Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany. Christa Kamenetsky
contributions to the growth of the German nation, as they put it, they would selectively emphasize their collections of national folklore while they would ignore their contributions to comparative folklore and literature as well as to international understanding.14
And yet, it was Herder who, with his first international folk song collection toward the end of the eighteenth century, stimulated German interest in the Urpoesie (primeval poetry) of many lands. His Stimme der Völker (Voice of the Nations) contained authentic folk songs from a great number of nations, including the American Indians, and its preface supported the idea that, originally, all nations had sung with “one voice” to honor God who had endowed each one of them with an equal share of love. As a true Christian, Herder believed that each nation, like every individual, was equal and unique before God and that it was equipped with a “folk soul.” To recapture this soul, he said, which civilization had partially buried, it was necessary that each nation should collect the folk songs, myths, folktales and legends of the past, for in these was still living the naïve and pure spirit of ancient times.15
The Brothers Grimm shared Herder’s concept of the Urpoesie, which they renamed Naturpoesie (nature poetry). In respecting this theory of its common origin, they kept alive their vital interest in the folktales of other lands. Folklorists from the Scandinavian countries, among them Asbjörnsen and Moe, corresponded with them over many years, and so did folklore scholars from England, Scotland, Ireland, Russia, and Serbia, to name just a few. The Brothers traveled to various foreign countries, and in turn, they received many visitors from foreign lands.16
The poetic and scholarly contributions of the Brothers Grimm to international and cross-cultural studies are quite remarkable by themselves. Wilhelm translated old Danish and old Scottish ballads while studying their background, and in 1823, just one year after its original publication, he translated, together with Jacob, the Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, to which he added an original essay about the fairies of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.17 Jacob published in 1835 the first study of comparative mythology, the Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology) that contained a systematic arrangement and analysis of parallel myths and folk beliefs in all of the “Teutonic” countries. This work is too scholarly to be counted as children’s literature, but like his comparative grammar, the Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), and his translation of the monumental Serbian grammar, it gives evidence of his international (rather than merely national) orientation in folklore, language and linguistics.
What Herder and the Brothers Grimm told the other nations on behalf of the search for their “folk soul” through native folklore, they applied also to themselves. Undoubtedly, they had strong sentiments for their own fatherland and hoped to strengthen Germany’s self-awareness by reviving her national folk traditions. In this context they considered the Nordic Germanic folk heritage as an integral part of the native German tradition. Their “forefathers” had not been “savages,” they said, but peasants and warriors worthy of respect. As they encouraged their compatriots at home to shake off the fetters of foreign imitations, they called for the development of national pride, hoping that a revival of native folklore would help in promoting this goal.18
A closer analysis of the changing role of German and Nordic Germanic folklore in German culture of the nineteenth century is important for our background study of children’s literature in Nazi Germany, as the Nazis willfully distorted it. Whereas officially they took pride in having initiated a cultural revolution with the establishment of a “New Order” in the Third Reich, in effect, they spent much energy on “documenting” the “evolution” of Nazism from pre-Romantic and Romantic thought. The Nazi writer Dahmen, for example, in his work Die nationale Idee von Herder bis Hitler (The Idea of Nationalism from Herder to Hitler) claimed that Nazism was rooted in the heritage of Herder and the German Romantic movement. Julius Petersen went so far as to expound the idea that in their “Nostalgia for the Third Reich in German Legend and Literature,” the Nordic Germanic tribes had, more than a thousand years ago, foreseen the coming of the “savior,” Adolf Hitler;19 that the Romantic writers had continued this dream, and that the Nazi Regime had finally brought a fulfillment of this prophecy. In their text selections the Nazis consistently gave preference to political Romanticism over cultural Romanticism, while even in this case quoting passages out of context.
Among the early Romantic writers there were some indeed whose interest in folklore and poetry was secondary to a concern with politics.20 They were patriots at heart and strongly nationalistic, although not radically exclusive as far as other nations, races, or traditions were concerned. Among these were Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt. In 1810, Jahn published his book Deutsches Volkstum (German Ethnicity) in which he expressed his longing for a renewal of Germandom from its “source.” He shared some ideas with Grimm but had his own plan. Folklore played a definite role in his program, especially folk songs, but in the final analysis, it represented only a minor aspect of his physical fitness program based on the principles of patriotism.21 Yet, folklore fused with nationalistic ideas was to have a very strong impact on the German Youth movement in the years to come, which considered Jahn as one of their spiritual fathers.22 Ernst Moritz Arndt, too, was better known for his political contributions than for his folklore research or his volumes of fairy tales.23 In his work Volk und Staat (Folk and State), published between 1802 and 1815, he praised the solid and safe possession of the soil inherited from generation to generation. Like Langbehn and de Lagarde after him, he saw the peasant as guardian not only of folklore but of the soil, thus praising him as the protector of the German state. He deserved to be called “the first of the fatherland,” and Arndt, as he had best preserved the original native concepts of custom, law, honor, loyalty and closeness to tradition and the land. He set the peasant up as a sharp contrast to the Bürger (bourgeois) of the cities who had lost interest in both tradition and land while chasing after superficial entertainment.24 While Jahn used German folk songs for his youth programs, thus hoping to revive German national consciousness among the young, Arndt became more engaged in political theory which made substantial use of the Nordic Germanic folk heritage.
The idea that the simple peasant held the key to certain intuitive powers of knowledge which were lacking in civilized man was not the invention of the early Romanticists nor of Herder, but originally came from Rousseau. New to the German interpretation of the “noble savage” concept was its association of the “golden age” with that of the Nordic Germanic past within the context of an “organic” folk state.25 It was mainly due to the influence of Heinrich Wilhelm Riehl that by the middle of the nineteenth century the study of folklore in Germany developed as a science, with close affinities to the field of sociology. In the idyllic and peaceful peasant community Riehl saw the basis for a new society built according to the pattern of medieval estates. For the industrial worker he developed a plan that was to transform him into a member of the folk community: he was to receive a small piece of land that he was expected to cultivate in his free time. Riehl thought that in this way he would not only strengthen his communion with the soil but also with the people of the peasant community. Within this community, he would recapture what he had lost as a result of civilization: his creative self, his individuality.26 Tönnies later developed the sociological contrast between the Gemeinschaft (community) and the Gesellschaft (society), both of which the Nazis adopted for their own purposes while denying the role of the individual within the community.27
We may identify two reasons why the German Romantic writers placed so much emphasis on folklore and folk community. Aside from Schelling’s nature philosophy which influenced many of their thoughts pertaining to the mystical power of the landscape, they faced some real problems with regard to the state of the nation, as well as the German cultural situation at large. Both of these they hoped to remedy. After Napoleon’s conquest, the three hundred diverse little dukedoms and kingdoms that made up Germany were reduced to forty-eight, which still did not bring about political or cultural unity. Officially, Germany did not reach statehood until 1871, and even then there were diverse systems, customs, and traditions that seemed to work against the ideal of the folk community. Nordic Germanic folklore, and peasant folklore in general, were at least a bond in history that was thought to work