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Harris
Professor Ebner
Quinn Harris
November 20, 2014
Final paper rough draft
Censorship & Subversion in Nazi Germany
Paragraph 1: Introduction
From 1933 to 1934, Machtergreifun or seizure of power, took place as Adolf
Hitler rose to power in Germany (Fischer). From this period to about 1939, Hitler
established the Third Reich, a totalitarian, fascist, racist, and cruel state in Germany
(Fischer). Under this regime, Hitler emphasized several key tenets such as control,
ideology, propaganda, and submission.
Shortly after the formation of this regime, in 1933, Joseph Goebbels was
appointed as head of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. According
to Goebbels, News policy is a weapon of war [...] its purpose ist o wage war and not to
give out information (Fischer). Goebbels was responsible for all tasks of spiritual
direction of the nation and instituted programs of propaganda, supervision of essentially
all artistic forms abroad, foreign press and tourist traffic (Fischer). Below are a few of the
principles favored by Goebbels that summarize his legacy:
1. Propagandist must have access to intelligence concerning events and public
opinion.
2. Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority.
a. It must issue all the propaganda directives.

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b. It must explain propaganda directives to important officials and
maintain their morale.
c. It must oversee other agencies' activities which have propaganda
consequences (Doob).
Especially important is 2c, the notion that Goebbels department oversaw all agencies
which might effect propaganda. Since he used media methods like radio and literature to
spread his ideals, it became difficult for authors to write anything that didnt fit into
Goebbels directives.
Stemming from this general suppression and widespread propaganda were the
book burnings of May n1933. In short, the event was a campaign by the German Student
Union to destroy works of literature which were deemed as subversive or harmful to the
Nazi ideology. This was seen by many as a seminal event and symbolic of the drastic
measures the Nazi Party would take to uphold their ideals, echoing the idea claimed by
Henreich Heine in 1838 that, Where they have burned books, they will end in burning
human beings (Heine).
Paragraph on Wehrkraftzersetzun

Lineage from censorship and book burnins

Subversion of the war effort
1938: Wartime Special Penal Code (crimes punishable by death)

In short, a clear design of intentional speech suppression took place in Germany

from 1933 until the end of the Nazi reign. It became increasingly difficult for the general
public, authors, and filmmakers to be critical or even openly vocal about their
government. For this reason, there were few methods to criticize or subvert said
government. One of those methods to fight Nazism was in literature, often through subtle

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metaphor and allusion. Many authors decided to leave the country and denounce it from
afar. Bertolt Brecht left Germany for the United States and after doing so wrote, The
houses in Hell, too, are not all ugly/But the fear of being thrown out on the street/Wears
down the inhabitants of the villas no less (Brecht, pg. needed). While many left the
country, others such as Erich Kastner and Ernst Junger stayed and eventually came under
intense criticism from others like Thomas Mann.
Thomas Mann believed German readers would not acknowledge that the
atrocities revealed in the camps, unique in their scale and horror, were not the work of a
small group of criminals, but that a large number of Germans had been involved in them
(Grenville) and felt those who stayed in the country deflected responsibility in many
ways. But the morality of inner emigration is not entirely the focus here. Rather, the
effectiveness of subversion in literature must be investigates. Some, like Theiss, who
claimed to invent the term inner emigration, believed that those opposed to the Hitler
regime began to practice a quiet, gentle opposition which set them dangerously apart
from their contemporary conformist fellows (Thuleen).
A prominent author who did exactly that - opposed the Nazi regime from within
Germany was Ernst Junger. Junger opposed the Nazi regime both publically and in his
literature; he refused both a seat offered to him in the Reichstag [and] refused the
invitation to head the German Academy of Literature (citation needed). Furthering his
public dislike and rejection of the regime was the fact that, on June 14, 1934, Junger
wrote a letter of rejection to the Volkischer Beobachter (Kindley) which was the
official Nazi newspaper. In the letter Junger requested none of his writings be published
in the magazine.

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Yet examples like this an author with the courage and ability to reject the Nazi
government were extremely rare. For most, their criticism had to be messages subtly
placed in between the lines of a text so to speak. Jungers novel, read allegorically,
disclosed an esoteric narrative of the German vicissitudes from the end of the Great War
until the vigil of World War II, whose symbolism the Hitlerites would temporarily turn to
political use (Preparata). The book tells the tale of two brothers who had been initiated
into a brotherhood called the Order of the Mauretanians. There, power was the principle
worshipped and the brotherhood demanded that domination be exercised
dispassionately, whether in insurrection or in order (Preparata). This is clearly a
criticism of the Nazi regime and, according to Guido Preparata in his book Conjuring
Hitler: How Britain and America made the Third Reich:
The defeatist narration of the coming battle against Stalin
prompted several party censors, including Goebbels, to
demand that the book be banned and the author punished,
but Hitler intervened personally in the matter, forbidding
anyone to molest the bard. (Preparata, pg needed)
That authors like Junger and Kastner were able to attack and condemn the nazi
regime within their works is widely accepted, but less so is the effectiveness of said
criticism. In his diary, Thomas Mann wondered if the average German was now, or
would ever be, aware of the magnitude of the situation (Thuleen). Because much of the
criticism had to be hidden behind dense metaphor and allegory, some argue that reading
these works today the messages seem so subtle that they are invisible (citation needed).
Further research:

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-look at book sales/how wide reaching were
-use of metaphor effective?
Paragraph 10: PROPAGANDA/CENSORSHIPS EFFECT ON DAILY LIFE
Paragraph 11: METHOD 2: GRASSROOTS (WHITE ROSE)
Paragraph 12: COMPARISON BETWEEN EFFECTIVENESS OF THE TWO:
LIT & GRASSROOTS

Works Cited
Doob, Leonard. "Joseph Goebbels - Propaganda Principles." Joseph Goebbels - Propaganda
Principles. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.

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Fischer, Hannah. Methods of censorship in Nazi-Germany and in the U.S.S.R. Retrieved from
http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/imk/MEVIT4217/h04/undervisningsmateriale/Hanna.
ppt
Heine, Heinrich. Almansor: A Tragedy. N.p.: n.p., 1821. Print.
Kindley, John. "People v. State." People v State RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2014.
Preparata, Guido Giacomo. Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich.
London: Pluto, 2005. Print.
Thuleen, Nancy. "Thomas Mann and the Proponents of Inner Emigration." Thomas Mann and
the Proponents of Inner Emigration. University of Wisconsin-Madison., 1999. Web. 15
Nov. 2014.