GERMANY: Kultur’s Authors

“Gentlemen, we thank you! When in 1918 desperation ruled Germany, you cherished our great heritage. When cowardice was in the ascendant you continued to sing of the German man’s eternal heroism. At a time when men without honor governed, you stood for German honor!”

Thus with a choke in his voice, pallid-faced and flabby-fingered Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, “The Great Ideologist of the Nazi Party,” opened last week in the National Socialist Cultural Chamber at Berlin what he called “War Literature Week” as the host of 60 German authors who have written pro-War books since 1918. Not one of the 60 has a name outside Germany. All world-famed German authors of the post-War generation have been men like Erich Maria Remarque whose All Quiet on the Western Front the Nazis think fit only for bonfires. Samples of the Kultur of the 60:

Wilhelm Kohlhass, in his novel The Officer and the Republic, thrills Nazis with this mystic description of how an ideal young German officer speaks: “His voice had the right tremolo for midnight excitement, the fortunes of Pride and defiance of Death: the jubilant joy of Death with the Weapon in one’s hand.”

Theodor Jakobs, in his The Lion of Brzezing, thumbnails Adolf Hitler’s venerable friend, General Karl Litzmann: “With legs astride, as though ready for battle, the old General stood before the window like a rock carved out of ancient Prussia.”

Ernest Jiinger was hailed by Nazis in Berlin last week as having perfectly caught the essence of their Kultur in his volume of essays entitled The Inner Experience of Battle. Excerpts: “All Freedom, all Greatness, all Culture are only maintained and spread aloft by wars. . . . Today in Germany we write poems in steel and symphonies in ferroconcrete. . . . War is the mightiest encounter of nations!”

Since the Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment knew that news of “War Literature Week” would create an unfavorable impression abroad, popular though it was at home, Propagandist & Enlightener Dr. Goebbels exerted himself to the end that last week not a single foreign newspaper correspondent cabled so much as the name of one of the 60 Kultur authors or an excerpt from any of their works.