:Hitler's War Poets: Literature and Politics in the Third Reich
2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.114.1.230
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoJay W. Baird has undertaken a thankless and dirty job, which makes him the academic equivalent of Mike Rowe. The study of Nazi literature has its roots in the period from 1933 to 1945 among antifascists such as Georg Lukacs. Writing about the mass of literature of the Nazi period today is simply uninteresting. Of much greater fascination for literary critics are the so-called “ambivalent” figures such as Gottfried Benn or Ernst Ringer. The latter has become so representative of this type that even the “right-wing” rock band “Stahlgewitter” (the title of his first best-seller) evokes him to legitimize their position in contemporary German culture. Baird looks at six writers, staggering them from the oldest Rudolf G. Binding (1867–1938) to Josef Magnus Wehner (1891–1973), Hans Zoberlein (1895–1964), Edwin Erich Dwinger (1898–1981), Eberhard Wolfgang Möller (1906–1972), and Kurt Eggers (1905–1943). Do not bother looking them up in virtually any history of German literature written over the past fifty years; while all are “classics” of the Nazi period, they have (with the possible exception of Binding) been banished into the forgotten recesses of German literature. (I own a volume of Binding's poetry published in the early 1940s with the pages devoted to poems on the Third Reich removed so that it could be sold after 1945.) Sure, they were popular, but they arguably do not represent “real” literature in Germany from 1933 to 1945. For that we need to look to writers such as Ringer or Jan Petersen, the “man in the black mask,” who remained in the underground in Germany after 1933, or writers such as Gertrud Kolmar who were murdered as Jews in the death camps. The fact that the writers presented by Baird were actually read by millions and thus shaped and were shaped by the Nazi culture in which they functioned is ignored. They do not represent the “real” Germany, which lies elsewhere.
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