Hitler’s War Poets: Literature and Politics in the Third Reich

Jay W. Baird comes to grips with a theme which has been generally avoided by over two generations of scholars and literary critics. He argues that German literature did not end with the advent of Hitler in 1933, only to be reborn after the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. Baird demonstrates how poets and writers responded enthusiastically to Hitler’s summons to artists to create a cultural revolution commensurate with the political radicalism of the new state, thereby affirming the centrality of renewed German culture. Hitler’s War Poets focuses on the lives and the works of six leading conservative, anti-communist yet revolutionary authors who articulated the dream of World War I veterans to form a socially just national community. Tradition was redrawn by Rudolf G. Binding, while Josef Magnus Wehner dramatized the link from Flanders fields and Verdun to the Third Reich. Hans Zoeberlein exalted anti-Semitism, the Free Corps, and Nazi violence, providing the counterpoint to Edwin Erich Dwinger, who launched an unrelenting assault against ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. The torch was passed to Eberhard Wolfgang Moeller, the leading bard of the revolutionary young generation. But it was Kurt Eggers, a tank commander in the 5th SS Panzer Division ‘Viking’, who delighted Hitler as he appeared as a prophet bearing the testament of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Taken together, these authors offered the regime significant support. More importantly, their’s was a tragic legacy because they provided aesthetic accompaniment to Nazi barbarism and ultimately to the Holocaust.