The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany: Books and the Media Dictatorship by Jan-Pieter Barbian (review)

To many, the publicly staged book burnings in May of 1933, orchestrated by the German Student Union, have become synonymous with the National Socialist attitude toward authors and their books. However, while the burning of books remains a powerful symbol, it tends at times to obscure the many facets of National Socialist cultural policy. It is the great accomplishment of Jan-Pieter Barbian’s The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany to highlight the many contradictions and inconsistencies of Nazi cultural engineering.

Like every arena of the Nazi state, the cultural domain was afflicted by internecine struggles between the numerous agencies and individuals involved in policing culture: the Reich Ministry of Popular Entertainment and Propaganda, which was flush with money after tapping the revenues of the Nazi broadcasting service and grew to an organization with 1,500 employees and 17 departments, including the Chambers of Culture and of Literature; the Gestapo, which was charged with seizing and sequestering indexed books and with closing Jewish publishers and book stores; the Parteiamtliche Prüfungskommission zum Schutze nationalsozialistischen Schrifttums, which censored calendars, encyclopedias, and schoolbooks; the Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhändler, which quickly adopted the values of the Nazi regime and kept its mandatory members informed about the desirability of specific works; and the Wehrmacht, which exerted a great deal of influence in the book market because it commissioned publishers and controlled vast amounts of paper.

As is well known, the Nazi state suppressed and destroyed literature it considered harmful or undesirable. It did so directly—in 1939, the List of Harmful and Undesirable Literature included 4,175 individual works and 565 bans on complete works—and indirectly, particularly by using paper allocation as an instrument of preemptive censorship. Barbian draws attention to the fact that these bans had drastic repercussions not only for the affected authors, such as Remarque, Brecht, or Heinrich Mann, to name just a few, but also involved enormous economic losses for publishers, such as Fischer, Kiepenheuer, Rowohlt, and Ullstein.

Even so, banned books were never completely unavailable. For example, many works made their way back into bookstores when private Jewish libraries were dissolved as their owners emigrated or were deported. Moreover, the practice of banning books itself was characterized by numerous inconsistencies. To begin with, the task of monitoring the bans, which during the war extended to French, British, US, Polish, and Russian authors in addition to politically controversial and Jewish authors of German descent, was overwhelming. As Barbian explains, “every year just two section heads were examining up to 4,000 manuscripts for which an application for paper had been made or whose publication was to be prohibited on political grounds” (70). Sometimes bans were lifted because of personal interventions. In some cases, such as Erich Kästner, the ban initially concerned specific texts while other works were still being printed and sold. Conversely, Ernst Wiechert’s books remained in bookstores even while their author was confined to a concentration camp. And Thomas Mann’s books were sold even after their author had emigrated, but were indexed when Mann was deprived of his citizenship. In spite of these loopholes, however, the Nazi regime was both consistent and stringent when it came to the expulsion of Jews from every level of the book trade. By May of 1935 the 428 Jewish members of the Reich Chamber of Literature had been reduced to five. Jewish publishers, such as S. Fischer or the Grieben Verlag, known for its travel guides, lost their businesses.

While the Nazi regime dedicated significant resources to suppressing unwanted literature, it also directed many funds toward the promotion of politically desirable works. The Reich Ministry of Popular Entertainment and Propaganda, in particular the Chamber of Literature, organized book weeks and a book donation campaign for the Wehrmacht. There were substantial subsidies for book exports which led to a “significant rise in sales of German...