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  • Fantasy and the State in Nazi Germany
  • Nancy Tillman Fetz (bio)
Christa Kamenetsky . Children's Literature in Hitler's Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism. Athens, Ohio and London: Ohio UP, 1984.

Increasingly, cultural historians are turning to children's literature as an illuminating area of study. For those who believe, with anthropologist James Spradley, that "the richest settings for discovering the rules of society are those where novices of one sort or another are being instructed in appropriate behavior" (Culture and Cognition, 21), children's literature has come to seem an important key to understanding how adult society interprets and justifies its values, attitudes and beliefs.

Ironically, children's book critics have been slower than the historians to accept the validity of interpreting literary texts in terms of the value systems embedded in them. Our field has however produced several excellent studies of this kind, for example Ann Scott MacLeod's A Moral Tale, R. Gordon Kelly's Mother Was a Lady, and Jack Zipes's work with fairy tales. It is also fair to say that children's literature criticism has tended to gravitate toward one or the other of two seemingly opposite poles: toward a preoccupation (as just indicated) with the non-literary uses of books as agents of socialization, or more often, toward a concern with literary matters to the exclusion of all others. In fact, the two approaches are often compatible, as Christa Kamenetsky demonstrates in her study of children's literature during Hitler's Third Reich.

The author draws on historical, sociological, anthropological, and literary methodologies. The breadth of this study is impressive from this and other standpoints. But such breadth is needed if one is to understand in all its complexity how a totalitarian regime was able to inculcate its ideology through children's reading material.

Kamenetsky shows that the National Socialists' policies regarding literature had "positive" as well as "negative" dimensions. The negative strategies of thought control are well known: through book burning, black listing, and indexing of "decadent" authors, the Nazis were able to purge an estimated one-third of all library holdings in Germany by 1933. The so-called "positive" strategy of their cultural [End Page 152] policy—the promotion and creation of "appropriate" literature—required a more formal, sophisticated, and organized effort, and as such was perhaps the more insidious of the two sets of measures. The plan involved nothing less than a thorough reform of library and educational institutions and a total reorganization of the means of producing, disseminating, evaluating, and interpreting children's books. By the mid-thirties when the all-embracing mechanism of censorship was in place, it included 32 state offices, 55 district offices, and approximately 900 censors who issued "black" lists, "white" lists, and reviewed books at the rate of 4,000 a year.

Kamenetsky begins with an examination of literary theory and cultural policy as applied to the German folktale. As one party official put it: "The German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young" (70). The author examines the sagas and folklore which became the cornerstones of many school and library collections. A professor of English at Central Michigan University, she is at her best when literary criticism is called for; particularly insightful is her discussion of folktale symbolism and the Nazis' misuse of literary analysis.

The party's overarching policy was to stress Volkish-racial bias in folktales, historical novels, plays, and wherever else they could find (and distort) it. Only folk literature that projected appropriate heroic qualities was deemed acceptable. New guidelines and prefaces to popular folklore editions pointed to "Germanic" virtues such as bravery, loyalty, service, and sacrifice to the community. Folktales were cleansed of all "alien influences"—foreign or Christian elements that might undermine the cause: the revival of a German national identity. In her overview of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature, Kamenetsky shows that the Nazis did not invent ethnocentric and racial ideas. But she takes great pains throughout the book to show that they did confuse and purposely distort nineteenth-century concepts of Volk literature, forcing comparisons and values that in the...

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