ehrhard Bahr and Thomas
P. Saine. New York and London: Garland, 1 992. 3- 1 0.

"Laudatio auf Professor Dr. Stuart Atkins (Santa Barbara/USA) bei der
Verleihung der Goldenen Goethe-Medaille." Goethe-Jahrbuch
112 (1995): 425-27.

"Vorwort [1997]." Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: Kontinuitdt und
Verdnderung vom Mittelaher bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. 2: Von
derAuJkldrung bis zum Vormdrz. Ed. Ehrhard Bahr. 2nd rev. and
enl. Tubingen: Francke, 1998. xi-xii.

'Verrat an Goethe: Sammelbesprechung zur Geschichte der Goethe-
Gesellschaft in Weimar." Goethe Yearbook 12 (2004): 261-64.

IV. Abstracts

"Los Angeles als Exilzentrum: Ein Problemfall zur Frage: Wariim und wo
ExilT' Alte Welten - - neue Welten: Akten des IX. Kongresses der
Internationalen Vereini-gung fur germanische Sprach- und
Literatunvissenschaften. Ed. Michael S. Batts. Vol. 3. Tubingen:
Niemeyer, 1996. 153.

V. Translations

With Ida Novak Myers. "Nelly Sachs: Beiyll sieht in der Nacht/Beiyl!
Sees in the Night."' Dimension: Contemporary German Arts
and Letters 2 ( 1 969): 500-29.

"'Imagine' by Paul Celan and 'Jemsalem is Everywhere' by Nelly Sachs."
HA AM: UCLA 's Jewish Magazine (June 1972): 6.

VI. Published Works Translated by Others

La Pensee de GeorgLukacs. Trans. Jean Lyon. Toulouse: [Private], 1972.

VII. Bibliographies

With Walter K. Stewart. "North- American Goethe Dissertations: 1896-
\9m:' Goethe Yearbook 1 (1982): 177-96.

With Walter K. Stewart. "North American Goethe Dissertations: 1988
Supplement." Goethe Yearbook 5 {\990): 293-303.

"Bibliography: A Select Checklist." The Inte?na/ized Revolution: German
Reactions to the French Revohition, 1789-1989. Ed. Erhard
Bahr and Thomas P. Saine. New York and London: Garland, 1992.

253-58.

With Walter K. Stewart. "North American Goethe Dissertations: 1989-99
Supplement." Goethe Yearbook 10 (2001): 263-75.

159

VIII. Dissertations Supervised

1971

Faulwell, Margaret L. "Unreliable Narration in the Contemporary First-
Person Novel." Diss. UCLA.

1973

Rogan, Richard G "The Reader in the Novels of C. M. Wieland." Diss.

UCLA. [Published as The Reader in the Novels of C. M. Wieland.

Las Vegas: P Lang, 1981.]

1975

Stewart, Walter K. "Time in Goethe's Sturm und Drang Dramas." Diss.
UCLA. [Published as Time Structure in Drama: Goethe's Sturm
nnd Drang Plays. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978.]

1977

Cowan, James L. "Gyorgy Lukacs's Criticism of Thomas Mann and
Avantgarde Literature." Diss. UC Berkeley.

1978

Mittelmann, Hanni. "Die Utopie des weiblichen Glucks in den Romanen
Theodor Fontanes." Diss. UCLA. [Published as Die Utopie des
weiblichen Gliicks in den Romanen Theodor Fontanes. Bern,
Las Vegas: P Lang, 1980.]

Trafton, Elisabeth Rockenbach. "Resignation in Wilhelm Raabes
Stuttgarter Trilogie." Diss. UCLA.

1981

Cohen, Rosi. "Das Problem des Selbstmords in Stefan Zweigs Leben und
Werk." Diss. UCLA. [Published as Das Problem des Selbst-
mordes in Stefan Zweigs Leben imd Werk. Bern, Frankfurt/Main:
PLang, 1982.]

1982

Kruse, Jens. "Poetische Struktur und Geschichte in Goethes Faust IL'"
Diss. UCLA. [Published as Der Tanz der Zeichen: Poetische
Struktur und Geschichte in Goethes ^' Faust." Konigstein/Ts.:
Main, 1985.]

160

1983

Arjomand-Fathi, Nushafarin. "Hafez und Goethe: Studien zum literarischen
Einflu und zu Goethes Hafez-Bild." Diss. UCLA.

Fuchs-Sumiyoshi, Andrea. "Orientalismus in der deutschen Literatur;
Studien zu Werken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts von Goethes
West-ostlichew Divan bis zu Thomas Manns Jo.9e/;/7-Tetralogie."
Diss. UCLA. [Published as Orieittalismus in der deutschen
Literatur: Untersuchungen zu Werken des 19. und 20.
Jahrhunderts. von Goethes ^'West-ostlichem Divan" bis Thomas
Manns "'Joseph'"'-Tetralogie. Hildesheim: 01ms. 1984.]

1985

Burt, Raymond. "The Pietist Autobiography and Goethes Lehrjahre: An

Examination of the Emergence of the Gemian Bildungsroman."

Diss. UCLA.

Kapaun, Gisela Elisabeth. "Die Rolle des fikti\ en Lesers im deutschen
Briefroman des 1 8. Jahrhunderts." Diss. UCLA.

1988

Parasidou Alden. Maria. "Der griechische Mythos in Faust II: Line Studie
zum EintluB von Karl Philipp Moritz' "Gotterlehre" und zu
Goethes "Arbeit am Mythos" in Akt II und III." Diss. UCLA.

O'Brien. Mary-Elizabeth. "Fantasy and Reality in Inntraud Morgner's
Salman Novels: A Discursive Analysis of Leben der Trobadora
und v4/wawc/cr." Diss. UCLA.

Sazaki, Kristina Rosemarie. "Berthold Auerbach's Image of America: Reality
versus Realism." Diss. UCLA.

Schiele, Bemhard Florian. "Wirkungsgeschichte der Literaturzeitschrift
Sinn und Fonn unter der Redaktion von Peter Huchel (1949-
1962)." Diss. UCLA.

161

1989

Cape, Ruth Inningard. "Zur Bildersprache der Franzosischen Revolution
in Goethes Dramen; Goethes Natunnetaphem und Natursymbole
als Ausdruck seines Geschichtsbildes nach 1789." Diss.
UCLA. [Published as Das frcmzosische Ungewitter: Goethes
Bildersprache zur Franzosischen Revolution. Heidelberg:
Winter, 1991.]

Olson, Michael R "Money and Love in the Novels of Heinrich Boll: The
Marriage Theme in His Fiction between 1953 and 1985." Diss.
UCLA.

1990

Cohen-Pfister, Laurel Ann. "Literary Scholarship in the German Democratic

Republic in the 1980s: The Conflict with 'Young' Literature."

Diss. UCLA.

1991

Multer, Reingard. "Kunstler- and Kunstproblematik im Werk von Thomas

Bemhard: Gegen Aura-Verlust und Warencharakter der Kunst."

Diss. UCLA.

1993

Vazsonyi. Nicholas. "Anatomy of a 'Breakthrough': Georg Lukacs's
Goethe Reception and Concurrent Accommodation of Stalinism."
Diss. UCLA. [Published as Lukdcs Reads Goethe: From
Aestheticism to Stalinism. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997.]

Weilnbock, Harald. "Romantische Revolution und die Psychoanalyse
der protofaschistischen Entfremdung: Line nachfreudianische
Lesart der biirgerlichen Mentalitat, ausgehend von Friedrich
Holderlins Empedokles mit Ausblick auf die Situation der
(Post-)Modeme." Diss. UCLA. [Published as ^"Was die Wange
rothet. kann nicht iibel seyn": Die Beziehungsanalyse der
Entfremdung bei Holderlin und Heidegger. Wiirzburg:
Konigshausen & Neumann, 2000.]

162

1994

Jang, Hyun-Sung. "Thomas Manns iind Menno ter Braaks Nietzsche-
RezeptionimLichtedesFaschismus: 1927-1955." Diss. UCLA.
[Published as Nietzsche-Rezeption im Lichte des Faschisnws:
Thomas Mann iind Menno terBraak. Hiidesheim: 01ms, 1994.]

McAnear, Michael Frank. '•Gemian Cultural Hegemony over Austria: The
Case of Albert Drach." Diss. UCLA.

1995

Doering, Wolfgang. "Gliick und Gewalt bei Heinrich von Kleist: Die

Frustrations-Agressions-Hypothese als literaturpsycho-

logischer Ansatz." Diss. UCLA.

Lashgari, Mahafarid. "Schiller's Gender Theor\' in His Classical Dramas."
Diss. UCLA.

Siehoff, John Thomas. "Thomas Manns Doktor Faustits: Studien zur
Asthetik der Kritischen Theorie im Exil und zu Theodor W.
Adomos Beitrag zur Kunsttheorie im Roman." Diss. UCLA.

Bothe, Britta. "Arbeit, Liebe und Androgynie in Irmtraud Morgners
Salman-Romanen."Diss. UCLA.

1996

Krol, Monika. "Women Writers and Social Change in the Former GDR

after the Wende: Gabriele Stotzer, Christa Wolf and Sarah Kirsch."

Diss. UCLA.

1997

Eisel, Erik M. "The Works of Karl Philipp Moritz as Alternate Discourse
of the Public Sphere." Diss. UCLA.

1998

Heinrichsdorff, Amelie. "'Nur eine Frau?': Kritische Untersuchungen zur
literaturwissenschaftlichen Vernachlassigung der Exilschrift-
stellerinnen in Los Angeles: Ruth Berlau, Marta Feuchtwanger,
Gina Kaus und Victoria Wolff." Diss. UCLA.

163

2000

Russo, Eva-Maria. '"Auf keinen Teufel gefaBt': The Discourse of

Seduction and Rape in Eighteenth-Century German Literature."

Diss. UCLA.

2002

Parkes, Lisa Caroline. '"Unter einem musikalischen Vorwand': The

Embodiment of Musical Performance in Thomas Mann's Fiction."

Diss. UCLA.

164

New German
NGR Review

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES

L 009 118 696 5

Thomas P. Saine, University of Colifomio, Irvine

Jens Kruse, Wellesley College

The Political Uses of "Goethe" during the Nazi Period: ;

Goethe Fictions between 1933 and 1945

Hanni Mittelmann, Hebrew University

Vom Essen und von Zionismus: Sammy Gronemanns National-
Judisches Anekdotenbuch "Schalet. Beitrdge zur
Philosophie des 'Wenn schon'"

Mary Beth O'Brien, Skidmore College

National Socialist Realism: The Politics of Popular Cinema

in the Third Reich i

Michael P. Olson, Harvard University ;

Goethe as a Catalyst for Germanisfik at Harvard

Lisa Parkes, University of California, Los Angeles
Composing for the Films: Adorno and Schoenberg in ■
Hollywood

Nicholas Vazsonyi, University of Soutfi Carolina

The Wagner Industry and the Politics of German Culture

Hans R. Vaget, Smiffi College

The Historians' Mann and Mann's Historian:

Thomas Mann and Erich Kohler

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