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  • Harmful and Undesirable: Book Censorship in Nazi Germany by Guenter Lewy
  • Jonathan Rose
Harmful and Undesirable: Book Censorship in Nazi Germany. By Guenter Lewy (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016) 268pp. $34.95

We have come to understand the Third Reich as a “polycratic” regime of rival bureaucratic fiefdoms endlessly battling over turf. The only arbiter was Adolf Hitler, who preserved his own authority by allowing his lieutenants to squabble among themselves, even if doing so resulted in grotesquely inefficient administration. Nowhere is that entropy better illustrated than in the realm of censorship, wherein literature collided with, and was wrecked by, politics. In what was supposed to be a dictatorship, who exactly was in charge was never clear, and chaos was normal. Consequently, Lewy’s new history of Nazi censorship inevitably reads like a collaboration between George Orwell and Lewis Carroll—oppressive, wildly inconsistent, and based on ludicrous or impenetrable logic.

Nazi censorship began with the notorious book burnings of 1933, which were carried out spontaneously by student vigilantes. Josef Goebbels had little involvement, perhaps because he realized the events would not play well abroad. As Propaganda Minister, Goebbels tried to keep censorship in his own hands, working through the Reichsschrifttumskammer (National Chamber of Literature), which controlled all professional authors. But he also had to reckon with the Parteiamtliche Prüfungskommission (Party Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature), and its rival, Alfred Rosenberg’s Reichsstelle zur Förderung des deutschen Schrifttums (Reich Office for the Promotion of German Literature). Even after these institutions were ordered to follow the instructions of the Propaganda Ministry, the various local and länder police forces continued to conduct book raids [End Page 92] on their own initiative, as did the Gestapo, while the central criminal police office in Berlin continued (as under the Weimar Republic) to crack down on pornography. The Sicherheitdienst (the intelligence service of the ss) used its network of informers to spy on publishers, and the Wehrmacht had its own extensive facilities for publishing and censoring books for soldiers. Even more government machinery was created to remove ideologically unsound textbooks from schools, but that project stalled because the regime mostly failed to produce Nazi textbooks to replace them. Sometimes the Ministry of Economics intervened to lift bans on books that had a strong export market. After all, Germany needed foreign currency to fund re-armament.

With the creation of the Beratungsstelle für das astrologische und verwandte Schrifttum (the Advisory Office for Astrological and Related Literature), the Nazi bureaucracy descended to the depths of black comedy. This department drew sharp distinctions between “scientific” and “inferior” astrology, according to mysterious criteria (158). Goebbels, Rosenberg, Martin Bormann, and other Nazi satraps fought absurd battles over the publication of astrological calendars (they considered appealing to Hitler, but at the time, he was busy planning the invasion of the Soviet Union).

Until 1940, lists of forbidden books were official secrets; publishers were not allowed tell customers which books were banned for fear that prohibition would make them more alluring. When librarians and booksellers protested, Nazi officials sharply replied that ignorance was no excuse; they ought to have guessed that certain authors were unacceptable.

In fact, censorship was wildly unpredictable. Goebbels countermanded a blanket prohibition of homosexual writers, but a biography of Mrs. Wallis Simpson was deemed too “sensationalist” (perhaps the censors realized that she was married to a Nazi sympathizer) (88). A ban on nudist books was imposed in 1933, lifted in 1936, and re-imposed in 1941. The dark novels of Hans Fallada (such as Little Man, What Now? [Berlin, 1932]) were permitted (Goebbels liked them), but Erich Kästner’s innocuous children’s book Emil und die Detektive (Berlin, 1929) was blacklisted, even though the movie version was freely shown. Public libraries were purged, but because librarians often had no clear idea of which books to keep and which ones to discard, the losses varied enormously, anywhere from 10 to 80 percent of collections. The order to expunge Jewish authors imposed an impossible task of bibliographic control. The director of the Cologne university library protested that his staff could not possibly determine which of their 400,000 volumes were...

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