EIGHT: Nazi Polemical Theater: the Kampfbuhne
THE THEATER PLAYED a vital part in National Socialism; indeed, it was one of Hitler's dominant passions. No German regime in the past did more to further the theater than the Third Reich. In 1936, for example, some 331 theaters, many of them recently built or renovated, played a regular season. [1] The theater was, in fact, an integral part of Nazi ideology, serving to reinforce the political liturgy of the movement. Mass meetings and the theater were intended to supplement each other. For this reason the liturgical weihebuhne, the "Thing theater" on which the volkish ideology was acted out, assumed special significance, presenting the liturgy of the movement through cultic plays meant to create a living community of faith. The National Socialist myth was acted out in dramatic and visual form as an act of religious worship in which masses of people participated. The Thing theater has been investigated [2] and there is no need to analyze it once more. However, the Kampfbuhne (or fighting stage), the other Nazi attempt to harness the theater to their cause needs further exploration, it antedated and outlasted the Thing theater, which was created in 1933 and dissolved in 1937. [3] The Kampfbuhne began its career in 1926, well before the seizure of power, and endured as long as the Third Reich itself.
It is necessary first to describe the diverse forms of the Kampfbuhne that existed before the seizure of power. Here we shall proceed by types, as all the forms of this theater overlap chronologically. The S.A. and Hitler Youth "Spiel-Trupps" (amateur actors) appeared first; then, in 1931, the Gau theater, a mobile stage that played throughout each province, was created. The NS-Versuchsbuhne Nazi Experimental Theater) started in 1927, and in 1930 became the NS-Volksbuhne, performing on a regular basis. Once we have analyzed these various Kampfbuhnen, both amateur and professional, we can then set them into the historical background of the search for a national theater which, starting in the nineteenth century, became accelerated during the Weimar Republic. Finally, we must take a glance at the fate of the Kampfbuhne during the Third Reich.
Whatever its diverse forms, the Nazis defined a Kampfbuhne as a "Streitgesprach" -- a polemic against the enemy. It was designed partly to "indoctrinate through fun and entertainment," and partly, in the words of one S.A. leader, to encourage "fighters for the cause to emerge from the masses." [4] To be sure, the Nazi ideology was presented to the audience, but always in a crude and polemical fashion, quite different, for example, from the majestic liturgy of the Thing theater. The first "Spiel-Trupps" were attached either to the S.A. or to the Hitler Youth, and gave themselves titles like the "Storm Troops" or the "Brown Shirts." These were enthusiastic groups of amateur actors. Little record remains of their plays, and their theatrical presentations are almost impossible to reconstruct. But as far as we can tell, these fell into two parts: fun and entertainment consisting of folk songs and folk dancing; and a "fighting part," which presented "contemporary political sketches" (Politische Zeitbilder). Such, for example, was the mixture of fun and action which the "Brown Shirts" of Hesse-Nassau presented as part of the Nazi propaganda program in the city of Wetzlar in 1932. [5] Sometimes such troupes seem to have used tableaux vivantes centered upon stereotypes of bankers, trade unionists, and consumers. For the most part the troupes would march on stage in closed formation, before beginning the songs, dances, and plays.
Play troupes like the "Brown Shirts" and "Storm Troopers" were often used in election rallies, especially during mass meetings in cities. Their plays were Streitgesprache, used to bring variety to evenings of martial music and speeches. The Hitler Youth carried their plays to such election rallies in cities, and especially to the villages, where they would perform as part of a "Bunter Abend" (cabaret theater) of skits, songs, and dances.
What were such plays like? For the most part only their titles have survived, and these tend toward the banal, as in All Germans Are Brothers. [6] I have found only one script without a title performed in Berlin by such an amateur group. Yet, for all its crudity, the play may well be typical for many others. It was performed on a bare stage in a hall belonging to the German Veterans Association (Stahlhelm). The stage represented the guard room of a local S.A. troop. As the play begins, shots are heard behind the stage and a dead S.A. man is carried into the room. Immediately afterwards a communist is dragged in as the probable murderer. But as the S.A. look through the pockets of their murdered comrade, they find a large sum of money and the address of a Jew. The Jew himself is then brought onto the stage, "whining in his jargon," and is shot by the S.A. as the man really responsible for the murder. [7] Through simple action and stereotypes the lesson is driven home that communists are the dupes of the Jews.
Such amateur players provided the inspiration for a more permanent play troupe made up of professional actors: the Gau theater. From 1931 onwards, such Gau-Buhnen presented "cultural evenings" up and down the province, which consisted of folk songs, political poetry, comic sketches, and monologues. [8] However, political plays were also performed with increasing frequency. We know more about the content of these plays than of those of the "Brown Shirts" or "Storm Troopers" because the Gau theater of Pomerania has been extensively documented for the years 1931 and 1932, though no such documentation seems to exist for other Gau theaters. For example, Walter Busch's Giftgas 500 (Poisoned Gas 500), performed during these years, was a play that maintained its popularity. Its subject is described appropriately enough by the Nazi Illustrierter Beobachter [9] as the story of a key German invention, which Jewish greed swindled from Polish heavy industry. The hierarchy of villains will remain unchanged throughout Nazi rule -- the Poles are bad but the Jews are worse. The plays performed were always highly topical. Thus the German National Party (Deutsche Nationale Volkspartei), always a rival of the Nazis, was satirized for its conceit and pretensions. In addition, plays directed against political Catholicism loomed large in a Polish border region. In one of these, a German Catholic priest hates the Nazis so much that he would rather sell good farm land to Poles than let it be farmed by a German National Socialist. [10] The director of the Pomeranian Gau theater maintained that all in all some 15,000 to 20,000 people would watch a playas it wound its way through the towns and villages. [11] Eventually, the Gau-Buhnen became a part of the "Strength through Joy" movement. [12]
The amateur play troupes and the Gau theaters traveled throughout the German provinces. But the so-called NS-Versuchsbuhne was a traditional troupe, staffed by professional actors, which performed in Berlin in theater buildings hired for the occasion. It opened on April 20, 1927, when, to celebrate Hitler's birthday, Wolf Geyser staged his drama Revolution before some 3,000 spectators. It consisted of a series of tableaux vivantes which contrasted the ideal life in the future Nazi state to that in the Weimar Republic. [13] A few months later, the Experimental Theater performed Joseph Goebbels's Der Wanderer, which was an adaptation of his novel Michael, Bin Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (Michael, The Diary of a German Fate, 1929). [14] But this so-called Experimental Theater seems to have lacked success, for no regular season was attempted for the next three years, only occasional performances.
The provinces had to step in once more, and it was their pressure which led to the establishment of another NS-Volksbuhne in Berlin in 1930. Perhaps this NS-Volksbuhne was supposed to travel throughout Germany, but that function seems to have been usurped by the Gau theater established one year later. [15] The NS-Volksbuhne was an imitation of the older, left-leaning Volksbuhne and the Christian Buhnenvolksbund. It performed regularly and its plays are easiest to reconstruct because they were reported by the party press.
The NS-Volksbuhne plays were polemical, and, whether classic or modern, were conceived as Streitgesprache in spite of their conventional staging. Schiller's Rauber was one of the first plays performed, and it was claimed that here the Rauber had finally been staged as Schiller himself desired. The character of Spiegelberg, the enemy of Karl Moor and "leader" of the band, was brought to the fore. He became the villain, transformed into a "loud-mouthed Jewish agitator" who, while himself a coward, incites others to the craven murder of Karl Moor. Schiller's play as performed by the NS-Volksbuhne was hailed by the Nazi press as the first dawn of a new area of Aryan German art. [16] By contrast, in Piscator's performance of the Rauber staged five years before the Nazis' version, Spiegelberg wore the mask of Leon Trotsky, and the murder of Moor was pictured as a noble attempt to rescue freedom from the clutches of the gang. The only other traditional plays performed in those early days of the Nazi theater were Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Ernst von Wildenbruch's Mennoniten. The Ibsen play, first staged in 1931, was intended to demonstrate the superiority of Nordic aristocracy over majority rule, and the value of personality as opposed to public opinion. [17] The Mennoniten was directed against the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia. It dealt with German courage and French intrigue, the chastity of the German woman and the French attempt to contaminate German blood. Waldemar, the hero of the play, could be viewed as a forerunner of Albert Leo Schlageter, who had fought the good fight more recently in the Ruhr and entered the Nazi gallery of martyrs. [18]
Historical analogies were popular in the NS-Volksbuhne as they were in Nazi ideology. For example, Walter Flex's Klaus von Bismarck was part of the repertoire, a drama that attempted to show how in the Middle Ages the ancestor of the Iron Chancellor fought against the divisiveness of political parties and for the salvation of the Mark Brandenburg. [19] The NS-Volksbuhne happily annexed such nationalist drama. If Flex's play was directed against divisiveness, others, such as G. von Noel's Wehrwolf, used the peasants of the Thirty Years' War to demonstrate that it was right and proper to defend national rights by violent means. [20] Finally the German struggle of liberation against Napoleon was an always popular theme; thus Joseph Stolzing's Friedrich Friesen invoked the wars of liberation against Napoleon. However, light entertainment was not neglected, and Ernst von Wolzogen's Ein Unbeschriebenes Blatt (A Blank Leaf), a play of "sunny laughter," was featured in the program, although with the apology that such pause in the fight rejuvenates man's energy for a renewed struggle. [21]
The party seems to have fully supported the NS-Volksbuhne. For example, when in 1930 it played Walther Ilge's Laterne, a play which castigated the French Revolution, the entire Reichstag delegation of the party was present. [22] Yet the vast majority of performances in the NS-Volksbuhne were not devoted to the historical drama or comedy but rather to contemporary plays whose message did not depend upon analogies with the past. The play written by Hitler's political mentor Dietrich Eckart, Familienvater (Father of the Family), was typical of the Volksbuhne's didactic style. Eckart's play dealt with a tyrannical and corrupt newspaper proprietor and with a cowardly Jewish journalist who does the tyrant's bidding. Between them, the tyrant and the journalist crush a young playwright (presumably the unsuccessful dramatist Eckart himself), who has dared to expose the newspaper's corruption. [23] Walter Busch's Giftgas 500, already performed by the Gau theater, was taken over by the Volksbuhne as well. The plays of a rising young playwright, Eberhard Wolfgang Moller, were especially popular, perhaps because of their more elaborate staging and the lavish use of choruses. Moller brought to the Volksbuhne plays of Germanic worship similar to those of the Thing theater for which he wrote most of his material. [24] Moller's dramas were unique among the committed Nazi playwrights during the Weimar Republic. While the plays we have mentioned had their first and often only performances on the stage of the NS-Volksbuhne, his works were frequently performed in regular municipal theaters even before the Nazi theater took them over. Thus his war drama Douaumont (the principal fortress of Verdun) was a great success at the Berlin liberal Volksbuhne before it succeeded on the Nazi stage. Moller's themes were broader than those of most other Nazi playwrights. They were a crusade against the love of money. Parliaments were manipulated as finance capitalists, representing gold, not people. Such populism appealed to the left as well as to the right, even though Moller was a committed Nazi. [25]
The Nazis liked best Moller's Rothschild Siegt bei Waterloo (Rothschild Wins the Battle of Waterloo, 1932), because unlike others this one was centered on the Jews as corrupting the world through money, a racism that became central to Moller's world view. Rothschild is depicted as the "third great power" besides England and France; indeed, he is the true victor at Waterloo. Though the banker asserts that "my money is everywhere and money is friendly, the friendliest power in the world, fat, round as a ball, and laughing," in reality, it has been earned by dishonoring the struggle against the plundering and butchering French. Rothschild is told that "The dead did not die in order that you could earn money through their sacrifice, and in such a shabby way." The moral was clear: the Rothschilds were a sinister power, "which makes cripples of humanity, men into the objects of the stock exchange, profit from life and capital from blood." [26] Finance capitalism as an all-embracing menace, whether symbolized by Rothschild or the Jews in Giftgas 500, was a staple of Nazi drama.
What then were the historical sources of the Kampfbuhne as we have sketched it? Was it an imitation of the Piscator theater, with its agitprop and polemics? The Nationalsozialistiche Monatshefte in 1931 praised the Piscator stage for having had the courage to present polemical plays. [27] The Nazis paid attention to this left-wing theater, perhaps because Piscator's radicalism appealed to their populism; his unconventional staging could be applied to the NS-Volksbuhne. However, the Piscator theater, which existed only from 1927 to 1931, was already in decline when the Nazis praised it. [28] They hardly borrowed from Piscator, in any case; certainly they did not follow the revolutionary staging or use of film, but instead placed the Nazi polemics within a conservative theatrical form. The speaking choruses are an exception here, for the Hitler Youth admitted openly to having borrowed them from the Communist Party. [29]
The genesis of the Kampfbuhne is not linked to the Piscator theater but must rather be sought in the attempt to create a national theater, and, in the Vereinsbuhne, a lay theater of trade and apprentice organizations.
The debate over the creation of a national theater had a long history. Gottfried Keller, for example, had been inspired by an outdoor performance of Wilhelm Tell during the Schiller Year of 1859 to propose the founding of a national theater, in a natural setting, which would combine choirs with folk plays. Such a theater would bring volkish mythology to life (he called his proposal the "Stone of Myth"-Am Mythenstein). [30] The conventional stage was to be abolished, and with it the distance that separates audience and actors. The audience should be drawn into a world of illusion which, through the immediacy of the drama, would become their world of reality. The Thing theater resulted from this pseudo-religious "volkische drama," and such liturgical plays were staged in open-air theaters from the beginning of the twentieth century onward.
The thrust toward the creation of a national theater also affected the traditional stage after World War I. The call went out to transform the professional stage into a national theater. Its purpose was to fight so-called degenerate forms of art, which symbolized Germany's defeat and revolution. Here then was the immediate precedent for the Nazi Kampfbuhne, both in its national purpose and in its polemical intent. Thus Richard Eisner used his older journal Das Deutsche Drama (The German Drama) after 1918 in order to advocate a national theater as opposed to the theater of the Weimar Republic. He founded an organization in 1927 and was able to sponsor some plays -- for example, one entitled Fritjof exalting Nordic man, and another, Andreas Hofer, dealing with the German war of liberation against kings, bishops, and princes. However, Schiller was Eisner's ideal, just as he was the patron saint of the NS-Volksbuhne. [31]
The Manifesto of Erich Brandenburg calling for a national theater in 1919 was more important than Eisner's efforts, even if lacking in aggressiveness. Indeed, Erich Brandenburg demonstrates how the postwar impulse for a national theater was transmitted into the Third Reich. His Manifesto called for an emphasis upon space and movement, and characterized all theater as group art. The influence of the modern dance as practiced by Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman is of importance here; Brandenburg was captivated by "dancing choirs which make a statement," as Wigman put it. The plays performed must be dramas conceived as symbolical action, analogous to cultic rites. Brandenburg contrasted this German drama to the supposed shallowness of the French and the Italian Renaissance stage. Clearly, the Manifesto treats theater as a cultic rite that was capable of renewing the nation. The stage was to be extended into the audience in order to abolish the difference between spectator and performer, while the auditorium should be modeled after the Roman amphitheater. [32]
The Manifesto was signed by a wide variety of intellectuals, ranging from the humanist socialist Gustav Landauer (murdered before it was printed), Thomas Mann, and Richard Dehmel to Hans Bluher of the youth movement and the future Nazi poet Will Vesper. They all joined Brandenburg's Bund fur das Neue Theater (Bund for a New Theater). The Bund soon failed, and Brandenburg then pinned his hope upon the lay plays of the youth movement. [33] Meanwhile, he had refined his Manifesto, envisioning national drama as an instrument to fight modern mechanization and materialism. The neo-romantic tone, present but subdued in the original Manifesto, took over. [34] While Brandenburg took no part in the NS-Kampfbuhne itself, as far as I can determine, he welcomed the advent of the Third Reich as the opportunity to fulfill the promise of this Manifesto and Bund. The time had come for a festive drama, one that would move "between masses and hero, Yolk and Fuhrer." [35] The Nazis, without mentioning the Manifesto, adopted Brandenburg and praised his agitation for a national stage. [36]
Brandenburg called for a national theater that would transmit its message through drama, group symbolism (such as the Kampfbuhne used frequently), and the use of movement and space. These were theatrical forms that also preoccupied the Nazi stage. But side by side with such attempts at national theater, amateur groups continued to playas a part of the youth movement. This amateur play movement was an obvious influence on groups like the "Brown Shirts" and "Storm Troopers," and it would remain highly popular throughout the Third Reich. After the First World War the amateur play was becoming increasingly nationalistic and formalized. Whereas medieval mystery plays had captivated the enthusiasm of the prewar youth movement, now Rudolf Mirbt, prominent in the amateur theater movement, recommended dramas like Hans Johst's Die Propheten (Prophets), which contrasted the Catholic to the German man, and whose hero was Martin Luther. The symbolism and the simplicity of the staging would remain. [37]
In fact, the amateur play had already been used as a weapon of political propaganda. The Free Corps Rossbach attempted to use Spielschaaren (troupes of young amateur actors) directly after the war as a way to mobilize the nation against the Poles and the Republic. Gerhard Rossbach himself saw in such troupes a secret weapon in the hands of a poor and unprotected nation, a continuation of military action by other means. [38] But the Rossbach Spielscaaren were not imitated, even by other Free Corps, and had little influence on the professional theater.
More important were those amateur play groups that performed folk plays or folk festivals in the villages or in the countryside, known as the Heimatspiele, thirty-one of which were officially recognized as worthy of support by the German government after the First World War. The vast majority of these, unlike the Oberammergau Passion Play, were not religious but either patriotic or concerned with a historical episode that had taken place in the locality. Thus, in Ahide, some two hundred amateur players reenacted the heroism and martyrdom of Andreas Hofer, the leader of the Tyrolean struggle against Italy, while other plays recreated the Hermannschlach, which the Germans won against Rome, or the saga of Wittekind. Wilhelm Tell, Goetz von Berlichingen, Andreas Hofer, and the Niebelungenlied provided the most popular themes for these Heimatspiele. [39]
Amateur plays themselves were performed through the Hitler Youth, the "Strength through Joy" movement, and the Arbeitsdienst (Compulsory Labor Service). Amateur actors engaged in simple productions, sometimes merely folk plays, at other times Kampfbuhnen. [40] The Nazis were fearful that the amateur theater might lead to dilettantism and perhaps through the enthusiasm that it generated among the young escape their control; so amateur play educational camps (Laienspielschullager) were instituted, where lay actors could receive a minimal training for the stage. [41]
The Heimatspiele were viewed as a national theater in which the people themselves acted out their traditions and battles for survival. But side by side with the quest for a national theater, which extended from the nineteenth century into the postwar world, we must set the Vereinstheater in all its parochialism and artificiality. Eventually, the Nazis gave such plays performed by trade associations a high priority as true expressions of the Volk soul. If the quest for national theater determined the ambition and tone of the NS-Kampfbuhne, the Vereinsbuhne is directly related to its content.
The Vereinstheater was widespread and popular, [42] and we know little about it (though as the Nazis rightly claimed, every Verein had such a theater, even the Kleintierhalterverband or pet owners association, [43] but for lack of accessible records, I must confine myself to one such theater. The Association of Catholic Apprentices, founded by Adolf Kolping in 1851, loved to perform plays that were an integral part of the educational program of the "Kolping family." The apprentice was meant to become a modest and industrious craftsman, who knew how to work, to pray, and to shun easy wealth and monetary speculation. Adolf Kolping's motto was that "Religion and work are the golden soil of the Volk." [44] But there was no Protestant harshness to this morality; the Kolping family spent their evenings sharing play and song, and listening to popular lectures on history and natural science. [45]
The plays, like the short stories Adolf Kolping wrote, contained simple messages, such as "Thou shalt not steal," or lauded the triumph of love and devotion over a hard-headed businessman. The villain, the enemy of all "honest work," was the speculator, the capitalist, the Jew greedy for gold and riches. [46] There is hardly a play where the Jew does not appear as the symbol of evil. If we take as our example plays performed between 1874 and 1884, we can see a hardening of the polemic and of the racism which in notable contrast to Adolf Kolping's own stories comes to pervade such plays.
Joseph Becks was the most prolific playwright of these years; a Catholic priest, he had become the president of the St. Joseph's Guild of Kolping Apprentices in Cologne. Kolping himself in his short stories had been careful to distinguish between the evil gold-loving Jew who refuses Christian conversion and the converted Jew who became a noble figure. [47] Becks no longer makes such fine distinctions.
For example, Becks's Wurst Wieder Wurst (The Tom-Fool, 1880) shows a Jew trying to cheat a master-craftsman. But the craftsman's loyal apprentices trick the Jew instead. The Jew is not only the foil; he inevitably loses throughout these plays. Becks used traditional comedy, which featured the peasant dolt as the foil. This peasant still appears in the Kolping theater, but by and large it is the Jew who takes the peasant's place, though treated with a brutality largely absent in traditional comedy, Becks constantly stresses the Jewish stereotype, and his Jews talk "jargon" -- that mixture of Yiddish and German used in most anti-Semitic writing and found again in the Kampfbuhne as well. Such plays are crude and polemical, very much like the later performances of the "Storm Troops" or "Brown Shirts." For example, a play written by a teacher called Peter Sturn, Die Schone Nase, oder das Recht Gewinnt den Sieg (The Beautiful Nose, or Justice Triumphs, 1878) is typical. A Jew in his greed sells his nose to the highest bidder, only to finally buy it back at an exorbitant price. The content of a play entitled Hyman Levy as Soldier (1877) does not need elucidation.
These plays spread well beyond the Kolping families and even Catholic circles. After the First World War, the Buhnenvolksbund took up the heritage of this Vereinstheater: Founded in 1919 in order to counter the modern "immoral" and "atheistic" theater, it was supported by such organizations as those of Catholic apprentices (including Kolping), Catholic trade unions, and the Protestant Union of Commercial Employees (Deutsclnationaler Handlungs Gehilfen Verband). The Catholics were in the forefront attempting to influence national culture in this way. [48] The Protestants were less active in exploiting the stage for meir purposes. The Bund began with 700 individual and twenty corporate members; by 1928, it had gained 300 local affiliates and counted between 220,000 and 300,000 members. [49] This was almost exactly half the membership that had joined the rival leftist Volksbuhnenbewegung.
The plays given in the first years after its founding were anti-French, anti-socialist, and anti-Jewish. The morality presented was the same me Kolping theater had already proclaimed. Thus one hero exclaims: "Happy are those unemployed who have a wife to pray for them and keep them from falling into the hands of the Volksverhetzer [meaning the socialists]!" Philip Ausserer, a Camolic theologian and gymnasium professor in Salzburg, contributed a play, Die Wiege (The Cradle), in which a Jew deprives a peasant of his farm. Some plays glorified a pious peasantry, so always close to the heart of Catholicism. The theme of me peasant deprived of his land by the Jew was a commonplace one in all volkish literature. [51] There were other plays which showed me horror of revolution and, again through the example of a Jew, that "Hochmut kommt vor dem fall" (pride goeth before the fall). [52] Such themes are almost identical with those of the later Volksbuhne.
The physical stereotypes were present as well. Thus we learn from the Dictionary of the Theater published by the Bund for amateur players in 1925 how to make a "Jewish mask": dark skin, sharply marked facial lines, thick eyebrows, bent nose. The "usurer" is made up in similar fashion, but as these were always conceived as old men, pale skin and deep-set eyes had to be created. [53] Yet by that time such anti-Semitic plays had largely disappeared from the repertoire. At the same point, the national Bund repudiated an anti-Jewish resolution passed by its Dresden branch and refused the pressure of younger members to haul down the flag of the Weimar Republic at one of its meetings. [54] The Buhnenvolksbund had made its peace with the Republic (as had the Catholic associations that sponsored it).
The Bund declined by 1928, perhaps because of the tensions between the younger and the older generations. [55] The last years of the Weimar Republic required a greater radicalization than the Volksbuhnenbund now desired. The biblical dramas it produced and the shallow comedies (such as The Gambler of Monte Carlo) [56] could not meet this need. These were years when people flocked to see polemical plays hostile to the Republic or to plays like The Threepenny Opera where the middle classes could safely enjoy being derided and spat upon. [57] Though most people came for amusement, nevertheless this was surely one sign of the transformation of middle-class values into their own negation, something closely related to the later Nazi experience.
The building blocks of the Nazi Kampfbuhne were laid through the debate about a national theater, by the amateur play movement, the Vereinstheater; and the Volksbuhnenbund. Surely as the Kampfbuhne increasingly becomes an object of scholarly investigation, other building blocks will be discovered. The tradition of the Kampfbuhne was continued into the Third Reich mainly by the Hitler Youth, but also by the "Strength through Joy" movement and the Labor Service. Baldur von Schirach in 1936 made the renewal of the German theater a special task of the Hitler Youth. [58] Beginning the following year, theatrical congresses were held. The first, in Bochum, included not only the Kampfbuhne but also liturgical theater (in the same year in which the Thing theater itself was discontinued). Thus Eberhard Wolfgang Moller's Frankenburger Wurfelspiel (The Dice Game of Frankenburg, 1936) was performed with the participation of the Hitler Youth.
This play had been produced originally for the Thing theater, and required 1,200 participants. When it opened in 1936 as a Weihespiel (a pseudo-religious play) to accompany the Olympic Games, the Labor Service provided the choruses and the crowds. [59] The play pictured the German peasants accusing tyrants who had oppressed it throughout history in front of seven judges; the audience was drawn into the drama as the actors addressed them directly from the stage. But the NS-Volksbuhne was also represented at Bochum through Moller's Rothschild Siegt bei Waterloo, which concluded the Congress. The Hitler Youth now attempted to advance young dramatists from its own ranks, not only Eberhard Wolfgang Moller but also men like Friedrich Wilhelm Hymmen and Hans Schwitzke who wrote historical dramas very similar to those the NS-Volksbuhne had performed. [60]
But the Dramatists of the Hitler Youth (to cite the title of an official publication) also included men like Paul Alverdes, of an older generation. Alverdes, for example, brought to the drama performed by Hitler Youth the memory of his war experiences. In a play written for the Hitler Youth, Das Winterlager (The Winter Camp), he called for discipline and obedience to the leader, using as his example a dangerous adventure in which Hitler Youth are lost in a snow storm because they had broken the discipline of the group. However, Alverdes returns to his obsession at the end of the play when two war veterans draw the proper moral and refer to their experience in battle. [61] Das Winterlager was performed over the radio; indeed, the radio play provided one of the principal forums for the play groups of the Hitler Youth. But they were also sent into the countryside in order to stem the flight from the land and to help preserve peasant culture. [62] Thus the Hitler Youth took up where they had left off in their pre-1933 election propaganda. The Spielschaaren performed popular cabaret in the villages, consisting of singing, dancing, and folk plays, but Nazi polemics also remained part of their repertoire. During the Second World War they would first take a communal meal with the villagers. [63]
If little enough is known about the actual plays these Hitler Youth troupes performed, still less is known about those of the "Strength through Joy," movement, which also encouraged Spielgruppen in factories. Such factory groups were called the Vanguard (Stosstruppen) and were meant to urge their fellow workers to sing, dance, and stage plays. [64] The Labor Service in its plays does seem to have stressed what one official called the manly, heroic world view as against the attitude of a nomadic and trading people. [65] We are back to the Jewish stereotype so easily presented on the "fighting stage." Such amateur theaters seem to have been the true continuation of the Kampfbuhne. Although the professional theater did present some of the plays of the NS-Volksbuhne, I have found hardly a trace of those writers whose dramas were performed before the seizure of power and whom we have mentioned earlier.
However, it is clear that the Kampfbuhne exemplified the thrust of Nazi ideology and in its roots points to a theatrical tradition of importance. Surely neither the Vereinstheater nor the call for a national stage were without influence upon the attitudes of important sections of the population. Surely, too, the polemical theater during the Weimar Republic must be seen as a whole, in its impact upon the right as well as left, though the actual interaction between them may have been slight. We know much about the Piscator theater because it was innovative and important in putting forward a new dramatic style, while the Kampfbuhne was crude and primitive. However, the latter's enthusiastic S.A. or Hitler Youth play troupes may well have struck a spark because of their very crudeness and traditionalism. Nor was the NS-Volksbuhne without an audience, though it could never rival the famous older Volksbuhne itself.
This theater must be placed next to the Thing theater as the objectification of Nazi ideology -- an important function in a modern mass movement that relied on empathy, participation, and "enlightenment." For the Nazis themselves, the theater belonged to the most elementary expressions of life, as they put it. [66] That alone makes the Kampfbuhne worth investigating, even if it is largely devoid of literary merit.
The Nazis did innovate within the relatively new media of film and photography. Some time late in the 1920s they began to use projectors to show a rapidly changing series of photographs: "pictures without words." These contrasted, for example, slum housing to the high life of a Reichstag deputy. They were fond of projecting the so-called Jewish faces of the republican statesmen, or showing Isidor Weiss, the deputy police chief of Berlin, whom they hated, in a riding outfit. This kind of kaleidoscope seems to have been a success with audiences. The Nazis also at times used photo-montage, and did not disdain the newest avant-garde film techniques pioneered during the Weimer Republic. [67] However, such innovation was always embedded in traditionalism. The stream of history which the Nazis claimed was on their side had to be kept alive -- the past must determine the artistic and literary forms of the present. The crude and simplistic Kampfbuhne exemplified not only Nazi literature and art but also the Nazi historical consciousness.