The German War (71 page)

Goebbels had always been prepared to spend huge sums on live performance in order to keep the theatres going. By 1942–43, he was allocating 45 million marks to the theatres – up nearly a hundredfold from a decade earlier. This sum, which the Gaus and the municipalities were meant to top up, amounted to a full quarter of Goebbels’s entire budget. It was more than he spent on propaganda itself, and more than twice the amount spent on film – for where the film industry was profitable, theatre would have folded without subsidies. And while the regime called for theatre to be opened up to the masses, it tolerated the enduring cultural grip of the middle classes, which they exercised through the tradition of renewable annual subscriptions for seats. The scale of resources allocated to theatre shows just how seriously the Nazi regime took the notion of ‘German culture’ and satisfying the educated classes who embodied it. Most of the Reich’s 300 theatre companies operated all year round, performing two or three times every day. To keep the show on the road, on average one new production was needed every fortnight: with over 13,000 new productions during the war years, this average was sustained across the Reich. A flagship house such as the Vienna Burgtheater inaugurated a dozen new productions during the 1943–44 season. In February 1944, the latest of the Third Reich’s new theatres opened its doors in the industrial town of Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia.
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Two-thirds of the Berlin theatres had been seriously damaged by the end of 1943, but restoration work began immediately. By mid-1944 seventeen theatres were operating normally again, with a further five still being rebuilt. The repair of the Comedy House was only abandoned after it was hit for the fourth time in January. Improvisation was the order of the day. When the Schiller Theatre was beyond repair, performances were held in its vast canteen where a stellar cast was assembled for Goethe’s
Faust.
By the summer, Goebbels, who demanded detailed monthly reports on the state of the theatres in his Gau, suggested additional night-time performances around the full moon, when it would be easier for audiences to pick their way home through the rubble-strewn streets in the blackout. Meanwhile, several actors from the German Theatre were sleeping at the Friedrichstrasse station – happy to be in a heated dormitory close at hand.

Live performance had never been more memorable. In the depths of winter 1943, Berliners started queuing on Saturday afternoon in front of the box office of Gustaf Gründgens’s Prussian State Theatre, relieving each other periodically through the night, in order to be there at 10 a.m. on Sunday when tickets went on sale. In April 1944, Goebbels persuaded star actors to come to Berlin from Vienna and perform Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale.
Ursula von Kardorff managed to attend, only hours after enduring a heavy American air raid. To reach the theatre she had to clamber over rubble, ‘past blood-spattered people with green-tinged faces’, as she noted in her diary that night. But it was worth it: ‘I felt almost physically lifted out of my present existence and transported into a dream world’. This elation united actors and audiences, inadvertently providing a sense of emotional intensity which theatre directors, critics and Nazi propagandists had long craved. Shakespeare was as eagerly consumed in Berlin as in London, the search for spiritual meaning and for moments of inner reprieve just as crucial in the intervals between air raids.
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Live performance also provided a means of expressing nonconformity. During performances of Goethe’s
Faust
at the Berlin State Theatre, audiences stood up and applauded ostentatiously when Mephistopheles, played by Gustaf Gründgens, declared, ‘Of the rights with which we are born / sadly of them it is never a question.’ In
Don Carlos
Schiller had the Marquis of Posa confront Philip II of Spain with the tyranny of the Inquisition, scripting a demand for political and religious freedom which so often brought audiences to their feet that theatre directors began to shy away from putting on the play. In Vienna’s Burgtheater, which – despite all of Goebbels’s efforts in Berlin – still remained the premier stage in the Reich, dissent took a more separatist turn. Franz Grillparzer’s
King Ottokar,
a play about the tragic fall of the last King of Bohemia, gave conservative Viennese the opportunity to stand and applaud von Hornek’s patriotic soliloquy in praise of Austria. They cheered still more loudly when the first Austrian emperor, Rudolf von Habsburg, came on to plead that ‘justice and the rule of law prevail in German lands’. The SD took note of this ‘demonstration by various reactionary elements’.
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The regime took it all in its stride. When an enraged Hitler Youth leader in Bremen wrote to Rainer Schlösser, Goebbels’s head of theatres, denouncing the city’s Schauspielhaus as a ‘hotbed of reactionary sentiment’, it was Schlösser himself who explained that ‘Theatres with a pronounced liberal atmosphere are essential because they cater for a certain section of the audience and ensure that [these people] ultimately remain under our control.’ Goebbels and Schlösser might criticise the choices of repertoire made by their favoured theatre directors, especially the galaxy of actor-managers in Berlin, but on the whole they let them run their own houses as they saw fit.
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Wanting an uncensored theatre, even standing up for a traditional version of Schiller, was not necessarily a political protest so much as a rediscovery of a kind of national identity: the ‘apolitical German’, profoundly nationalist but in an axiomatic rather party-political sense. It was a self-identity which had served the educated classes well during the previous war. Two writers who were widely read both at home and at the front and to whom educated Germans returned to again and again for inspiration were the contemporary Ernst Jünger, who continued to publish during the war, and the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who had studied with Hegel and Schelling in the 1780s and been influenced by Goethe and Schiller in the early 1790s.
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During the nineteenth century much of Hölderlin’s oeuvre remained unpublished and he had been less well known than his early-nineteenth-century contemporaries such as Joseph von Eichendorff or Theodor Körner. They were also more strident, celebrating the military heroism of the war of ‘national liberation’ against Napoleon, where Hölderlin was more elegiac and lyrical. But it was precisely the mystical and elusive qualities of his writing that appealed to the poet Stefan George, who started the Hölderlin cult as a patriotic, mysterious and exclusive endeavour before the First World War. One of George’s disciples, Norbert von Hellingrath, helped to edit and publish Hölderlin’s unpublished work during the war. When he showed it to Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet was so moved by the hymns and elegies that he composed his first two ‘Duino Elegies’ as a kind of late-Romantic tribute. Hellingrath asserted that many of Hölderlin’s works ‘only share their secret with a very small number, indeed remain completely silent for the majority. And are utterly inaccessible for non-Germans.’ Hellingrath was killed at Verdun, but his version of Hölderlin entered public consciousness in Germany via the elitist ‘George circle’, which venerated a Hellenistic, aristocratic ‘secret Germany’. When the three handsome Stauffenberg brothers – Berthold, Alexander and Claus – joined the circle in the 1920s, they were immediately welcomed as the descendants of the Stauffen Emperor Frederick II – whose biography another member of the circle, the historian Ernst Kantorowicz, was writing. The cult of a ‘secret’, ‘other Germany’ entered public circulation. Associated with another young officer who had served in the First World War and the
Freikorps,
Ernst Jünger, it became the literary touchstone of the anti-Weimar nationalist Right, creating an inheritance with an enduring – and deeply personal – appeal.
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The centenary of Hölderlin’s death in June 1843 was marked by celebrations of his work across Germany, with Tübingen, where Hölderlin had lived for the last thirty-six years of his life, at their centre. One sharp-tongued graduate student, Hellmuth Günther Dahms, wrote to a friend disparaging the Nazi epigones’ efforts to kidnap the poet and ‘declare Hölderlin the first SS man’ during the crass official lectures which accompanied the Tübingen Hölderlin festival. But Dahms found the festival’s final concert ‘deeply moving’, especially its culmination – Brahms’s setting of the ‘Song of Fate’ from
Hyperion.
The first stanza established the harmony of the divine world, where ‘Fateless, like sleeping / infants, the divine beings breathe’, sealing it off from the mortals down below. Their fate is described in the second stanza:

Yet there is granted us

no place to rest;

we vanish, we fall –

the suffering humans –

blind from one

hour to another,

like water thrown from cliff

to cliff,

for years into the unknown abyss.

Brahms repeated the final words four times, that plunge ‘into the unknown abyss’ – ‘ins Ungewisse hinab’. The performance left Dahms ‘quietly convinced that the effect of this hour was so powerful that nothing contemporary can compare with it, that this one true figure can say more than all the stupid clap-trap of our days, that morally speaking Hölderlin’s centenary is on the same level as Katyn’. This was a strange, jarring comparison – placing the lyric poet next to the mass grave of Polish officers shot by the NKVD. Presumably, the brief reference to Katyn – which had been in the news for the previous seven weeks – made perfect sense to his friend, however odd it sounds in retrospect. If Hölderlin was the culture they were fighting for, then Katyn represented the overwhelming threat facing Germany of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik annihilation’. Dahms did not have to be a Nazi to believe this: indeed, what he resented was not the mobilisation of his cultural values but the crude attempt to Nazify Hölderlin.
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In Marburg, the writer Lisa de Boor turned to Hölderlin’s ‘Song of Fate’ to chronicle her own reaction to the news of the fire-bombing of Wuppertal: ‘Yet, how horrific is the path for us in Germany into the abyss. “Into the unknown depths.”’ Wishing for the defeat of the Nazi regime she detested and dreading what that would mean for Germany, Lisa de Boor turned to Hölderlin because he expressed the fundamental dilemma of living on the edge of the abyss, drawn down into it yet morally resisting the pull of fate. When Ursula von Kardorff heard that a close friend – and a private critic of the regime – had been killed in action, she remembered the volume of Hölderlin’s poetry she had given him, and her dedication: ‘You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles.’ The words were not hers. They came from Ernst Jünger’s
On the Marble Cliffs,
a work that Lisa de Boor was also reading with a mixture of repulsion and admiration.
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In December 1943, Lisa de Boor’s daughter, Monika, was arrested along with other doctors in Hamburg belonging to a group called ‘Candidates of Humanity’. Wolf and Lisa de Boor drew on all their connections to gain access to Monika, to write to her and to find a good Nazi lawyer to defend her when her case came to trial. Meanwhile, Lisa sat for a portrait and went to concerts of Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin in Marburg. She was delighted when a young officer wrote to tell her that her playful articles in the
Neue Schau
had meant more to him on the eastern front than all the propaganda slogans dinned into their ears. For her own part, ‘moved by the millions of German dead with whose bodies Russian soil is now being nurtured’, she felt drawn to her ‘old idea of composing ballads’. She felt too that the ruins of Kassel and other German cities were heralding ‘a new birth of Christ’, and that ‘the trials must be undergone’. In January 1944, it was Ernst Jünger’s novel
The Worker
which told her of ‘the demonic, transcendental entities that overpower mankind’.

By 1942, the young General Staff officer Claus von Stauffenberg was turning against the Führer he had formerly revered, drawing spiritual strength to resist Hitler from the poetic sources which had nurtured his opposition to Weimar democracy: Pindar, Dante, Hölderlin and Stefan George. Meanwhile, in Munich the student Sophie Scholl turned to Hölderlin for inspiration when she wrote a long letter to her boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel to explain why she had to oppose the Nazis. Comparing the poet to the boxer Max Schmeling, she pointed out that Schmeling may have been physically stronger but insisted that Hölderlin remained superior: ‘We do not believe in the victory of the stronger, but the stronger in spirit. And the fact that this victory may perhaps come to pass in a world other than our own limited one (beautiful though it is, it is nonetheless small) makes it no less worthy of attainment.’ She continued to distribute the leaflets of the White Rose urging Germans to engage in peaceful resistance to Nazi rule until she and other members of the group were arrested on 18 February 1943. They were executed four days later.
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But neither Hölderlin nor Jünger inspired everyone on the path towards anti-Nazi resistance. Helmut Paulus had taken the poet’s works with him as he marched across Ukraine. In the winter of 1943–44, another young infantryman found himself in dialogue with the same writers when he sat down to turn his war diary into a memoir. Willy Reese was a 23-year-old trainee bank clerk from Duisburg, who had four tours of duty on the eastern front behind him and would return for a fifth. A lapsed Catholic who had abhorred Nazi parades and avoided drilling with the Hitler Youth, Reese had gone to war in 1941 expecting to measure his own ‘baptism of fire’ by the yardstick set by Jünger in his best-selling accounts of the First World War. In 1922, in
The Struggle as Inner Experience,
Jünger had scripted a paean to the erotic charge of pulsing blood and ‘a frenzied orgy’ of killing, describing how ‘The sight of the opponent brings not only ultimate horror but also release from a heavy and unbearable pressure. This is the voluptuousness of blood that hangs over war like a red storm-sail over black galleys, in its boundless verve akin only to love.’ For Reese, keyed up to expect their first, frenzied infantry charge at Soviet lines to be like this, the reality ‘was not harrowing and stirring enough, and yet everywhere horror leered at us’.
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