U. S. readers hear more about concentration camps than they do about literary life in Hitler's Naziland. Nazi publishing facts at first glance look startling indeed. The Third Reich publishes 25,000 books annually (U. S. total is 11,000; Britain's 16,000). Scores of new writers, unheard-of before Hitler, have popped into the best-seller class. U. S. Writers Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner are favorites of the Nazi Napoleons.
Nazis call their literary brand "steel romanticism" to distinguish it from the foggy fervors of the traditional German romantics. Pet bugbear of Nazi writers is "Jewish realism and intellectualism." Their pet ideal is an Aryan hero who does not yet exist. On paper he is: 1) an individual only in the sense that he is one of a blood community; 2) close to the soil, because his blood community has lived close to it for generations; 3) perfectly poised between these poles of blood and soil, so that his actions are always determined by them, but appear to be instinctive and unreasoned, like the actions of a healthy animal. When Nazi theoreticians sound off about the German folk-soul, they mean to refer to this somewhat vague balance of blood, soil, race.
But Nazi writers have succeeded little better than Nazi drill sergeants in filling rush orders for the model Nazi hero. In real life he might be a nuisance; in a book he is a bore.
Leading literary pluggers for the Nazi folk-soul are: Harms Johst, Germany's foremost dramatist by default, and since 1935 head of the Reich Chamber of Literature. His Schlageter was for years almost the only presentable Nazi drama. In 1934 Johst's play Prophets was so violently anti-Semitic that it frightened even Field Marshal Goring into banning it. Johst is author of the Nazi crack: "Whenever I hear the word Culture, I reach for my revolver!"
Hans Friederich Blunck's ice-age novel, Power Over Fire, shows Nordic man as he emerged from the primitive state. In Struggle of the Constellations (Stone Age), and Struggle Against the Gods (Bronze Age), Blunck advanced the Nordics by archeological progression toward the Third Reich. His heroes "get their strength from the soil in which they are rooted, and from their ancestors' blood which flows in their veins."
Herman Stehr, a kind of German Knut Hamsun, writes about peasants. Hans Grimm is the author of a novel whose enormous length (1,300 pages) belies its title: People Without Room. A Nazi classic, it is often contrasted with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, to Mann's disadvantage.
Hans Fallada (Little Man, What Now?), though not a Nazi, is still popular in Germany. But his Iron Gustav has been quietly blacklisted. Joseph Ponten's seven-volume historical novel will trace the emigrations of German minorities abroad, especially in Russia. Edwin Erich Dwinger's The Last Horsemen describes the futile attempt of a gang of German frontier soldiers to invade Courland and make it a German province.
Friedrich Ekkehard is the author of Storm-Breed, whose down-at-the-mouth hero is revived by hearing Hitler speak "beautiful words, splendid words." Gottfried Rothacker's Frontier Village told of the pre-Munich yearnings of a Sudeten German to be reunited with the Reich. The book sold 60,000 copies in 1936.