Читаем Berlin полностью

Aware that such demonstrations and proclamations, however unsubtle, were not enough to ensure conformity, the Nazis established an elaborate bureaucracy to control the nation’s cultural life—the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), based in Berlin. It contained seven departments individually responsible for radio, theater, film, music, the visual arts, the press, and literature.

Like the other departments, the Reichsschriftumskammer, which dealt with literature, was a kind of government union; writers who did not belong to it were unlikely to get published, at least in Germany. The agency kept publishers and booksellers informed as to which authors were acceptable and which were on its index. Since its writ extended across the entire Reich, it brought a degree of centralization never experienced before (or since) in German literary history. Berlin might be the center of German “decadence,” but in culture as in politics it wielded unprecedented authority during the Third Reich.

A few nonconformist writers who were unwilling to flee the country tried to survive by restricting themselves to producing esoteric or specialized works or by writing in a kind of code, which they hoped the Nazi censors were too dim to decipher. This tactic, known as “inner emigration,” was hard to pull off in Berlin because the censorship bureaucracy was headquartered there. Thus some writers chose to retreat to the countryside, where they hoped to be left in peace. A prime example was Hans Fallada, whose novel Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Little Man, What Now?) chronicles the plight of Germany’s petite bourgeoisie squeezed between big labor and big capital. Fallada had thought that as a “nonpolitical man” he had nothing to fear from the Nazis, but they temporarily arrested him in 1933, which convinced him to go to ground in a north German village far from the capital. There he played it safe by writing a novel, Der Eiserne Gustav (Iron Gustav), which celebrates a Berlin coachman who refuses to switch to taxicabs. It was not until after the war that he explored antifascist themes in his novel of the Berlin resistance, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Everyone Dies His Own Death). The physician and poet Gottfried Benn, who had initially heralded the triumph of Nazism, was expelled from the Reichs-schriftumskammer in 1936 for writing verse with “un-German” imagery. For the rest of the Third Reich he found his own inner immigration as an army doctor in Hanover and on the front. The novelist Ernst Jünger, whose works celebrating trench warfare as a spiritual epiphany had won the admiration of Goebbels, refused to put his talent at the service of the Nazis and abandoned Berlin for the little town of Goslar shortly after Hitler came to power.

The majority of the writers who published actively in Berlin during the Nazi era were hacks or opportunists, grateful for the drop-off in competition. The former bastion of “asphalt literature” was now crawling with Blut-und-Boden (blood and soil) writers who celebrated the virtues of race and rootedness. This group included such figures as Hans-Friedrich Blunck, Hans Grimm, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Isolde Kurz, Agnes Miegel, and Hanns Johst (who became head of the Reichs-274 schriftumskammer). Unlike the writers whom they helped to drive away, most of these stars in the Nazi firmament faded from view as soon as the Third Reich collapsed.

While some independent-thinking novelists and poets could continue to do productive work in inner emigration, often in the provinces, playwrights, by dint of the public nature of their craft, found this sort of partial hibernation much harder. They wanted to remain where the action was, and that was Berlin. The Nazis, for their part, were conscious of the Berlin theater’s traditional role as conscience and educator of the nation, and they were determined to bend this tradition to their purposes.