Censorship in Nazi Germany was strictly enforced by the governing Nazi Party, but specifically by Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Similarly to many other police states both before and since, censorship within Nazi Germany included the silencing of all past and present dissenting voices. In addition to the further propaganda weaponization of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film, by the State, the Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature, which was solely devoted to spreading Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth.
As many other Orwellian political parties have done both before and since, the Nazis set out in many other ways to completely rewrite German history and the history of German literature to conform to Nazi ideology and condemned everything that contradicted their fictitious claims to "the memory hole" of historical negationism. They were harshly criticized for this at the time by figures including Clemens von Galen, Sigrid Undset, Dietrich von Hildebrand,Dietrich von Hildebrand (2014), My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich, Image Publications. J.R.R. Tolkien, and Jorge Luis Borges.Jorge Luis Borges (1999), Selected Nonfictions, Penguin Books. Pages 199–213.
Among the thousands of books burned on Berlin's Opernplatz in 1933, following the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, were works by one of the most iconic individuals ever to write in the German language, the German Jewish Romantic poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). To both memorialize and criticize Nazi ideological censorship, the oft-quoted and eerily prophetic lines from Heine's 1821 stage play Almansor, were put in a plaque at the site: () ("That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.")Heinrich Heine, Gesamtausgabe der Werke; Hrsg. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg 1973–1997), Bd. 5, page 16
Even though the German people are traditionally stereotyped as blindly obedient to authority, excessive government censorship stirred up the same backlash commonly seen in many other countries. Despite the extremely high risks involved, public demand created a black market for banned literature, which continued to be published throughout the global German diaspora by Exilliteratur firms, and especially for allegedly "degenerate" American Jazz and Swing Music, which were acquired anyway and devoured in secret by the early beginnings of an anti-Nazi youth dissident movement.
Moreover, Nazi ideological censorship triggered a brain drain that proved devastating to Germany and Austria's once dynamic literary, artistic, and cultural life and to the once and rather innovative and pioneering German film industry. Many cities throughout the world became population centers of anti-Nazi German and Austrian refugees, including many highly important poets, writers, scientists, and intellectuals who had fled to maintain their freedom of expression. Many of Germany and Austria's best actors, directors, and film technicians, including Fritz Lang, Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle, Fred Zinnemann, Conrad Veidt, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr, Peter Lorre, and many others like them often emigrated for very similar reasons and continued their careers by aiding the Allied war effort as anti-Nazi filmmakers in Hollywood. It was even more damaging to Austria and Germany's intellectual, literary, and cultural life that, despite the eventual end of Nazi Party rule in 1945, most of these highly talented refugees never returned.
Even so, many Allied policy makers and propagandists took the claims of Goebbels Ministry about German history and culture at face value, particularly following the outbreak of World War II. This lack of insight led to both widespread Anti-German sentiment and calls by influential figures like Ilya Ehrenberg, Edvard Beneš, Theodore N. Kaufman, and Abba Kovner, for total war tactics and even for ethnic cleansing and genocide against the German people following the end of the war, which were far more widely carried out in the postwar Soviet Bloc, than in what became West Germany.
In actual practice, giving German POWs easy access to banned art, music, motion pictures, and literary works was found in the United States to be a very effective tool of deprogramming them from Nazi ideology. For this reason, several former POWs held in the United States went on to highly influential positions in the literary and cultural life of the Federal Republic of Germany, where the Marshall Plan, instead of a second Versailles Treaty or the even more vengeful Morgenthau Plan, helped set the stage for the West German economic miracle. Also following the end of Nazi Party rule in 1945, the deliberate falsification of history, art, literature, and current events by the Ministry of Propaganda were satirized as the ironically named Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Ever since it opened in 1980, the Memorial to the German Resistance in Berlin has included exhibits about Nazi propaganda, censorship, and those, like The White Rose student movement, who defied them at extremely high risk and often with terrible costs.
The Black List All innovation in art starting with Impressionism, especially Cubism and Expressionism, were ruled degenerate art and banned by the Ministry. All works by composers of popular or Classical music with Jewish ancestry like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned as degenerate music.Degenerate' Music", A Teacher's Guide to The Holocaust, College of Education, University of South Florida
In a particularly egregious example, the Ministry banned and blacklisted legendary avante garde stage director Max Reinhardt, whom Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy have dubbed "one of the most picturesque actor-directors of modern times". Reinhardt, whose Max Reinhardt Seminar acting school was later refounded in post-World War II Vienna, eventually fled to the United States as a refugee from the imminent Nazi takeover of Austria. His arrival in America had followed a long and distinguished career, "inspired by the example of social participation in the ancient Greek and Medieval theatres", of seeking "to bridge the separation between actors and audiences".Edited by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (1970), Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the World's Great Actors, Told in Their Own Words, Crown Publishers. Page 294.
When Reinhardt's brief Hollywood career resulted in his acclaimed 1935 film adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the film was banned from German theatres by the Ministry, as well. This was due not only to Joseph Goebbels' belief that Reinhardt's filmmaking style, which drew heavily upon the pre-1933 tradition of German expressionist cinema, was degenerate art, but even more so due to the Jewish ancestry of Reinhardt, Classical music composer Felix Mendelssohn, and soundtrack arranger Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Amongst those authors and artists who were suppressed both during the Nazi book burnings and the attempt to destroy modernist fine art in the "degenerate" art exhibition were:Adam, Peter (1992). Art of the Third Reich. New York:, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.., pp. 121–122
Bertolt Brecht Heinrich Heine Ernest Hemingway Thomas Mann John Dos Passos Dietrich von Hildebrand H. G. Wells
Artists banned include:
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler Pablo Picasso Claude Monet Vincent van Gogh
Composers banned include:
Erich Wolfgang Korngold Gustav Mahler Felix Mendelssohn Arnold Schoenberg
Dramatists and filmmakers banned include:
William Dieterle Friedrich Forster Hugo von Hofmannsthal Fritz Lang Max Reinhardt
Philosophers, scientists, and sociologists suppressed by Nazi Germany include:
Albert Einstein Niels Bohr Friedrich Engels Sigmund Freud Dietrich von Hildebrand Magnus Hirschfeld Edmund Husserl Karl Marx Max Scheler
Politicians suppressed by Nazi Germany include:
Konrad Adenauer Karl Goerdeler Theodor Heuss
Criticism and opposition
Even though the German people are traditionally stereotyped as blindly obedient to authority,Stereotype. Was ist typisch deutsch? it should not be pretended that Nazi censorship was left unchallenged.
Between 1933 and 1939, large numbers of German-speakers fled into exile. These included many dissident writers, poets, and artists. Many refugees had Jewish ancestry, but there were also large numbers of "Aryans", too, who held anti-Nazi religious or political beliefs.Mews, Siegfried. "Exile Literature and Literary Exile: A Review Essay". South Atlantic Review 57.1 (1992): 103–109. Web
Population centers of anti-Nazi émigrés who continued to speak and write in the German language and the Exilliteratur publishing firms catering to their readers swiftly emerged in several European cities, including Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Zürich, London, Prague, Moscow as well as across the Atlantic in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and many other cities. Well known for their publications were the publishers Querido Verlag and Verlag Allert de Lange in Amsterdam, Berman-Fischer Verlag in Stockholm, and Oprecht in Zürich.Roy, Pinaki. "Patriots in Fremden Landern: 1939–45 German Émigré Literature". Writing Difference: Nationalism, Identity, and Literature. Eds. Ray, G.N., J. Sarkar, and A. Bhattacharyya. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Pvt. Ltd., 2014 (). pp. 367–90.
Like anti-communist Russian poets, writers, and publishing houses in Prague, Berlin, Paris, London, and New York after the October Revolution, anti-Nazi German poets and writers saw themselves as the continuation of an older and better Germany, which had been taken over and perverted by the Nazi Party. A particularly effective example was Rudolf Roessler's Vita Nova Verlag, based in Lucerne, Switzerland, which published anti-Nazi German writers, anti-communist Russian writers, and anti-Franco Spanish writers. Vita Nova also commissioned and published translations into the German language of Christian literature by writers from multiple denominations, but all of whom had been banned by Goebbels' Ministry, such as Nikolai Berdyaev, William Ralph Inge, Emanuel Rádl, Emmanuel Mounier, and Sigrid Undset.
With this in mind, they supplied the German diaspora with both banned literary works and with Alternative media critical of the regime, and, in defiance of Nazi censorship laws, their books, newspapers, and magazines were smuggled into the homeland and both read and distributed in secret by the German people.
Similarly, Jazz and Swing music, due to the vitally important role played by African American and Jewish American musicians in creating and performing both genres, were banned as Negermusik, but remained very popular among the Swingjugend counterculture anyway and were always in very high demand on Nazi Germany's thriving black market."", JazzScript.co.uk.
Furthermore, before he was sent back to the Wehrmacht in disgrace,Goldmann, Gereon (2000), The Shadow of His Wings, Ignatius Press, San Francisco. pp. 67–68. conscripted Catholic seminarian Gereon Goldmann used his Waffen-SS uniform as a cover for both black marketeering and the deliberate subversion of Nazi anti-Catholicism and ideological censorship. He secretly purchased large numbers of strictly illegal German-language Catholic books from second-hand bookshops in occupied France. Goldmann and several other conscripted seminarians then smuggled these same books back into Nazi Germany in boxes stamped TOP SECRET: SS MAIL. Some fellow SS men assisted out of sympathy, others because they were bribed.Goldmann, Gereon (2000), The Shadow of His Wings, Ignatius Press, San Francisco. pp. 60–62.