Gerwin Strobl. History Today. Volume 47, Issue 5, May 1997.
The Third Reich’s emphasis on classical culture and the importance of theater in motivating the masses made it difficult for the Nazis to ban Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s dramas became a propaganda tool. By the end of World War II, his comedies were a refuge from German reality.
On April 23rd, 1940, St George’s Day, as Hitler’s armies were preparing for their westward drive towards the Channel ports, the leading lights of German cultural and intellectual life were assembling at the National Theatre in Weimar to commemorate Shakespeare’s birthday. Also present were political representatives of the Reich. This remarkable gathering at Germany‘s most hallowed literary shrine, the town of Schiller and Goethe, was in fact a tradition that had survived Nazi Gleichschaltung. But now all this was in doubt. Was it appropriate, mused the Chairman of the German Shakespeare Society in his inaugural address, to celebrate the great Englander thus even as German soldiers, sailors and airmen were once again having to confront perfidious Albion in open battle?
Shakespeare’s fluctuating fortunes in the Third Reich are more than just a historical curiosity. They go to the heart of Nazi efforts of ‘cleansing’ the German mind and the wider drive to create a Germany in the Party’s image. They touch on important foreign policy considerations: particularly, Nazi attempts at an accommodation with Britain up to—and beyond—September 1939; and form a bizarre plank of anti-British propaganda thereafter. And they provide, along the way, revealing glimpses of the workings of the Party hierarchies and of popular reaction to Nazi rule.
Shakespeare’s place on the stage and in the classrooms of the Reich preoccupied Germany’s new masters in a way few other cultural issues did. At one time or another, every level of officialdom, from local activists right up to the Minister for Propaganda were agonising over it. In 1939 Hitler himself intervened (in his capacity of arbiter elegantium). If it proved so extraordinarily difficult to reach an overall decision, this was because the matter was too finely balanced. Against Shakespeare’s inconvenient nationality, and often doubtful politics, had to be weighed a whole host of issues.
First and foremost, the twin Nazi obsessions with high Kultur and Great Men: a party that claimed to restore the classics to their rightful place could ill afford to ban the greatest classic of them all. Ideology aside, Shakespeare’s peculiar importance for the German theatre was itself a factor: ever since the eighteenth century and Schlegel and Tieck’s brilliant translation he had been considered an ‘honorary German’, and the young men who, in 1939, set out to fight for the fatherland were as likely to carry Hamlet as Faust in their knapsacks. (When, early in the war, members of a Berlin FLAK regiment took time off from guarding the skies over Hitler’s capital, they promptly put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) There were less sentimental reasons too. It did not escape Nazi notice that conspicuous cultivation of Shakespeare might be a useful weapon in the propaganda war at home and abroad—whereas a ban, however tempting at times, would only backfire.
The recent French example had been a useful warning. In 1934 the government in France had taken exception to a production of Coriolanus generally perceived as an unflattering allusion to its policies. It retaliated by banning first the production and then the play itself in perpetuity. The ensuing chorus of outrage and derision, in which Goebbels’ press had gleefully joined, forced a humiliating retreat. Privately, Goebbels and his minions had been more understanding. Several of the bard’s plays were distinctly awkward—open to all manner of political allusion and full of the most unwholesome sentiment. Theatrical routine could smooth this over, but inventive productions, or new translations, tended to throw Shakespeare’s ‘subversiveness’ into unwelcome relief. A string of new versions by the country’s leading Shakespearean translator, Hans Rothe, jolted audiences in the 1934-35 season with unfamiliar ‘liberal witticisms’, and moved the SS in-house magazine, Das Schwarze Korps, to observe that some of these, quoted out of context, should be enough for a one-way ticket to the nearest concentration camp. In the case of Rothe’s translations Goebbels acted decisively, under clear pressure from the Party rank and file. Otherwise, as in most areas of Nazi policy, the official response evolved over time, depended on the whims and rivalries of the major political players, and was therefore often contradictory.
An important factor in official calculations were the difficulties the Nazis encountered in creating a theatre worthy of their cultural pretensions. The haemorrhaging of artistic talent through emigration was bad enough, but the real problem lay in the dearth of ‘acceptable’ plays. Most of the Austro-German dramatic output from about 1890 onward had been banned because it was either Jewish, left-wing, pacifist, ‘degenerate’, or a combination of all four.
Attempts to fill the gap had not met with much success. The new genre of the Thingspiel, memorably described as ‘open-air medleys of Nazi “agitprop”, military tattoo, pagan oratorio and circus performance’ proved unviable even though vast amounts of money had been lavished on it; and the historical dramas churned out by Party members with literary ambitions were, like the so-called ‘blood and soil’ epics, playing to empty houses. (Literally so: a fifth of all new plays in the 1935-36 season did not even survive beyond their opening nights). By 1935 Goebbels was having to make light of palpable failure: at a pep talk for party activists he quipped, we ‘… can build autobahns, revive the economy, create a new army, but [we]…cannot manufacture new dramatists’. Yet in a country where every provincial town takes pride in its state theatre the shrinking of the repertoire was a source of genuine embarassment.
The embarrassment was all the more acute as the Party had assigned to the theatre a key role in its Kulturpolitik. Theatre was to be a ‘weapon’ in the nation’s struggle, and its purpose firmly educational. It would be a forum where the Volksgemeinschaft would become tangible; where the individual was submerged in the collective and readied for battle. The effect was to be a little like the Party rallies: carefully controlled and orchestrated emotions that would provide ideological motivation from the masses, hence Nazi efforts to encourage theatre-going through subsidised tickets and organised outings at office or factory level. But while audiences doubled between 1933 and 1942, and no expense was spared on productions and buildings (one bombed-out theatre in Berlin was actually re-built in the middle of the war only to be smashed to bits a second time six months later), the range of plays was severely limited.
Producers in the Third Reich did not need to be encouraged to put on more classics. In the absence of contemporary native talent (and of currency reserves to pay the royalties of ‘politically acceptable’ foreign authors like George Bernard Shaw) they had no other option. But even here things were fraught, and got progressively more so as official paranoia, and public disenchantment with the regime, increased. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the father of classical German drama, had blotted his copy book with Nathan (an impassioned plea for toleration of the Jews). Goethe, though publicly feted, was suspect because of his lack of patriotic fervour and his ‘maudlin humanism’. More than once, the Fuhrer fell to pondering the perverse excentricities of Germany’s dramatists, ‘Why did Schiller have to go and write a play about a Swiss rebel?’ Fearing its effect on impressionable minds, Wilhelm Tell, Schiller’s most popular play, was banished from the Reich’s classrooms. (There had been unease about it for some time; but when, in 1941, the Gestapo arrested a Swiss national plotting to kill Hitler, it was curtains for Tell). Don Carlos, too, was awkward: theatre audiences had developed an irritating enthusiasm for the Marquis of Posa’s plea ‘Grant us freedom of thought’. In Hamburg things got so out of hand, the play had to be taken off.
At the other end of the Reich, in Austria, the elation of the Anschluss had worn thin, and any mention on stage of the country’s (otherwise banned) name now produced an electric effect. When the Vienna Burgtheater put on Grillparzer’s King Ottokar, the Gestapo wearily expected ‘ostentatious reactions’ to the play’s famous eulogy on Austria. But it was the reaction of the Viennese to the line ‘Let justice and the rule of law prevail’ that was judged to be really sinister.
In this charged atmosphere, Shakespeare often seemed a safer choice—at least in Schlegel and Tieck’s mellow rendering. (From 1936 any new translation required personal authorisation by Goebbels: Hans Rothe’s ‘liberal witticisms’ having evidently hit home). Thus rendered innocuous, Shakespeare’s stock was steadily rising. In 1934, the first year the Nazis fully controlled the choice of plays, 235 theatres in Germany opened with new Shakespeare productions. Three years later the figure stood at 320.
But the reasons for the bard’s popularity were not purely negative. There was much to admire. In the characters of Macbeth or Richard III the native hue of Nordic resolution warmed Nazi hearts. Hamlet too was agreeably Nordic. ‘If the courtier Laertes is drawn to Paris and the humanist Horatio seems more Roman than Danish, it is surely no accident that Hamlet’s alma mater should have been Wittenberg’, as one leading literary critic put it. There had always been in Germany a special affinity with Hamlet. The poet Freiligrath had famously claimed Germany was Hamlet. Now the Party offered a new reading. The magazine Der Turmer suggested to its readers that the crime which had deprived Hamlet of his inheritance foreshadowed Versailles; Gertrude’s betrayal that of spineless Weimar politicians. But now it was time for Hamlet’s revenge. (No one seems to have noticed that in his reading Hamlet’s eventual fate was, to say the least, thought-provoking.)
Initially, some Party activists had sought a ban on Shakespeare. To them he was merely another foreigner depriving Germans of their place in the sun. But these attempts had met with disaproval from the highest quarters. Only months after Hitler became chancellor, the Party’s education department had issued a pamphlet entitled Shakespeare—a Germanic Writer. If this theme had required further amplification, German academe rose to the occasion. Some literary critics, it is true, persisted with traditional interpretations but others were only too happy to offer ‘Nordic’ readings and helpful advice on the optimum use of Shakespeare in schools (The Merchant of Venice might be a good choice). Other disciplines also sought to con tribute. ‘Racial experts’ proved conclusively that the bard had been an early proponent of eugenics, and an examination of his portrait revealed solidly Nordic characteristics (with perhaps the merest hint of the Dinaric type).
The official enthusiasm for Shakespeare linked in happily with the Third Reich’s wooing of Britain; the bard himself becoming symbolic of the racial links between the two Aryan super states. But Nazi Germany was doing more than celebrating what it considered a common heritage: it was increasingly laying claim to its favourite dramatist. In 1936 it was noted with quiet satisfaction that there had been that year more productions of Shakespearean plays in Germany than in the rest of the world put together. A year later, a special Shakespeare festival was put on for the Hitler Youth in the presence of Rudolf Hess. Again, this might look good abroad, but was also useful at home. Official Germany basked in the knowledge that when it came to Shakespeare even provincial backwaters could more than hold their own with London. Gauleiter Josef Wagner, proud host to the massed ranks of young Shakespeareans, pronounced upon Germany’s elective affinities with her adopted son, while Rainer Schlosser, Goebbels’ theatre supremo in the Propaganda Ministry, wondered publicly whether Germany had not earned herself greater claim to the bard than his native land. Jovial condescension was the order of the day. But the overall line of Goebbels’ propaganda—no overt criticism of Britain—was strictly adhered to.
The advent of war changed all this. Initially, Shakespeare was banned along with all other ‘enemy dramatists’ in a sweeping measure by Goebbels’ Ministry. But Hitler personally intervened and lifted the ban. His continuing hopes of sustaining a relationship with Britain may or may not have played a part in this. Since Shakespeare alone was reprieved, it seems probable that the decision was based on ‘artistic’ considerations. This, after all, was the man who would keep his generals waiting while admiring the latest opulent designs by his favourite stage designer, Benno von Arendt (‘Dear Arendt, you are my link with the world of Beauty!’).
Once it became clear Britain would fight on, Hitler’s decision had to be squared with the new political realities. Shakespeare was now at the centre of two connected propaganda drives. The first was essentially an exercise in damage limitation. With party zealots baying for English blood, the bard’s German credentials had to be played up for all they were worth. The big guns of Nazi Kulturpolitik swung into action. A host of articles by prominent writers appeared in the press. The enthusiasm of Goebbels’ right-hand man Schlosser for ‘Shakespeare: our compatriot’ overflowed into verse. Baldur von Schirach’s magazine ‘for National Socialist Youth’, Wille und Macht, rushed out a special number to put young Nazis straight. In a sense, the task had become easier, since Shakespeare could now be used overtly as a stick with which to beat England.
This took various forms. There was the familiar numbers game (ten productions in Berlin in the first winter of the war against one in London), which allowed Germany to present herself as the defender of European culture against near-universal barbarism. ‘The only Shakespeare known today in England is a soccer player of that name’, observed a speaker at the bard’s birthday celebrations in Weimar in 1940. But the appropriation went much further. Elizabethan England, which had produced Shakespeare, was itself annexed and explicitly equated with the Third Reich: two youthful nations, with strong leaders, opposing corrupt, crumbling empires; the Royal Navy thus doubled up as the Armada and Churchill as Phillip II. Usefully, this also helped explain why Germany had so far failed to produce a Shakespeare of her own: the bard’s England, unlike Germany, had been free of Jews for 300 years (now, of course, there was no holding back the ‘New Elizabethans’ led by Adolf Hitler).
Inevitably, some of Shakespeare’s plays had to be sacrificed: many of the royal epics with their ‘narrow English patriotism’ faded from the stage, though these were never officially banned. Other plays, too, were controversial. One of these, paradoxically, was The Merchant of Venice. Apart from being not nearly anti-Semitic enough—Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, largely unknown in Germany, was suggested as a ‘more powerful’ alternative—there was the matter of Shylock’s daughter marrying an Aryan youth. In deference to ‘contemporary sensitivities’, Jessica tended either to become an adopted (Aryan) child bound for bliss in Lorenzo’s arms, or stayed Jewish (and celibate). Potential miscegenation in Othello was routinely avoided by insisting on white (Arab) Moors. Anthony and Cleopatra presented more fundamental problems. The play offended both the Nazis’ murderous racial prejudice and their no-less deadly patriotism. Was it desirable to show a general putting a woman above his country? Far better to stick to Richard III or Macbeth. Far better to demonstrate, in the words of a leading educationalist, that ‘the only purpose of a hero’s life is to achieve a hero’s death‘, and then invite Germany’s youth to do likewise. (Here the ‘real’ Shakespeare came up trumps, whereas Schiller and his ilk were forever ‘bleating on about freedom’).
Yet, some time after the unwelcome conclusion to the Battle of Britain, Goebbels began to instigate definite restrictions. As of November 1941 all Shakespeare productions required his personal authorisation. This can only partially be explained by ideological considerations, since he also sought to limit theatres to one Shakespeare per season’ irrespective of the choice of play. Moreover, he banned the Shakespeare Day celebrations in Weimar that year. Interestingly, this had provoked a rare direct challenge to his authority. Baldur von Schirach, who had for some time been leading a semidetached Kulturpolitik in Austria, pointedly invited the exiled Shakespeareans to Vienna. (Schirach, already dangerously isolated among the higher echelons of the party, had overplayed his hand, however, and his Shakespeare festival never got off the ground.)
Goebbels’ hostility may not have been unconnected with another challenge to his authority, several years earlier. The Prussian State Theatre in Berlin—part of Goring’s personal empire (as prime minister of Prussia) and thus largely beyond Goebbels’ influence—had staged in 1937 an unforgettable Richard III. What made it so remarkable was the extraordinary daring on the part of the director. When Richard’s henchman threw off their cloaks to reveal dark shirts and all too familiar shoulder straps there were audible gasps in the auditorium. The underlying purpose soon became clear. For the image of a poisonous, club-footed weakling opportuning widows and orphans also had distinct contemporary resonance. Goebbels affected not to notice and limped about with all the bonhomie he could muster. Goring enjoyed it all hugely. But perhaps Goebbels chose not to forget.
Ultimately, Shakespeare proved as irreplaceable as the Nazis had always proclaimed him to be. With the war in the East becoming increasingly desperate and life on the home front ever more uncomfortable, the choice of plays narrowed still further. When offered ideology or stage heroics, audiences voted with their feet. Instead, the Volksgemeinschaft embraced escapism. From Oslo to Athens and from Brussels to Minsk, Germans in and out of uniform found a temporary refuge from grim Nazi reality in the Forest of Arden or on Illyria’s enchanted shore. As this triumph of Shakespeare’s ‘individualist’ comedies over his once-favoured ‘public’ tragedies demonstrates, the Third Reich had lost the ideological war on stage even before the tide had turned decisively on the battlefields.