Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

performed, now disap-

peared almost completely, making way for National Socialist and völkisch authors,

who now dominated repertoires with a share of almost 60 per cent—also to the

detriment of foreign dramatists, whose share also fell. The Entjudung of theatre

repertoires—the banning of plays written by Jewish authors or those reflecting the

‘Jewish-liberalist’ spirit of the Weimar Republic, was thus the immediate precon-

dition for the conquest of the theatre by authors close to National Socialism. 63

National Socialist architectural theorists did their best to distance ‘German’

architecture from a ‘degenerate’ international or modern architecture described as

‘Jewish’ or ‘culturally Bolshevik’. Jewish speculation had led to the abandonment

of ‘blood-and-soil-bound’ building methods and thus to the deracination of

architecture. 64 ‘The architectural non-culture, which was propagated under the slogan “New Objectivity”, and carried out even in the face of its unanimous

rejection by the people, was nothing but an attempt to remove the cultural value

of the German Volk’s specific homeland and impose Jewish cultural Bolshevism

upon it.’65

The intended Renaissance of ‘German architecture’ was linked with the terms

Volk, organism, homeland, family, blood, and soil, even though no solid archi-

tectural programme could have developed from it. 66

The increasing penetration of everyday life by a Nazi-inspired aesthetic, in areas

such as advertising, fashion, and design, for example, was also impossible without

a constant polemic against the travesty of a ‘Judaized’ (verjudet) everyday culture.

Thus the control of advertising67 by the Nazi state (via the ‘Advertising Council of German Commerce’ and the almost complete monopolization of advertising by

the Party) went hand in hand with a material and stylistic Entjudung and

Verdeutschung (Germanization) of advertising. Advertising, according to the

compulsory guidelines of the Advertising Council, must be German ‘in spirit

and expression’. 68 What the ‘German character’ of advertising might have been was never properly explained; attempts to give the guidelines concrete form or

even encode them in a law were fruitless. Instead, officials restricted themselves to

the contrast between ‘respectable’ German advertising and supposedly Jewish-

dominated ‘Anglo-American commercials’, although without being able to

develop a particularly Nazi style of advertising.

One effort to adapt the everyday look of the ‘Third Reich’ to National Socialist

ideas was the propagation of ‘Aryan-style fashion’. Under this slogan the National

Socialists throughout the whole of the Reich set up associations and organizations

which—supported by strident journalism—were supposed to organize fashion in

a uniform manner, encourage export, destroy the exemplary function of Paris, and

Interim Conclusions

85

above all exclude Jewish fashion designers. 69 At the same time, however, it remained entirely unclear what was supposed to be specifically ‘German’ about

the new style: in fact, ‘Aryan-style fashion’ was more or less exhausted in the

struggle against the ‘Jewish ready-made’, which was represented as the gateway of

international, above all French fashion. The complete Entjudung of the ready-

made industry was depicted as the precondition for the realization of a ‘German’

fashion, and the polemic against ‘alien’ fashion did not stop even after successful

Aryanization. 70 The slogan of Entjudung became a substitute for the lack of creativity of ‘Aryan’ fashion designers—and in the end it gave National Socialist

fashion functionaries crucial controlling functions in the fashion industry.

Even in the design of functional objects and furniture, the regime’s attempts—

we might think, for example, of the ‘Beauty of Work’ office of the German Labour

Front—to attempt an autonomous design style remained substantially unsuccessful;

official declarations distanced themselves from avant-garde visions such as those

developed in the ‘Jewish’ Bauhaus, but design remained to a large extent trapped

in the functionalistic design of the Weimar era. 71

The various examples have demonstrated that the Entjudung and racial ‘cleans-

ing’ of German society was a process that went far beyond the mere removal of the

Jews and other unwanted ‘foreigners’ in the different areas of life. In fact it was a

much more comprehensive process: as the homogeneous, entirely German Volks-

gemeinschaft could not be brought about in a positive way, either conceptually or

in practice, the National Socialists fell back on imposing it negatively, through

permanent differentiation, distancing, and liberation from an apparently omni-

present and omnipotent enemy.

Rhetorical as this process of dissociation remained, the above examples have

demonstrated that it affected practically all areas of life and by no means stopped

with the actual exclusion of Jews, but remained a lasting theme during the Nazi

period. Behind the phase of Entjudung there lay a very real claim in terms of

political power: the imposition of the Nazis’ claim to total power.

The Emergence of a Jewish Sector as a

Consequence of the Politics of Repression

The segregation policy promoted on a massive scale in 1935—as a consequence of

that year’s anti-Semitic campaign—and then again after the end of the Olympic

Games from the end of 1936 had profound consequences for the everyday life of

the Jewish minority. In so far as such generalizations are possible at all, in the

years 1935 and 1936 any private contact still existing between Jews and non-Jews

seems largely to have been severed. Numerous reports and memoirs make it clear

that the whole range of everyday relationships seems to have been affected by it:

86

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

children stopped playing together; the members of youth cliques dispersed; polite

gestures such as everyday greetings ceased to be exchanged; neighbours stopped

talking to each other; visits to each other’s houses and communal visits to pubs

became a thing of the past; those friendships and love affairs that still existed fell

apart; even the joint participation of Jews and non-Jews in funerals became rarer.

Segregation was imposed through an interplay of government departments, the

Party apparatus, police, and Gestapo, which was able to rely on the energetic

support of the populace. 72 Of course, isolation tended to be more prevalent in smaller towns, where Jews had already become too frightened to go into the streets

and had become completely isolated, than it was in the anonymity of the big cities.

This strengthened the progress of migration from the countryside to the city and

worsened still further the precarious life of those impoverished, isolated Jews in

the countryside. 73

The many consequences of persecution for the life of the Jews themselves

cannot be pursued here in every last detail. The consequences for family life and

the relations between the sexes, the increased focus upon Jewish culture and a

more intense religious life as well as strategies of resistance and survival developed

by the various Jewish organizations are themes that have been