The publishing house Individuum has released historian of culture Jan-Pieter Barbian’s book “The Literary Policy of the Third Reich.” The first copies were presented at Moscow’s Parallel festival, held from December 4 to 7 alongside non/fiction. Reviewer Sorin Brut examines the study of how the Nazi regime sought to subordinate literature.
Before 1933, Germany was one of Europe’s literary centers: Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Remarque, Hesse, Zweig, Brecht and Döblin were active there, and the country had a developed network of libraries, publishers and bookshops. After Hitler came to power, the process of Gleichschaltung began, pushing out the previous culture and building a Nazi one in its place. Its most visible symbol was the burning of books, which took place in 93 locations across the country.
Those targeted included political opponents, Jewish writers, pacifists, Catholics, modernist currents, psychoanalysis, and books about abortion, gender and sexuality. Library staff were dismissed or sent for ideological retraining. Only members of the Reich Chamber of Literature were allowed to write and publish; expulsion from it meant an effective professional ban.
Barbian shows that the removal of unwanted figures proceeded gradually but relentlessly. In 1934, the chamber still included 428 Jewish writers with special status, but by 1935 previous service and hardship no longer counted. Publishers and booksellers deemed “non-Aryan” or politically unreliable were forced to sell their businesses to “Aryan” owners at reduced prices. At the same time, the regime often acted out of calculation rather than principle: some figures, such as Ernst Rowohlt, were able to maneuver and keep their positions longer than others.
One of the book’s central arguments is that Nazi cultural policy was full of internal contradictions. Different agencies competed with one another, while Goebbels treated propaganda as an “art of elasticity,” allowing exceptions when they benefited the state or served a public purpose.
At the same time, the reviewer notes, only the purge of the literary field truly succeeded. Nearly all major writers ended up in exile, in internal isolation, or as victims of the regime. But the attempt to impose official Nazi literature on readers failed: attendance fell at libraries stocked with such books, readers turned to lighter material, and adventure, crime and romance novels remained the most popular. In the wording cited from Goebbels, during the war people sought a spiritual space “that had nothing to do with war.”