Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars

Notes

193 Notes INTRODuCTION 1. Göttinger Tageblatt (hereafter GT) 4 May 1924. 2. GT 4 May and 20 April 1924. 3. GT 6 May 1924. 4. The full name of Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Party) or NSDAP. In 1939 he was honored as an “old fighter” with a street named after him: Stadt Archiv Göttingen (hereafter StadtAGö): Chronik 20 April 1939. 5. Fritz Hasselhorn, “Göttingen 1918/17–1933,” in Göttingen: Geschichte einer Universitätsstadt, Band 3: Von der preußischen Mittelstadt zur südniedersächsichen Großstadt 1866–1989, ed. Rudolf von Thadden and Günter J. Trittel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999), 90. 6. Klaus Nathans has recently argued something similar in “Leisure Clubs and the Decline of the Weimar Republic: A Reassessment,” Journal of Contemporary History 45.1 (2010): 27–50. 7. Helmut Walser Smith notes eloquently that historians’ attention to the Holocaust has shifted the major “vanishing point” of German history away from 1933 in The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). My project similarly assumes that we learn more about Germans’ development of Nazism by treating 1933 as but one important step in a longer process. More generally Charles Maier raises important questions about historical periodization in “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105.3 (2000): 807–31. 8. Bernett, “Der deutsche Sport im Jahre 1933,” Stadion 7.2 (1981): 225–83; see also Andrew Bergerson, Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004), and especially “Eigensinn, Ethik und die nationalsozialistische Reformatio vitae,” in Sehnsucht nach Nähe: Interpersonale Kommunikation in Deutschland seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Moritz Föllmer (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 127–56. Bernett was speaking of sports specifically, for which the Nazi process of “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) was sometimes particularly dramatic, but the distinction between longer, gradual devel- 194 Notes to Pages 3–4 opments from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s versus concerted “coordination” efforts from 1933 to 1935 is especially helpful. 9. Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Torchbooks, 1968). See also Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971); John Willet, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917–1933 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1978); Thomas Kniesche, ed., Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia: Camden House, 1994). A recent collection edited by John Williams , Weimar Culture Revisited (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), enlarges the study of “Weimar culture” to include more cultural practices, exploring both the progressive potential of these activities and the ways in which they prefigured Nazi cultural notions. 10. Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 11. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966); Taylor and van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Hampshire : Winchester Press, 1990); Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the AvantGarde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams and Los Angeles County Museum, 1991); Richard A. Etlin, ed., Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); Klaus Backes, Hitler und die bildenden Künste: Kulturverständnis und Kunstpolitik im Dritten Reich (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1988). Other works on cultural regulation paint a more nuanced picture: e.g., Glenn R. Cuomo, ed., National Socialist Cultural Policy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 12. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 79. Benjamin Ziemann’s recent historiographical essay disagrees: “Weimar Was Weimar: Politics, Culture and the Emplotment of the German Republic,” German History 28.4 (2010): 542–71. 13. The relationship, moreover, between principalities, states, and the capital in the Weimar Republic was itself complicated: John Bingham, Weimar Cities: The Challenge of Urban Modernity in Germany...