Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the Wars by David Imhoof (review)

In the tradition of William Sheridan Allen and Rudy Koshar, Imhoof’s monograph offers a study of the midsized, central German town of Göttingen on its road to “becoming a Nazi town.” In contrast to these landmark studies, however, Imhoof argues that our understanding of political change between the wars can be deepened if we also examine how Germans—in this case Göttingers—participated in cultural activities. The book is structured around three case studies: sharpshooting, the local Händel Festival, and film. In each section, Imhoof identifies a turning point, several years before 1933, during which a nascent Nazi worldview began to shape these cultural endeavours.

The two chapters on sharpshooting are divided by the events of 1925, when local organizers decided to encourage the enlistment of all male citizens in the sharpshooting association as a way to build community. Imhoof explains that, while the sharpshooting society had been founded in 1392 as a local militia, it had become, by the late nineteenth century, a popular social club for the town’s middle-class men. After the imposition of restrictions on Germany’s standing military in 1919, however, the association’s medieval rationale, linking military preparedness to citizenship, was reinvigorated. In the 1920s, nostalgic visions of the association as an “apolitical,” i.e. non-party affiliated, community builder shaped decision-making in conservative ways. This trend accelerated after 1925. While one might think that the call for every man to join was a sign of a growing democratic civil society in Weimar-era Göttingen, Imhoof insists that the association’s expansion after 1925 signalled an antirepublican quest for community “based on a mythic notion of the Volk” (68) in the face of economic crisis and political discord.

Imhoof treats the Händel Festival and film similarly. In Göttingen, the Händel Festival had begun as a rather daring revival of an underappreciated baroque composer, updated for modern audiences both in terms of what was delivered musically and in the expressionist staging of the annual operas through the mid-1920s. Yet financial difficulties in 1928 and an emerging trend in German musicology that celebrated “historical accuracy” in performances of “German” music (123) led the organizers to embark on a right-leaning trajectory. This process prepared the Festival well for its integration into the cultural offerings promoted by the Nazi state. Meanwhile, a combination of local and national factors affected film offerings in Göttingen. “The tremendous expansion of cinema in the 1920s,” Imhoof explains, “occurred through regulations and relationships that originated in the Kaiserreich” (129). Regulations, for example, that were set up nationally but policed locally encouraged theater owners to seek tax discounts for screening “edifying” films alongside movies defined as popular entertainment. The book details the town’s reception of some of Weimar’s most famous films, but it is the G.W. Pabst film, Westfront 1918, which most exemplifies the overarching themes of Becoming a Nazi Town. Film critics across the political spectrum found something in Pabst’s treatment of the war that they liked; but as the reader learned from the other case studies, cultural activities or products that could “unite conflicting political opinions bolstered conservatives … who consistently lamented Weimar’s fragmented political scene” (159).

The book’s main actors are town elites: theater owners, sharpshooting organizers, newspaper cultural critics, university professors, and the restaurant owner Albert Gnade. Of all these men, it is only Gnade who can best be described as an early committed Nazi. He is an “old fighter” and SS man who plays a role in each of these case studies. After serving on the Magistracy beginning in 1929, he eventually became leader of the sharpshooters, mayor, police chief, and Lord Mayor by 1938. Yet Imhoof notes that Gnade worked smoothly with traditional conservatives to promote “Göttingen’s interests” (18). It is unfortunate...